mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning Dynamic Siamese Network for Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Wei Feng, Ce Zhou, Rui Huang, Liang Wan, Song Wang Qing Guo
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: How to effectively learn temporal variation of target appearance, to exclude the interference of cluttered background, while maintaining real-time response, is an essential problem of visual object tracking. Recently, Siamese networks have shown great potentials of matching based trackers in achieving balanced accuracy and beyond real-time speed. However, they still have a big gap to classification & updating based trackers in tolerating the temporal changes of objects and imaging conditions. In this paper, we propose dynamic Siamese network, via a fast transformation learning model that enables effective online learning of target appearance variation and background suppression from previous frames. We then present elementwise multi-layer fusion to adaptively integrate the network outputs using multi-level deep features. Unlike state-of-the-art trackers, our approach allows the usage of any feasible generally- or particularly-trained features, such as SiamFC and VGG. More importantly, the proposed dynamic Siamese network can be jointly trained as a whole directly on the labeled video sequences, thus can take full advantage of the rich spatial temporal information of moving objects. As a result, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on OTB-2013 and VOT-2015 benchmarks, while exhibits superiorly balanced accuracy and real-time response over state-of-the-art competitors.
High Order Tensor Formulation for Convolutional Sparse Coding
Authors: Bernard Ghanem Adel Bibi
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Convolutional sparse coding (CSC) has gained attention for its successful role as a reconstruction and a classification tool in the computer vision and machine learning community. Current CSC methods can only reconstruct single-feature 2D images independently. However, learning multi-dimensional dictionaries and sparse codes for the reconstruction of multi-dimensional data is very important, as it examines correlations among all the data jointly. This provides more capacity for the learned dictionaries to better reconstruct data. In this paper, we propose a generic and novel formulation for the CSC problem that can handle an arbitrary order tensor of data. Backed with experimental results, our proposed formulation can not only tackle applications that are not possible with standard CSC solvers, including colored video reconstruction (5D- tensors), but it also performs favorably in reconstruction with much fewer parameters as compared to naive extensions of standard CSC to multiple features/channels.
Learning Proximal Operators: Using Denoising Networks for Regularizing Inverse Imaging Problems
Authors: Michael Moller, Caner Hazirbas, Daniel Cremers Tim Meinhardt
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: While variational methods have been among the most powerful tools for solving linear inverse problems in imaging, deep (convolutional) neural networks have recently taken the lead in many challenging benchmarks. A remaining drawback of deep learning approaches is their requirement for an expensive retraining whenever the specific problem, the noise level, noise type, or desired measure of fidelity changes. On the contrary, variational methods have a plug-and-play nature as they usually consist of separate data fidelity and regularization terms. In this paper we study the possibility of replacing the proximal operator of the regularization used in many convex energy minimization algorithms by a denoising neural network. The latter therefore serves as an implicit natural image prior, while the data term can still be chosen independently. Using a fixed denoising neural network in exemplary problems of image deconvolution with different blur kernels and image demosaicking, we obtain state-of-the-art reconstruction results. These indicate the high generalizability of our approach and a reduction of the need for problem-specific training. Additionally, we discuss novel results on the analysis of possible optimization algorithms to incorporate the network into, as well as the choices of algorithm parameters and their relation to the noise level the neural network is trained on.
ScaleNet: Guiding Object Proposal Generation in Supermarkets and Beyond
Authors: Wei Shen, Weichao Qiu, Chenxi Liu, Alan Yuille Siyuan Qiao
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Motivated by product detection in supermarkets, this paper studies the problem of object proposal generation in supermarket images and other natural images. We argue that estimation of object scales in images is helpful for generating object proposals, especially for supermarket images where object scales are usually within a small range. Therefore, we propose to estimate object scales of images before generating object proposals. The proposed method for predicting object scales is called ScaleNet. To validate the effectiveness of ScaleNet, we build three supermarket datasets, two of which are real-world datasets used for testing and the other one is a synthetic dataset used for training. In short, we extend the previous state-of-the-art object proposal methods by adding a scale prediction phase. The resulted method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on the supermarket datasets by a large margin. We also show that the approach works for object proposal on other natural images and it outperforms the previous state-of-the-art object proposal methods on the MS COCO dataset. The supermarket datasets, the virtual supermarkets, and the tools for creating more synthetic datasets will be made public.
