mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Exploit All the Layers: Fast and Accurate CNN Object Detector With Scale Dependent Pooling and Cascaded Rejection Classifiers
Authors: Wongun Choi, Yuanqing Lin Fan Yang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate two new strategies to detect objects accurately and efficiently using deep convolutional neural network: 1) scale-dependent pooling and 2) layer-wise cascaded rejection classifiers. The scale-dependent pooling (SDP) improves detection accuracy by exploiting appropriate convolutional features depending on the scale of candidate object proposals. The cascaded rejection classifiers (CRC) effectively utilize convolutional features and eliminate negative object proposals in a cascaded manner, which greatly speeds up the detection while maintaining high accuracy. In combination of the two, our method achieves significantly better accuracy compared to other state-of-the-arts in three challenging datasets, PASCAL object detection challenge, KITTI object detection benchmark and newly collected Inner-city dataset, while being more efficient.
Dictionary Pair Classifier Driven Convolutional Neural Networks for Object Detection
Authors: Liang Lin, Wangmeng Zuo, Shuhang Gu, Lei Zhang Keze Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Feature representation and object category classification are two key components of most object detection methods. While significant improvements have been achieved for deep feature representation learning, traditional SVM/softmax classifiers remain the dominant methods for final object category classification. However, SVM/softmax classifiers lack the capacity of explicitly exploiting the complex structure of deep features, as they are purely discriminative methods. The recently proposed discriminative dictionary pair learning (DPL) model involves a fidelity term to minimize the reconstruction loss and a discrimination term to enhance the discriminative capability of the learned dictionary pair, and thus is appropriate for balancing the representation and discrimination to boost object detection performance. In this paper, we propose a novel object detection system by unifying DPL with the convolutional feature learning. Specifically, we incorporate DPL as a Dictionary Pair Classifier Layer (DPCL) into the deep architecture, and develop an end-to-end learning algorithm for optimizing the dictionary pairs and the neural networks simultaneously. Moreover, we design a multi-task loss for guiding our model to accomplish the three correlated tasks: objectness estimation, categoryness computation, and bounding box regression. From the extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007/2012 benchmarks, our approach demonstrates the effectiveness to substantially improve the performances over the popular existing object detection frameworks (e.g., R-CNN [13] and FRCN [12]), and achieves new state-of-the-arts.
Monocular 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Kaustav Kundu, Ziyu Zhang, Huimin Ma, Sanja Fidler, Raquel Urtasun Xiaozhi Chen
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to perform 3D object detection in single monocular images in the domain of autonomous driving.  Our method first aims to generate a set of candidate class-specific object proposals, which are then run through a standard CNN pipeline to obtain high-quality object detections. The focus of this paper is on proposal generation. In particular, we propose a probabilistic model that places object candidates in 3D using a prior on ground-plane. We then score each candidate box projected to the image plane via several intuitive potentials such as semantic segmentation, contextual information, size and location priors and typical object shape. The weights in our model are trained with S-SVM. Experiments show that our object proposal generation approach significantly outperforms all monocular baselines, and achieves the best detection performance on the challenging KITTI benchmark, among the published monocular competitors.
How Hard Can It Be? Estimating the Difficulty of Visual Search in an Image
Authors: Bogdan Alexe, Marius Leordeanu, Marius Popescu, Dim P. Papadopoulos, Vittorio Ferrari Radu Tudor Ionescu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We address the problem of estimating image difficulty defined as the human response time for solving a visual search task. We collect human annotations of image difficulty for the PASCAL VOC 2012 data set through a crowd-sourcing platform. We then analyze what human interpretable image properties can have an impact on visual search difficulty, and how accurate are those properties for predicting difficulty. Next, we build a regression model based on deep features learned with state of the art convolutional neural networks and show better results for predicting the ground-truth visual search difficulty scores produced by human annotators. Our model is able to correctly rank about 75% image pairs according to their difficulty score. We also show that our difficulty predictor generalizes well to new classes not seen during training. Finally, we demonstrate that our predicted difficulty scores are useful for weakly supervised object localization (8% improvement) and semi-supervised object classification (1% improvement).
