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

Part Detector Discovery in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Current fine-grained classification approaches often rely on a robust localization of object parts to extract localized feature representations suitable for discrimination. However, part localization is a challenging task due to the large variation of appearance and pose. In this paper, we show how pre-trained convolutional neural networks can be used for robust and efficient object part discovery and localization without the necessity to actually train the network on the current dataset. Our approach called "part detector discovery" (PDD) is based on analyzing the gradient maps of the network outputs and finding activation centers spatially related to annotated semantic parts or bounding boxes. This allows us not just to obtain excellent performance on the CUB200-2011 dataset, but in contrast to previous approaches also to perform detection and bird classification jointly without requiring a given bounding box annotation during testing and ground-truth parts during training. The code is available at http://www.inf-cv.uni-jena.de/part_discovery and https://github.com/cvjena/PartDetectorDisovery.Comment: Accepted for publication on Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) 201

Track, then Decide: Category-Agnostic Vision-based Multi-Object Tracking

The most common paradigm for vision-based multi-object tracking is tracking-by-detection, due to the availability of reliable detectors for several important object categories such as cars and pedestrians. However, future mobile systems will need a capability to cope with rich human-made environments, in which obtaining detectors for every possible object category would be infeasible. In this paper, we propose a model-free multi-object tracking approach that uses a category-agnostic image segmentation method to track objects. We present an efficient segmentation mask-based tracker which associates pixel-precise masks reported by the segmentation. Our approach can utilize semantic information whenever it is available for classifying objects at the track level, while retaining the capability to track generic unknown objects in the absence of such information. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art tracking-by-detection methods for popular object categories such as cars and pedestrians. Additionally, we show that the proposed method can discover and robustly track a large variety of other objects.Comment: ICRA'18 submissio

SINet: A Scale-insensitive Convolutional Neural Network for Fast Vehicle Detection

Vision-based vehicle detection approaches achieve incredible success in recent years with the development of deep convolutional neural network (CNN). However, existing CNN based algorithms suffer from the problem that the convolutional features are scale-sensitive in object detection task but it is common that traffic images and videos contain vehicles with a large variance of scales. In this paper, we delve into the source of scale sensitivity, and reveal two key issues: 1) existing RoI pooling destroys the structure of small scale objects, 2) the large intra-class distance for a large variance of scales exceeds the representation capability of a single network. Based on these findings, we present a scale-insensitive convolutional neural network (SINet) for fast detecting vehicles with a large variance of scales. First, we present a context-aware RoI pooling to maintain the contextual information and original structure of small scale objects. Second, we present a multi-branch decision network to minimize the intra-class distance of features. These lightweight techniques bring zero extra time complexity but prominent detection accuracy improvement. The proposed techniques can be equipped with any deep network architectures and keep them trained end-to-end. Our SINet achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy and speed (up to 37 FPS) on the KITTI benchmark and a new highway dataset, which contains a large variance of scales and extremely small objects.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS