mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Effective Learning-Based Illuminant Estimation Using Simple Features
Authors: Dongliang Cheng, Brian Price, Scott Cohen, Michael S. Brown
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Illumination estimation is the process of determining the chromaticity of the illumination in an imaged scene in order to remove undesirable color casts through white-balancing.   While computational color constancy is a well-studied topic in computer vision, it remains challenging due to the ill-posed nature of the problem.   One class of techniques relies on low-level statistical information in the image color distribution and works under various assumptions (e.g. Grey-World, White-Patch, etc). These methods have an advantage that they are simple and fast, but often do not perform well.  More recent state-of-the-art methods employ learning-based techniques that produce better results, but often rely on complex features and have long evaluation and training times.  In this paper, we present a learning-based method based on four simple color features and show how to use this with an ensemble of regression trees to estimate the illumination.  We demonstrate that our approach is not only faster than existing learning-based methods in terms of both evaluation and training time, but also gives the best results reported to date on modern color constancy data sets.
PAIGE: PAirwise Image Geometry Encoding for Improved Efficiency in Structure-From-Motion
Authors: Johannes L. Schonberger, Alexander C. Berg, Jan-Michael Frahm
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Large-scale Structure-from-Motion systems typically spend major computational effort on pairwise image matching and geometric verification in order to discover connected components in large-scale, unordered image collections. In recent years, the research community has spent significant effort on improving the efficiency of this stage. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of various state-of-the-art methods, evaluating and analyzing their performance. Based on the insights of this evaluation, we propose a learning-based approach, the PAirwise Image Geometry Encoding (PAIGE), to efficiently identify image pairs with scene overlap without the need to perform exhaustive putative matching and geometric verification. PAIGE achieves state-of-the-art performance and integrates well into existing Structure-from-Motion pipelines.
Dense, Accurate Optical Flow Estimation With Piecewise Parametric Model
Authors: Jiaolong Yang, Hongdong Li
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper proposes a simple method for estimating dense and accurate optical flow field. It revitalizes an early idea of piecewise parametric flow model. A key innovation is that, we fit a flow field piecewise to a variety of parametric models, where the domain of each piece (i.e., each piece's shape, position and size) is determined adaptively, while at the same time maintaining a global inter-piece flow continuity constraint. We achieve this by a multi-model fitting scheme via energy minimization. Our energy takes into account both the piecewise constant model assumption and the flow field continuity constraint, enabling the proposed method to effectively handle both homogeneous motions and complex motions. The experiments on three public optical flow benchmarks (KITTI, MPI Sintel, and Middlebury) show the superiority of our method compared with the state of the art: it achieves top-tier performances on all the three benchmarks.
Single-Image Estimation of the Camera Response Function in Near-Lighting
Authors: Pedro Rodrigues, Joao P. Barreto
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: The camera response function (CRF) relates quantised image pixel values with physical incoming light. This paper describes a method to estimate the CRF from a single image of a general two-coloured surface for which the albedo ratio between the coloured regions is known a priori. While other radiometric calibration methods either use multiple frames or require the light to be infinitely distant, the algorithm herein proposed makes no assumptions about lighting conditions and can handle cameras with strong vignetting. Although the approach is generic, in the sense that can be applied to any camera system, the method is particularly well suited for determining the CRF of near-lighting endoscopes in the operating room. This is a very pertinent problem for which no practical, effective solutions have been proposed. The robustness, repeatability, and accuracy of the algorithm is experimentally validated in real images acquired with different endoscopic set-ups.
Multispectral Pedestrian Detection: Benchmark Dataset and Baseline
Authors: Soonmin Hwang, Jaesik Park, Namil Kim, Yukyung Choi, In So Kweon
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: With the increasing interest in pedestrian detection, pedestrian datasets have also been the subject of research in the past decades. However, most existing datasets focus on a color channel, while a thermal channel is helpful for detection even in a dark environment. With this in mind, we propose a multispectral pedestrian dataset which provides well aligned color-thermal image pairs, captured by beam splitter-based special hardware. The color-thermal dataset is as large as previous color-based datasets and provides dense annotations including temporal correspondences. With this dataset, we introduce multispectral ACF, which is an extension of aggregated channel features (ACF) to simultaneously handle color-thermal image pairs. Multispectral ACF reduces the average miss rate of ACF by 15%, and achieves another breakthrough in the pedestrian detection task.
