OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DeepCoder: Semi-Parametric Variational Autoencoders for Automatic Facial Action Coding
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Human face exhibits an inherent hierarchy in its representations (i.e., holistic facial expressions can be encoded via a set of facial action units (AUs) and their intensity). Variational (deep) auto-encoders (VAE) have shown great results in unsupervised extraction of hierarchical latent representations from large amounts of image data, while being robust to noise and other undesired artifacts. Potentially, this makes VAEs a suitable approach for learning facial features for AU intensity estimation. Yet, most existing VAE-based methods apply classifiers learned separately from the encoded features. By contrast, the non-parametric (probabilistic) approaches, such as Gaussian Processes (GPs), typically outperform their parametric counterparts, but cannot deal easily with large amounts of data. To this end, we propose a novel VAE semi-parametric modeling framework, named DeepCoder, which combines the modeling power of parametric (convolutional) and nonparametric (ordinal GPs) VAEs, for joint learning of (1) latent representations at multiple levels in a task hierarchy1, and (2) classification of multiple ordinal outputs. We show on benchmark datasets for AU intensity estimation that the proposed DeepCoder outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, and related VAEs and deep learning models.
Pose-Invariant Face Alignment With a Single CNN
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Face alignment has witnessed substantial progress in the last decade. One of the recent focuses has been aligning a dense 3D face shape to face images with large head poses. The dominant technology used is based on the cascade of regressors, e.g., CNN, which has shown promising results. Nonetheless, the cascade of CNNs suffers from several drawbacks, e.g., lack of end-to-end training, hand-crafted features and slow training speed. To address these issues, we propose a new layer, named visualization layer, that can be integrated into the CNN architecture and enables joint optimization with different loss functions. Extensive evaluation of the proposed method on multiple datasets demonstrates state-of-the-art accuracy, while reducing the training time by more than half compared to the typical cascade of CNNs. In addition, we compare multiple CNN architectures with the visualization layer to further demonstrate the advantage of its utilization.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Face Recognition in Unlabeled Videos
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Despite rapid advances in face recognition, there remains a clear gap between the performance of still image-based face recognition and video-based face recognition, due to the vast difference in visual quality between the domains and the difficulty of curating diverse large-scale video datasets. This paper addresses both of those challenges, through an image to video feature-level domain adaptation approach, to learn discriminative video frame representations. The framework utilizes large-scale unlabeled video data to reduce the gap between different domains while transferring discriminative knowledge from large-scale labeled still images. Given a face recognition network that is pretrained in the image domain, the adaptation is achieved by (i) distilling knowledge from the network to a video adaptation network through feature matching, (ii) performing feature restoration through synthetic data augmentation and (iii) learning a domain-invariant feature through a domain adversarial discriminator. We further improve performance through a discriminator-guided feature fusion that boosts high-quality frames while eliminating those degraded by video domain-specific factors. Experiments on the YouTube Faces and IJB-A datasets demonstrate that each module contributes to our feature-level domain adaptation framework and substantially improves video face recognition performance to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. We demonstrate qualitatively that the network learns to suppress diverse artifacts in videos such as pose, illumination or occlusion without being explicitly trained for them.
Deeply-Learned Part-Aligned Representations for Person Re-Identification
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we address the problem of person re-identification, which refers to associating the persons captured from different cameras. We propose a simple yet effective human part-aligned representation for handling the body part misalignment problem. Our approach decomposes the human body into regions (parts) which are discriminative for person matching, accordingly computes the representations over the regions, and aggregates the similarities computed between the corresponding regions of a pair of probe and gallery images as the overall matching score. Our formulation, inspired by attention models, is a deep neural network modeling the three steps together, which is learnt through minimizing the triplet loss function without requiring body part labeling information. Unlike most existing deep learning algorithms that learn a global or spatial partition-based local representation, our approach performs human body partition, and thus is more robust to pose changes and various human spatial distributions in the person bounding box. Our approach shows state-of-the-art results over standard datasets, Market-$1501$, CUHK$03$, CUHK$01$ and VIPeR.
