mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Exploring Weak Stabilization for Motion Feature Extraction
Authors: Dennis Park, C. L. Zitnick, Deva Ramanan, Piotr Dollar
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We describe novel but simple motion features for the problem of detecting objects in video sequences. Previous approaches either compute optical flow or temporal differences on video frame pairs with various assumptions about stabilization. We describe a combined approach that uses coarse-scale flow and fine-scale temporal difference features. Our approach performs weak motion stabilization by factoring out camera motion and coarse object motion while preserving nonrigid motions that serve as useful cues for recognition. We show results for pedestrian detection and human pose estimation in video sequences, achieving state-of-the-art results in both. In particular, given a fixed detection rate our method achieves a five-fold reduction in false positives over prior art on the Caltech Pedestrian benchmark. Finally, we perform extensive diagnostic experiments to reveal what aspects of our system are crucial for good performance. Proper stabilization, long time-scale features, and proper normalization are all critical.
Discovering the Structure of a Planar Mirror System from Multiple Observations of a Single Point
Authors: Ilya Reshetouski, Alkhazur Manakov, Ayush Bandhari, Ramesh Raskar, Hans-Peter Seidel, Ivo Ihrke
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We investigate the problem of identifying the position of a viewer inside a room of planar mirrors with unknown geometry in conjunction with the room's shape parameters. We consider the observations to consist of angularly resolved depth measurements of a single scene point that is being observed via many multi-bounce interactions with the specular room geometry. Applications of this problem statement include areas such as calibration, acoustic echo cancelation and time-of-flight imaging. We theoretically analyze the problem and derive sufficient conditions for a combination of convex room geometry, observer, and scene point to be reconstructable. The resulting constructive algorithm is exponential in nature and, therefore, not directly applicable to practical scenarios. To counter the situation, we propose theoretically devised geometric constraints that enable an efficient pruning of the solution space and develop a heuristic randomized search algorithm that uses these constraints to obtain an effective solution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on extensive simulations as well as in a challenging real-world calibration scenario.
Fine-Grained Crowdsourcing for Fine-Grained Recognition
Authors: Jia Deng, Jonathan Krause, Li Fei-Fei
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Fine-grained recognition concerns categorization at sub-ordinate levels, where the distinction between object classes is highly local. Compared to basic level recognition, fine-grained categorization can be more challenging as there are in general less data and fewer discriminative features. This necessitates the use of stronger prior for feature selection. In this work, we include humans in the loop to help computers select discriminative features. We introduce a novel online game called "Bubbles" that reveals discriminative features humans use. The player's goal is to identify the category of a heavily blurred image. During the game, the player can choose to reveal full details of circular regions ("bubbles"), with a certain penalty. With proper setup the game generates discriminative bubbles with assured quality. We next propose the "BubbleBank" algorithm that uses the human selected bubbles to improve machine recognition performance. Experiments demonstrate that our approach yields large improvements over the previous state of the art on challenging benchmarks.
Joint 3D Scene Reconstruction and Class Segmentation
Authors: Christian Hane, Christopher Zach, Andrea Cohen, Roland Angst, Marc Pollefeys
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Both image segmentation and dense 3D modeling from images represent an intrinsically ill-posed problem. Strong regularizers are therefore required to constrain the solutions from being 'too noisy'. Unfortunately, these priors generally yield overly smooth reconstructions and/or segmentations in certain regions whereas they fail in other areas to constrain the solution sufficiently. In this paper we argue that image segmentation and dense 3D reconstruction contribute valuable information to each other's task. As a consequence, we propose a rigorous mathematical framework to formulate and solve a joint segmentation and dense reconstruction problem. Image segmentations provide geometric cues about which surface orientations are more likely to appear at a certain location in space whereas a dense 3D reconstruction yields a suitable regularization for the segmentation problem by lifting the labeling from 2D images to 3D space. We show how appearance-based cues and 3D surface orientation priors can be learned from training data and subsequently used for class-specific regularization. Experimental results on several real data sets highlight the advantages of our joint formulation.
