Object Re-IDentification (ReID), one of the most significant problems in biometrics and surveillance systems, has been extensively studied by image processing and computer vision communities in the past decades. Learning a robust and discriminative feature representation is a crucial challenge for object ReID. The problem is even more challenging in ReID based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) as the images are characterized by continuously varying camera parameters (e.g., view angle, altitude, etc.) of a flying drone. To address this challenge, multiscale feature representation has been considered to characterize images captured from UAV flying at different altitudes. In this work, we propose a multitask learning approach, which employs a new multiscale architecture without convolution, Pyramid Vision Transformer (PVT), as the backbone for UAV-based object ReID. By uncertainty modeling of intraclass variations, our proposed model can be jointly optimized using both uncertainty-aware object ID and camera ID information. Experimental results are reported on PRAI and VRAI, two ReID data sets from aerial surveillance, to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach
Person re-identification is a key technology for analyzing video-based human behavior; however, its application is still challenging in practical situations due to the performance degradation for domains different from those in the training data. Here, we propose an environment-constrained adaptive network for reducing the domain gap. This network refines pseudo-labels estimated via a self-training scheme by imposing multi-camera constraints. The proposed method incorporates person-pair information without person identity labels obtained from the environment into the model training. In addition, we develop a method that appropriately selects a person from the pair that contributes to the performance improvement. We evaluate the performance of the network using public and private datasets and confirm the performance surpasses state-of-the-art methods in domains with overlapping camera views. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on domain-adaptive learning with multi-camera constraints that can be obtained in real environments.
Compared to visible-to-visible (V2V) person re-identification (ReID), the visible-to-infrared (V2I) person ReID task is more challenging due to the lack of sufficient training samples and the large cross-modality discrepancy. To this end, we propose Flow2Flow, a unified framework that could jointly achieve training sample expansion and cross-modality image generation for V2I person ReID. Specifically, Flow2Flow learns bijective transformations from both the visible image domain and the infrared domain to a shared isotropic Gaussian domain with an invertible visible flow-based generator and an infrared one, respectively. With Flow2Flow, we are able to generate pseudo training samples by the transformation from latent Gaussian noises to visible or infrared images, and generate cross-modality images by transformations from existing-modality images to latent Gaussian noises to missing-modality images. For the purpose of identity alignment and modality alignment of generated images, we develop adversarial training strategies to train Flow2Flow. Specifically, we design an image encoder and a modality discriminator for each modality. The image encoder encourages the generated images to be similar to real images of the same identity via identity adversarial training, and the modality discriminator makes the generated images modal-indistinguishable from real images via modality adversarial training. Experimental results on SYSU-MM01 and RegDB demonstrate that both training sample expansion and cross-modality image generation can significantly improve V2I ReID accuracy.
We introduce a Transformer based 6D Object Pose Estimation framework VideoPose, comprising an end-to-end attention based modelling architecture, that attends to previous frames in order to estimate accurate 6D Object Poses in videos. Our approach leverages the temporal information from a video sequence for pose refinement, along with being computationally efficient and robust. Compared to existing methods, our architecture is able to capture and reason from long-range dependencies efficiently, thus iteratively refining over video sequences. Experimental evaluation on the YCB-Video dataset shows that our approach is on par with the state-of-the-art Transformer methods, and performs significantly better relative to CNN based approaches. Further, with a speed of 33 fps, it is also more efficient and therefore applicable to a variety of applications that require real-time object pose estimation. Training code and pretrained models are available at //github.com/ApoorvaBeedu/VideoPose
In many visual systems, visual tracking often bases on RGB image sequences, in which some targets are invalid in low-light conditions, and tracking performance is thus affected significantly. Introducing other modalities such as depth and infrared data is an effective way to handle imaging limitations of individual sources, but multi-modal imaging platforms usually require elaborate designs and cannot be applied in many real-world applications at present. Near-infrared (NIR) imaging becomes an essential part of many surveillance cameras, whose imaging is switchable between RGB and NIR based on the light intensity. These two modalities are heterogeneous with very different visual properties and thus bring big challenges for visual tracking. However, existing works have not studied this challenging problem. In this work, we address the cross-modal object tracking problem and contribute a new video dataset, including 654 cross-modal image sequences with over 481K frames in total, and the average video length is more than 735 frames. To promote the research and development of cross-modal object tracking, we propose a new algorithm, which learns the modality-aware target representation to mitigate the appearance gap between RGB and NIR modalities in the tracking process. It is plug-and-play and could thus be flexibly embedded into different tracking frameworks. Extensive experiments on the dataset are conducted, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in two representative tracking frameworks against 17 state-of-the-art tracking methods. We will release the dataset for free academic usage, dataset download link and code will be released soon.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for person re-identification (re-ID) aim at transferring re-ID knowledge from labeled source data to unlabeled target data. Although achieving great success, most of them only use limited data from a single-source domain for model pre-training, making the rich labeled data insufficiently exploited. To make full use of the valuable labeled data, we introduce the multi-source concept into UDA person re-ID field, where multiple source datasets are used during training. However, because of domain gaps, simply combining different datasets only brings limited improvement. In this paper, we try to address this problem from two perspectives, \ie{} domain-specific view and domain-fusion view. Two constructive modules are proposed, and they are compatible with each other. First, a rectification domain-specific batch normalization (RDSBN) module is explored to simultaneously reduce domain-specific characteristics and increase the distinctiveness of person features. Second, a graph convolutional network (GCN) based multi-domain information fusion (MDIF) module is developed, which minimizes domain distances by fusing features of different domains. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art UDA person re-ID methods by a large margin, and even achieves comparable performance to the supervised approaches without any post-processing techniques.
