mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Large Displacement Optical Flow from Nearest Neighbor Fields
Authors: Zhuoyuan Chen, Hailin Jin, Zhe Lin, Scott Cohen, Ying Wu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We present an optical flow algorithm for large displacement motions. Most existing optical flow methods use the standard coarse-to-fine framework to deal with large displacement motions which has intrinsic limitations. Instead, we formulate the motion estimation problem as a motion segmentation problem. We use approximate nearest neighbor fields to compute an initial motion field and use a robust algorithm to compute a set of similarity transformations as the motion candidates for segmentation. To account for deviations from similarity transformations, we add local deformations in the segmentation process. We also observe that small objects can be better recovered using translations as the motion candidates. We fuse the motion results obtained under similarity transformations and under translations together before a final refinement. Experimental validation shows that our method can successfully handle large displacement motions. Although we particularly focus on large displacement motions in this work, we make no sacrifice in terms of overall performance. In particular, our method ranks at the top of the Middlebury benchmark.
Hallucinated Humans as the Hidden Context for Labeling 3D Scenes
Authors: Yun Jiang, Hema Koppula, Ashutosh Saxena
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: For scene understanding, one popular approach has been to model the object-object relationships. In this paper, we hypothesize that such relationships are only an artifact of certain hidden factors, such as humans. For example, the objects, monitor and keyboard, are strongly spatially correlated only because a human types on the keyboard while watching the monitor. Our goal is to learn this hidden human context (i.e., the human-object relationships), and also use it as a cue for labeling the scenes. We present Infinite Factored Topic Model (IFTM), where we consider a scene as being generated from two types of topics: human configurations and human-object relationships. This enables our algorithm to hallucinate the possible configurations of the humans in the scene parsimoniously. Given only a dataset of scenes containing objects but not humans, we show that our algorithm can recover the human object relationships. We then test our algorithm on the task of attribute and object labeling in 3D scenes and show consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art.
Discrete MRF Inference of Marginal Densities for Non-uniformly Discretized Variable Space
Authors: Masaki Saito, Takayuki Okatani, Koichiro Deguchi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the inference of marginal densities based on MRF models. The optimization algorithms for continuous variables are only applicable to a limited number of problems, whereas those for discrete variables are versatile. Thus, it is quite common to convert the continuous variables into discrete ones for the problems that ideally should be solved in the continuous domain, such as stereo matching and optical flow estimation. In this paper, we show a novel formulation for this continuous-discrete conversion. The key idea is to estimate the marginal densities in the continuous domain by approximating them with mixtures of rectangular densities. Based on this formulation, we derive a mean field (MF) algorithm and a belief propagation (BP) algorithm. These algorithms can correctly handle the case where the variable space is discretized in a non-uniform manner. By intentionally using such a non-uniform discretization, a higher balance between computational efficiency and accuracy of marginal density estimates could be achieved. We present a method for actually doing this, which dynamically discretizes the variable space in a coarse-to-fine manner in the course of the computation. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.
Efficient Large-Scale Structured Learning
Authors: Steve Branson, Oscar Beijbom, Serge Belongie
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We introduce an algorithm, SVM-IS, for structured SVM learning that is computationally scalable to very large datasets and complex structural representations. We show that structured learning is at least as fast-and often much faster-than methods based on binary classification for problems such as deformable part models, object detection, and multiclass classification, while achieving accuracies that are at least as good. Our method allows problem-specific structural knowledge to exploited for faster optimization by integrating with a user-defined importance sampling function. We demonstrate fast train times on two challenging largescale datasets for two very different problems: ImageNet for multiclass classification and CUB-200-2011 for deformable part model training. Our method is shown to be 10-50 times faster than SVMstruct for cost-sensitive multiclass classification while being about as fast as the fastest 1-vs-all methods for multiclass classification. For deformable part model training, it is shown to be 50-1000 times faster than methods based on SVMstruct, mining hard negatives, and Pegasos-style stochastic gradient descent. Source code of our method is publicly available.
