The success of data mixing augmentations in image classification tasks has been well-received. However, these techniques cannot be readily applied to object detection due to challenges such as spatial misalignment, foreground/background distinction, and plurality of instances. To tackle these issues, we first introduce a novel conceptual framework called Supervision Interpolation (SI), which offers a fresh perspective on interpolation-based augmentations by relaxing and generalizing Mixup. Based on SI, we propose LossMix, a simple yet versatile and effective regularization that enhances the performance and robustness of object detectors and more. Our key insight is that we can effectively regularize the training on mixed data by interpolating their loss errors instead of ground truth labels. Empirical results on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets demonstrate that LossMix can consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods widely adopted for detection. Furthermore, by jointly leveraging LossMix with unsupervised domain adaptation, we successfully improve existing approaches and set a new state of the art for cross-domain object detection.

Overhead images captured by helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites are widely available. Prior aerial target recognition methods mainly deal with generic object categories such as cars, roads, and boats. We go beyond this and aim for fine-grained recognition, e.g., distinguishing between a Toyota and a Honda sedan. This task is so challenging for human annotators that labeling images directly is no longer an option: annotators are often unable to identify the object from such an extreme viewpoint and at such a low resolution. We propose a novel solution to collect fine-grained annotations of aerial images and develop the first ground-to-sky cross-view car dataset with instance-level correspondences. We compare the performance of human experts and deep learning approaches on fine-grained car recognition from aerial imagery. Noting that intraclass variation in aerial images is limited, we further show that with simple data augmentation, a classifier can be trained from fewer instances yet achieves comparable or even significantly better performance than human experts. Our experimental evidence demonstrates that fine-grained object recognition from overhead images is not only feasible but also well suited for deep learning methods. Our dataset is available at: http://ai.bu.edu/Ground2Sky/.

Unlike human learning, machine learning often fails to handle changes between training (source) and test (target) input distributions. Such domain shifts, common in practical scenarios, severely damage the performance of conventional machine learning methods. Supervised domain adaptation methods have been proposed for the case when the target data have labels, including some that perform very well despite being ``frustratingly easy'' to implement. However, in practice, the target domain is often unlabeled, requiring unsupervised adaptation. We propose a simple, effective, and efficient method for unsupervised domain adaptation called CORrelation ALignment (CORAL). CORAL minimizes domain shift by aligning the second-order statistics of source and target distributions, without requiring any target labels. Even though it is extraordinarily simple--it can be implemented in four lines of Matlab code--CORAL performs remarkably well in extensive evaluations on standard benchmark datasets.

We propose a novel method for unsupervised domain adaptation. Traditional machine learning algorithms often fail to generalize to new input distributions, causing reduced accuracy. Domain adaptation attempts to compensate for the performance degradation by transferring and adapting source knowledge to target domain. Existing unsupervised methods project domains into a lower-dimensional space and attempt to align the subspace bases, effectively learning a mapping from source to target points or vice versa. However, they fail to take into account the difference of the two distributions in the subspaces, resulting in misalignment even after adaptation. We present a unified view of existing subspace mapping based methods and develop a generalized approach that also aligns the distributions as well as the subspace bases. We provide a detailed evaluation of our approach on benchmark datasets and show improved results over published approaches.

Crowdsourced 3D CAD models are easily accessible online, and can potentially generate an infinite number of training images for almost any object category. We show that augmenting the training data of contemporary Deep Convolutional Neural Net (DCNN) models with such synthetic data can be effective, especially when real training data is limited or not well matched to the target domain. Most freely available CAD models capture 3D shape but are often missing other low level cues, such as realistic object texture, pose, or background. In a detailed analysis, we use synthetic CAD images to probe the ability of DCNN to learn without these cues, with surprising findings. In particular, we show that when the DCNN is fine-tuned on the target detection task, it exhibits a large degree of invariance to missing low-level cues, but, when pretrained on generic ImageNet classification, it learns better when the low-level cues are simulated. We show that our synthetic DCNN training approach significantly outperforms previous methods on the benchmark PASCAL VOC2007 dataset when learning in the few-shot scenario and improves performance in a domain shift scenario on the Office benchmark.

To produce images that are suitable for display, tone-mapping is widely used in digital cameras to map linear color measurements into narrow gamuts with limited dynamic range. This introduces non-linear distortion that must be undone, through a radiometric calibration process, before computer vision systems can analyze such photographs radiometrically. This paper considers the inherent uncertainty of undoing the effects of tone-mapping. We observe that this uncertainty varies substantially across color space, making some pixels more reliable than others. We introduce a model for this uncertainty and a method for fitting it to a given camera or imaging pipeline. Once fit, the model provides for each pixel in a tone-mapped digital photograph a probability distribution over linear scene colors that could have induced it. We demonstrate how these distributions can be useful for visual inference by incorporating them into estimation algorithms for a representative set of vision tasks.