Kernel Null Space Methods for Novelty Detection
Authors: Paul Bodesheim, Alexander Freytag, Erik Rodner, Michael Kemmler, Joachim Denzler
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Detecting samples from previously unknown classes is a crucial task in object recognition, especially when dealing with real-world applications where the closed-world assumption does not hold. We present how to apply a null space method for novelty detection, which maps all training samples of one class to a single point. Beside the possibility of modeling a single class, we are able to treat multiple known classes jointly and to detect novelties for a set of classes with a single model. In contrast to modeling the support of each known class individually, our approach makes use of a projection in a joint subspace where training samples of all known classes have zero intra-class variance. This subspace is called the null space of the training data. To decide about novelty of a test sample, our null space approach allows for solely relying on a distance measure instead of performing density estimation directly. Therefore, we derive a simple yet powerful method for multi-class novelty detection, an important problem not studied sufficiently so far. Our novelty detection approach is assessed in comprehensive multi-class experiments using the publicly available datasets Caltech-256 and ImageNet. The analysis reveals that our null space approach is perfectly suited for multi-class novelty detection since it outperforms all other methods.
Information Consensus for Distributed Multi-target Tracking
Authors: Ahmed T. Kamal, Jay A. Farrell, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Due to their high fault-tolerance, ease of installation and scalability to large networks, distributed algorithms have recently gained immense popularity in the sensor networks community, especially in computer vision. Multitarget tracking in a camera network is one of the fundamental problems in this domain. Distributed estimation algorithms work by exchanging information between sensors that are communication neighbors. Since most cameras are directional sensors, it is often the case that neighboring sensors may not be sensing the same target. Such sensors that do not have information about a target are termed as "naive" with respect to that target. In this paper, we propose consensus-based distributed multi-target tracking algorithms in a camera network that are designed to address this issue of naivety. The estimation errors in tracking and data association, as well as the effect of naivety, are jointly addressed leading to the development of an informationweighted consensus algorithm, which we term as the Multitarget Information Consensus (MTIC) algorithm. The incorporation of the probabilistic data association mechanism makes the MTIC algorithm very robust to false measurements/clutter. Experimental analysis is provided to support the theoretical results.
CLAM: Coupled Localization and Mapping with Efficient Outlier Handling
Authors: Jonathan Balzer, Stefano Soatto
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We describe a method to efficiently generate a model (map) of small-scale objects from video. The map encodes sparse geometry as well as coarse photometry, and could be used to initialize dense reconstruction schemes as well as to support recognition and localization of three-dimensional objects. Self-occlusions and the predominance of outliers present a challenge to existing online Structure From Motion and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping systems. We propose a unified inference criterion that encompasses map building and localization (object detection) relative to the map in a coupled fashion. We establish correspondence in a computationally efficient way without resorting to combinatorial matching or random-sampling techniques. Instead, we use a simpler M-estimator that exploits putative correspondence from tracking after photometric and topological validation. We have collected a new dataset to benchmark model building in the small scale, which we test our algorithm on in comparison to others. Although our system is significantly leaner than previous ones, it compares favorably to the state of the art in terms of accuracy and robustness.
Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation with Instance Constraints
Authors: Jeff Donahue, Judy Hoffman, Erik Rodner, Kate Saenko, Trevor Darrell
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Most successful object classification and detection methods rely on classifiers trained on large labeled datasets. However, for domains where labels are limited, simply borrowing labeled data from existing datasets can hurt performance, a phenomenon known as "dataset bias." We propose a general framework for adapting classifiers from "borrowed" data to the target domain using a combination of available labeled and unlabeled examples. Specifically, we show that imposing smoothness constraints on the classifier scores over the unlabeled data can lead to improved adaptation results. Such constraints are often available in the form of instance correspondences, e.g. when the same object or individual is observed simultaneously from multiple views, or tracked between video frames. In these cases, the object labels are unknown but can be constrained to be the same or similar. We propose techniques that build on existing domain adaptation methods by explicitly modeling these relationships, and demonstrate empirically that they improve recognition accuracy in two scenarios, multicategory image classification and object detection in video.
Detecting and Naming Actors in Movies Using Generative Appearance Models
Authors: Vineet Gandhi, Remi Ronfard
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We introduce a generative model for learning person and costume specific detectors from labeled examples. We demonstrate the model on the task of localizing and naming actors in long video sequences. More specifically, the actor's head and shoulders are each represented as a constellation of optional color regions. Detection can proceed despite changes in view-point and partial occlusions. We explain how to learn the models from a small number of labeled keyframes or video tracks, and how to detect novel appearances of the actors in a maximum likelihood framework. We present results on a challenging movie example, with 81% recall in actor detection (coverage) and 89% precision in actor identification (naming).
