Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

Abstract: Existing image/video datasets for cattle behavior recognition are mostly small, lack well-defined labels, or are collected in unrealistic controlled environments. This limits the utility of machine learning (ML) models learned from them. Therefore, we introduce a new dataset, called Cattle Visual Behaviors (CVB), that consists of 502 video clips, each fifteen seconds long, captured in natural lighting conditions, and annotated with eleven visually perceptible behaviors of grazing cattle. We use the Computer Vision Annotation Tool (CVAT) to collect our annotations. To make the procedure more efficient, we perform an initial detection and tracking of cattle in the videos using appropriate pre-trained models. The results are corrected by domain experts along with cattle behavior labeling in CVAT. The pre-hoc detection and tracking step significantly reduces the manual annotation time and effort. Moreover, we convert CVB to the atomic visual action (AVA) format and train and evaluate the popular SlowFast action recognition model on it. The associated preliminary results confirm that we can localize the cattle and recognize their frequently occurring behaviors with confidence. By creating and sharing CVB, our aim is to develop improved models capable of recognizing all important behaviors accurately and to assist other researchers and practitioners in developing and evaluating new ML models for cattle behavior classification using video data.

Abstract: Image-Text Retrieval (ITR) is essentially a ranking problem. Given a query caption, the goal is to rank candidate images by relevance, from large to small. The current ITR datasets are constructed in a pairwise manner. Image-text pairs are annotated as positive or negative. Correspondingly, ITR models mainly use pairwise losses, such as triplet loss, to learn to rank. Pairwise-based ITR increases positive pair similarity while decreasing negative pair similarity indiscriminately. However, the relevance between dissimilar negative pairs is different. Pairwise annotations cannot reflect this difference in relevance. In the current datasets, pairwise annotations miss many correlations. There are many potential positive pairs among the pairs labeled as negative. Pairwise-based ITR can only rank positive samples before negative samples, but cannot rank negative samples by relevance. In this paper, we integrate listwise ranking into conventional pairwise-based ITR. Listwise ranking optimizes the entire ranking list based on relevance scores. Specifically, we first propose a Relevance Score Calculation (RSC) module to calculate the relevance score of the entire ranked list. Then we choose the ranking metric, Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), as the optimization objective. We transform the non-differentiable NDCG into a differentiable listwise loss, named Smooth-NDCG (S-NDCG). Our listwise ranking approach can be plug-and-play integrated into current pairwise-based ITR models. Experiments on ITR benchmarks show that integrating listwise ranking can improve the performance of current ITR models and provide more user-friendly retrieval results. The code is available at https://github.com/AAA-Zheng/Listwise_ITR.

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is a critical task in computer vision because of its role in ensuring traffic safety. However, existing methods that rely solely on RGB images suffer from performance degradation under low-light conditions due to the lack of useful information. To address this issue, recent multispectral detection approaches combine thermal images to provide complementary information. Nevertheless, these approaches have limitations such as the noisy fused feature maps and the loss of informative features. In this paper, we propose a novel target-aware fusion strategy for multispectral pedestrian detection, named TFDet. Unlike existing methods, TFDet enhances features by supervising the fusion process with a correlation-maximum loss function. Our fusion strategy highlights the pedestrian-related features while suppressing the unrelated ones. TFDet achieves state-of-the-art performances on both KAIST and LLVIP benchmarks, with a speed comparable to the previous state-of-the-art counterpart. Importantly, TFDet performs remarkably well under low-light conditions, which is a significant advancement for road safety.

Abstract: Learning to infer labels in an open world, i.e., in an environment where the target ``labels'' are unknown, is an important characteristic for achieving autonomy. Foundation models pre-trained on enormous amounts of data have shown remarkable generalization skills through prompting, particularly in zero-shot inference. However, their performance is restricted to the correctness of the target label's search space. In an open world where these labels are unknown, the search space can be exceptionally large. It can require reasoning over several combinations of elementary concepts to arrive at an inference, which severely restricts the performance of such models. To tackle this challenging problem, we propose a neuro-symbolic framework called ALGO - novel Action Learning with Grounded Object recognition that can use symbolic knowledge stored in large-scale knowledge bases to infer activities (verb-noun combinations) in egocentric videos with limited supervision using two steps. First, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic prompting approach that uses object-centric vision-language foundation models as a noisy oracle to ground objects in the video through evidence-based reasoning. Second, driven by prior commonsense knowledge, we discover plausible activities through an energy-based symbolic pattern theory framework and learn to ground knowledge-based action (verb) concepts in the video. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets (GTEA Gaze and GTEA Gaze Plus) demonstrate its performance on open-world activity inference and its generalization to unseen actions in an unknown search space. We show that ALGO can be extended to zero-shot settings and demonstrate its competitive performance to multimodal foundation models.