Single-Label Multi-Class Image Classification by Deep Logistic Regression

The objective learning formulation is essential for the success of convolutional neural networks. In this work, we analyse thoroughly the standard learning objective functions for multi-class classification CNNs: softmax regression (SR) for single-label scenario and logistic regression (LR) for multi-label scenario. Our analyses lead to an inspiration of exploiting LR for single-label classification learning, and then the disclosing of the negative class distraction problem in LR. To address this problem, we develop two novel LR based objective functions that not only generalise the conventional LR but importantly turn out to be competitive alternatives to SR in single label classification. Extensive comparative evaluations demonstrate the model learning advantages of the proposed LR functions over the commonly adopted SR in single-label coarse-grained object categorisation and cross-class fine-grained person instance identification tasks. We also show the performance superiority of our method on clothing attribute classification in comparison to the vanilla LR function.Comment: Accepted by AAAI-19, code at https://github.com/qd301/FocusRectificationLogisticRegressio

Multi-Modal Multi-Scale Deep Learning for Large-Scale Image Annotation

Image annotation aims to annotate a given image with a variable number of class labels corresponding to diverse visual concepts. In this paper, we address two main issues in large-scale image annotation: 1) how to learn a rich feature representation suitable for predicting a diverse set of visual concepts ranging from object, scene to abstract concept; 2) how to annotate an image with the optimal number of class labels. To address the first issue, we propose a novel multi-scale deep model for extracting rich and discriminative features capable of representing a wide range of visual concepts. Specifically, a novel two-branch deep neural network architecture is proposed which comprises a very deep main network branch and a companion feature fusion network branch designed for fusing the multi-scale features computed from the main branch. The deep model is also made multi-modal by taking noisy user-provided tags as model input to complement the image input. For tackling the second issue, we introduce a label quantity prediction auxiliary task to the main label prediction task to explicitly estimate the optimal label number for a given image. Extensive experiments are carried out on two large-scale image annotation benchmark datasets and the results show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.Comment: Submited to IEEE TI

Patch-based Convolutional Neural Network for Whole Slide Tissue Image Classification

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are state-of-the-art models for many image classification tasks. However, to recognize cancer subtypes automatically, training a CNN on gigapixel resolution Whole Slide Tissue Images (WSI) is currently computationally impossible. The differentiation of cancer subtypes is based on cellular-level visual features observed on image patch scale. Therefore, we argue that in this situation, training a patch-level classifier on image patches will perform better than or similar to an image-level classifier. The challenge becomes how to intelligently combine patch-level classification results and model the fact that not all patches will be discriminative. We propose to train a decision fusion model to aggregate patch-level predictions given by patch-level CNNs, which to the best of our knowledge has not been shown before. Furthermore, we formulate a novel Expectation-Maximization (EM) based method that automatically locates discriminative patches robustly by utilizing the spatial relationships of patches. We apply our method to the classification of glioma and non-small-cell lung carcinoma cases into subtypes. The classification accuracy of our method is similar to the inter-observer agreement between pathologists. Although it is impossible to train CNNs on WSIs, we experimentally demonstrate using a comparable non-cancer dataset of smaller images that a patch-based CNN can outperform an image-based CNN

One-Shot Learning for Semantic Segmentation

Low-shot learning methods for image classification support learning from sparse data. We extend these techniques to support dense semantic image segmentation. Specifically, we train a network that, given a small set of annotated images, produces parameters for a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN). We use this FCN to perform dense pixel-level prediction on a test image for the new semantic class. Our architecture shows a 25% relative meanIoU improvement compared to the best baseline methods for one-shot segmentation on unseen classes in the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset and is at least 3 times faster.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2017. The code is available at https://github.com/lzzcd001/OSLS