mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Finding Tiny Faces
Authors: Peiyun Hu, Deva Ramanan
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Though tremendous strides have been made in object recognition, one of the remaining open challenges is detecting small objects. We explore three aspects of the problem in the context of finding small faces: the role of scale invariance, image resolution, and contextual reasoning. While most recognition approaches aim to be scale-invariant, the cues for recognizing a 3px tall face are fundamentally different than those for recognizing a 300px tall face. We take a different approach and train separate detectors for different scales. To maintain efficiency, detectors are trained in a multi-task fashion: they make use of features extracted from multiple layers of single (deep) feature hierarchy. While training detectors for large objects is straightforward, the crucial challenge remains training detectors for small objects. We show that context is crucial, and define templates that make use of massively-large receptive fields (where 99% of the template extends beyond the object of interest). Finally, we explore the role of scale in pre-trained deep networks, providing ways to extrapolate networks tuned for limited scales to rather extreme ranges. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on massively-benchmarked face datasets (FDDB and WIDER FACE). In particular, when compared to prior art on WIDER FACE, our results reduce error by a factor of 2 (our models produce an AP of 82% while prior art ranges from 29-64%).
Visual-Inertial-Semantic Scene Representation for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Jingming Dong, Xiaohan Fei, Stefano Soatto
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We describe a system to detect objects in three-dimensional space using video and inertial sensors (accelerometer and gyrometer), ubiquitous in modern mobile platforms from phones to drones. Inertials afford the ability to impose class-specific scale priors for objects, and provide a global orientation reference. A minimal sufficient representation, the posterior of semantic (identity) and syntactic (pose) attributes of objects in space, can be decomposed into a geometric term, which can be maintained by a localization-and-mapping filter, and a likelihood function, which can be approximated by a discriminatively-trained convolutional neural network The resulting system can process the video stream causally in real time, and provides a representation of objects in the scene that is persistent: Confidence in the presence of objects grows with evidence, and objects previously seen are kept in memory even when temporarily occluded, with their return into view automatically predicted to prime re-detection.
ActionVLAD: Learning Spatio-Temporal Aggregation for Action Classification
Authors: Rohit Girdhar, Deva Ramanan, Abhinav Gupta, Josef Sivic, Bryan Russell
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: In this work, we introduce a new video representation for action classification that aggregates local convolutional features across the entire spatio-temporal extent of the video. We do so by integrating state-of-the-art two-stream networks with learnable spatio-temporal feature aggregation. The resulting architecture is end-to-end trainable for whole-video classification. We investigate different strategies for pooling across space and time and combining signals from the different streams. We find that: (i) it is important to pool jointly across space and time, but (ii) appearance and motion streams are best aggregated into their own separate representations. Finally, we show that our representation outperforms the two-stream base architecture by a large margin (13% relative) as well as outperforms other baselines with comparable base architectures on HMDB51, UCF101, and Charades video classification benchmarks.
Predictive-Corrective Networks for Action Detection
Authors: Achal Dave, Olga Russakovsky, Deva Ramanan
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: While deep feature learning has revolutionized techniques for static-image understanding, the same does not quite hold for video processing. Architectures and optimization techniques used for video are largely based off those for static images, potentially underutilizing rich video information. In this work, we rethink both the underlying network architecture and the stochastic learning paradigm for temporal data. To do so, we draw inspiration from classic theory on linear dynamic systems for modeling time series. By extending such models to include nonlinear mappings, we derive a series of novel recurrent neural networks that sequentially make top-down predictions about the future and then correct those predictions with bottom-up observations. Predictive-corrective networks have a number of desirable properties: (1) they can adaptively focus computation on "surprising" frames where predictions require large corrections, (2) they simplify learning in that only "residual-like" corrective terms need to be learned over time and (3) they naturally decorrelate an input data stream in a hierarchical fashion, producing a more reliable signal for learning at each layer of a network. We provide an extensive analysis of our lightweight and interpretable framework, and demonstrate that our model is competitive with the two-stream network on three challenging datasets without the need for computationally expensive optical flow.