Rolling Shutter Camera Calibration
Authors: Luc Oth, Paul Furgale, Laurent Kneip, Roland Siegwart
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Rolling Shutter (RS) cameras are used across a wide range of consumer electronic devices--from smart-phones to high-end cameras. It is well known, that if a RS camera is used with a moving camera or scene, significant image distortions are introduced. The quality or even success of structure from motion on rolling shutter images requires the usual intrinsic parameters such as focal length and distortion coefficients as well as accurate modelling of the shutter timing. The current state-of-the-art technique for calibrating the shutter timings requires specialised hardware. We present a new method that only requires video of a known calibration pattern. Experimental results on over 60 real datasets show that our method is more accurate than the current state of the art.
A Linear Approach to Matching Cuboids in RGBD Images
Authors: Hao Jiang, Jianxiong Xiao
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a novel linear method to match cuboids in indoor scenes using RGBD images from Kinect. Beyond depth maps, these cuboids reveal important structures of a scene. Instead of directly fitting cuboids to 3D data, we first construct cuboid candidates using superpixel pairs on a RGBD image, and then we optimize the configuration of the cuboids to satisfy the global structure constraints. The optimal configuration has low local matching costs, small object intersection and occlusion, and the cuboids tend to project to a large region in the image; the number of cuboids is optimized simultaneously. We formulate the multiple cuboid matching problem as a mixed integer linear program and solve the optimization efficiently with a branch and bound method. The optimization guarantees the global optimal solution. Our experiments on the Kinect RGBD images of a variety of indoor scenes show that our proposed method is efficient, accurate and robust against object appearance variations, occlusions and strong clutter.
Discriminative Segment Annotation in Weakly Labeled Video
Authors: Kevin Tang, Rahul Sukthankar, Jay Yagnik, Li Fei-Fei
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The ubiquitous availability of Internet video offers the vision community the exciting opportunity to directly learn localized visual concepts from real-world imagery. Unfortunately, most such attempts are doomed because traditional approaches are ill-suited, both in terms of their computational characteristics and their inability to robustly contend with the label noise that plagues uncurated Internet content. We present CRANE, a weakly supervised algorithm that is specifically designed to learn under such conditions. First, we exploit the asymmetric availability of real-world training data, where small numbers of positive videos tagged with the concept are supplemented with large quantities of unreliable negative data. Second, we ensure that CRANE is robust to label noise, both in terms of tagged videos that fail to contain the concept as well as occasional negative videos that do. Finally, CRANE is highly parallelizable, making it practical to deploy at large scale without sacrificing the quality of the learned solution. Although CRANE is general, this paper focuses on segment annotation, where we show state-of-the-art pixel-level segmentation results on two datasets, one of which includes a training set of spatiotemporal segments from more than 20,000 videos.
Multi-agent Event Detection: Localization and Role Assignment
Authors: Suha Kwak, Bohyung Han, Joon Hee Han
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We present a joint estimation technique of event localization and role assignment when the target video event is described by a scenario. Specifically, to detect multi-agent events from video, our algorithm identifies agents involved in an event and assigns roles to the participating agents. Instead of iterating through all possible agent-role combinations, we formulate the joint optimization problem as two efficient subproblems--quadratic programming for role assignment followed by linear programming for event localization. Additionally, we reduce the computational complexity significantly by applying role-specific event detectors to each agent independently. We test the performance of our algorithm in natural videos, which contain multiple target events and nonparticipating agents.
