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While originally designed for natural language processing tasks, the self-attention mechanism has recently taken various computer vision areas by storm. However, the 2D nature of images brings three challenges for applying self-attention in computer vision: (1) treating images as 1D sequences neglects their 2D structures; (2) the quadratic complexity is too expensive for high-resolution images; (3) it only captures spatial adaptability but ignores channel adaptability. In this paper, we propose a novel linear attention named large kernel attention (LKA) to enable self-adaptive and long-range correlations in self-attention while avoiding its shortcomings. Furthermore, we present a neural network based on LKA, namely Visual Attention Network (VAN). While extremely simple, VAN achieves comparable results with similar size convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs) in various tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, pose estimation, etc. For example, VAN-B6 achieves 87.8% accuracy on ImageNet benchmark, and sets new state-of-the-art performance (58.2 PQ) for panoptic segmentation. Besides, VAN-B2 surpasses Swin-T 4 mIoU (50.1 vs. 46.1) for semantic segmentation on ADE20K benchmark, 2.6 AP (48.8 vs. 46.2) for object detection on COCO dataset. It provides a novel method and a simple yet strong baseline for the community. The code is available at https://github.com/Visual-Attention-Network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object attention maps generated by image classifiers are usually used as priors for weakly supervised semantic segmentation. However, attention maps usually locate the most discriminative object parts. The lack of integral object localization maps heavily limits the performance of weakly supervised segmentation approaches. This paper attempts to investigate a novel way to identify entire object regions in a weakly supervised manner. We observe that image classifiers’ attention maps at different training phases may focus on different parts of the target objects. Based on this observation, we propose an online attention accumulation (OAA) strategy that utilizes the attention maps at different training phases to obtain more integral object regions. Specifically, we maintain a cumulative attention map for each target category in each training image and utilize it to record the discovered object regions at different training phases. Albeit OAA can effectively mine more object regions for most images, for some training images, the range of the attention movement is not large, limiting the generation of integral object attention regions. To overcome this problem, we propose incorporating an attention drop layer into the online attention accumulation process to enlarge the range of attention movement during training explicitly. Our method (OAA) can be plugged into any classification network and progressively accumulate the discriminative regions into cumulative attention maps as the training process goes. Additionally, we also explore utilizing the final cumulative attention maps to serve as the pixel-level supervision, which can further assist the network in discovering more integral object regions. When applying the resulting attention maps to the weakly supervised semantic segmentation task, our approach improves the existing state-of-the-art methods on the PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark, achieving a mIoU score of 67.2 percent on the test set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the first systematic study on concealed object detection (COD), which aims to identify objects that are visually embedded in their background. The high intrinsic similarities between the concealed objects and their background make COD far more challenging than traditional object detection/segmentation. To better understand this task, we collect a large-scale dataset, called COD10K, which consists of 10,000 images covering concealed objects in diverse real-world scenarios from 78 object categories. Further, we provide rich annotations including object categories, object boundaries, challenging attributes, object-level labels, and instance-level annotations. Our COD10K is the largest COD dataset to date, with the richest annotations, which enables comprehensive concealed object understanding and can even be used to help progress several other vision tasks, such as detection, segmentation, classification etc. Motivated by how animals hunt in the wild, we also design a simple but strong baseline for COD, termed the Search Identification Network (SINet). Without any bells and whistles, SINet outperforms twelve cutting-edge baselines on all datasets tested, making them robust, general architectures that could serve as catalysts for future research in COD. Finally, we provide some interesting findings, and highlight several potential applications and future directions. To spark research in this new field, our code, dataset, and online demo are available at our project page: http://mmcheng.net/cod. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent progress on salient object detection (SOD) mainly benefits from multi-scale learning, where the high-level and low-level features collaborate in locating salient objects and discovering fine details, respectively. However, most efforts are devoted to low-level feature learning by fusing multi-scale features or enhancing boundary representations. High-level features, which although have long proven effective for many other tasks, yet have been barely studied for SOD. In this paper, we tap into this gap and show that enhancing high-level features is essential for SOD as well. To this end, we introduce an Extremely-Downsampled Network (EDN), which employs an extreme downsampling technique to effectively learn a global view of the whole image, leading to accurate salient object localization. To accomplish better multi-level feature fusion, we construct the Scale-Correlated Pyramid Convolution (SCPC) to build an elegant decoder for recovering object details from the above extreme downsampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDN achieves state-of-the-art performance with real-time speed. Our efficient EDN-Lite also achieves competitive performance with a speed of 316fps. Hence, this work is expected to spark some new thinking in SOD. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhuan-wu/EDN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weakly supervised semantic instance segmentation with only image-level supervision, instead of relying on expensive pixel-wise masks or bounding box annotations, is an important problem to alleviate the data-hungry nature of deep learning. In this article, we tackle this challenging problem by aggregating the image-level information of all training images into a large knowledge graph and exploiting semantic relationships from this graph. Specifically, our effort starts with some generic segment-based object proposals (SOP) without category priors. We propose a multiple instance learning (MIL) framework, which can be trained in an end-to-end manner using training images with image-level labels. For each proposal, this MIL framework can simultaneously compute probability distributions and category-aware semantic features, with which we can formulate a large undirected graph. The category of background is also included in this graph to remove the massive noisy object proposals. An optimal multi-way cut of this graph can thus assign a reliable category label to each proposal. The denoised SOP with assigned category labels can be viewed as pseudo instance segmentation of training images, which are used to train fully supervised models. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for both weakly supervised instance segmentation and semantic segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/yun-liu/LIID. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The class activation maps are generated from the final convolutional layer of CNN. They can highlight discriminative object regions for the class of interest. These discovered object regions have been widely used for weakly-supervised tasks. However, due to the small spatial resolution of the final convolutional layer, such class activation maps often locate coarse regions of the target objects, limiting the performance of weakly-supervised tasks that need pixel-accurate object locations. Thus, we aim to generate more fine-grained object localization information from the class activation maps to locate the target objects more accurately. In this paper, by rethinking the relationships between the feature maps and their corresponding gradients, we propose a simple yet effective method, called LayerCAM. It can produce reliable class activation maps for different layers of CNN. This property enables us to collect object localization information from coarse (rough spatial localization) to fine (precise fine-grained details) levels. We further integrate them into a high-quality class activation map, where the object-related pixels can be better highlighted. To evaluate the quality of the class activation maps produced by LayerCAM, we apply them to weakly-supervised object localization and semantic segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that the class activation maps generated by our method are more effective and reliable than those by the existing attention methods. The code will be made publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent efforts on salient object detection (SOD) have been devoted to producing accurate saliency maps without being aware of their instance labels. To this end, we propose a new pipeline for end-to-end salient instance segmentation (SIS) that predicts a class-agnostic mask for each detected salient instance. To better use the rich feature hierarchies in deep networks and enhance the side predictions, we propose the regularized dense connections, which attentively promote informative features and suppress non-informative ones from all feature pyramids. A novel multi-level RoIAlign based decoder is introduced to adaptively aggregate multi-level features for better mask predictions. Such strategies can be well-encapsulated into the Mask R-CNN pipeline. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that our design significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art competitors by 6.3% (58.6% vs. 52.3%) in terms of the AP metric. The code is available at https://github.com/yuhuan-wu/RDPNet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a pandemic disease in over 200 countries, influencing billions of humans. To control the infection, identifying and separating the infected people is the most crucial step. The main diagnostic tool is the Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) test. Still, the sensitivity of the RT-PCR test is not high enough to effectively prevent the pandemic. The chest CT scan test provides a valuable complementary tool to the RT-PCR test, and it can identify the patients in the early-stage with high sensitivity. However, the chest CT scan test is usually time-consuming, requiring about 21.5 minutes per case. This paper develops a novel Joint Classification and Segmentation (JCS) system to perform real-time and explainable COVID- 19 chest CT diagnosis. To train our JCS system, we construct a large scale COVID- 19 Classification and Segmentation (COVID-CS) dataset, with 144,167 chest CT images of 400 COVID- 19 patients and 350 uninfected cases. 3,855 chest CT images of 200 patients are annotated with fine-grained pixel-level labels of opacifications, which are increased attenuation of the lung parenchyma. We also have annotated lesion counts, opacification areas, and locations and thus benefit various diagnosis aspects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed JCS diagnosis system is very efficient for COVID-19 classification and segmentation. It obtains an average sensitivity of 95.0% and a specificity of 93.0% on the classification test set, and 78.5% Dice score on the segmentation test set of our COVID-CS dataset. The COVID-CS dataset and code are available at https://github.com/yuhuan-wu/JCS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D spatial information is known to be beneficial to the semantic segmentation task. Most existing methods take 3D spatial data as an additional input, leading to a two-stream segmentation network that processes RGB and 3D spatial information separately. This solution greatly increases the inference time and severely limits its scope for real-time applications. To solve this problem, we propose Spatial information guided Convolution (S-Conv), which allows efficient RGB feature and 3D spatial information integration. S-Conv is competent to infer the sampling offset of the convolution kernel guided by the 3D spatial information, helping the convolutional layer adjust the receptive field and adapt to geometric transformations. S-Conv also incorporates geometric information into the feature learning process