Current fine-grained classification approaches often rely on a robust
localization of object parts to extract localized feature representations
suitable for discrimination. However, part localization is a challenging task
due to the large variation of appearance and pose. In this paper, we show how
pre-trained convolutional neural networks can be used for robust and efficient
object part discovery and localization without the necessity to actually train
the network on the current dataset. Our approach called "part detector
discovery" (PDD) is based on analyzing the gradient maps of the network outputs
and finding activation centers spatially related to annotated semantic parts or
bounding boxes.
This allows us not just to obtain excellent performance on the CUB200-2011
dataset, but in contrast to previous approaches also to perform detection and
bird classification jointly without requiring a given bounding box annotation
during testing and ground-truth parts during training. The code is available at
http://www.inf-cv.uni-jena.de/part_discovery and
https://github.com/cvjena/PartDetectorDisovery.Comment: Accepted for publication on Asian Conference on Computer Vision
(ACCV) 201