Temporal Dynamic Graph LSTM for Action-Driven Video Object Detection
Authors: Xiaodan Liang, Xiaolong Wang, Dit-Yan Yeung, Abhinav Gupta Yuan Yuan
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate a weakly-supervised object detection framework. Most existing frameworks focus on using static images to learn object detectors. However, these detectors often fail to generalize to videos because of the existing domain shift. Therefore, we investigate learning these detectors directly from boring videos of daily activities. Instead of using bounding boxes, we explore the use of action descriptions as supervision since they are relatively easy to gather. A common issue, however, is that objects of interest that are not involved in human actions are often absent in global action descriptions known as "missing label". To tackle this problem, we propose a novel temporal dynamic graph Long Short-Term Memory network (TD- Graph LSTM). TD-Graph LSTM enables global temporal reasoning by constructing a dynamic graph that is based on temporal correlations of object proposals and spans the entire video. The missing label issue for each individual frame can thus be significantly alleviated by transferring knowledge across correlated objects proposals in the whole video. Extensive evaluations on a large-scale daily-life action dataset (i.e., Charades) demonstrates the superiority of our proposed method. We also release object bounding-box annotations for more than 5,000 frames in Charades. We believe this annotated data can also benefit other research on video-based object recognition in the future.
VQS: Linking Segmentations to Questions and Answers for Supervised Attention in VQA and Question-Focused Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yandong Li, Haoxiang Li, Chen Sun, Boqing Gong Chuang Gan
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Rich and dense human labeled datasets are the main enabling factor, among others, for the recent exciting work on vision-language understanding. Many seemingly distinct annotations (e.g., semantic segmentation and visual questions answering (VQA)) are inherently connected in that they reveal different levels and perspectives of human understandings about the same visual scenes --- and even the same set of MS COCO images. The popularity of MS COCO could strongly correlate those annotations and tasks. Explicitly linking them up, as we envision, can significantly benefit not only individual tasks but also the overarching goal of unified vision-language understand. We present the preliminary work of linking the instance segmentations provided by MS COCO to the questions and answers (QA) in the VQA dataset. We call the collected links visual questions and segmentation answers (VQS). They transfer human supervision between the previously separate tasks, offer more effective leverage to existing problems, and also open the door for new tasks and richer models. We study two applications of the VQS data in this paper: supervised attention for VQA and a novel question-focused semantic segmentation task. For the former, we obtain state-of-the-art results on the VQA real multiple-choice task by simply augmenting multilayer perceptrons with some attention features that are learned by using the segmentation-QA links as explicit supervision. To put the latter in perspective, we study two plausible methods and an oracle upper bound.
Multi-Modal Factorized Bilinear Pooling With Co-Attention Learning for Visual Question Answering
Authors: Jun Yu, Jianping Fan, Dacheng Tao Zhou Yu
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Visual question answering (VQA) is challenging because it requires a simultaneous understanding of both the visual content of images and the textual content of questions. The approaches used to represent the images and questions in a fine-grained manner and questions and to fuse these multi-modal features play key roles in performance. Bilinear pooling based models have been shown to outperform traditional linear models for VQA, but their high-dimensional representations and high computational complexity may seriously limit their applicability in practice. For multi-modal feature fusion, here we develop a Multi-modal Factorized Bilinear (MFB) pooling approach to efficiently and effectively combine multi-modal features, which results in superior performance for VQA compared with other bilinear pooling approaches. For fine-grained image and question representation, we develop a co-attention mechanism using an end-to-end deep network architecture to jointly learn both the image and question attentions. Combining the proposed MFB approach with co-attention learning in a new network architecture provides a unified model for VQA. Our experimental results demonstrate that the single MFB with co-attention model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the real-world VQA dataset. Code available at https://github.com/yuzcccc/mfb
SCNet: Learning Semantic Correspondence
Authors: Rafael S. Rezende, Bumsub Ham, Kwan-Yee K. Wong, Minsu Cho, Cordelia Schmid, Jean Ponce Kai Han
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of establishing semantic correspondences between images depicting different instances of the same object or scene category. Previous approaches focus on either combining a spatial regularizer with hand-crafted features, or learning a correspondence model for appearance only. We propose instead a convolutional neural network architecture, called SCNet, for learning a geometrically plausible model for semantic correspondence. SCNet uses region proposals as matching primitives, and explicitly incorporates geometric consistency in its loss function. It is trained on image pairs obtained from the PASCAL VOC 2007 keypoint dataset, and a comparative evaluation on several standard benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed approach substantially outperforms both recent deep learning architectures and previous methods based on hand-crafted features.
