Self-supervised pre-training bears potential to generate expressive representations without human annotation. Most pre-training in Earth observation (EO) are based on ImageNet or medium-size, labeled remote sensing (RS) datasets. We share an unlabeled RS dataset SSL4EO-S12 (Self-Supervised Learning for Earth Observation - Sentinel-1/2) to assemble a large-scale, global, multimodal, and multi-seasonal corpus of satellite imagery from the ESA Sentinel-1 \& -2 satellite missions. For EO applications we demonstrate SSL4EO-S12 to succeed in self-supervised pre-training for a set of methods: MoCo-v2, DINO, MAE, and data2vec. Resulting models yield downstream performance close to, or surpassing accuracy measures of supervised learning. In addition, pre-training on SSL4EO-S12 excels compared to existing datasets. We make openly available the dataset, related source code, and pre-trained models at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/SSL4EO-S12.
Multi-label image classification allows predicting a set of labels from a given image. Unlike multiclass classification, where only one label per image is assigned, such a setup is applicable for a broader range of applications. In this work we revisit two popular approaches to multilabel classification: transformer-based heads and labels relations information graph processing branches. Although transformer-based heads are considered to achieve better results than graph-based branches, we argue that with the proper training strategy, graph-based methods can demonstrate just a small accuracy drop, while spending less computational resources on inference. In our training strategy, instead of Asymmetric Loss (ASL), which is the de-facto standard for multilabel classification, we introduce its metric learning modification. In each binary classification sub-problem it operates with $L_2$ normalized feature vectors coming from a backbone and enforces angles between the normalized representations of positive and negative samples to be as large as possible. This results in providing a better discrimination ability, than binary cross entropy loss does on unnormalized features. With the proposed loss and training strategy, we obtain SOTA results among single modality methods on widespread multilabel classification benchmarks such as MS-COCO, PASCAL-VOC, NUS-Wide and Visual Genome 500. Source code of our method is available as a part of the OpenVINO Training Extensions https://github.com/openvinotoolkit/deep-object-reid/tree/multilabel
Contrastive learning (CL) has shown impressive advances in image representation learning in whichever supervised multi-class classification or unsupervised learning. However, these CL methods fail to be directly adapted to multi-label image classification due to the difficulty in defining the positive and negative instances to contrast a given anchor image in multi-label scenario, let the label missing one alone, implying that borrowing a commonly-used way from contrastive multi-class learning to define them will incur a lot of false negative instances unfavorable for learning. In this paper, with the introduction of a label correction mechanism to identify missing labels, we first elegantly generate positives and negatives for individual semantic labels of an anchor image, then define a unique contrastive loss for multi-label image classification with missing labels (CLML), the loss is able to accurately bring images close to their true positive images and false negative images, far away from their true negative images. Different from existing multi-label CL losses, CLML also preserves low-rank global and local label dependencies in the latent representation space where such dependencies have been shown to be helpful in dealing with missing labels. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first general multi-label CL loss in the missing-label scenario and thus can seamlessly be paired with those losses of any existing multi-label learning methods just via a single hyperparameter. The proposed strategy has been shown to improve the classification performance of the Resnet101 model by margins of 1.2%, 1.6%, and 1.3% respectively on three standard datasets, MSCOCO, VOC, and NUS-WIDE. Code is available at https://github.com/chuangua/ContrastiveLossMLML.
In deep learning research, self-supervised learning (SSL) has received great attention triggering interest within both the computer vision and remote sensing communities. While there has been a big success in computer vision, most of the potential of SSL in the domain of earth observation remains locked. In this paper, we provide an introduction to, and a review of the concepts and latest developments in SSL for computer vision in the context of remote sensing. Further, we provide a preliminary benchmark of modern SSL algorithms on popular remote sensing datasets, verifying the potential of SSL in remote sensing and providing an extended study on data augmentations. Finally, we identify a list of promising directions of future research in SSL for earth observation (SSL4EO) to pave the way for fruitful interaction of both domains.