Relative Volume Constraints for Single View 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Eno Toppe, Claudia Nieuwenhuis, Daniel Cremers
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We introduce the concept of relative volume constraints in order to account for insufficient information in the reconstruction of 3D objects from a single image. The key idea is to formulate a variational reconstruction approach with shape priors in form of relative depth profiles or volume ratios relating object parts. Such shape priors can easily be derived either from a user sketch or from the object's shading profile in the image. They can handle textured or shadowed object regions by propagating information. We propose a convex relaxation of the constrained optimization problem which can be solved optimally in a few seconds on graphics hardware. In contrast to existing single view reconstruction algorithms, the proposed algorithm provides substantially more flexibility to recover shape details such as self-occlusions, dents and holes, which are not visible in the object silhouette.
Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo for Unknown Isotropic Reflectances
Authors: Feng Lu, Yasuyuki Matsushita, Imari Sato, Takahiro Okabe, Yoichi Sato
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose an uncalibrated photometric stereo method that works with general and unknown isotropic reflectances. Our method uses a pixel intensity profile, which is a sequence of radiance intensities recorded at a pixel across multi-illuminance images. We show that for general isotropic materials, the geodesic distance between intensity profiles is linearly related to the angular difference of their surface normals, and that the intensity distribution of an intensity profile conveys information about the reflectance properties, when the intensity profile is obtained under uniformly distributed directional lightings. Based on these observations, we show that surface normals can be estimated up to a convex/concave ambiguity. A solution method based on matrix decomposition with missing data is developed for a reliable estimation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations of our method are performed using both synthetic and real-world scenes.
Image Understanding from Experts' Eyes by Modeling Perceptual Skill of Diagnostic Reasoning Processes
Authors: Rui Li, Pengcheng Shi, Anne R. Haake
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Eliciting and representing experts' remarkable perceptual capability of locating, identifying and categorizing objects in images specific to their domains of expertise will benefit image understanding in terms of transferring human domain knowledge and perceptual expertise into image-based computational procedures. In this paper, we present a hierarchical probabilistic framework to summarize the stereotypical and idiosyncratic eye movement patterns shared within 11 board-certified dermatologists while they are examining and diagnosing medical images. Each inferred eye movement pattern characterizes the similar temporal and spatial properties of its corresponding segments of the experts' eye movement sequences. We further discover a subset of distinctive eye movement patterns which are commonly exhibited across multiple images. Based on the combinations of the exhibitions of these eye movement patterns, we are able to categorize the images from the perspective of experts' viewing strategies. In each category, images share similar lesion distributions and configurations. The performance of our approach shows that modeling physicians' diagnostic viewing behaviors informs about medical images' understanding to correct diagnosis.
Robust Discriminative Response Map Fitting with Constrained Local Models
Authors: Akshay Asthana, Stefanos Zafeiriou, Shiyang Cheng, Maja Pantic
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We present a novel discriminative regression based approach for the Constrained Local Models (CLMs) framework, referred to as the Discriminative Response Map Fitting (DRMF) method, which shows impressive performance in the generic face fitting scenario. The motivation behind this approach is that, unlike the holistic texture based features used in the discriminative AAM approaches, the response map can be represented by a small set of parameters and these parameters can be very efficiently used for reconstructing unseen response maps. Furthermore, we show that by adopting very simple off-the-shelf regression techniques, it is possible to learn robust functions from response maps to the shape parameters updates. The experiments, conducted on Multi-PIE, XM2VTS and LFPW database, show that the proposed DRMF method outperforms stateof-the-art algorithms for the task of generic face fitting. Moreover, the DRMF method is computationally very efficient and is real-time capable. The current MATLAB implementation takes 1 second per image. To facilitate future comparisons, we release the MATLAB code acand the pretrained models for research purposes.
Unconstrained Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation by Action Detection and Cross-Modality Regression Forest
Authors: Tsz-Ho Yu, Tae-Kyun Kim, Roberto Cipolla
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This work addresses the challenging problem of unconstrained 3D human pose estimation (HPE) from a novel perspective. Existing approaches struggle to operate in realistic applications, mainly due to their scene-dependent priors, such as background segmentation and multi-camera network, which restrict their use in unconstrained environments. We therfore present a framework which applies action detection and 2D pose estimation techniques to infer 3D poses in an unconstrained video. Action detection offers spatiotemporal priors to 3D human pose estimation by both recognising and localising actions in space-time. Instead of holistic features, e.g. silhouettes, we leverage the flexibility of deformable part model to detect 2D body parts as a feature to estimate 3D poses. A new unconstrained pose dataset has been collected to justify the feasibility of our method, which demonstrated promising results, significantly outperforming the relevant state-of-the-arts.
