scholarly journals How Low Can You Go? Using Synthetic 3D Imagery to Drastically Reduce Real-World Training Data for Object Detection.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoe Gastelum ◽  
Timothy Shead
Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (23) ◽  
pp. 7901
Author(s):  
Leon Eversberg ◽  
Jens Lambrecht

Limited training data is one of the biggest challenges in the industrial application of deep learning. Generating synthetic training images is a promising solution in computer vision; however, minimizing the domain gap between synthetic and real-world images remains a problem. Therefore, based on a real-world application, we explored the generation of images with physics-based rendering for an industrial object detection task. Setting up the render engine’s environment requires a lot of choices and parameters. One fundamental question is whether to apply the concept of domain randomization or use domain knowledge to try and achieve photorealism. To answer this question, we compared different strategies for setting up lighting, background, object texture, additional foreground objects and bounding box computation in a data-centric approach. We compared the resulting average precision from generated images with different levels of realism and variability. In conclusion, we found that domain randomization is a viable strategy for the detection of industrial objects. However, domain knowledge can be used for object-related aspects to improve detection performance. Based on our results, we provide guidelines and an open-source tool for the generation of synthetic images for new industrial applications.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Zhi Zhang

Despite being a core topic for more than several decades, object detection is still receiving increasing attentions due to its irreplaceable importance in a wide variety of applications. Abundant object detectors based on deep neural networks have shown significantly revamped accuracies in recent years. However, it's still the day one for these models to be effectively deployed to real world. In this dissertation, we focus on object detection models which tackle real world problems that are unavailable few years ago. We also aim at making object detectors on the go, which means detectors are not longer required to be run on workstations and cloud services which is latency unfriendly. To achieve these goals, we addressed the problem in two phases: application and deployment. We have done thoughtful research on both areas. Our contribution involves inter-frame information fusing, model knowledge distillation, advanced model flow control for progressive inference, and hardware oriented model design and optimization. More specifically, we proposed a novel cross-frame verification scheme for spatial temporal fused object detection model for sequential images and videos in a proposal and reject favor. To compress model from a learning basis and resolve domain specific training data shortage, we improved the learning algorithm to handle insufficient labeled data by searching for optimal guidance paths from pre-trained models. To further reduce model inference cost, we designed a progressive neural network which run in flexible cost enabled by RNN style decision controller during runtime. We recognize the awkward model deployment problem, especially for object detection models that require excessive customized layers. In response, we propose to use end-to-end neural network which use pure neural network components to substitute traditional post-processing operations. We also applied operator decomposition and graph level and on-device optimization towards real-time object detection on low power edge devices. All these works have achieved state-of-the-art performances and converted to successful applications.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (8) ◽  
pp. 2611
Author(s):  
Andrew Shepley ◽  
Greg Falzon ◽  
Christopher Lawson ◽  
Paul Meek ◽  
Paul Kwan

Image data is one of the primary sources of ecological data used in biodiversity conservation and management worldwide. However, classifying and interpreting large numbers of images is time and resource expensive, particularly in the context of camera trapping. Deep learning models have been used to achieve this task but are often not suited to specific applications due to their inability to generalise to new environments and inconsistent performance. Models need to be developed for specific species cohorts and environments, but the technical skills required to achieve this are a key barrier to the accessibility of this technology to ecologists. Thus, there is a strong need to democratize access to deep learning technologies by providing an easy-to-use software application allowing non-technical users to train custom object detectors. U-Infuse addresses this issue by providing ecologists with the ability to train customised models using publicly available images and/or their own images without specific technical expertise. Auto-annotation and annotation editing functionalities minimize the constraints of manually annotating and pre-processing large numbers of images. U-Infuse is a free and open-source software solution that supports both multiclass and single class training and object detection, allowing ecologists to access deep learning technologies usually only available to computer scientists, on their own device, customised for their application, without sharing intellectual property or sensitive data. It provides ecological practitioners with the ability to (i) easily achieve object detection within a user-friendly GUI, generating a species distribution report, and other useful statistics, (ii) custom train deep learning models using publicly available and custom training data, (iii) achieve supervised auto-annotation of images for further training, with the benefit of editing annotations to ensure quality datasets. Broad adoption of U-Infuse by ecological practitioners will improve ecological image analysis and processing by allowing significantly more image data to be processed with minimal expenditure of time and resources, particularly for camera trap images. Ease of training and use of transfer learning means domain-specific models can be trained rapidly, and frequently updated without the need for computer science expertise, or data sharing, protecting intellectual property and privacy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 4894
Author(s):  
Anna Scius-Bertrand ◽  
Michael Jungo ◽  
Beat Wolf ◽  
Andreas Fischer ◽  
Marc Bui

The current state of the art for automatic transcription of historical manuscripts is typically limited by the requirement of human-annotated learning samples, which are are necessary to train specific machine learning models for specific languages and scripts. Transcription alignment is a simpler task that aims to find a correspondence between text in the scanned image and its existing Unicode counterpart, a correspondence which can then be used as training data. The alignment task can be approached with heuristic methods dedicated to certain types of manuscripts, or with weakly trained systems reducing the required amount of annotations. In this article, we propose a novel learning-based alignment method based on fully convolutional object detection that does not require any human annotation at all. Instead, the object detection system is initially trained on synthetic printed pages using a font and then adapted to the real manuscripts by means of self-training. On a dataset of historical Vietnamese handwriting, we demonstrate the feasibility of annotation-free alignment as well as the positive impact of self-training on the character detection accuracy, reaching a detection accuracy of 96.4% with a YOLOv5m model without using any human annotation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Tanguy Ophoff ◽  
Cédric Gullentops ◽  
Kristof Van Beeck ◽  
Toon Goedemé

