RandMSAugment: A Mixed-Sample Augmentation for Limited-Data Scenarios

The high costs of annotating large datasets suggests a need for effectively training CNNs with limited data, and data augmentation is a promising direction. We study foundational augmentation techniques, including Mixed Sample Data Augmentations (MSDAs) and a no-parameter variant of RandAugment termed Preset-RandAugment, in the fully supervised scenario. We observe that Preset-RandAugment excels in limited-data contexts while MSDAs are moderately effective. We show that low-level feature transforms play a pivotal role in this performance difference, postulate a new property of augmentations related to their data efficiency, and propose new ways to measure the diversity and realism of augmentations. Building on these insights, we introduce a novel augmentation technique called RandMSAugment that integrates complementary strengths of existing methods. RandMSAugment significantly outperforms the competition on CIFAR-100, STL-10, and Tiny-Imagenet. With very small training sets (4, 25, 100 samples/class), RandMSAugment achieves compelling performance gains between 4.1% and 6.75%. Even with more training data (500 samples/class) we improve performance by 1.03% to 2.47%. RandMSAugment does not require hyperparameter tuning, extra validation data, or cumbersome optimizations

CoMaL Tracking: Tracking Points at the Object Boundaries

Traditional point tracking algorithms such as the KLT use local 2D information aggregation for feature detection and tracking, due to which their performance degrades at the object boundaries that separate multiple objects. Recently, CoMaL Features have been proposed that handle such a case. However, they proposed a simple tracking framework where the points are re-detected in each frame and matched. This is inefficient and may also lose many points that are not re-detected in the next frame. We propose a novel tracking algorithm to accurately and efficiently track CoMaL points. For this, the level line segment associated with the CoMaL points is matched to MSER segments in the next frame using shape-based matching and the matches are further filtered using texture-based matching. Experiments show improvements over a simple re-detect-and-match framework as well as KLT in terms of speed/accuracy on different real-world applications, especially at the object boundaries.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, to appear in 1st Joint BMTT-PETS Workshop on Tracking and Surveillance, CVPR 201