Yash Patel

Yash Patel, Giorgos Tolias, Jiri Matas

This paper addresses supervised deep metric learning for open-set image retrieval, focusing on three key aspects: the loss function, mixup regularization, and model initialization. In deep metric learning, optimizing the retrieval evaluation metric, recall@k, via gradient descent is desirable but challenging due to its non-differentiable nature. To overcome this, we propose a differentiable surrogate loss that is computed on large batches, nearly equivalent to the entire training set. This computationally intensive process is made feasible through an implementation that bypasses the GPU memory limitations. Additionally, we introduce an efficient mixup regularization technique that operates on pairwise scalar similarities, effectively increasing the batch size even further. The training process is further enhanced by initializing the vision encoder using foundational models, which are pre-trained on large-scale datasets. Through a systematic study of these components, we demonstrate that their synergy enables large models to nearly solve popular benchmarks.

Yash Patel, Jiri Matas

This paper proposes a procedure to train a scene text recognition model using a robust learned surrogate of edit distance. The proposed method borrows from self-paced learning and filters out the training examples that are hard for the surrogate. The filtering is performed by judging the quality of the approximation, using a ramp function, enabling end-to-end training. Following the literature, the experiments are conducted in a post-tuning setup, where a trained scene text recognition model is tuned using the learned surrogate of edit distance. The efficacy is demonstrated by improvements on various challenging scene text datasets such as IIIT-5K, SVT, ICDAR, SVTP, and CUTE. The proposed method provides an average improvement of $11.2 \%$ on total edit distance and an error reduction of $9.5\%$ on accuracy.

Slobodan Djukanović, Yash Patel, Jiři Matas et al.

This paper addresses acoustic vehicle counting using one-channel audio. We predict the pass-by instants of vehicles from local minima of clipped vehicle-to-microphone distance. This distance is predicted from audio using a two-stage (coarse-fine) regression, with both stages realised via neural networks (NNs). Experiments show that the NN-based distance regression outperforms by far the previously proposed support vector regression. The $ 95\% $ confidence interval for the mean of vehicle counting error is within $[0.28\%, -0.55\%]$. Besides the minima-based counting, we propose a deep learning counting that operates on the predicted distance without detecting local minima. Although outperformed in accuracy by the former approach, deep counting has a significant advantage in that it does not depend on minima detection parameters. Results also show that removing low frequencies in features improves the counting performance.

Yash Patel, Tomas Hodan, Jiri Matas

This paper proposes a technique for training a neural network by minimizing a surrogate loss that approximates the target evaluation metric, which may be non-differentiable. The surrogate is learned via a deep embedding where the Euclidean distance between the prediction and the ground truth corresponds to the value of the evaluation metric. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is demonstrated in a post-tuning setup, where a trained model is tuned using the learned surrogate. Without a significant computational overhead and any bells and whistles, improvements are demonstrated on challenging and practical tasks of scene-text recognition and detection. In the recognition task, the model is tuned using a surrogate approximating the edit distance metric and achieves up to $39\%$ relative improvement in the total edit distance. In the detection task, the surrogate approximates the intersection over union metric for rotated bounding boxes and yields up to $4.25\%$ relative improvement in the $F_{1}$ score.

Yash Patel, Srikar Appalaraju, R. Manmatha

This paper proposes a new end-to-end trainable model for lossy image compression, which includes several novel components. The method incorporates 1) an adequate perceptual similarity metric; 2) saliency in the images; 3) a hierarchical auto-regressive model. This paper demonstrates that the popularly used evaluations metrics such as MS-SSIM and PSNR are inadequate for judging the performance of image compression techniques as they do not align with the human perception of similarity. Alternatively, a new metric is proposed, which is learned on perceptual similarity data specific to image compression. The proposed compression model incorporates the salient regions and optimizes on the proposed perceptual similarity metric. The model not only generates images which are visually better but also gives superior performance for subsequent computer vision tasks such as object detection and segmentation when compared to existing engineered or learned compression techniques.

Yash Patel, Srikar Appalaraju, R. Manmatha

Recently, there has been much interest in deep learning techniques to do image compression and there have been claims that several of these produce better results than engineered compression schemes (such as JPEG, JPEG2000 or BPG). A standard way of comparing image compression schemes today is to use perceptual similarity metrics such as PSNR or MS-SSIM (multi-scale structural similarity). This has led to some deep learning techniques which directly optimize for MS-SSIM by choosing it as a loss function. While this leads to a higher MS-SSIM for such techniques, we demonstrate using user studies that the resulting improvement may be misleading. Deep learning techniques for image compression with a higher MS-SSIM may actually be perceptually worse than engineered compression schemes with a lower MS-SSIM.