High-Quality Correspondence and Segmentation Estimation for Dual-Lens Smart-Phone Portraits
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Estimating correspondence between two images and extracting the foreground object are two challenges in computer vision. With dual-lens smart phones, such as iPhone 7Plus and Huawei P9, coming into the market, two images of slightly different views provide us new information to unify the two topics. We propose a joint method to tackle them simultaneously via a joint fully connected conditional random field (CRF) framework. The regional correspondence is used to handle textureless regions in matching and make our CRF system computationally efficient. Our method is evaluated over 2,000 new image pairs, and produces promising results on challenging portrait images.
DSLR-Quality Photos on Mobile Devices With Deep Convolutional Networks
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Despite a rapid rise in the quality of built-in smartphone cameras, their physical limitations - small sensor size, compact lenses and the lack of specific hardware, - impede them to achieve the quality results of DSLR cameras. In this work we present an end-to-end deep learning approach that bridges this gap by translating ordinary photos into DSLR-quality images. We propose learning the translation function using a residual convolutional neural network that improves both color rendition and image sharpness. Since the standard mean squared loss is not well suited for measuring perceptual image quality, we introduce a composite perceptual error function that combines content, color and texture losses. The first two losses are defined analytically, while the texture loss is learned in an adversarial fashion. We also present DPED, a large-scale dataset that consists of real photos captured from three different phones and one high-end reflex camera. Our quantitative and qualitative assessments reveal that the enhanced image quality is comparable to that of DSLR-taken photos, while the methodology is generalized to any type of digital camera.
Beyond Standard Benchmarks: Parameterizing Performance Evaluation in Visual Object Tracking
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Object-to-camera motion produces a variety of apparent motion patterns that significantly affect performance of short-term visual trackers. Despite being crucial for designing robust trackers, their influence is poorly explored in standard benchmarks due to weakly defined, biased and overlapping attribute annotations. In this paper we propose to go beyond pre-recorded benchmarks with post-hoc annotations by presenting an approach that utilizes omnidirectional videos to generate realistic, consistently annotated, short-term tracking scenarios with exactly parameterized motion patterns. We have created an evaluation system, constructed a fully annotated dataset of omnidirectional videos and the generators for typical motion patterns. We provide an in-depth analysis of major tracking paradigms which is complementary to the standard benchmarks and confirms the expressiveness of our evaluation approach.
The Pose Knows: Video Forecasting by Generating Pose Futures
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Current approaches in video forecasting attempt to generate videos directly in pixel space using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). However, since these approaches try to model all the structure and scene dynamics at once, in unconstrained settings they often generate uninterpretable results. Our insight is to model the forecasting problem at a higher level of abstraction. Specifically, we exploit human pose detectors as a free source of supervision and break the video forecasting problem into two discrete steps. First we explicitly model the high level structure of active objects in the scene---humans---and use a VAE to model the possible future movements of humans in the pose space. We then use the future poses generated as conditional information to a GAN to predict the future frames of the video in pixel space. By using the structured space of pose as an intermediate representation, we sidestep the problems that GANs have in generating video pixels directly. We show through quantitative and qualitative evaluation that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods for video prediction.
Recurrent Topic-Transition GAN for Visual Paragraph Generation
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

A natural image usually conveys rich semantic content and can be viewed from different angles. Existing image description methods are largely restricted by small sets of biased visual paragraph annotations, and fail to cover rich underlying semantics. In this paper, we investigate a semi-supervised paragraph generative framework that is able to synthesize diverse and semantically coherent paragraph descriptions by reasoning over local semantic regions and exploiting linguistic knowledge. The proposed Recurrent Topic-Transition Generative Adversarial Network (RTT-GAN) builds an adversarial framework between a structured paragraph generator and multi-level paragraph discriminators. The paragraph generator generates sentences recurrently by incorporating region-based visual and language attention mechanisms at each step. The quality of generated paragraph sentences is assessed by multi-level adversarial discriminators from two aspects, namely, plausibility at sentence level and topic-transition coherence at paragraph level. The joint adversarial training of RTT-GAN drives the model to generate realistic paragraphs with smooth logical transition between sentence topics. Extensive quantitative experiments on image and video paragraph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our RTT-GAN in both supervised and semi-supervised settings. Qualitative results on telling diverse stories for an image also verify the interpretability of RTT-GAN.
