OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Action Maps of Large Environments via First-Person Vision
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

When people observe and interact with physical spaces, they are able to associate functionality to regions in the environment. Our goal is to automate dense functional understanding of large spaces by leveraging sparse activity demonstrations recorded from an ego-centric viewpoint. The method we describe enables functionality estimation in large scenes where people have behaved, as well as novel scenes where no behaviors are observed. Our method learns and predicts "Action Maps", which encode the ability for a user to perform activities at various locations. With the usage of an egocentric camera to observe human activities, our method scales with the size of the scene without the need for mounting multiple static surveillance cameras and is well-suited to the task of observing activities up-close. We demonstrate that by capturing appearance-based attributes of the environment and associating these attributes with activity demonstrations, our proposed mathematical framework allows for the prediction of Action Maps in new environments. Additionally, we offer a preliminary glance of the applicability of Action Maps by demonstrating a proof-of-concept application in which they are used in concert with activity detections to perform localization.
Shallow and Deep Convolutional Networks for Saliency Prediction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

The prediction of salient areas in images has been traditionally addressed with hand-crafted features based on neuroscience principles. This paper, however, addresses the problem with a completely data-driven approach by training a convolutional neural network (convnet). The learning process is formulated as a minimization of a loss function that measures the Euclidean distance of the predicted saliency map with the provided ground truth. The recent publication of large datasets of saliency prediction has provided enough data to train end-to-end architectures that are both fast and accurate. Two designs are proposed: a shallow convnet trained from scratch, and a another deeper solution whose first three layers are adapted from another network trained for classification. To the authors knowledge, these are the first end-to-end CNNs trained and tested for the purpose of saliency prediction.
Sample and Filter: Nonparametric Scene Parsing via Efficient Filtering
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Scene parsing has attracted a lot of attention in computer vision. While parametric models have proven effective for this task, they cannot easily incorporate new training data. By contrast, nonparametric approaches, which bypass any learning phase and directly transfer the labels from the training data to the query images, can readily exploit new labeled samples as they become available. Unfortunately, because of the computational cost of their label transfer procedures, state-of-the-art nonparametric methods typically filter out most training images to only keep a few relevant ones to label the query. As such, these methods throw away many images that still contain valuable information and generally obtain an unbalanced set of labeled samples. In this paper, we introduce a nonparametric approach to scene parsing that follows a sample-and-filter strategy. More specifically, we propose to sample labeled superpixels according to an image similarity score, which allows us to obtain a balanced set of samples. We then formulate label transfer as an efficient filtering procedure, which lets us exploit more labeled samples than existing techniques. Our experiments evidence the benefits of our approach over state-of-the-art nonparametric methods on two benchmark datasets.
Deep Saliency With Encoded Low Level Distance Map and High Level Features
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Recent advances in saliency detection have utilized deep learning to obtain high level features to detect salient regions in a scene. These advances have demonstrated superior results over previous works that utilize hand-crafted low level features for saliency detection. In this paper, we demonstrate that hand-crafted features can provide complementary information to enhance performance of saliency detection that utilizes only high level features. Our method utilizes both high level and low level features for saliency detection under a unified deep learning framework. The high level features are extracted using the VGG-net, and the low level features are compared with other parts of an image to form a low level distance map. The low level distance map is then encoded using a convolutional neural network(CNN) with multiple 1X1 convolutional and ReLU layers. We concatenate the encoded low level distance map and the high level features, and connect them to a fully connected neural network classifier to evaluate the saliency of a query region. Our experiments show that our method can further improve the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning-based saliency detection methods.
Instance-Level Segmentation for Autonomous Driving With Deep Densely Connected MRFs
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Our aim is to provide a pixel-wise instance-level labeling of a monocular image in the context of autonomous driving. We build on recent work [Zhang et al., ICCV15] that trained a convolutional neural net to predict instance labeling in local image patches, extracted exhaustively in a stride from an image. A simple Markov random field model using several heuristics was then proposed in [Zhang et al., ICCV15] to derive a globally consistent instance labeling of the image. In this paper, we formulate the global labeling problem with a novel densely connected Markov random field and show how to encode various intuitive potentials in a way that is amenable to efficient mean field inference [Krähenbühl et al., NIPS11]. Our potentials encode the compatibility between the global labeling and the patch-level predictions, contrast-sensitive smoothness as well as the fact that separate regions form different instances. Our experiments on the challenging KITTI benchmark [Geiger et al., CVPR12] demonstrate that our method achieves a significant performance boost over the baseline [Zhang et al., ICCV15].
Learning Temporal Regularity in Video Sequences
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Perceiving meaningful activities in a long video sequence is a challenging problem due to ambiguous definition of 'meaningfulness' as well as clutters in the scene. We approach this problem by learning a generative model for regular motion patterns, termed as regularity, using multiple sources with very limited supervision. Specifically, we propose two methods that are built upon the autoencoders for their ability to work with little to no supervision. We first leverage the conventional handcrafted spatio-temporal local features and learn a fully connected autoencoder on them. Second, we build a fully convolutional feed-forward autoencoder to learn both the local features and the classifiers as an end-to-end learning framework. Our model can capture the regularities from multiple datasets. We evaluate our methods in both qualitative and quantitative ways - showing the learned regularity of videos in various aspects and demonstrating competitive performance on anomaly detection datasets as an application.
Training Region-Based Object Detectors With Online Hard Example Mining
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

