pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Online Robust Dictionary Learning
Authors: Cewu Lu, Jiaping Shi, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Dictionary Learning

Online dictionary learning is particularly useful for processing large-scale and dynamic data in computer vision. It, however, faces the major difficulty to incorporate robust functions, rather than the square data fitting term, to handle outliers in training data. In this paper, we propose a new online framework enabling the use of ersparse data fitting term in robust dictionary learning, notably enhancing the usability and practicality of this important technique. Extensive experiments have been carried out to validate our new framework.
Learning the Change for Automatic Image Cropping
Authors: Jianzhou Yan, Stephen Lin, Sing Bing Kang, Xiaoou Tang
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Image Cropping

Image cropping is a common operation used to improve the visual quality of photographs. In this paper, we present an automatic cropping technique that accounts for the two primary considerations of people when they crop: removal of distracting content, and enhancement of overall composition. Our approach utilizes a large training set consisting of photos before and after cropping by expert photographers to learn how to evaluate these two factors in a crop. In contrast to the many methods that exist for general assessment of image quality, ours specifically examines differences between the original and cropped photo in solving for the crop parameters. To this end, several novel image features are proposed to model the changes in image content and composition when a crop is applied. Our experiments demonstrate improvements of our method over recent cropping algorithms on a broad range of images.
Multi-resolution Shape Analysis via Non-Euclidean Wavelets: Applications to Mesh Segmentation and Surface Alignment Problems
Authors: Won Hwa Kim, Moo. K. Chung, Vikas Singh
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

The analysis of 3-D shape meshes is a fundamental problem in computer vision, graphics, and medical imaging. Frequently, the needs of the application require that our analysis take a multi-resolution view of the shape's local and global topology, and that the solution is consistent across multiple scales. Unfortunately, the preferred mathematical construct which offers this behavior in classical image/signal processing, Wavelets, is no longer applicable in this general setting (data with non-uniform topology). In particular, the traditional definition does not allow writing out an expansion for graphs that do not correspond to the uniformly sampled lattice (e.g., images). In this paper, we adapt recent results in harmonic analysis, to derive NonEuclidean Wavelets based algorithms for a range of shape analysis problems in vision and medical imaging. We show how descriptors derived from the dual domain representation offer native multi-resolution behavior for characterizing local/global topology around vertices. With only minor modifications, the framework yields a method for extracting interest/key points from shapes, a surprisingly simple algorithm for 3-D shape segmentation (competitive with state of the art), and a method for surface alignment (without landmarks). We give an extensive set of comparison results on a large shape segmentation benchmark and derive a uniqueness theorem for the surface alignment problem.
Stochastic Deconvolution
Authors: James Gregson, Felix Heide, Matthias B. Hullin, Mushfiqur Rouf, Wolfgang Heidrich
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

We present a novel stochastic framework for non-blind deconvolution based on point samples obtained from random walks. Unlike previous methods that must be tailored to specific regularization strategies, the new Stochastic Deconvolution method allows arbitrary priors, including nonconvex and data-dependent regularizers, to be introduced and tested with little effort. Stochastic Deconvolution is straightforward to implement, produces state-of-the-art results and directly leads to a natural boundary condition for image boundaries and saturated pixels.
Nonparametric Scene Parsing with Adaptive Feature Relevance and Semantic Context
Authors: Gautam Singh, Jana Kosecka
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Retrieval, Scene Parsing, Semantic Parsing

This paper presents a nonparametric approach to semantic parsing using small patches and simple gradient, color and location features. We learn the relevance of individual feature channels at test time using a locally adaptive distance metric. To further improve the accuracy of the nonparametric approach, we examine the importance of the retrieval set used to compute the nearest neighbours using a novel semantic descriptor to retrieve better candidates. The approach is validated by experiments on several datasets used for semantic parsing demonstrating the superiority of the method compared to the state of art approaches.
Social Role Discovery in Human Events
Authors: Vignesh Ramanathan, Bangpeng Yao, Li Fei-Fei
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Variational Inference

We deal with the problem of recognizing social roles played by people in an event. Social roles are governed by human interactions, and form a fundamental component of human event description. We focus on a weakly supervised setting, where we are provided different videos belonging to an event class, without training role labels. Since social roles are described by the interaction between people in an event, we propose a Conditional Random Field to model the inter-role interactions, along with person specific social descriptors. We develop tractable variational inference to simultaneously infer model weights, as well as role assignment to all people in the videos. We also present a novel YouTube social roles dataset with ground truth role annotations, and introduce annotations on a subset of videos from the TRECVID-MED11 [1] event kits for evaluation purposes. The performance of the model is compared against different baseline methods on these datasets.
Learning to Estimate and Remove Non-uniform Image Blur
Authors: Florent Couzinie-Devy, Jian Sun, Karteek Alahari, Jean Ponce
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Deblurring

