mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Kernel Methods on the Riemannian Manifold of Symmetric Positive Definite Matrices
Authors: Sadeep Jayasumana, Richard Hartley, Mathieu Salzmann, Hongdong Li, Mehrtash Harandi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices have become popular to encode image information. Accounting for the geometry of the Riemannian manifold of SPD matrices has proven key to the success of many algorithms. However, most existing methods only approximate the true shape of the manifold locally by its tangent plane. In this paper, inspired by kernel methods, we propose to map SPD matrices to a high dimensional Hilbert space where Euclidean geometry applies. To encode the geometry of the manifold in the mapping, we introduce a family of provably positive definite kernels on the Riemannian manifold of SPD matrices. These kernels are derived from the Gaussian kernel, but exploit different metrics on the manifold. This lets us extend kernel-based algorithms developed for Euclidean spaces, such as SVM and kernel PCA, to the Riemannian manifold of SPD matrices. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on the problems of pedestrian detection, object categorization, texture analysis, 2D motion segmentation and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) segmentation.
Graph Transduction Learning with Connectivity Constraints with Application to Multiple Foreground Cosegmentation
Authors: Tianyang Ma, Longin Jan Latecki
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The proposed approach is based on standard graph transduction, semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework. Its key novelty is the integration of global connectivity constraints into this framework. Although connectivity leads to higher order constraints and their number is an exponential, finding the most violated connectivity constraint can be done efficiently in polynomial time. Moreover, each such constraint can be represented as a linear inequality. Based on this fact, we design a cutting-plane algorithm to solve the integrated problem. It iterates between solving a convex quadratic problem of label propagation with linear inequality constraints, and finding the most violated constraint. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach on a realistic and very challenging problem of cosegmentation of multiple foreground objects in photo collections in which the foreground objects are not present in all photos. The obtained results not only demonstrate performance boost induced by the connectivity constraints, but also show a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.
A Max-Margin Riffled Independence Model for Image Tag Ranking
Authors: Tian Lan, Greg Mori
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose Max-Margin Riffled Independence Model (MMRIM), a new method for image tag ranking modeling the structured preferences among tags. The goal is to predict a ranked tag list for a given image, where tags are ordered by their importance or relevance to the image content. Our model integrates the max-margin formalism with riffled independence factorizations proposed in [10], which naturally allows for structured learning and efficient ranking. Experimental results on the SUN Attribute and LabelMe datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model compared with baseline tag ranking methods. We also apply the predicted rank list of tags to several higher-level computer vision applications in image understanding and retrieval, and demonstrate that MMRIM significantly improves the accuracy of these applications.
Label Propagation from ImageNet to 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Yan Wang, Rongrong Ji, Shih-Fu Chang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in understanding the semantics of point clouds in a wide variety of applications. However, point cloud labeling remains an open problem, due to the difficulty in acquiring sufficient 3D point labels towards training effective classifiers. In this paper, we overcome this challenge by utilizing the existing massive 2D semantic labeled datasets from decadelong community efforts, such as ImageNet and LabelMe, and a novel "cross-domain" label propagation approach. Our proposed method consists of two major novel components, Exemplar SVM based label propagation, which effectively addresses the cross-domain issue, and a graphical model based contextual refinement incorporating 3D constraints. Most importantly, the entire process does not require any training data from the target scenes, also with good scalability towards large scale applications. We evaluate our approach on the well-known Cornell Point Cloud Dataset, achieving much greater efficiency and comparable accuracy even without any 3D training data. Our approach shows further major gains in accuracy when the training data from the target scenes is used, outperforming state-ofthe-art approaches with far better efficiency.
Supervised Semantic Gradient Extraction Using Linear-Time Optimization
Authors: Shulin Yang, Jue Wang, Linda Shapiro
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper proposes a new supervised semantic edge and gradient extraction approach, which allows the user to roughly scribble over the desired region to extract semantically-dominant and coherent edges in it. Our approach first extracts low-level edgelets (small edge clusters) from the input image as primitives and build a graph upon them, by jointly considering both the geometric and appearance compatibility of edgelets. Given the characteristics of the graph, it cannot be effectively optimized by commonly-used energy minimization tools such as graph cuts. We thus propose an efficient linear algorithm for precise graph optimization, by taking advantage of the special structure of the graph. Objective evaluations show that the proposed method significantly outperforms previous semantic edge detection algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in various image editing tasks.
