MatConvNet-Calvin v1.0

MatConvNet-Calvin is a wrapper around MatConvNet that (re-)implements several state of-the-art papers in object detection and semantic segmentation. This includes our own work "Region-based semantic segmentation with end-to-end training" [5]. Calvin is a Computer Vision research group at the University of Edinburgh (http://calvin.inf.ed.ac.uk/). Copyrights by Holger Caesar and Jasper Uijlings, 2015-2016.

Overview

• Methods
• Dependencies
• Installation
• Instructions
• References
• Disclaimer
• Contact

Methods

• Fast R-CNN (FRCN) [1]: State-of-the-art object detection method. The original code was implemented for Caffe. This reimplementation ports it to MatConvNet by adding region of interest pooling and a simplified version of bounding box regression.
• Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN) [2]: Very successful semantic segmentation method that builds the basis for many modern semantic segmentation methods. FCNs operate directly on image pixels, performing a series of convolutional, fully connected and deconvolutional filters. This implementation is based on MatConvNet-FCN and is modified to work with arbitrary datasets.
• Multi-Class Multipe Instance Learning [3]: Extends FCNs for weakly supervised semantic segmentation. We also implement the improved loss function of "What's the point" [4], which takes into account label presence and absence.
• Region-based semantic segmentation with end-to-end training (E2S2) [5]: State-of-the-art semantic segmentation method that brings together the advantages of region-based methods and end-to-end trainable FCNs. This implementation is based on our implementation of Fast R-CNN and adds the free-form region of interest pooling and region-to-pixel layers.

Dependencies

• Note: This software does not work on Windows or Mac OS X. Please use Ubuntu.
• MatConvNet: beta20 (http://github.com/vlfeat/matconvnet)
• MatConvNet-FCN: (http://github.com/vlfeat/matconvnet-fcn)
• Selective Search: for Fast R-CNN and E2S2 (http://koen.me/research/selectivesearch/)
• Datasets:
  • SIFT Flow: (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jtighe/Papers/ECCV10/)
  • PASCAL VOC 2010: (http://host.robots.ox.ac.uk/pascal/VOC/voc2010/)

Installation

• Install Matlab R2015a (or newer) and Git
• Clone the repository and its submodules from your shell
  • git clone https://github.com/nightrome/matconvnet-calvin.git
  • cd matconvnet-calvin
  • git submodule update --init
• Execute the following Matlab commands
  • Setup MatConvNet
  • cd matconvnet/matlab; vl_compilenn('EnableGpu', true); cd ../..;
  • Setup MatConvNet-Calvin
  • cd matconvnet-calvin/matlab; vl_compilenn_calvin(); cd ../..;
  • Add files to Matlab path
  • setup();
  • (Optional) Download pretrained models:
  • FRCN: downloadModel('frcn');
  • FCN: downloadModel('fcn');
  • E2S2 (Full): downloadModel('e2s2_full');
  • E2S2 (Fast): downloadModel('e2s2_fast');

Instructions

1) FRCN

• Usage: Run demo_frcn()
• What: This script trains and tests Fast R-CNN using VGG-16 for object detection on PASCAL VOC 2010. The parametrization of the regressed bounding boxes is slightly simplified, but we found this to make no difference in performance.
• Model: Training this model takes about 8h on a Titan X GPU. If you just want to use it you can download the pretrained model in the installation step above. Then run the demo to see the test results.
• Results: If the program executes correctly, it will print the per-class results in average precision and their mean (mAP) for each of the 20 classes in PASCAL VOC. The example model achieves 63.5% mAP on the validation set using no external training data.
• Note: The results vary due to the random order of images presented during training. To reproduce the above results we fix the initial seed of the random number generator.