Revisiting Depth Layers from Occlusions
Authors: Adarsh Kowdle, Andrew Gallagher, Tsuhan Chen
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this work, we consider images of a scene with a moving object captured by a static camera. As the object (human or otherwise) moves about the scene, it reveals pairwise depth-ordering or occlusion cues. The goal of this work is to use these sparse occlusion cues along with monocular depth occlusion cues to densely segment the scene into depth layers. We cast the problem of depth-layer segmentation as a discrete labeling problem on a spatiotemporal Markov Random Field (MRF) that uses the motion occlusion cues along with monocular cues and a smooth motion prior for the moving object. We quantitatively show that depth ordering produced by the proposed combination of the depth cues from object motion and monocular occlusion cues are superior to using either feature independently, and using a na??ve combination of the features.
Efficient Object Detection and Segmentation for Fine-Grained Recognition
Authors: Anelia Angelova, Shenghuo Zhu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a detection and segmentation algorithm for the purposes of fine-grained recognition. The algorithm first detects low-level regions that could potentially belong to the object and then performs a full-object segmentation through propagation. Apart from segmenting the object, we can also 'zoom in' on the object, i.e. center it, normalize it for scale, and thus discount the effects of the background. We then show that combining this with a state-of-the-art classification algorithm leads to significant improvements in performance especially for datasets which are considered particularly hard for recognition, e.g. birds species. The proposed algorithm is much more efficient than other known methods in similar scenarios [4, 21]. Our method is also simpler and we apply it here to different classes of objects, e.g. birds, flowers, cats and dogs. We tested the algorithm on a number of benchmark datasets for fine-grained categorization. It outperforms all the known state-of-the-art methods on these datasets, sometimes by as much as 11%. It improves the performance of our baseline algorithm by 3-4%, consistently on all datasets. We also observed more than a 4% improvement in the recognition performance on a challenging largescale flower dataset, containing 578 species of flowers and 250,000 images.
Fast Rigid Motion Segmentation via Incrementally-Complex Local Models
Authors: Fernando Flores-Mangas, Allan D. Jepson
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The problem of rigid motion segmentation of trajectory data under orthography has been long solved for nondegenerate motions in the absence of noise. But because real trajectory data often incorporates noise, outliers, motion degeneracies and motion dependencies, recently proposed motion segmentation methods resort to non-trivial representations to achieve state of the art segmentation accuracies, at the expense of a large computational cost. This paper proposes a method that dramatically reduces this cost (by two or three orders of magnitude) with minimal accuracy loss (from 98.8% achieved by the state of the art, to 96.2% achieved by our method on the standard Hopkins 155 dataset). Computational efficiency comes from the use of a simple but powerful representation of motion that explicitly incorporates mechanisms to deal with noise, outliers and motion degeneracies. Subsets of motion models with the best balance between prediction accuracy and model complexity are chosen from a pool of candidates, which are then used for segmentation.
A Lazy Man's Approach to Benchmarking: Semisupervised Classifier Evaluation and Recalibration
Authors: Peter Welinder, Max Welling, Pietro Perona
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: How many labeled examples are needed to estimate a classifier's performance on a new dataset? We study the case where data is plentiful, but labels are expensive. We show that by making a few reasonable assumptions on the structure of the data, it is possible to estimate performance curves, with confidence bounds, using a small number of ground truth labels. Our approach, which we call Semisupervised Performance Evaluation (SPE), is based on a generative model for the classifier's confidence scores. In addition to estimating the performance of classifiers on new datasets, SPE can be used to recalibrate a classifier by reestimating the class-conditional confidence distributions.
Motionlets: Mid-level 3D Parts for Human Motion Recognition
Authors: LiMin Wang, Yu Qiao, Xiaoou Tang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper proposes motionlet, a mid-level and spatiotemporal part, for human motion recognition. Motionlet can be seen as a tight cluster in motion and appearance space, corresponding to the moving process of different body parts. We postulate three key properties of motionlet for action recognition: high motion saliency, multiple scale representation, and representative-discriminative ability. Towards this goal, we develop a data-driven approach to learn motionlets from training videos. First, we extract 3D regions with high motion saliency. Then we cluster these regions and preserve the centers as candidate templates for motionlet. Finally, we examine the representative and discriminative power of the candidates, and introduce a greedy method to select effective candidates. With motionlets, we present a mid-level representation for video, called motionlet activation vector. We conduct experiments on three datasets, KTH, HMDB51, and UCF50. The results show that the proposed methods significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods.