Deep Learning Shape Priors for Object Segmentation
Authors: Fei Chen, Huimin Yu, Roland Hu, Xunxun Zeng
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this paper we introduce a new shape-driven approach for object segmentation. Given a training set of shapes, we first use deep Boltzmann machine to learn the hierarchical architecture of shape priors. This learned hierarchical architecture is then used to model shape variations of global and local structures in an energetic form. Finally, it is applied to data-driven variational methods to perform object extraction of corrupted data based on shape probabilistic representation. Experiments demonstrate that our model can be applied to dataset of arbitrary prior shapes, and can cope with image noise and clutter, as well as partial occlusions.
Consensus of k-NNs for Robust Neighborhood Selection on Graph-Based Manifolds
Authors: Vittal Premachandran, Ramakrishna Kakarala
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Propagating similarity information along the data manifold requires careful selection of local neighborhood. Selecting a "good" neighborhood in an unsupervised setting, given an affinity graph, has been a difficult task. The most common way to select a local neighborhood has been to use the k-nearest neighborhood (k-NN) selection criterion. However, it has the tendency to include noisy edges. In this paper, we propose a way to select a robust neighborhood using the consensus of multiple rounds of k-NNs. We explain how using consensus information can give better control over neighborhood selection. We also explain in detail the problems with another recently proposed neighborhood selection criteria, i.e., Dominant Neighbors, and show that our method is immune to those problems. Finally, we show the results from experiments in which we compare our method to other neighborhood selection approaches. The results corroborate our claims that consensus of k-NNs does indeed help in selecting more robust and stable localities.
Semi-supervised Learning with Constraints for Person Identification in Multimedia Data
Authors: Martin Bauml, Makarand Tapaswi, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We address the problem of person identification in TV series. We propose a unified learning framework for multiclass classification which incorporates labeled and unlabeled data, and constraints between pairs of features in the training. We apply the framework to train multinomial logistic regression classifiers for multi-class face recognition. The method is completely automatic, as the labeled data is obtained by tagging speaking faces using subtitles and fan transcripts of the videos. We demonstrate our approach on six episodes each of two diverse TV series and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Capturing Layers in Image Collections with Componential Models: From the Layered Epitome to the Componential Counting Grid
Authors: Alessandro Perina, Nebojsa Jojic
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Recently, the Counting Grid (CG) model [5] was developed to represent each input image as a point in a large grid of feature counts. This latent point is a corner of a window of grid points which are all uniformly combined to match the (normalized) feature counts in the image. Being a bag of word model with spatial layout in the latent space, the CG model has superior handling of field of view changes in comparison to other bag of word models, but with the price of being essentially a mixture, mapping each scene to a single window in the grid. In this paper we introduce a family of componential models, dubbed the Componential Counting Grid, whose members represent each input image by multiple latent locations, rather than just one. In this way, we make a substantially more flexible admixture model which captures layers or parts of images and maps them to separate windows in a Counting Grid. We tested the models on scene and place classification where their componential nature helped to extract objects, to capture parallax effects, thus better fitting the data and outperforming Counting Grids and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, especially on sequences taken with wearable cameras.
Layer Depth Denoising and Completion for Structured-Light RGB-D Cameras
Authors: Ju Shen, Sen-Ching S. Cheung
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The recent popularity of structured-light depth sensors has enabled many new applications from gesture-based user interface to 3D reconstructions. The quality of the depth measurements of these systems, however, is far from perfect. Some depth values can have significant errors, while others can be missing altogether. The uncertainty in depth measurements among these sensors can significantly degrade the performance of any subsequent vision processing. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic model to capture various types of uncertainties in the depth measurement process among structured-light systems. The key to our model is the use of depth layers to account for the differences between foreground objects and background scene, the missing depth value phenomenon, and the correlation between color and depth channels. The depth layer labeling is solved as a maximum a-posteriori estimation problem, and a Markov Random Field attuned to the uncertainty in measurements is used to spatially smooth the labeling process. Using the depth-layer labels, we propose a depth correction and completion algorithm that outperforms other techniques in the literature.
