mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Zero-Shot Object Recognition by Semantic Manifold Distance
Authors: Zhenyong Fu, Tao Xiang, Elyor Kodirov, Shaogang Gong
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Object recognition by zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognise objects without seeing any visual examples by learning knowledge transfer between seen and unseen object classes. This is typically achieved by exploring a semantic embedding space such as attribute space or semantic word vector space. In such a space, both seen and unseen class labels, as well as image features can be embedded (projected), and the similarity between them can thus be measured directly. Existing works differ in what embedding space is used and how to project the visual data into the semantic embedding space. Yet, they all measure the similarity in the space using a conventional distance metric (e.g. cosine) that does not consider the rich intrinsic structure, i.e. semantic manifold, of the semantic categories in the embedding space. In this paper we propose to model the semantic manifold in an embedding space using a semantic class label graph. The semantic manifold structure is used to redefine the distance metric in the semantic embedding space for more effective ZSL. The proposed semantic manifold distance is computed using a novel absorbing Markov chain process (AMP), which has a very efficient closed-form solution. The proposed new model improves upon and seamlessly unifies various existing ZSL algorithms. Extensive experiments on both the large scale ImageNet dataset and the widely used Animal with Attribute (AwA) dataset show that our model outperforms significantly the state-of-the-arts.
Hyper-Class Augmented and Regularized Deep Learning for Fine-Grained Image Classification
Authors: Saining Xie, Tianbao Yang, Xiaoyu Wang, Yuanqing Lin
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have seen tremendous success in large-scale generic object recognition. In comparison with generic object recognition, fine-grained image classification (FGIC) is much more challenging because (i) fine-grained labeled data is much more expensive to acquire (usually requiring domain expertise); (ii) there exists large intra-class and small inter-class variance. Most recent work exploiting deep CNN for image recognition with small training data adopts a simple strategy: pre-train a deep CNN on a large-scale external dataset (e.g., ImageNet) and fine-tune on the small-scale target data to fit the specific classification task. In this paper, beyond the fine-tuning strategy, we propose a systematic framework of learning a deep CNN that addresses the challenges from two new perspectives: (i) identifying easily annotated hyper-classes inherent in the fine-grained data and acquiring a large number of hyper-class-labeled images from readily available external sources (e.g., image search engines), and formulating the problem into multi-task learning;  (ii) a novel learning model by exploiting a regularization between the fine-grained recognition model and the hyper-class recognition model. We demonstrate the success of the proposed framework on two small-scale fine-grained datasets (Stanford Dogs and Stanford Cars) and on a large-scale car dataset that we collected.
Direct Structure Estimation for 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Nianjuan Jiang, Daniel Lin, Minh N. Do, Jiangbo Lu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Most conventional structure-from-motion (SFM) techniques require camera pose estimation before computing any scene structure. In this work we show that when combined with single/multiple homography estimation, the general Euclidean rigidity constraint provides a simple formulation for scene structure recovery without explicit camera pose computation. This direct structure estimation (DSE) opens a new way to design a SFM system that reverses the order of structure and motion estimation. We show that this alternative approach works well for recovering scene structure and camera poses from sideway motion given planar or general man-made scenes.
Global Supervised Descent Method
Authors: Xuehan Xiong, Fernando De la Torre
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Mathematical optimization plays a fundamental role in solving many problems in computer vision (e.g., camera calibration, image alignment, structure from motion). It is generally accepted that second order descent methods are the most robust, fast, and reliable approaches for nonlinear optimization of a general smooth function. However, in the context of computer vision, second order descent methods have two main drawbacks: 1) the function might not be analytically differentiable and numerical approximations are impractical, and 2) the Hessian may be large and not positive definite. Recently, Supervised Descent Method (SDM), a method that learns the "weighted averaged gradients" in a  supervised manner has been proposed to solve these issues. However, SDM is a local algorithm and it is likely to average conflicting gradient directions. This paper proposes Global SDM (GSDM), an extension of SDM that divides the search space into regions of similar gradient directions. GSDM provides a better and more efficient strategy to minimize non-linear least squares functions in computer vision. We illustrate the effectiveness of GSDM in two problems: non-rigid image alignment and extrinsic camera calibration.