A Low-Dimensional Step Pattern Analysis Algorithm With Application to Multimodal Retinal Image Registration
Authors: Jimmy Addison Lee, Jun Cheng, Beng Hai Lee, Ee Ping Ong, Guozhen Xu, Damon Wing Kee Wong, Jiang Liu, Augustinus Laude, Tock Han Lim
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Existing feature descriptor-based methods on retinal image registration are mainly based on scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) or partial intensity invariant feature descriptor (PIIFD). While these descriptors are often being exploited, they do not work very well upon unhealthy multimodal images with severe diseases. Additionally, the descriptors demand high dimensionality to adequately represent the features of interest. The higher the dimensionality, the greater the consumption of resources (e.g. memory space). To this end, this paper introduces a novel registration algorithm coined low-dimensional step pattern analysis (LoSPA), tailored to achieve low dimensionality while providing sufficient distinctiveness to effectively align unhealthy multimodal image pairs. The algorithm locates hypotheses of robust corner features based on connecting edges from the edge maps, mainly formed by vascular junctions. This method is insensitive to intensity changes, and produces uniformly distributed features and high repeatability across the image domain. The algorithm continues with describing the corner features in a rotation invariant manner using step patterns. These customized step patterns are robust to non-linear intensity changes, which are well-suited for multimodal retinal image registration. Apart from its low dimensionality, the LoSPA algorithm achieves about two-fold higher success rate in multimodal registration on the dataset of severe retinal diseases when compared to the top score among state-of-the-art algorithms.
Bilinear Heterogeneous Information Machine for RGB-D Action Recognition
Authors: Yu Kong, Yun Fu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel approach to action recognition from RGB-D cameras, in which depth features and RGB visual features are jointly used. Rich heterogeneous RGB and depth data are effectively compressed and projected to a learned shared space, in order to reduce noise and capture useful information for recognition. Knowledge from various sources can then be shared with others in the learned space to learn cross-modal features. This guides the discovery of valuable information for recognition. To capture complex spatiotemporal structural relationships in visual and depth features, we represent both RGB and depth data in a matrix form. We formulate the recognition task as a low-rank bilinear model composed of row and column parameter matrices. The rank of the model parameter is minimized to build a low-rank classifier, which is beneficial for improving the generalization power. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on two public RGB-D action datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art results. It also shows promising results if RGB or depth data are missing in training or testing procedure.
MRF Optimization by Graph Approximation
Authors: Wonsik Kim, Kyoung Mu Lee
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Graph cuts-based algorithms have achieved great success in energy minimization for many computer vision applications. These algorithms provide approximated solutions for multi-label energy functions via move-making approach. This approach fuses the current solution with a proposal to generate a lower-energy solution. Thus, generating the appropriate proposals is necessary for the success of the move-making approach. However, not much research efforts has been done on the generation of ``good'' proposals, especially for non-metric energy functions. In this paper, we propose an application-independent and energy-based approach to generate ``good'' proposals. With these proposals, we present a graph cuts-based move-making algorithm called GA-fusion (fusion with graph approximation-based proposals). Extensive experiments support that our proposal generation is effective across different classes of energy functions. The proposed algorithm outperforms others both on real and synthetic problems.
SALICON: Saliency in Context
Authors: Ming Jiang, Shengsheng Huang, Juanyong Duan, Qi Zhao
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Saliency in Context (SALICON) is an ongoing effort that aims at understanding and predicting visual attention. This paper presents a new method to collect large-scale human data during natural explorations on images. While current datasets present a rich set of images and task-specific annotations such as category labels and object segments, this work focuses on recording and logging how humans shift their attention during visual exploration. The goal is to offer new possibilities to (1) complement task-specific annotations to advance the ultimate goal in visual understanding, and (2) understand visual attention and learn saliency models, all with human attentional data at a much larger scale.  We designed a mouse-contingent multi-resolutional paradigm based on neurophysiological and psychophysical studies of peripheral vision, to simulate the natural viewing behavior of humans. The new paradigm allowed using a general-purpose mouse instead of an eye tracker to record viewing behaviors, thus enabling large-scale data collection. The paradigm was validated with controlled laboratory as well as large-scale online data. We report in this paper a proof-of-concept SALICON dataset of human "free-viewing" data on 10,000 images from the Microsoft COCO (MS COCO) dataset with rich contextual information. We evaluated the use of the collected data in the context of saliency prediction, and demonstrated them a good source as ground truth for the evaluation of saliency algorithms.