Soft Proposal Networks for Weakly Supervised Object Localization
Authors: Yanzhao Zhou, Qixiang Ye, Qiang Qiu, Jianbin Jiao Yi Zhu
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Weakly supervised object localization remains challenging, where only image labels instead of bounding boxes are available during training. Object proposal is an effective component in localization, but often computationally expensive and incapable of joint optimization with some of the remaining modules. In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we for the first time integrate weakly supervised object proposal into convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in an end-to-end learning manner. We design a network component, Soft Proposal (SP), to be plugged into any standard convolutional architecture to introduce the nearly cost-free object proposal, orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art methods. In the SP-augmented CNNs, referred to as Soft Proposal Networks (SPNs), iteratively evolved object proposals are generated based on the deep feature maps then projected back, and further jointly optimized with network parameters, with image-level supervision only. Through the unified learning process, SPNs learn better object-centric filters, discover more discriminative visual evidence, and suppress background interference, significantly boosting both weakly supervised object localization and classification performance. We report the best results on popular benchmarks, including PASCAL VOC, MS COCO, and ImageNet.
Class Rectification Hard Mining for Imbalanced Deep Learning
Authors: Shaogang Gong, Xiatian Zhu Qi Dong
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Recognising detailed facial or clothing attributes in images of people is a challenging task for computer vision, especially when the training data are both in very large scale and extremely imbalanced among different attribute classes. To address this problem, we formulate a novel scheme for batch incremental hard sample mining of minority attribute classes from imbalanced large scale training data. We develop an end-to-end deep learning framework capable of avoiding the dominant effect of majority classes by discovering sparsely sampled boundaries of minority classes. This is made possible by introducing a Class Rectification Loss (CRL) regularising algorithm. We demonstrate the advantages and scalability of CRL over existing state-of-the-art attribute recognition and imbalanced data learning models on two large scale imbalanced benchmark datasets, the CelebA facial attribute dataset and the X-Domain clothing attribute dataset.
Generating High-Quality Crowd Density Maps Using Contextual Pyramid CNNs
Authors: Vishal M. Patel Vishwanath A. Sindagi
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We present a novel method called Contextual Pyramid CNN (CP-CNN) for generating high-quality crowd density and count estimation by explicitly incorporating global and local contextual information of crowd images. The proposed CP-CNN consists of four modules: Global Context Estimator (GCE), Local Context Estimator (LCE), Density Map Estimator (DME) and a Fusion-CNN (F-CNN). GCE is a VGG-16 based CNN that encodes global context and it is trained to classify input images into different density classes, whereas LCE is another CNN that encodes local context information and it is trained to perform patch-wise classification of input images into different density classes. DME is a multi-column architecture-based CNN that aims to generate high-dimensional feature maps from the input image which are fused with the contextual information estimated by GCE and LCE using F-CNN. To generate high resolution and high-quality density maps, F-CNN uses a set of convolutional and fractionally-strided convolutional layers and it is trained along with the DME in an end-to-end fashion using a combination of adversarial loss and pixel-level Euclidean loss. Extensive experiments on highly challenging datasets show that the proposed method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
See the Glass Half Full: Reasoning About Liquid Containers, Their Volume and Content
Authors: Connor Schenck, Dieter Fox, Ali Farhadi Roozbeh Mottaghi
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Humans have rich understanding of liquid containers and their contents; for example, we can effortlessly pour water from a pitcher to a cup. Doing so requires estimating the volume of the cup, approximating the amount of water in the pitcher, and predicting the behavior of water when we tilt the pitcher. Very little attention in computer vision has been made to liquids and their containers. In this paper, we study liquid containers and their contents, and propose methods to estimate the volume of containers, approximate the amount of liquid in them, and perform comparative volume estimations all from a single RGB image. Furthermore, we show the results of the proposed model for predicting the behavior of liquids inside containers when one tilts the containers. We also introduce a new dataset of Containers Of liQuid contEnt (COQE) that contains more than 5,000 images of 10,000 liquid containers in context labelled with volume, amount of content, bounding box annotation, and corresponding similar 3D CAD models.