Understanding Indoor Scenes Using 3D Geometric Phrases
Authors: Wongun Choi, Yu-Wei Chao, Caroline Pantofaru, Silvio Savarese
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Visual scene understanding is a difficult problem interleaving object detection, geometric reasoning and scene classification. We present a hierarchical scene model for learning and reasoning about complex indoor scenes which is computationally tractable, can be learned from a reasonable amount of training data, and avoids oversimplification. At the core of this approach is the 3D Geometric Phrase Model which captures the semantic and geometric relationships between objects which frequently co-occur in the same 3D spatial configuration. Experiments show that this model effectively explains scene semantics, geometry and object groupings from a single image, while also improving individual object detections.
Intrinsic Characterization of Dynamic Surfaces
Authors: Tony Tung, Takashi Matsuyama
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to characterize deformable surface using intrinsic property dynamics. 3D dynamic surfaces representing humans in motion can be obtained using multiple view stereo reconstruction methods or depth cameras. Nowadays these technologies have become capable to capture surface variations in real-time, and give details such as clothing wrinkles and deformations. Assuming repetitive patterns in the deformations, we propose to model complex surface variations using sets of linear dynamical systems (LDS) where observations across time are given by surface intrinsic properties such as local curvatures. We introduce an approach based on bags of dynamical systems, where each surface feature to be represented in the codebook is modeled by a set of LDS equipped with timing structure. Experiments are performed on datasets of real-world dynamical surfaces and show compelling results for description, classification and segmentation.
Detecting Changes in 3D Structure of a Scene from Multi-view Images Captured by a Vehicle-Mounted Camera
Authors: Ken Sakurada, Takayuki Okatani, Koichiro Deguchi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper proposes a method for detecting temporal changes of the three-dimensional structure of an outdoor scene from its multi-view images captured at two separate times. For the images, we consider those captured by a camera mounted on a vehicle running in a city street. The method estimates scene structures probabilistically, not deterministically, and based on their estimates, it evaluates the probability of structural changes in the scene, where the inputs are the similarity of the local image patches among the multi-view images. The aim of the probabilistic treatment is to maximize the accuracy of change detection, behind which there is our conjecture that although it is difficult to estimate the scene structures deterministically, it should be easier to detect their changes. The proposed method is compared with the methods that use multi-view stereo (MVS) to reconstruct the scene structures of the two time points and then differentiate them to detect changes. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms such MVS-based methods.
Part-Based Visual Tracking with Online Latent Structural Learning
Authors: Rui Yao, Qinfeng Shi, Chunhua Shen, Yanning Zhang, Anton van den Hengel
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Despite many advances made in the area, deformable targets and partial occlusions continue to represent key problems in visual tracking. Structured learning has shown good results when applied to tracking whole targets, but applying this approach to a part-based target model is complicated by the need to model the relationships between parts, and to avoid lengthy initialisation processes. We thus propose a method which models the unknown parts using latent variables. In doing so we extend the online algorithm pegasos to the structured prediction case (i.e., predicting the location of the bounding boxes) with latent part variables. To better estimate the parts, and to avoid over-fitting caused by the extra model complexity/capacity introduced by the parts, we propose a two-stage training process, based on the primal rather than the dual form. We then show that the method outperforms the state-of-the-art (linear and non-linear kernel) trackers.
A Higher-Order CRF Model for Road Network Extraction
Authors: Jan D. Wegner, Javier A. Montoya-Zegarra, Konrad Schindler
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The aim of this work is to extract the road network from aerial images. What makes the problem challenging is the complex structure of the prior: roads form a connected network of smooth, thin segments which meet at junctions and crossings. This type of a-priori knowledge is more difficult to turn into a tractable model than standard smoothness or co-occurrence assumptions. We develop a novel CRF formulation for road labeling, in which the prior is represented by higher-order cliques that connect sets of superpixels along straight line segments. These long-range cliques have asymmetric P es-potentials, which express a preference to assign all rather than just some of their constituent superpixels to the road class. Thus, the road likelihood is amplified for thin chains of superpixels, while the CRF is still amenable to optimization with graph cuts. Since the number of such cliques of arbitrary length is huge, we furthermore propose a sampling scheme which concentrates on those cliques which are most relevant for the optimization. In experiments on two different databases the model significantly improves both the per-pixel accuracy and the topological correctness of the extracted roads, and outperforms both a simple smoothness prior and heuristic rulebased road completion.
