Network traffic data is a combination of different data bytes packets under different network protocols. These traffic packets have complex time-varying non-linear relationships. Existing state-of-the-art methods rise up to this challenge by fusing features into multiple subsets based on correlations and using hybrid classification techniques that extract spatial and temporal characteristics. This often requires high computational cost and manual support that limit them for real-time processing of network traffic. To address this, we propose a new novel feature extraction method based on covariance matrices that extract spatial-temporal characteristics of network traffic data for detecting malicious network traffic behavior. The covariance matrices in our proposed method not just naturally encode the mutual relationships between different network traffic values but also have well-defined geometry that falls in the Riemannian manifold. Riemannian manifold is embedded with distance metrics that facilitate extracting discriminative features for detecting malicious network traffic. We evaluated our model on NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 datasets and showed our proposed method significantly outperforms the conventional method and other existing studies on the dataset.
The goal of few-shot learning is to recognize new visual concepts with just a few amount of labeled samples in each class. Recent effective metric-based few-shot approaches employ neural networks to learn a feature similarity comparison between query and support examples. However, the importance of feature embedding, i.e., exploring the relationship among training samples, is neglected. In this work, we present a simple yet powerful baseline for few-shot classification by emphasizing the importance of feature embedding. Specifically, we revisit the classical triplet network from deep metric learning, and extend it into a deep K-tuplet network for few-shot learning, utilizing the relationship among the input samples to learn a general representation learning via episode-training. Once trained, our network is able to extract discriminative features for unseen novel categories and can be seamlessly incorporated with a non-linear distance metric function to facilitate the few-shot classification. Our result on the miniImageNet benchmark outperforms other metric-based few-shot classification methods. More importantly, when evaluated on completely different datasets (Caltech-101, CUB-200, Stanford Dogs and Cars) using the model trained with miniImageNet, our method significantly outperforms prior methods, demonstrating its superior capability to generalize to unseen classes.
Detection and classification of objects in aerial imagery have several applications like urban planning, crop surveillance, and traffic surveillance. However, due to the lower resolution of the objects and the effect of noise in aerial images, extracting distinguishing features for the objects is a challenge. We evaluate CenterNet, a state of the art method for real-time 2D object detection, on the VisDrone2019 dataset. We evaluate the performance of the model with different backbone networks in conjunction with varying resolutions during training and testing.
Pedestrian detection plays an important role in many applications such as autonomous driving. We propose a method that explores semantic segmentation results as self-attention cues to significantly improve the pedestrian detection performance. Specifically, a multi-task network is designed to jointly learn semantic segmentation and pedestrian detection from image datasets with weak box-wise annotations. The semantic segmentation feature maps are concatenated with corresponding convolution features maps to provide more discriminative features for pedestrian detection and pedestrian classification. By jointly learning segmentation and detection, our proposed pedestrian self-attention mechanism can effectively identify pedestrian regions and suppress backgrounds. In addition, we propose to incorporate semantic attention information from multi-scale layers into deep convolution neural network to boost pedestrian detection. Experiment results show that the proposed method achieves the best detection performance with MR of 6.27% on Caltech dataset and obtain competitive performance on CityPersons dataset while maintaining high computational efficiency.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are increasingly being used in surveillance and traffic monitoring thanks to their high mobility and ability to cover areas at different altitudes and locations. One of the major challenges is to use aerial images to accurately detect cars and count them in real-time for traffic monitoring purposes. Several deep learning techniques were recently proposed based on convolution neural network (CNN) for real-time classification and recognition in computer vision. However, their performance depends on the scenarios where they are used. In this paper, we investigate the performance of two state-of-the-art CNN algorithms, namely Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3, in the context of car detection from aerial images. We trained and tested these two models on a large car dataset taken from UAVs. We demonstrated in this paper that YOLOv3 outperforms Faster R-CNN in sensitivity and processing time, although they are comparable in the precision metric.
This work aims to solve the challenging few-shot object detection problem where only a few annotated examples are available for each object category to train a detection model. Such an ability of learning to detect an object from just a few examples is common for human vision systems, but remains absent for computer vision systems. Though few-shot meta learning offers a promising solution technique, previous works mostly target the task of image classification and are not directly applicable for the much more complicated object detection task. In this work, we propose a novel meta-learning based model with carefully designed architecture, which consists of a meta-model and a base detection model. The base detection model is trained on several base classes with sufficient samples to offer basis features. The meta-model is trained to reweight importance of features from the base detection model over the input image and adapt these features to assist novel object detection from a few examples. The meta-model is light-weight, end-to-end trainable and able to entail the base model with detection ability for novel objects fast. Through experiments we demonstrated our model can outperform baselines by a large margin for few-shot object detection, on multiple datasets and settings. Our model also exhibits fast adaptation speed to novel few-shot classes.