Hierarchical Multimodal LSTM for Dense Visual-Semantic Embedding
Authors: Mo Zhou, Le Wang, Xinbo Gao, Gang Hua Zhenxing Niu
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We address the problem of dense visual-semantic embedding that maps not only full sentences and whole images but also phrases within sentences and salient regions within images into a multimodal embedding space. As a result, we can produce several region-oriented and expressive phrases rather than just an overview sentence to describe an image. In particular, we present a hierarchical structured recurrent neural network (RNN), namely Hierarchical Multimodal LSTM (HM-LSTM) model. Different from chain structured RNN, our model presents a hierarchical structure so that it can naturally build representations for phrases and image regions, and further exploit their hierarchical relations. Moreover, the fine-grained correspondences between phrases and image regions can be automatically learned and utilized to boost the learning of the dense embedding space. Extensive experiments on several datasets validate the efficacy of our proposed method, which compares favorably with the state-of-the-art methods.
Identity-Aware Textual-Visual Matching With Latent Co-Attention
Authors: Tong Xiao, Hongsheng Li, Wei Yang, Xiaogang Wang Shuang Li
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Textual-visual matching aims at measuring similarities between sentence descriptions and images. Most existing methods tackle this problem without effectively utilizing identity-level annotations. In this paper, we propose an identity-aware two-stage framework for the textual-visual matching problem. Our stage-1 CNN-LSTM network learns to embed cross-modal features with a novel Cross-Modal Cross-Entropy (CMCE) loss. The stage-1 network is able to efficiently screen easy incorrect matchings and also provide initial training point for the stage-2 training. The stage-2 CNN-LSTM network refines the matching results with a latent co-attention mechanism. The spatial attention relates each word with corresponding image regions while the latent semantic attention aligns different sentence structures to make the matching results more robust to sentence structure variations. Extensive experiments on three datasets with identity-level annotations show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by large margins.
Learning Deep Neural Networks for Vehicle Re-ID With Visual-Spatio-Temporal Path Proposals
Authors: Tong Xiao, Hongsheng Li, Shuai Yi, Xiaogang Wang Yantao Shen
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Vehicle re-identification is an important problem and has many applications in video surveillance and intelligent transportation. It gains increasing attention because of the recent advances of person re-identification techniques. However, unlike person re-identification, the visual differences between pairs of vehicle images are usually subtle and even challenging for humans to distinguish. Incorporating additional spatio-temporal information is vital for solving the challenging re-identification task. Existing vehicle re-identification methods ignored or used over-simplified models for the spatio-temporal relations between vehicle images. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework that incorporates complex spatio-temporal information for effectively regularizing the re-identification results. Given a pair of vehicle images with their spatio-temporal information, a candidate visual-spatio-temporal path is first generated by a chain MRF model with a deeply learned potential function, where each visual-spatio-temporal state corresponds to an actual vehicle image with its spatio-temporal information. A Siamese-CNN+Path-LSTM model takes the candidate path as well as the pairwise queries to generate their similarity score. Extensive experiments and analysis show the effectiveness of our proposed method and individual components.
Learning From Noisy Labels With Distillation
Authors: Jianchao Yang, Yale Song, Liangliang Cao, Jiebo Luo, Li-Jia Li Yuncheng Li
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: The ability of learning from noisy labels is very useful in many visual recognition tasks, as a vast amount of data with noisy labels are relatively easy to obtain. Traditionally, label noise has been treated as statistical outliers, and techniques such as importance re-weighting and bootstrapping have been proposed to alleviate the problem. According to our observation, the real-world noisy labels exhibit multi-mode characteristics as the true labels, rather than behaving like independent random outliers. In this work, we propose a unified distillation framework to use "side" information, including a small clean dataset and label relations in knowledge graph, to "hedge the risk" of learning from noisy labels. Unlike the traditional approaches evaluated based on simulated label noises, we propose a suite of new benchmark datasets, in Sports, Species and Artifacts domains, to evaluate the task of learning from noisy labels in the practical setting. The empirical study demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method in all the domains.