Yash Patel, Srikar Appalaraju, R. Manmatha

Several deep learned lossy compression techniques have been proposed in the recent literature. Most of these are optimized by using either MS-SSIM (multi-scale structural similarity) or MSE (mean squared error) as a loss function. Unfortunately, neither of these correlate well with human perception and this is clearly visible from the resulting compressed images. In several cases, the MS-SSIM for deep learned techniques is higher than say a conventional, non-deep learned codec such as JPEG-2000 or BPG. However, the images produced by these deep learned techniques are in many cases clearly worse to human eyes than those produced by JPEG-2000 or BPG. We propose the use of an alternative, deep perceptual metric, which has been shown to align better with human perceptual similarity. We then propose Deep Perceptual Compression (DPC) which makes use of an encoder-decoder based image compression model to jointly optimize on the deep perceptual metric and MS-SSIM. Via extensive human evaluations, we show that the proposed method generates visually better results than previous learning based compression methods and JPEG-2000, and is comparable to BPG. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for tasks like object-detection, images compressed with DPC give better accuracy.

Yash Patel, Lluis Gomez, Marçal Rusiñol et al.

Cross-modal retrieval methods have been significantly improved in last years with the use of deep neural networks and large-scale annotated datasets such as ImageNet and Places. However, collecting and annotating such datasets requires a tremendous amount of human effort and, besides, their annotations are usually limited to discrete sets of popular visual classes that may not be representative of the richer semantics found on large-scale cross-modal retrieval datasets. In this paper, we present a self-supervised cross-modal retrieval framework that leverages as training data the correlations between images and text on the entire set of Wikipedia articles. Our method consists in training a CNN to predict: (1) the semantic context of the article in which an image is more probable to appear as an illustration (global context), and (2) the semantic context of its caption (local context). Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is not only capable of learning discriminative visual representations for solving vision tasks like image classification and object detection, but that the learned representations are better for cross-modal retrieval when compared to supervised pre-training of the network on the ImageNet dataset.

Yash Patel, Lluis Gomez, Raul Gomez et al.

The immense success of deep learning based methods in computer vision heavily relies on large scale training datasets. These richly annotated datasets help the network learn discriminative visual features. Collecting and annotating such datasets requires a tremendous amount of human effort and annotations are limited to popular set of classes. As an alternative, learning visual features by designing auxiliary tasks which make use of freely available self-supervision has become increasingly popular in the computer vision community. In this paper, we put forward an idea to take advantage of multi-modal context to provide self-supervision for the training of computer vision algorithms. We show that adequate visual features can be learned efficiently by training a CNN to predict the semantic textual context in which a particular image is more probable to appear as an illustration. More specifically we use popular text embedding techniques to provide the self-supervision for the training of deep CNN. Our experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in image classification, object detection, and multi-modal retrieval compared to recent self-supervised or naturally-supervised approaches.

Yash Patel, Kashyap Chitta, Bhavan Jasani

We address the problem of semi-supervised domain adaptation of classification algorithms through deep Q-learning. The core idea is to consider the predictions of a source domain network on target domain data as noisy labels, and learn a policy to sample from this data so as to maximize classification accuracy on a small annotated reward partition of the target domain. Our experiments show that learned sampling policies construct labeled sets that improve accuracies of visual classifiers over baselines.

Michal Bušta, Yash Patel, Jiri Matas

An end-to-end trainable (fully differentiable) method for multi-language scene text localization and recognition is proposed. The approach is based on a single fully convolutional network (FCN) with shared layers for both tasks. E2E-MLT is the first published multi-language OCR for scene text. While trained in multi-language setup, E2E-MLT demonstrates competitive performance when compared to other methods trained for English scene text alone. The experiments show that obtaining accurate multi-language multi-script annotations is a challenging problem.

Lluis Gomez, Yash Patel, Marçal Rusiñol et al.

End-to-end training from scratch of current deep architectures for new computer vision problems would require Imagenet-scale datasets, and this is not always possible. In this paper we present a method that is able to take advantage of freely available multi-modal content to train computer vision algorithms without human supervision. We put forward the idea of performing self-supervised learning of visual features by mining a large scale corpus of multi-modal (text and image) documents. We show that discriminative visual features can be learnt efficiently by training a CNN to predict the semantic context in which a particular image is more probable to appear as an illustration. For this we leverage the hidden semantic structures discovered in the text corpus with a well-known topic modeling technique. Our experiments demonstrate state of the art performance in image classification, object detection, and multi-modal retrieval compared to recent self-supervised or natural-supervised approaches.