Leveraging Color Channel Independence for Improved Unsupervised Object Detection

Bibliographic Details
Title: Leveraging Color Channel Independence for Improved Unsupervised Object Detection
Authors: Jäckl, Bastian, Metz, Yannick, Schlegel, Udo, Keim, Daniel A., Fischer, Maximilian T.
Publication Year: 2024
Collection: Computer Science
Subject Terms: Computer Science - Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science - Machine Learning, I.4.8, I.2.10
More Details: Object-centric architectures can learn to extract distinct object representations from visual scenes, enabling downstream applications on the object level. Similarly to autoencoder-based image models, object-centric approaches have been trained on the unsupervised reconstruction loss of images encoded by RGB color spaces. In our work, we challenge the common assumption that RGB images are the optimal color space for unsupervised learning in computer vision. We discuss conceptually and empirically that other color spaces, such as HSV, bear essential characteristics for object-centric representation learning, like robustness to lighting conditions. We further show that models improve when requiring them to predict additional color channels. Specifically, we propose to transform the predicted targets to the RGB-S space, which extends RGB with HSV's saturation component and leads to markedly better reconstruction and disentanglement for five common evaluation datasets. The use of composite color spaces can be implemented with basically no computational overhead, is agnostic of the models' architecture, and is universally applicable across a wide range of visual computing tasks and training types. The findings of our approach encourage additional investigations in computer vision tasks beyond object-centric learning.
Comment: 38 pages incl. references, 16 figures
Document Type: Working Paper
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15150
Accession Number: edsarx.2412.15150
Database: arXiv
More Details
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