DSOD: Learning Deeply Supervised Object Detectors From Scratch
Authors: Zhuang Liu, Jianguo Li, Yu-Gang Jiang, Yurong Chen, Xiangyang Xue Zhiqiang Shen
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We present Deeply Supervised Object Detector (DSOD), a framework that can learn object detectors from scratch. State-of-the-art object objectors rely heavily on the off-the-shelf networks pre-trained on large-scale classification datasets like ImageNet, which incurs learning bias due to the difference on both the loss functions and the category distributions between classification and detection tasks. Model fine-tuning for the detection task could alleviate this bias to some extent but not fundamentally. Besides, transferring pre-trained models from classification to detection between discrepant domains is even more difficult (e.g. RGB to depth images). A better solution to tackle these two critical problems is to train object detectors from scratch, which motivates our proposed DSOD. Previous efforts in this direction mostly failed due to much more complicated loss functions and limited training data in object detection. In DSOD, we contribute a set of design principles for training object detectors from scratch. One of the key findings is that deep supervision, enabled by dense layer-wise connections, plays a critical role in learning a good detector. Combining with several other principles, we develop DSOD following the single-shot detection (SSD) framework. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2007, 2012 and MS COCO datasets demonstrate that DSOD can achieve better results than the state-of-the-art solutions with much more compact models. For instance, DSOD outperforms SSD on all three benchmarks with real-time detection speed, while requires only 1/2 parameters to SSD and 1/10 parameters to Faster RCNN.
Phrase Localization and Visual Relationship Detection With Comprehensive Image-Language Cues
Authors: Arun Mallya, Christopher M. Cervantes, Julia Hockenmaier, Svetlana Lazebnik Bryan A. Plummer
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: This paper presents a framework for localization or grounding of phrases in images using a large collection of linguistic and visual cues. We model the appearance, size, and position of entity bounding boxes, adjectives that contain attribute information, and spatial relationships between pairs of entities connected by verbs or prepositions. Special attention is given to relationships between people and clothing or body part mentions, as they are useful for distinguishing individuals. We automatically learn weights for combining these cues and at test time, perform joint inference over all phrases in a caption. The resulting system produces state of the art performance on phrase localization on the Flickr30k Entities dataset and visual relationship detection on the Stanford VRD dataset.
Chained Cascade Network for Object Detection
Authors: Kun Wang, Xin Zhu, Xiaogang Wang Wanli Ouyang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Cascade is a widely used approach that rejects obvious negative samples at early stages for learning better classifier and faster inference. This paper presents chained cascade network (CC-Net). In this CC-Net, there are many cascade stages. Preceding cascade stages are placed at shallow layers. Easy hard examples are rejected at shallow layers so that the computation for deeper or wider layers is not required. In this way, features and classifiers at latter stages handle more difficult samples with the help of features and classifiers in previous stages. It yields consistent boost in detection performance on PASCAL VOC 2007 and ImageNet for both fast RCNN and Faster RCNN. CC-Net saves computation for both training and testing. Code is available on.
VPGNet: Vanishing Point Guided Network for Lane and Road Marking Detection and Recognition
Authors: Junsik Kim, Jae Shin Yoon, Seunghak Shin, Oleksandr Bailo, Namil Kim, Tae-Hee Lee, Hyun Seok Hong, Seung-Hoon Han, In So Kweon Seokju Lee
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a unified end-to-end trainable multi-task network that jointly handles lane and road marking detection and recognition that is guided by a vanishing point under adverse weather conditions. We tackle rainy and low illumination conditions, which have not been extensively studied until now due to clear challenges. For example, images taken under rainy days are subject to low illumination, while wet roads cause light reflection and distort the appearance of lane and road markings. At night, color distortion occurs under limited illumination. As a result, no benchmark dataset exists and only a few developed algorithms work under poor weather conditions. To address this shortcoming, we build up a lane and road marking benchmark which consists of about 20,000 images with 17 lane and road marking classes under four different scenarios: no rain, rain, heavy rain, and night. We train and evaluate several versions of the proposed multi-task network and validate the importance of each task. The resulting approach, VPGNet, can detect and classify lanes and road markings, and predict a vanishing point with a single forward pass. Experimental results show that our approach achieves high accuracy and robustness under various conditions in real-time (20 fps). The benchmark and the VPGNet model will be publicly available.