Deep Relative Distance Learning: Tell the Difference Between Similar Vehicles
Authors: Yonghong Tian, Yaowei Yang, Lu Pang, Tiejun Huang Hongye Liu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: The growing explosion in the use of surveillance cameras in public security highlights the importance of vehicle search from a large-scale image or video database. However, compared with person re-identification or face recognition, vehicle search problem has long been neglected by researchers in vision community. This paper focuses on an interesting but challenging problem, vehicle re-identification (a.k.a precise vehicle search). We propose a Deep Relative Distance Learning (DRDL) method which exploits a two-branch deep convolutional network to project raw vehicle images into an Euclidean space where distance can be directly used to measure the similarity of arbitrary two vehicles. To further facilitate the future research on this problem, we also present a carefully-organized large-scale image database "VehicleID", which includes multiple images of the same vehicle captured by different real-world cameras in a city. We evaluate our DRDL method on our VehicleID dataset and another recently-released vehicle model classification dataset "CompCars" in three sets of experiments: vehicle re-identification, vehicle model verification and vehicle retrieval. Experimental results show that our method can achieve promising results and outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches.
Eye Tracking for Everyone
Authors: Aditya Khosla, Petr Kellnhofer, Harini Kannan, Suchendra Bhandarkar, Wojciech Matusik, Antonio Torralba Kyle Krafka
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: From scientific research to commercial applications, eye tracking is an important tool across many domains. Despite its range of applications, eye tracking has yet to become a pervasive technology. We believe that we can put the power of eye tracking in everyone's palm by building eye tracking software that works on commodity hardware such as mobile phones and tablets, without the need for additional sensors or devices. We tackle this problem by introducing GazeCapture, the first large-scale dataset for eye tracking, containing data from over 1450 people consisting of almost 2:5M frames. Using GazeCapture, we train iTracker, a convolutional neural network for eye tracking, which achieves a significant reduction in error over previous approaches while running in real time (10-15fps) on a modern mobile device. Our model achieves a prediction error of 1.71cm and 2.53cm without calibration on mobile phones and tablets respectively. With calibration, this is reduced to 1.34cm and 2.12cm. Further, we demonstrate that the features learned by iTracker generalize well to other datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results. The code, data, and models are available at http://gazecapture.csail.mit.edu.
Efficient Globally Optimal 2D-To-3D Deformable Shape Matching
Authors: Emanuele Rodola, Frank R. Schmidt, Michael M. Bronstein, Daniel Cremers Zorah Lahner
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We propose the first algorithm for non-rigid 2D-to-3D shape matching, where the input is a 2D query shape as well as a 3D target shape and the output is a continuous matching curve represented as a closed contour on the 3D shape. We cast the problem as finding the shortest circular path on the product 3-manifold of the two shapes. We prove that the optimal matching can be computed in polynomial time with a (worst-case) complexity of O(m*n^2*log(n)), where m and n denote the number of vertices on the 2D and the 3D shape respectively. Quantitative evaluation confirms that the method provides excellent results for sketch-based deformable 3D shape retrieval.
Ambiguity Helps: Classification With Disagreements in Crowdsourced Annotations
Authors: Daniel Hernandez-Lobato, Jose Miguel Hernandez-Lobato, Novi Quadrianto Viktoriia Sharmanska
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Imagine we show an image to a person and ask her/him to decide whether the scene in the image is warm or not warm, and whether it is easy or not to spot a squirrel in the image. For exactly the same image, the answers to those questions are likely to differ from person to person. This is because the task is inherently ambiguous. Such an ambiguous, therefore challenging, task is pushing the boundary of computer vision in showing what can and can not be learned from visual data. Crowdsourcing has been invaluable for collecting annotations. This is particularly so for a task that goes beyond a clear-cut dichotomy as multiple human judgments per image are needed to reach a consensus. This paper makes conceptual and technical contributions. On the conceptual side, we define disagreements among annotators as privileged information about the data instance. On the technical side, we propose a framework to incorporate annotation disagreements into the classifiers. The proposed framework is simple, relatively fast, and outperforms classifiers that do not take into account the disagreements, especially if tested on high confidence annotations.
A Task-Oriented Approach for Cost-Sensitive Recognition
Authors: Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ali Farhadi Roozbeh Mottaghi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: With the recent progress in visual recognition, we have already started to see a surge of vision related real-world applications. These applications, unlike general scene understanding, are task oriented and require specific information from visual data. Considering the current growth in new sensory devices, feature designs, feature learning methods, and algorithms, the search in the space of features and models becomes combinatorial. In this paper, we propose a novel cost-sensitive task-oriented recognition method that is based on a combination of linguistic semantics and visual cues. Our task-oriented framework is able to generalize to unseen tasks for which there is no training data and outperforms state-of-the-art cost-based recognition baselines on our new task-based dataset.
Refining Architectures of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Duncan Robertson, Yani Ioannou, Antonio Criminisi, Roberto Cipolla Sukrit Shankar
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently evinced immense success for various image recognition tasks. However, a question of paramount importance is somewhat unanswered in deep learning research - is the selected CNN optimal for the dataset in terms of accuracy and model size?  In this paper, we intend to answer this question and introduce a novel strategy that alters the architecture of a given CNN for a specified dataset, to potentially enhance the original accuracy while possibly reducing the model size. We use two operations for architecture refinement, viz. stretching and symmetrical splitting. Stretching increases the number of hidden units (nodes) in a  given CNN layer, while a symmetrical split of say K between two layers separates the input and output channels into K equal groups, and connects only the corresponding input-output channel groups.  Our procedure starts with a pre-trained CNN for a given dataset, and optimally decides the stretch and split factors across the network to refine the architecture. We empirically demonstrate the necessity of the two operations.   We evaluate our approach on two natural scenes attributes datasets, SUN Attributes  and CAMIT-NSAD, with architectures of GoogleNet and VGG-11, that are quite contrasting in their construction. We justify our choice of datasets, and show that they are interestingly distinct from each other, and together pose a challenge to our architectural refinement algorithm. Our results substantiate the usefulness of the proposed method.
iLab-20M: A Large-Scale Controlled Object Dataset to Investigate Deep Learning
Authors: Saeed Izadi, Laurent Itti Ali Borji
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Tolerance to image variations (e.g. translation, scale, pose, illumination, background) is an important desired property of any object recognition system, be it human or machine. Moving towards increasingly bigger datasets has been trending in computer vision especially with the emergence of highly popular deep learning models. While being very useful for learning invariance to object inter- and intra-class shape variability, these large-scale wild datasets are not very useful for learning  invariance to other parameters urging researchers to resort to other tricks for training a model. In this work, we introduce a large-scale synthetic dataset, which is freely and publicly available, and use it to answer several fundamental questions regarding selectivity and invariance properties of convolutional neural networks. Our dataset contains two parts: a) objects shot on a turntable: 15 categories, 8 rotation angles, 11 cameras on a semi-circular arch, 5 lighting conditions, 3 focus levels, variety of backgrounds (23.4 per instance) generating 1320 images per instance (about 22 million images in total), and b) scenes: in which a robotic arm takes pictures of objects on a 1:160 scale scene. We study: 1) invariance and selectivity of different CNN layers, 2) knowledge transfer from one object category to another, 3) systematic or random sampling of images to build a train set, 4) domain adaptation from synthetic to natural scenes, and 5) order of knowledge delivery to CNNs. We also discuss how our analyses can lead the field to develop more efficient deep learning methods.
Recursive Recurrent Nets With Attention Modeling for OCR in the Wild
Authors: Simon Osindero Chen-Yu Lee
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We present recursive recurrent neural networks with attention modeling (R2AM) for lexicon-free optical character recognition in natural scene images. The primary advantages of the proposed method are: (1) use of recursive convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which allow for parametrically efficient and effective image feature extraction; (2) an implicitly learned character-level language model, embodied in a recurrent neural network which avoids the need to use N-grams; and (3) the use of a soft-attention mechanism, allowing the model to selectively exploit image features in a coordinated way, and allowing for end-to-end training within a standard backpropagation framework. We validate our method with state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmark datasets: Street View Text, IIIT5k, ICDAR and Synth90k.
Deep Decision Network for Multi-Class Image Classification
Authors: Vivek Singh, Terrence Chen, R. Manmatha, Dorin Comaniciu Venkatesh N. Murthy
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel Deep Decision Network (DDN) that provides an alternative approach towards building an efficient deep learning network. During the learning phase, starting from the root network node, DDN automatically builds a network that splits the data into disjoint clusters of classes which would be handled by the subsequent expert networks. This results in a tree-like structured network driven by the data. The proposed method provides an insight into the data by identifying the group of classes that are hard to classify and require more attention when compared to others. DDN also has the ability to make early decisions thus making it suitable for time-sensitive applications.  We validate DDN on two publicly available benchmark datasets: CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 and it yields state-of-the-art classification performance on both the datasets. The proposed algorithm has no limitations to be applied to any generic classification problems.
Less Is More: Zero-Shot Learning From Online Textual Documents With Noise Suppression
Authors: Lingqiao Liu, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel Ruizhi Qiao
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Classifying a visual concept merely from its associated online textual source, such as a Wikipedia article, is an attractive research topic in zero-shot learning because it alleviates the burden of manually collecting semantic attributes. Several recent works have pursued this approach by exploring various ways of connecting the visual and text domains. This paper revisits this idea by stepping further to consider one important factor: the textual representation is usually too noisy for the zero-shot learning application. This consideration motivates us to design a simple-but-effective zero-shot learning method capable of suppressing noise in the text. More specifically, we propose an l_2,1-norm based objective function which can simultaneously suppress the noisy signal in the text and learn a function to match the text document and visual features. We also develop an optimization algorithm to efficiently solve the resulting problem. By conducting experiments on two large datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the competing methods which rely on online information sources but without explicit noise suppression. We further make an in-depth analysis of the proposed method and provide insight as to what kind of information in documents is useful for zero-shot learning.
Fast Algorithms for Linear and Kernel SVM+
Authors: Dengxin Dai, Mingkui Tan, Dong Xu, Luc Van Gool Wen Li
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: The SVM+ approach has shown excellent performance in visual recognition tasks for exploiting privileged information in the   training data. In this paper, we propose two efficient algorithms for solving the linear and kernel SVM+, respectively. For linear SVM+, we absorb the bias term into the weight vector, and formulate a new optimization problem with simpler constraints in the dual form. Then, we develop an efficient dual coordinate descent algorithm to solve the new optimization problem. For kernel SVM+, we further apply the l2-loss, which leads to a simpler optimization problem in the dual form with only half of dual variables when compared with the dual form of the original SVM+ method. More interestingly, we show that our new dual problem can be efficiently solved by using the SMO algorithm of the one-class SVM problem. Comprehensive experiments on three datasets clearly demonstrate that our proposed algorithms achieve significant speed-up than the state-of-the-art solvers for linear and kernel SVM+.
Hierarchically Gated Deep Networks for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Guo-Jun Qi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Semantic segmentation aims to parse the scene structure of images by annotating the labels to each pixel so that images can be segmented into different regions.   While image structures usually have various scales, it is difficult to use a single scale to model the spatial contexts for all individual pixels.  Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and their variants have made striking success for modeling the global scene structure for an image. However, they are limited in labeling fine-grained local structures like pixels and patches, since spatial contexts might be  blindly mixed up without appropriately customizing their scales.  To address this challenge, we develop a novel paradigm of multi-scale deep network to model spatial contexts surrounding different pixels at various scales.  It builds multiple layers of memory cells, learning feature representations for individual pixels at their customized scales by hierarchically absorbing relevant spatial contexts via memory gates between layers.Such Hierarchically Gated Deep Networks (HGDNs) can customize a suitable scale for each pixel, thereby delivering better performance on labeling scene structures of various scales.  We conduct the experiments on two datasets, and show competitive results compared with the other multi-scale deep networks on the semantic segmentation task.
Deep Structured Scene Parsing by Learning With Image Descriptions
Authors: Guangrun Wang, Rui Zhang, Ruimao Zhang, Xiaodan Liang, Wangmeng Zuo Liang Lin
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of structured scene parsing, i.e., parsing the input scene into a configuration including hierarchical semantic objects with their interaction relations. We propose a deep architecture consisting of two networks: i) a convolutional neural network (CNN) extracting the image representation for pixelwise object labeling and ii) a recursive neural network (RNN) discovering the hierarchical object structure and the inter-object relations. Rather than relying on elaborative annotations (e.g., manually labeled semantic maps and relations), we train our deep model in a weakly-supervised manner by leveraging the descriptive sentences of the training images. Specifically, we decompose each sentence into a semantic tree consisting of nouns and verb phrases, and facilitate these trees discovering the configurations of the training images. Once these scene configurations are determined, then the parameters of both the CNN and RNN are updated accordingly by back propagation. The entire model training is accomplished through an Expectation-Maximization method. Extensive experiments suggest that our model is capable of producing meaningful and structured scene configurations and achieving more favorable scene labeling performance on PASCAL VOC 2012 over other state-of-the-art weakly-supervised methods.
