Visual Learning and Recognition

Notes for CMSC828I Visual Learning and Recognition (Fall 2020) taught by Abhinav Shrivastava

This class covers:

• How a sub-topic evolved
• State of the art

Introduction to Data

Lecture 3 September 8, 2020

The extremes of data. If we have very few images, we are working on an extrapolation problem.
As we approach an infinite number of training samples, learning becomes an interpolation problem.
Traditional datasets are in the order of \(\displaystyle 10^2-10^4\) training samples.
Current datasets are in the order of \(\displaystyle 10^5-10^7\) training samples.

In tiny images , Torrabla et al. use 80 million tiny images.

What is the capacity of visual long term memory?

In Standing (1973), people could recall whether they've seen 10,000 images with 83% recognition.

What we don't know is what people are remembering for each item?

In Brady et al., they tested recall for novel (new object), exemplar (same type of object), and state (same object & state). They got 92% for novel, 88% for exemplar, and 87% for state so humans remember the exact state of objects they've seen.

Rule of thumb

(Simple algorithms + big data) is better than (complicated algorithms + small data)

Lecture 4 September 10, 2020

This lecture is on the bias of data. It follows Torralba et al.

Will big data solve all our problems?

E.g. Can (big company) just dump millions of dollars to collect data and solve any problem?
No. E.g. COVID.
There will always be new tasks or problems.

We will never have enough data

Long tails - Zipf's law

Data is biased

Types of visual bias:

• Observer Bias (human vs bird)
• Capture Bias (photographer vs robot)
• Selection Bias (Flickr vs Google Street View)
• Category/Label Bias
• Negative Set Bias

In general, all datasets will have all of these biases mixed in.

• Social Bias

Graduation photos always have a certain structure.

Measuring Dataset Bias

Evaluate cross-dataset performance
Train on one dataset, test on another

To evaluate negative set bias, pool negatives from other datasets (e.g. not car or not person).
They found that models trained on a dataset do ~8% worse at detecting negatives from other datasets.

Overcoming Datset Bias

Mixing datasets

Selection bias

In general, automatically gathered images do better.
You can also collect data from multiple sources (multiple search engines across multiple countries) or collect unannotated images and label them via crowd-sourcing.

Capture bias

To overcome the bias of professional photographs:
Apply data augmentations: flipping images, jittering (small affine transformations), random crops.

Negative set bias

Add negatives from other datasets.
Mine hard negatives from other datasets using standard algorithms.

Data-driven Methods in Vision

Beginning of Lecture 5 (September 15)

Dale et al. perform semantic color correction using a large dataset.
Heys and Efros perform scene completion.
Heys and Efros perform image localization.
Kaneva et al. perform scene matching with camera view transformations.

Dealing with Sparse Data

• Better Similarity

Better Alignment

• • E.g. reduce resolution, sifting, warping

SIFT-Flow

Take sift features for all regions.
Then learn some SIFT vector to RGB color matching. The RGB images are called sift flow features.
Similar RGB regions will have similar SIFT feature vectors.
Then we can learn some transformation \(\displaystyle T\) to match the sift flows (i.e. \(\displaystyle T(F_1) \approx F_2\)).

Non-parametric Scene Parsing (CVPR 2009)

If you have a good scene alignment algorithm, you can just use a segmentation map.

Use sub-images (primitives) to match

Allows matching from multiple images

Mid-level primitives

Bag of visual words:

1. Take some features (e.g. SIFT) from every image in your dataset.
2. Apply clustering to your dataset to get k clusters. These k clusters are your visual words.

The challenge with matching patches is how to find patches to match?
Ideally, we want patches which are both representative and discriminate.
Representative is that the patch is found in the target image set; i.e. coverage of the target concept.
Discriminative is that the patch is not found in non-target image sets (distinct from other concepts).

Understanding simple stuff first

E.g. from a video, find one frame which is easy to detect pose and then apply optical-flow methods to transfer the flow to adjacent frames.

Looking beyond the k-NN method

Use data to make connections.

Visual Memex Knowledge Graph

(Malisiewicz and Efros 2009)
Build a visual knowledge graph of entites. Edges can be context edges or similarity edges.
Embed an image into the graph and copy information from the graph.

Manifolds in Vision

These days, we can assume deep learning features are reasonable manifolds.

ConvNets and Architectures

See Convolutional neural network for basics.

Paper Summaries

Krizhevsky et al. develop AlexNet for image classification. AlexNet is a CNN architecture with two branches. Their architecture and training proceedure includes many tricks, some of which are now commonplace today. These include multi-GPU training, 8 layers, ReLU activations, Local Response Normalization (LRU), (overlapping) max pooling, data augmentation, and dropout. They won on ImageNet 2012 by a large margin.