Object detection with transformers (DETR) reaches competitive performance with Faster R-CNN via a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. Inspired by the great success of pre-training transformers in natural language processing, we propose a pretext task named random query patch detection to unsupervisedly pre-train DETR (UP-DETR) for object detection. Specifically, we randomly crop patches from the given image and then feed them as queries to the decoder. The model is pre-trained to detect these query patches from the original image. During the pre-training, we address two critical issues: multi-task learning and multi-query localization. (1) To trade-off multi-task learning of classification and localization in the pretext task, we freeze the CNN backbone and propose a patch feature reconstruction branch which is jointly optimized with patch detection. (2) To perform multi-query localization, we introduce UP-DETR from single-query patch and extend it to multi-query patches with object query shuffle and attention mask. In our experiments, UP-DETR significantly boosts the performance of DETR with faster convergence and higher precision on PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets. The code will be available soon.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been a frequent topic of research due to many practical applications. However, many of the current solutions are still not robust in real-world situations, commonly depending on many constraints. This paper presents a robust and efficient ALPR system based on the state-of-the-art YOLO object detection. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are trained and fine-tuned for each ALPR stage so that they are robust under different conditions (e.g., variations in camera, lighting, and background). Specially for character segmentation and recognition, we design a two-stage approach employing simple data augmentation tricks such as inverted License Plates (LPs) and flipped characters. The resulting ALPR approach achieved impressive results in two datasets. First, in the SSIG dataset, composed of 2,000 frames from 101 vehicle videos, our system achieved a recognition rate of 93.53% and 47 Frames Per Second (FPS), performing better than both Sighthound and OpenALPR commercial systems (89.80% and 93.03%, respectively) and considerably outperforming previous results (81.80%). Second, targeting a more realistic scenario, we introduce a larger public dataset, called UFPR-ALPR dataset, designed to ALPR. This dataset contains 150 videos and 4,500 frames captured when both camera and vehicles are moving and also contains different types of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, buses and trucks). In our proposed dataset, the trial versions of commercial systems achieved recognition rates below 70%. On the other hand, our system performed better, with recognition rate of 78.33% and 35 FPS.
Sufficient training data is normally required to train deeply learned models. However, the number of pedestrian images per ID in person re-identification (re-ID) datasets is usually limited, since manually annotations are required for multiple camera views. To produce more data for training deeply learned models, generative adversarial network (GAN) can be leveraged to generate samples for person re-ID. However, the samples generated by vanilla GAN usually do not have labels. So in this paper, we propose a virtual label called Multi-pseudo Regularized Label (MpRL) and assign it to the generated images. With MpRL, the generated samples will be used as supplementary of real training data to train a deep model in a semi-supervised learning fashion. Considering data bias between generated and real samples, MpRL utilizes different contributions from predefined training classes. The contribution-based virtual labels are automatically assigned to generated samples to reduce ambiguous prediction in training. Meanwhile, MpRL only relies on predefined training classes without using extra classes. Furthermore, to reduce over-fitting, a regularized manner is applied to MpRL to regularize the learning process. To verify the effectiveness of MpRL, two state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are adopted in our experiments. Experiments demonstrate that by assigning MpRL to generated samples, we can further improve the person re-ID performance on three datasets i.e., Market-1501, DukeMTMCreID, and CUHK03. The proposed method obtains +6.29%, +6.30% and +5.58% improvements in rank-1 accuracy over a strong CNN baseline respectively, and outperforms the state-of-the- art methods.
Person re-identification (\textit{re-id}) refers to matching pedestrians across disjoint yet non-overlapping camera views. The most effective way to match these pedestrians undertaking significant visual variations is to seek reliably invariant features that can describe the person of interest faithfully. Most of existing methods are presented in a supervised manner to produce discriminative features by relying on labeled paired images in correspondence. However, annotating pair-wise images is prohibitively expensive in labors, and thus not practical in large-scale networked cameras. Moreover, seeking comparable representations across camera views demands a flexible model to address the complex distributions of images. In this work, we study the co-occurrence statistic patterns between pairs of images, and propose to crossing Generative Adversarial Network (Cross-GAN) for learning a joint distribution for cross-image representations in a unsupervised manner. Given a pair of person images, the proposed model consists of the variational auto-encoder to encode the pair into respective latent variables, a proposed cross-view alignment to reduce the view disparity, and an adversarial layer to seek the joint distribution of latent representations. The learned latent representations are well-aligned to reflect the co-occurrence patterns of paired images. We empirically evaluate the proposed model against challenging datasets, and our results show the importance of joint invariant features in improving matching rates of person re-id with comparison to semi/unsupervised state-of-the-arts.