We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.

/pdf/going-deeper-with-convolutions-1yobw2o2ds.pdf

Going deeper with convolutions

The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge is a benchmark in object category classification and detection on hundreds of object categories and millions of images. The challenge has been run annually from 2010 to present, attracting participation from more than fifty institutions. This paper describes the creation of this benchmark dataset and the advances in object recognition that have been possible as a result. We discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale ground truth annotation, highlight key breakthroughs in categorical object recognition, provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale image classification and object detection, and compare the state-of-the-art computer vision accuracy with human accuracy. We conclude with lessons learned in the 5 years of the challenge, and propose future directions and improvements.

/pdf/imagenet-large-scale-visual-recognition-challenge-caky5nmmix.pdf

ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge

The central building block of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is the convolution operator, which enables networks to construct informative features by fusing both spatial and channel-wise information within local receptive fields at each layer. A broad range of prior research has investigated the spatial component of this relationship, seeking to strengthen the representational power of a CNN by enhancing the quality of spatial encodings throughout its feature hierarchy. In this work, we focus instead on the channel relationship and propose a novel architectural unit, which we term the “Squeeze-and-Excitation” (SE) block, that adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses by explicitly modelling interdependencies between channels. We show that these blocks can be stacked together to form SENet architectures that generalise extremely effectively across different datasets. We further demonstrate that SE blocks bring significant improvements in performance for existing state-of-the-art CNNs at slight additional computational cost. Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks formed the foundation of our ILSVRC 2017 classification submission which won first place and reduced the top-5 error to 2.251 percent, surpassing the winning entry of 2016 by a relative improvement of ${\sim }$ ∼ 25 percent. Models and code are available at https://github.com/hujie-frank/SENet .

/pdf/squeeze-and-excitation-networks-50icgwqgeu.pdf

Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks

We propose a deep learning method for single image super-resolution (SR). Our method directly learns an end-to-end mapping between the low/high-resolution images. The mapping is represented as a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that takes the low-resolution image as the input and outputs the high-resolution one. We further show that traditional sparse-coding-based SR methods can also be viewed as a deep convolutional network. But unlike traditional methods that handle each component separately, our method jointly optimizes all layers. Our deep CNN has a lightweight structure, yet demonstrates state-of-the-art restoration quality, and achieves fast speed for practical on-line usage. We explore different network structures and parameter settings to achieve trade-offs between performance and speed. Moreover, we extend our network to cope with three color channels simultaneously, and show better overall reconstruction quality.

Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks

We propose Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), a simple yet effective attention module for feed-forward convolutional neural networks. Given an intermediate feature map, our module sequentially infers attention maps along two separate dimensions, channel and spatial, then the attention maps are multiplied to the input feature map for adaptive feature refinement. Because CBAM is a lightweight and general module, it can be integrated into any CNN architectures seamlessly with negligible overheads and is end-to-end trainable along with base CNNs. We validate our CBAM through extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K, MS~COCO detection, and VOC~2007 detection datasets. Our experiments show consistent improvements in classification and detection performances with various models, demonstrating the wide applicability of CBAM. The code and models will be publicly available.

CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module

We present a novel boundary-aware face alignment algorithm by utilising boundary lines as the geometric structure of a human face to help facial landmark localisation. Unlike the conventional heatmap based method and regression based method, our approach derives face landmarks from boundary lines which remove the ambiguities in the landmark definition. Three questions are explored and answered by this work: 1. Why using boundary? 2. How to use boundary? 3. What is the relationship between boundary estimation and landmarks localisation? Our boundary- aware face alignment algorithm achieves 3.49% mean error on 300-W Fullset, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our method can also easily integrate information from other datasets. By utilising boundary information of 300-W dataset, our method achieves 3.92% mean error with 0.39% failure rate on COFW dataset, and 1.25% mean error on AFLW-Full dataset. Moreover, we propose a new dataset WFLW to unify training and testing across different factors, including poses, expressions, illuminations, makeups, occlusions, and blurriness. Dataset and model will be publicly available at this https URL