Adaptive Compressed Tomography Sensing
Authors: Oren Barkan, Jonathan Weill, Amir Averbuch, Shai Dekel
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: One of the main challenges in Computed Tomography (CT) is how to balance between the amount of radiation the patient is exposed to during scan time and the quality of the CT image. We propose a mathematical model for adaptive CT acquisition whose goal is to reduce dosage levels while maintaining high image quality at the same time. The adaptive algorithm iterates between selective limited acquisition and improved reconstruction, with the goal of applying only the dose level required for sufficient image quality. The theoretical foundation of the algorithm is nonlinear Ridgelet approximation and a discrete form of Ridgelet analysis is used to compute the selective acquisition steps that best capture the image edges. We show experimental results where for the same number of line projections, the adaptive model produces higher image quality, when compared with standard limited angle, non-adaptive acquisition algorithms.
Detection of Manipulation Action Consequences (MAC)
Authors: Yezhou Yang, Cornelia Fermuller, Yiannis Aloimonos
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The problem of action recognition and human activity has been an active research area in Computer Vision and Robotics. While full-body motions can be characterized by movement and change of posture, no characterization, that holds invariance, has yet been proposed for the description of manipulation actions. We propose that a fundamental concept in understanding such actions, are the consequences of actions. There is a small set of fundamental primitive action consequences that provides a systematic high-level classification of manipulation actions. In this paper a technique is developed to recognize these action consequences. At the heart of the technique lies a novel active tracking and segmentation method that monitors the changes in appearance and topological structure of the manipulated object. These are then used in a visual semantic graph (VSG) based procedure applied to the time sequence of the monitored object to recognize the action consequence. We provide a new dataset, called Manipulation Action Consequences (MAC 1.0), which can serve as testbed for other studies on this topic. Several experiments on this dataset demonstrates that our method can robustly track objects and detect their deformations and division during the manipulation. Quantitative tests prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the method.
Efficient Color Boundary Detection with Color-Opponent Mechanisms
Authors: Kaifu Yang, Shaobing Gao, Chaoyi Li, Yongjie Li
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Color information plays an important role in better understanding of natural scenes by at least facilitating discriminating boundaries of objects or areas. In this study, we propose a new framework for boundary detection in complex natural scenes based on the color-opponent mechanisms of the visual system. The red-green and blue-yellow color opponent channels in the human visual system are regarded as the building blocks for various color perception tasks such as boundary detection. The proposed framework is a feedforward hierarchical model, which has direct counterpart to the color-opponent mechanisms involved in from the retina to the primary visual cortex (V1). Results show that our simple framework has excellent ability to flexibly capture both the structured chromatic and achromatic boundaries in complex scenes.
Better Exploiting Motion for Better Action Recognition
Authors: Mihir Jain, Herve Jegou, Patrick Bouthemy
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Several recent works on action recognition have attested the importance of explicitly integrating motion characteristics in the video description. This paper establishes that adequately decomposing visual motion into dominant and residual motions, both in the extraction of the space-time trajectories and for the computation of descriptors, significantly improves action recognition algorithms. Then, we design a new motion descriptor, the DCS descriptor, based on differential motion scalar quantities, divergence, curl and shear features. It captures additional information on the local motion patterns enhancing results. Finally, applying the recent VLAD coding technique proposed in image retrieval provides a substantial improvement for action recognition. Our three contributions are complementary and lead to outperform all reported results by a significant margin on three challenging datasets, namely Hollywood 2, HMDB51 and Olympic Sports.
Constraints as Features
Authors: Shmuel Asafi, Daniel Cohen-Or
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new approach to constrained clustering which treats the constraints as features. Our method augments the original feature space with additional dimensions, each of which derived from a given Cannot-link constraints. The specified Cannot-link pair gets extreme coordinates values, and the rest of the points get coordinate values that express their spatial influence from the specified constrained pair. After augmenting all the new features, a standard unconstrained clustering algorithm can be performed, like k-means or spectral clustering. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method for active semi-supervised learning applied to image segmentation and compare it to alternative methods. We also evaluate the performance of our method on the four most commonly evaluated datasets from the UCI machine learning repository.