CNN-RNN: A Unified Framework for Multi-Label Image Classification
Authors: Yi Yang, Junhua Mao, Zhiheng Huang, Chang Huang, Wei Xu Jiang Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: While deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown a great success in single-label image classification, it is important to note that most real world images contain multiple labels, which could correspond to different objects, scenes, actions and attributes in an image. Traditional approaches to multi-label image classification learn independent classifiers for each category and employ ranking or thresholding on the classification results. These techniques, although working well, fail to explicitly exploit the label dependencies in an image. In this paper, we utilize recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to address this problem. Combined with CNNs, the proposed CNN-RNN framework learns a joint image-label embedding to characterize the semantic label dependency as well as the image-label relevance, and it can be trained end-to-end from scratch to integrate both information in an unified framework. Experimental results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art multi-label classification models.
Walk and Learn: Facial Attribute Representation Learning From Egocentric Video and Contextual Data
Authors: Yu Cheng, Rogerio Schmidt Feris Jing Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: The way people look in terms of facial attributes (ethnicity, hair color, facial hair, etc.) and the clothes or accessories they wear (sunglasses, hat, hoodies, etc.) is highly dependent on geo-location and weather condition, respectively. This work explores, for the first time, the use of this contextual information, as people with wearable cameras walk across different neighborhoods of a city, in order to learn a rich feature representation for facial attribute classification, without the costly manual annotation required by previous methods. By tracking the faces of casual walkers on more than 40 hours of egocentric video, we are able to cover tens of thousands of different identities and automatically extract nearly 5 million pairs of images connected by or from different face tracks, along with their weather and location context, under pose and lighting variations. These image pairs are then fed into a deep network that preserves similarity of images connected by the same track, in order to capture identity-related attribute features, and optimizes for location and weather prediction to capture additional facial attribute features. Finally, the network is fine-tuned with manually annotated samples. We perform an extensive experimental analysis on wearable data and two standard benchmark datasets based on web images (LFWA and CelebA). Our method outperforms by a large margin a network trained from scratch. Moreover, even without using manually annotated identity labels for pre-training as in previous methods, our approach achieves results that are better than the state of the art.
CNN-N-Gram for Handwriting Word Recognition
Authors: Lior Wolf Arik Poznanski
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Given an image of a handwritten word, a CNN is employed to estimate its n-gram frequency profile, which is the set of n-grams contained in the word. Frequencies for unigrams, bigrams and trigrams are estimated for the entire word and for parts of it. Canonical Correlation Analysis is then used to match the estimated profile to the true profiles of all words in a large dictionary. The CNN that is used employs several novelties such as the use of multiple fully connected branches. Applied to all commonly used handwriting recognition benchmarks, our method outperforms, by a very large margin, all existing methods.
Synthetic Data for Text Localisation in Natural Images
Authors: Andrea Vedaldi, Andrew Zisserman Ankush Gupta
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: In this paper we introduce a new method for text detection in natural images. The method comprises two contributions: First, a fast and scalable engine to generate synthetic images of text in clutter.  This engine overlays synthetic text to existing background images in a natural way, accounting for the local 3D scene geometry. Second, we use the synthetic images to train a Fully-Convolutional Regression Network (FCRN) which efficiently performs text detection and bounding-box regression at all locations and multiple scales in an image. We discuss the relation of FCRN to the recently-introduced YOLO detector, as well as other end-to-end object detection systems based on deep learning. The resulting detection network significantly out performs current methods for text detection in natural images, achieving an F-measure of 84.2% on the standard ICDAR 2013 benchmark. Furthermore, it can process 15 images per second on a GPU.
