Higher-Order Integration of Hierarchical Convolutional Activations for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
01 Oct 2017-pp 511-520
TL;DR: This work proposes an end-to-end framework based on higherorder integration of hierarchical convolutional activations for FGVC that yields more discriminative representation and achieves competitive results on the widely used FGVC datasets.
Abstract: The success of fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) extremely relies on the modeling of appearance and interactions of various semantic parts. This makes FGVC very challenging because: (i) part annotation and detection require expert guidance and are very expensive; (ii) parts are of different sizes; and (iii) the part interactions are complex and of higher-order. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end framework based on higherorder integration of hierarchical convolutional activations for FGVC. By treating the convolutional activations as local descriptors, hierarchical convolutional activations can serve as a representation of local parts from different scales. A polynomial kernel based predictor is proposed to capture higher-order statistics of convolutional activations for modeling part interaction. To model inter-layer part interactions, we extend polynomial predictor to integrate hierarchical activations via kernel fusion. Our work also provides a new perspective for combining convolutional activations from multiple layers. While hypercolumns simply concatenate maps from different layers, and holistically-nested network uses weighted fusion to combine side-outputs, our approach exploits higher-order intra-layer and inter-layer relations for better integration of hierarchical convolutional features. The proposed framework yields more discriminative representation and achieves competitive results on the widely used FGVC datasets.
Citations
More filters
28 Feb 2018
TL;DR: Multi-Level Factorization Net (MLFN) as discussed by the authors is a novel network architecture that factorises the visual appearance of a person into latent discriminative factors at multiple semantic levels without manual annotation.
Abstract: Key to effective person re-identification (Re-ID) is modelling discriminative and view-invariant factors of person appearance at both high and low semantic levels. Recently developed deep Re-ID models either learn a holistic single semantic level feature representation and/or require laborious human annotation of these factors as attributes. We propose Multi-Level Factorisation Net (MLFN), a novel network architecture that factorises the visual appearance of a person into latent discriminative factors at multiple semantic levels without manual annotation. MLFN is composed of multiple stacked blocks. Each block contains multiple factor modules to model latent factors at a specific level, and factor selection modules that dynamically select the factor modules to interpret the content of each input image. The outputs of the factor selection modules also provide a compact latent factor descriptor that is complementary to the conventional deeply learned features. MLFN achieves state-of-the-art results on three Re-ID datasets, as well as compelling results on the general object categorisation CIFAR-100 dataset.
533 citations
08 Sep 2018
TL;DR: In this paper, a self-supervision mechanism is proposed to locate informative regions without the need of bounding-box/part annotations, which consists of a navigator agent, a teacher agent and a scrutinizer agent.
Abstract: Fine-grained classification is challenging due to the difficulty of finding discriminative features. Finding those subtle traits that fully characterize the object is not straightforward. To handle this circumstance, we propose a novel self-supervision mechanism to effectively localize informative regions without the need of bounding-box/part annotations. Our model, termed NTS-Net for Navigator-Teacher-Scrutinizer Network, consists of a Navigator agent, a Teacher agent and a Scrutinizer agent. In consideration of intrinsic consistency between informativeness of the regions and their probability being ground-truth class, we design a novel training paradigm, which enables Navigator to detect most informative regions under the guidance from Teacher. After that, the Scrutinizer scrutinizes the proposed regions from Navigator and makes predictions. Our model can be viewed as a multi-agent cooperation, wherein agents benefit from each other, and make progress together. NTS-Net can be trained end-to-end, while provides accurate fine-grained classification predictions as well as highly informative regions during inference. We achieve state-of-the-art performance in extensive benchmark datasets.
433 citations
15 Jun 2019
TL;DR: A novel "Destruction and Construction Learning" (DCL) method to enhance the difficulty of fine-grained recognition and exercise the classification model to acquire expert knowledge.
