Multitask AET With Orthogonal Tangent Regularity for Dark Object Detection

Ziteng Cui, Guo-Jun Qi, Lin Gu, Shaodi You, Zenghui Zhang, Tatsuya Harada; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 2553-2562

Abstract


Dark environment becomes a challenge for computer vision algorithms owing to insufficient photons and undesirable noises. Most of the existing studies tackle this by either targeting human vision for better visual perception or improving the machine vision for specific high-level tasks. In addition, these methods rely on data argumentation and directly train their models based on real-world or over-simplified synthetic datasets without exploring the intrinsic pattern behind illumination translation. Here, we propose a novel multitask auto encoding transformation (MAET) model that combines human vision and machine vision tasks to enhance object detection in a dark environment. With a self-supervision learning, the MAET learns an intrinsic visual structure by encoding and decoding the realistic illumination-degrading transformation considering the physical noise model and image signal processing (ISP). Based on this representation, we achieve object detection task by decoding the bounding box coordinates and classes. To avoid the over-entanglement of two tasks, our MAET disentangles the object and degrading features by imposing an orthogonal tangent regularity. This forms a parametric manifold along which multitask predictions can be geometrically formulated by maximizing the orthogonality between the tangents along the outputs of respective tasks. Our framework can be implemented based on the mainstream object detection architecture and directly trained end-to-end using the normal target detection datasets, such as COCO and VOC. We have achieved the state-of-the-art performance using synthetic and real-world datasets.

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[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Cui_2021_ICCV, author = {Cui, Ziteng and Qi, Guo-Jun and Gu, Lin and You, Shaodi and Zhang, Zenghui and Harada, Tatsuya}, title = {Multitask AET With Orthogonal Tangent Regularity for Dark Object Detection}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)}, month = {October}, year = {2021}, pages = {2553-2562} }