Incorporating Structural Alternatives and Sharing into Hierarchy for Multiclass Object Recognition and Detection
Authors: Xiaolong Wang, Liang Lin, Lichao Huang, Shuicheng Yan
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper proposes a reconfigurable model to recognize and detect multiclass (or multiview) objects with large variation in appearance. Compared with well acknowledged hierarchical models, we study two advanced capabilities in hierarchy for object modeling: (i)"switch" variables(i.e. or-nodes) for specifying alternative compositions, and (ii) making local classifiers (i.e. leaf-nodes) shared among different classes. These capabilities enable us to account well for structural variabilities while preserving the model compact. Our model, in the form of an And-Or Graph, comprises four layers: a batch of leaf-nodes with collaborative edges in bottom for localizing object parts; the or-nodes over bottom to activate their children leaf-nodes; the andnodes to classify objects as a whole; one root-node on the top for switching multiclass classification, which is also an or-node. For model training, we present an EM-type algorithm, namely dynamical structural optimization (DSO), to iteratively determine the structural configuration, (e.g., leaf-node generation associated with their parent or-nodes and shared across other classes), along with optimizing multi-layer parameters. The proposed method is valid on challenging databases, e.g., PASCAL VOC 2007 and UIUCPeople, and it achieves state-of-the-arts performance.
Correspondence-Less Non-rigid Registration of Triangular Surface Meshes
Authors: Zsolt Santa, Zoltan Kato
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: A novel correspondence-less approach is proposed to find a thin plate spline map between a pair of deformable 3D objects represented by triangular surface meshes. The proposed method works without landmark extraction and feature correspondences. The aligning transformation is found simply by solving a system of nonlinear equations. Each equation is generated by integrating a nonlinear function over the object's domains. We derive recursive formulas for the efficient computation of these integrals. Based on a series of comparative tests on a large synthetic dataset, our triangular mesh-based algorithm outperforms state of the art methods both in terms of computing time and accuracy. The applicability of the proposed approach has been demonstrated on the registration of 3D lung CT volumes.
Globally Consistent Multi-label Assignment on the Ray Space of 4D Light Fields
Authors: Sven Wanner, Christoph Straehle, Bastian Goldluecke
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We present the first variational framework for multi-label segmentation on the ray space of 4D light fields. For traditional segmentation of single images, features need to be extracted from the 2D projection of a three-dimensional scene. The associated loss of geometry information can cause severe problems, for example if different objects have a very similar visual appearance. In this work, we show that using a light field instead of an image not only enables to train classifiers which can overcome many of these problems, but also provides an optimal data structure for label optimization by implicitly providing scene geometry information. It is thus possible to consistently optimize label assignment over all views simultaneously. As a further contribution, we make all light fields available online with complete depth and segmentation ground truth data where available, and thus establish the first benchmark data set for light field analysis to facilitate competitive further development of algorithms.
Top-Down Segmentation of Non-rigid Visual Objects Using Derivative-Based Search on Sparse Manifolds
Authors: Jacinto C. Nascimento, Gustavo Carneiro
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: The solution for the top-down segmentation of non-rigid visual objects using machine learning techniques is generally regarded as too complex to be solved in its full generality given the large dimensionality of the search space of the explicit representation of the segmentation contour. In order to reduce this complexity, the problem is usually divided into two stages: rigid detection and non-rigid segmentation. The rationale is based on the fact that the rigid detection can be run in a lower dimensionality space (i.e., less complex and faster) than the original contour space, and its result is then used to constrain the non-rigid segmentation. In this paper, we propose the use of sparse manifolds to reduce the dimensionality of the rigid detection search space of current stateof-the-art top-down segmentation methodologies. The main goals targeted by this smaller dimensionality search space are the decrease of the search running time complexity and the reduction of the training complexity of the rigid detector. These goals are attainable given that both the search and training complexities are function of the dimensionality of the rigid search space. We test our approach in the segmentation of the left ventricle from ultrasound images and lips from frontal face images. Compared to the performance of state-of-the-art non-rigid segmentation system, our experiments show that the use of sparse manifolds for the rigid detection leads to the two goals mentioned above.
Harry Potter's Marauder's Map: Localizing and Tracking Multiple Persons-of-Interest by Nonnegative Discretization
Authors: Shoou-I Yu, Yi Yang, Alexander Hauptmann
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: A device just like Harry Potter's Marauder's Map, which pinpoints the location of each person-of-interest at all times, provides invaluable information for analysis of surveillance videos. To make this device real, a system would be required to perform robust person localization and tracking in real world surveillance scenarios, especially for complex indoor environments with many walls causing occlusion and long corridors with sparse surveillance camera coverage. We propose a tracking-by-detection approach with nonnegative discretization to tackle this problem. Given a set of person detection outputs, our framework takes advantage of all important cues such as color, person detection, face recognition and non-background information to perform tracking. Local learning approaches are used to uncover the manifold structure in the appearance space with spatio-temporal constraints. Nonnegative discretization is used to enforce the mutual exclusion constraint, which guarantees a person detection output to only belong to exactly one individual. Experiments show that our algorithm performs robust localization and tracking of persons-of-interest not only in outdoor scenes, but also in a complex indoor real-world nursing home environment.