Robust Camera Location Estimation by Convex Programming
Authors: Onur Ozyesil, Amit Singer
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: 3D structure recovery from a collection of 2D images requires the estimation of the camera locations and orientations, i.e. the camera motion. For large, irregular collections of images, existing methods for the location estimation part, which can be formulated as the inverse problem of estimating n locations from noisy measurements of a subset of the pairwise directions, are sensitive to outliers in direction measurements. In this paper, we firstly provide a complete characterization of well-posed instances of the location estimation problem, by presenting its relation to the existing theory of parallel rigidity. For robust estimation of camera locations, we introduce a two-step approach, comprised of a pairwise direction estimation method robust to outliers in point correspondences between image pairs, and a convex program to maintain robustness to outlier directions. In the presence of partially corrupted measurements, we empirically demonstrate that our convex formulation can even recover the locations exactly. Lastly, we demonstrate the utility of our formulations through experiments on Internet photo collections.
Practical Robust Two-View Translation Estimation
Authors: Johan Fredriksson, Viktor Larsson, Carl Olsson
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Outliers pose a problem in all real structure from motion systems. Due to the use of automatic matching methods one has to expect that a (sometimes very large) portion of the detected correspondences can be incorrect. In this paper we propose a method that estimates the relative translation between two cameras and simultaneously maximizes the number of inlier correspondences. Traditionally, outlier removal tasks have been addressed using RANSAC approaches. However, these are random in nature and offer no guarantees of finding a good solution. If the amount of mismatches is large, the approach becomes costly because of the need to evaluate a large number of random samples. In contrast, our approach is based on the branch and bound methodology which guarantees that an optimal solution will be found. While most optimal methods trade speed for optimality, the proposed algorithm has competitive running times on problem sizes well beyond what is common in practice. Experiments on both real and synthetic data show that the method outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives, including RANSAC, in terms of solution quality. In addition, the approach is shown to be faster than RANSAC in settings with a large amount of outliers.
Learning From Massive Noisy Labeled Data for Image Classification
Authors: Tong Xiao, Tian Xia, Yi Yang, Chang Huang, Xiaogang Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Large-scale supervised datasets are crucial to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for various computer vision problems. However, obtaining a massive amount of well-labeled data is usually very expensive and time consuming. In this paper, we introduce a general framework to train CNNs with only a limited number of clean labels and millions of easily obtained noisy labels. We model the relationships between images, class labels and label noises with a probabilistic graphical model and further integrate it into an end-to-end deep learning system. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we collect a large-scale real-world clothing classification dataset with both noisy and clean labels. Experiments on this dataset indicate that our approach can better correct the noisy labels and improves the performance of trained CNNs.
KL Divergence Based Agglomerative Clustering for Automated Vitiligo Grading
Authors: Mithun Das Gupta, Srinidhi Srinivasa, Madhukara J., Meryl Antony
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper we present a symmetric KL divergence based agglomerative clustering framework to segment multiple levels of depigmentation in Vitiligo images. The proposed framework starts with a simple merge cost based on symmetric KL divergence. We extend the recent body of work related to Bregman divergence based agglomerative clustering and prove that the symmetric KL divergence is an upper-bound for uni-modal Gaussian distributions. This leads to a very simple yet elegant method for bottomup agglomerative clustering. We introduce albedo and reflectance fields as features for the distance computations. We compare against other established methods to bring out possible pros and cons of the proposed method.
Robust Saliency Detection via Regularized Random Walks Ranking
Authors: Changyang Li, Yuchen Yuan, Weidong Cai, Yong Xia, David Dagan Feng
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In the field of saliency detection, many graph-based algorithms heavily depend on the accuracy of the pre-processed superpixel segmentation, which leads to significant sacrifice of detail information from the input image. In this paper, we propose a novel bottom-up saliency detection approach that takes advantage of both region-based features and image details. To provide more accurate saliency estimations, we first optimize the image boundary selection by the proposed erroneous boundary removal. By taking the image details and region-based estimations into account, we then propose the regularized random walks ranking to formulate pixel-wised saliency maps from the superpixel-based background and foreground saliency estimations. Experiment results on two public datasets indicate the significantly improved accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm in comparison with 12 state-of-the-art saliency detection approaches.