The field of object detection has made significant advances riding on the wave of region-based ConvNets, but their training procedure still includes many heuristics and hyperparameters that are costly to tune. We present a simple yet surprisingly effective online hard example mining (OHEM) algorithm for training region-based ConvNet detectors. Our motivation is the same as it has always been -- detection datasets contain an overwhelming number of easy examples and a small number of hard examples. Automatic selection of these hard examples can make training more effective and efficient. OHEM is a simple and intuitive algorithm that eliminates several heuristics and hyperparameters in common use. But more importantly, it yields consistent and significant boosts in detection performance on benchmarks like PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012. Its effectiveness increases as datasets become larger and more difficult, as demonstrated by the results on the MS COCO dataset. Moreover, combined with complementary advances in the field, OHEM leads to state-of-the-art results of 78.9% and 76.3% mAP on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 respectively.
You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network predicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detectors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is far less likely to predict false detections where nothing exists. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms all other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, by a wide margin when generalizing from natural images to artwork on both the Picasso Dataset and the People-Art Dataset.
LocNet: Improving Localization Accuracy for Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

We propose a novel object localization methodology with the purpose of boosting the localization accuracy of state-of-the-art object detection systems. Our model, given a search region, aims at returning the bounding box of an object of interest inside this region. To accomplish its goal, it relies on assigning conditional probabilities to each row and column of this region, where these probabilities provide useful information regarding the location of the boundaries of the object inside the search region and allow the accurate inference of the object bounding box under a simple probabilistic framework. For implementing our localization model, we make use of a convolutional neural network architecture that is properly adapted for this task, called LocNet. We show experimentally that LocNet achieves a very significant improvement on the mAP for high IoU thresholds on PASCAL VOC2007 test set and that it can be very easily coupled with recent state-of-the-art object detection systems, helping them to boost their performance. Finally, we demonstrate that our detection approach can achieve high detection accuracy even when it is given as input a set of sliding windows, thus proving that it is independent of box proposal methods.
Deep Sliding Shapes for Amodal 3D Object Detection in RGB-D Images
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

