Humans process visual scenes selectively and sequentially using attention. Central to models of human visual attention is the saliency map. We propose a hierarchical visual architecture that operates on a saliency map and uses a novel attention mechanism to sequentially focus on salient regions and take additional glimpses within those regions. The architecture is motivated by human visual attention, and is used for multi-label image classification on a novel multiset task, demonstrating that it achieves high precision and recall while localizing objects with its attention. Unlike conventional multi-label image classification models, the model supports multiset prediction due to a reinforcement-learning based training process that allows for arbitrary label permutation and multiple instances per label.
@cite_41: In this paper we provide an extensive evaluation of fixation prediction and salient object segmentation algorithms as well as statistics of major datasets. Our analysis identifies serious design flaws of existing salient object benchmarks, called the dataset design bias, by over emphasizing the stereotypical concepts of saliency. The dataset design bias does not only create the discomforting disconnection between fixations and salient object segmentation, but also misleads the algorithm designing. Based on our analysis, we propose a new high quality dataset that offers both fixation and salient object segmentation ground-truth. With fixations and salient object being presented simultaneously, we are able to bridge the gap between fixations and salient objects, and propose a novel method for salient object segmentation. Finally, we report significant benchmark progress on three existing datasets of segmenting salient objects
@cite_43: This paper addresses the visualisation of image classification models, learnt using deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets). We consider two visualisation techniques, based on computing the gradient of the class score with respect to the input image. The first one generates an image, which maximises the class score [5], thus visualising the notion of the class, captured by a ConvNet. The second technique computes a class saliency map, specific to a given image and class. We show that such maps can be employed for weakly supervised object segmentation using classification ConvNets. Finally, we establish the connection between the gradient-based ConvNet visualisation methods and deconvolutional networks [13].
@cite_40: In this work, we revisit the global average pooling layer proposed in [13], and shed light on how it explicitly enables the convolutional neural network (CNN) to have remarkable localization ability despite being trained on imagelevel labels. While this technique was previously proposed as a means for regularizing training, we find that it actually builds a generic localizable deep representation that exposes the implicit attention of CNNs on an image. Despite the apparent simplicity of global average pooling, we are able to achieve 37.1 top-5 error for object localization on ILSVRC 2014 without training on any bounding box annotation. We demonstrate in a variety of experiments that our network is able to localize the discriminative image regions despite just being trained for solving classification task1.
@cite_27: Image captioning has been recently gaining a lot of attention thanks to the impressive achievements shown by deep captioning architectures, which combine Convolutional Neural Networks to extract image representations, and Recurrent Neural Networks to generate the corresponding captions. At the same time, a significant research effort has been dedicated to the development of saliency prediction models, which can predict human eye fixations. Even though saliency information could be useful to condition an image captioning architecture, by providing an indication of what is salient and what is not, research is still struggling to incorporate these two techniques. In this work, we propose an image captioning approach in which a generative recurrent neural network can focus on different parts of the input image during the generation of the caption, by exploiting the conditioning given by a saliency prediction model on which parts of the image are salient and which are contextual. We show, through extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on large scale datasets, that our model achieves superior performances with respect to captioning baselines with and without saliency, and to different state of the art approaches combining saliency and captioning.
@cite_16: Attention plays a critical role in human visual experience. Furthermore, it has recently been demonstrated that attention can also play an important role in the context of applying artificial neural networks to a variety of tasks from fields such as computer vision and NLP. In this work we show that, by properly defining attention for convolutional neural networks, we can actually use this type of information in order to significantly improve the performance of a student CNN network by forcing it to mimic the attention maps of a powerful teacher network. To that end, we propose several novel methods of transferring attention, showing consistent improvement across a variety of datasets and convolutional neural network architectures. Code and models for our experiments are available at this https URL
@cite_17: This manuscript introduces the problem of prominent object detection and recognition inspired by the fact that human seems to priorities perception of scene elements. The problem deals with finding the most important region of interest, segmenting the relevant item object in that area, and assigning it an object class label. In other words, we are solving the three problems of saliency modeling, saliency detection, and object recognition under one umbrella. The motivation behind such a problem formulation is (1) the benefits to the knowledge representation-based vision pipelines, and (2) the potential improvements in emulating bio-inspired vision systems by solving these three problems together. We are foreseeing extending this problem formulation to fully semantically segmented scenes with instance object priority for high-level inferences in various applications including assistive vision. Along with a new problem definition, we also propose a method to achieve such a task. The proposed model predicts the most important area in the image, segments the associated objects, and labels them. The proposed problem and method are evaluated against human fixations, annotated segmentation masks, and object class categories. We define a chance level for each of the evaluation criterion to compare the proposed algorithm with. Despite the good performance of the proposed baseline, the overall evaluations indicate that the problem of prominent object detection and recognition is a challenging task that is still worth investigating further.
Saliency is typically studied in the context of saliency modeling, in which a model outputs a saliency map for an image that matches human fixation data, or salient object segmentation @cite_41 . Separately, several works have considered extracting a saliency map for understanding classification network decisions @cite_43 @cite_40 . @cite_16 formulate a loss function that causes a student network to have similar "saliency" to a teacher network. They model saliency as a reduction operation @math applied to a volume of convolutional activations, which we adopt due to its simplicity. Here, we investigate using a saliency map for a downstream task. Recent work has begun to explore saliency maps as inputs for prominent object detection @cite_17 and image captioning @cite_27 , pointing to further uses of saliency-based vision models.