Effective Use of Dilated Convolutions for Segmenting Small Object Instances in Remote Sensing Imagery

Thanks to recent advances in CNNs, solid improvements have been made in semantic segmentation of high resolution remote sensing imagery. However, most of the previous works have not fully taken into account the specific difficulties that exist in remote sensing tasks. One of such difficulties is that objects are small and crowded in remote sensing imagery. To tackle with this challenging task we have proposed a novel architecture called local feature extraction (LFE) module attached on top of dilated front-end module. The LFE module is based on our findings that aggressively increasing dilation factors fails to aggregate local features due to sparsity of the kernel, and detrimental to small objects. The proposed LFE module solves this problem by aggregating local features with decreasing dilation factor. We tested our network on three remote sensing datasets and acquired remarkably good results for all datasets especially for small objects

Deep Regionlets for Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a novel object detection framework named "Deep Regionlets" by establishing a bridge between deep neural networks and conventional detection schema for accurate generic object detection. Motivated by the abilities of regionlets for modeling object deformation and multiple aspect ratios, we incorporate regionlets into an end-to-end trainable deep learning framework. The deep regionlets framework consists of a region selection network and a deep regionlet learning module. Specifically, given a detection bounding box proposal, the region selection network provides guidance on where to select regions to learn the features from. The regionlet learning module focuses on local feature selection and transformation to alleviate local variations. To this end, we first realize non-rectangular region selection within the detection framework to accommodate variations in object appearance. Moreover, we design a "gating network" within the regionlet leaning module to enable soft regionlet selection and pooling. The Deep Regionlets framework is trained end-to-end without additional efforts. We perform ablation studies and conduct extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and Microsoft COCO datasets. The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, such as RetinaNet and Mask R-CNN, even without additional segmentation labels.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 201

Multi-labeled Relation Extraction with Attentive Capsule Network

To disclose overlapped multiple relations from a sentence still keeps challenging. Most current works in terms of neural models inconveniently assuming that each sentence is explicitly mapped to a relation label, cannot handle multiple relations properly as the overlapped features of the relations are either ignored or very difficult to identify. To tackle with the new issue, we propose a novel approach for multi-labeled relation extraction with capsule network which acts considerably better than current convolutional or recurrent net in identifying the highly overlapped relations within an individual sentence. To better cluster the features and precisely extract the relations, we further devise attention-based routing algorithm and sliding-margin loss function, and embed them into our capsule network. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can indeed extract the highly overlapped features and achieve significant performance improvement for relation extraction comparing to the state-of-the-art works.Comment: To be published in AAAI 201