Unsupervised Learning of Important Objects From First-Person Videos
Authors: Hyun Soo Park, Stella X. Yu, Jianbo Shi Gedas Bertasius
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: A first-person camera, placed at a person's head, captures, which objects are important to the camera wearer. Most prior methods for this task learn to detect such important objects from the manually labeled first-person data in a supervised fashion. However, important objects are strongly related to the camera wearer's internal state such as his intentions and attention, and thus, only the person wearing the camera can provide the importance labels. Such a constraint makes the annotation process costly and limited in scalability. In this work, we show that we can detect important objects in first-person images without the supervision by the camera wearer or even third-person labelers. We formulate an important detection problem as an interplay between the 1) segmentation and 2) recognition agents. The segmentation agent first proposes a possible important object segmentation mask for each image, and then feeds it to the recognition agent, which learns to predict an important object mask using visual semantics and spatial features. We implement such an interplay between both agents via an alternating cross-pathway supervision scheme inside our proposed Visual-Spatial Network (VSN). Our VSN consists of spatial ("where") and visual ("what") pathways, one of which learns common visual semantics while the other focuses on the spatial location cues. Our unsupervised learning is accomplished via a cross-pathway supervision, where one pathway feeds its predictions to a segmentation agent, which proposes a candidate important object segmentation mask that is then used by the other pathway as a supervisory signal. We show our method's success on two different important object datasets, where our method achieves similar or better results as the supervised methods.
An Analysis of Visual Question Answering Algorithms
Authors: Christopher Kanan Kushal Kafle
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: In visual question answering (VQA), an algorithm must answer text-based questions about images. While multiple datasets for VQA have been created since late 2014, they all have flaws in both their content and the way algorithms are evaluated on them. As a result, evaluation scores are inflated and predominantly determined by answering easier questions, making it difficult to compare different methods. In this paper, we analyze existing VQA algorithms using a new dataset called the Task Driven Image Understanding Challenge (TDIUC), which has over 1.6 million questions organized into 12 different categories. We also introduce questions that are meaningless for a given image to force a VQA system to reason about image content. We propose new evaluation schemes that compensate for over-represented question-types and make it easier to study the strengths and weaknesses of algorithms. We analyze the performance of both baseline and state-of-the-art VQA models, including multi-modal compact bilinear pooling (MCB), neural module networks, and recurrent answering units. Our experiments establish how attention helps certain categories more than others, determine which models work better than others, and explain how simple models (e.g. MLP) can surpass more complex models (MCB) by simply learning to answer large, easy question categories.
Visual Relationship Detection With Internal and External Linguistic Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Ang Li, Vlad I. Morariu, Larry S. Davis Ruichi Yu
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Understanding the visual relationship between two objects involves identifying the subject, the object, and a predicate relating them.We leverage the strong correlations between the predicate and the (subj,obj) pair (both semantically and spatially) to predict predicates conditioned on the subjects and the objects. Modeling the three entities jointly more accurately reflects their relationships compared to modeling them independently, but it complicates learning since the semantic space of visual relationships is huge and training data is limited, especially for long-tail relationships that have few instances. To overcome this, we use knowledge of linguistic statistics to regularize visual model learning. We obtain linguistic knowledge by mining from both training annotations (internal knowledge) and publicly available text, e.g., Wikipedia (external knowledge), computing the conditional probability distribution of a predicate given a (subj,obj) pair. As we train the visual model, we distill this knowledge into the deep model to achieve better generalization. Our experimental results on the Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) and Visual Genome datasets suggest that with this linguistic knowledge distillation, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly, especially when predicting unseen relationships (e.g., recall improved from 8.45% to 19.17% on VRD zero-shot testing set).
A Two Stream Siamese Convolutional Neural Network for Person Re-Identification
Authors: Khalid Tahboub, Edward J. Delp Dahjung Chung
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Person re-identification is an important task in video surveillance systems. It can be formally defined as establishing the correspondence between images of a person taken from different cameras at different times. In this pa- per, we present a two stream convolutional neural network where each stream is a Siamese network. This architecture can learn spatial and temporal information separately. We also propose a weighted two stream training objective function which combines the Siamese cost of the spatial and temporal streams with the objective of predicting a person's identity. We evaluate our proposed method on the publicly available PRID2011 and iLIDS-VID datasets and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method. On average, the top rank matching accuracy is 4% higher than the accuracy achieved by the cross-view quadratic discriminant analysis used in combination with the hierarchical Gaussian descriptor (GOG+XQDA), and 5% higher than the recurrent neural network method.