Look at Boundary: A Boundary-Aware Face Alignment Algorithm

Estimating 3D interacting hand pose from a single RGB image is essential for understanding human actions. Unlike most previous works that directly predict the 3D poses of two interacting hands simultaneously, we propose to decompose the challenging interacting hand pose estimation task and estimate the pose of each hand separately. In this way, it is straightforward to take advantage of the latest research progress on the single-hand pose estimation system. However, hand pose estimation in interacting scenarios is very challenging, due to (1) severe hand-hand occlusion and (2) ambiguity caused by the homogeneous appearance of hands. To tackle these two challenges, we propose a novel Hand De-occlusion and Removal (HDR) framework to perform hand de-occlusion and distractor removal. We also propose the first large-scale synthetic amodal hand dataset, termed Amodal InterHand Dataset (AIH), to facilitate model training and promote the development of the related research. Experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art interacting hand pose estimation approaches. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/MengHao666/HDR.

3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation by Hand De-occlusion and Removal

Most differentiable neural architecture search methods construct a super-net for search and derive a target-net as its sub-graph for evaluation. There exists a significant gap between the architectures in search and evaluation. As a result, current methods suffer from an inconsistent, inefficient, and inflexible search process. In this paper, we introduce EnTranNAS that is composed of Engine-cells and Transit-cells. The Engine-cell is differentiable for architecture search, while the Transit-cell only transits a sub-graph by architecture derivation. Consequently, the gap between the architectures in search and evaluation is significantly reduced. Our method also spares much memory and computation cost, which speeds up the search process. A feature sharing strategy is introduced for more balanced optimization and more efficient search. Furthermore, we develop an architecture derivation method to replace the traditional one that is based on a hand-crafted rule. Our method enables differentiable sparsification, and keeps the derived architecture equivalent to that of Engine-cell, which further improves the consistency between search and evaluation. Besides, it supports the search for topology where a node can be connected to prior nodes with any number of connections, so that the searched architectures could be more flexible. For experiments on CIFAR-10, our search on the standard space requires only 0.06 GPU-day. We further have an error rate of 2.22% with 0.07 GPU-day for the search on an extended space. We can also directly perform the search on ImageNet with topology learnable and achieve a top-1 error rate of 23.8% in 2.1 GPU-day.

Towards Improving the Consistency, Efficiency, and Flexibility of Differentiable Neural Architecture Search.

An improved SegNet network model for accurate detection and segmentation of car body welding slags

Temporal modeling is crucial for capturing spatiotemporal structure in videos for action recognition. Video data is with extremely complex dynamics along its temporal dimension due to various factors such as camera motion, speed variation, and different activities. To effectively capture this diverse motion pattern, this paper presents a new temporal adaptive module ({\bf TAM}) to generate video-specific kernels based on its own feature maps. TAM proposes a unique two-level adaptive modeling scheme by decoupling dynamic kernels into a location sensitive importance map and a location invariant aggregation weight. The importance map is learned in a local temporal window to capture short term information, while the aggregation weight is generated from a global view with a focus on long-term structure. TAM is a principled module and could be integrated into 2D CNNs to yield a powerful video architecture (TANet) with a very small extra computational cost. The extensive experiments on Kinetics-400 and Something-Something datasets, demonstrate that the TAM outperforms other temporal modeling methods consistently owing to its temporal adaptive modeling strategy.

/pdf/tam-temporal-adaptive-module-for-video-recognition-4r2si42on0.pdf

Chen Qian

Papers

Look at Boundary: A Boundary-Aware Face Alignment Algorithm

3D Interacting Hand Pose Estimation by Hand De-occlusion and Removal

Towards Improving the Consistency, Efficiency, and Flexibility of Differentiable Neural Architecture Search.

An improved SegNet network model for accurate detection and segmentation of car body welding slags

TAM: Temporal Adaptive Module for Video Recognition