mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Saliency Detection in Large Point Sets
Authors: Elizabeth Shtrom, George Leifman, Ayellet Tal
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: While saliency in images has been extensively studied in recent years, there is very little work on saliency of point sets. This is despite the fact that point sets and range data are becoming ever more widespread and have myriad applications. In this paper we present an algorithm for detecting the salient points in unorganized 3D point sets. Our algorithm is designed to cope with extremely large sets, which may contain tens of millions of points. Such data is typical of urban scenes, which have recently become commonly available on the web. No previous work has handled such data. For general data sets, we show that our results are competitive with those of saliency detection of surfaces, although we do not have any connectivity information. We demonstrate the utility of our algorithm in two applications: producing a set of the most informative viewpoints and suggesting an informative city tour given a city scan.
Segmentation Driven Object Detection with Fisher Vectors
Authors: Ramazan Gokberk Cinbis, Jakob Verbeek, Cordelia Schmid
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We present an object detection system based on the Fisher vector (FV) image representation computed over SIFT and color descriptors. For computational and storage efficiency, we use a recent segmentation-based method to generate class-independent object detection hypotheses, in combination with data compression techniques. Our main contribution is a method to produce tentative object segmentation masks to suppress background clutter in the features. Re-weighting the local image features based on these masks is shown to improve object detection significantly. We also exploit contextual features in the form of a full-image FV descriptor, and an inter-category rescoring mechanism. Our experiments on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2010 datasets show that our detector improves over the current state-of-the-art detection results.
Joint Segmentation and Pose Tracking of Human in Natural Videos
Authors: Taegyu Lim, Seunghoon Hong, Bohyung Han, Joon Hee Han
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose an on-line algorithm to extract a human by foreground/background segmentation and estimate pose of the human from the videos captured by moving cameras. We claim that a virtuous cycle can be created by appropriate interactions between the two modules to solve individual problems. This joint estimation problem is divided into two subproblems, foreground/background segmentation and pose tracking, which alternate iteratively for optimization; segmentation step generates foreground mask for human pose tracking, and human pose tracking step provides foreground response map for segmentation. The final solution is obtained when the iterative procedure converges. We evaluate our algorithm quantitatively and qualitatively in real videos involving various challenges, and present its outstanding performance compared to the state-of-the-art techniques for segmentation and pose estimation.
NYC3DCars: A Dataset of 3D Vehicles in Geographic Context
Authors: Kevin Matzen, Noah Snavely
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Geometry and geography can play an important role in recognition tasks in computer vision. To aid in studying connections between geometry and recognition, we introduce NYC3DCars, a rich dataset for vehicle detection in urban scenes built from Internet photos drawn from the wild, focused on densely trafficked areas of New York City. Our dataset is augmented with detailed geometric and geographic information, including full camera poses derived from structure from motion, 3D vehicle annotations, and geographic information from open resources, including road segmentations and directions of travel. NYC3DCars can be used to study new questions about using geometric information in detection tasks, and to explore applications of Internet photos in understanding cities. To demonstrate the utility of our data, we evaluate the use of the geographic information in our dataset to enhance a parts-based detection method, and suggest other avenues for future exploration.
Robust Trajectory Clustering for Motion Segmentation
Authors: Feng Shi, Zhong Zhou, Jiangjian Xiao, Wei Wu
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Due to occlusions and objects' non-rigid deformation in the scene, the obtained motion trajectories from common trackers may contain a number of missing or mis-associated entries. To cluster such corrupted point based trajectories into multiple motions is still a hard problem. In this paper, we present an approach that exploits temporal and spatial characteristics from tracked points to facilitate segmentation of incomplete and corrupted trajectories, thereby obtain highly robust results against severe data missing and noises. Our method first uses the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) bases as a temporal smoothness constraint on trajectory projection to ensure the validity of resulting components to repair pathological trajectories. Then, based on an observation that the trajectories of foreground and background in a scene may have different spatial distributions, we propose a two-stage clustering strategy that first performs foreground-background separation then segments remaining foreground trajectories. We show that, with this new clustering strategy, sequences with complex motions can be accurately segmented by even using a simple translational model. Finally, a series of experiments on Hopkins 155 dataset and Berkeley motion segmentation dataset show the advantage of our method over other state-of-the-art motion segmentation algorithms in terms of both effectiveness and robustness.