Fast Image Super-Resolution Based on In-Place Example Regression
Authors: Jianchao Yang, Zhe Lin, Scott Cohen
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We propose a fast regression model for practical single image super-resolution based on in-place examples, by leveraging two fundamental super-resolution approaches-learning from an external database and learning from selfexamples. Our in-place self-similarity refines the recently proposed local self-similarity by proving that a patch in the upper scale image have good matches around its origin location in the lower scale image. Based on the in-place examples, a first-order approximation of the nonlinear mapping function from lowto high-resolution image patches is learned. Extensive experiments on benchmark and realworld images demonstrate that our algorithm can produce natural-looking results with sharp edges and preserved fine details, while the current state-of-the-art algorithms are prone to visual artifacts. Furthermore, our model can easily extend to deal with noise by combining the regression results on multiple in-place examples for robust estimation. The algorithm runs fast and is particularly useful for practical applications, where the input images typically contain diverse textures and they are potentially contaminated by noise or compression artifacts.
Query Adaptive Similarity for Large Scale Object Retrieval
Authors: Danfeng Qin, Christian Wengert, Luc Van Gool
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Many recent object retrieval systems rely on local features for describing an image. The similarity between a pair of images is measured by aggregating the similarity between their corresponding local features. In this paper we present a probabilistic framework for modeling the feature to feature similarity measure. We then derive a query adaptive distance which is appropriate for global similarity evaluation. Furthermore, we propose a function to score the individual contributions into an image to image similarity within the probabilistic framework. Experimental results show that our method improves the retrieval accuracy significantly and consistently. Moreover, our result compares favorably to the state-of-the-art.
Winding Number for Region-Boundary Consistent Salient Contour Extraction
Authors: Yansheng Ming, Hongdong Li, Xuming He
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper aims to extract salient closed contours from an image. For this vision task, both region segmentation cues (e.g. color/texture homogeneity) and boundary detection cues (e.g. local contrast, edge continuity and contour closure) play important and complementary roles. In this paper we show how to combine both cues in a unified framework. The main focus is given to how to maintain the consistency (compatibility) between the region cues and the boundary cues. To this ends, we introduce the use of winding number-a well-known concept in topology-as a powerful mathematical device. By this device, the region-boundary consistency is represented as a set of simple linear relationships. Our method is applied to the figure-ground segmentation problem. The experiments show clearly improved results.
Analytic Bilinear Appearance Subspace Construction for Modeling Image Irradiance under Natural Illumination and Non-Lambertian Reflectance
Authors: Shireen Y. Elhabian, Aly A. Farag
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Conventional subspace construction approaches suffer from the need of "large-enough" image ensemble rendering numerical methods intractable. In this paper, we propose an analytic formulation for low-dimensional subspace construction in which shading cues lie while preserving the natural structure of an image sample. Using the frequencyspace representation of the image irradiance equation, the process of finding such subspace is cast as establishing a relation between its principal components and that of a deterministic set of basis functions, termed as irradiance harmonics. Representing images as matrices further lessen the number of parameters to be estimated to define a bilinear projection which maps the image sample to a lowerdimensional bilinear subspace. Results show significant impact on dimensionality reduction with minimal loss of information as well as robustness against noise.
A Fully-Connected Layered Model of Foreground and Background Flow
Authors: Deqing Sun, Jonas Wulff, Erik B. Sudderth, Hanspeter Pfister, Michael J. Black
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Layered models allow scene segmentation and motion estimation to be formulated together and to inform one another. Traditional layered motion methods, however, employ fairly weak models of scene structure, relying on locally connected Ising/Potts models which have limited ability to capture long-range correlations in natural scenes. To address this, we formulate a fully-connected layered model that enables global reasoning about the complicated segmentations of real objects. Optimization with fully-connected graphical models is challenging, and our inference algorithm leverages recent work on efficient mean field updates for fully-connected conditional random fields. These methods can be implemented efficiently using high-dimensional Gaussian filtering. We combine these ideas with a layered flow model, and find that the long-range connections greatly improve segmentation into figure-ground layers when compared with locally connected MRF models. Experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the method can recover fine structures and large occlusion regions, with good flow accuracy and much lower computational cost than previous locally-connected layered models.