End-To-End People Detection in Crowded Scenes
Authors: Mykhaylo Andriluka, Andrew Y. Ng Russell Stewart
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Current people detectors operate either by scanning an image in a sliding window fashion or by classifying a discrete set of proposals. We propose a model that is based on decoding an image into a set of people detections. Our system takes an image as input and directly outputs a set of distinct detection hypotheses. Because we generate predictions jointly, common post-processing steps such as non-maximum suppression are unnecessary. We use a recurrent LSTM layer for sequence generation and train our model end-to-end with a new loss function that operates on sets of detections.  We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the challenging task of detecting people in crowded scenes
Real-Time Salient Object Detection With a Minimum Spanning Tree
Authors: Shengfeng He, Qingxiong Yang, Shao-Yi Chien Wei-Chih Tu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: In this paper, we present a real-time salient object detection system based on the minimum spanning tree. Due to the fact that background regions are typically connected to the image boundaries, salient objects can be extracted by computing the distances to the boundaries. However, measuring the image boundary connectivity efficiently is a challenging problem. Existing methods either rely on superpixel representation to reduce the processing units or approximate the distance transform. Instead, we propose an exact and iteration free solution on a minimum spanning tree. The minimum spanning tree representation of an image inherently reveals the object geometry information in a scene. Meanwhile, it largely reduces the search space of shortest paths, resulting an efficient and high quality distance transform algorithm. We further introduce a boundary dissimilarity measure to compliment the shortage of distance transform for salient object detection. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed algorithm achieves the leading performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency and accuracy.
Local Background Enclosure for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
Authors: Nick Barnes, Shaodi You, Chris McCarthy David Feng
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Recent work in salient object detection has considered the incorporation of depth cues from RGB-D images. In most cases, depth contrast is used as the main feature. However, areas of high contrast in background regions cause false positives for such methods, as the background frequently contains regions that are highly variable in depth. Here, we propose a novel RGB-D saliency feature. Local Background Enclosure (LBE) captures the spread of angular directions which are background with respect to the candidate region and the object that it is part of. We show that our feature improves over state-of-the-art RGB-D saliency approaches as well as RGB methods on the RGBD1000 and NJUDS2000 datasets.
Adaptive Object Detection Using Adjacency and Zoom Prediction
Authors: Tara Javidi, Svetlana Lazebnik Yongxi Lu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: State-of-the-art object detection systems rely on an accurate set of region proposals. Several recent methods use a neural network architecture to hypothesize promising object locations. While these approaches are computationally efficient, they rely on fixed image regions as anchors for predictions. In this paper we propose to use a search strategy that adaptively directs computational resources to sub-regions likely to contain objects. Compared to methods based on fixed anchor locations, our approach naturally adapts to cases where object instances are sparse and small. Our approach is comparable in terms of accuracy to the state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN approach while using two orders of magnitude fewer anchors on average. Code is publicly available.
Semantic Channels for Fast Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Sergiu Nedevschi Arthur Daniel Costea
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Pedestrian detection and semantic segmentation are high potential tasks for many real-time applications. However most of the top performing approaches provide state of art results at high computational costs. In this work we propose a fast solution for achieving state of art results for both pedestrian detection and semantic segmentation.  As baseline for pedestrian detection we use sliding windows over cost efficient multiresolution filtered LUV+HOG channels. We use the same channels for classifying pixels into eight semantic classes. Using short range and long range multiresolution channel features we achieve more robust  segmentation results compared to traditional codebook based approaches at much lower computational costs. The resulting segmentations are used as additional semantic channels in order to achieve a more powerful pedestrian detector. To also achieve fast pedestrian detection we employ a multiscale detection scheme based on a single flexible pedestrian model and a single image scale. The proposed solution provides competitive results on both pedestrian detection and semantic segmentation benchmarks at 8 FPS on CPU and at 15 FPS on GPU, being the fastest top performing approach.
G-CNN: An Iterative Grid Based Object Detector
Authors: Mohammad Rastegari, Larry S. Davis Mahyar Najibi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We introduce G-CNN, an object detection technique based on CNNs which works without proposal algorithms. G-CNN starts with a multi-scale grid of fixed bounding boxes. We train a regressor to move and scale elements of the grid towards objects iteratively. G-CNN models the problem of object detection as finding a path from a fixed grid to boxes tightly surrounding the objects. G-CNN with around 180 boxes in a multi-scale grid performs comparably to Fast R-CNN which uses around 2K bounding boxes generated with a proposal technique. This strategy makes detection faster by removing the object proposal stage as well as reducing the number of boxes to be processed.