Object detection models are usually trained and evaluated on highly complicated, challenging academic datasets, which results in deep networks requiring lots of computations. However, a lot of operational use-cases consist of more constrained situations: they have a limited number of classes to be detected, less intra-class variance, less lighting and background variance, constrained or even fixed camera viewpoints, etc. In these cases, we hypothesize that smaller networks could be used without deteriorating the accuracy. However, there are multiple reasons why this does not happen in practice. Firstly, overparameterized networks tend to learn better, and secondly, transfer learning is usually used to reduce the necessary amount of training data. In this paper, we investigate how much we can reduce the computational complexity of a standard object detection network in such constrained object detection problems. As a case study, we focus on a well-known single-shot object detector, YoloV2, and combine three different techniques to reduce the computational complexity of the model without reducing its accuracy on our target dataset. To investigate the influence of the problem complexity, we compare two datasets: a prototypical academic (Pascal VOC) and a real-life operational (LWIR person detection) dataset. The three optimization steps we exploited are: swapping all the convolutions for depth-wise separable convolutions, perform pruning and use weight quantization. The results of our case study indeed substantiate our hypothesis that the more constrained a problem is, the more the network can be optimized. On the constrained operational dataset, combining these optimization techniques allowed us to reduce the computational complexity with a factor of 349, as compared to only a factor 9.8 on the academic dataset. When running a benchmark on an Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier, our fastest model runs more than 15 times faster than the original YoloV2 model, whilst increasing the accuracy by 5% Average Precision (AP).


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Wei Zhao ◽  
William Yamada ◽  
Tianxin Li ◽  
Matthew Digman ◽  
Troy Runge

In recent years, precision agriculture has been researched to increase crop production with less inputs, as a promising means to meet the growing demand of agriculture products. Computer vision-based crop detection with unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-acquired images is a critical tool for precision agriculture. However, object detection using deep learning algorithms rely on a significant amount of manually prelabeled training datasets as ground truths. Field object detection, such as bales, is especially difficult because of (1) long-period image acquisitions under different illumination conditions and seasons; (2) limited existing prelabeled data; and (3) few pretrained models and research as references. This work increases the bale detection accuracy based on limited data collection and labeling, by building an innovative algorithms pipeline. First, an object detection model is trained using 243 images captured with good illimitation conditions in fall from the crop lands. In addition, domain adaptation (DA), a kind of transfer learning, is applied for synthesizing the training data under diverse environmental conditions with automatic labels. Finally, the object detection model is optimized with the synthesized datasets. The case study shows the proposed method improves the bale detecting performance, including the recall, mean average precision (mAP), and F measure (F1 score), from averages of 0.59, 0.7, and 0.7 (the object detection) to averages of 0.93, 0.94, and 0.89 (the object detection + DA), respectively. This approach could be easily scaled to many other crop field objects and will significantly contribute to precision agriculture.


Author(s):  
B. Valentine ◽  
S. Apewokin ◽  
L. Wills ◽  
S. Wills ◽  
A. Gentile
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 2104
Author(s):  
Michał Tomaszewski ◽  
Paweł Michalski ◽  
Jakub Osuchowski

This article presents an analysis of the effectiveness of object detection in digital images with the application of a limited quantity of input. The possibility of using a limited set of learning data was achieved by developing a detailed scenario of the task, which strictly defined the conditions of detector operation in the considered case of a convolutional neural network. The described solution utilizes known architectures of deep neural networks in the process of learning and object detection. The article presents comparisons of results from detecting the most popular deep neural networks while maintaining a limited training set composed of a specific number of selected images from diagnostic video. The analyzed input material was recorded during an inspection flight conducted along high-voltage lines. The object detector was built for a power insulator. The main contribution of the presented papier is the evidence that a limited training set (in our case, just 60 training frames) could be used for object detection, assuming an outdoor scenario with low variability of environmental conditions. The decision of which network will generate the best result for such a limited training set is not a trivial task. Conducted research suggests that the deep neural networks will achieve different levels of effectiveness depending on the amount of training data. The most beneficial results were obtained for two convolutional neural networks: the faster region-convolutional neural network (faster R-CNN) and the region-based fully convolutional network (R-FCN). Faster R-CNN reached the highest AP (average precision) at a level of 0.8 for 60 frames. The R-FCN model gained a worse AP result; however, it can be noted that the relationship between the number of input samples and the obtained results has a significantly lower influence than in the case of other CNN models, which, in the authors’ assessment, is a desired feature in the case of a limited training set.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Zheng Wang ◽  
Qiao Wang ◽  
Tingzhang Zhao ◽  
Chaokun Wang ◽  
Xiaojun Ye

Feature selection, an effective technique for dimensionality reduction, plays an important role in many machine learning systems. Supervised knowledge can significantly improve the performance. However, faced with the rapid growth of newly emerging concepts, existing supervised methods might easily suffer from the scarcity and validity of labeled data for training. In this paper, the authors study the problem of zero-shot feature selection (i.e., building a feature selection model that generalizes well to “unseen” concepts with limited training data of “seen” concepts). Specifically, they adopt class-semantic descriptions (i.e., attributes) as supervision for feature selection, so as to utilize the supervised knowledge transferred from the seen concepts. For more reliable discriminative features, they further propose the center-characteristic loss which encourages the selected features to capture the central characteristics of seen concepts. Extensive experiments conducted on various real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.


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