Bilinear Programming for Human Activity Recognition with Unknown MRF Graphs
Authors: Zhenhua Wang, Qinfeng Shi, Chunhua Shen, Anton van den Hengel
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Markov Random Fields (MRFs) have been successfully applied to human activity modelling, largely due to their ability to model complex dependencies and deal with local uncertainty. However, the underlying graph structure is often manually specified, or automatically constructed by heuristics. We show, instead, that learning an MRF graph and performing MAP inference can be achieved simultaneously by solving a bilinear program. Equipped with the bilinear program based MAP inference for an unknown graph, we show how to estimate parameters efficiently and effectively with a latent structural SVM. We apply our techniques to predict sport moves (such as serve, volley in tennis) and human activity in TV episodes (such as kiss, hug and Hi-Five). Experimental results show the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art.
What Object Motion Reveals about Shape with Unknown BRDF and Lighting
Authors: Manmohan Chandraker, Dikpal Reddy, Yizhou Wang, Ravi Ramamoorthi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We present a theory that addresses the problem of determining shape from the (small or differential) motion of an object with unknown isotropic reflectance, under arbitrary unknown distant illumination, for both orthographic and perpsective projection. Our theory imposes fundamental limits on the hardness of surface reconstruction, independent of the method involved. Under orthographic projection, we prove that three differential motions suffice to yield an invariant that relates shape to image derivatives, regardless of BRDF and illumination. Under perspective projection, we show that four differential motions suffice to yield depth and a linear constraint on the surface gradient, with unknown BRDF and lighting. Further, we delineate the topological classes up to which reconstruction may be achieved using the invariants. Finally, we derive a general stratification that relates hardness of shape recovery to scene complexity. Qualitatively, our invariants are homogeneous partial differential equations for simple lighting and inhomogeneous for complex illumination. Quantitatively, our framework shows that the minimal number of motions required to resolve shape is greater for more complex scenes. Prior works that assume brightness constancy, Lambertian BRDF or a known directional light source follow as special cases of our stratification. We illustrate with synthetic and real data how potential reconstruction methods may exploit our framework.
Learning by Associating Ambiguously Labeled Images
Authors: Zinan Zeng, Shijie Xiao, Kui Jia, Tsung-Han Chan, Shenghua Gao, Dong Xu, Yi Ma
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We study in this paper the problem of learning classifiers from ambiguously labeled images. For instance, in the collection of new images, each image contains some samples of interest (e.g., human faces), and its associated caption has labels with the true ones included, while the samplelabel association is unknown. The task is to learn classifiers from these ambiguously labeled images and generalize to new images. An essential consideration here is how to make use of the information embedded in the relations between samples and labels, both within each image and across the image set. To this end, we propose a novel framework to address this problem. Our framework is motivated by the observation that samples from the same class repetitively appear in the collection of ambiguously labeled training images, while they are just ambiguously labeled in each image. If we can identify samples of the same class from each image and associate them across the image set, the matrix formed by the samples from the same class would be ideally low-rank. By leveraging such a low-rank assumption, we can simultaneously optimize a partial permutation matrix (PPM) for each image, which is formulated in order to exploit all information between samples and labels in a principled way. The obtained PPMs can be readily used to assign labels to samples in training images, and then a standard SVM classifier can be trained and used for unseen data. Experiments on benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed method.
As-Projective-As-Possible Image Stitching with Moving DLT
Authors: Julio Zaragoza, Tat-Jun Chin, Michael S. Brown, David Suter
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We investigate projective estimation under model inadequacies, i.e., when the underpinning assumptions of the projective model are not fully satisfied by the data. We focus on the task of image stitching which is customarily solved by estimating a projective warp -a model that is justified when the scene is planar or when the views differ purely by rotation. Such conditions are easily violated in practice, and this yields stitching results with ghosting artefacts that necessitate the usage of deghosting algorithms. To this end we propose as-projective-as-possible warps, i.e., warps that aim to be globally projective, yet allow local non-projective deviations to account for violations to the assumed imaging conditions. Based on a novel estimation technique called Moving Direct Linear Transformation (Moving DLT), our method seamlessly bridges image regions that are inconsistent with the projective model. The result is highly accurate image stitching, with significantly reduced ghosting effects, thus lowering the dependency on post hoc deghosting.