FastMask: Segment Multi-Scale Object Candidates in One Shot
Authors: Hexiang Hu, Shiyi Lan, Yuning Jiang, Zhimin Cao, Fei Sha
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Objects appear to scale differently in natural images. This fact requires methods dealing with object-centric tasks (e.g. object proposal) to have robust performance over variances in object scales. In the paper, we present a novel segment proposal framework, namely FastMask, which takes advantage of hierarchical features in deep convolutional neural networks to segment multi-scale objects in one shot. Innovatively, we adapt segment proposal network into three different functional components (body, neck and head). We further propose a weight-shared residual neck module as well as a scale-tolerant attentional head module for efficient one-shot inference. On MS COCO benchmark, the proposed FastMask outperforms all state-of-the-art segment proposal methods in average recall being 2 5 times faster. Moreover, with a slight trade-off in accuracy, FastMask can segment objects in near real time ( 13 fps) with 800*600 resolution images, demonstrating its potential in practical applications. Our implementation is available on https://github.com/voidrank/FastMask.
A Combinatorial Solution to Non-Rigid 3D Shape-To-Image Matching
Authors: Florian Bernard, Frank R. Schmidt, Johan Thunberg, Daniel Cremers
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We propose a combinatorial solution for the problem of non-rigidly matching a 3D shape to 3D image data. To this end, we model the shape as a triangular mesh and allow each triangle of this mesh to be rigidly transformed to achieve a suitable matching to the image. By penalising the distance and the relative rotation between neighbouring triangles our matching compromises between the image and the shape information. In this paper, we resolve two major challenges: Firstly, we address the resulting large and NP-hard combinatorial problem with a suitable graph-theoretic approach. Secondly, we propose an efficient discretisation of the unbounded 6-dimensional Lie group SE(3). To our knowledge this is the first combinatorial formulation for non-rigid 3D shape-to-image matching. In contrast to existing local (gradient descent) optimisation methods, we obtain solutions that do not require a good initialisation and that are within a bound of the optimal solution. We evaluate the proposed combinatorial method on the two problems of non-rigid 3D shape-to-shape and non-rigid 3D shape-to-image registration and demonstrate that it provides promising results.
Interpretable Structure-Evolving LSTM
Authors: Xiaodan Liang, Liang Lin, Xiaohui Shen, Jiashi Feng, Shuicheng Yan, Eric P. Xing
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: This paper develops a general framework for learning interpretable data representation via Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks over hierarchal graph structures. Instead of learning LSTM models over the pre-fixed structures, we propose to further learn the intermediate interpretable multi-level graph structures in a progressive and stochastic way from data during the LSTM network optimization. We thus call this model the structure-evolving LSTM. In particular, starting with an initial element-level graph representation where each node is a small data element, the structure-evolving LSTM gradually evolves the multi-level graph representations by stochastically merging the graph nodes with high compatibilities along the stacked LSTM layers. In each LSTM layer, we estimate the compatibility of two connected nodes from their corresponding LSTM gate outputs, which is used to generate a merging probability. The candidate graph structures are accordingly generated where the nodes are grouped into cliques with their merging probabilities. We then produce the new graph structure with a Metropolis-Hasting algorithm, which alleviates the risk of getting stuck in local optimums by stochastic sampling with an acceptance probability. Once a graph structure is accepted, a higher-level graph is then constructed by taking the partitioned cliques as its nodes. During the evolving process, representation becomes more abstracted in higher-levels where redundant information is filtered out, allowing more efficient propagation of long-range data dependencies. We evaluate the effectiveness of structure-evolving LSTM in the application of semantic object parsing and demonstrate its advantage over state-of-the-art LSTM models on standard benchmarks.
Generating the Future With Adversarial Transformers
Authors: Carl Vondrick, Antonio Torralba
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We learn models to generate the immediate future in video. This problem has two main challenges. Firstly, since the future is uncertain, models should be multi-modal, which can be difficult to learn. Secondly, since the future is similar to the past, models store low-level details, which complicates learning of high-level semantics. We propose a framework to tackle both of these challenges. We present a model that generates the future by transforming pixels in the past. Our approach explicitly disentangles the model's memory from the prediction, which helps the model learn desirable invariances. Experiments suggest that this model can generate short videos of plausible futures. We believe predictive models have many applications in robotics, health-care, and video understanding.