Fully-Connected CRFs with Non-Parametric Pairwise Potential
Authors: Neill D.F. Campbell, Kartic Subr, Jan Kautz
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are used for diverse tasks, ranging from image denoising to object recognition. For images, they are commonly defined as a graph with nodes corresponding to individual pixels and pairwise links that connect nodes to their immediate neighbors. Recent work has shown that fully-connected CRFs, where each node is connected to every other node, can be solved efficiently under the restriction that the pairwise term is a Gaussian kernel over a Euclidean feature space. In this paper, we generalize the pairwise terms to a non-linear dissimilarity measure that is not required to be a distance metric. To this end, we propose a density estimation technique to derive conditional pairwise potentials in a nonparametric manner. We then use an efficient embedding technique to estimate an approximate Euclidean feature space for these potentials, in which the pairwise term can still be expressed as a Gaussian kernel. We demonstrate that the use of non-parametric models for the pairwise interactions, conditioned on the input data, greatly increases expressive power whilst maintaining efficient inference.
Hierarchical Saliency Detection
Authors: Qiong Yan, Li Xu, Jianping Shi, Jiaya Jia
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: When dealing with objects with complex structures, saliency detection confronts a critical problem namely that detection accuracy could be adversely affected if salient foreground or background in an image contains small-scale high-contrast patterns. This issue is common in natural images and forms a fundamental challenge for prior methods. We tackle it from a scale point of view and propose a multi-layer approach to analyze saliency cues. The final saliency map is produced in a hierarchical model. Different from varying patch sizes or downsizing images, our scale-based region handling is by finding saliency values optimally in a tree model. Our approach improves saliency detection on many images that cannot be handled well traditionally. A new dataset is also constructed.
Depth Acquisition from Density Modulated Binary Patterns
Authors: Zhe Yang, Zhiwei Xiong, Yueyi Zhang, Jiao Wang, Feng Wu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper proposes novel density modulated binary patterns for depth acquisition. Similar to Kinect, the illumination patterns do not need a projector for generation and can be emitted by infrared lasers and diffraction gratings. Our key idea is to use the density of light spots in the patterns to carry phase information. Two technical problems are addressed here. First, we propose an algorithm to design the patterns to carry more phase information without compromising the depth reconstruction from a single captured image as with Kinect. Second, since the carried phase is not strictly sinusoidal, the depth reconstructed from the phase contains a systematic error. We further propose a pixelbased phase matching algorithm to reduce the error. Experimental results show that the depth quality can be greatly improved using the phase carried by the density of light spots. Furthermore, our scheme can achieve 20 fps depth reconstruction with GPU assistance.
Pose from Flow and Flow from Pose
Authors: Katerina Fragkiadaki, Han Hu, Jianbo Shi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Human pose detectors, although successful in localising faces and torsos of people, often fail with lower arms. Motion estimation is often inaccurate under fast movements of body parts. We build a segmentation-detection algorithm that mediates the information between body parts recognition, and multi-frame motion grouping to improve both pose detection and tracking. Motion of body parts, though not accurate, is often sufficient to segment them from their backgrounds. Such segmentations are crucial for extracting hard to detect body parts out of their interior body clutter. By matching these segments to exemplars we obtain pose labeled body segments. The pose labeled segments and corresponding articulated joints are used to improve the motion flow fields by proposing kinematically constrained affine displacements on body parts. The pose-based articulated motion model is shown to handle large limb rotations and displacements. Our algorithm can detect people under rare poses, frequently missed by pose detectors, showing the benefits of jointly reasoning about pose, segmentation and motion in videos.
Composite Statistical Inference for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Fuxin Li, Joao Carreira, Guy Lebanon, Cristian Sminchisescu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this paper we present an inference procedure for the semantic segmentation of images. Different from many CRF approaches that rely on dependencies modeled with unary and pairwise pixel or superpixel potentials, our method is entirely based on estimates of the overlap between each of a set of mid-level object segmentation proposals and the objects present in the image. We define continuous latent variables on superpixels obtained by multiple intersections of segments, then output the optimal segments from the inferred superpixel statistics. The algorithm is capable of recombine and refine initial mid-level proposals, as well as handle multiple interacting objects, even from the same class, all in a consistent joint inference framework by maximizing the composite likelihood of the underlying statistical model using an EM algorithm. In the PASCAL VOC segmentation challenge, the proposed approach obtains high accuracy and successfully handles images of complex object interactions.
