No Arabic abstract
The energy consumption of deep learning models is increasing at a breathtaking rate, which raises concerns due to potential negative effects on carbon neutrality in the context of global warming and climate change. With the progress of efficient deep learning techniques, e.g., model compression, researchers can obtain efficient models with fewer parameters and smaller latency. However, most of the existing efficient deep learning methods do not explicitly consider energy consumption as a key performance indicator. Furthermore, existing methods mostly focus on the inference costs of the resulting efficient models, but neglect the notable energy consumption throughout the entire life cycle of the algorithm. In this paper, we present the first large-scale energy consumption benchmark for efficient computer vision models, where a new metric is proposed to explicitly evaluate the full-cycle energy consumption under different model usage intensity. The benchmark can provide insights for low carbon emission when selecting efficient deep learning algorithms in different model usage scenarios.
For all the ways convolutional neural nets have revolutionized computer vision in recent years, one important aspect has received surprisingly little attention: the effect of image size on the accuracy of tasks being trained for. Typically, to be efficient, the input images are resized to a relatively small spatial resolution (e.g. 224x224), and both training and inference are carried out at this resolution. The actual mechanism for this re-scaling has been an afterthought: Namely, off-the-shelf image resizers such as bilinear and bicubic are commonly used in most machine learning software frameworks. But do these resizers limit the on task performance of the trained networks? The answer is yes. Indeed, we show that the typical linear resizer can be replaced with learned resizers that can substantially improve performance. Importantly, while the classical resizers typically result in better perceptual quality of the downscaled images, our proposed learned resizers do not necessarily give better visual quality, but instead improve task performance. Our learned image resizer is jointly trained with a baseline vision model. This learned CNN-based resizer creates machine friendly visual manipulations that lead to a consistent improvement of the end task metric over the baseline model. Specifically, here we focus on the classification task with the ImageNet dataset, and experiment with four different models to learn resizers adapted to each model. Moreover, we show that the proposed resizer can also be useful for fine-tuning the classification baselines for other vision tasks. To this end, we experiment with three different baselines to develop image quality assessment (IQA) models on the AVA dataset.
We introduce 3DB: an extendable, unified framework for testing and debugging vision models using photorealistic simulation. We demonstrate, through a wide range of use cases, that 3DB allows users to discover vulnerabilities in computer vision systems and gain insights into how models make decisions. 3DB captures and generalizes many robustness analyses from prior work, and enables one to study their interplay. Finally, we find that the insights generated by the system transfer to the physical world. We are releasing 3DB as a library (https://github.com/3db/3db) alongside a set of example analyses, guides, and documentation: https://3db.github.io/3db/ .
Computer vision has achieved impressive progress in recent years. Meanwhile, mobile phones have become the primary computing platforms for millions of people. In addition to mobile phones, many autonomous systems rely on visual data for making decisions and some of these systems have limited energy (such as unmanned aerial vehicles also called drones and mobile robots). These systems rely on batteries and energy efficiency is critical. This article serves two main purposes: (1) Examine the state-of-the-art for low-power solutions to detect objects in images. Since 2015, the IEEE Annual International Low-Power Image Recognition Challenge (LPIRC) has been held to identify the most energy-efficient computer vision solutions. This article summarizes 2018 winners solutions. (2) Suggest directions for research as well as opportunities for low-power computer vision.
Analysis of faces is one of the core applications of computer vision, with tasks ranging from landmark alignment, head pose estimation, expression recognition, and face recognition among others. However, building reliable methods requires time-consuming data collection and often even more time-consuming manual annotation, which can be unreliable. In our work we propose synthesizing such facial data, including ground truth annotations that would be almost impossible to acquire through manual annotation at the consistency and scale possible through use of synthetic data. We use a parametric face model together with hand crafted assets which enable us to generate training data with unprecedented quality and diversity (varying shape, texture, expression, pose, lighting, and hair).
The representation of images in the brain is known to be sparse. That is, as neural activity is recorded in a visual area ---for instance the primary visual cortex of primates--- only a few neurons are active at a given time with respect to the whole population. It is believed that such a property reflects the efficient match of the representation with the statistics of natural scenes. Applying such a paradigm to computer vision therefore seems a promising approach towards more biomimetic algorithms. Herein, we will describe a biologically-inspired approach to this problem. First, we will describe an unsupervised learning paradigm which is particularly adapted to the efficient coding of image patches. Then, we will outline a complete multi-scale framework ---SparseLets--- implementing a biologically inspired sparse representation of natural images. Finally, we will propose novel methods for integrating prior information into these algorithms and provide some preliminary experimental results. We will conclude by giving some perspective on applying such algorithms to computer vision. More specifically, we will propose that bio-inspired approaches may be applied to computer vision using predictive coding schemes, sparse models being one simple and efficient instance of such schemes.