Budget-Aware Deep Semantic Video Segmentation
Authors: Behrooz Mahasseni, Sinisa Todorovic, Alan Fern
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: In this work, we study a poorly understood trade-off between accuracy and runtime costs for deep semantic video segmentation. While recent work has demonstrated advantages of learning to speed-up deep activity detection, it is not clear if similar advantages will hold for our very different segmentation loss function, which is defined over individual pixels across the frames. In deep video segmentation, the most time consuming step represents the application of a CNN to every frame for assigning class labels to every pixel, typically taking 6-9 times of the video footage. This motivates our new budget-aware framework that learns to optimally select a small subset of frames for pixelwise labeling by a CNN, and then efficiently interpolates the obtained segmentations to yet unprocessed frames. This interpolation may use either a simple optical-flow guided mapping of pixel labels, or another significantly less complex and thus faster CNN. We formalize the frame selection as a Markov Decision Process, and specify a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to model a policy for selecting the frames. For training the LSTM, we develop a policy-gradient reinforcement-learning approach for approximating the gradient of our non-decomposable and non-differentiable objective. Evaluation on two benchmark video datasets show that our new framework is able to significantly reduce computation time, and maintain competitive video segmentation accuracy under varying budgets.
Spatially Adaptive Computation Time for Residual Networks
Authors: Michael Figurnov, Maxwell D. Collins, Yukun Zhu, Li Zhang, Jonathan Huang, Dmitry Vetrov, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: This paper proposes a deep learning architecture based on Residual Network that dynamically adjusts the number of executed layers for the regions of the image. This architecture is end-to-end trainable, deterministic and problem-agnostic. It is therefore applicable without any modifications to a wide range of computer vision problems such as image classification, object detection and image segmentation. We present experimental results showing that this model improves the computational efficiency of Residual Networks on the challenging ImageNet classification and COCO object detection datasets. Additionally, we evaluate the computation time maps on the visual saliency dataset cat2000 and find that they correlate surprisingly well with human eye fixation positions.
Order-Preserving Wasserstein Distance for Sequence Matching
Authors: Bing Su, Gang Hua
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We present a new distance measure between sequences that can tackle local temporal distortion and periodic sequences with arbitrary starting points. Through viewing the instances of sequences as empirical samples of an unknown distribution, we cast the calculation of the distance between sequences as the optimal transport problem. To preserve the inherent temporal relationships of the instances in sequences, we smooth the optimal transport problem with two novel temporal regularization terms. The inverse difference moment regularization enforces transport with local homogeneous structures, and the KL-divergence with a prior distribution regularization prevents transport between instances with far temporal positions. We show that this problem can be efficiently optimized through the matrix scaling algorithm. Extensive experiments on different datasets with different classifiers show that the proposed distance outperforms the traditional DTW variants and the smoothed optimal transport distance without temporal regularization.
Split-Brain Autoencoders: Unsupervised Learning by Cross-Channel Prediction
Authors: Richard Zhang, Phillip Isola, Alexei A. Efros
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We propose split-brain autoencoders, a straightforward modification of the traditional autoencoder architecture, for unsupervised representation learning. The method adds a split to the network, resulting in two disjoint sub-networks. Each sub-network is trained to perform a difficult task -- predicting one subset of the data channels from another. Together, the sub-networks extract features from the entire input signal. By forcing the network to solve cross-channel prediction tasks, we induce a representation within the network which transfers well to other, unseen tasks. This method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several large-scale transfer learning benchmarks.
SRN: Side-output Residual Network for Object Symmetry Detection in the Wild
Authors: Wei Ke, Jie Chen, Jianbin Jiao, Guoying Zhao, Qixiang Ye
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: In this paper, we establish a baseline for object symmetry detection in complex backgrounds by presenting a new benchmark and an end-to-end deep learning approach, opening up a promising direction for symmetry detection in the wild. The new benchmark, named Sym-PASCAL, spans challenges including object diversity, multi-objects, part-invisibility, and various complex backgrounds that are far beyond those in existing datasets. The proposed symmetry detection approach, named Side-output Residual Network (SRN), leverages output Residual Units (RUs) to fit the errors between the object symmetry ground-truth and the outputs of RUs. By stacking RUs in a deep-to-shallow manner, SRN exploits the 'flow' of errors among multiple scales to ease the problems of fitting complex outputs with limited layers, suppressing the complex backgrounds, and effectively matching object symmetry of different scales. Experimental results validate both the benchmark and its challenging aspects related to real-world images, and the state-of-the-art performance of our symmetry detection approach. The benchmark and the code for SRN are publicly available at https://github.com/KevinKecc/SRN.