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Social Images
Authors: Wei Zhang, Sheng Zeng, Dequan Wang, Xiangyang Xue
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Image semantic segmentation is the task of partitioning image into several regions based on semantic concepts.   In this paper, we learn a weakly supervised  semantic segmentation model from social images whose labels  are not pixel-level but image-level; furthermore, these labels might be noisy. We present a joint conditional random field model leveraging various contexts to address this issue.  More specifically, we extract global and local features in multiple scales by convolutional neural network   and topic model. Inter-label correlations  are captured by visual contextual cues and  label co-occurrence statistics.   The label consistency between image-level and pixel-level is finally achieved by iterative refinement. Experimental results on two real-world image datasets PASCAL VOC2007 and SIFT-Flow demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods and even achieves accuracy comparable with fully supervised methods.
Image Specificity
Authors: Mainak Jas, Devi Parikh
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: For some images, descriptions written by multiple people are consistent with each other. But for other images, descriptions across people vary considerably. In other words, some images are specific - they elicit consistent descriptions from different people - while other images are ambiguous. Applications involving images and text can benefit from an understanding of which images are specific and which ones are ambiguous. For instance, consider text-based image retrieval. If a query description is moderately similar to the caption (or reference description) of an ambiguous image, that query may be considered a decent match to the image. But if the image is very specific, a moderate similarity between the query and the reference description may not be sufficient to retrieve the image.  In this paper, we introduce the notion of image specificity. We present two mechanisms to measure specificity given multiple descriptions of an image: an automated measure and a measure that relies on human judgement. We analyze image specificity with respect to image content and properties to better understand what makes an image specific. We then train models to automatically predict the specificity of an image from image features alone without requiring textual descriptions of the image. Finally, we show that modeling image specificity leads to improvements in a text-based image retrieval application.
A Multi-Plane Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe Algorithm for Training Structural SVMs With a Costly Max-Oracle
Authors: Neel Shah, Vladimir Kolmogorov, Christoph H. Lampert
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Structural support vector machines (SSVMs) are amongst the best performing methods for structured computer vision tasks, such as semantic image segmentation or human pose estimation. Training SSVMs, however, is computationally costly, because it requires repeated calls to a structured prediction subroutine (called \emph{max-oracle}), which has to solve an optimization problem itself, e.g. a graph cut.  In this work, we introduce a new algorithm for SSVM training that is more efficient than earlier techniques when the max-oracle is computationally expensive, as it is frequently the case in computer vision tasks. The main idea is to (i) combine the recent stochastic Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm with efficient hyperplane caching, and (ii) use an automatic selection rule for deciding whether to call the exact max-oracle or to rely on an approximate one based on the cached hyperplanes.  We show experimentally that this strategy leads to faster convergence towards the optimum with respect to the number of required oracle calls, and that this also translates into faster convergence with respect to the total runtime when the max-oracle is slow compared to the other steps of the algorithm. A C++ implementation is provided at http://www.ist.ac.at/~vnk
Web-Scale Training for Face Identification
Authors: Yaniv Taigman, Ming Yang, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Lior Wolf
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Scaling machine learning methods to very large datasets has attracted considerable attention in recent years, thanks to easy access to ubiquitous sensing and data from the web. We study face recognition and show that three distinct properties have surprising effects on the transferability of deep convolutional networks (CNN): (1) The bottleneck of the network serves as an important transfer learning regularizer, and (2) in contrast to the common wisdom, performance saturation may exist in CNN's (as the number of training samples grows); we propose a solution for alleviating this by replacing the naive random subsampling of the training set with a bootstrapping process. Moreover, (3) we find a link between the representation norm and the ability to discriminate in a target domain, which sheds lights on how such networks represent faces. Based on these discoveries, we are able to improve face recognition accuracy on the widely used LFW benchmark, both in the verification (1:1) and identification (1:N) protocols, and directly compare, for the first time, with the state of the art Commercially-Off-The-Shelf system and show a sizable leap in performance.