Active Learning of an Action Detector from Untrimmed Videos
Authors: Sunil Bandla, Kristen Grauman
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Collecting and annotating videos of realistic human actions is tedious, yet critical for training action recognition systems. We propose a method to actively request the most useful video annotations among a large set of unlabeled videos. Predicting the utility of annotating unlabeled video is not trivial, since any given clip may contain multiple actions of interest, and it need not be trimmed to temporal regions of interest. To deal with this problem, we propose a detection-based active learner to train action category models. We develop a voting-based framework to localize likely intervals of interest in an unlabeled clip, and use them to estimate the total reduction in uncertainty that annotating that clip would yield. On three datasets, we show our approach can learn accurate action detectors more efficiently than alternative active learning strategies that fail to accommodate the "untrimmed" nature of real video data.
YouTube2Text: Recognizing and Describing Arbitrary Activities Using Semantic Hierarchies and Zero-Shot Recognition
Authors: Sergio Guadarrama, Niveda Krishnamoorthy, Girish Malkarnenkar, Subhashini Venugopalan, Raymond Mooney, Trevor Darrell, Kate Saenko
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Despite a recent push towards large-scale object recognition, activity recognition remains limited to narrow domains and small vocabularies of actions. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of recognizing and describing activities "in-the-wild". We present a solution that takes a short video clip and outputs a brief sentence that sums up the main activity in the video, such as the actor, the action and its object. Unlike previous work, our approach works on out-of-domain actions: it does not require training videos of the exact activity. If it cannot find an accurate prediction for a pre-trained model, it finds a less specific answer that is also plausible from a pragmatic standpoint. We use semantic hierarchies learned from the data to help to choose an appropriate level of generalization, and priors learned from web-scale natural language corpora to penalize unlikely combinations of actors/actions/objects; we also use a web-scale language model to "fill in" novel verbs, i.e. when the verb does not appear in the training set. We evaluate our method on a large YouTube corpus and demonstrate it is able to generate short sentence descriptions of video clips better than baseline approaches.
Manifold Based Face Synthesis from Sparse Samples
Authors: Hongteng Xu, Hongyuan Zha
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Data sparsity has been a thorny issue for manifold-based image synthesis, and in this paper we address this critical problem by leveraging ideas from transfer learning. Specifically, we propose methods based on generating auxiliary data in the form of synthetic samples using transformations of the original sparse samples. To incorporate the auxiliary data, we propose a weighted data synthesis method, which adaptively selects from the generated samples for inclusion during the manifold learning process via a weighted iterative algorithm. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, we apply it to the problem of face image synthesis from sparse samples. Compared with existing methods, the proposed method shows encouraging results with good performance improvements.
Like Father, Like Son: Facial Expression Dynamics for Kinship Verification
Authors: Hamdi Dibeklioglu, Albert Ali Salah, Theo Gevers
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Kinship verification from facial appearance is a difficult problem. This paper explores the possibility of employing facial expression dynamics in this problem. By using features that describe facial dynamics and spatio-temporal appearance over smile expressions, we show that it is possible to improve the state of the art in this problem, and verify that it is indeed possible to recognize kinship by resemblance of facial expressions. The proposed method is tested on different kin relationships. On the average, 72.89% verification accuracy is achieved on spontaneous smiles.
Toward Guaranteed Illumination Models for Non-convex Objects
Authors: Yuqian Zhang, Cun Mu, Han-Wen Kuo, John Wright
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Illumination variation remains a central challenge in object detection and recognition. Existing analyses of illumination variation typically pertain to convex, Lambertian objects, and guarantee quality of approximation in an average case sense. We show that it is possible to build models for the set of images across illumination variation with worstcase performance guarantees, for nonconvex Lambertian objects. Namely, a natural verification test based on the distance to the model guarantees to accept any image which can be sufficiently well-approximated by an image of the object under some admissible lighting condition, and guarantees to reject any image that does not have a sufficiently good approximation. These models are generated by sampling illumination directions with sufficient density, which follows from a new perturbation bound for directional illuminated images in the Lambertian model. As the number of such images required for guaranteed verification may be large, we introduce a new formulation for cone preserving dimensionality reduction, which leverages tools from sparse and low-rank decomposition to reduce the complexity, while controlling the approximation error with respect to the original model. 1
Nonparametric Blind Super-resolution
Authors: Tomer Michaeli, Michal Irani
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Super resolution (SR) algorithms typically assume that the blur kernel is known (either the Point Spread Function 'PSF' of the camera, or some default low-pass filter, e.g. a Gaussian). However, the performance of SR methods significantly deteriorates when the assumed blur kernel deviates from the true one. We propose a general framework for "blind" super resolution. In particular, we show that: (i) Unlike the common belief, the PSF of the camera is the wrong blur kernel to use in SR algorithms. (ii) We show how the correct SR blur kernel can be recovered directly from the low-resolution image. This is done by exploiting the inherent recurrence property of small natural image patches (either internally within the same image, or externally in a collection of other natural images). In particular, we show that recurrence of small patches across scales of the low-res image (which forms the basis for single-image SR), can also be used for estimating the optimal blur kernel. This leads to significant improvement in SR results.