We focus on the task of amodal 3D object detection in RGB-D images, which aims to produce a 3D bounding box of an object in metric form at its full extent. We introduce Deep Sliding Shapes, a 3D ConvNet formulation that takes a 3D volumetric scene from a RGB-D image as input and outputs 3D object bounding boxes. In our approach, we propose the first 3D Region Proposal Network (RPN) to learn objectness from geometric shapes and the first joint Object Recognition Network (ORN) to extract geometric features in 3D and color features in 2D. In particular, we handle objects of various sizes by training an amodal RPN at two different scales and an ORN to regress 3D bounding boxes. Experiments show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art by 13.8 in mAP and is 200x faster than the original Sliding Shapes. All source code and pre-trained models will be available at GitHub.
Object Detection From Video Tubelets With Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Deep Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown impressive performance in various vision tasks such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. For object detection, particularly in still images, the performance has been significantly increased last year thanks to powerful deep networks (e.g. GoogleNet) and detection frameworks (e.g. Regions with CNN features (R-CNN)). The lately introduced ImageNet task on object detection from video (VID) brings the object detection task into the video domain, in which objects' locations at each frame are required to be annotated with bounding boxes. In this work, we introduce a complete framework for the VID task based on still-image object detection and general object tracking. Their relations and contributions in the VID task are thoroughly studied and evaluated. In addition, a temporal convolution network is proposed to incorporate temporal information to regularize the detection results and shows its effectiveness for the task.
HyperNet: Towards Accurate Region Proposal Generation and Joint Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Almost all of the current top-performing object detection networks employ region proposals to guide the search for object instances. State-of-the-art region proposal methods usually need several thousand proposals to get high recall, thus hurting the detection efficiency. Although the latest Region Proposal Network method gets promising detection accuracy with several hundred proposals, it still struggles in small-size object detection and precise localization (e.g., large IoU thresholds), mainly due to the coarseness of its feature maps. In this paper, we present a deep hierarchical network, namely HyperNet, for handling region proposal generation and object detection jointly. Our HyperNet is primarily based on an elaborately designed Hyper Feature which aggregates hierarchical feature maps first and then compresses them into a uniform space. The Hyper Features well incorporate deep but highly semantic, intermediate but really complementary, and shallow but naturally high-resolution features of the image, thus enabling us to construct HyperNet by sharing them both in generating proposals and detecting objects via an end-to-end joint training strategy. For the deep VGG16 model, our method achieves completely leading recall and state-of-the-art object detection accuracy on PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 using only 100 proposals per image. It runs with a speed of 5 fps (including all steps) on a GPU, thus having the potential for real-time processing.
ASP Vision: Optically Computing the First Layer of Convolutional Neural Networks Using Angle Sensitive Pixels
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Deep learning using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is quickly becoming the state-of-the-art for challenging computer vision applications. However, deep learning's power consumption and bandwidth requirements currently limit its application in embedded and mobile systems with tight energy budgets. In this paper, we explore the energy savings of optically computing the first layer of CNNs. To do so, we utilize bio-inspired Angle Sensitive Pixels (ASPs), custom CMOS diffractive image sensors which act similar to Gabor filter banks in the V1 layer of the human visual cortex. ASPs replace both image sensing and the first layer of a conventional CNN by directly performing optical edge filtering, saving sensing energy, data bandwidth, and CNN FLOPS to compute. Our experimental results (both on synthetic data and a hardware prototype) for a variety of vision tasks such as digit recognition, object recognition, and face identification demonstrate using ASPs while achieving similar performance compared to traditional deep learning pipelines.
Beyond Local Search: Tracking Objects Everywhere With Instance-Specific Proposals
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Most tracking-by-detection methods employ a local search window around the predicted object location in the current frame assuming the previous location is accurate, the trajectory is smooth, and the computational capacity permits a search radius that can accommodate the maximum speed yet small enough to reduce mismatches. These, however, may not be valid always, in particular for fast and irregularly moving objects. Here, we present an object tracker that is not limited to a local search window and has ability to probe efficiently the entire frame. Our method generates a small number of "high-quality" proposals by a novel instance-specific objectness measure and evaluates them against the object model that can be adopted from an existing tracking-by-detection approach as a core tracker. During the tracking process, we update the object model concentrating on hard false-positives supplied by the proposals, which help suppressing distractors caused by difficult background clutters, and learn how to re-rank proposals according to the object model. Since we reduce significantly the number of hypotheses the core tracker evaluates, we can use richer object descriptors and stronger detector. Our method outperforms most recent state-of-the-art trackers on popular tracking benchmarks, and provides improved robustness for fast moving objects as well as for ultra low-frame-rate videos.
Direct Prediction of 3D Body Poses From Motion Compensated Sequences
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

