The success of existing salient object detection models relies on a large pixel-wise labeled training dataset. How-ever, collecting such a dataset is not only time-consuming but also very expensive. To reduce the labeling burden, we study semi-supervised salient object detection, and formulate it as an unlabeled dataset pixel-level confidence estimation problem by identifying pixels with less confident predictions. Specifically, we introduce a new latent variable model with an energy-based prior for effective latent space exploration, leading to more reliable confidence maps. With the proposed strategy, the unlabelled images can effectively participate in model training. Experimental results show that the proposed solution, using only 1/16 of the annotations from the original training dataset, achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art fully supervised models.
Anomaly detection among a large number of processes arises in many applications ranging from dynamic spectrum access to cybersecurity. In such problems one can often obtain noisy observations aggregated from a chosen subset of processes that conforms to a tree structure. The distribution of these observations, based on which the presence of anomalies is detected, may be only partially known. This gives rise to the need for a search strategy designed to account for both the sample complexity and the detection accuracy, as well as cope with statistical models that are known only up to some missing parameters. In this work we propose a sequential search strategy using two variations of the Generalized Local Likelihood Ratio statistic. Our proposed Hierarchical Dynamic Search (HDS) strategy is shown to be order-optimal with respect to the size of the search space and asymptotically optimal with respect to the detection accuracy. An explicit upper bound on the error probability of HDS is established for the finite sample regime. Extensive experiments are conducted, demonstrating the performance gains of HDS over existing methods.
Remote-sensing (RS) Change Detection (CD) aims to detect "changes of interest" from co-registered bi-temporal images. The performance of existing deep supervised CD methods is attributed to the large amounts of annotated data used to train the networks. However, annotating large amounts of remote sensing images is labor-intensive and expensive, particularly with bi-temporal images, as it requires pixel-wise comparisons by a human expert. On the other hand, we often have access to unlimited unlabeled multi-temporal RS imagery thanks to ever-increasing earth observation programs. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective way to leverage the information from unlabeled bi-temporal images to improve the performance of CD approaches. More specifically, we propose a semi-supervised CD model in which we formulate an unsupervised CD loss in addition to the supervised Cross-Entropy (CE) loss by constraining the output change probability map of a given unlabeled bi-temporal image pair to be consistent under the small random perturbations applied on the deep feature difference map that is obtained by subtracting their latent feature representations. Experiments conducted on two publicly available CD datasets show that the proposed semi-supervised CD method can reach closer to the performance of supervised CD even with access to as little as 10% of the annotated training data. Code available at //github.com/wgcban/SemiCD
Many recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) optical flow models use finite-step recurrent update operations to emulate traditional algorithms by encouraging iterative refinements toward a stable flow estimation. However, these RNNs impose large computation and memory overheads, and are not directly trained to model such stable estimation. They can converge poorly and thereby suffer from performance degradation. To combat these drawbacks, we propose deep equilibrium (DEQ) flow estimators, an approach that directly solves for the flow as the infinite-level fixed point of an implicit layer (using any black-box solver), and differentiates through this fixed point analytically (thus requiring $O(1)$ training memory). This implicit-depth approach is not predicated on any specific model, and thus can be applied to a wide range of SOTA flow estimation model designs. The use of these DEQ flow estimators allows us to compute the flow faster using, e.g., fixed-point reuse and inexact gradients, consumes $4\sim6\times$ times less training memory than the recurrent counterpart, and achieves better results with the same computation budget. In addition, we propose a novel, sparse fixed-point correction scheme to stabilize our DEQ flow estimators, which addresses a longstanding challenge for DEQ models in general. We test our approach in various realistic settings and show that it improves SOTA methods on Sintel and KITTI datasets with substantially better computational and memory efficiency.