The Variational Structure of Disparity and Regularization of 4D Light Fields
Authors: Bastian Goldluecke, Sven Wanner
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Unlike traditional images which do not offer information for different directions of incident light, a light field is defined on ray space, and implicitly encodes scene geometry data in a rich structure which becomes visible on its epipolar plane images. In this work, we analyze regularization of light fields in variational frameworks and show that their variational structure is induced by disparity, which is in this context best understood as a vector field on epipolar plane image space. We derive differential constraints on this vector field to enable consistent disparity map regularization. Furthermore, we show how the disparity field is related to the regularization of more general vector-valued functions on the 4D ray space of the light field. This way, we derive an efficient variational framework with convex priors, which can serve as a fundament for a large class of inverse problems on ray space.
Gauging Association Patterns of Chromosome Territories via Chromatic Median
Authors: Hu Ding, Branislav Stojkovic, Ronald Berezney, Jinhui Xu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Computing accurate and robust organizational patterns of chromosome territories inside the cell nucleus is critical for understanding several fundamental genomic processes, such as co-regulation of gene activation, gene silencing, X chromosome inactivation, and abnormal chromosome rearrangement in cancer cells. The usage of advanced fluorescence labeling and image processing techniques has enabled researchers to investigate interactions of chromosome territories at large spatial resolution. The resulting high volume of generated data demands for high-throughput and automated image analysis methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithmic tool for investigating association patterns of chromosome territories in a population of cells. Our method takes as input a set of graphs, one for each cell, containing information about spatial interaction of chromosome territories, and yields a single graph that contains essential information for the whole population and stands as its structural representative. We formulate this combinatorial problem as a semi-definite programming and present novel techniques to efficiently solve it. We validate our approach on both artificial and real biological data; the experimental results suggest that our approach yields a nearoptimal solution, and can handle large-size datasets, which are significant improvements over existing techniques.
Detecting Pulse from Head Motions in Video
Authors: Guha Balakrishnan, Fredo Durand, John Guttag
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We extract heart rate and beat lengths from videos by measuring subtle head motion caused by the Newtonian reaction to the influx of blood at each beat. Our method tracks features on the head and performs principal component analysis (PCA) to decompose their trajectories into a set of component motions. It then chooses the component that best corresponds to heartbeats based on its temporal frequency spectrum. Finally, we analyze the motion projected to this component and identify peaks of the trajectories, which correspond to heartbeats. When evaluated on 18 subjects, our approach reported heart rates nearly identical to an electrocardiogram device. Additionally we were able to capture clinically relevant information about heart rate variability.
Articulated Pose Estimation Using Discriminative Armlet Classifiers
Authors: Georgia Gkioxari, Pablo Arbelaez, Lubomir Bourdev, Jitendra Malik
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a novel approach for human pose estimation in real-world cluttered scenes, and focus on the challenging problem of predicting the pose of both arms for each person in the image. For this purpose, we build on the notion of poselets [4] and train highly discriminative classifiers to differentiate among arm configurations, which we call armlets. We propose a rich representation which, in addition to standard HOG features, integrates the information of strong contours, skin color and contextual cues in a principled manner. Unlike existing methods, we evaluate our approach on a large subset of images from the PASCAL VOC detection dataset, where critical visual phenomena, such as occlusion, truncation, multiple instances and clutter are the norm. Our approach outperforms Yang and Ramanan [26], the state-of-the-art technique, with an improvement from 29.0% to 37.5% PCP accuracy on the arm keypoint prediction task, on this new pose estimation dataset.