A Two-Streamed Network for Estimating Fine-Scaled Depth Maps From Single RGB Images
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Estimating depth from a single RGB image is an ill-posed and inherently ambiguous problem. State-of-the-art deep learning methods can now estimate accurate 2D depth maps, but when the maps are projected into 3D, they lack local detail and are often highly distorted. We propose a fast-to-train two-streamed CNN that predicts depth and depth gradients, which are then fused together into an accurate and detailed depth map. We also define a novel set loss over multiple images; by regularizing the estimation between a common set of images, the network is less prone to over-fitting and achieves better accuracy than competing methods. Experiments on the NYU Depth v2 dataset shows that our depth predictions are competitive with state-of-the-art and lead to faithful 3D projections.
Weakly Supervised Object Localization Using Things and Stuff Transfer
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

We propose to help weakly supervised object localization for classes where location annotations are not available, by transferring things and stuff knowledge from a source set with available annotations. The source and target classes might share similar appearance (e.g. bear fur is similar to cat fur) or appear against similar background (e.g. horse and sheep appear against grass). To exploit this, we acquire three types of knowledge from the source set: a segmentation model trained on both thing and stuff classes; similarity relations between target and source classes; and co-occurrence relations between thing and stuff classes in the source. The segmentation model is used to generate thing and stuff segmentation maps on a target image, while the class similarity and co-occurrence knowledge help refining them. We then incorporate these maps as new cues into a multiple instance learning framework (MIL), propagating the transferred knowledge from the pixel level to the object proposal level. In extensive experiments, we conduct our transfer from the PASCAL Context dataset (source) to the ILSVRC, COCO and PASCAL VOC 2007 datasets (targets). We evaluate our transfer across widely different thing classes, including some that are not similar in appearance, but appear against similar background. The results demonstrate significant improvement over standard MIL, and we outperform the state-of-the-art in the transfer setting.
Incremental Learning of Object Detectors Without Catastrophic Forgetting
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Despite their success for object detection, convolutional neural networks are ill-equipped for incremental learning, i.e., adapting the original model trained on a set of classes to additionally detect objects of new classes, in the absence of the initial training data. They suffer from "catastrophic forgetting" - an abrupt degradation of performance on the original set of classes, when the training objective is adapted to the new classes. We present a method to address this issue, and learn object detectors incrementally, when neither the original training data nor annotations for the original classes in the new training set are available. The core of our proposed solution is a loss function to balance the interplay between predictions on the new classes and a new distillation loss which minimizes the discrepancy between responses for old classes from the original and the updated networks. This incremental learning can be performed multiple times, for a new set of classes in each step, with a moderate drop in performance compared to the baseline network trained on the ensemble of data. We present object detection results on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and COCO datasets, along with a detailed empirical analysis of the approach.
Learning to Disambiguate by Asking Discriminative Questions
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

The ability to ask questions is a powerful tool to gather information in order to learn about the world and resolve ambiguities. In this paper, we explore a novel problem of generating discriminative questions to help disambiguate visual instances. Our work can be seen as a complement and new extension to the rich research studies on image captioning and question answering. We introduce the first large-scale dataset with over 10,000 carefully annotated images-question tuples to facilitate benchmarking. In particular, each tuple consists of a pair of images and 4.6 discriminative questions (as positive samples) and 5.9 non-discriminative questions (as negative samples) on average. In addition, we present an effective method for visual discriminative question generation. The method can be trained in a weakly supervised manner without discriminative images-question tuples but just existing visual question answering datasets. Promising results are shown against representative baselines through quantitative evaluations and user studies.
Predicting Visual Exemplars of Unseen Classes for Zero-Shot Learning
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Leveraging class semantic descriptions and examples of known objects, zero-shot learning makes it possible to train a recognition model for an object class whose examples are not available. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot learning model that takes advantage of clustering structures in the semantic embedding space. The key idea is to impose the structural constraint that semantic representations must be predictive of the locations of their corresponding visual exemplars. To this end, this reduces to training multiple kernel-based regressors from semantic representation-exemplar pairs from labeled data of the seen object categories. Despite its simplicity, our approach significantly outperforms existing zero-shot learning methods on standard benchmark datasets, including the ImageNet dataset with more than 20,000 unseen categories.