Dynamically Encoded Actions Based on Spacetime Saliency
Authors: Christoph Feichtenhofer, Axel Pinz, Richard P. Wildes
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Human actions typically occur over a well localized extent in both space and time. Similarly, as typically captured in video, human actions have small spatiotemporal support in image space. This paper capitalizes on these observations by weighting feature pooling for action recognition over those areas within a video where actions are most likely to occur. To enable this operation, we define a novel measure of spacetime saliency. The measure relies on two observations regarding foreground motion of human actors: They typically exhibit motion that contrasts with that of their surrounding region and they are spatially compact. By using the resulting definition of saliency during feature pooling we show that action recognition performance achieves state-of-the-art levels on three widely considered action recognition datasets. Our saliency weighted pooling can be applied to essentially any locally defined features and encodings thereof. Additionally, we demonstrate that inclusion of locally aggregated spatiotemporal energy features, which efficiently result as a by-product of the saliency computation, further boosts performance over reliance on standard action recognition features alone.
Visual Recognition by Learning From Web Data: A Weakly Supervised Domain Generalization Approach
Authors: Li Niu, Wen Li, Dong Xu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this work, we formulate a new weakly supervised domain generalization problem for the visual recognition task by using loosely labeled web images/videos as training data. Specifically, we aim to address two challenging issues when learning robust classifiers: 1) enhancing the generalization capability of the learnt classifiers to any unseen target domain; and 2) coping with noise in the labels of training web images/videos in the source domain. To address the first issue, we assume the training web images/videos may come from multiple hidden domains with different data distributions. We then extend the multi-class SVM formulation to learn one classifier for each class and each latent domain such that multiple classifiers from each class can be effectively integrated to achieve better generalization capability. To address the second issue, we partition the training samples in each class into multiple clusters. By treating each cluster as a "bag" and the samples in each cluster as "instances", we formulate a new multi-instance learning (MIL) problem for domain generalization by selecting a subset of training samples from each training bag and simultaneously learning the optimal classifiers based on the selected samples. Moreover, we also extend our newly proposed Weakly Supervised Domain Generalization (WSDG) approach by taking advantage of the additional textual descriptions that are only available in the training web images/videos as privileged information. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our new approaches for visual recognition by learning from web data.
Clustering of Static-Adaptive Correspondences for Deformable Object Tracking
Authors: Georg Nebehay, Roman Pflugfelder
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose a novel method for establishing correspondences on deformable objects for single-target object tracking. The key ingredient is a dissimilarity measure between correspondences that takes into account their geometric compatibility, allowing us to separate inlier correspondences from outliers. We employ both static correspondences from the initial appearance of the object as well as adaptive correspondences from the previous frame to address the stability-plasticity dilemma. The geometric dissimilarity measure enables us to also disambiguate keypoints that are difficult to match. Based on these ideas we build a keypoint-based tracker that outputs rotated bounding boxes. We demonstrate in a rigorous empirical analysis that this tracker outperforms the state of the art on a dataset of 77 sequences.
Geo-Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Shervin Ardeshir, Kofi Malcolm Collins-Sibley, Mubarak Shah
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: The availability of GIS (Geographical Information System) databases for many urban areas, provides a valuable source of information for improving the performance of many computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a method which leverages information acquired from GIS databases to perform semantic segmentation of the image alongside with geo-referencing each semantic segment with its address and geo-location. First, the image is segmented into a set of initial super-pixels. Then, by projecting the information from GIS databases, a set of priors are obtained about the approximate location of the semantic entities such as buildings and streets in the image plane. However, there are significant inaccuracies (misalignments) in the projections, mainly due to inaccurate GPS-tags and camera parameters. In order to address this misalignment issue, we perform data fusion such that it improves the segmentation and GIS projections accuracy simultaneously with an iterative approach. At each iteration, the projections are evaluated and weighted in terms of reliability, and then fused with the super-pixel segmentations. First segmentation is performed using random walks, based on the GIS projections. Then the global transformation which best aligns the projections to their corresponding semantic entities is computed and applied to the projections to further align them to the content of the image. The iterative approach continues until the projections and segments are well aligned.
