No Arabic abstract
Unsupervised representation learning achieves promising performances in pre-training representations for object detectors. However, previous approaches are mainly designed for image-level classification, leading to suboptimal detection performance. To bridge the performance gap, this work proposes a simple yet effective representation learning method for object detection, named patch re-identification (Re-ID), which can be treated as a contrastive pretext task to learn location-discriminative representation unsupervisedly, possessing appealing advantages compared to its counterparts. Firstly, unlike fully-supervised person Re-ID that matches a human identity in different camera views, patch Re-ID treats an important patch as a pseudo identity and contrastively learns its correspondence in two different image views, where the pseudo identity has different translations and transformations, enabling to learn discriminative features for object detection. Secondly, patch Re-ID is performed in Deeply Unsupervised manner to learn multi-level representations, appealing to object detection. Thirdly, extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms its counterparts on COCO in all settings, such as different training iterations and data percentages. For example, Mask R-CNN initialized with our representation surpasses MoCo v2 and even its fully-supervised counterparts in all setups of training iterations (e.g. 2.1 and 1.1 mAP improvement compared to MoCo v2 in 12k and 90k iterations respectively). Code will be released at https://github.com/dingjiansw101/DUPR.
Unsupervised pretraining has recently proven beneficial for computer vision tasks, including object detection. However, previous self-supervised approaches are not designed to handle a key aspect of detection: localizing objects. Here, we present DETReg, an unsupervised pretraining approach for object DEtection with TRansformers using Region priors. Motivated by the two tasks underlying object detection: localization and categorization, we combine two complementary signals for self-supervision. For an object localization signal, we use pseudo ground truth object bounding boxes from an off-the-shelf unsupervised region proposal method, Selective Search, which does not require training data and can detect objects at a high recall rate and very low precision. The categorization signal comes from an object embedding loss that encourages invariant object representations, from which the object category can be inferred. We show how to combine these two signals to train the Deformable DETR detection architecture from large amounts of unlabeled data. DETReg improves the performance over competitive baselines and previous self-supervised methods on standard benchmarks like MS COCO and PASCAL VOC. DETReg also outperforms previous supervised and unsupervised baseline approaches on low-data regime when trained with only 1%, 2%, 5%, and 10% of the labeled data on MS COCO. For code and pretrained models, visit the project page at https://amirbar.net/detreg
Image-level contrastive representation learning has proven to be highly effective as a generic model for transfer learning. Such generality for transfer learning, however, sacrifices specificity if we are interested in a certain downstream task. We argue that this could be sub-optimal and thus advocate a design principle which encourages alignment between the self-supervised pretext task and the downstream task. In this paper, we follow this principle with a pretraining method specifically designed for the task of object detection. We attain alignment in the following three aspects: 1) object-level representations are introduced via selective search bounding boxes as object proposals; 2) the pretraining network architecture incorporates the same dedicated modules used in the detection pipeline (e.g. FPN); 3) the pretraining is equipped with object detection properties such as object-level translation invariance and scale invariance. Our method, called Selective Object COntrastive learning (SoCo), achieves state-of-the-art results for transfer performance on COCO detection using a Mask R-CNN framework. Code and models will be made available.
Data augmentation has always been an effective way to overcome overfitting issue when the dataset is small. There are already lots of augmentation operations such as horizontal flip, random crop or even Mixup. However, unlike image classification task, we cannot simply perform these operations for object detection task because of the lack of labeled bounding boxes information for corresponding generated images. To address this challenge, we propose a framework making use of Generative Adversarial Networks(GAN) to perform unsupervised data augmentation. To be specific, based on the recently supreme performance of YOLOv4, we propose a two-step pipeline that enables us to generate an image where the object lies in a certain position. In this way, we can accomplish the goal that generating an image with bounding box label.
Unsupervised pretraining has achieved great success and many recent works have shown unsupervised pretraining can achieve comparable or even slightly better transfer performance than supervised pretraining on downstream target datasets. But in this paper, we find this conclusion may not hold when the target dataset has very few labeled samples for finetuning, ie, few-label transfer. We analyze the possible reason from the clustering perspective: 1) The clustering quality of target samples is of great importance to few-label transfer; 2) Though contrastive learning is essential to learn how to cluster, its clustering quality is still inferior to supervised pretraining due to lack of label supervision. Based on the analysis, we interestingly discover that only involving some unlabeled target domain into the unsupervised pretraining can improve the clustering quality, subsequently reducing the transfer performance gap with supervised pretraining. This finding also motivates us to propose a new progressive few-label transfer algorithm for real applications, which aims to maximize the transfer performance under a limited annotation budget. To support our analysis and proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on nine different target datasets. Experimental results show our proposed method can significantly boost the few-label transfer performance of unsupervised pretraining.
This work tackles the unsupervised cross-domain object detection problem which aims to generalize a pre-trained object detector to a new target domain without labels. We propose an uncertainty-aware model adaptation method, which is based on two motivations: 1) the estimation and exploitation of model uncertainty in a new domain is critical for reliable domain adaptation; and 2) the joint alignment of distributions for inputs (feature alignment) and outputs (self-training) is needed. To this end, we compose a Bayesian CNN-based framework for uncertainty estimation in object detection, and propose an algorithm for generation of uncertainty-aware pseudo-labels. We also devise a scheme for joint feature alignment and self-training of the object detection model with uncertainty-aware pseudo-labels. Experiments on multiple cross-domain object detection benchmarks show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.