No Arabic abstract
Traditional fine-grained image classification generally requires abundant labeled samples to deal with the low inter-class variance but high intra-class variance problem. However, in many scenarios we may have limited samples for some novel sub-categories, leading to the fine-grained few shot learning (FG-FSL) setting. To address this challenging task, we propose a novel method named foreground object transformation (FOT), which is composed of a foreground object extractor and a posture transformation generator. The former aims to remove image background, which tends to increase the difficulty of fine-grained image classification as it amplifies the intra-class variance while reduces inter-class variance. The latter transforms the posture of the foreground object to generate additional samples for the novel sub-category. As a data augmentation method, FOT can be conveniently applied to any existing few shot learning algorithm and greatly improve its performance on FG-FSL tasks. In particular, in combination with FOT, simple fine-tuning baseline methods can be competitive with the state-of-the-art methods both in inductive setting and transductive setting. Moreover, FOT can further boost the performances of latest excellent methods and bring them up to the new state-of-the-art. In addition, we also show the effectiveness of FOT on general FSL tasks.
Affective computing and cognitive theory are widely used in modern human-computer interaction scenarios. Human faces, as the most prominent and easily accessible features, have attracted great attention from researchers. Since humans have rich emotions and developed musculature, there exist a lot of fine-grained expressions in real-world applications. However, it is extremely time-consuming to collect and annotate a large number of facial images, of which may even require psychologists to correctly categorize them. To the best of our knowledge, the existing expression datasets are only limited to several basic facial expressions, which are not sufficient to support our ambitions in developing successful human-computer interaction systems. To this end, a novel Fine-grained Facial Expression Database - F2ED is contributed in this paper, and it includes more than 200k images with 54 facial expressions from 119 persons. Considering the phenomenon of uneven data distribution and lack of samples is common in real-world scenarios, we further evaluate several tasks of few-shot expression learning by virtue of our F2ED, which are to recognize the facial expressions given only few training instances. These tasks mimic human performance to learn robust and general representation from few examples. To address such few-shot tasks, we propose a unified task-driven framework - Compositional Generative Adversarial Network (Comp-GAN) learning to synthesize facial images and thus augmenting the instances of few-shot expression classes. Extensive experiments are conducted on F2ED and existing facial expression datasets, i.e., JAFFE and FER2013, to validate the efficacy of our F2ED in pre-training facial expression recognition network and the effectiveness of our proposed approach Comp-GAN to improve the performance of few-shot recognition tasks.
The goal of few-shot fine-grained image classification is to recognize rarely seen fine-grained objects in the query set, given only a few samples of this class in the support set. Previous works focus on learning discriminative image features from a limited number of training samples for distinguishing various fine-grained classes, but ignore one important fact that spatial alignment of the discriminative semantic features between the query image with arbitrary changes and the support image, is also critical for computing the semantic similarity between each support-query pair. In this work, we propose an object-aware long-short-range spatial alignment approach, which is composed of a foreground object feature enhancement (FOE) module, a long-range semantic correspondence (LSC) module and a short-range spatial manipulation (SSM) module. The FOE is developed to weaken background disturbance and encourage higher foreground object response. To address the problem of long-range object feature misalignment between support-query image pairs, the LSC is proposed to learn the transferable long-range semantic correspondence by a designed feature similarity metric. Further, the SSM module is developed to refine the transformed support feature after the long-range step to align short-range misaligned features (or local details) with the query features. Extensive experiments have been conducted on four benchmark datasets, and the results show superior performance over most state-of-the-art methods under both 1-shot and 5-shot classification scenarios.
Fine-grained action recognition is attracting increasing attention due to the emerging demand of specific action understanding in real-world applications, whereas the data of rare fine-grained categories is very limited. Therefore, we propose the few-shot fine-grained action recognition problem, aiming to recognize novel fine-grained actions with only few samples given for each class. Although progress has been made in coarse-grained actions, existing few-shot recognition methods encounter two issues handling fine-grained actions: the inability to capture subtle action details and the inadequacy in learning from data with low inter-class variance. To tackle the first issue, a human vision inspired bidirectional attention module (BAM) is proposed. Combining top-down task-driven signals with bottom-up salient stimuli, BAM captures subtle action details by accurately highlighting informative spatio-temporal regions. To address the second issue, we introduce contrastive meta-learning (CML). Compared with the widely adopted ProtoNet-based method, CML generates more discriminative video representations for low inter-class variance data, since it makes full use of potential contrastive pairs in each training episode. Furthermore, to fairly compare different models, we establish specific benchmark protocols on two large-scale fine-grained action recognition datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across evaluated tasks.
Bilinear feature transformation has shown the state-of-the-art performance in learning fine-grained image representations. However, the computational cost to learn pairwise interactions between deep feature channels is prohibitively expensive, which restricts this powerful transformation to be used in deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a deep bilinear transformation (DBT) block, which can be deeply stacked in convolutional neural networks to learn fine-grained image representations. The DBT block can uniformly divide input channels into several semantic groups. As bilinear transformation can be represented by calculating pairwise interactions within each group, the computational cost can be heavily relieved. The output of each block is further obtained by aggregating intra-group bilinear features, with residuals from the entire input features. We found that the proposed network achieves new state-of-the-art in several fine-grained image recognition benchmarks, including CUB-Bird, Stanford-Car, and FGVC-Aircraft.
Few-shot learning for fine-grained image classification has gained recent attention in computer vision. Among the approaches for few-shot learning, due to the simplicity and effectiveness, metric-based methods are favorably state-of-the-art on many tasks. Most of the metric-based methods assume a single similarity measure and thus obtain a single feature space. However, if samples can simultaneously be well classified via two distinct similarity measures, the samples within a class can distribute more compactly in a smaller feature space, producing more discriminative feature maps. Motivated by this, we propose a so-called textit{Bi-Similarity Network} (textit{BSNet}) that consists of a single embedding module and a bi-similarity module of two similarity measures. After the support images and the query images pass through the convolution-based embedding module, the bi-similarity module learns feature maps according to two similarity measures of diverse characteristics. In this way, the model is enabled to learn more discriminative and less similarity-biased features from few shots of fine-grained images, such that the model generalization ability can be significantly improved. Through extensive experiments by slightly modifying established metric/similarity based networks, we show that the proposed approach produces a substantial improvement on several fine-grained image benchmark datasets. Codes are available at: https://github.com/spraise/BSNet