Joint-SRVDNet: Joint Super Resolution and Vehicle Detection Network

In many domestic and military applications, aerial vehicle detection and super-resolutionalgorithms are frequently developed and applied independently. However, aerial vehicle detection on super-resolved images remains a challenging task due to the lack of discriminative information in the super-resolved images. To address this problem, we propose a Joint Super-Resolution and Vehicle DetectionNetwork (Joint-SRVDNet) that tries to generate discriminative, high-resolution images of vehicles fromlow-resolution aerial images. First, aerial images are up-scaled by a factor of 4x using a Multi-scaleGenerative Adversarial Network (MsGAN), which has multiple intermediate outputs with increasingresolutions. Second, a detector is trained on super-resolved images that are upscaled by factor 4x usingMsGAN architecture and finally, the detection loss is minimized jointly with the super-resolution loss toencourage the target detector to be sensitive to the subsequent super-resolution training. The network jointlylearns hierarchical and discriminative features of targets and produces optimal super-resolution results. Weperform both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our proposed network on VEDAI, xView and DOTAdatasets. The experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves better visual quality than thestate-of-the-art methods for aerial super-resolution with 4x up-scaling factor and improves the accuracy ofaerial vehicle detection

A Survey on Metric Learning for Feature Vectors and Structured Data

The need for appropriate ways to measure the distance or similarity between data is ubiquitous in machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining, but handcrafting such good metrics for specific problems is generally difficult. This has led to the emergence of metric learning, which aims at automatically learning a metric from data and has attracted a lot of interest in machine learning and related fields for the past ten years. This survey paper proposes a systematic review of the metric learning literature, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. We pay particular attention to Mahalanobis distance metric learning, a well-studied and successful framework, but additionally present a wide range of methods that have recently emerged as powerful alternatives, including nonlinear metric learning, similarity learning and local metric learning. Recent trends and extensions, such as semi-supervised metric learning, metric learning for histogram data and the derivation of generalization guarantees, are also covered. Finally, this survey addresses metric learning for structured data, in particular edit distance learning, and attempts to give an overview of the remaining challenges in metric learning for the years to come.Comment: Technical report, 59 pages. Changes in v2: fixed typos and improved presentation. Changes in v3: fixed typos. Changes in v4: fixed typos and new method

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): Challenges, Solutions, and Future Directions

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is a novel class of deep generative models which has recently gained significant attention. GANs learns complex and high-dimensional distributions implicitly over images, audio, and data. However, there exists major challenges in training of GANs, i.e., mode collapse, non-convergence and instability, due to inappropriate design of network architecture, use of objective function and selection of optimization algorithm. Recently, to address these challenges, several solutions for better design and optimization of GANs have been investigated based on techniques of re-engineered network architectures, new objective functions and alternative optimization algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing survey that has particularly focused on broad and systematic developments of these solutions. In this study, we perform a comprehensive survey of the advancements in GANs design and optimization solutions proposed to handle GANs challenges. We first identify key research issues within each design and optimization technique and then propose a new taxonomy to structure solutions by key research issues. In accordance with the taxonomy, we provide a detailed discussion on different GANs variants proposed within each solution and their relationships. Finally, based on the insights gained, we present the promising research directions in this rapidly growing field.Comment: 42 pages, Figure 13, Table

Learning joint feature adaptation for zero-shot recognition

Zero-shot recognition (ZSR) aims to recognize target-domain data instances of unseen classes based on the models learned from associated pairs of seen-class source and target domain data. One of the key challenges in ZSR is the relative scarcity of source-domain features (e.g. one feature vector per class), which do not fully account for wide variability in target-domain instances. In this paper we propose a novel framework of learning data-dependent feature transforms for scoring similarity between an arbitrary pair of source and target data instances to account for the wide variability in target domain. Our proposed approach is based on optimizing over a parameterized family of local feature displacements that maximize the source-target adaptive similarity functions. Accordingly we propose formulating zero-shot learning (ZSL) using latent structural SVMs to learn our similarity functions from training data. As demonstration we design a specific algorithm under the proposed framework involving bilinear similarity functions and regularized least squares as penalties for feature displacement. We test our approach on several benchmark datasets for ZSR and show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art. For instance, on aP&Y dataset we can achieve 80.89% in terms of recognition accuracy, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 11.15%

Learning joint feature adaptation for zero-shot recognition

Zero-shot recognition (ZSR) aims to recognize target-domain data instances of unseen classes based on the models learned from associated pairs of seen-class source and target domain data. One of the key challenges in ZSR is the relative scarcity of source-domain features (e.g. one feature vector per class), which do not fully account for wide variability in target-domain instances. In this paper we propose a novel framework of learning data-dependent feature transforms for scoring similarity between an arbitrary pair of source and target data instances to account for the wide variability in target domain. Our proposed approach is based on optimizing over a parameterized family of local feature displacements that maximize the source-target adaptive similarity functions. Accordingly we propose formulating zero-shot learning (ZSL) using latent structural SVMs to learn our similarity functions from training data. As demonstration we design a specific algorithm under the proposed framework involving bilinear similarity functions and regularized least squares as penalties for feature displacement. We test our approach on several benchmark datasets for ZSR and show significant improvement over the state-of-the-art. For instance, on aP&Y dataset we can achieve 80.89% in terms of recognition accuracy, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 11.15%