Zachary Wharton

Asish Bera, Zachary Wharton, Yonghuai Liu et al.

Over the past few years, a significant progress has been made in deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based image recognition. This is mainly due to the strong ability of such networks in mining discriminative object pose and parts information from texture and shape. This is often inappropriate for fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) since it exhibits high intra-class and low inter-class variances due to occlusions, deformation, illuminations, etc. Thus, an expressive feature representation describing global structural information is a key to characterize an object/ scene. To this end, we propose a method that effectively captures subtle changes by aggregating context-aware features from most relevant image-regions and their importance in discriminating fine-grained categories avoiding the bounding-box and/or distinguishable part annotations. Our approach is inspired by the recent advancement in self-attention and graph neural networks (GNNs) approaches to include a simple yet effective relation-aware feature transformation and its refinement using a context-aware attention mechanism to boost the discriminability of the transformed feature in an end-to-end learning process. Our model is evaluated on eight benchmark datasets consisting of fine-grained objects and human-object interactions. It outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin in recognition accuracy.

Zachary Wharton, Ardhendu Behera, Asish Bera

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have revolutionized the understanding of visual content. This is mainly due to their ability to break down an image into smaller pieces, extract multi-scale localized features and compose them to construct highly expressive representations for decision making. However, the convolution operation is unable to capture long-range dependencies such as arbitrary relations between pixels since it operates on a fixed-size window. Therefore, it may not be suitable for discriminating subtle changes (e.g. fine-grained visual recognition). To this end, our proposed method captures the high-level long-range dependencies by exploring Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), which aggregate information by establishing relationships among multi-scale hierarchical regions. These regions consist of smaller (closer look) to larger (far look), and the dependency between regions is modeled by an innovative attention-driven message propagation, guided by the graph structure to emphasize the neighborhoods of a given region. Our approach is simple yet extremely effective in solving both the fine-grained and generic visual classification problems. It outperforms the state-of-the-arts with a significant margin on three and is very competitive on other two datasets.

Zachary Wharton, Ardhendu Behera, Yonghuai Liu et al.

There is significant progress in recognizing traditional human activities from videos focusing on highly distinctive actions involving discriminative body movements, body-object and/or human-human interactions. Driver's activities are different since they are executed by the same subject with similar body parts movements, resulting in subtle changes. To address this, we propose a novel framework by exploiting the spatiotemporal attention to model the subtle changes. Our model is named Coarse Temporal Attention Network (CTA-Net), in which coarse temporal branches are introduced in a trainable glimpse network. The goal is to allow the glimpse to capture high-level temporal relationships, such as 'during', 'before' and 'after' by focusing on a specific part of a video. These branches also respect the topology of the temporal dynamics in the video, ensuring that different branches learn meaningful spatial and temporal changes. The model then uses an innovative attention mechanism to generate high-level action specific contextual information for activity recognition by exploring the hidden states of an LSTM. The attention mechanism helps in learning to decide the importance of each hidden state for the recognition task by weighing them when constructing the representation of the video. Our approach is evaluated on four publicly accessible datasets and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art by a considerable margin with only RGB video as input.

Ardhendu Behera, Zachary Wharton, Pradeep Hewage et al.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown a strong ability in mining discriminative object pose and parts information for image recognition. For fine-grained recognition, context-aware rich feature representation of object/scene plays a key role since it exhibits a significant variance in the same subcategory and subtle variance among different subcategories. Finding the subtle variance that fully characterizes the object/scene is not straightforward. To address this, we propose a novel context-aware attentional pooling (CAP) that effectively captures subtle changes via sub-pixel gradients, and learns to attend informative integral regions and their importance in discriminating different subcategories without requiring the bounding-box and/or distinguishable part annotations. We also introduce a novel feature encoding by considering the intrinsic consistency between the informativeness of the integral regions and their spatial structures to capture the semantic correlation among them. Our approach is simple yet extremely effective and can be easily applied on top of a standard classification backbone network. We evaluate our approach using six state-of-the-art (SotA) backbone networks and eight benchmark datasets. Our method significantly outperforms the SotA approaches on six datasets and is very competitive with the remaining two.