Towards Unified Depth and Semantic Prediction From a Single Image
Authors: Peng Wang, Xiaohui Shen, Zhe Lin, Scott Cohen, Brian Price, Alan L. Yuille
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Depth estimation and semantic segmentation are two fundamental problems in image understanding. While the two tasks are strongly correlated and mutually beneficial, they are usually solved separately or sequentially. Motivated by the complementary properties of the two tasks, we propose a unified framework for joint depth and semantic prediction. Given an image, we first use a trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to jointly predict a global layout composed of pixel-wise depth values and semantic labels. By allowing for interactions between the depth and semantic information, the joint network provides more accurate depth prediction than a state-of-the-art CNN trained solely for depth prediction [5]. To further obtain fine-level details, the image is decomposed into local segments for region-level depth and semantic prediction under the guidance of global layout. Utilizing the pixel-wise global prediction and region-wise local prediction, we formulate the inference problem in a two-layer Hierarchical Conditional Random Field (HCRF) to produce the final depth and semantic map. As demonstrated in the experiments, our approach effectively leverages the advantages of both tasks and provides the state-of-the-art results.
Towards Force Sensing From Vision: Observing Hand-Object Interactions to Infer Manipulation Forces
Authors: Tu-Hoa Pham, Abderrahmane Kheddar, Ammar Qammaz, Antonis A. Argyros
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We present a novel, non-intrusive approach for estimating contact forces during hand-object interactions relying solely on visual input provided by a single RGB-D camera. We consider a  manipulated object with known geometrical and physical properties. First, we rely on model-based visual tracking to estimate the object's pose together with that of the hand manipulating it throughout the motion. Following this, we compute the object's first and second order kinematics using a new class of numerical differentiation operators. The estimated kinematics is then instantly fed into a second-order cone program that returns a minimal force distribution explaining the observed motion. However, humans typically apply more forces than mechanically required when manipulating objects. Thus, we complete our estimation method by learning these excessive forces and their distribution among the fingers in contact. We provide a full validity analysis of the proposed method by evaluating it based on ground truth data from additional sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes and pressure sensors. Experimental results show that force sensing from vision (FSV) is indeed feasible.
A MRF Shape Prior for Facade Parsing With Occlusions
Authors: Mateusz Kozinski, Raghudeep Gadde, Sergey Zagoruyko, Guillaume Obozinski, Renaud Marlet
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We present a new shape prior formalism for segmentation of rectified facade images. It combines the simplicity of split grammars with unprecedented expressive power: the capability of encoding simultaneous alignment in two dimensions, facade occlusions and irregular boundaries between facade elements. Our method simultaneously segments the visible and occluding objects and recovers the structure of the occluded facade. We formulate the task of finding the most likely image segmentation conforming to a prior of the proposed form as a MAP-MRF problem over the standard 4-connected pixel grid with hard constraints on the classes of neighboring pixels, and propose an efficient optimization algorithm for solving it. We demonstrate state of the art results on a number of facade segmentation datasets.
Probability Occupancy Maps for Occluded Depth Images
Authors: Timur Bagautdinov, Francois Fleuret, Pascal Fua
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We  propose a  novel approach  to computing  the probabilities of presence of multiple and potentially occluding objects in a scene from a single depth map. To this end, we use a generative model that predicts the distribution of depth images that would be produced if the probabilities of presence were known and then to optimize them so that this distribution explains observed evidence as closely as possible.  This  allows  us  to  exploit  very effectively  the  available  evidence  and outperform state-of-the-art methods without requiring large amounts of data, or without using the RGB signal that modern RGB-D sensors also provide.
Segment Based 3D Object Shape Priors
Authors: Rabeeh Karimi Mahabadi, Christian Hane, Marc Pollefeys
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Dense 3D reconstruction still remains a hard task for a broad number of object classes which are not sufficiently textured or contain transparent and reflective parts. Shape priors are the tool of choice when the input data itself is not descriptive enough to get a faithful reconstruction. We propose a novel shape prior formulation that splits the object into multiple convex parts. The reconstruction problem is posed as a volumetric multi-label segmentation. Each of the transitions between labels is penalized with its individual anisotropic smoothness term. This powerful formulation allows us to represent a descriptive shape prior. For the object classes used in this paper the individual segments naturally correspond to different semantic parts of the object. This leads to a semantic segmentation as a side product of our shape prior formulation. We evaluate our method on several challenging real-world datasets. Our results show that we can resolve issues such as undesired holes and disconnected parts.  Taking into account a segmentation of the free space, we show that we are able to reconstruct concavities, such as the interior of a mug.