Spindle Net: Person Re-Identification With Human Body Region Guided Feature Decomposition and Fusion
Authors: Haiyu Zhao, Maoqing Tian, Shuyang Sun, Jing Shao, Junjie Yan, Shuai Yi, Xiaogang Wang, Xiaoou Tang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Person re-identification (ReID) is an important task in video surveillance and has various applications. It is non-trivial due to complex background clutters, varying illumination conditions, and uncontrollable camera settings. Moreover, the person body misalignment caused by detectors or pose variations is sometimes too severe for feature matching across images. In this study, we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), called Spindle Net, based on human body region guided multi-stage feature decomposition and tree-structured competitive feature fusion. It is the first time human body structure information is considered in a CNN framework to facilitate feature learning. The proposed Spindle Net brings unique advantages: 1) it separately captures semantic features from different body regions thus the macro- and micro-body features can be well aligned across images, 2) the learned region features from different semantic regions are merged with a competitive scheme and discriminative features can be well preserved. State of the art performance can be achieved on multiple datasets by large margins. We further demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed Spindle Net on our proposed dataset SenseReID without fine-tuning.
Borrowing Treasures From the Wealthy: Deep Transfer Learning Through Selective Joint Fine-Tuning
Authors: Weifeng Ge, Yizhou Yu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Deep neural networks require a large amount of labeled training data during supervised learning. However, collecting and labeling so much data might be infeasible in many cases. In this paper, we introduce a deep transfer learning scheme, called selective joint fine-tuning, for improving the performance of deep learning tasks with insufficient training data. In this scheme, a target learning task with insufficient training data is carried out simultaneously with another source learning task with abundant training data. However, the source learning task does not use all existing training data. Our core idea is to identify and use a subset of training images from the original source learning task whose low-level characteristics are similar to those from the target learning task, and jointly fine-tune shared convolutional layers for both tasks. Specifically, we compute descriptors from linear or nonlinear filter bank responses on training images from both tasks, and use such descriptors to search for a desired subset of training samples for the source learning task. Experiments demonstrate that our deep transfer learning scheme achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple visual classification tasks with insufficient training data for deep learning. Such tasks include Caltech 256, MIT Indoor 67, and fine-grained classification problems (Oxford Flowers 102 and Stanford Dogs 120). In comparison to fine-tuning without a source domain, the proposed method can improve the classification accuracy by 2% - 10% using a single model. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/ZYYSzj/Selective-Joint-Fine-tuning.
Unified Embedding and Metric Learning for Zero-Exemplar Event Detection
Authors: Noureldien Hussein, Efstratios Gavves, Arnold W.M. Smeulders
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Event detection in unconstrained videos is conceived as a content-based video retrieval with two modalities: textual and visual. Given a text describing a novel event, the goal is to rank related videos accordingly. This task is zero-exemplar, no video examples are given to the novel event. Related works train a bank of concept detectors on external data sources. These detectors predict confidence scores for test videos, which are ranked and retrieved accordingly. In contrast, we learn a joint space in which the visual and textual representations are embedded. The space casts a novel event as a probability of pre-defined events. Also, it learns to measure the distance between an event and its related videos. Our model is trained end-to-end on publicly available EventNet. When applied to TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection dataset, it outperforms the state-of-the-art by a considerable margin.
A Practical Method for Fully Automatic Intrinsic Camera Calibration Using Directionally Encoded Light
Authors: Mahdi Abbaspour Tehrani, Thabo Beeler, Anselm Grundhofer
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Calibrating the intrinsic properties of a camera is one of the fundamental tasks required for a variety of computer vision and image processing tasks. The precise measurement of focal length, location of the principal point as well as distortion parameters of the lens is crucial, for example, for 3D reconstruction. Although a variety of methods exist to achieve this goal, they are often cumbersome to carry out, require substantial manual interaction, expert knowledge, and a significant operating volume. We propose a novel calibration method based on the usage of directionally encoded light rays for estimating the intrinsic parameters. It enables a fully automatic calibration with a small device mounted close to the front lens element and still enables an accuracy comparable to standard methods even when the lens is focused up to infinity.  Our method overcomes the mentioned limitations since it guarantees an accurate calibration without any human intervention while requiring only a limited amount of space. Besides that, the approach also allows to estimate the distance of the focal plane as well as the size of the aperture. We demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method by evaluating several camera/lens configurations using prototypical devices.
