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.

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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

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 .

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U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation

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---8x deeper than VGG nets 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 competitions, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

We present region-based, fully convolutional networks for accurate and efficient object detection. In contrast to previous region-based detectors such as Fast/Faster R-CNN that apply a costly per-region subnetwork hundreds of times, our region-based detector is fully convolutional with almost all computation shared on the entire image. To achieve this goal, we propose position-sensitive score maps to address a dilemma between translation-invariance in image classification and translation-variance in object detection. Our method can thus naturally adopt fully convolutional image classifier backbones, such as the latest Residual Networks (ResNets), for object detection. We show competitive results on the PASCAL VOC datasets (e.g., 83.6% mAP on the 2007 set) with the 101-layer ResNet. Meanwhile, our result is achieved at a test-time speed of 170ms per image, 2.5-20 times faster than the Faster R-CNN counterpart. Code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/daijifeng001/r-fcn.

/pdf/r-fcn-object-detection-via-region-based-fully-convolutional-337dzvr36m.pdf

R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks

We introduce an extremely computation-efficient CNN architecture named ShuffleNet, which is designed specially for mobile devices with very limited computing power (e.g., 10-150 MFLOPs). The new architecture utilizes two new operations, pointwise group convolution and channel shuffle, to greatly reduce computation cost while maintaining accuracy. Experiments on ImageNet classification and MS COCO object detection demonstrate the superior performance of ShuffleNet over other structures, e.g. lower top-1 error (absolute 7.8%) than recent MobileNet [12] on ImageNet classification task, under the computation budget of 40 MFLOPs. On an ARM-based mobile device, ShuffleNet achieves ~13A— actual speedup over AlexNet while maintaining comparable accuracy.

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ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices

Existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require a fixed-size (e.g. 224×224) input image. This requirement is “artificial” and may hurt the recognition accuracy for the images or sub-images of an arbitrary size/scale. In this work, we equip the networks with a more principled pooling strategy, “spatial pyramid pooling”, to eliminate the above requirement. The new network structure, called SPP-net, can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size/scale. By removing the fixed-size limitation, we can improve all CNN-based image classification methods in general. Our SPP-net achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the datasets of ImageNet 2012, Pascal VOC 2007, and Caltech101.

/pdf/spatial-pyramid-pooling-in-deep-convolutional-networks-for-3bgz95frgf.pdf

Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition

In this paper, we propose a simple but effective image prior-dark channel prior to remove haze from a single input image. The dark channel prior is a kind of statistics of outdoor haze-free images. It is based on a key observation-most local patches in outdoor haze-free images contain some pixels whose intensity is very low in at least one color channel. Using this prior with the haze imaging model, we can directly estimate the thickness of the haze and recover a high-quality haze-free image. Results on a variety of hazy images demonstrate the power of the proposed prior. Moreover, a high-quality depth map can also be obtained as a byproduct of haze removal.

Single Image Haze Removal Using Dark Channel Prior

Currently, the neural network architecture design is mostly guided by the indirect metric of computation complexity, i.e., FLOPs. However, the direct metric, e.g., speed, also depends on the other factors such as memory access cost and platform characterics. Thus, this work proposes to evaluate the direct metric on the target platform, beyond only considering FLOPs. Based on a series of controlled experiments, this work derives several practical guidelines for efficient network design. Accordingly, a new architecture is presented, called ShuffleNet V2. Comprehensive ablation experiments verify that our model is the state-of-the-art in terms of speed and accuracy tradeoff.

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Jian Sun

Papers

R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks

ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices

Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition

Single Image Haze Removal Using Dark Channel Prior

ShuffleNet V2: Practical Guidelines for Efficient CNN Architecture Design