Shape-From-Template in Flatland
Authors: Mathias Gallardo, Daniel Pizarro, Adrien Bartoli, Toby Collins
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Shape-from-Template (SfT) is the problem of inferring the shape of a deformable object as observed in an image using a shape template. We call 2DSfT the 'usual' instance of SfT where the shape is a surface embedded in 3D and the image a 2D projection. We introduce 1DSfT, a novel instance of SfT where the shape is a curve embedded in 2D and the image a 1D projection. We focus on isometric deformations, for which 2DSfT is a well-posed problem, and admits an analytical local solution which may be used to initialize nonconvex refinement. Through a complete theoretical study of 1DSfT with perspective projection, we show that it is related to 2DSfT, but may have very different properties: (i) 1DSfT cannot be exactly solved locally and (ii) 1DSfT cannot be solved uniquely, as it has a discrete amount of at least two solutions. We then propose two convex initialization algorithms, a local analytical one based on infinitesimal planarity and a global one based on inextensibility. We show how nonconvex refinement can be implemented where, contrarily to current 2DSfT methods, one may enforce isometry exactly using a novel angle-based parameterization. Finally, our method is tested with simulated and real data.
Understanding Tools: Task-Oriented Object Modeling, Learning and Recognition
Authors: Yixin Zhu, Yibiao Zhao, Song Chun Zhu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper, we present a new framework - task-oriented modeling, learning and recognition which aims at understanding the underlying functions, physics and causality in using objects as "tools". Given a task,  such as, cracking a nut or painting a wall, we represent each object, e.g. a hammer or brush, in a generative spatio-temporal representation consisting of four components: i) an affordance basis to be grasped by hand; ii) a functional basis to act on a target object (the nut), iii) the imagined actions with typical motion trajectories; and iv) the underlying physical concepts, e.g. force, pressure, etc. In a learning phase, our algorithm observes only one RGB-D video, in which a rational human picks up one object (i.e. tool) among a number of candidates to accomplish the task. From this example, our algorithm learns the essential physical concepts in the task (e.g. forces in cracking nuts). In an inference phase, our algorithm is given a new set of objects (daily objects or stones), and picks the best choice available together with the inferred affordance basis, functional basis, imagined human actions (sequence of poses), and the expected physical quantity that it will produce. From this new perspective, any objects can be viewed as a hammer or a shovel, and object recognition is not merely memorizing typical appearance examples for each category but reasoning the physical mechanisms in various tasks to achieve generalization.
Deep Roto-Translation Scattering for Object Classification
Authors: Edouard Oyallon, Stephane Mallat
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Dictionary learning algorithms or supervised deep convolution networks have considerably improved the efficiency of predefined feature representations such as SIFT. We introduce a deep scattering convolution network,  with predefined wavelet filters over spatial and angular variables. This representation  brings an important improvement to results previously obtained with predefined features over object image databases such as Caltech and CIFAR. The resulting accuracy is comparable to results obtained  with unsupervised deep learning and dictionary based representations. This shows that refining image representations by using geometric  priors is a promising direction to improve image classification and  its understanding.
Non-Rigid Registration of Images With Geometric and Photometric Deformation by Using Local Affine Fourier-Moment Matching
Authors: Hong-Ren Su, Shang-Hong Lai
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Registration between images taken with different cameras, from different viewpoints or under different lighting conditions is a challenging problem. It needs to solve not only the geometric registration problem but also the photometric matching problem. In this paper, we propose to estimate the integrated geometric and photometric transformations between two images based on a local affine Fourier-moment matching framework, which is developed to achieve deformable registration. We combine the local Fourier moment constraints with the smoothness constraints to determine the local affine transforms in a hierarchal block model. Our experimental results on registering some real images related by large color and geometric transformations show the proposed registration algorithm provides superior image registration results compared to the state-of-the-art image registration methods.
