Abstract: Several recent works on self-supervised learning are trained by mapping different augmentations of the same image to the same feature representation. The data augmentations used are of crucial importance to the quality of learned feature representations. In this paper, we analyze how the color jitter traditionally used in data augmentation negatively impacts the quality of the color features in learned feature representations. To address this problem, we propose a more realistic, physics-based color data augmentation – which we call Planckian Jitter – that creates realistic variations in chromaticity and produces a model robust to illumination changes that can be commonly observed in real life, while maintaining the ability to discriminate image content based on color information. Experiments confirm that such a representation is complementary to the representations learned with the currently-used color jitter augmentation and that a simple concatenation leads to significant performance gains on a wide range of downstream datasets. In addition, we present a color sensitivity analysis that documents the impact of different training methods on model neurons and shows that the performance of the learned features is robust with respect to illuminant variations.

Abstract: Siamese approaches address the visual tracking problem by extracting an appearance template from the current frame, which is used to localize the target in the next frame. In general, this template is linearly combined with the accumulated template from the previous frame, resulting in an exponential decay of information over time. While such an approach to updating has led to improved results, its simplicity limits the potential gain likely to be obtained by learning to update. Therefore, we propose to replace the handcrafted update function with a method which learns to update. We use a convolutional neural network, called UpdateNet, which given the initial template, the accumulated template and the template of the current frame aims to estimate the optimal template for the next frame. The UpdateNet is compact and can easily be integrated into existing Siamese trackers. We demonstrate the generality of the proposed approach by applying it to two Siamese trackers, SiamFC and DaSiamRPN. Extensive experiments on VOT2016, VOT2018, LaSOT, and TrackingNet datasets demonstrate that our UpdateNet effectively predicts the new target template, outperforming the standard linear update. On the large-scale TrackingNet dataset, our UpdateNet improves the results of DaSiamRPN with an absolute gain of 3.9% in terms of success score.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution-based generative adversarial network (DCNGAN) for perceptual quality enhancement of compressed videos. DCNGAN is also adaptive to the quantization parameters (QPs). Compared with optical flows, deformable convolutions are more effective and efficient to align frames. Deformable convolutions can operate on multiple frames, thus leveraging more temporal information, which is beneficial for enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed videos. Instead of aligning frames in a pairwise manner, the deformable convolution can process multiple frames simultaneously, which leads to lower computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DCNGAN outperforms other state-of-the-art compressed video quality enhancement algorithms.

Abstract: Face anti-spoofing is essential to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face anti-spoofing benchmark datasets in recent years. However, existing face anti-spoofing benchmarks have limited number of subjects (≤170) and modalities (≤2), which hinder the further development of the academic community. To facilitate face anti-spoofing research, we introduce a large-scale multi-modal dataset, namely CASIA-SURF, which is the largest publicly available dataset for face anti-spoofing in terms of both subjects and modalities. Specifically, it consists of 1,000 subjects with 21,000 videos and each sample has 3 modalities ( i.e. , RGB, Depth and IR). We also provide comprehensive evaluation metrics, diverse evaluation protocols, training/validation/testing subsets and a measurement tool, developing a new benchmark for face anti-spoofing. Moreover, we present a novel multi-modal multi-scale fusion method as a strong baseline, which performs feature re-weighting to select the more informative channel features while suppressing the less useful ones for each modality across different scales. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the proposed dataset to verify its significance and generalization capability. The dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/qq.com/face-anti-spoofing/welcome/challengecvpr2019?authuser=0