Weakly Supervised Object Detection With Convex Clustering
Authors: Hakan Bilen, Marco Pedersoli, Tinne Tuytelaars
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Weakly supervised object detection, is a challenging task, where the training procedure involves learning at the same time both, the model appearance and the object location in each image. The classical approach to solve this problem is to consider the location of the object of interest in each image as a latent variable and minimize the loss generated by such latent variable during learning.  However, as learning appearance and localization are two interconnected tasks, the optimization is not convex and the procedure can easily get stuck in a poor local minimum, the algorithm "misses" the object in some images. In this paper, we help the optimization to get close to the global minimum by enforcing a "soft" similarity between each possible location in the image and a reduced set of "exemplars", or clusters, learned with a convex formulation in the training images.  The help is effective because it comes from a different and smooth source of information that is not directly connected with the main task.  Results show that our method improves a strong baseline based on convolutional neural network features by more than 4 points without any additional features or extra computation at testing time but only adding a small increment of the training time due to the convex clustering.
Interleaved Text/Image Deep Mining on a Very Large-Scale Radiology Database
Authors: Hoo-Chang Shin, Le Lu, Lauren Kim, Ari Seff, Jianhua Yao, Ronald M. Summers
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Despite tremendous progress in computer vision, effective learning on very large-scale (>100K patients) medical image databases has been vastly hindered. We present an interleaved text/image deep learning system to extract and mine the semantic interactions of radiology images and reports from a national research hospital's picture archiving and communication system. Instead of using full 3D medical volumes, we focus on a collection of representative ~216K 2D key images/slices (selected by clinicians for diagnostic reference) with text-driven scalar and vector labels. Our system interleaves between unsupervised learning (e.g., latent Dirichlet allocation, recurrent neural net language models) on document- and sentence-level texts to generate semantic labels and supervised learning via deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to map from images to label spaces. Disease-related key words can be predicted for radiology images in a retrieval manner. We have demonstrated promising quantitative and qualitative results. The large-scale datasets of extracted key images and their categorization, embedded vector labels and sentence descriptions can be harnessed to alleviate the deep learning "data-hungry" obstacle in the medical domain.
Learning Semantic Relationships for Better Action Retrieval in Images
Authors: Vignesh Ramanathan, Congcong Li, Jia Deng, Wei Han, Zhen Li, Kunlong Gu, Yang Song, Samy Bengio, Charles Rosenberg, Li Fei-Fei
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Human actions capture a wide variety of interactions between people and objects. As a result, the set of possible actions is extremely large and it is difficult to obtain sufficient training examples for all actions. However, we could compensate for this sparsity in supervision by leveraging the rich semantic relationship between different actions. A single action is often composed of other smaller actions and is exclusive of certain others. We need a method which can reason about such relationships and extrapolate unobserved actions from known actions. Hence, we propose a novel neural network framework which jointly extracts the relationship between actions and uses them for training better action retrieval models. Our model incorporates linguistic, visual and logical consistency based cues to effectively identify these relationships. We train and test our model on a largescale image dataset of human actions. We show a significant improvement in mean AP compared to different baseline methods including the HEX-graph approach from Deng et al.
Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network for Skeleton Based Action Recognition
Authors: Yong Du, Wei Wang, Liang Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Human actions can be represented by the trajectories of skeleton joints. Traditional methods generally model the spatial structure and temporal dynamics of human skeleton with hand-crafted features and recognize human actions by well-designed classifiers. In this paper, considering that recurrent neural network (RNN) can model the long-term contextual information of temporal sequences well, we propose an end-to-end hierarchical RNN for skeleton based action recognition. Instead of taking the whole skeleton as the input, we divide the human skeleton into five parts according to human physical structure, and then separately feed them to five subnets. As the number of layers increases, the representations extracted by the subnets are hierarchically fused to be the inputs of higher layers. The final representations of the skeleton sequences are fed into a single-layer perceptron, and the temporally accumulated output of the perceptron is the final decision. We compare with five other deep RNN architectures derived from our model to verify the effectiveness of the proposed network, and also compare with several other methods on three publicly available datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance with high computational efficiency.