Detector Discovery in the Wild: Joint Multiple Instance and Representation Learning
Authors: Judy Hoffman, Deepak Pathak, Trevor Darrell, Kate Saenko
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We develop methods for detector learning which exploit joint training over both weak and strong labels and which transfer learned perceptual representations from strongly-labeled auxiliary tasks. Previous methods for weak-label learning often learn detector models independently using latent variable optimization, but fail to share deep representation knowledge across classes and usually require strong initialization. Other previous methods transfer deep representations from domains with strong labels to those with only weak labels, but do not optimize over individual latent boxes, and thus may miss specific salient structures for a particular category.  We propose a model that subsumes these previous approaches, and simultaneously trains a representation and detectors for categories with either weak or strong labels present. We provide a novel formulation of a joint multiple instance learning method that includes examples from classification-style data when available, and also performs domain transfer learning to improve the underlying detector representation. Our model outperforms known methods on ImageNet-200 detection with weak labels.
Deeply Learned Face Representations Are Sparse, Selective, and Robust
Authors: Yi Sun, Xiaogang Wang, Xiaoou Tang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper designs a high-performance deep convolutional network (DeepID2+) for face recognition. It is learned with the identification-verification supervisory signal. By increasing the dimension of hidden representations and adding  supervision to early convolutional layers, DeepID2+ achieves new state-of-the-art on LFW  and YouTube Faces benchmarks. Through empirical studies, we have discovered three properties of its deep neural activations critical for the high performance: sparsity, selectiveness and robustness.  (1) It is observed that neural activations are moderately sparse. Moderate sparsity maximizes the discriminative power of the deep net as well as the distance between images. It is surprising that DeepID2+ still can achieve high recognition accuracy even after the neural responses are binarized. (2) Its neurons in higher layers are highly selective to identities and identity-related attributes. We can identify different subsets of neurons which are either constantly excited or inhibited when different identities or attributes are present.  Although  DeepID2+  is not taught to distinguish attributes during training, it has implicitly learned such high-level concepts. (3) It is much more robust to occlusions, although occlusion patterns are not included in the training set.
Unsupervised Visual Alignment With Similarity Graphs
Authors: Fatemeh Shokrollahi Yancheshmeh, Ke Chen, Joni-Kristian Kamarainen
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Alignment of semantically meaningful visual patterns, such as object classes, is an important pre-processing step for a number of applications such as object detection and image categorization. Considering the  expensive manpower spent on the annotation of supervised alignment methods, unsupervised alignment techniques are more favourable especially for large-scale problems. Fine adjustment can be effectively and efficiently achieved with the recent image congealing methods, but they require moderately good initialisation which is largely invalid in practice. It remains as an open problem how to align images of class examples with large view point changes. Feature-based methods can solve the problem to some degree, but require manual selection of a good seed image and omit the fact that two examples of semantical classes can be visually very different (e.g., Harley-Davison and Scooter``motorbikes''). In this work, we adopt the feature basedapproach,but to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks define visual similarity as an assignment problem which is solved by fast approximation and non-linear optimization.From pair-wise image similarities we construct an image graph which is used to step-wise align,``morph'', an image to another by graph traveling. Our method also automatically finds a suitable seed by novel centrality measure which identifies ``similarity hubs'' in the graph. The proposed approach in the unsupervised manner outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with classes from the popular benchmark datasets.
Video Anomaly Detection and Localization Using Hierarchical Feature Representation and Gaussian Process Regression
Authors: Kai-Wen Cheng, Yie-Tarng Chen, Wen-Hsien Fang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper presents a hierarchical framework for detecting local and global anomalies via hierarchical feature representation and Gaussian process regression. While local anomaly is typically detected as a 3D pattern matching problem, we are more interested in global anomaly that involves multiple normal events interacting in an unusual manner such as car accident. To simultaneously detect local and global anomalies, we formulate the extraction of normal interactions from training video as the problem of efficiently finding the frequent geometric relations of the nearby sparse spatio-temporal interest points. A codebook of interaction templates is then constructed and modeled using Gaussian process regression. A novel inference method for computing the likelihood of an observed interaction is also proposed. As such, our model is robust to slight topological deformations and can handle the noise and data unbalance problems in the training data. Simulations show that our system outperforms the main state-of-the-art methods on this topic and achieves at least 80% detection rates based on three challenging datasets.
