Companies pay astonishing amounts of money to sponsor events  and raise brand visibility. Calculating the ROI from such sponsorship can be augmented with machine learning-powered tools to deliver more accurate results. 

Event sponsoring is a well-established marketing strategy to build brand awareness. Despite being one of the most recognizable brands in the automotive industry, Chevrolet pays $71.4 million dollars each year to put its brand on Manchester United shirts.

How many people does your brand reach?

According to Eventmarketer’s study, 72% of consumers positively view brands that provide them with positive experiences, be it a great sports game or another cultural event, such as a music festival. Such events attract large numbers of viewers both directly and via media reports, allowing brands to get favorable positioning and work on their word-of-mouth recognition.

Sponsorship contracts often come at a steep price, so brand owners are naturally more than a little interested in finding out how effectively their outlays are working for them. However, it’s difficult to assess quantitatively just how great the brand exposure is in a given campaign. The information on brand exposure can further support demand forecasting efforts, as the company gains information on expected demand peaks that result from greater brand exposure in media coverage.

The current approach to computing such statistics has involved manually annotating broadcast material, which is tedious and expensive. To address these problems, we have developed an automated tool for logo detection and visibility analysis that provides both raw detection and a rich set of statistics.

Solution overview

We decided to break the problem down into two steps: logo detection with convolutional neural networks and an analytics for computing summary statistics.

The main advantage of this approach is that swapping the analytics module for a different one is straightforward. This is essential when different types of statistics are called for, or even if the neural net is to be trained for a completely different task (we had plenty of fun modifying this system to spot and count coins – stay tuned for a future blog post on that).

Logo detection with deep learning

There are two principal approaches to object detection with convolutional neural networks: region-based methods and fully convolutional methods.

Region-based methods, such as R-CNN and its descendants, first identify image regions which are likely to contain objects (region proposals). They then extract these regions and process them individually with an image classifier. This process tends to be quite slow, but can be sped up to some extent with Fast R-CNN, where the image is processed by the convolutional network as a whole and then region representations are extracted from high-level feature maps. Faster R-CNN is a further improvement where region proposals are also computed from high-level CNN features, which accelerates the region proposal step.

Fully convolutional methods, such as SSD, do away with processing individual region proposals and instead aim to output class labels where the region proposal step would be. This approach can be much faster, since there is no need to extract and process region proposals individually. In order to make this work for objects with very different sizes, the SSD network has several detection layers attached to feature maps of different resolutions.

Since real-time video processing is one of the requirements of our system, we decided to go with the SSD method rather than Fast R-CNN. Our network also uses ResNet-50 as its convnet backbone, rather than the default VGG-16. This made it much less memory-hungry, while also helping to stabilize the training process.

Model training

In the process of refining the SSD architecture for our requirements, we ran dozens of experiments. This was an iterative process with a large delay between the start and finish of an experiment (typically 1-2 days). In order to run numerous experiments in parallel, we used Neptune, our machine learning experiment manager. Neptune captures the values of the loss function and other statistics while an experiment is running, displaying them in a friendly web UI. Additionally, it can capture images via image channels and display them, which really helped us troubleshoot the different variations of the data augmentation we tested.

Logo detection analytics

The model we produced generates detections very well. However, when even a short video is analyzed, the raw description can span thousands of lines. To help humans analyze the results, we created software that translates these descriptions into a series of statistics, charts, rankings and visualizations that can be assembled into a concise report.

The statistics are calculated globally and per brand. Some of them, like brand display time, are meant to be displayed, but many are there to fuel the visual representation. Speaking of which, the charts are really expressive in this task. Some features include brand exposure size in time, heatmaps of a logo’s position on the screen and bar charts to allow you to easily compare various statistics across the brands. Last but not least, we have a module for creating highlights – visualizations of the bounding boxes detected by the model. This module serves a double purpose: in addition to making the analysis easy to track, such visualizations are also a source of valuable information for data scientists tweaking the model.

Results

We processed a short video featuring a competition between rivals Coca-Cola and Pepsi to see which brand received more exposure in quantitative terms. You can watch it on YouTube by following this link. Which logo has better visibility?

Below, you can compare your guesses with what our model reported:

Possible extensions

There are many business problems where object detection can be helpful. Here at deepsense.ai, we have worked on a number of them.

We developed a solution for Nielsen that extracts information about ingredients from photographs of FMCG products, using object detection networks to locate the list of ingredients in photographs of products. This made Nielsen’s data collection more efficient and automatic. In its bid to save the gravely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale,The NOAA used a related technique to spot whales in aerial photographs. Similar techniques are used when the reinforcement learning-based models behind autonomous vehicles learn to recognize road signs.

With logo detection technology, companies can evaluate a campaign’s ROI by analyzing any media coverage of a sponsored event. With the information on brand positioning in hand, it is easy to calculate the advertising equivalent value or determine the most impactful events to sponsor.

With further extrapolation, companies can monitor the context of media coverage and track whether their brand is shown with positive or negative information, providing even more knowledge for the marketing team.

