Collaborative Layer-wise Discriminative Learning in Deep Neural Networks

Intermediate features at different layers of a deep neural network are known to be discriminative for visual patterns of different complexities. However, most existing works ignore such cross-layer heterogeneities when classifying samples of different complexities. For example, if a training sample has already been correctly classified at a specific layer with high confidence, we argue that it is unnecessary to enforce rest layers to classify this sample correctly and a better strategy is to encourage those layers to focus on other samples. In this paper, we propose a layer-wise discriminative learning method to enhance the discriminative capability of a deep network by allowing its layers to work collaboratively for classification. Towards this target, we introduce multiple classifiers on top of multiple layers. Each classifier not only tries to correctly classify the features from its input layer, but also coordinates with other classifiers to jointly maximize the final classification performance. Guided by the other companion classifiers, each classifier learns to concentrate on certain training examples and boosts the overall performance. Allowing for end-to-end training, our method can be conveniently embedded into state-of-the-art deep networks. Experiments with multiple popular deep networks, including Network in Network, GoogLeNet and VGGNet, on scale-various object classification benchmarks, including CIFAR100, MNIST and ImageNet, and scene classification benchmarks, including MIT67, SUN397 and Places205, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In addition, we also analyze the relationship between the proposed method and classical conditional random fields models.Comment: To appear in ECCV 2016. Maybe subject to minor changes before camera-ready versio

Deep feature fusion through adaptive discriminative metric learning for scene recognition

With the development of deep learning techniques, fusion of deep features has demonstrated the powerful capability to improve recognition performance. However, most researchers directly fuse different deep feature vectors without considering the complementary and consistent information among them. In this paper, from the viewpoint of metric learning, we propose a novel deep feature fusion method, called deep feature fusion through adaptive discriminative metric learning (DFF-ADML), to explore the complementary and consistent information for scene recognition. Concretely, we formulate an adaptive discriminative metric learning problem, which not only fully exploits discriminative information from each deep feature vector, but also adaptively fuses complementary information from different deep feature vectors. Besides, we map different deep feature vectors of the same image into a common space by different linear transformations, such that the consistent information can be preserved as much as possible. Moreover, DFF-ADML is extended to a kernelized version. Extensive experiments on both natural scene and remote sensing scene datasets demonstrate the superiority and robustness of the proposed deep feature fusion method

Second-order Democratic Aggregation

Aggregated second-order features extracted from deep convolutional networks have been shown to be effective for texture generation, fine-grained recognition, material classification, and scene understanding. In this paper, we study a class of orderless aggregation functions designed to minimize interference or equalize contributions in the context of second-order features and we show that they can be computed just as efficiently as their first-order counterparts and they have favorable properties over aggregation by summation. Another line of work has shown that matrix power normalization after aggregation can significantly improve the generalization of second-order representations. We show that matrix power normalization implicitly equalizes contributions during aggregation thus establishing a connection between matrix normalization techniques and prior work on minimizing interference. Based on the analysis we present {\gamma}-democratic aggregators that interpolate between sum ({\gamma}=1) and democratic pooling ({\gamma}=0) outperforming both on several classification tasks. Moreover, unlike power normalization, the {\gamma}-democratic aggregations can be computed in a low dimensional space by sketching that allows the use of very high-dimensional second-order features. This results in a state-of-the-art performance on several datasets

Action Recognition: From Static Datasets to Moving Robots

Deep learning models have achieved state-of-the- art performance in recognizing human activities, but often rely on utilizing background cues present in typical computer vision datasets that predominantly have a stationary camera. If these models are to be employed by autonomous robots in real world environments, they must be adapted to perform independently of background cues and camera motion effects. To address these challenges, we propose a new method that firstly generates generic action region proposals with good potential to locate one human action in unconstrained videos regardless of camera motion and then uses action proposals to extract and classify effective shape and motion features by a ConvNet framework. In a range of experiments, we demonstrate that by actively proposing action regions during both training and testing, state-of-the-art or better performance is achieved on benchmarks. We show the outperformance of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art in two new datasets; one emphasizes on irrelevant background, the other highlights the camera motion. We also validate our action recognition method in an abnormal behavior detection scenario to improve workplace safety. The results verify a higher success rate for our method due to the ability of our system to recognize human actions regardless of environment and camera motion