RGB-T salient object detection via fusing multi-level CNN features

RGB-induced salient object detection has recently witnessed substantial progress, which is attributed to the superior feature learning capability of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, such detections suffer from challenging scenarios characterized by cluttered backgrounds, low-light conditions and variations in illumination. Instead of improving RGB based saliency detection, this paper takes advantage of the complementary benefits of RGB and thermal infrared images. Specifically, we propose a novel end-to-end network for multi-modal salient object detection, which turns the challenge of RGB-T saliency detection to a CNN feature fusion problem. To this end, a backbone network (e.g., VGG-16) is first adopted to extract the coarse features from each RGB or thermal infrared image individually, and then several adjacent-depth feature combination (ADFC) modules are designed to extract multi-level refined features for each single-modal input image, considering that features captured at different depths differ in semantic information and visual details. Subsequently, a multi-branch group fusion (MGF) module is employed to capture the cross-modal features by fusing those features from ADFC modules for a RGB-T image pair at each level. Finally, a joint attention guided bi-directional message passing (JABMP) module undertakes the task of saliency prediction via integrating the multi-level fused features from MGF modules. Experimental results on several public RGB-T salient object detection datasets demonstrate the superiorities of our proposed algorithm over the state-of-the-art approaches, especially under challenging conditions, such as poor illumination, complex background and low contrast

Taking a look at small-scale pedestrians and occluded pedestrians

Small-scale pedestrian detection and occluded pedestrian detection are two challenging tasks. However, most state-of-the-art methods merely handle one single task each time, thus giving rise to relatively poor performance when the two tasks, in practice, are required simultaneously. In this paper, it is found that small-scale pedestrian detection and occluded pedestrian detection actually have a common problem, i.e., an inaccurate location problem. Therefore, solving this problem enables to improve the performance of both tasks. To this end, we pay more attention to the predicted bounding box with worse location precision and extract more contextual information around objects, where two modules (i.e., location bootstrap and semantic transition) are proposed. The location bootstrap is used to reweight regression loss, where the loss of the predicted bounding box far from the corresponding ground-truth is upweighted and the loss of the predicted bounding box near the corresponding ground-truth is downweighted. Additionally, the semantic transition adds more contextual information and relieves semantic inconsistency of the skip-layer fusion. Since the location bootstrap is not used at the test stage and the semantic transition is lightweight, the proposed method does not add many extra computational costs during inference. Experiments on the challenging CityPersons and Caltech datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the small-scale pedestrians and occluded pedestrians (e.g., 5.20% and 4.73% improvements on the Caltech)

ContextVP: Fully Context-Aware Video Prediction

Video prediction models based on convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and their combinations often result in blurry predictions. We identify an important contributing factor for imprecise predictions that has not been studied adequately in the literature: blind spots, i.e., lack of access to all relevant past information for accurately predicting the future. To address this issue, we introduce a fully context-aware architecture that captures the entire available past context for each pixel using Parallel Multi-Dimensional LSTM units and aggregates it using blending units. Our model outperforms a strong baseline network of 20 recurrent convolutional layers and yields state-of-the-art performance for next step prediction on three challenging real-world video datasets: Human 3.6M, Caltech Pedestrian, and UCF-101. Moreover, it does so with fewer parameters than several recently proposed models, and does not rely on deep convolutional networks, multi-scale architectures, separation of background and foreground modeling, motion flow learning, or adversarial training. These results highlight that full awareness of past context is of crucial importance for video prediction.Comment: 19 pages. ECCV 2018 oral presentation. Project webpage is at https://wonmin-byeon.github.io/publication/2018-ecc

QDTrack: Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning for Appearance-Only Multiple Object Tracking

Similarity learning has been recognized as a crucial step for object tracking. However, existing multiple object tracking methods only use sparse ground truth matching as the training objective, while ignoring the majority of the informative regions in images. In this paper, we present Quasi-Dense Similarity Learning, which densely samples hundreds of object regions on a pair of images for contrastive learning. We combine this similarity learning with multiple existing object detectors to build Quasi-Dense Tracking (QDTrack), which does not require displacement regression or motion priors. We find that the resulting distinctive feature space admits a simple nearest neighbor search at inference time for object association. In addition, we show that our similarity learning scheme is not limited to video data, but can learn effective instance similarity even from static input, enabling a competitive tracking performance without training on videos or using tracking supervision. We conduct extensive experiments on a wide variety of popular MOT benchmarks. We find that, despite its simplicity, QDTrack rivals the performance of state-of-the-art tracking methods on all benchmarks and sets a new state-of-the-art on the large-scale BDD100K MOT benchmark, while introducing negligible computational overhead to the detector

Deep Learning and Statistical Models for Time-Critical Pedestrian Behaviour Prediction

The time it takes for a classifier to make an accurate prediction can be crucial in many behaviour recognition problems. For example, an autonomous vehicle should detect hazardous pedestrian behaviour early enough for it to take appropriate measures. In this context, we compare the switching linear dynamical system (SLDS) and a three-layered bi-directional long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network, which are applied to infer pedestrian behaviour from motion tracks. We show that, though the neural network model achieves an accuracy of 80%, it requires long sequences to achieve this (100 samples or more). The SLDS, has a lower accuracy of 74%, but it achieves this result with short sequences (10 samples). To our knowledge, such a comparison on sequence length has not been considered in the literature before. The results provide a key intuition of the suitability of the models in time-critical problems