We introduce and tackle the problem of zero-shot object detection (ZSD), which aims to detect object classes which are not observed during training. We work with a challenging set of object classes, not restricting ourselves to similar and/or fine-grained categories cf. prior works on zero-shot classification. We follow a principled approach by first adapting visual-semantic embeddings for ZSD. We then discuss the problems associated with selecting a background class and motivate two background-aware approaches for learning robust detectors. One of these models uses a fixed background class and the other is based on iterative latent assignments. We also outline the challenge associated with using a limited number of training classes and propose a solution based on dense sampling of the semantic label space using auxiliary data with a large number of categories. We propose novel splits of two standard detection datasets - MSCOCO and VisualGenome and discuss extensive empirical results to highlight the benefits of the proposed methods. We provide useful insights into the algorithm and conclude by posing some open questions to encourage further research.
As we move towards large-scale object detection, it is unrealistic to expect annotated training data for all object classes at sufficient scale, and so methods capable of unseen object detection are required. We propose a novel zero-shot method based on training an end-to-end model that fuses semantic attribute prediction with visual features to propose object bounding boxes for seen and unseen classes. While we utilize semantic features during training, our method is agnostic to semantic information for unseen classes at test-time. Our method retains the efficiency and effectiveness of YOLO for objects seen during training, while improving its performance for novel and unseen objects. The ability of state-of-art detection methods to learn discriminative object features to reject background proposals also limits their performance for unseen objects. We posit that, to detect unseen objects, we must incorporate semantic information into the visual domain so that the learned visual features reflect this information and leads to improved recall rates for unseen objects. We test our method on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO dataset and observed significant improvements on the average precision of unseen classes.
Deep CNN-based object detection systems have achieved remarkable success on several large-scale object detection benchmarks. However, training such detectors requires a large number of labeled bounding boxes, which are more difficult to obtain than image-level annotations. Previous work addresses this issue by transforming image-level classifiers into object detectors. This is done by modeling the differences between the two on categories with both image-level and bounding box annotations, and transferring this information to convert classifiers to detectors for categories without bounding box annotations. We improve this previous work by incorporating knowledge about object similarities from visual and semantic domains during the transfer process. The intuition behind our proposed method is that visually and semantically similar categories should exhibit more common transferable properties than dissimilar categories, e.g. a better detector would result by transforming the differences between a dog classifier and a dog detector onto the cat class, than would by transforming from the violin class. Experimental results on the challenging ILSVRC2013 detection dataset demonstrate that each of our proposed object similarity based knowledge transfer methods outperforms the baseline methods. We found strong evidence that visual similarity and semantic relatedness are complementary for the task, and when combined notably improve detection, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance in a semi-supervised setting.
Salient object detection, which aims to identify and locate the most salient pixels or regions in images, has been attracting more and more interest due to its various real-world applications. However, this vision task is quite challenging, especially under complex image scenes. Inspired by the intrinsic reflection of natural images, in this paper we propose a novel feature learning framework for large-scale salient object detection. Specifically, we design a symmetrical fully convolutional network (SFCN) to learn complementary saliency features under the guidance of lossless feature reflection. The location information, together with contextual and semantic information, of salient objects are jointly utilized to supervise the proposed network for more accurate saliency predictions. In addition, to overcome the blurry boundary problem, we propose a new structural loss function to learn clear object boundaries and spatially consistent saliency. The coarse prediction results are effectively refined by these structural information for performance improvements. Extensive experiments on seven saliency detection datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves consistently superior performance and outperforms the very recent state-of-the-art methods.
Reasoning about the relationships between object pairs in images is a crucial task for holistic scene understanding. Most of the existing works treat this task as a pure visual classification task: each type of relationship or phrase is classified as a relation category based on the extracted visual features. However, each kind of relationships has a wide variety of object combination and each pair of objects has diverse interactions. Obtaining sufficient training samples for all possible relationship categories is difficult and expensive. In this work, we propose a natural language guided framework to tackle this problem. We propose to use a generic bi-directional recurrent neural network to predict the semantic connection between the participating objects in the relationship from the aspect of natural language. The proposed simple method achieves the state-of-the-art on the Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) and Visual Genome datasets, especially when predicting unseen relationships (e.g. recall improved from 76.42% to 89.79% on VRD zero-shot testing set).