Graph-Laplacian PCA: Closed-Form Solution and Robustness
Authors: Bo Jiang, Chris Ding, Bio Luo, Jin Tang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a widely used to learn a low-dimensional representation. In many applications, both vector data X and graph data W are available. Laplacian embedding is widely used for embedding graph data. We propose a graph-Laplacian PCA (gLPCA) to learn a low dimensional representation of X that incorporates graph structures encoded in W . This model has several advantages: (1) It is a data representation model. (2) It has a compact closed-form solution and can be efficiently computed. (3) It is capable to remove corruptions. Extensive experiments on 8 datasets show promising results on image reconstruction and significant improvement on clustering and classification.
Determining Motion Directly from Normal Flows Upon the Use of a Spherical Eye Platform
Authors: Tak-Wai Hui, Ronald Chung
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We address the problem of recovering camera motion from video data, which does not require the establishment of feature correspondences or computation of optical flows but from normal flows directly. We have designed an imaging system that has a wide field of view by fixating a number of cameras together to form an approximate spherical eye. With a substantially widened visual field, we discover that estimating the directions of translation and rotation components of the motion separately are possible and particularly efficient. In addition, the inherent ambiguities between translation and rotation also disappear. Magnitude of rotation is recovered subsequently. Experimental results on synthetic and real image data are provided. The results show that not only the accuracy of motion estimation is comparable to those of the state-of-the-art methods that require explicit feature correspondences or optical flows, but also a faster computation time.
Visual Place Recognition with Repetitive Structures
Authors: Akihiko Torii, Josef Sivic, Tomas Pajdla, Masatoshi Okutomi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Repeated structures such as building facades, fences or road markings often represent a significant challenge for place recognition. Repeated structures are notoriously hard for establishing correspondences using multi-view geometry. Even more importantly, they violate the feature independence assumed in the bag-of-visual-words representation which often leads to over-counting evidence and significant degradation of retrieval performance. In this work we show that repeated structures are not a nuisance but, when appropriately represented, they form an important distinguishing feature for many places. We describe a representation of repeated structures suitable for scalable retrieval. It is based on robust detection of repeated image structures and a simple modification of weights in the bag-of-visual-word model. Place recognition results are shown on datasets of street-level imagery from Pittsburgh and San Francisco demonstrating significant gains in recognition performance compared to the standard bag-of-visual-words baseline and more recently proposed burstiness weighting.
Single-Pedestrian Detection Aided by Multi-pedestrian Detection
Authors: Wanli Ouyang, Xiaogang Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this paper, we address the challenging problem of detecting pedestrians who appear in groups and have interaction. A new approach is proposed for single-pedestrian detection aided by multi-pedestrian detection. A mixture model of multi-pedestrian detectors is designed to capture the unique visual cues which are formed by nearby multiple pedestrians but cannot be captured by single-pedestrian detectors. A probabilistic framework is proposed to model the relationship between the configurations estimated by singleand multi-pedestrian detectors, and to refine the single-pedestrian detection result with multi-pedestrian detection. It can integrate with any single-pedestrian detector without significantly increasing the computation load. 15 state-of-the-art single-pedestrian detection approaches are investigated on three widely used public datasets: Caltech, TUD-Brussels and ETH. Experimental results show that our framework significantly improves all these approaches. The average improvement is 9% on the Caltech-Test dataset, aveaon the TUD-Brussels dataset and teh-on the ETH dataset in terms of average miss rate. The lowest average miss rate is reduced from 48% to 43% on the Caltech-Test dataset, from edueto fom4on the TUD-Brussels dataset and from etfoto 55%ton the ETH dataset.
Understanding Bayesian Rooms Using Composite 3D Object Models
Authors: Luca Del Pero, Joshua Bowdish, Bonnie Kermgard, Emily Hartley, Kobus Barnard
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We develop a comprehensive Bayesian generative model for understanding indoor scenes. While it is common in this domain to approximate objects with 3D bounding boxes, we propose using strong representations with finer granularity. For example, we model a chair as a set of four legs, a seat and a backrest. We find that modeling detailed geometry improves recognition and reconstruction, and enables more refined use of appearance for scene understanding. We demonstrate this with a new likelihood function that rewards 3D object hypotheses whose 2D projection is more uniform in color distribution. Such a measure would be confused by background pixels if we used a bounding box to represent a concave object like a chair. Complex objects are modeled using a set or re-usable 3D parts, and we show that this representation captures much of the variation among object instances with relatively few parameters. We also designed specific data-driven inference mechanisms for each part that are shared by all objects containing that part, which helps make inference transparent to the modeler. Further, we show how to exploit contextual relationships to detect more objects, by, for example,proposing chairs around and underneath tables. We present results showing the benefits of each of these innovations. The performance of our approach often exceeds that of state-of-the-art methods on the two tasks of room layout estimation and object recognition, as evaluated on two bench mark data sets used in this domain.
