mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Semantic Object Segmentation via Detection in Weakly Labeled Video
Authors: Yu Zhang, Xiaowu Chen, Jia Li, Chen Wang, Changqun Xia
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Semantic object segmentation in video is an important step for large-scale multimedia analysis. In many cases, however, semantic objects are only tagged at video-level, making them difficult to be located and segmented. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach to segment semantic objects in weakly labeled video via object detection. In our approach, a novel video segmentationby-detection framework is proposed, which first incorporates object and region detectors pre-trained on still images to generate a set of detection and segmentation proposals. Based on the noisy proposals, several object tracks are then initialized by solving a joint binary optimization problem with min-cost flow. As such tracks actually provide rough configurations of semantic objects, we thus refine the object segmentation while preserving the spatiotemporal consistency by inferring the shape likelihoods of pixels from the statistical information of tracks. Experimental results on Youtube-Objects dataset and SegTrack v2 dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-arts and shows impressive results.
Learning With Dataset Bias in Latent Subcategory Models
Authors: Dimitris Stamos, Samuele Martelli, Moin Nabi, Andrew McDonald, Vittorio Murino, Massimiliano Pontil
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Latent subcategory models (LSMs) offer significant improvements over training flat classifiers such as linear SVMs. Training LSMs is a challenging task due to the potentially large number of local optima in the objective function and the increased model complexity which requires large training set sizes. Often larger datasets are available as a collection of heterogeneous datasets. However, previous work has highlighted the possible danger of simply training a model from the combined datasets, due to the presence of bias. In this paper, we present a model which jointly learns an LSM for each dataset as well as a compound LSM. The method provides a means to borrow statistical strength from the datasets while reducing their inherent bias. In experiments we demonstrate that the compound LSM, when tested on Pascal, LabelMe, Caltech101 and SUN in a leave-one-dataset-out fashion, achieves an average improvement of over 6.5% over a previous SVM-based undoing bias approach and an average improvement of over 8.6% over a standard LSM trained on the concatenation of the datasets. Hence our method provides the best of both worlds.
Image Retrieval Using Scene Graphs
Authors: Justin Johnson, Ranjay Krishna, Michael Stark, Li-Jia Li, David Shamma, Michael Bernstein, Li Fei-Fei
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper develops a novel framework for semantic image retrieval based on the notion of a scene graph. Our scene graphs represent objects ("man", "boat"), attributes of objects ("boat is white") and relationships between objects ("man standing on boat"). We use these scene graphs as queries to retrieve semantically related images. To this end, we design a conditional random field model that reasons about possible groundings of scene graphs to test images. The likelihoods of these groundings are used as ranking scores for retrieval. We introduce a novel dataset of 5,000 human-generated scene graphs grounded to images and use this dataset to evaluate our method for image retrieval. In particular, we evaluate retrieval using full scene graphs and small scene subgraphs, and show that our method outperforms retrieval methods that use only objects or low-level image features. In addition, we show that our full model can be used to improve object localization compared to baseline methods.
Unifying Holistic and Parts-Based Deformable Model Fitting
Authors: Joan Alabort-i-Medina, Stefanos Zafeiriou
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: The construction and fitting of deformable models that capture the degrees of freedom of articulated objects is one of the most popular areas of research in computer vision. The two main approaches are: Holistic Deformable Models (HDMs), which try to represent the object as a whole, and Parts-Based Deformable Models (PBDMs), which model object parts independently. Both models have their own advantages. In this paper we try to marry the previous two frameworks into a unified one that potentially combines the advantages of both. We do so by merging the popular Active Appearance Models (holistic) and Constrained Local Models (part-based) using a novel probabilistic formulation of the fitting problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such an idea has been proposed. We show that our unified holistic and part-based formulation achieves state-of-the-art results in the problem of face alignment in-the-wild. Finally, in order to encourage open research and facilitate future comparisons with the proposed method, our code will be made publicly available to the research community.