We propose an efficient approach to exploiting motion information from consecutive frames of a video sequence to recover the 3D pose of people. Previous approaches typically compute candidate poses in individual frames and then link them in a post-processing step to resolve ambiguities. By contrast, we directly regress from a spatio-temporal volume of bounding boxes to a 3D pose in the central frame. We further show that, for this approach to achieve its full potential, it is essential to compensate for the motion in consecutive frames so that the subject remains centered. This then allows us to effectively overcome ambiguities and improve upon the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the Human3.6m, HumanEva, and KTH Multiview Football 3D human pose estimation benchmarks.
Video2GIF: Automatic Generation of Animated GIFs From Video
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

We introduce the novel problem of automatically generating animated GIFs from video. GIFs are short looping video with no sound, and a perfect combination between image and video that really capture our attention. GIFs tell a story, express emotion, turn events into humorous moments, and are the new wave of photojournalism. We pose the question: Can we automate the entirely manual and elaborate process of GIF creation by leveraging the plethora of user generated GIF content? We propose a Robust Deep RankNet that, given a video, generates a ranked list of its segments according to their suitability as GIF. We train our model to learn what visual content is often selected for GIFs by using over 100K user generated GIFs and their corresponding video sources. We effectively deal with the noisy web data by proposing a novel adaptive Huber loss in the ranking formulation. We show that our approach is robust to outliers and picks up several patterns that are frequently present in popular animated GIFs. On our new large-scale benchmark dataset, we show the advantage of our approach over several state-of-the-art methods.
NTU RGB+D: A Large Scale Dataset for 3D Human Activity Analysis
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Recent approaches in depth-based human activity analysis achieved outstanding performance and proved the effectiveness of 3D representation for classification of action classes. Currently available depth-based and RGB+D-based action recognition benchmarks have a number of limitations, including the lack of training samples, distinct class labels, camera views and variety of subjects. In this paper we introduce a large-scale dataset for RGB+D human action recognition with more than 56 thousand video samples and 4 million frames, collected from 40 distinct subjects. Our dataset contains 60 different action classes including daily, mutual, and health-related actions. In addition, we propose a new recurrent neural network structure to model the long-term temporal correlation of the features for each body part, and utilize them for better action classification. Experimental results show the advantages of applying deep learning methods over state-of-the-art hand-crafted features on the suggested cross-subject and cross-view evaluation criteria for our dataset. The introduction of this large scale dataset will enable the community to apply, develop and adapt various data-hungry learning techniques for the task of depth-based and RGB+D-based human activity analysis.
Temporal Action Localization in Untrimmed Videos via Multi-Stage CNNs
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

We address temporal action localization in untrimmed long videos. This is important because videos in real applications are usually unconstrained and contain multiple action instances plus video content of background scenes or other activities. To address this challenging issue, we exploit the effectiveness of deep networks in temporal action localization via three segment-based 3D ConvNets: (1) a proposal network identifies candidate segments in a long video that may contain actions; (2) a classification network learns one-vs-all action classification model to serve as initialization for the localization network; and (3) a localization network fine-tunes on the learned classification network to localize each action instance. We propose a novel loss function for the localization network to explicitly consider temporal overlap and therefore achieve high temporal localization accuracy. Only the proposal network and the localization network are used during prediction. On two large-scale benchmarks, our approach achieves significantly superior performances compared with other state-of-the-art systems: mAP increases from 1.7% to 7.4% on MEXaction2 and increases from 15.0% to 19.0% on THUMOS 2014, when the overlap threshold for evaluation is set to 0.5.
Summary Transfer: Exemplar-Based Subset Selection for Video Summarization
Venue: Conference CVPR 2016
Year: 2016

Video summarization has unprecedented importance to help us digest, browse, and search today's ever-growing video collections. We propose a novel subset selection technique that leverages supervision in the form of human-created summaries to perform automatic keyframe-based video summarization. The main idea is to nonparametrically transfer summary structures from annotated videos to unseen test videos. We show how to extend our method to exploit semantic side information about the video's category/genre to guide the transfer process by those training videos semantically consistent with the test input. We also show how to generalize our method to subshot-based summarization, which not only reduces computational costs but also provides more flexible ways of defining visual similarity across subshots spanning several frames. We conduct extensive evaluation on several benchmarks and demonstrate promising results, outperforming existing methods in several settings.