No Arabic abstract
We introduce RP2K, a new large-scale retail product dataset for fine-grained image classification. Unlike previous datasets focusing on relatively few products, we collect more than 500,000 images of retail products on shelves belonging to 2000 different products. Our dataset aims to advance the research in retail object recognition, which has massive applications such as automatic shelf auditing and image-based product information retrieval. Our dataset enjoys following properties: (1) It is by far the largest scale dataset in terms of product categories. (2) All images are captured manually in physical retail stores with natural lightings, matching the scenario of real applications. (3) We provide rich annotations to each object, including the sizes, shapes and flavors/scents. We believe our dataset could benefit both computer vision research and retail industry. Our dataset is publicly available at https://www.pinlandata.com/rp2k_dataset.
Food classification is a challenging problem due to the large number of categories, high visual similarity between different foods, as well as the lack of datasets for training state-of-the-art deep models. Solving this problem will require advances in both computer vision models as well as datasets for evaluating these models. In this paper we focus on the second aspect and introduce FoodX-251, a dataset of 251 fine-grained food categories with 158k images collected from the web. We use 118k images as a training set and provide human verified labels for 40k images that can be used for validation and testing. In this work, we outline the procedure of creating this dataset and provide relevant baselines with deep learning models. The FoodX-251 dataset has been used for organizing iFood-2019 challenge in the Fine-Grained Visual Categorization workshop (FGVC6 at CVPR 2019) and is available for download.
We propose a novel approach to enhance the discriminability of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The key idea is to build a tree structure that could progressively learn fine-grained features to distinguish a subset of classes, by learning features only among these classes. Such features are expected to be more discriminative, compared to features learned for all the classes. We develop a new algorithm to effectively learn the tree structure from a large number of classes. Experiments on large-scale image classification tasks demonstrate that our method could boost the performance of a given basic CNN model. Our method is quite general, hence it can potentially be used in combination with many other deep learning models.
Retrieving content relevant images from a large-scale fine-grained dataset could suffer from intolerably slow query speed and highly redundant storage cost, due to high-dimensional real-valued embeddings which aim to distinguish subtle visual differences of fine-grained objects. In this paper, we study the novel fine-grained hashing topic to generate compact binary codes for fine-grained images, leveraging the search and storage efficiency of hash learning to alleviate the aforementioned problems. Specifically, we propose a unified end-to-end trainable network, termed as ExchNet. Based on attention mechanisms and proposed attention constraints, it can firstly obtain both local and global features to represent object parts and whole fine-grained objects, respectively. Furthermore, to ensure the discriminative ability and semantic meanings consistency of these part-level features across images, we design a local feature alignment approach by performing a feature exchanging operation. Later, an alternative learning algorithm is employed to optimize the whole ExchNet and then generate the final binary hash codes. Validated by extensive experiments, our proposal consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generic hashing methods on five fine-grained datasets, which shows our effectiveness. Moreover, compared with other approximate nearest neighbor methods, ExchNet achieves the best speed-up and storage reduction, revealing its efficiency and practicality.
The task of large-scale retrieval-based image localization is to estimate the geographical location of a query image by recognizing its nearest reference images from a city-scale dataset. However, the general public benchmarks only provide noisy GPS labels associated with the training images, which act as weak supervisions for learning image-to-image similarities. Such label noise prevents deep neural networks from learning discriminative features for accurate localization. To tackle this challenge, we propose to self-supervise image-to-region similarities in order to fully explore the potential of difficult positive images alongside their sub-regions. The estimated image-to-region similarities can serve as extra training supervision for improving the network in generations, which could in turn gradually refine the fine-grained similarities to achieve optimal performance. Our proposed self-enhanced image-to-region similarity labels effectively deal with the training bottleneck in the state-of-the-art pipelines without any additional parameters or manual annotations in both training and inference. Our method outperforms state-of-the-arts on the standard localization benchmarks by noticeable margins and shows excellent generalization capability on multiple image retrieval datasets.
Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) and Transformer have achieved remarkable successes in image recognition. However, their performance in fine-grained image recognition is still difficult to meet the requirements of actual needs. This paper proposes a Sequence Random Network (SRN) to enhance the performance of DCNN. The output of DCNN is one-dimensional features. This one-dimensional feature abstractly represents image information, but it does not express well the detailed information of image. To address this issue, we use the proposed SRN which composed of BiLSTM and several Tanh-Dropout blocks (called BiLSTM-TDN), to further process DCNN one-dimensional features for highlighting the detail information of image. After the feature transform by BiLSTM-TDN, the recognition performance has been greatly improved. We conducted the experiments on six fine-grained image datasets. Except for FGVC-Aircraft, the accuracies of the proposed methods on the other datasets exceeded 99%. Experimental results show that BiLSTM-TDN is far superior to the existing state-of-the-art methods. In addition to DCNN, BiLSTM-TDN can also be extended to other models, such as Transformer.