No More Discrimination: Cross City Adaptation of Road Scene Segmenters
Authors: Wei-Yu Chen, Yu-Ting Chen, Bo-Cheng Tsai, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Min Sun Yi-Hsin Chen
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Despite the recent success of deep-learning based semantic segmentation, deploying a pre-trained road scene segmenter to a city whose images are not presented in the training set would not achieve satisfactory performance due to dataset biases. Instead of collecting a large number of annotated images of each city of interest to train or refine the segmenter, we propose an unsupervised learning approach to adapt road scene segmenters across different cities. By utilizing Google Street View and its time-machine feature, we can collect unannotated images for each road scene at different times, so that the associated static-object priors can be extracted accordingly. By advancing a joint global and class-specific domain adversarial learning framework, adaptation of pre-trained segmenters to that city can be achieved without the need of any user annotation or interaction. We show that our method improves the performance of semantic segmentation in multiple cities across continents, while it performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches requiring annotated training data.
Open Vocabulary Scene Parsing
Authors: Xavier Puig, Bolei Zhou, Sanja Fidler, Antonio Torralba Hang Zhao
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Recognizing arbitrary objects in the wild has been a challenging problem due to the limitations of existing classification models and datasets. In this paper, we propose a new task that aims at parsing scenes with a large and open vocabulary, and several evaluation metrics are explored for this problem. Our approach is a joint image pixel and word concept embeddings framework, where word concepts are connected by semantic relations. We validate the open vocabulary prediction ability of our framework on ADE20K dataset which covers a wide variety of scenes and objects. We further explore the trained joint embedding space to show its interpretability.
Learned Watershed: End-To-End Learning of Seeded Segmentation
Authors: Lukas Schott, Ullrich Kothe, Fred Hamprecht Steffen Wolf
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Learned boundary maps are known to outperform hand-crafted ones as a basis for the watershed algorithm. We show, for the first time, how to train watershed computation jointly with boundary map prediction. The estimator for the merging priorities is cast as a neural network that is convolutional (over space) and recurrent (over iterations). The latter allows learning of complex shape priors. The method gives the best known seeded segmentation results on the CREMI segmentation challenge.
Curriculum Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes
Authors: Philip David, Boqing Gong Yang Zhang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: During the last half decade, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have triumphed over semantic segmentation, which is a core task of various emerging industrial applications such as autonomous driving and medical imaging. However, to train CNNs requires a huge amount of data, which is difficult to collect and laborious to annotate. Recent advances in computer graphics make it possible to train CNN models on photo-realistic synthetic data with computer-generated annotations. Despite this, the domain mismatch between the real images and the synthetic data significantly decreases the models' performance. Hence we propose a curriculum-style learning approach to minimize the domain gap in semantic segmentation. The curriculum domain adaptation solves easy tasks first in order to infer some necessary properties about the target domain; in particular, the first task is to learn global label distributions over images and local distributions over landmark superpixels. These are easy to estimate because images of urban traffic scenes have strong idiosyncrasies (e.g., the size and spatial relations of buildings, streets, cars, etc.). We then train the segmentation network in such a way that the network predictions in the target domain follow those inferred properties. In experiments, our method significantly outperforms the baselines as well as the only known existing approach to the same problem.
Scale-Adaptive Convolutions for Scene Parsing
Authors: Sheng Tang, Yongdong Zhang, Jintao Li, Shuicheng Yan Rui Zhang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Many existing scene parsing methods adopt Convolutional Neural Networks with fixed-size receptive fields, which frequently result in inconsistent predictions of large objects and invisibility of small objects. To tackle this issue, we propose a scale-adaptive convolution to acquire flexible-size receptive fields during scene parsing. Through adding a new scale regression layer, we can dynamically infer the position-adaptive scale coefficients which are adopted to resize the convolutional patches. Consequently, the receptive fields can be adjusted automatically according to the various sizes of the objects in scene images. Thus, the problems of invisible small objects and inconsistent large-object predictions can be alleviated. Furthermore, our proposed scale-adaptive convolutions are not only differentiable to learn the convolutional parameters and scale coefficients in an end-to-end way, but also of high parallelizability for the convenience of GPU implementation. Additionally, since the new scale regression layers are learned implicitly, any extra training supervision of object sizes is unnecessary. Extensive experiments on Cityscapes and ADE20K datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scale-adaptive convolutions.