Recurrent Face Aging
Authors: Zhen Cui, Yan Yan, Jiashi Feng, Shuicheng Yan, Xiangbo Shu, Nicu Sebe Wei Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Modeling the aging process of human face is important for cross-age face verification and recognition. In this paper, we introduce a recurrent face aging (RFA) framework based on a recurrent neural network which can identify the ages of people from 0 to 80. Due to the lack of labeled face data of the same person captured in a long range of ages, traditional face aging models usually split the ages into discrete groups and learn a one-step face feature transformation for each pair of adjacent age groups. However, those methods neglect the in-between evolving states between the adjacent age groups and the synthesized faces often suffer from severe ghosting artifacts. Since human face aging is a smooth progression, it is more appropriate to age the face by going through smooth transition states. In this way, the ghosting artifacts can be effectively eliminated and the intermediate aged faces between two discrete age groups can also be obtained. Towards this target, we employ a two-layer gated recurrent unit as the basic recurrent module whose bottom layer encodes a young face to a latent representation and the top layer decodes the representation to a corresponding older face. The experimental results demonstrate our proposed RFA provides better aging faces over other state-of-the-art age progression methods.
Face2Face: Real-Time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos
Authors: Michael Zollhofer, Marc Stamminger, Christian Theobalt, Matthias Niessner Justus Thies
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: We present a novel approach for real-time facial reenactment of a monocular target video sequence (e.g., Youtube video). The source sequence is also a monocular video stream, captured live with a commodity webcam. Our goal is to animate the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-render the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion. To this end, we first address the under-constrained problem of facial identity recovery from monocular video by non-rigid model-based bundling. At run time, we track facial expressions of both source and target video using a dense photometric consistency measure. Reenactment is then achieved by fast and efficient deformation transfer between source and target. The mouth interior that best matches the re-targeted expression is retrieved from the target sequence and warped to produce an accurate fit. Finally, we convincingly re-render the synthesized target face on top of the corresponding video stream such that it seamlessly blends with the real-world illumination. We demonstrate our method in a live setup, where Youtube videos are reenacted in real time.
Self-Adaptive Matrix Completion for Heart Rate Estimation From Face Videos Under Realistic Conditions
Authors: Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Elisa Ricci, Lijun Yin, Jeffrey F. Cohn, Nicu Sebe Sergey Tulyakov
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Recent studies in computer vision have shown that, while practically invisible to a human observer, skin color changes due to blood flow can be captured on face videos and, surprisingly, be used to estimate the heart rate (HR). While considerable progress has been made in the last few years, still many issues remain open. In particular, state-of-the-art approaches are not robust enough to operate in natural conditions (e.g. in case of spontaneous movements, facial expressions, or illumination changes). Opposite to previous approaches that estimate the HR by processing all the skin pixels inside a fixed region of interest, we introduce a strategy to dynamically select face regions useful for robust HR estimation. Our approach, inspired by recent advances on matrix completion theory, allows us to predict the HR while simultaneously discover the best regions of the face to be used for estimation. Thorough experimental evaluation conducted on public benchmarks suggests that the proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art HR estimation methods in naturalistic conditions.
Visually Indicated Sounds
Authors: Phillip Isola, Josh McDermott, Antonio Torralba, Edward H. Adelson, William T. Freeman Andrew Owens
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Objects make distinctive sounds when they are hit or scratched. These sounds reveal aspects of an object's material properties, as well as the actions that produced them. In this paper, we propose the task of predicting what sound an object makes when struck as a way of studying physical interactions within a visual scene. We present an algorithm that synthesizes sound from silent videos of people hitting and scratching objects with a drumstick. This algorithm uses a recurrent neural network to predict sound features from videos and then produces a waveform from these features with an example-based synthesis procedure. We show that the sounds predicted by our model are realistic enough to fool participants in a "real or fake" psychophysical experiment, and that they convey significant information about material properties and physical interactions.
Image Style Transfer Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Alexander S. Ecker, Matthias Bethge Leon A. Gatys
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Rendering the semantic content of an image in different styles is a difficult image processing task. Arguably, a major limiting factor for previous approaches has been the lack of image representations that explicitly represent semantic information and, thus, allow to separate image content from style. Here we use image representations derived from Convolutional Neural Networks optimised for object recognition, which make high level image information explicit. We introduce A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style that can separate and recombine the image content and style of natural images. The algorithm allows us to produce new images of high perceptual quality that combine the content of an arbitrary photograph with the appearance of numerous well-known artworks. Our results provide new insights into the deep image representations learned by Convolutional Neural Networks and demonstrate their potential for high level image synthesis and manipulation.
