Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation Network for Vehicle Make and Model Recognition

Vehicle Make and Model Recognition (VMMR) is one of the fundamental elements in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) that becomes the enabler for plenty of downstream tasks. Most of the past studies advance the recognition performance by focusing on the top-level feature maps but this practice hi...

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Main Authors: Shi Hao Tan, Joon Huang Chuah, Chee-Onn Chow, Jeevan Kanesan
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2023-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10305506/
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author Shi Hao Tan
Joon Huang Chuah
Chee-Onn Chow
Jeevan Kanesan
author_facet Shi Hao Tan
Joon Huang Chuah
Chee-Onn Chow
Jeevan Kanesan
author_sort Shi Hao Tan
collection DOAJ
description Vehicle Make and Model Recognition (VMMR) is one of the fundamental elements in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) that becomes the enabler for plenty of downstream tasks. Most of the past studies advance the recognition performance by focusing on the top-level feature maps but this practice hinders the ability of the network to learn features. Although the top-level feature maps are rich in global context information, they do not incorporate the fine-scale details that are embedded within the low-level feature maps. In this work, we bridge the gap by proposing a Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation (CFCA) module which effectively integrates information from feature maps of various scales. In particular, the cross-scale features are generated by first refining the scale-specific components independently and then fusing them in a nonlinear manner through convolution. The resultant multi-scale feature maps are highly discriminative, as they contain both local subtle details and global abstract information. This is proven when the proposed framework achieves astounding classification performance on five publicly available datasets i.e. web-nature Comprehensive Cars (CompCars), Stanford Cars, Car-FG3K, surveillance-nature CompCars and Mohsin-VMMR. Moreover, the neurons exhibit high feature responses on the discriminative vehicle parts, corresponding to the superior feature extraction ability of the CFCA module. The CFCA module is also highly generalizable to other networks as it elevates the performance of VGG16, Inceptionv3, ResNet50 and DenseNet169.
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spelling doaj.art-2c3bddc64b4e483fa2b08c5f8634eeae2023-11-17T00:00:51ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362023-01-011112673312674710.1109/ACCESS.2023.333011410305506Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation Network for Vehicle Make and Model RecognitionShi Hao Tan0https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8648-3589Joon Huang Chuah1https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9058-3497Chee-Onn Chow2https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6044-2650Jeevan Kanesan3https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9949-3105Department of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaDepartment of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaDepartment of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaDepartment of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaVehicle Make and Model Recognition (VMMR) is one of the fundamental elements in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) that becomes the enabler for plenty of downstream tasks. Most of the past studies advance the recognition performance by focusing on the top-level feature maps but this practice hinders the ability of the network to learn features. Although the top-level feature maps are rich in global context information, they do not incorporate the fine-scale details that are embedded within the low-level feature maps. In this work, we bridge the gap by proposing a Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation (CFCA) module which effectively integrates information from feature maps of various scales. In particular, the cross-scale features are generated by first refining the scale-specific components independently and then fusing them in a nonlinear manner through convolution. The resultant multi-scale feature maps are highly discriminative, as they contain both local subtle details and global abstract information. This is proven when the proposed framework achieves astounding classification performance on five publicly available datasets i.e. web-nature Comprehensive Cars (CompCars), Stanford Cars, Car-FG3K, surveillance-nature CompCars and Mohsin-VMMR. Moreover, the neurons exhibit high feature responses on the discriminative vehicle parts, corresponding to the superior feature extraction ability of the CFCA module. The CFCA module is also highly generalizable to other networks as it elevates the performance of VGG16, Inceptionv3, ResNet50 and DenseNet169.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10305506/Convolutional neural networkfine-grained classificationintelligent transportation systemmulti-scalevehicle make and model recognition
spellingShingle Shi Hao Tan
Joon Huang Chuah
Chee-Onn Chow
Jeevan Kanesan
Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation Network for Vehicle Make and Model Recognition
IEEE Access
Convolutional neural network
fine-grained classification
intelligent transportation system
multi-scale
vehicle make and model recognition
title Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation Network for Vehicle Make and Model Recognition
title_full Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation Network for Vehicle Make and Model Recognition
title_fullStr Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation Network for Vehicle Make and Model Recognition
title_full_unstemmed Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation Network for Vehicle Make and Model Recognition
title_short Coarse-to-Fine Context Aggregation Network for Vehicle Make and Model Recognition
title_sort coarse to fine context aggregation network for vehicle make and model recognition
topic Convolutional neural network
fine-grained classification
intelligent transportation system
multi-scale
vehicle make and model recognition
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10305506/
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AT cheeonnchow coarsetofinecontextaggregationnetworkforvehiclemakeandmodelrecognition
AT jeevankanesan coarsetofinecontextaggregationnetworkforvehiclemakeandmodelrecognition