Multi-Label Image Classification (MLIC) approaches usually exploit label correlations to achieve good performance. However, emphasizing correlation like co-occurrence may overlook discriminative features of the target itself and lead to model overfitting, thus undermining the performance. In this study, we propose a generic framework named Parallel Self-Distillation (PSD) for boosting MLIC models. PSD decomposes the original MLIC task into several simpler MLIC sub-tasks via two elaborated complementary task decomposition strategies named Co-occurrence Graph Partition (CGP) and Dis-occurrence Graph Partition (DGP). Then, the MLIC models of fewer categories are trained with these sub-tasks in parallel for respectively learning the joint patterns and the category-specific patterns of labels. Finally, knowledge distillation is leveraged to learn a compact global ensemble of full categories with these learned patterns for reconciling the label correlation exploitation and model overfitting. Extensive results on MS-COCO and NUS-WIDE datasets demonstrate that our framework can be easily plugged into many MLIC approaches and improve performances of recent state-of-the-art approaches. The explainable visual study also further validates that our method is able to learn both the category-specific and co-occurring features. The source code is released at https://github.com/Robbie-Xu/CPSD.
Multi-label classification aims to recognize multiple objects or attributes from images. However, it is challenging to learn from proper label graphs to effectively characterize such inter-label correlations or dependencies. Current methods often use the co-occurrence probability of labels based on the training set as the adjacency matrix to model this correlation, which is greatly limited by the dataset and affects the model's generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a Graph Attention Transformer Network (GATN), a general framework for multi-label image classification that can effectively mine complex inter-label relationships. First, we use the cosine similarity based on the label word embedding as the initial correlation matrix, which can represent rich semantic information. Subsequently, we design the graph attention transformer layer to transfer this adjacency matrix to adapt to the current domain. Our extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on three datasets.
A well-known challenge associated with the multi-label classification problem is modelling dependencies between labels. Most attempts at modelling label dependencies focus on co-occurrences, ignoring the valuable information that can be extracted by detecting label subsets that rarely occur together. For example, consider customer product reviews; a product probably would not simultaneously be tagged by both "recommended" (i.e., reviewer is happy and recommends the product) and "urgent" (i.e., the review suggests immediate action to remedy an unsatisfactory experience). Aside from the consideration of positive and negative dependencies, the direction of a relationship should also be considered. For a multi-label image classification problem, the "ship" and "sea" labels have an obvious dependency, but the presence of the former implies the latter much more strongly than the other way around. These examples motivate the modelling of multiple types of bi-directional relationships between labels. In this paper, we propose a novel method, entitled Multi-relation Message Passing (MrMP), for the multi-label classification problem. Experiments on benchmark multi-label text classification datasets show that the MrMP module yields similar or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. The approach imposes only minor additional computational and memory overheads.
Multi-label learning in the presence of missing labels (MLML) is a challenging problem. Existing methods mainly focus on the design of network structures or training schemes, which increase the complexity of implementation. This work seeks to fulfill the potential of loss function in MLML without increasing the procedure and complexity. Toward this end, we propose two simple yet effective methods via robust loss design based on an observation that a model can identify missing labels during training with a high precision. The first is a novel robust loss for negatives, namely the Hill loss, which re-weights negatives in the shape of a hill to alleviate the effect of false negatives. The second is a self-paced loss correction (SPLC) method, which uses a loss derived from the maximum likelihood criterion under an approximate distribution of missing labels. Comprehensive experiments on a vast range of multi-label image classification datasets demonstrate that our methods can remarkably boost the performance of MLML and achieve new state-of-the-art loss functions in MLML.
Multi-label image classification is about predicting a set of class labels that can be considered as orderless sequential data. Transformers process the sequential data as a whole, therefore they are inherently good at set prediction. The first vision-based transformer model, which was proposed for the object detection task introduced the concept of object queries. Object queries are learnable positional encodings that are used by attention modules in decoder layers to decode the object classes or bounding boxes using the region of interests in an image. However, inputting the same set of object queries to different decoder layers hinders the training: it results in lower performance and delays convergence. In this paper, we propose the usage of primal object queries that are only provided at the start of the transformer decoder stack. In addition, we improve the mixup technique proposed for multi-label classification. The proposed transformer model with primal object queries improves the state-of-the-art class wise F1 metric by 2.1% and 1.8%; and speeds up the convergence by 79.0% and 38.6% on MS-COCO and NUS-WIDE datasets respectively.