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved superior performance in many visual recognition applications, such as image classification, detection and segmentation. Training deep CNNs requires huge amounts of labeled data, which is expensive and labor intensive to collect. Active learning is a paradigm aimed at reducing the annotation effort by training the model on actively selected
informative and/or representative samples. In this thesis we study several aspects of active learning including video object detection for autonomous driving systems, image classification on balanced and imbalanced datasets and the incorporation of self-supervised learning in active learning. We briefly describe our approach in each of these areas to reduce the labeling effort.
In chapter two we introduce a novel active learning approach for object detection in videos by exploiting temporal coherence. Our criterion is based on the estimated number of errors in terms of false positives and false negatives. Additionally, we introduce a synthetic video dataset, called SYNTHIA-AL, specially designed to evaluate active
learning for video object detection in road scenes. Finally, we show that our
approach outperforms active learning baselines tested on two outdoor datasets.
In the next chapter we address the well-known problem of over confidence in the neural networks. As an alternative to network confidence, we propose a new informativeness-based active learning method that captures the learning dynamics of neural network with a metric called label-dispersion. This metric is low when the network consistently assigns the same label to the sample during the course of training and high when the assigned label changes frequently. We show that label-dispersion is a promising predictor of the uncertainty of the network, and show on two benchmark datasets that an active learning algorithm based on label-dispersion obtains excellent results.
In chapter four, we tackle the problem of sampling bias in active learning methods on imbalanced datasets. Active learning is generally studied on balanced datasets where an equal amount of images per class is available. However, real-world datasets suffer from severe imbalanced classes, the so called longtail distribution. We argue that this further complicates the active learning process, since the imbalanced data pool can result in suboptimal classifiers. To address this problem in the context of active learning, we propose a general optimization framework that explicitly takes class-balancing into account. Results on three datasets show that the method is general (it can be combined with most existing active learning algorithms) and can be effectively applied to boost the performance of both informative and representative-based active learning methods. In addition, we show that also on balanced datasets our method generally results in a performance gain.
Another paradigm to reduce the annotation effort is self-training that learns from a large amount of unlabeled data in an unsupervised way and fine-tunes on few labeled samples. Recent advancements in self-training have achieved very impressive results rivaling supervised learning on some datasets. In the last chapter we focus on whether active learning and self supervised learning can benefit from each other.
We study object recognition datasets with several labeling budgets for the evaluations. Our experiments reveal that self-training is remarkably more efficient than active learning at reducing the labeling effort, that for a low labeling budget, active learning offers no benefit to self-training, and finally that the combination of active learning and self-training is fruitful when the labeling budget is high.

Abstract: In this paper we investigate a new representation approach for visual object recognition. The new representation, called sketchable-HoG, extends the classical histogram of oriented gradients (HoG) feature by adding two different aspects: the stability of the majority orientation and the continuity of gradient orientations. In this way, the sketchable-HoG locally characterizes the complexity of an object model and introduces global structure information while still keeping simplicity, compactness and robustness. We evaluated the proposed image descriptor on publicly Catltech 101 dataset. The obtained results outperforms classical HoG descriptor as well as other reported descriptors in the literature.

Abstract: Active learning is a paradigm aimed at reducing the annotation effort by training the model on actively selected informative and/or representative samples. Another paradigm to reduce the annotation effort is self-training that learns from a large amount of unlabeled data in an unsupervised way and fine-tunes on few labeled samples. Recent developments in self-training have achieved very impressive results rivaling supervised learning on some datasets. The current work focuses on whether the two paradigms can benefit from each other. We studied object recognition datasets including CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Tiny ImageNet with several labeling budgets for the evaluations. Our experiments reveal that self-training is remarkably more efficient than active learning at reducing the labeling effort, that for a low labeling budget, active learning offers no benefit to self-training, and finally that the combination of active learning and self-training is fruitful when the labeling budget is high. The performance gap between active learning trained either with self-training or from scratch diminishes as we approach to the point where almost half of the dataset is labeled.

Abstract: Face anti-spoofing is essential to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face anti-spoofing benchmark datasets in recent years. However, existing face anti-spoofing benchmarks have limited number of subjects (≤170) and modalities (≤2), which hinder the further development of the academic community. To facilitate face anti-spoofing research, we introduce a large-scale multi-modal dataset, namely CASIA-SURF, which is the largest publicly available dataset for face anti-spoofing in terms of both subjects and visual modalities. Specifically, it consists of 1,000 subjects with 21,000 videos and each sample has 3 modalities (i.e., RGB, Depth and IR). We also provide a measurement set, evaluation protocol and training/validation/testing subsets, developing a new benchmark for face anti-spoofing. Moreover, we present a new multi-modal fusion method as baseline, which performs feature re-weighting to select the more informative channel features while suppressing the less useful ones for each modal. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the proposed dataset to verify its significance and generalization capability. The dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/qq.com/chalearnfacespoofingattackdete/.