No Arabic abstract
The recent emerged weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) methods can learn to localize an object in the image only using image-level labels. Previous works endeavor to perceive the interval objects from the small and sparse discriminative attention map, yet ignoring the co-occurrence confounder (e.g., bird and sky), which makes the model inspection (e.g., CAM) hard to distinguish between the object and context. In this paper, we make an early attempt to tackle this challenge via causal intervention (CI). Our proposed method, dubbed CI-CAM, explores the causalities among images, contexts, and categories to eliminate the biased co-occurrence in the class activation maps thus improving the accuracy of object localization. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CI-CAM in learning the clear object boundaries from confounding contexts. Particularly, in CUB-200-2011 which severely suffers from the co-occurrence confounder, CI-CAM significantly outperforms the traditional CAM-based baseline (58.39% vs 52.4% in top-1 localization accuracy). While in more general scenarios such as ImageNet, CI-CAM can also perform on par with the state of the arts.
Weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) has gained popularity over the last years for its promise to train localization models with only image-level labels. Since the seminal WSOL work of class activation mapping (CAM), the field has focused on how to expand the attention regions to cover objects more broadly and localize them better. However, these strategies rely on full localization supervision to validate hyperparameters and for model selection, which is in principle prohibited under the WSOL setup. In this paper, we argue that WSOL task is ill-posed with only image-level labels, and propose a new evaluation protocol where full supervision is limited to only a small held-out set not overlapping with the test set. We observe that, under our protocol, the five most recent WSOL methods have not made a major improvement over the CAM baseline. Moreover, we report that existing WSOL methods have not reached the few-shot learning baseline, where the full-supervision at validation time is used for model training instead. Based on our findings, we discuss some future directions for WSOL.
Weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) enables finding an object using a dataset without any localization information. By simply training a classification model using only image-level annotations, the feature map of the model can be utilized as a score map for localization. In spite of many WSOL methods proposing novel strategies, there has not been any de facto standard about how to normalize the class activation map (CAM). Consequently, many WSOL methods have failed to fully exploit their own capacity because of the misuse of a normalization method. In this paper, we review many existing normalization methods and point out that they should be used according to the property of the given dataset. Additionally, we propose a new normalization method which substantially enhances the performance of any CAM-based WSOL methods. Using the proposed normalization method, we provide a comprehensive evaluation over three datasets (CUB, ImageNet and OpenImages) on three different architectures and observe significant performance gains over the conventional min-max normalization method in all the evaluated cases.
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation and localiza- tion have a problem of focusing only on the most important parts of an image since they use only image-level annota- tions. In this paper, we solve this problem fundamentally via two-phase learning. Our networks are trained in two steps. In the first step, a conventional fully convolutional network (FCN) is trained to find the most discriminative parts of an image. In the second step, the activations on the most salient parts are suppressed by inference conditional feedback, and then the second learning is performed to find the area of the next most important parts. By combining the activations of both phases, the entire portion of the tar- get object can be captured. Our proposed training scheme is novel and can be utilized in well-designed techniques for weakly supervised semantic segmentation, salient region detection, and object location prediction. Detailed experi- ments demonstrate the effectiveness of our two-phase learn- ing in each task.
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.
Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to localize objects by only utilizing image-level labels. Class activation maps (CAMs) are the commonly used features to achieve WSOL. However, previous CAM-based methods did not take full advantage of the shallow features, despite their importance for WSOL. Because shallow features are easily buried in background noise through conventional fusion. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective Shallow feature-aware Pseudo supervised Object Localization (SPOL) model for accurate WSOL, which makes the utmost of low-level features embedded in shallow layers. In practice, our SPOL model first generates the CAMs through a novel element-wise multiplication of shallow and deep feature maps, which filters the background noise and generates sharper boundaries robustly. Besides, we further propose a general class-agnostic segmentation model to achieve the accurate object mask, by only using the initial CAMs as the pseudo label without any extra annotation. Eventually, a bounding box extractor is applied to the object mask to locate the target. Experiments verify that our SPOL outperforms the state-of-the-art on both CUB-200 and ImageNet-1K benchmarks, achieving 93.44% and 67.15% (i.e., 3.93% and 2.13% improvement) Top-5 localization accuracy, respectively.