Pedestrian Parsing via Deep Decompositional Network
Authors: Ping Luo, Xiaogang Wang, Xiaoou Tang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a new Deep Decompositional Network (DDN) for parsing pedestrian images into semantic regions, such as hair, head, body, arms, and legs, where the pedestrians can be heavily occluded. Unlike existing methods based on template matching or Bayesian inference, our approach directly maps low-level visual features to the label maps of body parts with DDN, which is able to accurately estimate complex pose variations with good robustness to occlusions and background clutters. DDN jointly estimates occluded regions and segments body parts by stacking three types of hidden layers: occlusion estimation layers, completion layers, and decomposition layers. The occlusion estimation layers estimate a binary mask, indicating which part of a pedestrian is invisible. The completion layers synthesize low-level features of the invisible part from the original features and the occlusion mask. The decomposition layers directly transform the synthesized visual features to label maps. We devise a new strategy to pre-train these hidden layers, and then fine-tune the entire network using the stochastic gradient descent. Experimental results show that our approach achieves better segmentation accuracy than the state-of-the-art methods on pedestrian images with or without occlusions. Another important contribution of this paper is that it provides a large scale benchmark human parsing dataset 1 that includes 3, 673 annotated samples collected from 171 surveillance videos. It is 20 times larger than existing public datasets.
Large-Scale Video Hashing via Structure Learning
Authors: Guangnan Ye, Dong Liu, Jun Wang, Shih-Fu Chang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Recently, learning based hashing methods have become popular for indexing large-scale media data. Hashing methods map high-dimensional features to compact binary codes that are efficient to match and robust in preserving original similarity. However, most of the existing hashing methods treat videos as a simple aggregation of independent frames and index each video through combining the indexes of frames. The structure information of videos, e.g., discriminative local visual commonality and temporal consistency, is often neglected in the design of hash functions. In this paper, we propose a supervised method that explores the structure learning techniques to design efficient hash functions. The proposed video hashing method formulates a minimization problem over a structure-regularized empirical loss. In particular, the structure regularization exploits the common local visual patterns occurring in video frames that are associated with the same semantic class, and simultaneously preserves the temporal consistency over successive frames from the same video. We show that the minimization objective can be efficiently solved by an Accelerated Proximal Gradient (APG) method. Extensive experiments on two large video benchmark datasets (up to around 150K video clips with over 12 million frames) show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-ofthe-art hashing methods.
Salient Region Detection by UFO: Uniqueness, Focusness and Objectness
Authors: Peng Jiang, Haibin Ling, Jingyi Yu, Jingliang Peng
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The goal of saliency detection is to locate important pixels or regions in an image which attract humans' visual attention the most. This is a fundamental task whose output may serve as the basis for further computer vision tasks like segmentation, resizing, tracking and so forth. In this paper we propose a novel salient region detection algorithm by integrating three important visual cues namely uniqueness, focusness and objectness (UFO). In particular, uniqueness captures the appearance-derived visual contrast; focusness reflects the fact that salient regions are often photographed in focus; and objectness helps keep completeness of detected salient regions. While uniqueness has been used for saliency detection for long, it is new to integrate focusness and objectness for this purpose. In fact, focusness and objectness both provide important saliency information complementary of uniqueness. In our experiments using public benchmark datasets, we show that, even with a simple pixel level combination of the three components, the proposed approach yields significant improvement compared with previously reported methods.
