No Arabic abstract
Fine-grained image classification is to recognize hundreds of subcategories in each basic-level category. Existing methods employ discriminative localization to find the key distinctions among subcategories. However, they generally have two limitations: (1) Discriminative localization relies on region proposal methods to hypothesize the locations of discriminative regions, which are time-consuming. (2) The training of discriminative localization depends on object or part annotations, which are heavily labor-consuming. It is highly challenging to address the two key limitations simultaneously, and existing methods only focus on one of them. Therefore, we propose a weakly supervised discriminative localization approach (WSDL) for fast fine-grained image classification to address the two limitations at the same time, and its main advantages are: (1) n-pathway end-to-end discriminative localization network is designed to improve classification speed, which simultaneously localizes multiple different discriminative regions for one image to boost classification accuracy, and shares full-image convolutional features generated by region proposal network to accelerate the process of generating region proposals as well as reduce the computation of convolutional operation. (2) Multi-level attention guided localization learning is proposed to localize discriminative regions with different focuses automatically, without using object and part annotations, avoiding the labor consumption. Different level attentions focus on different characteristics of the image, which are complementary and boost the classification accuracy. Both are jointly employed to simultaneously improve classification speed and eliminate dependence on object and part annotations. Compared with state-of-the-art methods on 2 widely-used fine-grained image classification datasets, our WSDL approach achieves the best performance.
Although recent advances in deep learning accelerated an improvement in a weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) task, there are still challenges to identify the entire body of an object, rather than only discriminative parts. In this paper, we propose a novel residual fine-grained attention (RFGA) module that autonomously excites the less activated regions of an object by utilizing information distributed over channels and locations within feature maps in combination with a residual operation. To be specific, we devise a series of mechanisms of triple-view attention representation, attention expansion, and feature calibration. Unlike other attention-based WSOL methods that learn a coarse attention map, having the same values across elements in feature maps, our proposed RFGA learns fine-grained values in an attention map by assigning different attention values for each of the elements. We validated the superiority of our proposed RFGA module by comparing it with the recent methods in the literature over three datasets. Further, we analyzed the effect of each mechanism in our RFGA and visualized attention maps to get insights.
Discriminative localization is essential for fine-grained image classification task, which devotes to recognizing hundreds of subcategories in the same basic-level category. Reflecting on discriminative regions of objects, key differences among different subcategories are subtle and local. Existing methods generally adopt a two-stage learning framework: The first stage is to localize the discriminative regions of objects, and the second is to encode the discriminative features for training classifiers. However, these methods generally have two limitations: (1) Separation of the two-stage learning is time-consuming. (2) Dependence on object and parts annotations for discriminative localization learning leads to heavily labor-consuming labeling. It is highly challenging to address these two important limitations simultaneously. Existing methods only focus on one of them. Therefore, this paper proposes the discriminative localization approach via saliency-guided Faster R-CNN to address the above two limitations at the same time, and our main novelties and advantages are: (1) End-to-end network based on Faster R-CNN is designed to simultaneously localize discriminative regions and encode discriminative features, which accelerates classification speed. (2) Saliency-guided localization learning is proposed to localize the discriminative region automatically, avoiding labor-consuming labeling. Both are jointly employed to simultaneously accelerate classification speed and eliminate dependence on object and parts annotations. Comparing with the state-of-the-art methods on the widely-used CUB-200-2011 dataset, our approach achieves both the best classification accuracy and efficiency.
For fine-grained visual classification, objects usually share similar geometric structure but present variant local appearance and different pose. Therefore, localizing and extracting discriminative local features play a crucial role in accurate category prediction. Existing works either pay attention to limited object parts or train isolated networks for locating and classification. In this paper, we propose Weakly Supervised Bilinear Attention Network (WS-BAN) to solve these issues. It jointly generates a set of attention maps (region-of-interest maps) to indicate the locations of objects parts and extracts sequential part features by Bilinear Attention Pooling (BAP). Besides, we propose attention regularization and attention dropout to weakly supervise the generating process of attention maps. WS-BAN can be trained end-to-end and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on multiple fine-grained classification datasets, including CUB-200-2011, Stanford Car and FGVC-Aircraft, which demonstrated its effectiveness.
Classifying the sub-categories of an object from the same super-category (e.g. bird species, car and aircraft models) in fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) highly relies on discriminative feature representation and accurate region localization. Existing approaches mainly focus on distilling information from high-level features. In this paper, however, we show that by integrating low-level information (e.g. color, edge junctions, texture patterns), performance can be improved with enhanced feature representation and accurately located discriminative regions. Our solution, named Attention Pyramid Convolutional Neural Network (AP-CNN), consists of a) a pyramidal hierarchy structure with a top-down feature pathway and a bottom-up attention pathway, and hence learns both high-level semantic and low-level detailed feature representation, and b) an ROI guided refinement strategy with ROI guided dropblock and ROI guided zoom-in, which refines features with discriminative local regions enhanced and background noises eliminated. The proposed AP-CNN can be trained end-to-end, without the need of additional bounding box/part annotations. Extensive experiments on three commonly used FGVC datasets (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars, and FGVC-Aircraft) demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Code available at url{http://dwz1.cc/ci8so8a}
This work proposes a weakly-supervised temporal action localization framework, called D2-Net, which strives to temporally localize actions using video-level supervision. Our main contribution is the introduction of a novel loss formulation, which jointly enhances the discriminability of latent embeddings and robustness of the output temporal class activations with respect to foreground-background noise caused by weak supervision. The proposed formulation comprises a discriminative and a denoising loss term for enhancing temporal action localization. The discriminative term incorporates a classification loss and utilizes a top-down attention mechanism to enhance the separability of latent foreground-background embeddings. The denoising loss term explicitly addresses the foreground-background noise in class activations by simultaneously maximizing intra-video and inter-video mutual information using a bottom-up attention mechanism. As a result, activations in the foreground regions are emphasized whereas those in the background regions are suppressed, thereby leading to more robust predictions. Comprehensive experiments are performed on multiple benchmarks, including THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.2. Our D2-Net performs favorably in comparison to the existing methods on all datasets, achieving gains as high as 2.3% in terms of mAP at IoU=0.5 on THUMOS14. Source code is available at https://github.com/naraysa/D2-Net