OPTIMOL: automatic Online Picture collecTion via Incremental MOdel Learning
A well-built dataset is a necessary starting point for advanced computer vision research. It plays a crucial role in evaluation and provides a continuous challenge to state-of-the-art algorithms. Dataset collection is, however, a tedious and time-consuming task. This paper presents a novel automatic dataset collecting and model learning approach that uses object recognition techniques in an incremental method. The goal of this work is to use the tremendous resources of the web to learn robust object category models in order to detect and search for objects in real-world cluttered scenes. It mimics the human learning process of iteratively accumulating model knowledge and image examples. We adapt a non-parametric graphical model and propose an incremental learning framework. Our algorithm is capable of automatically collecting much larger object category datasets for 22 randomly selected classes from the Caltech 101 dataset. Furthermore, we offer not only more images in each object category dataset, but also a robust object model and meaningful image annotation. Our experiments show that OPTIMOL is capable of collecting image datasets that are superior to Caltech 101 and LabelMe.

title: A multi-view probabilistic model for 3D object classes
abstract: We propose a novel probabilistic framework for learning visual models of 3D object categories by combining appearance information and geometric constraints. Objects are represented as a coherent ensemble of parts that are consistent under 3D viewpoint transformations. Each part is a collection of salient image features. A generative framework is used for learning a model that captures the relative position of parts within each of the discretized viewpoints. Contrary to most of the existing mixture of viewpoints models, our model establishes explicit correspondences of parts across different viewpoints of the object class. Given a new image, detection and classification are achieved by determining the position and viewpoint of the model that maximize recognition scores of the candidate objects. Our approach is among the first to propose a generative probabilistic framework for 3D object categorization. We test our algorithm on the detection task and the viewpoint classification task by using “car” category from both the Savarese et al. 2007 and PASCAL VOC 2006 datasets. We show promising results in both the detection and viewpoint classification tasks on these two challenging datasets.

title: Towards total scene understanding: Classification, annotation and segmentation in an automatic framework
abstract: Given an image, we propose a hierarchical generative model that classifies the overall scene, recognizes and segments each object component, as well as annotates the image with a list of tags. To our knowledge, this is the first model that performs all three tasks in one coherent framework. For instance, a scene of a `polo game' consists of several visual objects such as `human', `horse', `grass', etc. In addition, it can be further annotated with a list of more abstract (e.g. `dusk') or visually less salient (e.g. `saddle') tags. Our generative model jointly explains images through a visual model and a textual model. Visually relevant objects are represented by regions and patches, while visually irrelevant textual annotations are influenced directly by the overall scene class. We propose a fully automatic learning framework that is able to learn robust scene models from noisy Web data such as images and user tags from Flickr.com. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by automatically classifying, annotating and segmenting images from eight classes depicting sport scenes. In all three tasks, our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.

title: Extracting Moving People from Internet Videos
abstract: We propose a fully automatic framework to detect and extract arbitrary human motion volumes from real-world videos collected from YouTube. Our system is composed of two stages. A person detector is first applied to provide crude information about the possible locations of humans. Then a constrained clustering algorithm groups the detections and rejects false positives based on the appearance similarity and spatio-temporal coherence. In the second stage, we apply a top-down pictorial structure model to complete the extraction of the humans in arbitrary motion. During this procedure, a density propagation technique based on a mixture of Gaussians is employed to propagate temporal information in a principled way. This method reduces greatly the search space for the measurement in the inference stage. We demonstrate the initial success of this framework both quantitatively and qualitatively by using a number of YouTube videos.

title: Composite Pattern Query Expression over Medical Data Streams
abstract: ICU is a typical environment where data stream has been applied to real-life scenarios. Medical data streams share the characteristic of real-time, complex semantics as well as meaningful patterns. Since traditional query methods or pattern process are inherently unable to satisfy real time analysis on various medical data streams, we introduce a novel concept of composite pattern, generalize it to the SQL-like query expression, and propose a method to support ad hoc queries with complex semantic patterns. Our experiments show it is feasible and effective on medical data streams.