Self-supervised Pre-training for Mirror Detection

Existing mirror detection methods require supervised ImageNet pre-training to obtain good general-purpose image features. However, supervised ImageNet pre-training focuses on category-level discrimination and may not be suitable for downstream tasks like mirror detection, due to the overfitting upstream tasks (e.g., supervised image classification). We observe that mirror reflection is crucial to how people perceive the presence of mirrors, and such mid-level features can be better transferred from self-supervised pre-trained models. Inspired by this observation, in this paper we aim to improve mirror detection methods by proposing a new self-supervised learning (SSL) pre-training framework for modeling the representation of mirror reflection progressively in the pre-training process. Our framework consists of three pre-training stages at different levels: 1) an image-level pre-training stage to globally incorporate mirror reflection features into the pre-trained model; 2) a patch-level pre-training stage to spatially simulate and learn local mirror reflection from image patches; and 3) a pixel-level pre-training stage to pixel-wisely capture mirror reflection via reconstructing corrupted mirror images based on the relationship between the inside and outside of mirrors. Extensive experiments show that our SSL pre-training framework significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art CNN-based SSL pre-training frameworks and even outperforms supervised ImageNet pre-training when transferred to the mirror detection task. Code and models are available at https://jiaying.link/iccv2023-sslmirror/ © 2023 IEEE.