Where's Wally Now? Deep Generative and Discriminative Embeddings for Novelty Detection

Philippe Burlina, Neil Joshi, I-Jeng Wang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019, pp. 11507-11516

We develop a framework for novelty detection (ND) methods relying on deep embeddings, either discriminative or generative, and also propose a novel framework for assessing their performance. While much progress was made recently in these approaches, it has been accompanied by certain limitations: most methods were tested on relatively simple problems (low resolution images / small number of classes) or involved non-public data; comparative performance has often proven inconclusive because of lacking statistical significance; and evaluation has generally been done on non-canonical problem sets of differing complexity, making apples-to-apples comparative performance evaluation difficult. This has led to a relative confusing state of affairs. We address these challenges via the following contributions: We make a proposal for a novel framework to measure the performance of novelty detection methods using a trade-space demonstrating performance (measured by ROCAUC) as a function of problem complexity. We also make several proposals to formally characterize problem complexity. We conduct experiments with problems of higher complexity (higher image resolution / number of classes). To this end we design several canonical datasets built from CIFAR-10 and ImageNet (IN-125) which we make available to perform future benchmarks for novelty detection as well as other related tasks including semantic zero/adaptive shot and unsupervised learning. Finally, we demonstrate, as one of the methods in our ND framework, a generative novelty detection method whose performance exceeds that of all recent best-in-class generative ND methods.