Depth and Surface Normal Estimation From Monocular Images Using Regression on Deep Features and Hierarchical CRFs
Authors: Bo Li, Chunhua Shen, Yuchao Dai, Anton van den Hengel, Mingyi He
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Predicting the depth (or surface normal) of a scene from single monocular color images is a challenging task. This paper tackles this challenging and essentially under-determined problem by regression on deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) features, combined with a post-processing refining step using conditional random fields(CRF). Our framework works at two levels, super-pixel level and pixel level. First, we design a DCNN model to learn the mapping from multi-scale image patches to depth or surface normal values at the super-pixel level. Second, the estimated super-pixel depth or surface normal is refined to the pixel level by exploiting various potentials on the depth or surface normal map, which includes a data term, a smoothness term among super-pixels and an auto-regression term characterizing the local structure of the estimation map. The inference problem can be efficiently solved because it admits a closed-form solution. Experiments on the Make3D and NYU Depth V2 datasets show competitive results compared with recent state-of-the-art methods.
Discriminative Shape From Shading in Uncalibrated Illumination
Authors: Stephan R. Richter, Stefan Roth
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Estimating surface normals from just a single image is challenging. To simplify the problem, previous work focused on special cases, including directional lighting, known reflectance maps, etc., making shape from shading impractical outside the lab. To cope with more realistic settings, shading cues need to be combined and generalized to natural illumination. This significantly increases the complexity of the approach, as well as the number of parameters that require tuning. Enabled by a new large-scale dataset for training and analysis, we address this with a discriminative learning approach to shape from shading, which uses regression forests for efficient pixel-independent prediction and fast learning. Von Mises-Fisher distributions in the leaves of each tree enable the estimation of surface normals. To account for their expected spatial regularity, we introduce spatial features, including texton and silhouette features. The proposed silhouette features are computed from the occluding contours of the surface and provide scale-invariant context. Aside from computational efficiency, they enable good generalization to unseen data and importantly allow for a robust estimation of the reflectance map, extending our approach to the uncalibrated setting. Experiments show that our discriminative approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on synthetic and real-world datasets.
Multi-Manifold Deep Metric Learning for Image Set Classification
Authors: Jiwen Lu, Gang Wang, Weihong Deng, Pierre Moulin, Jie Zhou
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a multi-manifold deep metric learning (MMDML) method for image set classification, which aims to recognize an object of interest from a set of image instances captured from varying viewpoints or under varying illuminations. Motivated by the fact that manifold can be effectively used to model the nonlinearity of samples in each image set and deep learning has demonstrated superb capability to model the nonlinearity of samples, we propose a MMDML method to learn multiple sets of nonlinear transformations, one set for each object class, to nonlinearly map multiple sets of image instances into a shared feature subspace, under which the manifold margin of different class is maximized, so that both discriminative and class-specific information can be exploited, simultaneously. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on five widely used datasets.
Target Identity-Aware Network Flow for Online Multiple Target Tracking
Authors: Afshin Dehghan, Yicong Tian, Philip H. S. Torr, Mubarak Shah
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper we show that multiple object tracking (MOT) can be formulated in a framework, where the detection and data-association are performed simultaneously. Our method allows us to overcome the confinements of data association based MOT approaches; where the performance is dependent on the object detection results provided at input level. At the core of our method lies structured learning which learns a model for each target and infers the best location of all targets simultaneously in a video clip. The inference of our structured learning is done through a new Target Identity-aware Network Flow (TINF), where each node in the network encodes the probability of each target identity belonging to that node. The proposed Lagrangian relaxation optimization finds the high quality solution to the network. During optimization a soft spatial constraint is enforced between the nodes of the graph which helps reducing the ambiguity caused by nearby targets with similar appearance in crowded scenarios. We show that automatically detecting and tracking targets in a single framework can help resolve the ambiguities due to frequent occlusion and heavy articulation of targets. Our experiments involve challenging yet distinct datasets and show that our method can achieve results better than the state-of-art.