Patch-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Whole Slide Tissue Image Classification
Authors: Dimitris Samaras, Tahsin M. Kurc, Yi Gao, James E. Davis, Joel H. Saltz Le Hou
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are state-of-the-art models for many image classification tasks. However, to recognize cancer subtypes automatically, training a CNN on gigapixel resolution Whole Slide Tissue Images (WSI) is currently computationally impossible. The differentiation of cancer subtypes is based on cellular-level visual features observed on image patch scale. Therefore, we argue that in this situation, training a patch-level classifier on image patches will perform better than or similar to an image-level classifier. The challenge becomes how to intelligently combine patch-level classification results and model the fact that not all patches will be discriminative. We propose to train a decision fusion model to aggregate patch-level predictions given by patch-level CNNs, which to the best of our knowledge has not been shown before. Furthermore, we formulate a novel Expectation-Maximization (EM) based method that automatically locates discriminative patches robustly by utilizing the spatial relationships of patches. We apply our method to the classification of glioma and non-small-cell lung carcinoma cases into subtypes. The classification accuracy of our method is similar to the inter-observer agreement between pathologists. Although it is impossible to train CNNs on WSIs, we experimentally demonstrate using a comparable non-cancer dataset of smaller images that a patch-based CNN can outperform an image-based CNN.
Hedgehog Shape Priors for Multi-Object Segmentation
Authors: Olga Veksler, Milan Sonka, Yuri Boykov Hossam Isack
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: Star-convexity prior is popular for interactive single object segmentation due to its simplicity and amenability to binary graph cut optimization. We propose a more general multi-object segmentation approach. Moreover, each object can be constrained by a more descriptive shape prior, "hedgehog". Each hedgehog shape has its surface normals locally constrained by an arbitrary given vector field, e.g. gradient of the user-scribble distance transform. In contrast to star-convexity, the tightness of our normal constraint can be changed giving better control over allowed shapes. For example, looser constraints, i.e. wider cones of allowed normals, give more relaxed hedgehog shapes. On the other hand, the tightest constraint enforces skeleton consistency with the scribbles. In general, hedgehog shapes are more descriptive than a star, which is only a special case corresponding to a radial vector field and weakest tightness. Our approach has significantly more applications than standard single star-convex segmentation, e.g. in medical data we can separate multiple non-star organs with similar appearances and weak edges. Optimization is done by our modified a-expansion moves shown to be submodular for multi-hedgehog shapes.
Latent Variable Graphical Model Selection Using Harmonic Analysis: Applications to the Human Connectome Project (HCP)
Authors: Hyunwoo J. Kim, Nagesh Adluru, Vikas Singh Won Hwa Kim
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2016 (Main Conference Track), 2016

Abstract: A major goal of imaging studies such as the (ongoing) Human Connectome Project (HCP) is to characterize the structural network map of the human brain and identify its associations with covariates such as genotype, risk factors, and so on that correspond to an individual. But the set of image derived measures and the set of covariates are both large, so we must first estimate a 'parsimonious' set of relations between the measurements. For instance, a Gaussian graphical model will show conditional independences between the random variables, which can then be used to setup specific hypothesis based analyses downstream. But most such data involve a large list of 'latent' variables that remain unobserved, yet affect the 'observed' variables sustantially. Accounting for such latent variables falls outside the scope of standard inverse covariance matrix estimation, and is tackled via highly specialized optimization methods. This paper offers a unique harmonic analysis view of this problem. By casting the estimation of the precision matrix in terms of a composition of low-frequency latent variables and high-frequency sparse terms, we show how the problem can be formulated using a new wavelet-type expansion in non-Euclidean spaces. Our formalization poses the estimation problem entirely in the frequency space and shows how it can be solved by a simple sub-gradient scheme (involving a single variable). We provide a compelling set of scientific results on   500 scans from the recently released HCP data where our algorithm recovers highly interpretable and sparse conditional dependencies between brain connectivity pathways and well-known covariates.