by generating spatially adaptive convolutional weights. The capability of perceiving geometry is largely enhanced without much affecting the amount of parameters and computational cost. Based on S-Conv, we further design a semantic segmentation network, called Spatial information Guided convolutional Network (SGNet), resulting in real-time inference and state-of-the-art performance on NYUDv2 and SUNRGBD datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edge detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have pushed forward this field significantly. Existing methods which adopt specific layers of deep CNNs may fail to capture complex data structures caused by variations of scales and aspect ratios. In this paper, we propose an accurate edge detector using richer convolutional features (RCF). RCF encapsulates all convolutional features into more discriminative representation, which makes good usage of rich feature hierarchies, and is amenable to training via backpropagation. RCF fully exploits multiscale and multilevel information of objects to perform the image-to-image prediction holistically. Using VGG16 network, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on several available datasets. When evaluating on the well-known BSDS500 benchmark, we achieve ODS F-measure of 0.811 while retaining a fast speed (8 FPS). Besides, our fast version of RCF achieves ODS F-measure of 0.806 with 30 FPS. We also demonstrate the versatility of the proposed method by applying RCF edges for classical image segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent progress on salient object detection is substantial, benefiting mostly from the explosive development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Semantic segmentation and salient object detection algorithms developed lately have been mostly based on Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs). There is still a large room for improvement over the generic FCN models that do not explicitly deal with the scale-space problem. The Holistically-Nested Edge Detector (HED) provides a skip-layer structure with deep supervision for edge and boundary detection, but the performance gain of HED on saliency detection is not obvious. In this paper, we propose a new salient object detection method by introducing short connections to the skip-layer structures within the HED architecture. Our framework takes full advantage of multi-level and multi-scale features extracted from FCNs, providing more advanced representations at each layer, a property that is critically needed to perform segment detection. Our method produces state-of-the-art results on 5 widely tested salient object detection benchmarks, with advantages in terms of efficiency (0.08 seconds per image), effectiveness, and simplicity over the existing algorithms. Beyond that, we conduct an exhaustive analysis of the role of training data on performance. We provide a training set for future research and fair comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Training a generic objectness measure to produce object proposals has recently become of significant interest. We observe that generic objects with well-defined closed boundaries can be detected by looking at the norm of gradients, with a suitable resizing of their corresponding image windows to a small fixed size. Based on this observation and computational reasons, we propose to resize the window to 8 × 8 and use the norm of the gradients as a simple 64D feature to describe it, for explicitly training a generic objectness measure. We further show how the binarized version of this feature, namely binarized normed gradients (BING), can be used for efficient objectness estimation, which requires only a few atomic operations (e.g., add, bitwise shift, etc.). To improve localization quality of the proposals while maintaining efficiency, we propose a novel fast segmentation method and demonstrate its effectiveness for improving BING's localization performance, when used in multi-thresholding straddling expansion (MTSE) post-processing. On the challenging PASCAL VOC2007 dataset, using 1000 proposals per image and intersection-over-union threshold of 0.5, our proposal method achieves a 95.6% object detection rate and 78.6% mean average best overlap in less than 0.005 second per image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we reconsider the clustering problem for image over-segmentation from a new perspective. We propose a novel search algorithm called "active search" which explicitly considers neighbor continuity. Based on this search method, we design a back-and-forth traversal strategy and a joint assignment and update step to speed up the algorithm. Compared to earlier methods, such as simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) and its variants, which use fixed search regions and perform the assignment and the update steps separately, our novel scheme reduces the number of iterations required for convergence, and also provides better boundaries in the over-segmentation results. Extensive evaluation using the Berkeley segmentation benchmark verifies that our method outperforms competing methods under various evaluation metrics. In particular, our method is fastest, achieving approximately 30 fps for a 481 × 321 image on a single CPU core. To facilitate further research, our code is made publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are motivated by the need for a generic object proposal generation algorithm which achieves good balance between object detection recall, proposal localization quality and computational efficiency. We propose a novel object proposal algorithm, BING++, which inherits the virtue of good computational efficiency of BING [1] but significantly improves its proposal localization quality. At high level we formulate the problem of object proposal generation from a novel probabilistic perspective, based on which our BING++ manages to improve the localization quality by employing edges and segments to estimate object boundaries and update the proposals sequentially. We propose learning the parameters efficiently by searching for approximate solutions in a quantized parameter space for complexity reduction. We demonstrate the generalization of BING++ with the same fixed parameters across different object classes and datasets. Empirically our BING++ can run at half speed of BING on CPU, but significantly improve the localization quality by 18.5 and 16.7 percent on both VOC2007 and Microhsoft COCO datasets, respectively. Compared