Adaptive As-Natural-As-Possible Image Stitching
Authors: Chung-Ching Lin, Sharathchandra U. Pankanti, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Aleksandr Y. Aravkin
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: The goal of image stitching is to create natural-looking mosaics free of artifacts that may occur due to relative camera motion, illumination changes, and optical aberrations. In this paper, we propose a novel stitching method, that uses a smooth stitching field over the entire target image, while accounting for all the local transformation variations. Computing the warp is fully automated and uses a combination of local homography and global similarity transformations, both of which are estimated with respect to the target. We mitigate the perspective distortion in the non-overlapping regions by linearizing the homography and slowly changing it to the global similarity. The proposed method is easily generalized to multiple images, and allows one to automatically obtain the best perspective in the panorama. It is also more robust to parameter selection, and hence more automated compared with state-of-the-art methods. The benefits of this method are demonstrated using a variety of challenging cases.
EpicFlow: Edge-Preserving Interpolation of Correspondences for Optical Flow
Authors: Jerome Revaud, Philippe Weinzaepfel, Zaid Harchaoui, Cordelia Schmid
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose a novel approach for optical flow estimation, targeted at large displacements with significant occlusions. It consists of two steps: i) dense matching by edge-preserving interpolation from a sparse set of matches; ii) variational energy minimization initialized with the dense matches. The sparse-to-dense interpolation relies on an appropriate choice of the distance, namely an edge-aware geodesic distance. This distance is tailored to handle occlusions and motion boundaries - two common and difficult issues for optical flow computation. We also propose an approximation scheme for the geodesic distance to allow fast computation without loss of performance. Subsequent to the dense interpolation step, standard one-level variational energy minimization is carried out on the dense matches to obtain the final flow estimation. The proposed approach, called Edge-Preserving Interpolation of Correspondences (EpicFlow) is fast and robust to large displacements. It significantly outperforms the state of the art on MPI-Sintel and performs on par on Kitti and Middlebury.
Learning Coarse-to-Fine Sparselets for Efficient Object Detection and Scene Classification
Authors: Gong Cheng, Junwei Han, Lei Guo, Tianming Liu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Part model-based methods have been successfully applied to object detection and scene classification and have achieved state-of-the-art results. More recently the "sparselets" work [1-3] were introduced to serve as a universal set of shared basis learned from a large number of part detectors, resulting in notable speedup. Inspired by this framework, in this paper, we propose a novel scheme to train more effective sparselets with a coarse-to-fine framework. Specifically, we first train coarse sparselets to exploit the redundancy existing among part detectors by using an unsupervised single-hidden layer auto-encoder. Then, we simultaneously train fine sparselets and activation vectors using a supervised single-hidden-layer neural network, in which sparselets training and discriminative activation vectors learning are jointly embedded into a unified framework. In order to adequately explore the discriminative information hidden in the part detectors and to achieve sparsity, we propose to optimize a new discriminative objective function by imposing L0-norm sparsity constraint on the activation vectors. By using the proposed framework, promising results for multi-class object detection and scene classification are achieved on PASCAL VOC 2007, MIT Scene-67, and UC Merced Land Use datasets, compared with the existing sparselets baseline methods.
Continuous Visibility Feature
Authors: Guilin Liu, Yotam Gingold, Jyh-Ming Lien
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this work, we propose a new type of visibility measurement named Continuous Visibility Feature (CVF). We say that a point q on the mesh is continuously visible from another point p if there exists a geodesic path connecting p and q that is entirely visible by p. In order to efficiently estimate the continuous visibility for all the vertices in a model, we propose two approaches that use specific CVF properties to avoid exhaustive visibility tests. CVF is then measured as the area of the continuously visible region. With this stronger visibility measure, we show that CVF better encodes the surface and part information of mesh than the tradition line-of-sight based visibility. For example, we show that existing segmentation algorithms can generate better segmentation results using CVF and its variants than using other visibility-based shape descriptors, such as shape diameter function. Similar to visibility and other mesh surface features, continuous visibility would have many applications.