Salient Object Detection: A Discriminative Regional Feature Integration Approach
Authors: Huaizu Jiang, Jingdong Wang, Zejian Yuan, Yang Wu, Nanning Zheng, Shipeng Li
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Salient object detection has been attracting a lot of interest, and recently various heuristic computational models have been designed. In this paper, we regard saliency map computation as a regression problem. Our method, which is based on multi-level image segmentation, uses the supervised learning approach to map the regional feature vector to a saliency score, and finally fuses the saliency scores across multiple levels, yielding the saliency map. The contributions lie in two-fold. One is that we show our approach, which integrates the regional contrast, regional property and regional backgroundness descriptors together to form the master saliency map, is able to produce superior saliency maps to existing algorithms most of which combine saliency maps heuristically computed from different types of features. The other is that we introduce a new regional feature vector, backgroundness, to characterize the background, which can be regarded as a counterpart of the objectness descriptor [2]. The performance evaluation on several popular benchmark data sets validates that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-arts.
Learning Locally-Adaptive Decision Functions for Person Verification
Authors: Zhen Li, Shiyu Chang, Feng Liang, Thomas S. Huang, Liangliang Cao, John R. Smith
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper considers the person verification problem in modern surveillance and video retrieval systems. The problem is to identify whether a pair of face or human body images is about the same person, even if the person is not seen before. Traditional methods usually look for a distance (or similarity) measure between images (e.g., by metric learning algorithms), and make decisions based on a fixed threshold. We show that this is nevertheless insufficient and sub-optimal for the verification problem. This paper proposes to learn a decision function for verification that can be viewed as a joint model of a distance metric and a locally adaptive thresholding rule. We further formulate the inference on our decision function as a second-order large-margin regularization problem, and provide an efficient algorithm in its dual from. We evaluate our algorithm on both human body verification and face verification problems. Our method outperforms not only the classical metric learning algorithm including LMNN and ITML, but also the state-of-the-art in the computer vision community.
BRDF Slices: Accurate Adaptive Anisotropic Appearance Acquisition
Authors: Jiri Filip, Radomir Vavra, Michal Haindl, Pavel Zid, Mikulas Krupika, Vlastimil Havran
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: In this paper we introduce unique publicly available dense anisotropic BRDF data measurements. We use this dense data as a reference for performance evaluation of the proposed BRDF sparse angular sampling and interpolation approach. The method is based on sampling of BRDF subspaces at fixed elevations by means of several adaptively-represented, uniformly distributed, perpendicular slices. Although this proposed method requires only a sparse sampling of material, the interpolation provides a very accurate reconstruction, visually and computationally comparable to densely measured reference. Due to the simple slices measurement and method's robustness it allows for a highly accurate acquisition of BRDFs. This in comparison with standard uniform angular sampling, is considerably faster yet uses far less samples.
Explicit Occlusion Modeling for 3D Object Class Representations
Authors: M. Zeeshan Zia, Michael Stark, Konrad Schindler
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Despite the success of current state-of-the-art object class detectors, severe occlusion remains a major challenge. This is particularly true for more geometrically expressive 3D object class representations. While these representations have attracted renewed interest for precise object pose estimation, the focus has mostly been on rather clean datasets, where occlusion is not an issue. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of modeling occlusion in the context of a 3D geometric object class model that is capable of fine-grained, part-level 3D object reconstruction. Following the intuition that 3D modeling should facilitate occlusion reasoning, we design an explicit representation of likely geometric occlusion patterns. Robustness is achieved by pooling image evidence from of a set of fixed part detectors as well as a non-parametric representation of part configurations in the spirit of poselets. We confirm the potential of our method on cars in a newly collected data set of inner-city street scenes with varying levels of occlusion, and demonstrate superior performance in occlusion estimation and part localization, compared to baselines that are unaware of occlusions.
Tag Taxonomy Aware Dictionary Learning for Region Tagging
Authors: Jingjing Zheng, Zhuolin Jiang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Tags of image regions are often arranged in a hierarchical taxonomy based on their semantic meanings. In this paper, using the given tag taxonomy, we propose to jointly learn multi-layer hierarchical dictionaries and corresponding linear classifiers for region tagging. Specifically, we generate a node-specific dictionary for each tag node in the taxonomy, and then concatenate the node-specific dictionaries from each level to construct a level-specific dictionary. The hierarchical semantic structure among tags is preserved in the relationship among node-dictionaries. Simultaneously, the sparse codes obtained using the levelspecific dictionaries are summed up as the final feature representation to design a linear classifier. Our approach not only makes use of sparse codes obtained from higher levels to help learn the classifiers for lower levels, but also encourages the tag nodes from lower levels that have the same parent tag node to implicitly share sparse codes obtained from higher levels. Experimental results using three benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach yields the best performance over recently proposed methods.