Modeling Relationships in Referential Expressions With Compositional Modular Networks
Authors: Ronghang Hu, Marcus Rohrbach, Jacob Andreas, Trevor Darrell, Kate Saenko
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: People often refer to entities in an image in terms of their relationships with other entities. For example, "the black cat sitting under the table" refers to both a "black cat" entity and its relationship with another "table" entity. Understanding these relationships is essential for interpreting and grounding such natural language expressions. Most prior work focuses on either grounding entire referential expressions holistically to one region, or localizing relationships based on a fixed set of categories. In this paper we instead present a modular deep architecture capable of analyzing referential expressions into their component parts, identifying entities and relationships mentioned in the input expression and grounding them all in the scene. We call this approach Compositional Modular Networks (CMNs): a novel architecture that learns linguistic analysis and visual inference end-to-end. Our approach is built around two types of neural modules that inspect local regions and pairwise interactions between regions. We evaluate CMNs on multiple referential expression datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on all tasks.
Image-To-Image Translation With Conditional Adversarial Networks
Authors: Phillip Isola, Jun-Yan Zhu, Tinghui Zhou, Alexei A. Efros
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We investigate conditional adversarial networks as a general-purpose solution to image-to-image translation problems. These networks not only learn the mapping from input image to output image, but also learn a loss function to train this mapping. This makes it possible to apply the same generic approach to problems that traditionally would require very different loss formulations. We demonstrate that this approach is effective at synthesizing photos from label maps, reconstructing objects from edge maps, and colorizing images, among other tasks. Moreover, since the release of the pix2pix software associated with this paper, hundreds of twitter users have posted their own artistic experiments using our system. As a community, we no longer hand-engineer our mapping functions, and this work suggests we can achieve reasonable results without handengineering our loss functions either.
Counting Everyday Objects in Everyday Scenes
Authors: Prithvijit Chattopadhyay, Ramakrishna Vedantam, Ramprasaath R. Selvaraju, Dhruv Batra, Devi Parikh
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We are interested in counting the number of instances of object classes in natural, everyday images. Previous counting approaches tackle the problem in restricted domains such as counting pedestrians in surveillance videos. Counts can also be estimated from outputs of other vision tasks like object detection. In this work, we build dedicated models for counting designed to tackle the large variance in counts, appearances, and scales of objects found in natural scenes. Our approach is inspired by the phenomenon of subitizing - the ability of humans to make quick assessments of counts given a perceptual signal, for small count values. Given a natural scene, we employ a divide and conquer strategy while incorporating context across the scene to adapt the subitizing idea to counting. Our approach offers consistent improvements over numerous baseline approaches for counting on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and COCO datasets. Subsequently, we study how counting can be used to improve object detection. We then show a proof of concept application of our counting methods to the task of Visual Question Answering, by studying the 'how many?' questions in the VQA and COCO-QA datasets.
Hand Keypoint Detection in Single Images Using Multiview Bootstrapping
Authors: Tomas Simon, Hanbyul Joo, Iain Matthews, Yaser Sheikh
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We present an approach that uses a multi-camera system to train fine-grained detectors for keypoints that are prone to occlusion, such as the joints of a hand. We call this procedure multiview bootstrapping: first, an initial keypoint detector is used to produce noisy labels in multiple views of the hand. The noisy detections are then triangulated in 3D using multiview geometry or marked as outliers. Finally, the reprojected triangulations are used as new labeled training data to improve the detector. We repeat this process, generating more labeled data in each iteration. We derive a result analytically relating the minimum number of views to achieve target true and false positive rates for a given detector. The method is used to train a hand keypoint detector for single images. The resulting keypoint detector runs in realtime on RGB images and has accuracy comparable to methods that use depth sensors. The single view detector, triangulated over multiple views, enables 3D markerless hand motion capture with complex object interactions.
Knowledge Acquisition for Visual Question Answering via Iterative Querying
Authors: Yuke Zhu, Joseph J. Lim, Li Fei-Fei
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Humans possess an extraordinary ability to learn new skills and new knowledge for problem solving. Such learning ability is also required by an automatic model to deal with arbitrary, open-ended questions in the visual world. We propose a neural-based approach to acquiring task- driven information for visual question answering (VQA). Our model proposes queries to actively acquire relevant information from external auxiliary data. Supporting evidence from either human-curated or automatic sources is encoded and stored into a memory bank. We show that acquiring task-driven evidence effectively improves model performance on both the Visual7W and VQA datasets; moreover, these queries offer certain level of interpretability in our iterative QA model.
