A Dilated Inception Network for Visual Saliency Prediction

Recently, with the advent of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN), the improvements in visual saliency prediction research are impressive. One possible direction to approach the next improvement is to fully characterize the multi-scale saliency-influential factors with a computationally-friendly module in DCNN architectures. In this work, we proposed an end-to-end dilated inception network (DINet) for visual saliency prediction. It captures multi-scale contextual features effectively with very limited extra parameters. Instead of utilizing parallel standard convolutions with different kernel sizes as the existing inception module, our proposed dilated inception module (DIM) uses parallel dilated convolutions with different dilation rates which can significantly reduce the computation load while enriching the diversity of receptive fields in feature maps. Moreover, the performance of our saliency model is further improved by using a set of linear normalization-based probability distribution distance metrics as loss functions. As such, we can formulate saliency prediction as a probability distribution prediction task for global saliency inference instead of a typical pixel-wise regression problem. Experimental results on several challenging saliency benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DINet with proposed loss functions can achieve state-of-the-art performance with shorter inference time.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. The source codes are available at https://github.com/ysyscool/DINe

Object Tracking by Reconstruction with View-Specific Discriminative Correlation Filters

Standard RGB-D trackers treat the target as an inherently 2D structure, which makes modelling appearance changes related even to simple out-of-plane rotation highly challenging. We address this limitation by proposing a novel long-term RGB-D tracker - Object Tracking by Reconstruction (OTR). The tracker performs online 3D target reconstruction to facilitate robust learning of a set of view-specific discriminative correlation filters (DCFs). The 3D reconstruction supports two performance-enhancing features: (i) generation of accurate spatial support for constrained DCF learning from its 2D projection and (ii) point cloud based estimation of 3D pose change for selection and storage of view-specific DCFs which are used to robustly localize the target after out-of-view rotation or heavy occlusion. Extensive evaluation of OTR on the challenging Princeton RGB-D tracking and STC Benchmarks shows it outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin

Rain Removal in Traffic Surveillance: Does it Matter?

Varying weather conditions, including rainfall and snowfall, are generally regarded as a challenge for computer vision algorithms. One proposed solution to the challenges induced by rain and snowfall is to artificially remove the rain from images or video using rain removal algorithms. It is the promise of these algorithms that the rain-removed image frames will improve the performance of subsequent segmentation and tracking algorithms. However, rain removal algorithms are typically evaluated on their ability to remove synthetic rain on a small subset of images. Currently, their behavior is unknown on real-world videos when integrated with a typical computer vision pipeline. In this paper, we review the existing rain removal algorithms and propose a new dataset that consists of 22 traffic surveillance sequences under a broad variety of weather conditions that all include either rain or snowfall. We propose a new evaluation protocol that evaluates the rain removal algorithms on their ability to improve the performance of subsequent segmentation, instance segmentation, and feature tracking algorithms under rain and snow. If successful, the de-rained frames of a rain removal algorithm should improve segmentation performance and increase the number of accurately tracked features. The results show that a recent single-frame-based rain removal algorithm increases the segmentation performance by 19.7% on our proposed dataset, but it eventually decreases the feature tracking performance and showed mixed results with recent instance segmentation methods. However, the best video-based rain removal algorithm improves the feature tracking accuracy by 7.72%.Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System

Deformable Siamese Attention Networks for Visual Object Tracking

Siamese-based trackers have achieved excellent performance on visual object tracking. However, the target template is not updated online, and the features of the target template and search image are computed independently in a Siamese architecture. In this paper, we propose Deformable Siamese Attention Networks, referred to as SiamAttn, by introducing a new Siamese attention mechanism that computes deformable self-attention and cross-attention. The self attention learns strong context information via spatial attention, and selectively emphasizes interdependent channel-wise features with channel attention. The cross-attention is capable of aggregating rich contextual inter-dependencies between the target template and the search image, providing an implicit manner to adaptively update the target template. In addition, we design a region refinement module that computes depth-wise cross correlations between the attentional features for more accurate tracking. We conduct experiments on six benchmarks, where our method achieves new state of-the-art results, outperforming the strong baseline, SiamRPN++ [24], by 0.464->0.537 and 0.415->0.470 EAO on VOT 2016 and 2018. Our code is available at: https://github.com/msight-tech/research-siamattn.Comment: CVPR 2020, with code available at: https://github.com/msight-tech/research-siamatt