2) FCN

• Usage: Run demo_fcn()
• What: This script trains and tests an FCN-16s network based on VGG-16 for semantic segmentation on the SIFT Flow dataset. The performance varies a bit compared to the implementation of [2], as they first train FCN-32s and use it to finetune FCN-16s. Instead we directly train FCN-16s. For weakly [3,4] and semi supervised training, see the options in fcnTrainGeneric().
• Model: Training this model takes a lot of time. If you just want to use it you can download the pretrained model in the installation step above. Then run the demo to see the test results.
• Results: If the program executes correctly, it will print the semantic segmentation performance. It will also show an image from the SIFT Flow dataset, the ground-truth labels, the output labeling and an image that shows the different types of error. The results and timings for the different models can be seen in the table below. We used a Titan X GPU with 12GB of RAM.

• Note: The results vary due to the random order of images presented during training. To reproduce the results in the table below we fix the initial seed of the random number generator.

  Method	Model	Class accuracy	Global accuracy	Mean IOU	Training epochs	Training time
  This	FCN-16s	48.8%	83.8%	36.7%	50	12h
  [2]	FCN-16s	51.7%	85.2%	39.5%	175?	-

3) E2S2

• Usage: Run demo_e2s2_full() or demo_e2s2_fast()
• What: These scripts train and test a region-based end-to-end network based on VGG-16 for semantic segmentation on the SIFT Flow dataset. The scripts automatically extract Selective Search region proposals from the dataset. All networks are trained with an inverse-class frequency weighted loss (Sect. 3.4 of [5]).
• Model: Training this model takes a lot of time. If you just want to use it you can download the pretrained model in the installation step above. Then run the demo to see the test results. There are two different models available:
  • Full: Our best performing model refered to in [5] as "separate weights".
  • Fast: A much faster model refered to in [5] as "tied weights". Additionally we set the number of training epochs to 10 instead of 25 to speedup training.
• Results: If the program executes correctly, it will print the semantic segmentation performance. It will also show an image from the SIFT Flow dataset, the ground-truth labels, the output labeling and an image that shows the different types of error. The results and timings for the different models can be seen in the table below. We used a Titan X GPU with 12GB of RAM.

• Note: The results vary due to the random order of images presented during training. The mean performance of the full model is 65.2% +- 0.7% Class accuracy. To reproduce the results in the table below we fix the initial seed of the random number generator.

  Model	Class accuracy	Training epochs	Training time	GPU RAM
  Full	66.2%	25	75h	8.5GB
  Fast	62.5%	10	20h	6.0GB
  [5]	64.0%	30	-	-

Training for different datasets

• The FCN and E2S2 code can be easily trained for different datasets.
• Create your own dataset class "MyDataset", e.g. by copying from SiftFlowDatasetMC. The labelCount field should correspond to all classes (incl. background if it exists in your dataset). Note that it has to inherit from the DatasetMC class. It has all the relevant methods: getImage(), getImLabelMap(), etc.
• FCN: Change the dataset in demo_fcn.m.
• E2S2: Modify setupE2S2Regions.m and e2s2_wrapper_SiftFlow_fast.m.

References

• [1] Fast R-CNN (FRCN) by Girshick et al., ICCV 2015, http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.08083
• [2] Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation (FCN) by Long et al., CVPR 2015, http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.4038
• [3] Fully Convolutional Multi-Class Multipe Instance Learning by Pathak et al., ICLR 2015 workshop, http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.7144
• [4] What's the point: Semantic segmentation with point supervision by Bearman et al., ECCV 2016, http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02106
• [5] Region-based semantic segmentation with end-to-end training (E2S2) by Caesar et al., ECCV 2016, http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.07671

Disclaimer

Except for [5], none of the methods implemented in MatConvNet-Calvin is authorized by the original authors. These are (possibly simplified) reimplementations of parts of the described methods and they might vary in terms of performance. This software is covered by the FreeBSD License. See LICENSE.MD for more details.

Contact

If you run into any problems with this code, please submit a bug report on the Github site of the project. For other inquiries contact holger-at-it-caesar.com.