text: Object localization is an important task in computer vision but requires a large amount of computational power due mainly to an exhaustive multiscale search on the input image. In this paper, we describe a near real-time multiscale search on a deep CNN feature map that does not use region proposals. The proposed approach effectively exploits local semantic information preserved in the feature map of the outermost convolutional layer. A multi-scale search is performed on the feature map by processing all the sub-regions of different sizes using separate expert units of fully connected layers. Each expert unit receives as input local semantic features only from the corresponding sub-regions of a specific geometric shape. Therefore, it contains more nearly optimal parameters tailored to the corresponding shape. This multi-scale and multi-aspect ratio scanning strategy can effectively localize a potential object of an arbitrary size. The proposed approach is fast and able to localize objects of interest with a frame rate of 4 fps while providing improved detection performance over the state-of-the art on the PASCAL VOC 12 and MSCOCO data sets.
  @cite_19: Convolutional networks are powerful visual models that yield hierarchies of features. We show that convolutional networks by themselves, trained end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels, exceed the state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation. Our key insight is to build “fully convolutional” networks that take input of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with efficient inference and learning. We define and detail the space of fully convolutional networks, explain their application to spatially dense prediction tasks, and draw connections to prior models. We adapt contemporary classification networks (AlexNet [20], the VGG net [31], and GoogLeNet [32]) into fully convolutional networks and transfer their learned representations by fine-tuning [3] to the segmentation task. We then define a skip architecture that combines semantic information from a deep, coarse layer with appearance information from a shallow, fine layer to produce accurate and detailed segmentations. Our fully convolutional network achieves state-of-the-art segmentation of PASCAL VOC (20 relative improvement to 62.2 mean IU on 2012), NYUDv2, and SIFT Flow, while inference takes less than one fifth of a second for a typical image.
  @cite_15: Successful methods for visual object recognition typically rely on training datasets containing lots of richly annotated images. Detailed image annotation, e.g. by object bounding boxes, however, is both expensive and often subjective. We describe a weakly supervised convolutional neural network (CNN) for object classification that relies only on image-level labels, yet can learn from cluttered scenes containing multiple objects. We quantify its object classification and object location prediction performance on the Pascal VOC 2012 (20 object classes) and the much larger Microsoft COCO (80 object classes) datasets. We find that the network (i) outputs accurate image-level labels, (ii) predicts approximate locations (but not extents) of objects, and (iii) performs comparably to its fully-supervised counterparts using object bounding box annotation for training.
  @cite_16: 
  @cite_13: Image representations, from SIFT and Bag of Visual Words to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are a crucial component of almost any image understanding system. Nevertheless, our understanding of them remains limited. In this paper we conduct a direct analysis of the visual information contained in representations by asking the following question: given an encoding of an image, to which extent is it possible to reconstruct the image itself? To answer this question we contribute a general framework to invert representations. We show that this method can invert representations such as HOG and SIFT more accurately than recent alternatives while being applicable to CNNs too. We then use this technique to study the inverse of recent state-of-the-art CNN image representations for the first time. Among our findings, we show that several layers in CNNs retain photographically accurate information about the image, with different degrees of geometric and photometric invariance.
  @cite_12: Existing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require a fixed-size (e.g., 224 @math 224) input image. This requirement is “artificial” and may reduce the recognition accuracy for the images or sub-images of an arbitrary size scale. In this work, we equip the networks with another pooling strategy, “spatial pyramid pooling”, to eliminate the above requirement. The new network structure, called SPP-net, can generate a fixed-length representation regardless of image size scale. Pyramid pooling is also robust to object deformations. With these advantages, SPP-net should in general improve all CNN-based image classification methods. On the ImageNet 2012 dataset, we demonstrate that SPP-net boosts the accuracy of a variety of CNN architectures despite their different designs. On the Pascal VOC 2007 and Caltech101 datasets, SPP-net achieves state-of-the-art classification results using a single full-image representation and no fine-tuning. The power of SPP-net is also significant in object detection. Using SPP-net, we compute the feature maps from the entire image only once, and then pool features in arbitrary regions (sub-images) to generate fixed-length representations for training the detectors. This method avoids repeatedly computing the convolutional features. In processing test images, our method is 24-102 @math faster than the R-CNN method, while achieving better or comparable accuracy on Pascal VOC 2007. In ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) 2014, our methods rank #2 in object detection and #3 in image classification among all 38 teams. This manuscript also introduces the improvement made for this competition.
summary: Besides the benefit of keeping the number of parameters relatively small, the convolutional layers also provide additional advantages. Unlike the fully connected layers with fixed input and output dimensions, the convolutional layer allows the structure to be flexible by taking input and output of variable sizes depending on the given tasks. @cite_12 introduced spatial pyramid pooling'' which constructs a multi-scale pyramid of feature maps in order to eliminate the requirement that input of CNN is fixed-sized. @cite_19 replaced the fully connected layers from @cite_16 with convolutional layers for semantic segmentation, called a fully convolutional network (FCN). @cite_15 also implemented the FCN for object localization. Moreover, the output of the convolutional layers (i.e., feature maps) preserves local spatial information to a certain degree relative to the original input image. Figure 6 in Mahendran and Vedaldi @cite_13 showing reconstructed images from the output of each layer of @cite_16 illustrates the spatial configuration of an input image cannot be recovered after @math layer. This finding supports our argument that exploiting the sub-windows of the feature map from the @math layer along with expert units of fully connected layers is highly efficient for object localization.