The availability of the sheer volume of Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery has created new opportunities for exploiting deep learning (DL) methods for land use land cover (LULC) image classification. However, an extensive set of benchmark experiments is currently lacking, i.e. DL models tested on the same dataset, with a common and consistent set of metrics, and in the same hardware. In this work, we use the BigEarthNet Sentinel-2 dataset to benchmark for the first time different state-of-the-art DL models for the multi-label, multi-class LULC image classification problem, contributing with an exhaustive zoo of 60 trained models. Our benchmark includes standard CNNs, as well as non-convolutional methods. We put to the test EfficientNets and Wide Residual Networks (WRN) architectures, and leverage classification accuracy, training time and inference rate. Furthermore, we propose to use the EfficientNet framework for the compound scaling of a lightweight WRN. Enhanced with an Efficient Channel Attention mechanism, our scaled lightweight model emerged as the new state-of-the-art. It achieves 4.5% higher averaged F-Score classification accuracy for all 19 LULC classes compared to a standard ResNet50 baseline model, with an order of magnitude less trainable parameters. We provide access to all trained models, along with our code for distributed training on multiple GPU nodes. This model zoo of pre-trained encoders can be used for transfer learning and rapid prototyping in different remote sensing tasks that use Sentinel-2 data, instead of exploiting backbone models trained with data from a different domain, e.g., from ImageNet. We validate their suitability for transfer learning in different datasets of diverse volumes. Our top-performing WRN achieves state-of-the-art performance (71.1% F-Score) on the SEN12MS dataset while being exposed to only a small fraction of the training dataset.
Contextual information is a valuable cue for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to learn better representations and improve accuracy. However, co-occurrence bias in the training dataset may hamper a DNN model's generalizability to unseen scenarios in the real world. For example, in COCO, many object categories have a much higher co-occurrence with men compared to women, which can bias a DNN's prediction in favor of men. Recent works have focused on task-specific training strategies to handle bias in such scenarios, but fixing the available data is often ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel and more generic solution to address the contextual bias in the datasets by selecting a subset of the samples, which is fair in terms of the co-occurrence with various classes for a protected attribute. We introduce a data repair algorithm using the coefficient of variation, which can curate fair and contextually balanced data for a protected class(es). This helps in training a fair model irrespective of the task, architecture or training methodology. Our proposed solution is simple, effective, and can even be used in an active learning setting where the data labels are not present or being generated incrementally. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for the task of object detection and multi-label image classification across different datasets. Through a series of experiments, we validate that curating contextually fair data helps make model predictions fair by balancing the true positive rate for the protected class across groups without compromising on the model's overall performance.
Most publicly available datasets for image classification are with single labels, while images are inherently multi-labeled in our daily life. Such an annotation gap makes many pre-trained single-label classification models fail in practical scenarios. This annotation issue is more concerned for aerial images: Aerial data collected from sensors naturally cover a relatively large land area with multiple labels, while annotated aerial datasets, which are publicly available (e.g., UCM, AID), are single-labeled. As manually annotating multi-label aerial images would be time/labor-consuming, we propose a novel self-correction integrated domain adaptation (SCIDA) method for automatic multi-label learning. SCIDA is weakly supervised, i.e., automatically learning the multi-label image classification model from using massive, publicly available single-label images. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel Label-Wise self-Correction (LWC) module to better explore underlying label correlations. This module also makes the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) from single- to multi-label data possible. For model training, the proposed model only uses single-label information yet requires no prior knowledge of multi-labeled data; and it predicts labels for multi-label aerial images. In our experiments, trained with single-labeled MAI-AID-s and MAI-UCM-s datasets, the proposed model is tested directly on our collected Multi-scene Aerial Image (MAI) dataset.