This paper identifies and addresses a serious design bias of existing salient object detection (SOD) datasets, which unrealistically assume that each image should contain at least one clear and uncluttered salient object. This design bias has led to a saturation in performance for state-of-the-art SOD models when evaluated on existing datasets. However, these models are still far from satisfactory when applied to real-world scenes. Based on our analyses, we propose a new high-quality dataset and update the previous saliency benchmark. Specifically, our dataset, called Salient Objects in Clutter~\textbf{(SOC)}, includes images with both salient and non-salient objects from several common object categories. In addition to object category annotations, each salient image is accompanied by attributes that reflect common challenges in common scenes, which can help provide deeper insight into the SOD problem. Further, with a given saliency encoder, e.g., the backbone network, existing saliency models are designed to achieve mapping from the training image set to the training ground-truth set. We, therefore, argue that improving the dataset can yield higher performance gains than focusing only on the decoder design. With this in mind, we investigate several dataset-enhancement strategies, including label smoothing to implicitly emphasize salient boundaries, random image augmentation to adapt saliency models to various scenarios, and self-supervised learning as a regularization strategy to learn from small datasets. Our extensive results demonstrate the effectiveness of these tricks. We also provide a comprehensive benchmark for SOD, which can be found in our repository: //github.com/DengPingFan/SODBenchmark.
Active learning is a promising alternative to alleviate the issue of high annotation cost in the computer vision tasks by consciously selecting more informative samples to label. Active learning for object detection is more challenging and existing efforts on it are relatively rare. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid approach to address this problem, where the instance-level uncertainty and diversity are jointly considered in a bottom-up manner. To balance the computational complexity, the proposed approach is designed as a two-stage procedure. At the first stage, an Entropy-based Non-Maximum Suppression (ENMS) is presented to estimate the uncertainty of every image, which performs NMS according to the entropy in the feature space to remove predictions with redundant information gains. At the second stage, a diverse prototype (DivProto) strategy is explored to ensure the diversity across images by progressively converting it into the intra-class and inter-class diversities of the entropy-based class-specific prototypes. Extensive experiments are conducted on MS COCO and Pascal VOC, and the proposed approach achieves state of the art results and significantly outperforms the other counterparts, highlighting its superiority.
Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) aims to facilitate the training and deployment of object detectors with the help of a large amount of unlabeled data. Though various self-training based and consistency-regularization based SSOD methods have been proposed, most of them are anchor-based detectors, ignoring the fact that in many real-world applications anchor-free detectors are more demanded. In this paper, we intend to bridge this gap and propose a DenSe Learning (DSL) based anchor-free SSOD algorithm. Specifically, we achieve this goal by introducing several novel techniques, including an Adaptive Filtering strategy for assigning multi-level and accurate dense pixel-wise pseudo-labels, an Aggregated Teacher for producing stable and precise pseudo-labels, and an uncertainty-consistency-regularization term among scales and shuffled patches for improving the generalization capability of the detector. Extensive experiments are conducted on MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC, and the results show that our proposed DSL method records new state-of-the-art SSOD performance, surpassing existing methods by a large margin. Codes can be found at \textcolor{blue}{//github.com/chenbinghui1/DSL}.
Imposing consistency through proxy tasks has been shown to enhance data-driven learning and enable self-supervision in various tasks. This paper introduces novel and effective consistency strategies for optical flow estimation, a problem where labels from real-world data are very challenging to derive. More specifically, we propose occlusion consistency and zero forcing in the forms of self-supervised learning and transformation consistency in the form of semi-supervised learning. We apply these consistency techniques in a way that the network model learns to describe pixel-level motions better while requiring no additional annotations. We demonstrate that our consistency strategies applied to a strong baseline network model using the original datasets and labels provide further improvements, attaining the state-of-the-art results on the KITTI-2015 scene flow benchmark in the non-stereo category. Our method achieves the best foreground accuracy (4.33% in Fl-all) over both the stereo and non-stereo categories, even though using only monocular image inputs.
Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
Applying artificial intelligence techniques in medical imaging is one of the most promising areas in medicine. However, most of the recent success in this area highly relies on large amounts of carefully annotated data, whereas annotating medical images is a costly process. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called FocalMix, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to leverage recent advances in semi-supervised learning (SSL) for 3D medical image detection. We conducted extensive experiments on two widely used datasets for lung nodule detection, LUNA16 and NLST. Results show that our proposed SSL methods can achieve a substantial improvement of up to 17.3% over state-of-the-art supervised learning approaches with 400 unlabeled CT scans.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).