Small Instance Detection by Integer Programming on Object Density Maps
Authors: Zheng Ma, Lei Yu, Antoni B. Chan
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose a novel object detection framework for partially-occluded small instances, such as pedestrians in low resolution surveillance video, cells under a microscope, flocks of small animals (e.g. birds, fishes), or even tiny insects like honeybees and flies. These scenarios are very challenging for traditional detectors, which are typically trained on individual instances. In our approach, we first estimate the object density map of the input image, and then divide it into local regions.  For each region, a sliding window (ROI) is passed over the density map to calculate the instance count within each ROI. 2D integer programming is used to recover the locations of object instances from the set of ROI counts, and the global count estimate of the density map is used as a constraint to regularize the detection performance. Finally, the bounding box for each instance is estimated using the local density map. Compared with current small-instance detection methods, our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging datasets including fluorescence microscopy cell images, UCSD pedestrians, small animals and insects.
Motion Part Regularization: Improving Action Recognition via Trajectory Selection
Authors: Bingbing Ni, Pierre Moulin, Xiaokang Yang, Shuicheng Yan
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Dense local motion features such as dense trajectories have been widely used in action recognition. For most actions, only a few local features (e.g., critical movements of the hand, arm, leg etc.) are responsible to the action label. Therefore, discovering important motion part will lead to a more discriminative and compact action representation. Inspired by the recent advance in sentence regularization for text classification, we introduce a Motion Part Regularization framework to mining discriminative semi-local groups of dense trajectories. First, motion part candidates are generated by spatio-temporal grouping of densely sampled trajectories. Then, we develop a learning objective function which encourages sparse selection for these trajectory groups in conjunction with a discriminative term. We propose an alternative optimization algorithm to efficiently solve this objective function by introducing a set of auxiliary variables. The learned trajectory group weights are further utilized for weighted bag-of-feature representation for unknown action samples. The proposed motion part regularization framework achieves the state-of-the-art performances on several action recognition benchmarks.
Multi-Task Deep Visual-Semantic Embedding for Video Thumbnail Selection
Authors: Wu Liu, Tao Mei, Yongdong Zhang, Cherry Che, Jiebo Luo
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Given the tremendous growth of online videos, video thumbnail, as the common visualization form of video content, is becoming increasingly important to influence user's browsing and searching experience. However, conventional methods for video thumbnail selection often fail to produce satisfying results as they ignore the side semantic information (e.g., title, description, and query) associated with the video. As a result, the selected thumbnail cannot always represent video semantics and the click-through rate is adversely affected even when the retrieved videos are relevant. In this paper, we have developed a multi-task deep visual-semantic embedding model, which can automatically select query-dependent video thumbnails according to both visual and side information. Different from most existing methods, the proposed approach employs the deep visual-semantic embedding model to directly compute the similarity between the query and video thumbnails by mapping them into a common latent semantic space, where even unseen query-thumbnail pairs can be correctly matched. In particular, we train the embedding model by exploring the large-scale and freely accessible click-through video and image data, as well as employing a multi-task learning strategy to holistically exploit the query-thumbnail relevance from these two highly related datasets. Finally, a thumbnail is selected by fusing both the representative and query relevance scores. The evaluations on 1,000 query-thumbnail dataset labeled by 191 workers in Amazon Mechanical Turk have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Fine-Grained Visual Categorization via Multi-Stage Metric Learning
Authors: Qi Qian, Rong Jin, Shenghuo Zhu, Yuanqing Lin
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is to categorize objects into subordinate classes instead of basic classes. One major challenge in FGVC is the co-occurrence of two issues: 1) many subordinate classes are highly correlated and are difficult to distinguish, and 2) there exists the large intra-class variation (e.g., due to object pose). This paper proposes to explicitly address the above two issues via distance metric learning (DML). DML addresses the first issue by learning an embedding so that data points from the same class will be pulled together while those from different classes should be pushed apart from each other; and it addresses the second issue by allowing the flexibility that only a portion of the neighbors (not all data points) from the same class need to be pulled together. However, feature representation of an image is often high dimensional, and DML is known to have difficulty in dealing with high dimensional feature vectors since it would require $O(d^2)$ for storage and $O(d^3)$ for optimization. To this end, we proposed a multi-stage metric learning framework that divides the large-scale high dimensional learning problem to a series of simple subproblems, achieving $O(d)$ computational complexity. The empirical study with FVGC benchmark datasets verifies that our method is both effective and efficient compared to the state-of-the-art FGVC approaches.