Revisiting the PnP Problem: A Fast, General and Optimal Solution
Authors: Yinqiang Zheng, Yubin Kuang, Shigeki Sugimoto, Kalle Astrom, Masatoshi Okutomi
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this paper, we revisit the classical perspective-n-point (PnP) problem, and propose the first non-iterative O(n) solution that is fast, generally applicable and globally optimal. Our basic idea is to formulate the PnP problem into a functional minimization problem and retrieve all its stationary points by using the Gr??bner basis technique. The novelty lies in a non-unit quaternion representation to parameterize the rotation and a simple but elegant formulation of the PnP problem into an unconstrained optimization problem. Interestingly, the polynomial system arising from its first-order optimality condition assumes two-fold symmetry, a nice property that can be utilized to improve speed and numerical stability of a Gr??bner basis solver. Experiment results have demonstrated that, in terms of accuracy, our proposed solution is definitely better than the state-ofthe-art O(n) methods, and even comparable with the reprojection error minimization method.
Rectangling Stereographic Projection for Wide-Angle Image Visualization
Authors: Che-Han Chang, Min-Chun Hu, Wen-Huang Cheng, Yung-Yu Chuang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper proposes a new projection model for mapping a hemisphere to a plane. Such a model can be useful for viewing wide-angle images. Our model consists of two steps. In the first step, the hemisphere is projected onto a swung surface constructed by a circular profile and a rounded rectangular trajectory. The second step maps the projected image on the swung surface onto the image plane through the perspective projection. We also propose a method for automatically determining proper parameters for the projection model based on image content. The proposed model has several advantages. It is simple, efficient and easy to control. Most importantly, it makes a better compromise between distortion minimization and line preserving than popular projection models, such as stereographic and Pannini projections. Experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
Hidden Factor Analysis for Age Invariant Face Recognition
Authors: Dihong Gong, Zhifeng Li, Dahua Lin, Jianzhuang Liu, Xiaoou Tang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Age invariant face recognition has received increasing attention due to its great potential in real world applications. In spite of the great progress in face recognition techniques, reliably recognizing faces across ages remains a difficult task. The facial appearance of a person changes substantially over time, resulting in significant intra-class variations. Hence, the key to tackle this problem is to separate the variation caused by aging from the person-specific features that are stable. Specifically, we propose a new method, called Hidden Factor Analysis (HFA). This method captures the intuition above through a probabilistic model with two latent factors: an identity factor that is age-invariant and an age factor affected by the aging process. Then, the observed appearance can be modeled as a combination of the components generated based on these factors. We also develop a learning algorithm that jointly estimates the latent factors and the model parameters using an EM procedure. Extensive experiments on two well-known public domain face aging datasets: MORPH (the largest public face aging database) and FGNET, clearly show that the proposed method achieves notable improvement over state-of-the-art algorithms.
Randomized Ensemble Tracking
Authors: Qinxun Bai, Zheng Wu, Stan Sclaroff, Margrit Betke, Camille Monnier
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a randomized ensemble algorithm to model the time-varying appearance of an object for visual tracking. In contrast with previous online methods for updating classifier ensembles in tracking-by-detection, the weight vector that combines weak classifiers is treated as a random variable and the posterior distribution for the weight vector is estimated in a Bayesian manner. In essence, the weight vector is treated as a distribution that reflects the confidence among the weak classifiers used to construct and adapt the classifier ensemble. The resulting formulation models the time-varying discriminative ability among weak classifiers so that the ensembled strong classifier can adapt to the varying appearance, backgrounds, and occlusions. The formulation is tested in a tracking-by-detection implementation. Experiments on 28 challenging benchmark videos demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve results comparable to and often better than those of stateof-the-art approaches.
Motion-Aware KNN Laplacian for Video Matting
Authors: Dingzeyu Li, Qifeng Chen, Chi-Keung Tang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper demonstrates how the nonlocal principle benefits video matting via the KNN Laplacian, which comes with a straightforward implementation using motionaware K nearest neighbors. In hindsight, the fundamental problem to solve in video matting is to produce spatiotemporally coherent clusters of moving foreground pixels. When used as described, the motion-aware KNN Laplacian is effective in addressing this fundamental problem, as demonstrated by sparse user markups typically on only one frame in a variety of challenging examples featuring ambiguous foreground and background colors, changing topologies with disocclusion, significant illumination changes, fast motion, and motion blur. When working with existing Laplacian-based systems, our Laplacian is expected to benefit them immediately with improved clustering of moving foreground pixels.
