Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers—8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

/pdf/deep-residual-learning-for-image-recognition-b75jg61qrq.pdf

Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition

In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

The explosion of image data on the Internet has the potential to foster more sophisticated and robust models and algorithms to index, retrieve, organize and interact with images and multimedia data. But exactly how such data can be harnessed and organized remains a critical problem. We introduce here a new database called “ImageNet”, a large-scale ontology of images built upon the backbone of the WordNet structure. ImageNet aims to populate the majority of the 80,000 synsets of WordNet with an average of 500-1000 clean and full resolution images. This will result in tens of millions of annotated images organized by the semantic hierarchy of WordNet. This paper offers a detailed analysis of ImageNet in its current state: 12 subtrees with 5247 synsets and 3.2 million images in total. We show that ImageNet is much larger in scale and diversity and much more accurate than the current image datasets. Constructing such a large-scale database is a challenging task. We describe the data collection scheme with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Lastly, we illustrate the usefulness of ImageNet through three simple applications in object recognition, image classification and automatic object clustering. We hope that the scale, accuracy, diversity and hierarchical structure of ImageNet can offer unparalleled opportunities to researchers in the computer vision community and beyond.

/pdf/imagenet-a-large-scale-hierarchical-image-database-1e8f663s1h.pdf

ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database

There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ronneber/u-net .

/pdf/u-net-convolutional-networks-for-biomedical-image-2xoyjzggxv.pdf

U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation

The objective of this paper is to show how modern computer vision methods can be used to aid the art or book historian in analysing large digital art collections.

Re-presentations of Art Collections

The objective of this work is to learn a compact embedding of a set of descriptors that is suitable for efficient retrieval and ranking, whilst maintaining discriminability of the individual descriptors. We focus on a specific example of this general problem -- that of retrieving images containing multiple faces from a large scale dataset of images. Here the set consists of the face descriptors in each image, and given a query for multiple identities, the goal is then to retrieve, in order, images which contain all the identities, all but one, \etc 
To this end, we make the following contributions: first, we propose a CNN architecture -- {\em SetNet} -- to achieve the objective: it learns face descriptors and their aggregation over a set to produce a compact fixed length descriptor designed for set retrieval, and the score of an image is a count of the number of identities that match the query; second, we show that this compact descriptor has minimal loss of discriminability up to two faces per image, and degrades slowly after that -- far exceeding a number of baselines; third, we explore the speed vs.\ retrieval quality trade-off for set retrieval using this compact descriptor; and, finally, we collect and annotate a large dataset of images containing various number of celebrities, which we use for evaluation and is publicly released.

Compact Deep Aggregation for Set Retrieval.

We consider the design of an image representation that embeds and aggregates a set of local descriptors into a single vector. Popular representations of this kind include the bag-of-visual-words, the Fisher vector and the VLAD. When two such image representations are compared with the dot-product, the image-to-image similarity can be interpreted as a match kernel. In match kernels, one has to deal with interference, i.e. with the fact that even if two descriptors are unrelated, their matching score may contribute to the overall similarity. 
We formalise this problem and propose two related solutions, both aimed at equalising the individual contributions of the local descriptors in the final representation. These methods modify the aggregation stage by including a set of per-descriptor weights. They differ by the objective function that is optimised to compute those weights. The first is a "democratisation" strategy that aims at equalising the relative importance of each descriptor in the set comparison metric. The second one involves equalising the match of a single descriptor to the aggregated vector. 
These concurrent methods give a substantial performance boost over the state of the art in image search with short or mid-size vectors, as demonstrated by our experiments on standard public image retrieval benchmarks.

Interferences in match kernels

The objective of this work is a scalable, real-time, visual search engine for 3-D medical images, where a user is able to select a query Region Of Interest (ROI) and automatically detect the corresponding regions within all returned images.

We make three contributions: (i) we show that with appropriate off-line processing, images can be retrieved and ROIs registered in real time; (ii) we propose and evaluate a number of scalable exemplar-based image registration schemes; (iii) we propose a discriminative method for learning to rank the returned images based on the content of the ROI. The retrieval system is demonstrated on MRI data from the ADNI dataset, and it is shown that the learnt ranking function outperforms the baseline.

/pdf/immediate-roi-search-for-3-d-medical-images-5bl5uuf1qn.pdf

Immediate ROI search for 3-d medical images

This paper explores the use of computer graphics and computer vision techniques in the history of art. The focus is on analysing the geometry of perspective paintings to learn about the perspectival skills of artists and explore the evolution of linear perspective in history. Algorithms for a systematic analysis of the two- and three-dimensional geometry of paintings are drawn from the work on “single-view reconstruction” and applied to interpreting works of art from the Italian Renaissance and later periods. Since a perspectival painting is not a photograph of an actual subject but an artificial construction subject to imaginative manipulation and inadvertent inaccuracies, the internal consistency of its geometry must be assessed before carrying out any geometric analysis. Some simple techniques to analyse the consistency and perspectival accuracy of the geometry of a painting are discussed. Moreover, this work presents new algorithms for generating new views of a painted scene or portions of it, analysing shapes and proportions of objects, filling in occluded areas, performing a complete threedimensional reconstruction of a painting and a rigorous analysis of possible reconstruction ambiguities. The validity of the techniques described here is demonstrated on a number of historical paintings and frescoes. Whenever possible, the computer-generated results are compared to those obtained by art historians through careful manual analysis. This research represents a further attempt to build a constructive dialogue between two very different disciplines: computer science and history of art. Despite their fundamental differences, science and art can learn and be enriched by each other’s procedures. A longer and more detailed version of this paper may be found in [5].

Andrew Zisserman

Papers

Re-presentations of Art Collections

Compact Deep Aggregation for Set Retrieval.

Interferences in match kernels

Immediate ROI search for 3-d medical images

Digital Art History: A subject in transition