Huang et al. develop DenseNet for image classification. The main contribution are dense blocks where each layer within the block are connected to all subsequent layers (i.e. the outputs are accumulated by concatenation). Each layer consists of (BN-ReLU-Conv(1x1)-BN-ReLU-Conv(3x3)). Following each dense block, they use transition layers (1x1 conv + 2x2 avg pool) to shrink the size. The evaluate on CIFAR, SVHN, and ImageNet.

Xie et al. develop S3D-G for video classification. The main idea is that video classification can be done with Conv2d layers at lower layers and Conv3d layers at higher layers. In addition, the time and spatial dimensions can be separated into two different 3D convolutions (with \(\displaystyle 1 \times k \times k\) and \(\displaystyle k_t \times 1 \times 1\) kernels). These two changes improve the accuracy and efficiency of video classification compared to just Conv3d.

Overview

ConvNet pipeline:

• Input
• Conv/ReLU/Pool
• FC/ReLu
• FC/Normalization/Loss

VGGNet

ILSVRC 2014 2nd place

This is a sequence of deeper networks trained progressively.
They replace large receptive fields with successive 3x3 conv + ReLU layers.
A single 7x7 conv layer with C-dim input and C-dim output would need \(\displaystyle 49 \times C^2\) weights.
Three \(\displaystyle 3\times 3\) conv layers only need \(\displaystyle 27 \times C^2\) weights.

Network in network

Use a small perceptron as your convolution kernel. I.e. the block goes into the perceptron. This output instead of calculating cross correlation with a standard kernel.

GoogLeNet

Hebbian Principle: Neurons that fire together are typically wired together.
Implemented using an Inception Module.

The key idea is to use a heterogeneous set of convolutions.
Naive idea: Do a 1x1 convolution, 3x3 convolution, and 5x5 convolution and then concatenate the output together. The intuition is that each captures a different receptive field. In practice, they need to add 1x1 convolutions before the 3x3 and 5x5 convolutions to make it work. These are used for dimension reduction by controlling the channel.

Another idea is to add auxiliary classifiers across the network.

Inception v2, v3 V2 adds batch-normalization to reduce dependence on auxiliary classifiers. V3 addes factored convolutions (i.e. nx1 and 1xn convolutions).

ResNet

The main idea is to introduce skip or shortcut connections.
This existing in literature before. The means returning \(\displaystyle F(x)+x\).
This allow smoother gradient flows since intermediate layers cannot block gradient flow.

They also replace 3x3 convolutions on 256 channels with 1x1 to 64 channels, 3x3 on the 64 channels, then 1x1 back to 256 channels.
This reduces parameters from approx 600k to approx 70k.

Accuracy vs efficiency

First we had AlexNet. Then we had VGG which had way more parameters and better accuracy.
Then we had GoogLeNet which is much smaller than both AlexNet and VGG with roughly the same accuracy.
Next ResNet and Inception increases the parameters slightly and attained better performance.

Beyond Resnet

Fractal Net

This is a take on ResNet which removes the skip connection across the whole network.
The point is to show that the performance is from connections of different lengths.

Wide ResNet

Reduce the number of residual blocks but increase feature maps in each block.
Shows that it's not just about depth but also the width of each layer.
Computationally, a wide network is more parallelizable.

We thought that more layers make networks exponentially more powerful.
However, this contradicts that hypothesis.

ResNeXt

Propose cardinality as a feature of network design.
First split the 256x256 input across the channel dimension. Each layer has much fewer features: 64 to 4, but now with 32 separate paths.
Within each layer, how many things can we do independently of each other?.

DenseNets

CVPR 2017 best paper award.
Forget about resnets, just connect everything to all following layers.

Video

Images are RGB.
Videos are RGB+T.

Combine per-frame models

• Single Frame
• Late Fusion (combine features for frames apart in time)
• Early Fusion (combine features from adjacent frames)
• Slow Fusion (combind features from adjacent frames and then features from adjacent features,...)

2-stream networks

Have a spatial stream and a temporal stream.
The spatial stream works on a single RGB frame.
The temporal stream works on optical flow.

3D ConvNets

Slide the kernel in the time domain.

I3D

Inflated 3D ConvNet
Types of 3D networks:

• LSTM
• 3D-ConvNet
• Two strea
• 3D-Fused Two Stream
• Two-stream 3D-ConvNet

Take the inception module and add a time dimension.

Design Principles

• Make networks parameter-efficient
  • Reduce filter sizes, factorize filters
  • Use 1x1 convolutions to reduce number of feature maps
  • Minimize reliance on FC layers
• Reduce spatial resolution gradually so we can repeat the same block
• Use skip connections or multiple redundant paths.
• Play around with depth vs width vs cardinality

Miscellaneous Things

• Training tricks and details
• Training data augmentation
• Ensembles of networks

Will be on the exam

• Back-prop and SGD,
• Softmax, sigmoid, cross entropy

Project Notes

We will need to include:

• Challenges
• What methods worked and didn't work.