Pose-Configurable Generic Tracking of Elongated Objects
Authors: Daniel Wesierski, Patrick Horain
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Elongated objects have various shapes and can shift, rotate, change scale, and be rigid or deform by flexing, articulating, and vibrating, with examples as varied as a glass bottle, a robotic arm, a surgical suture, a finger pair, a tram, and a guitar string. This generally makes tracking of poses of elongated objects very challenging. We describe a unified, configurable framework for tracking the pose of elongated objects, which move in the image plane and extend over the image region. Our method strives for simplicity, versatility, and efficiency. The object is decomposed into a chained assembly of segments of multiple parts that are arranged under a hierarchy of tailored spatio-temporal constraints. In this hierarchy, segments can rescale independently while their elasticity is controlled with global orientations and local distances. While the trend in tracking is to design complex, structure-free algorithms that update object appearance online, we show that our tracker, with the novel but remarkably simple, structured organization of parts with constant appearance, reaches or improves state-of-the-art performance. Most importantly, our model can be easily configured to track exact pose of arbitrary, elongated objects in the image plane. The tracker can run up to 100 fps on a desktop PC, yet the computation time scales linearly with the number of object parts. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to generic tracking of elongated objects.
Heterogeneous Auto-similarities of Characteristics (HASC): Exploiting Relational Information for Classification
Authors: Marco San Biagio, Marco Crocco, Marco Cristani, Samuele Martelli, Vittorio Murino
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Capturing the essential characteristics of visual objects by considering how their features are inter-related is a recent philosophy of object classification. In this paper, we embed this principle in a novel image descriptor, dubbed Heterogeneous Auto-Similarities of Characteristics (HASC). HASC is applied to heterogeneous dense features maps, encoding linear relations by covariances and nonlinear associations through information-theoretic measures such as mutual information and entropy. In this way, highly complex structural information can be expressed in a compact, scale invariant and robust manner. The effectiveness of HASC is tested on many diverse detection and classification scenarios, considering objects, textures and pedestrians, on widely known benchmarks (Caltech-101, Brodatz, Daimler Multi-Cue). In all the cases, the results obtained with standard classifiers demonstrate the superiority of HASC with respect to the most adopted local feature descriptors nowadays, such as SIFT, HOG, LBP and feature covariances. In addition, HASC sets the state-of-the-art on the Brodatz texture dataset and the Daimler Multi-Cue pedestrian dataset, without exploiting ad-hoc sophisticated classifiers.
A Learning-Based Approach to Reduce JPEG Artifacts in Image Matting
Authors: Inchang Choi, Sunyeong Kim, Michael S. Brown, Yu-Wing Tai
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Single image matting techniques assume high-quality input images. The vast majority of images on the web and in personal photo collections are encoded using JPEG compression. JPEG images exhibit quantization artifacts that adversely affect the performance of matting algorithms. To address this situation, we propose a learning-based post-processing method to improve the alpha mattes extracted from JPEG images. Our approach learns a set of sparse dictionaries from training examples that are used to transfer details from high-quality alpha mattes to alpha mattes corrupted by JPEG compression. Three different dictionaries are defined to accommodate different object structure (long hair, short hair, and sharp boundaries). A back-projection criteria combined within an MRF framework is used to automatically select the best dictionary to apply on the object's local boundary. We demonstrate that our method can produces superior results over existing state-of-the-art matting algorithms on a variety of inputs and compression levels.
Content-Aware Rotation
Authors: Kaiming He, Huiwen Chang, Jian Sun
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We present an image editing tool called Content-Aware Rotation. Casually shot photos can appear tilted, and are often corrected by rotation and cropping. This trivial solution may remove desired content and hurt image integrity. Instead of doing rigid rotation, we propose a warping method that creates the perception of rotation and avoids cropping. Human vision studies suggest that the perception of rotation is mainly due to horizontal/vertical lines. We design an optimization-based method that preserves the rotation of horizontal/vertical lines, maintains the completeness of the image content, and reduces the warping distortion. An efficient algorithm is developed to address the challenging optimization. We demonstrate our content-aware rotation method on a variety of practical cases.