Groupwise Registration via Graph Shrinkage on the Image Manifold
Authors: Shihui Ying, Guorong Wu, Qian Wang, Dinggang Shen
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Recently, groupwise registration has been investigated for simultaneous alignment of all images without selecting any individual image as the template, thus avoiding the potential bias in image registration. However, none of current groupwise registration method fully utilizes the image distribution to guide the registration. Thus, the registration performance usually suffers from large inter-subject variations across individual images. To solve this issue, we propose a novel groupwise registration algorithm for large population dataset, guided by the image distribution on the manifold. Specifically, we first use a graph to model the distribution of all image data sitting on the image manifold, with each node representing an image and each edge representing the geodesic pathway between two nodes (or images). Then, the procedure of warping all images to their population center turns to the dynamic shrinking of the graph nodes along their graph edges until all graph nodes become close to each other. Thus, the topology of image distribution on the image manifold is always preserved during the groupwise registration. More importantly, by modeling the distribution of all images via a graph, we can potentially reduce registration error since every time each image is warped only according to its nearby images with similar structures in the graph. We have evaluated our proposed groupwise registration method on both synthetic and real datasets, with comparison to the two state-of-the-art groupwise registration methods. All experimental results show that our proposed method achieves the best performance in terms of registration accuracy and robustness.
On a Link Between Kernel Mean Maps and Fraunhofer Diffraction, with an Application to Super-Resolution Beyond the Diffraction Limit
Authors: Stefan Harmeling, Michael Hirsch, Bernhard Scholkopf
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We establish a link between Fourier optics and a recent construction from the machine learning community termed the kernel mean map. Using the Fraunhofer approximation, it identifies the kernel with the squared Fourier transform of the aperture. This allows us to use results about the invertibility of the kernel mean map to provide a statement about the invertibility of Fraunhofer diffraction, showing that imaging processes with arbitrarily small apertures can in principle be invertible, i.e., do not lose information, provided the objects to be imaged satisfy a generic condition. A real world experiment shows that we can super-resolve beyond the Rayleigh limit.
Background Modeling Based on Bidirectional Analysis
Authors: Atsushi Shimada, Hajime Nagahara, Rin-ichiro Taniguchi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Background modeling and subtraction is an essential task in video surveillance applications. Most traditional studies use information observed in past frames to create and update a background model. To adapt to background changes, the background model has been enhanced by introducing various forms of information including spatial consistency and temporal tendency. In this paper, we propose a new framework that leverages information from a future period. Our proposed approach realizes a low-cost and highly accurate background model. The proposed framework is called bidirectional background modeling, and performs background subtraction based on bidirectional analysis; i.e., analysis from past to present and analysis from future to present. Although a result will be output with some delay because information is taken from a future period, our proposed approach improves the accuracy by about 30% if only a 33-millisecond of delay is acceptable. Furthermore, the memory cost can be reduced by about 65% relative to typical background modeling.
Minimum Uncertainty Gap for Robust Visual Tracking
Authors: Junseok Kwon, Kyoung Mu Lee
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a novel tracking algorithm that robustly tracks the target by finding the state which minimizes uncertainty of the likelihood at current state. The uncertainty of the likelihood is estimated by obtaining the gap between the lower and upper bounds of the likelihood. By minimizing the gap between the two bounds, our method finds the confident and reliable state of the target. In the paper, the state that gives the Minimum Uncertainty Gap (MUG) between likelihood bounds is shown to be more reliable than the state which gives the maximum likelihood only, especially when there are severe illumination changes, occlusions, and pose variations. A rigorous derivation of the lower and upper bounds of the likelihood for the visual tracking problem is provided to address this issue. Additionally, an efficient inference algorithm using Interacting Markov Chain Monte Carlo is presented to find the best state that maximizes the average of the lower and upper bounds of the likelihood and minimizes the gap between two bounds simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that our method successfully tracks the target in realistic videos and outperforms conventional tracking methods.