Privacy-Preserving Visual Learning Using Doubly Permuted Homomorphic Encryption
Authors: Vishnu Naresh Boddeti, Kris M. Kitani, Yoichi Sato Ryo Yonetani
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We propose a privacy-preserving framework for learning visual classifiers by leveraging distributed private image data. This framework is designed to aggregate multiple classifiers updated locally using private data and to ensure that no private information about the data is exposed during and after its learning procedure. We utilize a homomorphic cryptosystem that can aggregate the local classifiers while they are encrypted and thus kept secret. To overcome the high computational cost of homomorphic encryption of high-dimensional classifiers, we (1) impose sparsity constraints on local classifier updates and (2) propose a novel efficient encryption scheme named doubly-permuted homomorphic encryption (DPHE) which is tailored to sparse high-dimensional data. DPHE (i) decomposes sparse data into its constituent non-zero values and their corresponding support indices, (ii) applies homomorphic encryption only to the non-zero values, and (iii) employs double permutations on the support indices to make them secret. Our experimental evaluation on several public datasets shows that the proposed approach achieves comparable performance against state-of-the-art visual recognition methods while preserving privacy and significantly outperforms other privacy-preserving methods.
Multi-Task Self-Supervised Visual Learning
Authors: Andrew Zisserman Carl Doersch
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We investigate methods for combining multiple self-supervised tasks---i.e., supervised tasks where data can be collected without manual labeling---in order to train a single visual representation. First, we provide an apples-to-apples comparison of four different self-supervised tasks using the very deep ResNet-101 architecture. We then combine tasks to jointly train a network. We also explore lasso regularization to encourage the network to factorize the information in its representation, and methods for "harmonizing" network inputs in order to learn a more unified representation. We evaluate all methods on ImageNet classification, PASCAL VOC detection, and NYU depth prediction. Our results show that deeper networks work better, and that combining tasks---even via a naive multi-head architecture---always improves performance. Our best joint network nearly matches the PASCAL performance of a model pre-trained on ImageNet classification, and matches the ImageNet network on NYU depth prediction.
A Self-Balanced Min-Cut Algorithm for Image Clustering
Authors: Joshua Zhexue Haung, Feiping Nie, Renjie Chen, Qingyao Wu Xiaojun Chen
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Many spectral clustering algorithms have been proposed and successfully applied to image data analysis such as content based image retrieval, image annotation, and image indexing. Conventional spectral clustering algorithms usually involve a two-stage process: eigendecomposition of similarity matrix and clustering assignments from eigenvectors by k-means or spectral rotation. However, the final clustering assignments obtained by the two-stage process may deviate from the assignments by directly optimize the original objective function. Moreover, most of these methods usually have very high computational complexities. In this paper, we propose a new min-cut algorithm for image clustering, which scales linearly to the data size. In the new method, a self-balanced min-cut model is proposed in which the Exclusive Lasso is implicitly introduced as a balance regularizer in order to produce balanced partition. We propose an iterative algorithm to solve the new model, which has a time complexity of O(n) where n is the number of samples. Theoretical analysis reveals that the new method can simultaneously minimize the graph cut and balance the partition across all clusters. A series of experiments were conducted on both synthetic and benchmark data sets and the experimental results show the superior performance of the new method.
Is Second-Order Information Helpful for Large-Scale Visual Recognition?
Authors: Jiangtao Xie, Qilong Wang, Wangmeng Zuo Peihua Li
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: By stacking layers of convolution and nonlinearity, convolutional networks (ConvNets) effectively learn from low-level to high-level features and discriminative representations. Since the end goal of large-scale recognition is to delineate complex boundaries of thousands of classes, adequate exploration of feature distributions is important for realizing full potentials of ConvNets. However, state-of-the-art works concentrate only on deeper or wider architecture design, while rarely exploring feature statistics higher than first-order. We take a step towards addressing this problem. Our method consists in covariance pooling, instead of the most commonly used first-order pooling, of high-level convolutional features. The main challenges involved are robust covariance estimation given a small sample of large-dimensional features and usage of the manifold structure of covariance matrices. To address these challenges, we present a Matrix Power Normalized Covariance (MPN-COV) method. We develop forward and backward propagation formulas regarding the nonlinear matrix functions such that MPN-COV can be trained end-to-end. In addition, we analyze both qualitatively and quantitatively its advantage over the well-known Log-Euclidean metric. On the ImageNet 2012 validation set, by combining MPN-COV we achieve over 4%, 3% and 2.5% gains for AlexNet, VGG-M and VGG-16, respectively; integration of MPN-COV into 50-layer ResNet outperforms ResNet-101 and is comparable to ResNet-152. The source code will be available on the project page: http://www.peihuali.org/MPN-COV.