Perspective Motion Segmentation via Collaborative Clustering
Authors: Zhuwen Li, Jiaming Guo, Loong-Fah Cheong, Steven Zhiying Zhou
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper addresses real-world challenges in the motion segmentation problem, including perspective effects, missing data, and unknown number of motions. It first formulates the 3-D motion segmentation from two perspective views as a subspace clustering problem, utilizing the epipolar constraint of an image pair. It then combines the point correspondence information across multiple image frames via a collaborative clustering step, in which tight integration is achieved via a mixed norm optimization scheme. For model selection, we propose an over-segment and merge approach, where the merging step is based on the property of the 1 -norm of the mutual sparse representation of two oversegmented groups. The resulting algorithm can deal with incomplete trajectories and perspective effects substantially better than state-of-the-art two-frame and multi-frame methods. Experiments on a 62-clip dataset show the significant superiority of the proposed idea in both segmentation accuracy and model selection.
Progressive Multigrid Eigensolvers for Multiscale Spectral Segmentation
Authors: Michael Maire, Stella X. Yu
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We reexamine the role of multiscale cues in image segmentation using an architecture that constructs a globally coherent scale-space output representation. This characteristic is in contrast to many existing works on bottom-up segmentation, which prematurely compress information into a single scale. The architecture is a standard extension of Normalized Cuts from an image plane to an image pyramid, with cross-scale constraints enforcing consistency in the solution while allowing emergence of coarse-to-fine detail. We observe that multiscale processing, in addition to improving segmentation quality, offers a route by which to speed computation. We make a significant algorithmic advance in the form of a custom multigrid eigensolver for constrained Angular Embedding problems possessing coarseto-fine structure. Multiscale Normalized Cuts is a special case. Our solver builds atop recent results on randomized matrix approximation, using a novel interpolation operation to mold its computational strategy according to crossscale constraints in the problem definition. Applying our solver to multiscale segmentation problems demonstrates speedup by more than an order of magnitude. This speedup is at the algorithmic level and carries over to any implementation target.
Shape Index Descriptors Applied to Texture-Based Galaxy Analysis
Authors: Kim Steenstrup Pedersen, Kristoffer Stensbo-Smidt, Andrew Zirm, Christian Igel
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: A texture descriptor based on the shape index and the accompanying curvedness measure is proposed, and it is evaluated for the automated analysis of astronomical image data. A representative sample of images of low-redshift galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) serves as a testbed. The goal of applying texture descriptors to these data is to extract novel information about galaxies; information which is often lost in more traditional analysis. In this study, we build a regression model for predicting a spectroscopic quantity, the specific star-formation rate (sSFR). As texture features we consider multi-scale gradient orientation histograms as well as multi-scale shape index histograms, which lead to a new descriptor. Our results show that we can successfully predict spectroscopic quantities from the texture in optical multi-band images. We successfully recover the observed bi-modal distribution of galaxies into quiescent and star-forming. The state-ofthe-art for predicting the sSFR is a color-based physical model. We significantly improve its accuracy by augmenting the model with texture information. This study is the first step towards enabling the quantification of physical galaxy properties from imaging data alone.
Markov Network-Based Unified Classifier for Face Identification
Authors: Wonjun Hwang, Kyungshik Roh, Junmo Kim
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a novel unifying framework using a Markov network to learn the relationship between multiple classifiers in face recognition. We assume that we have several complementary classifiers and assign observation nodes to the features of a query image and hidden nodes to the features of gallery images. We connect each hidden node to its corresponding observation node and to the hidden nodes of other neighboring classifiers. For each observation-hidden node pair, we collect a set of gallery candidates that are most similar to the observation instance, and the relationship between the hidden nodes is captured in terms of the similarity matrix between the collected gallery images. Posterior probabilities in the hidden nodes are computed by the belief-propagation algorithm. The novelty of the proposed framework is the method that takes into account the classifier dependency using the results of each neighboring classifier. We present extensive results on two different evaluation protocols, known and unknown image variation tests, using three different databases, which shows that the proposed framework always leads to good accuracy in face recognition.