Few-Shot Object Recognition From Machine-Labeled Web Images
Authors: Zhongwen Xu, Linchao Zhu, Yi Yang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: With the tremendous advances made by Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) on object recognition, we can now easily obtain adequately reliable machine-labeled annotations easily from predictions by off-the-shelf ConvNets. In this work, we present an "abstraction memory" based framework for few-shot learning, building upon machine-labeled image annotations. Our method takes large-scale machine-annotated dataset (e.g., OpenImages) as an external memory bank. In the external memory bank, the information is stored in the memory slots in the form of key-value, in which image feature is regarded as the key and the label embedding serves as the value. When queried by the few-shot examples, our model selects visually similar data from the external memory bank and writes the useful information obtained from related external data into another memory bank, i.e., abstraction memory. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) controllers and attention mechanisms are utilized to guarantee the data written to the abstraction memory correlates with the query example. The abstraction memory concentrates information from the external memory bank to make the few-shot recognition effective. In the experiments, we first confirm that our model can learn to conduct few-shot object recognition on clean human-labeled data from the ImageNet dataset. Then, we demonstrate that with our model, machine-labeled image annotations are very effective and abundant resources for performing object recognition on novel categories. Experimental results show that our proposed model with machine-labeled annotations achieves great results, with only a 1% difference in accuracy between the machine-labeled annotations and the human-labeled annotations.
The VQA-Machine: Learning How to Use Existing Vision Algorithms to Answer New Questions
Authors: Peng Wang, Qi Wu, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: One of the most intriguing features of the Visual Question Answering (VQA) challenge is the unpredictability of the questions. Extracting the information required to answer them demands a variety of image operations from detection and counting, to segmentation and reconstruction. To train a method to perform even one of these operations accurately from image,question,answer tuples would be challenging, but to aim to achieve them all with a limited set of such training data seems ambitious at best. Our method thus learns how to exploit a set of external off-the-shelf algorithms to achieve its goal, an approach that has something in common with the Neural Turing Machine. The core of our proposed method is a new co-attention model. In addition, the proposed approach generates human-readable reasons for its decision, and can still be trained end-to-end without ground truth reasons being given. We demonstrate the effectiveness on two publicly available datasets, Visual Genome and VQA, and show that it produces the state-of-the-art results in both cases.
Learning Deep Binary Descriptor With Multi-Quantization
Authors: Yueqi Duan, Jiwen Lu, Ziwei Wang, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an unsupervised feature learning method called deep binary descriptor with multi-quantization (DBD-MQ) for visual matching. Existing learning-based binary descriptors such as compact binary face descriptor (CBFD) and DeepBit utilize the rigid sign function for binarization despite of data distributions, thereby suffering from severe quantization loss. In order to address the limitation, our DBD-MQ considers the binarization as a multi-quantization task. Specifically, we apply a K-AutoEncoders (KAEs) network to jointly learn the parameters and the binarization functions under a deep learning framework, so that discriminative binary descriptors can be obtained with a fine-grained multi-quantization. Extensive experimental results on different visual analysis including patch retrieval, image matching and image retrieval show that our DBD-MQ outperforms most existing binary feature descriptors.
Joint Discriminative Bayesian Dictionary and Classifier Learning
Authors: Naveed Akhtar, Ajmal Mian, Fatih Porikli
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We propose to jointly learn a Discriminative Bayesian dictionary along a linear classifier using coupled Beta-Bernoulli Processes. Our representation model uses separate base measures for the dictionary and the classifier, but associates them to the class-specific training data using the same Bernoulli distributions. The Bernoulli distributions control the frequency with which the factors (e.g. dictionary atoms) are used in data representations, and they are inferred while accounting for the class labels in our approach. To further encourage discrimination in the dictionary, our model uses separate (sets of) Bernoulli distributions to represent data from different classes. Our approach adaptively learns the association between the dictionary atoms and the class labels while tailoring the classifier to this relation with a joint inference over the dictionary and the classifier. Once a test sample is represented over the dictionary, its representation is accurately labelled by the classifier due to the strong coupling between the dictionary and the classifier. We derive the Gibbs Sampling equations for our joint representation model and test our approach for face, object, scene and action recognition to establish its effectiveness.