with other state-of-the-art approaches, BING++ can achieve comparable performance, but run significantly faster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, significant improvement has been made on semantic object segmentation due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). Training such a DCNN usually relies on a large number of images with pixel-level segmentation masks, and annotating these images is very costly in terms of both finance and human effort. In this paper, we propose a simple to complex (STC) framework in which only image-level annotations are utilized to learn DCNNs for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we first train an initial segmentation network called Initial-DCNN with the saliency maps of simple images (i.e., those with a single category of major object(s) and clean background). These saliency maps can be automatically obtained by existing bottom-up salient object detection techniques, where no supervision information is needed. Then, a better network called Enhanced-DCNN is learned with supervision from the predicted segmentation masks of simple images based on the Initial-DCNN as well as the image-level annotations. Finally, more pixel-level segmentation masks of complex images (two or more categories of objects with cluttered background), which are inferred by using Enhanced-DCNN and image-level annotations, are utilized as the supervision information to learn the Powerful-DCNN for semantic segmentation. Our method utilizes 40K simple images from Flickr.com and 10K complex images from PASCAL VOC for step-wisely boosting the segmentation network. Extensive experimental results on PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed STC framework compared with other state-of-the-arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic estimation of salient object regions across images, without any prior assumption or knowledge of the contents of the corresponding scenes, enhances many computer vision and computer graphics applications. We introduce a regional contrast based salient object detection algorithm, which simultaneously evaluates global contrast differences and spatial weighted coherence scores. The proposed algorithm is simple, efficient, naturally multi-scale, and produces full-resolution, high-quality saliency maps. These saliency maps are further used to initialize a novel iterative version of GrabCut, namely SaliencyCut, for high quality unsupervised salient object segmentation. We extensively evaluated our algorithm using traditional salient object detection datasets, as well as a more challenging Internet image dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm consistently outperforms 15 existing salient object detection and segmentation methods, yielding higher precision and better recall rates. We also show that our algorithm can be used to efficiently extract salient object masks from Internet images, enabling effective sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) via simple shape comparisons. Despite such noisy internet images, where the saliency regions are ambiguous, our saliency guided image retrieval achieves a superior retrieval rate compared with state-of-the-art SBIR methods, and additionally provides important target object region information. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Efficiently identifying salient objects in large image collections is essential for many applications including image retrieval, surveillance, image annotation, and object recognition. We propose a simple, fast, and effective algorithm for locating and segmenting salient objects by analysing image collections. As a key novelty, we introduce group saliency to achieve superior unsupervised salient object segmentation by extracting salient objects (in collections of pre-filtered images) that maximize between-image similarities and within-image distinctness. To evaluate our method, we construct a large benchmark dataset consisting of 15 K images across multiple categories with 6000+ pixel-accurate ground truth annotations for salient object regions where applicable. In all our tests, group saliency consistently outperforms state-of-the-art single-image saliency algorithms, resulting in both higher precision and better recall. Our algorithm successfully handles image collections, of an order larger than any existing benchmark datasets, consisting of diverse and heterogeneous images from various internet sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present PoseShop—a pipeline to construct segmented human image database with minimal manual intervention. By downloading, analyzing, and filtering massive amounts of human images from the Internet, we achieve a database which contains 400 thousands human figures that are segmented out of their background. The human figures are organized based on action semantic, clothes attributes, and indexed by the shape of their poses. They can be queried using either silhouette sketch or a skeleton to find a given pose. We demonstrate applications for this database for multiframe personalized content synthesis in the form of comic-strips, where the main character is the user or his/her friends. We address the two challenges of such synthesis, namely personalization and consistency over a set of frames, by introducing head swapping and clothes swapping techniques. We also demonstrate an action correlation analysis application to show the usefulness of the database for vision application. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present a semiautomatic image editing framework dedicated to individual structured object replacement from groups. The major technical difficulty is element separation with irregular spatial distribution, hampering previous texture, and image synthesis methods from easily producing visually compelling results. Our method uses the object-level operations and finds grouped elements based on appearance similarity and curvilinear features. This framework enables a number of image editing applications, including natural image mixing, structure preserving appearance transfer, and texture mixing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connectedness of random walk segmentation is examined, and novel properties are discovered, by considering electrical circuits equivalent to random walks. A theoretical analysis shows that earlier conclusions concerning connectedness of random walk segmentation results are incorrect, and counterexamples are demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]