Learning Hash Codes with Listwise Supervision
Authors: Jun Wang, Wei Liu, Andy X. Sun, Yu-Gang Jiang
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Hashing techniques have been intensively investigated in the design of highly efficient search engines for largescale computer vision applications. Compared with prior approximate nearest neighbor search approaches like treebased indexing, hashing-based search schemes have prominent advantages in terms of both storage and computational efficiencies. Moreover, the procedure of devising hash functions can be easily incorporated into sophisticated machine learning tools, leading to data-dependent and task-specific compact hash codes. Therefore, a number of learning paradigms, ranging from unsupervised to supervised, have been applied to compose appropriate hash functions. However, most of the existing hash function learning methods either treat hash function design as a classification problem or generate binary codes to satisfy pairwise supervision, and have not yet directly optimized the search accuracy. In this paper, we propose to leverage listwise supervision into a principled hash function learning framework. In particular, the ranking information is represented by a set of rank triplets that can be used to assess the quality of ranking. Simple linear projection-based hash functions are solved efficiently through maximizing the ranking quality over the training data. We carry out experiments on large image datasets with size up to one million and compare with the state-of-the-art hashing techniques. The extensive results corroborate that our learned hash codes via listwise supervision can provide superior search accuracy without incurring heavy computational overhead.
A Robust Analytical Solution to Isometric Shape-from-Template with Focal Length Calibration
Authors: Adrien Bartoli, Daniel Pizarro, Toby Collins
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We study the uncalibrated isometric Shape-fromTemplate problem, that consists in estimating an isometric deformation from a template shape to an input image whose focal length is unknown. Our method is the first that combines the following features: solving for both the 3D deformation and the camera's focal length, involving only local analytical solutions (there is no numerical optimization), being robust to mismatches, handling general surfaces and running extremely fast. This was achieved through two key steps. First, an 'uncalibrated' 3D deformation is computed thanks to a novel piecewise weak-perspective projection model. Second, the camera's focal length is estimated and enables upgrading the 3D deformation to metric. We use a variational framework, implemented using a smooth function basis and sampled local deformation models. The only degeneracy which we easily detectfor focal length estimation is a flat and fronto-parallel surface. Experimental results on simulated and real datasets show that our method achieves a 3D shape accuracy slightly below state of the art methods using a precalibrated or the true focal length, and a focal length accuracy slightly below static calibration methods.
Real-World Normal Map Capture for Nearly Flat Reflective Surfaces
Authors: Bastien Jacquet, Christian Hane, Kevin Koser, Marc Pollefeys
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Although specular objects have gained interest in recent years, virtually no approaches exist for markerless reconstruction of reflective scenes in the wild. In this work, we present a practical approach to capturing normal maps in real-world scenes using video only. We focus on nearly planar surfaces such as windows, facades from glass or metal, or frames, screens and other indoor objects and show how normal maps of these can be obtained without the use of an artificial calibration object. Rather, we track the reflections of real-world straight lines, while moving with a hand-held or vehicle-mounted camera in front of the object. In contrast to error-prone local edge tracking, we obtain the reflections by a robust, global segmentation technique of an ortho-rectified 3D video cube that also naturally allows efficient user interaction. Then, at each point of the reflective surface, the resulting 2D-curve to 3D-line correspondence provides a novel quadratic constraint on the local surface normal. This allows to globally solve for the shape by integrability and smoothness constraints and easily supports the usage of multiple lines. We demonstrate the technique on several objects and facades.
Perceptual Fidelity Aware Mean Squared Error
Authors: Wufeng Xue, Xuanqin Mou, Lei Zhang, Xiangchu Feng
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: How to measure the perceptual quality of natural images is an important problem in low level vision. It is known that the Mean Squared Error (MSE) is not an effective index to describe the perceptual fidelity of images. Numerous perceptual fidelity indices have been developed, while the representatives include the Structural SIMilarity (SSIM) index and its variants. However, most of those perceptual measures are nonlinear, and they cannot be easily adopted as an objective function to minimize in various low level vision tasks. Can MSE be perceptual fidelity aware after some minor adaptation? In this paper we propose a simple framework to enhance the perceptual fidelity awareness of MSE by introducing an l 2 -norm structural error term to it. Such a Structural MSE (SMSE) can lead to very competitive image quality assessment (IQA) results. More surprisingly, we show that by using certain structure extractors, SMSE can be further turned into a Gaussian smoothed MSE (i.e., the Euclidean distance between the original and distorted images after Gaussian smooth filtering), which is much simpler to calculate but achieves rather better IQA performance than SSIM. The socalled Perceptual-fidelity Aware MSE (PAMSE) can have great potentials in applications such as perceptual image coding and perceptual image restoration.
