No Arabic abstract
It has been widely proven that modelling long-range dependencies in fully convolutional networks (FCNs) via global aggregation modules is critical for complex scene understanding tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection. However, global aggregation is often dominated by features of large patterns and tends to oversmooth regions that contain small patterns (e.g., boundaries and small objects). To resolve this problem, we propose to first use emph{Global Aggregation} and then emph{Local Distribution}, which is called GALD, where long-range dependencies are more confidently used inside large pattern regions and vice versa. The size of each pattern at each position is estimated in the network as a per-channel mask map. GALD is end-to-end trainable and can be easily plugged into existing FCNs with various global aggregation modules for a wide range of vision tasks, and consistently improves the performance of state-of-the-art object detection and instance segmentation approaches. In particular, GALD used in semantic segmentation achieves new state-of-the-art performance on Cityscapes test set with mIoU 83.3%. Code is available at: url{https://github.com/lxtGH/GALD-Net}
Modelling long-range contextual relationships is critical for pixel-wise prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. However, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are inherently limited to model such dependencies due to the naive structure in its building modules (eg, local convolution kernel). While recent global aggregation methods are beneficial for long-range structure information modelling, they would oversmooth and bring noise to the regions containing fine details (eg,~boundaries and small objects), which are very much cared for the semantic segmentation task. To alleviate this problem, we propose to explore the local context for making the aggregated long-range relationship being distributed more accurately in local regions. In particular, we design a novel local distribution module which models the affinity map between global and local relationship for each pixel adaptively. Integrating existing global aggregation modules, we show that our approach can be modularized as an end-to-end trainable block and easily plugged into existing semantic segmentation networks, giving rise to the emph{GALD} networks. Despite its simplicity and versatility, our approach allows us to build new state of the art on major semantic segmentation benchmarks including Cityscapes, ADE20K, Pascal Context, Camvid and COCO-stuff. Code and trained models are released at url{https://github.com/lxtGH/GALD-DGCNet} to foster further research.
Handwritten text recognition is challenging because of the virtually infinite ways a human can write the same message. Our fully convolutional handwriting model takes in a handwriting sample of unknown length and outputs an arbitrary stream of symbols. Our dual stream architecture uses both local and global context and mitigates the need for heavy preprocessing steps such as symbol alignment correction as well as complex post processing steps such as connectionist temporal classification, dictionary matching or language models. Using over 100 unique symbols, our model is agnostic to Latin-based languages, and is shown to be quite competitive with state of the art dictionary based methods on the popular IAM and RIMES datasets. When a dictionary is known, we further allow a probabilistic character error rate to correct errant word blocks. Finally, we introduce an attention based mechanism which can automatically target variants of handwriting, such as slant, stroke width, or noise.
In this paper, we present a conceptually simple, strong, and efficient framework for panoptic segmentation, called Panoptic FCN. Our approach aims to represent and predict foreground things and background stuff in a unified fully convolutional pipeline. In particular, Panoptic FCN encodes each object instance or stuff category into a specific kernel weight with the proposed kernel generator and produces the prediction by convolving the high-resolution feature directly. With this approach, instance-aware and semantically consistent properties for things and stuff can be respectively satisfied in a simple generate-kernel-then-segment workflow. Without extra boxes for localization or instance separation, the proposed approach outperforms previous box-based and -free models with high efficiency on COCO, Cityscapes, and Mapillary Vistas datasets with single scale input. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/Jia-Research-Lab/PanopticFCN.
Deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) are fundamental to, besides large-scale visual recognition, a lot of vision tasks. As the primary goal of the ConvNets is to characterize complex boundaries of thousands of classes in a high-dimensional space, it is critical to learn higher-order representations for enhancing non-linear modeling capability. Recently, Global Second-order Pooling (GSoP), plugged at the end of networks, has attracted increasing attentions, achieving much better performance than classical, first-order networks in a variety of vision tasks. However, how to effectively introduce higher-order representation in earlier layers for improving non-linear capability of ConvNets is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a novel network model introducing GSoP across from lower to higher layers for exploiting holistic image information throughout a network. Given an input 3D tensor outputted by some previous convolutional layer, we perform GSoP to obtain a covariance matrix which, after nonlinear transformation, is used for tensor scaling along channel dimension. Similarly, we can perform GSoP along spatial dimension for tensor scaling as well. In this way, we can make full use of the second-order statistics of the holistic image throughout a network. The proposed networks are thoroughly evaluated on large-scale ImageNet-1K, and experiments have shown that they outperformed non-trivially the counterparts while achieving state-of-the-art results.
We desgin a novel fully convolutional network architecture for shapes, denoted by Shape Fully Convolutional Networks (SFCN). 3D shapes are represented as graph structures in the SFCN architecture, based on novel graph convolution and pooling operations, which are similar to convolution and pooling operations used on images. Meanwhile, to build our SFCN architecture in the original image segmentation fully convolutional network (FCN) architecture, we also design and implement a generating operation} with bridging function. This ensures that the convolution and pooling operation we have designed can be successfully applied in the original FCN architecture. In this paper, we also present a new shape segmentation approach based on SFCN. Furthermore, we allow more general and challenging input, such as mixed datasets of different categories of shapes} which can prove the ability of our generalisation. In our approach, SFCNs are trained triangles-to-triangles by using three low-level geometric features as input. Finally, the feature voting-based multi-label graph cuts is adopted to optimise the segmentation results obtained by SFCN prediction. The experiment results show that our method can effectively learn and predict mixed shape datasets of either similar or different characteristics, and achieve excellent segmentation results.