Abstract: Delicate feature representation about object parts plays a critical role in fine-grained recognition. For example, experts can even distinguish fine-grained objects relying only on object parts according to professional knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel "Destruction and Construction Learning" (DCL) method to enhance the difficulty of fine-grained recognition and exercise the classification model to acquire expert knowledge. Besides the standard classification backbone network, another "destruction and construction" stream is introduced to carefully "destruct" and then "reconstruct" the input image, for learning discriminative regions and features. More specifically, for "destruction", we first partition the input image into local regions and then shuffle them by a Region Confusion Mechanism (RCM). To correctly recognize these destructed images, the classification network has to pay more attention to discriminative regions for spotting the differences. To compensate the noises introduced by RCM, an adversarial loss, which distinguishes original images from destructed ones, is applied to reject noisy patterns introduced by RCM. For "construction", a region alignment network, which tries to restore the original spatial layout of local regions, is followed to model the semantic correlation among local regions. By jointly training with parameter sharing, our proposed DCL injects more discriminative local details to the classification network. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three standard benchmarks. Moreover, our proposed method does not need any external knowledge during training, and there is no computation overhead at inference time except the standard classification network feed-forwarding. Source code: https://github.com/JDAI-CV/DCL.
376 citations
18 Jun 2018
TL;DR: The authors proposed a bank of convolutional filters to capture class-specific discriminative patches without extra part or bounding box annotations, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available fine-grained recognition datasets (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars and FGVC-Aircraft).
Abstract: Compared to earlier multistage frameworks using CNN features, recent end-to-end deep approaches for fine-grained recognition essentially enhance the mid-level learning capability of CNNs. Previous approaches achieve this by introducing an auxiliary network to infuse localization information into the main classification network, or a sophisticated feature encoding method to capture higher order feature statistics. We show that mid-level representation learning can be enhanced within the CNN framework, by learning a bank of convolutional filters that capture class-specific discriminative patches without extra part or bounding box annotations. Such a filter bank is well structured, properly initialized and discriminatively learned through a novel asymmetric multi-stream architecture with convolutional filter supervision and a non-random layer initialization. Experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art on three publicly available fine-grained recognition datasets (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars and FGVC-Aircraft). Ablation studies and visualizations are provided to understand our approach.
366 citations
01 Oct 2019
TL;DR: Zhang et al. as discussed by the authors proposed a Mixed High-Order Attention Network (MHN) to further enhance the discrimination and richness of attention knowledge in an explicit manner, which can capture the subtle differences among pedestrians and produce the discriminative attention proposals.
Abstract: Attention has become more attractive in person re-identification (ReID) as it is capable of biasing the allocation of available resources towards the most informative parts of an input signal. However, state-of-the-art works concentrate only on coarse or first-order attention design, e.g. spatial and channels attention, while rarely exploring higher-order attention mechanism. We take a step towards addressing this problem. In this paper, we first propose the High-Order Attention (HOA) module to model and utilize the complex and high-order statistics information in attention mechanism, so as to capture the subtle differences among pedestrians and to produce the discriminative attention proposals. Then, rethinking person ReID as a zero-shot learning problem, we propose the Mixed High-Order Attention Network (MHN) to further enhance the discrimination and richness of attention knowledge in an explicit manner. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the superiority of our MHN for person ReID over a wide variety of state-of-the-art methods on three large-scale datasets, including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-ReID and CUHK03-NP. Code is available at http://www.bhchen.cn.
300 citations
References
More filters
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
Proceedings Article•
04 Sep 2014TL;DR: This work investigates the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting using an architecture with very small 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.
Abstract: 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.
55,235 citations
"Higher-Order Integration of Hierarc..." refers background in this paper
..., relu5 1, relu5 2, and relu5 3 in VGG-16 model [36]) is fairly effective to obtain satisfactory performance....
[...]
Proceedings Article•
01 Jan 2015TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigated the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting and showed that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 layers.
Abstract: 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.
49,914 citations
07 Jun 2015
TL;DR: Inception as mentioned in this paper is a deep convolutional neural network architecture that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14).
Abstract: 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.
40,257 citations
TL;DR: The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) as mentioned in this paper is a benchmark in object category classification and detection on hundreds of object categories and millions of images, which has been run annually from 2010 to present, attracting participation from more than fifty institutions.
Abstract: 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.
30,811 citations