FlowWeb: Joint Image Set Alignment by Weaving Consistent, Pixel-Wise Correspondences
Authors: Tinghui Zhou, Yong Jae Lee, Stella X. Yu, Alyosha A. Efros
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Given a set of poorly aligned images of the same visual concept without any annotations, we propose an algorithm to jointly bring them into pixel-wise correspondence by estimating a FlowWeb representation of the image set. FlowWeb is a fully-connected correspondence flow graph with each node representing an image, and each edge representing the correspondence flow field between a pair of images, i.e. a vector field indicating how each pixel in one image can find a corresponding pixel in the other image. Correspondence flow is related to optical flow but allows for correspondences between visually dissimilar regions if there is evidence they correspond transitively on the graph. Our algorithm starts by initializing all edges of this complete graph with an off-the-shelf, pairwise flow method. We then iteratively update the graph to force it to be more self- consistent. Once the algorithm converges, dense, globally-consistent correspondences can be read off the graph. Our results suggest that FlowWeb improves alignment accuracy over previous pairwise as well as joint alignment methods.
Unsupervised Object Discovery and Localization in the Wild: Part-Based Matching With Bottom-Up Region Proposals
Authors: Minsu Cho, Suha Kwak, Cordelia Schmid, Jean Ponce
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: This paper addresses unsupervised discovery and localization of dominant objects from a noisy image collection with multiple object classes. The setting of this problem is fully unsupervised, without even image-level annotations or any assumption of a single dominant class.  This is far more general than typical colocalization, cosegmentation, or weakly-supervised localization tasks.  We tackle the discovery and localization problem using a part-based region matching approach: We use off-the-shelf region proposals to form a set of candidate bounding boxes for objects and object parts. These regions are efficiently matched across images using a probabilistic Hough transform that evaluates the confidence for each candidate correspondence considering both appearance and spatial consistency. Dominant objects are discovered and localized by comparing the scores of candidate regions and selecting those that stand out over other regions containing them. Extensive experimental evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the current state of the art in colocalization, and achieves robust object discovery in challenging mixed-class datasets.
Supervised Descriptor Learning for Multi-Output Regression
Authors: Xiantong Zhen, Zhijie Wang, Mengyang Yu, Shuo Li
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Descriptor learning has recently drawn increasing attention in computer vision, Existing algorithms are mainly developed for classification rather than for regression which however has recently emerged as a powerful tool to solve a broad range of problems, e.g., head pose estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised descriptor learning (SDL) algorithm to establish a discriminative and compact feature representation for multi-output regression. By formulating as generalized low-rank approximations of matrices with a supervised manifold regularization (SMR), the SDL removes irrelevant and redundant information from raw features by transforming into a low-dimensional space under the supervision of multivariate targets. The obtained discriminative while compact descriptor largely reduces the variability and ambiguity in multi-output regression, and therefore enables more accurate and efficient multivariate estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SDL algorithm on a representative multi-output regression task: head pose estimation using the benchmark Pointing'04 dataset. Experimental results show that the SDL can achieve high pose estimation accuracy and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by an error reduction up to 27.5%. The proposed SDL algorithm provides a general descriptor learning framework in a supervised way for multi-output regression which can largely boost the performance of existing multi-output regression tasks.
A Statistical Model of Riemannian Metric Variation for Deformable Shape Analysis
Authors: Andrea Gasparetto, Andrea Torsello
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: The analysis of deformable 3D shape is often cast in terms of the shape's intrinsic geometry due to its invariance to a wide range of non-rigid deformations. However,  object's plasticity in non-rigid transformation often results in transformations that are not completely isometric in the surface's geometry and whose mode of deviation from isometry is an identifiable characteristic of the shape and its deformation modes. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model of the variations of the intrinsic metric of deformable shapes, based on the spectral decomposition of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. To this end, we assume two independent models for the eigenvectors and  the eigenvalues of the graph-Laplacian of a 3d mesh which are learned in a supervised way from a set of shapes belonging to the same class. We show how this model can be efficiently learned given a set of 3D meshes, and evaluate the performance of the resulting generative model in shape classification and retrieval tasks. Comparison with state-of-the-art solutions for these problems confirm the validity of the approach.