Real-Time No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Based on Filter Learning
Authors: Peng Ye, Jayant Kumar, Le Kang, David Doermann
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of general-purpose No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) with the goal of developing a real-time, cross-domain model that can predict the quality of distorted images without prior knowledge of non-distorted reference images and types of distortions present in these images. The contributions of our work are two-fold: first, the proposed method is highly efficient. NR-IQA measures are often used in real-time imaging or communication systems, therefore it is important to have a fast NR-IQA algorithm that can be used in these real-time applications. Second, the proposed method has the potential to be used in multiple image domains. Previous work on NR-IQA focus primarily on predicting quality of natural scene image with respect to human perception, yet, in other image domains, the final receiver of a digital image may not be a human. The proposed method consists of the following components: (1) a local feature extractor; (2) a global feature extractor and (3) a regression model. While previous approaches usually treat local feature extraction and regression model training independently, we propose a supervised method based on back-projection, which links the two steps by learning a compact set of filters which can be applied to local image patches to obtain discriminative local features. Using a small set of filters, the proposed method is extremely fast. We have tested this method on various natural scene and document image datasets and obtained stateof-the-art results.
City-Scale Change Detection in Cadastral 3D Models Using Images
Authors: Aparna Taneja, Luca Ballan, Marc Pollefeys
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a method to detect changes in the geometry of a city using panoramic images captured by a car driving around the city. We designed our approach to account for all the challenges involved in a large scale application of change detection, such as, inaccuracies in the input geometry, errors in the geo-location data of the images, as well as, the limited amount of information due to sparse imagery. We evaluated our approach on an area of 6 square kilometers inside a city, using 3420 images downloaded from Google StreetView. These images besides being publicly available, are also a good example of panoramic images captured with a driving vehicle, and hence demonstrating all the possible challenges resulting from such an acquisition. We also quantitatively compared the performance of our approach with respect to a ground truth, as well as to prior work. This evaluation shows that our approach outperforms the current state of the art.
Occlusion Patterns for Object Class Detection
Authors: Bojan Pepikj, Michael Stark, Peter Gehler, Bernt Schiele
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Despite the success of recent object class recognition systems, the long-standing problem of partial occlusion remains a major challenge, and a principled solution is yet to be found. In this paper we leave the beaten path of methods that treat occlusion as just another source of noise instead, we include the occluder itself into the modelling, by mining distinctive, reoccurring occlusion patterns from annotated training data. These patterns are then used as training data for dedicated detectors of varying sophistication. In particular, we evaluate and compare models that range from standard object class detectors to hierarchical, part-based representations of occluder/occludee pairs. In an extensive evaluation we derive insights that can aid further developments in tackling the occlusion challenge.
Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis for Pedestrian Re-identification
Authors: Sateesh Pedagadi, James Orwell, Sergio Velastin, Boghos Boghossian
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Metric learning methods, for person re-identification, estimate a scaling for distances in a vector space that is optimized for picking out observations of the same individual. This paper presents a novel approach to the pedestrian re-identification problem that uses metric learning to improve the state-of-the-art performance on standard public datasets. Very high dimensional features are extracted from the source color image. A first processing stage performs unsupervised PCA dimensionality reduction, constrained to maintain the redundancy in color-space representation. A second stage further reduces the dimensionality, using a Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis defined by a training set. A regularization step is introduced to avoid singular matrices during this stage. The experiments conducted on three publicly available datasets confirm that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art performance, including all other known metric learning methods. Furthermore, the method is an effective way to process observations comprising multiple shots, and is non-iterative: the computation times are relatively modest. Finally, a novel statistic is derived to characterize the Match Characteristic: the normalized entropy reduction can be used to define the 'Proportion of Uncertainty Removed' (P UR ). This measure is invariant to test set size and provides an intuitive indication of performance.