Temporally Consistent Superpixels
Authors: Matthias Reso, Jorn Jachalsky, Bodo Rosenhahn, Jorn Ostermann
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Superpixel algorithms represent a very useful and increasingly popular preprocessing step for a wide range of computer vision applications, as they offer the potential to boost efficiency and effectiveness. In this regards, this paper presents a highly competitive approach for temporally consistent superpixels for video content. The approach is based on energy-minimizing clustering utilizing a novel hybrid clustering strategy for a multi-dimensional feature space working in a global color subspace and local spatial subspaces. Moreover, a new contour evolution based strategy is introduced to ensure spatial coherency of the generated superpixels. For a thorough evaluation the proposed approach is compared to state of the art supervoxel algorithms using established benchmarks and shows a superior performance.
Efficient Pedestrian Detection by Directly Optimizing the Partial Area under the ROC Curve
Authors: Sakrapee Paisitkriangkrai, Chunhua Shen, Anton Van Den Hengel
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Many typical applications of object detection operate within a prescribed false-positive range. In this situation the performance of a detector should be assessed on the basis of the area under the ROC curve over that range, rather than over the full curve, as the performance outside the range is irrelevant. This measure is labelled as the partial area under the ROC curve (pAUC). Effective cascade-based classification, for example, depends on training node classifiers that achieve the maximal detection rate at a moderate false positive rate, e.g., around 40% to 50%. We propose a novel ensemble learning method which achieves a maximal detection rate at a user-defined range of false positive rates by directly optimizing the partial AUC using structured learning. By optimizing for different ranges of false positive rates, the proposed method can be used to train either a single strong classifier or a node classifier forming part of a cascade classifier. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and we show that it is possible to train state-of-the-art pedestrian detectors using the proposed structured ensemble learning method.
Rank Minimization across Appearance and Shape for AAM Ensemble Fitting
Authors: Xin Cheng, Sridha Sridharan, Jason Saragih, Simon Lucey
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Active Appearance Models (AAMs) employ a paradigm of inverting a synthesis model of how an object can vary in terms of shape and appearance. As a result, the ability of AAMs to register an unseen object image is intrinsically linked to two factors. First, how well the synthesis model can reconstruct the object image. Second, the degrees of freedom in the model. Fewer degrees of freedom yield a higher likelihood of good fitting performance. In this paper we look at how these seemingly contrasting factors can complement one another for the problem of AAM fitting of an ensemble of images stemming from a constrained set (e.g. an ensemble of face images of the same person).
Random Forests of Local Experts for Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Javier Marin, David Vazquez, Antonio M. Lopez, Jaume Amores, Bastian Leibe
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Pedestrian detection is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision, and has received a lot of attention in the last years. Recently, some authors have shown the advantages of using combinations of part/patch-based detectors in order to cope with the large variability of poses and the existence of partial occlusions. In this paper, we propose a pedestrian detection method that efficiently combines multiple local experts by means of a Random Forest ensemble. The proposed method works with rich block-based representations such as HOG and LBP, in such a way that the same features are reused by the multiple local experts, so that no extra computational cost is needed with respect to a holistic method. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to integrate the proposed approach with a cascaded architecture in order to achieve not only high accuracy but also an acceptable efficiency. In particular, the resulting detector operates at five frames per second using a laptop machine. We tested the proposed method with well-known challenging datasets such as Caltech, ETH, Daimler, and INRIA. The method proposed in this work consistently ranks among the top performers in all the datasets, being either the best method or having a small difference with the best one.
Monocular Image 3D Human Pose Estimation under Self-Occlusion
Authors: Ibrahim Radwan, Abhinav Dhall, Roland Goecke
Published in: IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this paper, an automatic approach for 3D pose reconstruction from a single image is proposed. The presence of human body articulation, hallucinated parts and cluttered background leads to ambiguity during the pose inference, which makes the problem non-trivial. Researchers have explored various methods based on motion and shading in order to reduce the ambiguity and reconstruct the 3D pose. The key idea of our algorithm is to impose both kinematic and orientation constraints. The former is imposed by projecting a 3D model onto the input image and pruning the parts, which are incompatible with the anthropomorphism. The latter is applied by creating synthetic views via regressing the input view to multiple oriented views. After applying the constraints, the 3D model is projected onto the initial and synthetic views, which further reduces the ambiguity. Finally, we borrow the direction of the unambiguous parts from the synthetic views to the initial one, which results in the 3D pose. Quantitative experiments are performed on the HumanEva-I dataset and qualitatively on unconstrained images from the Image Parse dataset. The results show the robustness of the proposed approach to accurately reconstruct the 3D pose form a single image.