Abstract: We propose an online domain adaptation method for the deformable part-based model (DPM). The online domain adaptation is based on a two-level hierarchical adaptation tree, which consists of instance detectors in the leaf nodes and a category detector at the root node. Moreover, combined with a multiple object tracking procedure (MOT), our proposal neither requires target-domain annotated data nor revisiting the source-domain data for performing the source-to-target domain adaptation of the DPM. From a practical point of view this means that, given a source-domain DPM and new video for training on a new domain without object annotations, our procedure outputs a new DPM adapted to the domain represented by the video. As proof-of-concept we apply our proposal to the challenging task of pedestrian detection. In this case, each instance detector is an exemplar classifier trained online with only one pedestrian per frame. The pedestrian instances are collected by MOT and the hierarchical model is constructed dynamically according to the pedestrian trajectories. Our experimental results show that the adapted detector achieves the accuracy of recent supervised domain adaptation methods (i.e., requiring manually annotated targetdomain data), and improves the source detector more than 10 percentage points.

Abstract: Autonomous driving has harsh requirements of small model size and energy efficiency, in order to enable the embedded system to achieve real-time on-board object detection. Recent deep convolutional neural network based object detectors have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. However, such models are trained with numerous parameters and their high computational costs and large storage prohibit the deployment to memory and computation resource limited systems. Low-precision neural networks are popular techniques for reducing the computation requirements and memory footprint. Among them, binary weight neural network (BWN) is the extreme case which quantizes the float-point into just bit. BWNs are difficult to train and suffer from accuracy deprecation due to the extreme low-bit representation. To address this problem, we propose a knowledge transfer (KT) method to aid the training of BWN using a full-precision teacher network. We built DarkNet-and MobileNet-based binary weight YOLO-v2 detectors and conduct experiments on KITTI benchmark for car, pedestrian and cyclist detection. The experimental results show that the proposed method maintains high detection accuracy while reducing the model size of DarkNet-YOLO from 257 MB to 8.8 MB and MobileNet-YOLO from 193 MB to 7.9 MB.

Abstract: This paper presents a bag of feature based method for visual object recognition. Our contribution is focussed on the selection of the best feature descriptor. It is implemented by using a novel multi-table reinforcement learning method that selects among five of classical descriptors (i.e., Spin, SIFT, SURF, C-SIFT and PHOW) the one that best describes each image. Experimental results and comparisons are provided showing the improvements achieved with the proposed approach.

Abstract: Confidence estimation has recently become a hot topic in image processing and computer vision.Yet, several definitions exist of the term “confidence” which are sometimes used interchangeably. This is a position paper, in which we aim to give an overview on existing definitions,
thereby clarifying the meaning of the used terms to facilitate further research in this field. Based on these clarifications, we develop a theory to compare confidence measures with respect to their quality.