Fully convolutional networks for semantic segmentation
07 Jun 2015-pp 3431-3440
TL;DR: The key insight is to build “fully convolutional” networks that take input of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with efficient inference and learning.
Abstract: Convolutional networks are powerful visual models that yield hierarchies of features. We show that convolutional networks by themselves, trained end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels, exceed the state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation. Our key insight is to build “fully convolutional” networks that take input of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with efficient inference and learning. We define and detail the space of fully convolutional networks, explain their application to spatially dense prediction tasks, and draw connections to prior models. We adapt contemporary classification networks (AlexNet [20], the VGG net [31], and GoogLeNet [32]) into fully convolutional networks and transfer their learned representations by fine-tuning [3] to the segmentation task. We then define a skip architecture that combines semantic information from a deep, coarse layer with appearance information from a shallow, fine layer to produce accurate and detailed segmentations. Our fully convolutional network achieves state-of-the-art segmentation of PASCAL VOC (20% relative improvement to 62.2% mean IU on 2012), NYUDv2, and SIFT Flow, while inference takes less than one fifth of a second for a typical image.
Citations
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27 Jun 2016
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously, which won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task.
Abstract: 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.
123,388 citations
05 Oct 2015
TL;DR: Neber et al. as discussed by the authors proposed a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently, which 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.
Abstract: 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 .
49,590 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: This work presents a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously, and provides comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth.
Abstract: 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.
44,703 citations
21 Jul 2017
TL;DR: DenseNet as mentioned in this paper proposes to connect each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion, which can alleviate the vanishing gradient problem, strengthen feature propagation, encourage feature reuse, and substantially reduce the number of parameters.
Abstract: Recent work has shown that convolutional networks can be substantially deeper, more accurate, and efficient to train if they contain shorter connections between layers close to the input and those close to the output. In this paper, we embrace this observation and introduce the Dense Convolutional Network (DenseNet), which connects each layer to every other layer in a feed-forward fashion. Whereas traditional convolutional networks with L layers have L connections—one between each layer and its subsequent layer—our network has L(L+1)/2 direct connections. For each layer, the feature-maps of all preceding layers are used as inputs, and its own feature-maps are used as inputs into all subsequent layers. DenseNets have several compelling advantages: they alleviate the vanishing-gradient problem, strengthen feature propagation, encourage feature reuse, and substantially reduce the number of parameters. We evaluate our proposed architecture on four highly competitive object recognition benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet). DenseNets obtain significant improvements over the state-of-the-art on most of them, whilst requiring less memory and computation to achieve high performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/liuzhuang13/DenseNet.
27,821 citations
TL;DR: This work introduces a Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals and further merge RPN and Fast R-CNN into a single network by sharing their convolutionAL features.
Abstract: State-of-the-art object detection networks depend on region proposal algorithms to hypothesize object locations. Advances like SPPnet [1] and Fast R-CNN [2] have reduced the running time of these detection networks, exposing region proposal computation as a bottleneck. In this work, we introduce a Region Proposal Network (RPN) that shares full-image convolutional features with the detection network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. An RPN is a fully convolutional network that simultaneously predicts object bounds and objectness scores at each position. The RPN is trained end-to-end to generate high-quality region proposals, which are used by Fast R-CNN for detection. We further merge RPN and Fast R-CNN into a single network by sharing their convolutional features—using the recently popular terminology of neural networks with ’attention’ mechanisms, the RPN component tells the unified network where to look. For the very deep VGG-16 model [3] , our detection system has a frame rate of 5 fps ( including all steps ) on a GPU, while achieving state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007, 2012, and MS COCO datasets with only 300 proposals per image. In ILSVRC and COCO 2015 competitions, Faster R-CNN and RPN are the foundations of the 1st-place winning entries in several tracks. Code has been made publicly available.
26,458 citations
References
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06 Sep 2014
TL;DR: This work equips the networks with another pooling strategy, “spatial pyramid pooling”, to eliminate the above requirement, and develops a new network structure, called SPP-net, which can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size/scale.
Abstract: 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.
3,945 citations
"Fully convolutional networks for se..." refers background in this paper
...[19] discard the nonconvolutional portion of classification nets to make a feature extractor....
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...These include advances in bounding box object detection [32, 12, 19], part and keypoint prediction [42, 26], and local correspondence [26, 10]....
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Proceedings Article•
21 Jun 2014TL;DR: DeCAF as discussed by the authors is an open-source implementation of these deep convolutional activation features, along with all associated network parameters, to enable vision researchers to conduct experimentation with deep representations across a range of visual concept learning paradigms.
