Regional dropout strategies have been proposed to enhance the performance of convolutional neural network classifiers. They have proved to be effective for guiding the model to attend on less discriminative parts of objects (e.g. leg as opposed to head of a person), thereby letting the network generalize better and have better object localization capabilities. On the other hand, current methods for regional dropout removes informative pixels on training images by overlaying a patch of either black pixels or random noise. Such removal is not desirable because it leads to information loss and inefficiency during training. We therefore propose the CutMix augmentation strategy: patches are cut and pasted among training images where the ground truth labels are also mixed proportionally to the area of the patches. By making efficient use of training pixels and retaining the regularization effect of regional dropout, CutMix consistently outperforms the stateof-the-art augmentation strategies on CIFAR and ImageNet classification tasks, as well as on the ImageNet weaklysupervised localization task. Moreover, unlike previous augmentation methods, our CutMix-trained ImageNet classifier, when used as a pretrained model, results in consistent performance gains in Pascal detection and MS-COCO image captioning benchmarks. We also show that CutMix improves the model robustness against input corruptions and its out-of-distribution detection performances.

The Visual Object Tracking challenge VOT2018 is the sixth annual tracker benchmarking activity organized by the VOT initiative. Results of over eighty trackers are presented; many are state-of-the-art trackers published at major computer vision conferences or in journals in the recent years. The evaluation included the standard VOT and other popular methodologies for short-term tracking analysis and a "real-time" experiment simulating a situation where a tracker processes images as if provided by a continuously running sensor. A long-term tracking subchallenge has been introduced to the set of standard VOT sub-challenges. The new subchallenge focuses on long-term tracking properties, namely coping with target disappearance and reappearance. A new dataset has been compiled and a performance evaluation methodology that focuses on long-term tracking capabilities has been adopted. The VOT toolkit has been updated to support both standard short-term and the new longterm tracking subchallenges. Performance of the tested trackers typically by far exceeds standard baselines. The source code for most of the trackers is publicly available from the VOT page. The dataset, the evaluation kit and the results are publicly available at the challenge website 60 .

Scene text detection methods based on neural networks have emerged recently and have shown promising results. Previous methods trained with rigid word-level bounding boxes exhibit limitations in representing the text region in an arbitrary shape. In this paper, we propose a new scene text detection method to effectively detect text area by exploring each character and affinity between characters. To overcome the lack of individual character level annotations, our proposed framework exploits both the given characterlevel annotations for synthetic images and the estimated character-level ground-truths for real images acquired by the learned interim model. In order to estimate affinity between characters, the network is trained with the newly proposed representation for affinity. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks, including the TotalText and CTW-1500 datasets which contain highly curved texts in natural images, demonstrate that our character-level text detection significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors. According to the results, our proposed method guarantees high flexibility in detecting complicated scene text images, such as arbitrarily-oriented, curved, or deformed texts.

Many new proposals for scene text recognition (STR) models have been introduced in recent years. While each claim to have pushed the boundary of the technology, a holistic and fair comparison has been largely missing in the field due to the inconsistent choices of training and evaluation datasets. This paper addresses this difficulty with three major contributions. First, we examine the inconsistencies of training and evaluation datasets, and the performance gap results from inconsistencies. Second, we introduce a unified four-stage STR framework that most existing STR models fit into. Using this framework allows for the extensive evaluation of previously proposed STR modules and the discovery of previously unexplored module combinations. Third, we analyze the module-wise contributions to performance in terms of accuracy, speed, and memory demand, under one consistent set of training and evaluation datasets. Such analyses clean up the hindrance on the current comparisons to understand the performance gain of the existing modules. Our code is publicly available 1 .

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We investigate the design aspects of feature distillation methods achieving network compression and propose a novel feature distillation method in which the distillation loss is designed to make a synergy among various aspects: teacher transform, student transform, distillation feature position and distance function. Our proposed distillation loss includes a feature transform with a newly designed margin ReLU, a new distillation feature position, and a partial L 2 distance function to skip redundant information giving adverse effects to the compression of student. In Ima-geNet, our proposed method achieves 21.65% of top-1 error with ResNet50, which outperforms the performance of the teacher network, ResNet152. Our proposed method is evaluated on various tasks such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation and achieves a significant performance improvement in all tasks. The code is available at bhheo.github.io/overhaul * This work was done when authors were in research internship at Clova AI Research, NAVER corp. 78.31 Teacher (ResNet152) 1 arXiv:1904.01866v2 [cs.CV] 9 Aug 2019 T t T s T t T s d d Training image Y t Y s T t T s d Teacher network Student network Figure 2. The general training scheme of feature distillation. The form of teacher transform Tt, student transform Ts and distance d differ from method to method.

An activation boundary for a neuron refers to a separating hyperplane that determines whether the neuron is activated or deactivated. It has been long considered in neural networks that the activations of neurons, rather than their exact output values, play the most important role in forming classificationfriendly partitions of the hidden feature space. However, as far as we know, this aspect of neural networks has not been considered in the literature of knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose a knowledge transfer method via distillation of activation boundaries formed by hidden neurons. For the distillation, we propose an activation transfer loss that has the minimum value when the boundaries generated by the student coincide with those by the teacher. Since the activation transfer loss is not differentiable, we design a piecewise differentiable loss approximating the activation transfer loss. By the proposed method, the student learns a separating boundary between activation region and deactivation region formed by each neuron in the teacher. Through the experiments in various aspects of knowledge transfer, it is verified that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art. 1

We propose a new tracking framework with an attentional mechanism that chooses a subset of the associated correlation filters for increased robustness and computational efficiency. The subset of filters is adaptively selected by a deep attentional network according to the dynamic properties of the tracking target. Our contributions are manifold, and are summarised as follows: (i) Introducing the Attentional Correlation Filter Network which allows adaptive tracking of dynamic targets. (ii) Utilising an attentional network which shifts the attention to the best candidate modules, as well as predicting the estimated accuracy of currently inactive modules. (iii) Enlarging the variety of correlation filters which cover target drift, blurriness, occlusion, scale changes, and flexible aspect ratio. (iv) Validating the robustness and efficiency of the attentional mechanism for visual tracking through a number of experiments. Our method achieves similar performance to non real-time trackers, and state-of-the-art performance amongst real-time trackers.