Multi-label image recognition is a challenging computer vision task of practical use. Progresses in this area, however, are often characterized by complicated methods, heavy computations, and lack of intuitive explanations. To effectively capture different spatial regions occupied by objects from different categories, we propose an embarrassingly simple module, named class-specific residual attention (CSRA). CSRA generates class-specific features for every category by proposing a simple spatial attention score, and then combines it with the class-agnostic average pooling feature. CSRA achieves state-of-the-art results on multilabel recognition, and at the same time is much simpler than them. Furthermore, with only 4 lines of code, CSRA also leads to consistent improvement across many diverse pretrained models and datasets without any extra training. CSRA is both easy to implement and light in computations, which also enjoys intuitive explanations and visualizations.
Semantic segmentation is a challenging task in the absence of densely labelled data. Only relying on class activation maps (CAM) with image-level labels provides deficient segmentation supervision. Prior works thus consider pre-trained models to produce coarse saliency maps to guide the generation of pseudo segmentation labels. However, the commonly used off-line heuristic generation process cannot fully exploit the benefits of these coarse saliency maps. Motivated by the significant inter-task correlation, we propose a novel weakly supervised multi-task framework termed as AuxSegNet, to leverage saliency detection and multi-label image classification as auxiliary tasks to improve the primary task of semantic segmentation using only image-level ground-truth labels. Inspired by their similar structured semantics, we also propose to learn a cross-task global pixel-level affinity map from the saliency and segmentation representations. The learned cross-task affinity can be used to refine saliency predictions and propagate CAM maps to provide improved pseudo labels for both tasks. The mutual boost between pseudo label updating and cross-task affinity learning enables iterative improvements on segmentation performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed auxiliary learning network structure and the cross-task affinity learning method. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art weakly supervised segmentation performance on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO benchmarks.
Multi-label image classification (MLIC) is a fundamental and practical task, which aims to assign multiple possible labels to an image. In recent years, many deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based approaches have been proposed which model label correlations to discover semantics of labels and learn semantic representations of images. This paper advances this research direction by improving both the modeling of label correlations and the learning of semantic representations. On the one hand, besides the local semantics of each label, we propose to further explore global semantics shared by multiple labels. On the other hand, existing approaches mainly learn the semantic representations at the last convolutional layer of a CNN. But it has been noted that the image representations of different layers of CNN capture different levels or scales of features and have different discriminative abilities. We thus propose to learn semantic representations at multiple convolutional layers. To this end, this paper designs a Multi-layered Semantic Representation Network (MSRN) which discovers both local and global semantics of labels through modeling label correlations and utilizes the label semantics to guide the semantic representations learning at multiple layers through an attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets including VOC 2007, COCO, NUS-WIDE, and Apparel show a competitive performance of the proposed MSRN against state-of-the-art models.
Predicting all applicable labels for a given image is known as multi-label classification. Compared to the standard multi-class case (where each image has only one label), it is considerably more challenging to annotate training data for multi-label classification. When the number of potential labels is large, human annotators find it difficult to mention all applicable labels for each training image. Furthermore, in some settings detection is intrinsically difficult e.g. finding small object instances in high resolution images. As a result, multi-label training data is often plagued by false negatives. We consider the hardest version of this problem, where annotators provide only one relevant label for each image. As a result, training sets will have only one positive label per image and no confirmed negatives. We explore this special case of learning from missing labels across four different multi-label image classification datasets for both linear classifiers and end-to-end fine-tuned deep networks. We extend existing multi-label losses to this setting and propose novel variants that constrain the number of expected positive labels during training. Surprisingly, we show that in some cases it is possible to approach the performance of fully labeled classifiers despite training with significantly fewer confirmed labels.