Inferring 3D Layout of Building Facades From a Single Image
Authors: Jiyan Pan, Martial Hebert, Takeo Kanade
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that infers the 3D layout of building facades from a single 2D image of an urban scene. Different from existing methods that only yield coarse orientation labels or qualitative block approximations, our algorithm quantitatively reconstructs building facades in 3D space using a set of planes mutually related by 3D geometric constraints. Each plane is characterized by a continuous orientation vector and a depth distribution. An optimal solution is reached through inter-planar interactions. Due to the quantitative and plane-based nature of our geometric reasoning, our model is more expressive and informative than existing approaches. Experiments show that our method compares competitively with the state of the art on both 2D and 3D measures, while yielding a richer interpretation of the 3D scene behind the image.
Evaluation of Output Embeddings for Fine-Grained Image Classification
Authors: Zeynep Akata, Scott Reed, Daniel Walter, Honglak Lee, Bernt Schiele
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Image classification has advanced significantly in recent years with the availability of large-scale image sets. However, fine-grained classification remains a major challenge due to the annotation cost of large numbers of fine-grained categories. This project shows that compelling classification performance can be achieved on such categories even without labeled training data. Given image and class embeddings, we learn a compatibility function such that matching embeddings are assigned a higher score than mismatching ones; zero-shot classification of an image proceeds by finding the label yielding the highest joint compatibility score. We use state-of-the-art image features and focus on different supervised attributes and unsupervised output embeddings either derived from hierarchies or learned from unlabeled text corpora. We establish a substantially improved state-of-the-art on the Animals with Attributes and Caltech-UCSD Birds datasets. Most encouragingly, we demonstrate that purely unsupervised output embeddings (learned from Wikipedia and improved with fine-grained text) achieve compelling results, even outperforming the previous supervised state-of-the-art. By combining different output embeddings, we further improve results.
Virtual View Networks for Object Reconstruction
Authors: Joao Carreira, Abhishek Kar, Shubham Tulsiani, Jitendra Malik
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: All that structure from motion algorithms "see" are sets of 2D points. We show that these impoverished views of the world can be faked for the purpose of reconstructing objects in challenging settings, such as from a single image, or from a few ones far apart, by recognizing the object and getting help from a collection of images of other objects from the same class. We synthesize virtual views by computing geodesics on novel networks connecting objects with similar viewpoints, and introduce techniques to increase the specificity and robustness of factorization-based object reconstruction in this setting. We report accurate object shape reconstruction from a single image on challenging PASCAL VOC data, which suggests that the current domain of applications of rigid structure-from-motion techniques may be significantly extended.
Real-Time Coarse-to-Fine Topologically Preserving Segmentation
Authors: Jian Yao, Marko Boben, Sanja Fidler, Raquel Urtasun
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper, we tackle the problem of unsupervised segmentation in the form of superpixels. Our main emphasis is on speed and accuracy. We build on [31] to define the problem as a boundary and topology preserving Markov random field. We propose a coarse to fine optimization technique that speeds up inference in terms of the number of updates by an order of magnitude. Our approach is shown to outperform [31] while employing a single iteration. We evaluate and compare our approach to state-of-the-art superpixel algorithms on the BSD and KITTI benchmarks. Our approach significantly outperforms the baselines in the segmentation metrics and achieves the lowest error on the stereo task.
Learning Lightness From Human Judgement on Relative Reflectance
Authors: Takuya Narihira, Michael Maire, Stella X. Yu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We develop a new approach to inferring lightness, the perceived reflectance of surfaces, from a single image.  Classic methods view this problem from the perspective of intrinsic image decomposition, where an image is separated into reflectance and shading components.  Rather than reason about reflectance and shading together, we learn to directly predict lightness differences between pixels.  Large-scale training from human judgement data on relative reflectance, and patch representations built using deep networks, provide the foundation for our model.  Benchmarked on the Intrinsic Images in the Wild dataset, our local lightness model achieves on-par performance with the state-of-the-art global lightness model, which incorporates multiple shading/reflectance priors and simultaneous reasoning between pairs of pixels in a dense conditional random field formulation.