Saturation-Preserving Specular Reflection Separation
Authors: Yuanliu Liu, Zejian Yuan, Nanning Zheng, Yang Wu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Specular reflection generally decreases the saturation of surface colors, which will be possibly confused with other colors that have the same hue but lower saturation. Traditional methods for specular reflection separation suffer this problem of hue-saturation ambiguity, producing over-saturated specular-free images quite often. We proposed a two-step approach to solve this problem. In the first step, we produce an over-saturated specular-free image by global chromaticity propagation from specular-free pixels to highlighted ones. Then we recover the saturation based on priors of the piecewise constancy of diffuse chromaticity as well as the spatial sparsity and smoothness of specular reflection. We achieve this through increasing the achromatic component of diffuse chromaticity, while the magnitudes of increments are determined by linear programming under the constraints derived from the priors. Experiments on both laboratory and natural images show that our method can separate the specular reflection while preserving the saturation of the underlying surface colors.
Joint SFM and Detection Cues for Monocular 3D Localization in Road Scenes
Authors: Shiyu Song, Manmohan Chandraker
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We present a system for fast and highly accurate 3D localization of objects like cars in autonomous driving applications, using a single camera. Our localization framework jointly uses information from complementary modalities such as structure from motion (SFM) and object detection to achieve high localization accuracy in both near and far fields. This is in contrast to prior works that rely purely on detector outputs, or motion segmentation based on sparse feature tracks. Rather than completely commit to tracklets generated by a 2D tracker, we make novel use of raw detection scores to allow our 3D bounding boxes to adapt to better quality 3D cues. To extract SFM cues, we demonstrate the advantages of dense tracking over sparse mechanisms in autonomous driving scenarios. In contrast to complex scene understanding, our formulation for 3D localization is efficient and can be regarded as an extension of sparse bundle adjustment to incorporate object detection cues. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show the efficacy of our cues, as well as the accuracy and robustness of our 3D object localization relative to ground truth and prior works.
Fisher Vectors Meet Neural Networks: A Hybrid Classification Architecture
Authors: Florent Perronnin, Diane Larlus
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Fisher Vectors (FV) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are two image classification pipelines with different strengths. While CNNs have shown superior accuracy on a number of classification tasks, FV classifiers are typically less costly to train and evaluate. We propose a hybrid architecture that combines their strengths: the first unsupervised layers rely on the FV while the subsequent fully-connected supervised layers are trained with back-propagation. We show experimentally that this hybrid architecture significantly outperforms standard FV systems without incurring the high cost that comes with CNNs. We also derive competitive mid-level features from our architecture that are readily applicable to other class sets and even to new tasks.
UniHIST: A Unified Framework for Image Restoration With Marginal Histogram Constraints
Authors: Xing Mei, Weiming Dong, Bao-Gang Hu, Siwei Lyu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Marginal histograms provide valuable information for various computer vision problems. However, current image restoration methods do not fully exploit the potential of marginal histograms, in particular, their role as ensemble constraints on the marginal statistics of the restored image. In this paper, we introduce a new framework, UniHIST, to incorporate marginal histogram constraints into image restoration. The key idea of UniHIST is to minimize the discrepancy between the marginal histograms of the restored image and the reference histograms in pixel or gradient domains using the quadratic Wasserstein (W2) distance. The W2 distance can be computed directly from data without resorting to density estimation. It provides a differentiable metric between marginal histograms and allows easy integration with existing image restoration methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UniHIST through denoising of pattern images and non-blind deconvolution of natural images. We show that UniHIST enhances restoration performance and leads to visual and quantitative improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods.
Human Action Segmentation With Hierarchical Supervoxel Consistency
Authors: Jiasen Lu, ran Xu, Jason J. Corso
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Detailed analysis of human action, such as action classification, detection and  localization has received increasing attention from the community; datasets like JHMDB have made it plausible to conduct studies analyzing the impact that such deeper information has on the greater action understanding problem.  However, detailed automatic segmentation of human action has comparatively been unexplored.  In this paper, we take a step in that direction and propose a hierarchical MRF model to bridge low-level video fragments with high-level human motion and appearance; novel higher-order potentials connect different levels of the supervoxel hierarchy to enforce the consistency of the human segmentation by pulling from different segment-scales.  Our single layer model significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art on actionness,  and our full model improves upon the single layer baselines in action segmentation.
Robust Manhattan Frame Estimation From a Single RGB-D Image
Authors: Bernard Ghanem, Ali Thabet, Juan Carlos Niebles, Fabian Caba Heilbron
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper proposes a new framework for estimating the Manhattan Frame (MF) of an indoor scene from a single RGB-D image. Our technique formulates this problem as the estimation of a rotation matrix that best aligns the normals of the captured scene to a canonical world axes. By introducing sparsity constraints, our method can simultaneously estimate the scene MF, the surfaces in the scene that are best aligned to one of three  coordinate axes, and the outlier surfaces that do not align with  any of the axes. To test our approach, we contribute a new set of annotations to determine ground truth MFs in each image of the popular NYUv2 dataset. We use this new benchmark to experimentally demonstrate that our method is more accurate, faster, more reliable and more robust than the methods used in the literature. We further motivate our technique by showing how it can be used to address the RGB-D SLAM problem in indoor scenes by incorporating it into and improving the performance of a popular RGB-D SLAM method.
Learning to Segment Under Various Forms of Weak Supervision
Authors: Jia Xu, Alexander G. Schwing, Raquel Urtasun
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Despite the promising performance of conventional fully supervised  algorithms,  semantic segmentation has remained an important, yet challenging task. Due to the limited availability of complete annotations, it is of great interest to design solutions for semantic segmentation that take into account weakly labeled data, which is readily available at a much larger scale. Contrasting the common theme to develop a different algorithm for each type of weak annotation, in this work, we propose a unified approach that incorporates various forms of weak supervision -- image level tags, bounding boxes, and partial labels -- to produce a pixel-wise labeling. We conduct a rigorous evaluation on the challenging Siftflow dataset for various weakly labeled settings, and show that our approach outperforms  the state-of-the-art by $12\%$ on per-class accuracy, while maintaining comparable per-pixel accuracy.
Fast and Accurate Image Upscaling With Super-Resolution Forests
Authors: Samuel Schulter, Christian Leistner, Horst Bischof
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: The aim of single image super-resolution is to reconstruct a high-resolution image from a single low-resolution input. Although the task is ill-posed it can be seen as finding a non-linear mapping from a low to high-dimensional space. Recent methods that rely on both neighborhood embedding and sparse-coding have led to tremendous quality improvements. Yet, many of the previous approaches are hard to apply in practice because they are either too slow or demand tedious parameter tweaks.   In this paper, we propose to directly map from low to high-resolution patches using random forests. We show the close relation of previous work on single image super-resolution to locally linear regression and demonstrate how random forests nicely fit into this framework. During training the trees, we optimize a novel and effective regularized objective that not only operates on the output space but also on the input space, which especially suits the regression task. During inference, our method comprises the same well-known computational efficiency that has made random forests popular for many computer vision problems.   In the experimental part, we demonstrate on standard benchmarks for single image super-resolution that our approach yields highly accurate state-of-the-art results, while being fast in both training and evaluation.
Light Field From Micro-Baseline Image Pair
Authors: Zhoutong Zhang, Yebin Liu, Qionghai Dai
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We present a novel phase-based approach for recon- structing 4D light field from a micro-baseline stereo (LfS) pair. Our approach takes advantage of the unique prop- erty of complex steerable pyramid filters in micro-baseline stereo. We first introduce a disparity assisted phase based synthesis (DAPS) strategy that can integrate disparity infor- mation into the phase term of a reference image to warp it to its close neighbor views. Based on the DAPS, an "analy- sis by synthesis" approach is proposed to warp from one of the input binocular images to the other, and iteratively op- timize the disparity map to minimize the phase differences between the warped one and the ground truth input. Fi- nally, the densely and regularly spaced, high quality light field images can be reconstructed using the proposed DAPS according to the refined disparity map. Our approach also solves the problems of disparity inconsistency and ringing artifact in available phase-based view synthesis methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach sub- stantially improves both the quality of disparity map and light field, compared with the state-of-the-art stereo match- ing and image based rendering approaches.
Efficient ConvNet-Based Marker-Less Motion Capture in General Scenes With a Low Number of Cameras
Authors: Ahmed Elhayek, Edilson de Aguiar, Arjun Jain, Jonathan Tompson, Leonid Pishchulin, Micha Andriluka, Chris Bregler, Bernt Schiele, Christian Theobalt
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We present a novel method for accurate marker-less capture of articulated skeleton motion of several subjects in general scenes, indoors and outdoors, even from input filmed with as few as two cameras. Our approach unites a discriminative image-based joint detection method with a model-based generative motion tracking algorithm through a combined pose optimization energy. The discriminative part-based pose detection method, implemented using Convolutional Networks (ConvNet), estimates unary potentials for each joint of a kinematic skeleton model. These unary potentials are used to probabilistically extract pose constraints for tracking by using weighted sampling from a pose posterior guided by the model. In the final energy, these constraints are combined with an appearance-based model-to-image similarity term. Poses can be computed very efficiently using iterative local optimization, as ConvNet detection is fast, and our formulation yields a combined pose estimation energy with analytic derivatives. In combination, this enables to track full articulated joint angles at state-of-the-art accuracy and temporal stability with a very low number of cameras.
Learning Scene-Specific Pedestrian Detectors Without Real Data
Authors: Hironori Hattori, Vishnu Naresh Boddeti, Kris M. Kitani, Takeo Kanade
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We consider the problem of designing a scene-specific pedestrian detector in a scenario where we have zero instances of real pedestrian data (i.e., no labeled real data or unsupervised real data). This scenario may arise when a new surveillance system is installed in a novel location and a scene-specific pedestrian detector must be trained prior to any observations of pedestrians. The key idea of our approach is to infer the potential appearance of pedestrians using geometric scene data and a customizable database of virtual simulations of pedestrian motion. We propose an efficient discriminative learning method that generates a spatially-varying pedestrian appearance model that takes into the account the perspective geometry of the scene. As a result, our method is able to learn a unique pedestrian classifier customized for every possible location in the scene. Our experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms classical pedestrian detection models and hybrid synthetic-real models. Our results also yield a surprising result, that our method using purely synthetic data is able to outperform models trained on real scene-specific data when data is limited.
Deep Filter Banks for Texture Recognition and Segmentation
Authors: Mircea Cimpoi, Subhransu Maji, Andrea Vedaldi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Research in texture recognition often concentrates on the problem of material recognition in uncluttered conditions, an assumption rarely met by applications. In this work we conduct a first study of material and describable texture attributes recognition in clutter, using a new dataset derived from the OpenSurface texture repository. Motivated by the challenge posed by this problem, we propose a new texture descriptor, \dcnn, obtained by Fisher Vector pooling of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) filter bank. \dcnn substantially improves the state-of-the-art in texture, material and scene recognition. Our approach achieves 79.8\% accuracy on Flickr material dataset and 81\% accuracy on MIT indoor scenes, providing absolute gains of more than 10\% over existing approaches. \dcnn easily transfers across domains without requiring feature adaptation as for methods that build on the fully-connected layers of CNNs. Furthermore, \dcnn can seamlessly incorporate multi-scale information and describe regions of arbitrary shapes and sizes. Our approach is particularly suited at localizing ``stuff'' categories and obtains state-of-the-art results on MSRC segmentation dataset, as well as promising results on recognizing materials and surface attributes in clutter on the OpenSurfaces dataset.
Multiple Random Walkers and Their Application to Image Cosegmentation
Authors: Chulwoo Lee, Won-Dong Jang, Jae-Young Sim, Chang-Su Kim
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: A graph-based system to simulate the movements and interactions of multiple random walkers (MRW) is proposed in this work. In the MRW system, multiple agents traverse a single graph simultaneously. To achieve desired interactions among those agents, a restart rule can be designed, which determines the restart distribution of each agent according to the probability distributions of all agents. In particular, we develop the repulsive rule for data clustering. We illustrate that the MRW clustering can segment real images reliably. Furthermore, we propose a novel image cosegmentation algorithm based on the MRW clustering. Specifically, the proposed algorithm consists of two steps: inter-image concurrence computation and intra-image MRW clustering. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides promising cosegmentation performance.
Beyond the Shortest Path : Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Sampling Subspaces Along the Spline Flow
Authors: Rui Caseiro, Joao F. Henriques, Pedro Martins, Jorge Batista
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Recently, a particular paradigm [9] in the domain adaptation field has received considerable attention by introducing novel and important insights to the problem. In this case, the source/target domains are represented in the form of subspaces, which are treated as points on the Grassmann manifold. The geodesic curve between them is sampled to obtain intermediate points. Then a classifier is learnt using the projections of the data onto these subspaces. Despite its relevance and popularity, this paradigm [9] contains some limitations. Firstly, in real-world applications, that simple curve (i.e. shortest path) does not provide the necessary flexibility to model the domain shift between the training and testing data sets. Secondly, by using the geodesic curve, we are restricted to only one source domain, which does not allow to take fully advantage of the multiple datasets that are available nowadays. It is then, natural to ask whether this popular paradigm could be extended to deal with more complex curves (e.g. splines) and to integrate multi-sources domains. This is a hard problem considering the Riemannian structure of the space, but we propose a mathematically well-founded idea that enables us to solve it.  We exploit the geometric insight of rolling maps [14] to compute a spline curve on the Grassmann manifold. The benefits of the proposed idea are demonstrated through several empirical studies on standard datasets. This novel paradigm allows to explicitly integrate multi-source domains while the previous one [9] uses the mean of all sources. This enables to model better the domain shift and take fully advantage of the training datasets.
Spherical Embedding of Inlier Silhouette Dissimilarities
Authors: Etai Littwin, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Daniel Cohen-Or
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a spherical embedding technique to position a given set of silhouettes of an object as observed from a set of cameras arbitrarily positioned around the object.  Our technique estimates dissimilarities among the silhouettes and embeds them directly in the rotation space SO(3). The embedding is obtained by an optimization scheme applied over the rotations represented with exponential maps.  Since the measure for inter-silhouette dissimilarities contains many outliers, our key idea is to perform the embedding by only using a subset of the estimated dissimilarities. We present a technique that carefully screens for inlier-distances, and the pairwise scaled dissimilarities are embedded in a spherical space, diffeomorphic to SO(3). We show that our method outperforms spherical MDS embedding, demonstrate its performance on various multi-view sets, and highlight its robustness to outliers.
Semantics-Preserving Hashing for Cross-View Retrieval
Authors: Zijia Lin, Guiguang Ding, Mingqing Hu, Jianmin Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: With benefits of low storage costs and high query speeds, hashing methods are widely researched for efficiently retrieving large-scale data, which commonly contains multiple views, e.g. a news report with images, videos and texts. In this paper, we study the problem of cross-view retrieval and propose an effective Semantics-Preserving Hashing method, termed SePH. Given semantic affinities of training data as supervised information, SePH transforms them into a probability distribution and approximates it with to-be-learnt hash codes in Hamming space via minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Then kernel logistic regression with a sampling strategy is utilized to learn the nonlinear projections from features in each view to the learnt hash codes. And for any unseen instance, predicted hash codes and their corresponding output probabilities from observed views are utilized to determine its unified hash code, using a novel probabilistic approach. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness and reasonableness of SePH.
Object Proposal by Multi-Branch Hierarchical Segmentation
Authors: Chaoyang Wang, Long Zhao, Shuang Liang, Liqing Zhang, Jinyuan Jia, Yichen Wei
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Hierarchical segmentation based object proposal methods have become an important step in modern object detection paradigm. However, standard single-way hierarchical methods are fundamentally flawed in that the errors in early steps cannot be corrected and accumulate. In this work, we propose a novel multi-branch hierarchical segmentation approach that alleviates such problems by learning multiple merging strategies in each step in a complementary manner, such that errors in one merging strategy could be corrected by the others. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance for both object proposal and object detection tasks, comparing to previous object proposal methods.
Ambient Occlusion via Compressive Visibility Estimation
Authors: Wei Yang, Yu Ji, Haiting Lin, Yang Yang, Sing Bing Kang, Jingyi Yu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: There has been emerging interest on recovering traditionally challenging intrinsic scene properties. In this paper, we present a novel computational imaging solution for recovering the ambient occlusion (AO) map of an object. AO measures how much light from all different directions can reach a surface point without being blocked by self-occlusions. Previous approaches either require obtaining highly accurate surface geometry or acquiring a large number of images. We adopt a compressive sensing framework that captures the object under strategically coded lighting directions. We show that this incident illumination field exhibits some unique properties suitable for AO recovery: every ray's contribution to the visibility function is binary while their distribution for AO measurement is sparse. This enables a sparsity-prior based solution for iteratively recovering the surface normal, the surface albedo, and the visibility function from a small number of images. To physically implement the scheme, we construct an encodable directional light source using the light field probe. Experiments on synthetic and real scenes show that our approach is both reliable and accurate with significantly reduced size of input.