Temporally Coherent Interpretations for Long Videos Using Pattern Theory
Authors: Fillipe Souza, Sudeep Sarkar, Anuj Srivastava, Jingyong Su
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Graph-theoretical methods have successfully provided semantic and structural interpretations of images and videos. A recent paper introduced a pattern-theoretic approach that allows construction of flexible graphs for representing interactions of actors with objects and inference is accomplished by an efficient annealing algorithm. Actions and objects are termed generators and their interactions are termed bonds; together they form high-probability configurations, or interpretations, of observed scenes. This work and other structural methods have generally been limited to analyzing short videos involving isolated actions. Here we provide an extension that uses additional temporal bonds across individual actions to enable semantic interpretations of longer videos. Longer temporal connections improve scene interpretations as they help discard (temporally) local solutions in favor of globally superior ones. Using this extension, we demonstrate improvements in understanding longer videos, compared to individual interpretations of non-overlapping time segments. We verified the success of our approach by generating interpretations for more than 700 video segments from the YouCook data set, with intricate videos that exhibit cluttered background, scenarios of occlusion,  viewpoint variations and changing conditions of illumination. Interpretations for long video segments were able to yield performance increases of about 70 and, in addition, proved to be more robust to different severe scenarios of classification errors.
Line-Sweep: Cross-Ratio For Wide-Baseline Matching and 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Srikumar Ramalingam, Michel Antunes, Dan Snow, Gim Hee Lee, Sudeep Pillai
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose a simple and useful idea based on cross-ratio constraint for wide-baseline matching and 3D reconstruction. Most existing methods exploit feature points and planes from images. Lines have always been considered notorious for both matching and reconstruction due to the lack of good line descriptors. We propose a method to generate and match new points using virtual lines constructed using pairs of keypoints, which are obtained using standard feature point detectors. We use cross-ratio constraints to obtain an initial set of new point matches, which are subsequently used to obtain line correspondences. We develop a method that works for both calibrated and uncalibrated camera configurations. We show compelling line-matching and large-scale 3D reconstruction.
Simplified Mirror-Based Camera Pose Computation via Rotation Averaging
Authors: Gucan Long, Laurent Kneip, Xin Li, Xiaohu Zhang, Qifeng Yu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: We propose a novel approach to compute the camera pose with respect to a reference object given only mirrored views. The latter originate from a planar mirror at different unknown poses. This problem is highly relevant in several extrinsic camera calibration scenarios, where the camera cannot see the reference object directly. In contrast to numerous existing methods, our approach does not employ the fixed axis rotation constraint, but represents a more elegant formulation as a rotation averaging problem. Our theoretical contribution extends the applicability of rotation averaging to a more general case, and enables mirror-based pose estimation in closed-form under the chordal L2-metric, or in an outlier-robust way by employing iterative L1-norm averaging. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach on both synthetic and real data, and show how the method can be applied to calibrate the non-overlapping pair of cameras of a common smart phone.
On the Relationship Between Visual Attributes and Convolutional Networks
Authors: Victor Escorcia, Juan Carlos Niebles, Bernard Ghanem
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: One of the cornerstone  principles of deep models is their abstraction capacity, i.e. their ability to learn abstract concepts from `simpler' ones. Through extensive experiments, we characterize the nature of the relationship between abstract concepts (specifically objects in images) learned by popular and high performing convolutional networks (conv-nets) and established mid-level representations used in computer vision (specifically semantic visual attributes). We focus on attributes due to their impact on several applications, such as object description, retrieval and mining, and active (and zero-shot) learning. Among the findings we  uncover, we show empirical evidence of the existence of Attribute Centric Nodes (ACNs) within a conv-net, which is trained to recognize objects (not attributes) in images. These special conv-net nodes (1) collectively encode information pertinent to visual attribute representation and discrimination, (2) are unevenly and sparsely distribution across all layers of the conv-net, and (3) play an important role in conv-net based object recognition.