A Fast Semidefinite Approach to Solving Binary Quadratic Problems
Authors: Peng Wang, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Many computer vision problems can be formulated as binary quadratic programs (BQPs). Two classic relaxation methods are widely used for solving BQPs, namely, spectral methods and semidefinite programming (SDP), each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Spectral relaxation is simple and easy to implement, but its bound is loose. Semidefinite relaxation has a tighter bound, but its computational complexity is high for large scale problems. We present a new SDP formulation for BQPs, with two desirable properties. First, it has a similar relaxation bound to conventional SDP formulations. Second, compared with conventional SDP methods, the new SDP formulation leads to a significantly more efficient and scalable dual optimization approach, which has the same degree of complexity as spectral methods. Extensive experiments on various applications including clustering, image segmentation, co-segmentation and registration demonstrate the usefulness of our SDP formulation for solving large-scale BQPs.
Learning without Human Scores for Blind Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Wufeng Xue, Lei Zhang, Xuanqin Mou
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: General purpose blind image quality assessment (BIQA) has been recently attracting significant attention in the fields of image processing, vision and machine learning. Stateof-the-art BIQA methods usually learn to evaluate the image quality by regression from human subjective scores of the training samples. However, these methods need a large number of human scored images for training, and lack an explicit explanation of how the image quality is affected by image local features. An interesting question is then: can we learn for effective BIQA without using human scored images? This paper makes a good effort to answer this question. We partition the distorted images into overlapped patches, and use a percentile pooling strategy to estimate the local quality of each patch. Then a quality-aware clustering (QAC) method is proposed to learn a set of centroids on each quality level. These centroids are then used as a codebook to infer the quality of each patch in a given image, and subsequently a perceptual quality score of the whole image can be obtained. The proposed QAC based BIQA method is simple yet effective. It not only has comparable accuracy to those methods using human scored images in learning, but also has merits such as high linearity to human perception of image quality, real-time implementation and availability of image local quality map.
Hollywood 3D: Recognizing Actions in 3D Natural Scenes
Authors: Simon Hadfield, Richard Bowden
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Action recognition in unconstrained situations is a difficult task, suffering from massive intra-class variations. It is made even more challenging when complex 3D actions are projected down to the image plane, losing a great deal of information. The recent emergence of 3D data, both in broadcast content, and commercial depth sensors, provides the possibility to overcome this issue. This paper presents a new dataset, for benchmarking action recognition algorithms in natural environments, while making use of 3D information. The dataset contains around 650 video clips, across 14 classes. In addition, two state of the art action recognition algorithms are extended to make use of the 3D data, and five new interest point detection strategies are also proposed, that extend to the 3D data. Our evaluation compares all 4 feature descriptors, using 7 different types of interest point, over a variety of threshold levels, for the Hollywood3D dataset. We make the dataset including stereo video, estimated depth maps and all code required to reproduce the benchmark results, available to the wider community.
3D Pictorial Structures for Multiple View Articulated Pose Estimation
Authors: Magnus Burenius, Josephine Sullivan, Stefan Carlsson
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We consider the problem of automatically estimating the 3D pose of humans from images, taken from multiple calibrated views. We show that it is possible and tractable to extend the pictorial structures framework, popular for 2D pose estimation, to 3D. We discuss how to use this framework to impose view, skeleton, joint angle and intersection constraints in 3D. The 3D pictorial structures are evaluated on multiple view data from a professional football game. The evaluation is focused on computational tractability, but we also demonstrate how a simple 2D part detector can be plugged into the framework.
Improving the Visual Comprehension of Point Sets
Authors: Sagi Katz, Ayellet Tal
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Point sets are the standard output of many 3D scanning systems and depth cameras. Presenting the set of points as is, might "hide" the prominent features of the object from which the points are sampled. Our goal is to reduce the number of points in a point set, for improving the visual comprehension from a given viewpoint. This is done by controlling the density of the reduced point set, so as to create bright regions (low density) and dark regions (high density), producing an effect of shading. This data reduction is achieved by leveraging a limitation of a solution to the classical problem of determining visibility from a viewpoint. In addition, we introduce a new dual problem, for determining visibility of a point from infinity, and show how a limitation of its solution can be leveraged in a similar way.