Shape-Tailored Local Descriptors and Their Application to Segmentation and Tracking
Authors: Naeemullah Khan, Marei Algarni, Anthony Yezzi, Ganesh Sundaramoorthi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose new dense descriptors for texture segmentation. Given a region of arbitrary shape in an image, these descriptors are formed from shape-dependent scale spaces of oriented gradients. These scale spaces are defined by Poisson-like partial differential equations. A key property of our new descriptors is that they do not aggregate image data across the boundary of the region, in contrast to existing descriptors based on aggregation of oriented gradients. As an example, we show how the descriptor can be incorporated in a Mumford-Shah energy for texture segmentation. We test our method on several challenging datasets for texture segmentation and textured object tracking. Experiments indicate that our descriptors lead to more accurate segmentation than non-shape dependent descriptors and the state-of-the-art in texture segmentation.
Scalable Object Detection by Filter Compression With Regularized Sparse Coding
Authors: Ting-Hsuan Chao, Yen-Liang Lin, Yin-Hsi Kuo, Winston H. Hsu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: For practical applications, an object detection system requires huge number of classes to meet real world needs. Many successful object detection systems use part-based model which trains several filters (classifiers) for each class to perform multiclass object detection. However, these methods have linear computational complexity in regard to the number of classes and may lead to huge computing time. To solve the problem, some works learn a codebook for the filters and conduct operations only on the codebook to make computational complexity sublinear in regard to the number of classes. But the past studies missed to consider filter characteristics, e.g., filters are weights trained by Support Vector Machine, and rather they applied method such as sparse coding for visual signals' optimization. This misuse results in huge accuracy loss when a large speedup is required. To remedy this shortcoming, we have developed a new method called Regularized Sparse Coding which is designed to reconstruct filter functionality. That is, it reconstructs the ability of filter to produce accurate score for classification. Our method can reconstruct filters by minimizing score map error, while sparse coding reconstructs filters by minimizing appearance error. This different optimization strategy makes our method be able to have small accuracy loss when a large speedup is achieved. On the ILSVRC 2013 dataset, which has 200 classes, this work represents a 16 times speedup using only 1.25% memory on single CPU with 0.04 mAP drop when compared with the original Deformable Part Model. Moreover, parallel computing on GPUs is also applicable for our work to achieve more speedup.
An Improved Deep Learning Architecture for Person Re-Identification
Authors: Ejaz Ahmed, Michael Jones, Tim K. Marks
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this work we propose a method for simultaneously learning features and a corresponding similarity metric for person re-identification. We present a deep convolution architecture with layers specially designed to address the problem of re-identification. Given a pair of images as input, our network outputs a similarity value indicating whether the two input images depict the same person. Novel elements of our architecture include a layer that computes cross-input neighborhood differences, which capture local relationships among mid-level features that were computed separately from the two input images. A high-level summary of the outputs of this layer is computed by a layer of patch summary features, which are then spatially integrated in subsequent layers. Our method significantly outperforms the state of the art on both a large data set (CUHK03) and a medium-sized dataset (CUHK01), and it is resistant to overfitting. We also demonstrate that by initially training on an unrelated large data set before fine tuning on a small target data set, our network can achieve results comparable to the state of the art even on the small data set (VIPeR).
Understanding Classifier Errors by Examining Influential Neighbors
Authors: Mayank Kabra, Alice Robie, Kristin Branson
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Modern supervised learning algorithms can learn very accurate and complex discriminating functions. But when these classifiers fail, this complexity can also be a drawback because there is no easy, intuitive way to diagnose why they are failing and remedy the problem. This important question has received little attention. To address this problem, we propose a novel method to analyze and understand a classifier's errors. Our method centers around a measure of how much influence a training example has on the classifier's prediction for a test example. To understand why a classifier is mispredicting the label of a given test example, the user can find and review the most influential training examples that caused this misprediction, allowing them to focus their attention on relevant areas of the data space. This will aid the user in determining if and how the training data is inconsistently labeled or lacking in diversity, or if the feature representation is insufficient. As computing the influence of each training example is computationally impractical, we propose a novel distance metric to approximate influence for boosting classifiers that is fast enough to be used interactively. We also show several novel use paradigms of our distance metric. Through experiments, we show that it can be used to find incorrectly or inconsistently labeled training examples, to find specific areas of the data space that need more training data, and to gain insight into which features are missing from the current representation.