Adaptive Feeding: Achieving Fast and Accurate Detections by Adaptively Combining Object Detectors
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Object detection aims at high speed and accuracy simultaneously. However, fast models are usually less accurate, while accurate models cannot satisfy our need for speed. A fast model can be 10 times faster but 50\% less accurate than an accurate model. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Feeding (AF) to combine a fast (but less accurate) detector and an accurate (but slow) detector, by adaptively determining whether an image is easy or hard and choosing an appropriate detector for it. In practice, we build a cascade of detectors, including the AF classifier which make the easy vs. hard decision and the two detectors. The AF classifier can be tuned to obtain different tradeoff between speed and accuracy, which has negligible training time and requires no additional training data. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC, MS COCO and Caltech Pedestrian datasets confirm that AF has the ability to achieve comparable speed as the fast detector and comparable accuracy as the accurate one at the same time. As an example, by combining the fast SSD300 with the accurate SSD500 detector, AF leads to 50\% speedup over SSD500 with the same precision on the VOC2007 test set.
Hide-And-Seek: Forcing a Network to Be Meticulous for Weakly-Supervised Object and Action Localization
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

We propose `Hide-and-Seek', a weakly-supervised framework that aims to improve object localization in images and action localization in videos. Most existing weakly-supervised methods localize only the most discriminative parts of an object rather than all relevant parts, which leads to suboptimal performance. Our key idea is to hide patches in a training image randomly, forcing the network to seek other relevant parts when the most discriminative part is hidden. Our approach only needs to modify the input image and can work with any network designed for object localization. During testing, we do not need to hide any patches. Our Hide-and-Seek approach obtains superior performance compared to previous methods for weakly-supervised object localization on the ILSVRC dataset. We also demonstrate that our framework can be easily extended to weakly-supervised action localization.
Two-Phase Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Localization
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation and localiza- tion have a problem of focusing only on the most important parts of an image since they use only image-level annota- tions. In this paper, we solve this problem fundamentally via two-phase learning. Our networks are trained in two steps. In the first step, a conventional fully convolutional network (FCN) is trained to find the most discriminative parts of an image. In the second step, the activations on the most salient parts are suppressed by inference conditional feedback, and then the second learning is performed to find the area of the next most important parts. By combining the activations of both phases, the entire portion of the tar- get object can be captured. Our proposed training scheme is novel and can be utilized in well-designed techniques for weakly supervised semantic segmentation, salient region detection, and object location prediction. Detailed experi- ments demonstrate the effectiveness of our two-phase learn- ing in each task.
Learning Robust Visual-Semantic Embeddings
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Many of the existing methods for learning joint embedding of images and text use only supervised information from paired images and its textual attributes. Taking advantage of the recent success of unsupervised learning in deep neural networks, we propose an end-to-end learning framework that is able to extract more robust multi-modal representations across domains. The proposed method combines representation learning models (i.e., auto-encoders) together with cross-domain learning criteria (i.e., Maximum Mean Discrepancy loss) to learn joint embeddings for semantic and visual features. A novel technique of unsupervised-data adaptation inference is introduced to construct more comprehensive embeddings for both labeled and unlabeled data. We evaluate our method on Animals with Attributes and Caltech-UCSD Birds 200-2011 dataset with a wide range of applications, including zero and few-shot image recognition and retrieval, from inductive to transductive settings. Empirically, we show that our framework improves over the current state of the art on many of the considered tasks.
Learning in an Uncertain World: Representing Ambiguity Through Multiple Hypotheses
Venue: Conference ICCV 2017
Year: 2017

Many prediction tasks contain uncertainty. In some cases, uncertainty is inherent in the task itself. In future prediction, for example, many distinct outcomes are equally valid. In other cases, uncertainty arises from the way data is labeled. For example, in object detection, many objects of interest often go unlabeled, and in human pose estimation, occluded joints are often labeled with ambiguous values. In this work we focus on a principled approach for handling such scenarios. In particular, we propose a framework for reformulating existing single-prediction models as multiple hypothesis prediction (MHP) models and an associated meta loss and optimization procedure to train them. To demonstrate our approach, we consider four diverse applications: human pose estimation, future prediction, image classification and segmentation. We find that MHP models outperform their single-hypothesis counterparts in all cases, and that MHP models simultaneously expose valuable insights into the variability of predictions.