Saliency Detection by Multi-Context Deep Learning
Authors: Rui Zhao, Wanli Ouyang, Hongsheng Li, Xiaogang Wang
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Low-level saliency cues or priors do not produce good enough saliency detection results especially when the salient object presents in a low-contrast background with confusing visual appearance. This issue raises a serious problem for conventional approaches. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a multi-context deep learning framework for salient object detection. We employ deep Convolutional Neural Networks to model saliency of objects in images. Global context and local context are both taken into account, and are jointly modeled in a unified multi-context deep learning framework.   To provide a better initialization for training the deep neural networks, we investigate different pre-training strategies, and a task-specific pre-training scheme is designed to make the multi-context modeling suited for saliency detection. Furthermore, recently proposed contemporary deep models in the ImageNet Image Classification Challenge are tested, and their effectiveness in saliency detection are investigated. Our approach is extensively evaluated on five public datasets, and experimental results show significant and consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
DeepShape: Deep Learned Shape Descriptor for 3D Shape Matching and Retrieval
Authors: Jin Xie, Yi Fang, Fan Zhu, Edward Wong
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Complex geometric structural variations of 3D models usually pose great challenges in 3D shape matching and retrieval. In this paper, we propose a high-level shape feature learning scheme to extract deformation-insensitive feature via a novel discriminative deep auto-encoder. First, we developed a multiscale shape distribution to concisely describe the entire shape of a 3D object. Then, by imposing the Fisher discrimination criterion on the neurons in the hidden layer, we developed a novel discriminative deep auto-encoder for shape feature learning. Finally, the neurons in hidden layers from multiple discriminative auto-encoders are concatenated to form a shape descriptor for 3D shape matching and retrieval. The proposed method is evaluated on the representative datasets with large geometric variations, i.e., Mcgill, SHREC'10 ShapeGoogle datasets. Experimental results on the benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the applications of 3D shape matching and retrieval.
Bayesian Adaptive Matrix Factorization With Automatic Model Selection
Authors: Peixian Chen, Naiyan Wang, Nevin L. Zhang, Dit-Yan Yeung
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Low-rank matrix factorization has long been recognized as a fundamental problem in many computer vision applications. Nevertheless, the reliability of existing matrix factorization methods is often hard to guarantee due to challenges brought by such model selection issues as selecting the noise model and determining the model capacity. We address these two issues simultaneously in this paper by proposing a robust non-parametric Bayesian adaptive matrix factorization (AMF) model. AMF proposes a new noise model built on the Dirichlet process Gaussian mixture model (DP-GMM) by taking advantage of its high flexibility on component number selection and capability of fitting a wide range of unknown noise. AMF also imposes an automatic relevance determination (ARD) prior on the low-rank factor matrices so that the rank can be determined automatically without the need for enforcing any hard constraint. An efficient variational method is then devised for model inference. We compare AMF with state-of-the-art matrix factorization methods based on data sets ranging from synthetic data to real-world application data. From the results, AMF consistently achieves better or comparable performance.
Joint Action Recognition and Pose Estimation From Video
Authors: Bruce Xiaohan Nie, Caiming Xiong, Song-Chun Zhu
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: Action recognition and pose estimation from video are closely related tasks for understanding human motion, most methods, however, learn separate models and combine them sequentially. In this paper, we propose a framework to integrate training and testing of the two tasks. A spatial- temporal And-Or graph model is introduced to represent action at three scales. Specifically the action is decomposed into poses which are further divided to mid-level ST-parts and then parts. The hierarchical structure of our model captures the geometric and appearance variations of pose at each frame and lateral connections between ST-parts at adjacent frames capture the action-specific motion information. The model parameters for three scales are learned discriminatively, and action labels and poses are efficiently inferred by dynamic programming. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-art accuracy in action recognition while also improving pose estimation.
Fast Action Proposals for Human Action Detection and Search
Authors: Gang Yu, Junsong Yuan
Published in: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2015 (Main Conference Track), 2015

Abstract: In this paper we target at generating generic action proposals in unconstrained videos. Each action proposal corresponds to a temporal series of spatial bounding boxes, i.e., a spatio-temporal video tube, which has a good potential to locate one human action. Assuming each action is performed by a human with meaningful motion, both appearance and motion cues are utilized to measure the actionness of the video tubes. After picking those spatiotemporal paths of high actionness scores, our action proposal generation is formulated as a maximum set coverage problem, where greedy search is performed to select a set of action proposals that can maximize the overall actionness score. Compared with existing action proposal approaches, our action proposals do not rely on video segmentation and can be generated in nearly real-time. Experimental results on two challenging datasets, MSRII and UCF 101, validate the superior performance of our action proposals as well as competitive results on action detection and search.