Abstract: We evaluate whether features extracted from the activation of a deep convolutional network trained in a fully supervised fashion on a large, fixed set of object recognition tasks can be repurposed to novel generic tasks. Our generic tasks may differ significantly from the originally trained tasks and there may be insufficient labeled or unlabeled data to conventionally train or adapt a deep architecture to the new tasks. We investigate and visualize the semantic clustering of deep convolutional features with respect to a variety of such tasks, including scene recognition, domain adaptation, and fine-grained recognition challenges. We compare the efficacy of relying on various network levels to define a fixed feature, and report novel results that significantly outperform the state-of-the-art on several important vision challenges. We are releasing DeCAF, an open-source implementation of these deep convolutional activation features, along with all associated network parameters to enable vision researchers to be able to conduct experimentation with deep representations across a range of visual concept learning paradigms.
3,760 citations
Proceedings Article•
23 Feb 2014TL;DR: In this article, a multiscale and sliding window approach is proposed to predict object boundaries, which is then accumulated rather than suppressed in order to increase detection confidence, and OverFeat is the winner of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013.
Abstract: We present an integrated framework for using Convolutional Networks for classification, localization and detection. We show how a multiscale and sliding window approach can be efficiently implemented within a ConvNet. We also introduce a novel deep learning approach to localization by learning to predict object boundaries. Bounding boxes are then accumulated rather than suppressed in order to increase detection confidence. We show that different tasks can be learned simultaneously using a single shared network. This integrated framework is the winner of the localization task of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013 (ILSVRC2013) and obtained very competitive results for the detection and classifications tasks. In post-competition work, we establish a new state of the art for the detection task. Finally, we release a feature extractor from our best model called OverFeat.
3,043 citations
Proceedings Article•
08 Dec 2014TL;DR: In this article, two deep network stacks are employed to make a coarse global prediction based on the entire image, and another to refine this prediction locally, which achieves state-of-the-art results on both NYU Depth and KITTI.
Abstract: Predicting depth is an essential component in understanding the 3D geometry of a scene. While for stereo images local correspondence suffices for estimation, finding depth relations from a single image is less straightforward, requiring integration of both global and local information from various cues. Moreover, the task is inherently ambiguous, with a large source of uncertainty coming from the overall scale. In this paper, we present a new method that addresses this task by employing two deep network stacks: one that makes a coarse global prediction based on the entire image, and another that refines this prediction locally. We also apply a scale-invariant error to help measure depth relations rather than scale. By leveraging the raw datasets as large sources of training data, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on both NYU Depth and KITTI, and matches detailed depth boundaries without the need for superpixelation.
2,994 citations
TL;DR: A method that uses a multiscale convolutional network trained from raw pixels to extract dense feature vectors that encode regions of multiple sizes centered on each pixel, alleviates the need for engineered features, and produces a powerful representation that captures texture, shape, and contextual information.
Abstract: Scene labeling consists of labeling each pixel in an image with the category of the object it belongs to. We propose a method that uses a multiscale convolutional network trained from raw pixels to extract dense feature vectors that encode regions of multiple sizes centered on each pixel. The method alleviates the need for engineered features, and produces a powerful representation that captures texture, shape, and contextual information. We report results using multiple postprocessing methods to produce the final labeling. Among those, we propose a technique to automatically retrieve, from a pool of segmentation components, an optimal set of components that best explain the scene; these components are arbitrary, for example, they can be taken from a segmentation tree or from any family of oversegmentations. The system yields record accuracies on the SIFT Flow dataset (33 classes) and the Barcelona dataset (170 classes) and near-record accuracy on Stanford background dataset (eight classes), while being an order of magnitude faster than competing approaches, producing a 320×240 image labeling in less than a second, including feature extraction.
2,791 citations
"Fully convolutional networks for se..." refers background or methods or result in this paper
...In contrast, previous works have applied small convnets without supervised pre-training [9, 31, 30]....
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...Our approach does not make use of pre- and post-processing complications, including superpixels [9, 17], proposals [17, 15], or post-hoc refinement by random fields or local classifiers [9, 17]....
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...2 Sampling in patchwise training can correct class imbalance [30, 9, 3] and mitigate the spatial correlation of dense patches [31, 17]....
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...Common elements of these approaches include • small models restricting capacity and receptive fields; • patchwise training [30, 3, 9, 31, 11]; • post-processing by superpixel projection, random field regularization, filtering, or local classification [9, 3, 11]; • input shifting and output interlacing for dense output [32, 31, 11]; • multi-scale pyramid processing [9, 31, 11]; • saturating tanh nonlinearities [9, 6, 31]; and • ensembles [3, 11], whereas our method does without this machinery....
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...Prior approaches have used convnets for semantic segmentation [30, 3, 9, 31, 17, 15, 11], in which each pixel is labeled with the class of its enclosing object or region, but with shortcomings that this work addresses....
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