Semi-supervised Node Splitting for Random Forest Construction
Authors: Xiao Liu, Mingli Song, Dacheng Tao, Zicheng Liu, Luming Zhang, Chun Chen, Jiajun Bu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Node splitting is an important issue in Random Forest but robust splitting requires a large number of training samples. Existing solutions fail to properly partition the feature space if there are insufficient training data. In this paper, we present semi-supervised splitting to overcome this limitation by splitting nodes with the guidance of both labeled and unlabeled data. In particular, we derive a nonparametric algorithm to obtain an accurate quality measure of splitting by incorporating abundant unlabeled data. To avoid the curse of dimensionality, we project the data points from the original high-dimensional feature space onto a low-dimensional subspace before estimation. A unified optimization framework is proposed to select a coupled pair of subspace and separating hyperplane such that the smoothness of the subspace and the quality of the splitting are guaranteed simultaneously. The proposed algorithm is compared with state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised algorithms for typical computer vision applications such as object categorization and image segmentation. Experimental results on publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Vantage Feature Frames for Fine-Grained Categorization
Authors: Asma Rejeb Sfar, Nozha Boujemaa, Donald Geman
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We study fine-grained categorization, the task of distinguishing among (sub)categories of the same generic object class (e.g., birds), focusing on determining botanical species (leaves and orchids) from scanned images. The strategy is to focus attention around several vantage points, which is the approach taken by botanists, but using features dedicated to the individual categories. Our implementation of the strategy is based on vantage feature frames, a novel object representation consisting of two components: a set of coordinate systems centered at the most discriminating local viewpoints for the generic object class and a set of category-dependent features computed in these frames. The features are pooled over frames to build the classifier. Categorization then proceeds from coarse-grained (finding the frames) to fine-grained (finding the category), and hence the vantage feature frames must be both detectable and discriminating. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the art algorithms, in particular those using more distributed representations, on standard databases of leaves.
A Video Representation Using Temporal Superpixels
Authors: Jason Chang, Donglai Wei, John W. Fisher III
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We develop a generative probabilistic model for temporally consistent superpixels in video sequences. In contrast to supervoxel methods, object parts in different frames are tracked by the same temporal superpixel. We explicitly model flow between frames with a bilateral Gaussian process and use this information to propagate superpixels in an online fashion. We consider four novel metrics to quantify performance of a temporal superpixel representation and demonstrate superior performance when compared to supervoxel methods.
Structure Preserving Object Tracking
Authors: Lu Zhang, Laurens van der Maaten
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Model-free trackers can track arbitrary objects based on a single (bounding-box) annotation of the object. Whilst the performance of model-free trackers has recently improved significantly, simultaneously tracking multiple objects with similar appearance remains very hard. In this paper, we propose a new multi-object model-free tracker (based on tracking-by-detection) that resolves this problem by incorporating spatial constraints between the objects. The spatial constraints are learned along with the object detectors using an online structured SVM algorithm. The experimental evaluation of our structure-preserving object tracker (SPOT) reveals significant performance improvements in multi-object tracking. We also show that SPOT can improve the performance of single-object trackers by simultaneously tracking different parts of the object.
Unsupervised Salience Learning for Person Re-identification
Authors: Rui Zhao, Wanli Ouyang, Xiaogang Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Human eyes can recognize person identities based on some small salient regions. However, such valuable salient information is often hidden when computing similarities of images with existing approaches. Moreover, many existing approaches learn discriminative features and handle drastic viewpoint change in a supervised way and require labeling new training data for a different pair of camera views. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective for person re-identification based on unsupervised salience learning. Distinctive features are extracted without requiring identity labels in the training procedure. First, we apply adjacency constrained patch matching to build dense correspondence between image pairs, which shows effectiveness in handling misalignment caused by large viewpoint and pose variations. Second, we learn human salience in an unsupervised manner. To improve the performance of person re-identification, human salience is incorporated in patch matching to find reliable and discriminative matched patches. The effectiveness of our approach is validated on the widely used VIPeR dataset and ETHZ dataset.