A Graph Regularized Deep Neural Network for Unsupervised Image Representation Learning
Authors: Shijie Yang, Liang Li, Shuhui Wang, Weigang Zhang, Qingming Huang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Deep Auto-Encoder (DAE) has shown its promising power in high-level representation learning. From the perspective of manifold learning, we propose a graph regularized deep neural network (GR-DNN) to endue traditional DAEs with the ability of retaining local geometric structure. A deep-structured regularizer is formulated upon multi-layer perceptions to capture this structure. The robust and discriminative embedding space is learned to simultaneously preserve the high-level semantics and the geometric structure within local manifold tangent space. Theoretical analysis presents the close relationship between the proposed graph regularizer and the graph Laplacian regularizer in terms of the optimization objective. We also alleviate the growth of the network complexity by introducing the anchor-based bipartite graph, which guarantees the good scalability for large scale data. The experiments on four datasets show the comparable results of the proposed GR-DNN with the state-of-the-art methods.
HSfM: Hybrid Structure-from-Motion
Authors: Hainan Cui, Xiang Gao, Shuhan Shen, Zhanyi Hu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Structure-from-Motion (SfM) methods can be broadly categorized as incremental or global according to their ways to estimate initial camera poses. While incremental system has advanced in robustness and accuracy, the efficiency remains its key challenge. To solve this problem, global reconstruction system simultaneously estimates all camera poses from the epipolar geometry graph, but it is usually sensitive to outliers. In this work, we propose a new hybrid SfM method to tackle the issues of efficiency, accuracy and robustness in a unified framework. More specifically, we propose an adaptive community-based rotation averaging method first to estimate camera rotations in a global manner. Then, based on these estimated camera rotations, camera centers are computed in an incremental way. Extensive experiments show that our hybrid method performs similarly or better than many of the state-of-the-art global SfM approaches, in terms of computational efficiency, while achieves similar reconstruction accuracy and robustness with two other state-of-the-art incremental SfM approaches.
Perceptual Generative Adversarial Networks for Small Object Detection
Authors: Jianan Li, Xiaodan Liang, Yunchao Wei, Tingfa Xu, Jiashi Feng, Shuicheng Yan
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Detecting small objects is notoriously challenging due to their low resolution and noisy representation. Existing object detection pipelines usually detect small objects through learning representations of all the objects at multiple scales. However, the performance gain of such ad hoc architectures is usually limited to pay off the computational cost. In this work, we address the small object detection problem by developing a single architecture that internally lifts representations of small objects to super-resolved ones, achieving similar characteristics as large objects and thus more discriminative for detection. For this purpose, we propose a new Perceptual Generative Adversarial Network (Perceptual GAN) model that improves small object detection through narrowing representation difference of small objects from the large ones. Specifically, its generator learns to transfer perceived poor representations of the small objects to super-resolved ones that are similar enough to real large objects to fool a competing discriminator. Meanwhile its discriminator competes with the generator to identify the generated representation and imposes an additional perceptual requirement - generated representations of small objects must be beneficial for detection purpose - on the generator. Extensive evaluations on the challenging Tsinghua-Tencent 100K and the Caltech benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of Perceptual GAN in detecting small objects, including traffic signs and pedestrians, over well-established state-of-the-arts.
Deep Roots: Improving CNN Efficiency With Hierarchical Filter Groups
Authors: Yani Ioannou, Duncan Robertson, Roberto Cipolla, Antonio Criminisi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: We propose a new method for creating computationally efficient and compact convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using a novel sparse connection structure that resembles a tree root. This allows a significant reduction in computational cost and number of parameters compared to state-of-the-art deep CNNs, without compromising accuracy, by exploiting the sparsity of inter-layer filter dependencies. We validate our approach by using it to train more efficient variants of state-of-the-art CNN architectures, evaluated on the CIFAR10 and ILSVRC datasets. Our results show similar or higher accuracy than the baseline architectures with much less computation, as measured by CPU and GPU timings. For example, for ResNet 50, our model has 40% fewer parameters, 45% fewer floating point operations, and is 31% (12%) faster on a CPU (GPU). For the deeper ResNet 200 our model has 48% fewer parameters and 27% fewer floating point operations, while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy. For GoogLeNet, our model has 7% fewer parameters and is 21% (16%) faster on a CPU (GPU).