Light Field Distortion Feature for Transparent Object Recognition
Authors: Kazuki Maeno, Hajime Nagahara, Atsushi Shimada, Rin-Ichiro Taniguchi
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Current object-recognition algorithms use local features, such as scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and speeded-up robust features (SURF), for visually learning to recognize objects. These approaches though cannot apply to transparent objects made of glass or plastic, as such objects take on the visual features of background objects, and the appearance of such objects dramatically varies with changes in scene background. Indeed, in transmitting light, transparent objects have the unique characteristic of distorting the background by refraction. In this paper, we use a single-shot light Aeld image as an input and model the distortion of the light Aeld caused by the refractive property of a transparent object. We propose a new feature, called the light Aeld distortion (LFD) feature, for identifying a transparent object. The proposal incorporates this LFD feature into the bag-of-features approach for recognizing transparent objects. We evaluated its performance in laboratory and real settings.
Ensemble Learning for Confidence Measures in Stereo Vision
Authors: Ralf Haeusler, Rahul Nair, Daniel Kondermann
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: With the aim to improve accuracy of stereo confidence measures, we apply the random decision forest framework to a large set of diverse stereo confidence measures. Learning and testing sets were drawn from the recently introduced KITTI dataset, which currently poses higher challenges to stereo solvers than other benchmarks with ground truth for stereo evaluation. We experiment with semi global matching stereo (SGM) and a census dataterm, which is the best performing realtime capable stereo method known to date. On KITTI images, SGM still produces a significant amount of error. We obtain consistently improved area under curve values of sparsification measures in comparison to best performing single stereo confidence measures where numbers of stereo errors are large. More specifically, our method performs best in all but one out of 194 frames of the KITTI dataset.
Mirror Surface Reconstruction from a Single Image
Authors: Miaomiao Liu, Richard Hartley, Mathieu Salzmann
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: This paper tackles the problem of reconstructing the shape of a smooth mirror surface from a single image. In particular, we consider the case where the camera is observing the reflection of a static reference target in the unknown mirror. We first study the reconstruction problem given dense correspondences between 3D points on the reference target and image locations. In such conditions, our differential geometry analysis provides a theoretical proof that the shape of the mirror surface can be uniquely recovered if the pose of the reference target is known. We then relax our assumptions by considering the case where only sparse correspondences are available. In this scenario, we formulate reconstruction as an optimization problem, which can be solved using a nonlinear least-squares method. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both synthetic and real images.
Handling Noise in Single Image Deblurring Using Directional Filters
Authors: Lin Zhong, Sunghyun Cho, Dimitris Metaxas, Sylvain Paris, Jue Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: State-of-the-art single image deblurring techniques are sensitive to image noise. Even a small amount of noise, which is inevitable in low-light conditions, can degrade the quality of blur kernel estimation dramatically. The recent approach of Tai and Lin [17] tries to iteratively denoise and deblur a blurry and noisy image. However, as we show in this work, directly applying image denoising methods often partially damages the blur information that is extracted from the input image, leading to biased kernel estimation. We propose a new method for handling noise in blind image deconvolution based on new theoretical and practical insights. Our key observation is that applying a directional low-pass filter to the input image greatly reduces the noise level, while preserving the blur information in the orthogonal direction to the filter. Based on this observation, our method applies a series of directional filters at different orientations to the input image, and estimates an accurate Radon transform of the blur kernel from each filtered image. Finally, we reconstruct the blur kernel using inverse Radon transform. Experimental results on synthetic and real data show that our algorithm achieves higher quality results than previous approaches on blurry and noisy images. 1
Joint Spectral Correspondence for Disparate Image Matching
Authors: Mayank Bansal, Kostas Daniilidis
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We address the problem of matching images with disparate appearance arising from factors like dramatic illumination (day vs. night), age (historic vs. new) and rendering style differences. The lack of local intensity or gradient patterns in these images makes the application of pixellevel descriptors like SIFT infeasible. We propose a novel formulation for detecting and matching persistent features between such images by analyzing the eigen-spectrum of the joint image graph constructed from all the pixels in the two images. We show experimental results of our approach on a public dataset of challenging image pairs and demonstrate significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art.