The task of multi-label image classification is to recognize all the object labels presented in an image. Though advancing for years, small objects, similar objects and objects with high conditional probability are still the main bottlenecks of previous convolutional neural network(CNN) based models, limited by convolutional kernels' representational capacity. Recent vision transformer networks utilize the self-attention mechanism to extract the feature of pixel granularity, which expresses richer local semantic information, while is insufficient for mining global spatial dependence. In this paper, we point out the three crucial problems that CNN-based methods encounter and explore the possibility of conducting specific transformer modules to settle them. We put forward a Multi-label Transformer architecture(MlTr) constructed with windows partitioning, in-window pixel attention, cross-window attention, particularly improving the performance of multi-label image classification tasks. The proposed MlTr shows state-of-the-art results on various prevalent multi-label datasets such as MS-COCO, Pascal-VOC, and NUS-WIDE with 88.5%, 95.8%, and 65.5% respectively. The code will be available soon at https://github.com/starmemda/MlTr/
Plot-based Graphic API recommendation (Plot2API) is an unstudied but meaningful issue, which has several important applications in the context of software engineering and data visualization, such as the plotting guidance of the beginner, graphic API correlation analysis, and code conversion for plotting. Plot2API is a very challenging task, since each plot is often associated with multiple APIs and the appearances of the graphics drawn by the same API can be extremely varied due to the different settings of the parameters. Additionally, the samples of different APIs also suffer from extremely imbalanced. Considering the lack of technologies in Plot2API, we present a novel deep multi-task learning approach named Semantic Parsing Guided Neural Network (SPGNN) which translates the Plot2API issue as a multi-label image classification and an image semantic parsing tasks for the solution. In SPGNN, the recently advanced Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) named EfficientNet is employed as the backbone network for API recommendation. Meanwhile, a semantic parsing module is complemented to exploit the semantic relevant visual information in feature learning and eliminate the appearance-relevant visual information which may confuse the visual-information-based API recommendation. Moreover, the recent data augmentation technique named random erasing is also applied for alleviating the imbalance of API categories. We collect plots with the graphic APIs used to drawn them from Stack Overflow, and release three new Plot2API datasets corresponding to the graphic APIs of R and Python programming languages for evaluating the effectiveness of Plot2API techniques. Extensive experimental results not only demonstrate the superiority of our method over the recent deep learning baselines but also show the practicability of our method in the recommendation of graphic APIs.
Perhaps surprisingly sewerage infrastructure is one of the most costly infrastructures in modern society. Sewer pipes are manually inspected to determine whether the pipes are defective. However, this process is limited by the number of qualified inspectors and the time it takes to inspect a pipe. Automatization of this process is therefore of high interest. So far, the success of computer vision approaches for sewer defect classification has been limited when compared to the success in other fields mainly due to the lack of public datasets. To this end, in this work we present a large novel and publicly available multi-label classification dataset for image-based sewer defect classification called Sewer-ML. The Sewer-ML dataset consists of 1.3 million images annotated by professional sewer inspectors from three different utility companies across nine years. Together with the dataset, we also present a benchmark algorithm and a novel metric for assessing performance. The benchmark algorithm is a result of evaluating 12 state-of-the-art algorithms, six from the sewer defect classification domain and six from the multi-label classification domain, and combining the best performing algorithms. The novel metric is a class-importance weighted F2 score, $\text{F}2_{\text{CIW}}$, reflecting the economic impact of each class, used together with the normal pipe F1 score, $\text{F}1_{\text{Normal}}$. The benchmark algorithm achieves an $\text{F}2_{\text{CIW}}$ score of 55.11% and $\text{F}1_{\text{Normal}}$ score of 90.94%, leaving ample room for improvement on the Sewer-ML dataset. The code, models, and dataset are available at the project page https://vap.aau.dk/sewer-ml/
Compared with single-label image classification, multi-label image classification is more practical and challenging. Some recent studies attempted to leverage the semantic information of categories for improving multi-label image classification performance. However, these semantic-based methods only take semantic information as type of complements for visual representation without further exploitation. In this paper, we present an innovative path towards the solution of the multi-label image classification which considers it as a dictionary learning task. A novel end-to-end model named Deep Semantic Dictionary Learning (DSDL) is designed. In DSDL, an auto-encoder is applied to generate the semantic dictionary from class-level semantics and then such dictionary is utilized for representing the visual features extracted by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with label embeddings. The DSDL provides a simple but elegant way to exploit and reconcile the label, semantic and visual spaces simultaneously via conducting the dictionary learning among them. Moreover, inspired by iterative optimization of traditional dictionary learning, we further devise a novel training strategy named Alternately Parameters Update Strategy (APUS) for optimizing DSDL, which alternately optimizes the representation coefficients and the semantic dictionary in forward and backward propagation. Extensive experimental results on three popular benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves promising performances in comparison with the state-of-the-arts. Our codes and models have been released at {https://github.com/ZFT-CQU/DSDL}.