Simultaneous localisation and categorization of objects in medical images, also referred to as medical object detection, is of high clinical relevance because diagnostic decisions often depend on rating of objects rather than e.g. pixels. For this task, the cumbersome and iterative process of method configuration constitutes a major research bottleneck. Recently, nnU-Net has tackled this challenge for the task of image segmentation with great success. Following nnU-Net's agenda, in this work we systematize and automate the configuration process for medical object detection. The resulting self-configuring method, nnDetection, adapts itself without any manual intervention to arbitrary medical detection problems while achieving results en par with or superior to the state-of-the-art. We demonstrate the effectiveness of nnDetection on two public benchmarks, ADAM and LUNA16, and propose 10 further medical object detection tasks on public data sets for comprehensive method evaluation. Code is at //github.com/MIC-DKFZ/nnDetection .
In recent years, knowledge distillation has been proved to be an effective solution for model compression. This approach can make lightweight student models acquire the knowledge extracted from cumbersome teacher models. However, previous distillation methods of detection have weak generalization for different detection frameworks and rely heavily on ground truth (GT), ignoring the valuable relation information between instances. Thus, we propose a novel distillation method for detection tasks based on discriminative instances without considering the positive or negative distinguished by GT, which is called general instance distillation (GID). Our approach contains a general instance selection module (GISM) to make full use of feature-based, relation-based and response-based knowledge for distillation. Extensive results demonstrate that the student model achieves significant AP improvement and even outperforms the teacher in various detection frameworks. Specifically, RetinaNet with ResNet-50 achieves 39.1% in mAP with GID on COCO dataset, which surpasses the baseline 36.2% by 2.9%, and even better than the ResNet-101 based teacher model with 38.1% AP.
Conventional methods for object detection typically require a substantial amount of training data and preparing such high-quality training data is very labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot object detection network that aims at detecting objects of unseen categories with only a few annotated examples. Central to our method are our Attention-RPN, Multi-Relation Detector and Contrastive Training strategy, which exploit the similarity between the few shot support set and query set to detect novel objects while suppressing false detection in the background. To train our network, we contribute a new dataset that contains 1000 categories of various objects with high-quality annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first datasets specifically designed for few-shot object detection. Once our few-shot network is trained, it can detect objects of unseen categories without further training or fine-tuning. Our method is general and has a wide range of potential applications. We produce a new state-of-the-art performance on different datasets in the few-shot setting. The dataset link is //github.com/fanq15/Few-Shot-Object-Detection-Dataset.
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.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.
Recent CNN based object detectors, no matter one-stage methods like YOLO, SSD, and RetinaNe or two-stage detectors like Faster R-CNN, R-FCN and FPN are usually trying to directly finetune from ImageNet pre-trained models designed for image classification. There has been little work discussing on the backbone feature extractor specifically designed for the object detection. More importantly, there are several differences between the tasks of image classification and object detection. 1. Recent object detectors like FPN and RetinaNet usually involve extra stages against the task of image classification to handle the objects with various scales. 2. Object detection not only needs to recognize the category of the object instances but also spatially locate the position. Large downsampling factor brings large valid receptive field, which is good for image classification but compromises the object location ability. Due to the gap between the image classification and object detection, we propose DetNet in this paper, which is a novel backbone network specifically designed for object detection. Moreover, DetNet includes the extra stages against traditional backbone network for image classification, while maintains high spatial resolution in deeper layers. Without any bells and whistles, state-of-the-art results have been obtained for both object detection and instance segmentation on the MSCOCO benchmark based on our DetNet~(4.8G FLOPs) backbone. The code will be released for the reproduction.
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.
Recent advances in object detection are mainly driven by deep learning with large-scale detection benchmarks. However, the fully-annotated training set is often limited for a target detection task, which may deteriorate the performance of deep detectors. To address this challenge, we propose a novel low-shot transfer detector (LSTD) in this paper, where we leverage rich source-domain knowledge to construct an effective target-domain detector with very few training examples. The main contributions are described as follows. First, we design a flexible deep architecture of LSTD to alleviate transfer difficulties in low-shot detection. This architecture can integrate the advantages of both SSD and Faster RCNN in a unified deep framework. Second, we introduce a novel regularized transfer learning framework for low-shot detection, where the transfer knowledge (TK) and background depression (BD) regularizations are proposed to leverage object knowledge respectively from source and target domains, in order to further enhance fine-tuning with a few target images. Finally, we examine our LSTD on a number of challenging low-shot detection experiments, where LSTD outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. The results demonstrate that LSTD is a preferable deep detector for low-shot scenarios.
Salient object detection is a fundamental problem and has been received a great deal of attentions in computer vision. Recently deep learning model became a powerful tool for image feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale deep neural network (MSDNN) for salient object detection. The proposed model first extracts global high-level features and context information over the whole source image with recurrent convolutional neural network (RCNN). Then several stacked deconvolutional layers are adopted to get the multi-scale feature representation and obtain a series of saliency maps. Finally, we investigate a fusion convolution module (FCM) to build a final pixel level saliency map. The proposed model is extensively evaluated on four salient object detection benchmark datasets. Results show that our deep model significantly outperforms other 12 state-of-the-art approaches.
We introduce Spatial-Temporal Memory Networks (STMN) for video object detection. At its core, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Memory module (STMM) as the recurrent computation unit to model long-term temporal appearance and motion dynamics. The STMM's design enables the integration of ImageNet pre-trained backbone CNN weights for both the feature stack as well as the prediction head, which we find to be critical for accurate detection. Furthermore, in order to tackle object motion in videos, we propose a novel MatchTrans module to align the spatial-temporal memory from frame to frame. We compare our method to state-of-the-art detectors on ImageNet VID, and conduct ablative studies to dissect the contribution of our different design choices. We obtain state-of-the-art results with the VGG backbone, and competitive results with the ResNet backbone. To our knowledge, this is the first video object detector that is equipped with an explicit memory mechanism to model long-term temporal dynamics.