From Local Similarity to Global Coding: An Application to Image Classification
Authors: Amirreza Shaban, Hamid R. Rabiee, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Marjan Ghazvininejad
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Bag of words models for feature extraction have demonstrated top-notch performance in image classification. These representations are usually accompanied by a coding method. Recently, methods that code a descriptor giving regard to its nearby bases have proved efficacious. These methods take into account the nonlinear structure of descriptors, since local similarities are a good approximation of global similarities. However, they confine their usage of the global similarities to nearby bases. In this paper, we propose a coding scheme that brings into focus the manifold structure of descriptors, and devise a method to compute the global similarities of descriptors to the bases. Given a local similarity measure between bases, a global measure is computed. Exploiting the local similarity of a descriptor and its nearby bases, a global measure of association of a descriptor to all the bases is computed. Unlike the locality-based and sparse coding methods, the proposed coding varies smoothly with respect to the underlying manifold. Experiments on benchmark image classification datasets substantiate the superiority of the proposed method over its locality and sparsity based rivals.
Probabilistic Elastic Matching for Pose Variant Face Verification
Authors: Haoxiang Li, Gang Hua, Zhe Lin, Jonathan Brandt, Jianchao Yang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Pose variation remains to be a major challenge for realworld face recognition. We approach this problem through a probabilistic elastic matching method. We take a part based representation by extracting local features (e.g., LBP or SIFT) from densely sampled multi-scale image patches. By augmenting each feature with its location, a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is trained to capture the spatialappearance distribution of all face images in the training corpus. Each mixture component of the GMM is confined to be a spherical Gaussian to balance the influence of the appearance and the location terms. Each Gaussian component builds correspondence of a pair of features to be matched between two faces/face tracks. For face verification, we train an SVM on the vector concatenating the difference vectors of all the feature pairs to decide if a pair of faces/face tracks is matched or not. We further propose a joint Bayesian adaptation algorithm to adapt the universally trained GMM to better model the pose variations between the target pair of faces/face tracks, which consistently improves face verification accuracy. Our experiments show that our method outperforms the state-ofthe-art in the most restricted protocol on Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) and the YouTube video face database by a significant margin.
Story-Driven Summarization for Egocentric Video
Authors: Zheng Lu, Kristen Grauman
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: We present a video summarization approach that discovers the story of an egocentric video. Given a long input video, our method selects a short chain of video subshots depicting the essential events. Inspired by work in text analysis that links news articles over time, we define a randomwalk based metric of influence between subshots that reflects how visual objects contribute to the progression of events. Using this influence metric, we define an objective for the optimal k-subshot summary. Whereas traditional methods optimize a summary's diversity or representativeness, ours explicitly accounts for how one sub-event "leads to" another--which, critically, captures event connectivity beyond simple object co-occurrence. As a result, our summaries provide a better sense of story. We apply our approach to over 12 hours of daily activity video taken from 23 unique camera wearers, and systematically evaluate its quality compared to multiple baselines with 34 human subjects.
Towards Pose Robust Face Recognition
Authors: Dong Yi, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013 (Main Conference Track), 2013

Abstract: Most existing pose robust methods are too computational complex to meet practical applications and their performance under unconstrained environments are rarely evaluated. In this paper, we propose a novel method for pose robust face recognition towards practical applications, which is fast, pose robust and can work well under unconstrained environments. Firstly, a 3D deformable model is built and a fast 3D model fitting algorithm is proposed to estimate the pose of face image. Secondly, a group of Gabor filters are transformed according to the pose and shape of face image for feature extraction. Finally, PCA is applied on the pose adaptive Gabor features to remove the redundances and Cosine metric is used to evaluate the similarity. The proposed method has three advantages: (1) The pose correction is applied in the filter space rather than image space, which makes our method less affected by the precision of the 3D model; (2) By combining the holistic pose transformation and local Gabor filtering, the final feature is robust to pose and other negative factors in face recognition; (3) The 3D structure and facial symmetry are successfully used to deal with self-occlusion. Extensive experiments on FERET and PIE show the proposed method outperforms state-ofthe-art methods significantly, meanwhile, the method works well on LFW.