Spatiotemporal Deformable Part Models for Action Detection
Authors: Yicong Tian, Rahul Sukthankar, Mubarak Shah
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Deformable part models have achieved impressive performance for object detection, even on difficult image datasets. This paper explores the generalization of deformable part models from 2D images to 3D spatiotemporal volumes to better study their effectiveness for action detection in video. Actions are treated as spatiotemporal patterns and a deformable part model is generated for each action from a collection of examples. For each action model, the most discriminative 3D subvolumes are automatically selected as parts and the spatiotemporal relations between their locations are learned. By focusing on the most distinctive parts of each action, our models adapt to intra-class variation and show robustness to clutter. Extensive experiments on several video datasets demonstrate the strength of spatiotemporal DPMs for classifying and localizing actions.
Beyond Point Clouds: Scene Understanding by Reasoning Geometry and Physics
Authors: Bo Zheng, Yibiao Zhao, Joey C. Yu, Katsushi Ikeuchi, Song-Chun Zhu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this paper, we present an approach for scene understanding by reasoning physical stability of objects from point cloud. We utilize a simple observation that, by human design, objects in static scenes should be stable with respect to gravity. This assumption is applicable to all scene categories and poses useful constraints for the plausible interpretations (parses) in scene understanding. Our method consists of two major steps: 1) geometric reasoning: recovering solid 3D volumetric primitives from defective point cloud; and 2) physical reasoning: grouping the unstable primitives to physically stable objects by optimizing the stability and the scene prior. We propose to use a novel disconnectivity graph (DG) to represent the energy landscape and use a Swendsen-Wang Cut (MCMC) method for optimization. In experiments, we demonstrate that the algorithm achieves substantially better performance for i) object segmentation, ii) 3D volumetric recovery of the scene, and iii) better parsing result for scene understanding in comparison to state-of-the-art methods in both public dataset and our own new dataset.
Recovering Stereo Pairs from Anaglyphs
Authors: Armand Joulin, Sing Bing Kang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: An anaglyph is a single image created by selecting complementary colors from a stereo color pair; the user can perceive depth by viewing it through color-filtered glasses. We propose a technique to reconstruct the original color stereo pair given such an anaglyph. We modified SIFT-Flow and use it to initially match the different color channels across the two views. Our technique then iteratively refines the matches, selects the good matches (which defines the "anchor" colors), and propagates the anchor colors. We use a diffusion-based technique for the color propagation, and added a step to suppress unwanted colors. Results on a variety of inputs demonstrate the robustness of our technique. We also extended our method to anaglyph videos by using optic flow between time frames.
Axially Symmetric 3D Pots Configuration System Using Axis of Symmetry and Break Curve
Authors: Kilho Son, Eduardo B. Almeida, David B. Cooper
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel approach for reassembling pot sherds found at archaeological excavation sites, for the purpose of reconstructing clay pots that had been made on a wheel. These pots and the sherds into which they have broken are axially symmetric. The reassembly process can be viewed as 3D puzzle solving or generalized cylinder learning from broken fragments. The estimation exploits both local and semi-global geometric structure, thus making it a fundamental problem of geometry estimation from noisy fragments in computer vision and pattern recognition. The data used are densely digitized 3D laser scans of each fragment's outer surface. The proposed reassembly system is automatic and functions when the pile of available fragments is from one or multiple pots, and even when pieces are missing from any pot. The geometric structure used are curves on the pot along which the surface had broken and the silhouette of a pot with respect to an axis, called axisprofile curve (APC). For reassembling multiple pots with or without missing pieces, our algorithm estimates the APC from each fragment, then reassembles into configurations the ones having distinctive APC. Further growth of configurations is based on adding remaining fragments such that their APC and break curves are consistent with those of a configuration. The method is novel, more robust and handles the largest numbers of fragments to date.
Learning a Manifold as an Atlas
Authors: Nikolaos Pitelis, Chris Russell, Lourdes Agapito
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this work, we return to the underlying mathematical definition of a manifold and directly characterise learning a manifold as finding an atlas, or a set of overlapping charts, that accurately describe local structure. We formulate the problem of learning the manifold as an optimisation that simultaneously refines the continuous parameters defining the charts, and the discrete assignment of points to charts. In contrast to existing methods, this direct formulation of a manifold does not require "unwrapping" the manifold into a lower dimensional space and allows us to learn closed manifolds of interest to vision, such as those corresponding to gait cycles or camera pose. We report state-ofthe-art results for manifold based nearest neighbour classification on vision datasets, and show how the same techniques can be applied to the 3D reconstruction of human motion from a single image.