Riemannian Coding and Dictionary Learning: Kernels to the Rescue
Authors: Mehrtash Harandi, Mathieu Salzmann
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: While sparse coding on non-flat Riemannian manifolds has recently become increasingly popular, existing solutions either are dedicated to specific manifolds, or rely on optimization problems that are difficult to solve, especially when it comes to dictionary learning. In this paper, we propose to make use of kernels to perform coding and dictionary learning on Riemannian manifolds. To this end, we introduce a general Riemannian coding framework with its kernel-based counterpart. This lets us (i) generalize beyond the special case of sparse coding; (ii) introduce efficient solutions to two coding schemes; (iii) learn the kernel parameters; (iv) perform unsupervised and supervised dictionary learning in a much simpler manner than previous Riemannian coding methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three different types of non-flat manifolds, and illustrate its generality by applying it to Euclidean spaces, which also are Riemannian manifolds.
Scalable Structure From Motion for Densely Sampled Videos
Authors: Benjamin Resch, Hendrik P. A. Lensch, Oliver Wang, Marc Pollefeys, Alexander Sorkine-Hornung
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Videos consisting of thousands of high resolution frames are challenging for existing structure from motion (SfM) and simultaneous-localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques. We present a new approach for simultaneously computing extrinsic camera poses and 3D scene structure that is capable of handling such large volumes of image data. The key insight behind this paper is to effectively exploit coherence in densely sampled video input. Our technical contributions include robust tracking and selection of confident video frames, a novel window bundle adjustment, frame-to-structure verification for globally consistent reconstructions with multi-loop closing, and utilizing efficient global linear camera pose estimation in order to link both consecutive and distant bundle adjustment windows. To our knowledge we describe the first system that is capable of handling high resolution, high frame-rate video data with close to realtime performance. In addition, our approach can robustly integrate data from different video sequences, allowing multiple video streams to be simultaneously calibrated in an efficient and globally optimal way. We demonstrate high quality alignment on large scale challenging datasets, e.g., 2-20 megapixel resolution at frame rates of 25-120 Hz with thousands of frames.
Parsing Occluded People by Flexible Compositions
Authors: Xianjie Chen, Alan L. Yuille
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper presents an approach to parsing humans when there is significant occlusion. We model humans using a graphical model which has a tree structure building on recent work [32, 6] and exploit the connectivity prior that, even in presence of occlusion, the visible nodes form a connected subtree of the graphical model. We call each connected subtree a flexible composition of object parts. This involves a novel method for learning occlusion cues. During inference we need to search over a mixture of different flexible models. By exploiting part sharing, we show that this inference can be done extremely efficiently requiring only twice as many computations as searching for the entire object (i.e., not modeling occlusion). We evaluate our model on the standard benchmarked "We Are Family" Stickmen dataset and obtain significant performance improvements over the best alternative algorithms.
Joint Calibration of Ensemble of Exemplar SVMs
Authors: Davide Modolo, Alexander Vezhnevets, Olga Russakovsky, Vittorio Ferrari
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We present a method for calibrating the Ensemble of Exemplar SVMs model. Unlike the standard approach, which calibrates each SVM independently, our method optimizes their joint performance as an ensemble. We formulate joint calibration as a constrained optimization problem and devise an efficient optimization algorithm to find its global optimum. The algorithm dynamically discards parts of the solution space that cannot contain the optimum early on, making the optimization computationally feasible. We experiment with EE-SVM trained on state-of-the-art CNN descriptors. Results on the ILSVRC 2014 and PASCAL VOC 2007 datasets show that (i) our joint calibration procedure outperforms independent calibration on the task of classifying windows as belonging to an object class or not; and (ii) this improved window classifier leads to better performance on the object detection task.
Holistic 3D Scene Understanding From a Single Geo-Tagged Image
Authors: Shenlong Wang, Sanja Fidler, Raquel Urtasun
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper we are interested in exploiting geographic priors to help outdoor scene understanding. Towards this goal we propose  a holistic approach that reasons jointly about 3D object detection, pose estimation, semantic segmentation as well as depth reconstruction from a single image. Our approach takes  advantage of  large-scale crowd-sourced maps to generate dense geographic, geometric and semantic priors by rendering the 3D world. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our holistic model on the challenging KITTI dataset, and show significant improvements over the baselines in all metrics and tasks.