Cited by 103Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsMachine Learning and Data Classification

Synthetic Examples Improve Generalization for Rare Classes

Open access
Beery, Sara, Liu, Yang, Morris, Dan, Piavis, Jim, Kapoor, Ashish, Meister, Markus, Joshi, Neel, Perona, Pietro·2020·2020 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)

Abstract

The ability to detect and classify rare occurrences in images has important applications - for example, counting rare and endangered species when studying biodiversity, or detecting infrequent traffic scenarios that pose a danger to self-driving cars. Few-shot learning is an open problem: current computer vision systems struggle to categorize objects they have seen only rarely during training, and collecting a sufficient number of training examples of rare events is often challenging and expensive, and sometimes outright impossible. We explore in depth an approach to this problem: complementing the few available training images with ad-hoc simulated data.Our testbed is animal species classification, which has a real-world long-tailed distribution. We present two natural world simulators, and analyze the effect of different axes of variation in simulation, such as pose, lighting, model, and simulation method, and we prescribe best practices for efficiently incorporating simulated data for real-world performance gain. Our experiments reveal that synthetic data can considerably reduce error rates for classes that are rare, that as the amount of simulated data is increased, accuracy on the target class improves, and that high variation of simulated data provides maximum performance gain.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1109/wacv45572.2020.9093570

Cites

74 of 74 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Computer vision can be used to classify species from camera traps, supporting a real-time, less labor-intensive species count.

    “For instance, camera traps take photos automatically whenever a motion sensor is activated—computer vision can be used to classify the species that pass by, supporting a real-time, less labor-intensive species count [64,585,643].”

    From Tackling climate change with machine learning (2023) · cites this paper as [64]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

4 of the 78 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. [21][21] E. Bondi, D. Dey, A. Kapoor, J. Piavis, S. Shah, F. Fang, B. Dilkina, R. Hannaford, A. Iyer, L. Joppa, et al. Airsimw: A simulation environment for wildlife conservation with uavs. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies , page 40. ACM, 2018. 3 -
  2. [35][35] I. Goodfellow, J. Pouget-Abadie, M. Mirza, B. Xu, D. Warde-Farley, S. Ozair, A. Courville, and Y. Bengio. Generative adversarial nets. In Advances in neural information processing systems , pages 2672-2680, 2014. 1, 3, 8 -
  3. [74][74] T. Tieleman and G. Hinton. Lecture 6.5-rmsprop: Divide the gradient by a running average of its recent magnitude. COURSERA: Neural networks for machine learning , 4(2):26-31, 2012. 5 -
  4. [81][81] Y. Z. S. Q. Z. X. T. S. K. Y. W. A. Y. Weichao Qiu, Fangwei Zhong. Unrealcv: Virtual worlds for computer vision. ACM Multimedia Open Source Software Competition , 2017. 3 -

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Beery, S., Liu, Y., Morris, D., Piavis, J., Kapoor, A., Meister, M., Joshi, N., & Perona, P.
Affiliations
  • California Institute of Technology (US)
  • Microsoft (United States) (US)
Venue
2020 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2020-03
Pages
852-862
ISSN
2472-6737 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2935725472
Cited by
103
References
78
Citations by year
2026: 9 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 18 · 2021: 23 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 3
FWCI
6.39
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1745301)
  • U.S. Geological Survey
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning and Data Classification
Keywords
few-shot learning, synthetic data augmentation, animal species classification, long-tailed distributions, endangered species detection

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review