In the previous post we explained what region of interest pooling (RoI pooling for short) is. In this one, we present an example of applying RoI pooling in TensorFlow. We base it on our custom RoI pooling TensorFlow operation. We also use Neptune as a support in our experiment performance tracking.

Example overview

Our goal is to detect cars in the images. We’d like to construct a network that is able to automatically draw a box around every car.
In our example we deal with car images from the Pascal VOC 2007 dataset. For simplicity we choose only cars not marked as truncated.

Neptune

We manage our experiment using Neptune. It’s a pretty handy tool:

• We track the tuning in real time. Especially, we preview the currently estimated bounding boxes.
• We can change model hyperparameters on the fly.
• We can easily integrate Neptune with TensorFlow and get all the charts, graphs and summary objects from the TensorFlow graph.
• We store the executed experiments in an aesthetic list.

Network architecture

In our example we use the Fast R-CNN architecture.
The network has two inputs:

1. Batch of images
2. Batch of potential bounding boxes – RoI proposals
   In the Fast R-CNN model RoI proposals are generated via an external algorithm, for example selective search. In our example, we take ground truth bounding boxes from the Pascal annotations and generate more negative bounding boxes ourselves.

The network has two outputs:

1. Batch of RoI proposals not classified as background (with corrected coordinates)
2. Probabilities that RoI proposals consist of objects of the consecutive categories

The network consists of three main parts:

1. Deep convolutional neural network
   • Input: images
   • Output: feature map

   We use the popular VGG16 network pretrained on the ImageNet dataset.

2. RoI pooling layer
   • Input: feature map, RoI proposals resized to a feature map
   • Output: max-pooled RoI proposals
3. Fully connected layer with RoI features
   • Input: max-pooled RoI proposals
   • Output: corrected RoI proposals, probabilities

We note that our detection task can be also solved with the Faster R-CNN architecture, which works significantly faster :). However, the implementation of Faster R-CNN requires much more code to write, so we chose the simpler Fast R-CNN.

Loss function

We tune the network to minimize the loss given by
\(loss = frac 1nsum_{i=1}^n frac 1{k_i} sum_{j=1}^{k_i} loss_{ij}\)
where:

• \(n\) is a number of images in a batch,
• \(k_i\) is a number of RoI proposals for the image \(i\),
• \(loss_{ij}\) is a loss for the RoI proposal \(j\) for the image \(i\).

For a single RoI proposal, \(loss_{ij}\) is the sum of the classification and regression loss, where:

• classification loss is the common cross entropy,

• regression loss is a smooth L1 distance between the rescaled coordinates of a RoI proposal and the ground-truth box. The regression loss is computed if the ground-truth box is not categorized as background, otherwise it’s defined as 0.

Implementation details

Prerequisites

To run the code we provide, you need the following software:

• CUDA 8,
• TensorFlow 1.0 with GPU support,
• our custom RoI pooling TensorFlow operation,
• OpenCV,
• Neptune (version 1.5): apply for our Early Adopters Program or try it immediately with Neptune Go.

Repository

You can download our code from our GitHub repository. It consists of two folders with the following content:

Description

When we run main.py , the script trainer.py  first restores the VGG16 network with the pretrained weights. Then it adds the RoI pooling layer and the fully connected layer. Finally, it begins tuning the entire network with use of provided images and RoI proposals. It also sends information to Neptune, so we can track the tuning progress in real time.
After cloning the repository, please download the file vgg16-20160129.tfmodel  referred to by the torrent file vgg16-20160129.tfmodel.torrent  and save it in the data  directory. Also, please run the script get_data.py to download needed images:

python get_data.py

Let’s test our RoI pooling in TensorFlow!

We run the script main.py  from the code folder by typing:

neptune run --
            --im_folder $PWD/../data/images
            --roidb $PWD/../data/roidb
            --pretrained_path $PWD/../data/vgg16-20160129.tfmodel

If we want to also use a non-default learning rate value or the number of epochs, we can add:

--learning_rate 1e-03 --num_epochs 200

to the command at the end.
After a while, we can start observing the tuning progress in Neptune:

Moreover, we can display the RoIs fitted to the cars by our network. We could just load all the processed images, but this procedure would take much of resources. That’s why we decided to activate this feature by a simple Neptune action.
To do that, we can go to the Actions tab and click ‘RUN’ to start sending the images.

After that, we can go to the Channels tab and expand the channels ‘region proposals for RoI pooling’ and ‘network detections’ by clicking ‘+’ signs.

Now we can see the RoIs in real time!

We can click on the pictures to zoom them. If we want Neptune to stop sending new images, we go to the Actions tab and click ‘RUN’ again.
An exemplary NeptuneGo execution of our script can be found here.

Summary

We hope you enjoy our example of RoI pooling in TensorFlow and experiment managing features offered by Neptune. If you want to comment our work, don’t be hesitate to leave us feedback!

References

• R. Girshick, Fast R-CNN, IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015.
• S. Ren, K. He, R. Girshick & J. Sun, Faster R-CNN: towards real-time object detection with Region Proposal Networks, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), 2015.
• deepsense.ai, Region of interest pooling explained, 2017.