Anti-Glare: Tightly Constrained Optimization for Eyeglass Reflection Removal
Authors: Tushar Sandhan, Jin Young Choi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Absence of a clear eye visibility not only degrades the aesthetic value of an entire face image but also creates difficulties in many computer vision tasks. Even mild reflections produce the undesired superpositions of visual information, whose decomposition into the background and reflection layers using a single image is a highly ill-posed problem. In this work, we enforce the tight constraints derived by thoroughly analysing the properties of an eyeglass reflection. In addition, our strategy regularizes gradients of the reflection layer to be highly sparse and proposes the facial symmetry prior via formulating a non-convex optimization scheme, which removes the reflections within a few iterations. Experiments on frontal face image inputs demonstrate the high quality reflection removal results and improvement of the iris detection rate.
Learning Detailed Face Reconstruction From a Single Image
Authors: Elad Richardson, Matan Sela, Roy Or-El, Ron Kimmel
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Reconstructing the detailed geometric structure of a face from a given image is a key to many computer vision and graphics applications, such as motion capture and reenactment. The reconstruction task is challenging as human faces vary extensively when considering expressions, poses, textures, and intrinsic geometries. While many approaches tackle this complexity by using additional data to reconstruct the face of a single subject, extracting facial surface from a single image remains a difficult problem. As a result, single-image based methods can usually provide only a rough estimate of the facial geometry. In contrast, we propose to leverage the power of convolutional neural networks to produce a highly detailed face reconstruction from a single image. For this purpose, we introduce an end-to-end CNN framework which derives the shape in a coarse-to-fine fashion. The proposed architecture is composed of two main blocks, a network that recovers the coarse facial geometry (CoarseNet), followed by a CNN that refines the facial features of that geometry (FineNet). The proposed networks are connected by a novel layer which renders a depth image given a mesh in 3D. Unlike object recognition and detection problems, there are no suitable datasets for training CNNs to perform face geometry reconstruction. Therefore, our training regime begins with a supervised phase, based on synthetic images, followed by an unsupervised phase that uses only unconstrained facial images. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed model is demonstrated by both qualitative and quantitative evaluation tests.
Stereo-Based 3D Reconstruction of Dynamic Fluid Surfaces by Global Optimization
Authors: Yiming Qian, Minglun Gong, Yee-Hong Yang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: 3D reconstruction of dynamic fluid surfaces is an open and challenging problem in computer vision. Unlike previous approaches that reconstruct each surface point independently and often return noisy depth maps, we propose a novel global optimization-based approach that recovers both depths and normals of all 3D points simultaneously. Using the traditional refraction stereo setup, we capture the wavy appearance of a pre-generated random pattern, and then estimate the correspondences between the captured images and the known background by tracking the pattern. Assuming that the light is refracted only once through the fluid interface, we minimize an objective function that incorporates both the cross-view normal consistency constraint and the single-view normal consistency constraints. The key idea is that the normals required for light refraction based on Snell's law from one view should agree with not only the ones from the second view, but also the ones estimated from local 3D geometry. Moreover, an effective reconstruction error metric is designed for estimating the refractive index of the fluid. We report experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrating that the proposed approach is accurate and shows superiority over the conventional stereo-based method.
Deep Video Deblurring for Hand-Held Cameras
Authors: Shuochen Su, Mauricio Delbracio, Jue Wang, Guillermo Sapiro, Wolfgang Heidrich, Oliver Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2017 (Main Conference Track), 2017

Abstract: Motion blur from camera shake is a major problem in videos captured by hand-held devices. Unlike single-image deblurring, video-based approaches can take advantage of the abundant information that exists across neighboring frames. As a result the best performing methods rely on the alignment of nearby frames. However, aligning images is a computationally expensive and fragile procedure, and methods that aggregate information must therefore be able to identify which regions have been accurately aligned and which have not, a task that requires high level scene understanding. In this work, we introduce a deep learning solution to video deblurring, where a CNN is trained end-to-end to learn how to accumulate information across frames. To train this network, we collected a dataset of real videos recorded with a high frame rate camera, which we use to generate synthetic motion blur for supervision. We show that the features learned from this dataset extend to deblurring motion blur that arises due to camera shake in a wide range of videos, and compare the quality of results to a number of other baselines.