This paper addresses the problem of restoring images subjected to unknown and spatially varying blur caused by defocus or linear (say, horizontal) motion. The estimation of the global (non-uniform) image blur is cast as a multilabel energy minimization problem. The energy is the sum of unary terms corresponding to learned local blur estimators, and binary ones corresponding to blur smoothness. Its global minimum is found using Ishikawa's method by exploiting the natural order of discretized blur values for linear motions and defocus. Once the blur has been estimated, the image is restored using a robust (non-uniform) deblurring algorithm based on sparse regularization with global image statistics. The proposed algorithm outputs both a segmentation of the image into uniform-blur layers and an estimate of the corresponding sharp image. We present qualitative results on real images, and use synthetic data to quantitatively compare our approach to the publicly available implementation of Chakrabarti et al. [5].
Scene Parsing by Integrating Function, Geometry and Appearance Models
Authors: Yibiao Zhao, Song-Chun Zhu
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Object, Object Recognition, Scene Parsing

Indoor functional objects exhibit large view and appearance variations, thus are difficult to be recognized by the traditional appearance-based classification paradigm. In this paper, we present an algorithm to parse indoor images based on two observations: i) The functionality is the most essential property to define an indoor object, e.g. "a chair to sit on"; ii) The geometry (3D shape) of an object is designed to serve its function. We formulate the nature of the object function into a stochastic grammar model. This model characterizes a joint distribution over the function-geometryappearance (FGA) hierarchy. The hierarchical structure includes a scene category, functional groups, functional objects, functional parts and 3D geometric shapes. We use a simulated annealing MCMC algorithm to find the maximum a posteriori (MAP) solution, i.e. a parse tree. We design four data-driven steps to accelerate the search in the FGA space: i) group the line segments into 3D primitive shapes, ii) assign functional labels to these 3D primitive shapes, iii) fill in missing objects/parts according to the functional labels, and iv) synthesize 2D segmentation maps and verify the current parse tree by the Metropolis-Hastings acceptance probability. The experimental results on several challenging indoor datasets demonstrate the proposed approach not only significantly widens the scope of indoor scene parsing algorithm from the segmentation and the 3D recovery to the functional object recognition, but also yields improved overall performance.
Efficient Detector Adaptation for Object Detection in a Video
Authors: Pramod Sharma, Ram Nevatia
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Human Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In this work, we present a novel and efficient detector adaptation method which improves the performance of an offline trained classifier (baseline classifier) by adapting it to new test datasets. We address two critical aspects of adaptation methods: generalizability and computational efficiency. We propose an adaptation method, which can be applied to various baseline classifiers and is computationally efficient also. For a given test video, we collect online samples in an unsupervised manner and train a random fern adaptive classifier . The adaptive classifier improves precision of the baseline classifier by validating the obtained detection responses from baseline classifier as correct detections or false alarms. Experiments demonstrate generalizability, computational efficiency and effectiveness of our method, as we compare our method with state of the art approaches for the problem of human detection and show good performance with high computational efficiency on two different baseline classifiers.
Evaluation of Color STIPs for Human Action Recognition
Authors: Ivo Everts, Jan C. van Gemert, Theo Gevers
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

This paper is concerned with recognizing realistic human actions in videos based on spatio-temporal interest points (STIPs). Existing STIP-based action recognition approaches operate on intensity representations of the image data. Because of this, these approaches are sensitive to disturbing photometric phenomena such as highlights and shadows. Moreover, valuable information is neglected by discarding chromaticity from the photometric representation. These issues are addressed by Color STIPs. Color STIPs are multi-channel reformulations of existing intensity-based STIP detectors and descriptors, for which we consider a number of chromatic representations derived from the opponent color space. This enhanced modeling of appearance improves the quality of subsequent STIP detection and description. Color STIPs are shown to substantially outperform their intensity-based counterparts on the challenging UCF sports, UCF11 and UCF50 action recognition benchmarks. Moreover, the results show that color STIPs are currently the single best low-level feature choice for STIP-based approaches to human action recognition.
A Global Approach for the Detection of Vanishing Points and Mutually Orthogonal Vanishing Directions
Authors: Michel Antunes, Joao P. Barreto
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

This article presents a new global approach for detecting vanishing points and groups of mutually orthogonal vanishing directions using lines detected in images of man-made environments. These two multi-model fitting problems are respectively cast as Uncapacited Facility Location (UFL) and Hierarchical Facility Location (HFL) instances that are efficiently solved using a message passing inference algorithm. We also propose new functions for measuring the consistency between an edge and a putative vanishing point, and for computing the vanishing point defined by a subset of edges. Extensive experiments in both synthetic and real images show that our algorithms outperform the state-ofthe-art methods while keeping computation tractable. In addition, we show for the first time results in simultaneously detecting multiple Manhattan-world configurations that can either share one vanishing direction (Atlanta world) or be completely independent.
Poselet Conditioned Pictorial Structures
Authors: Leonid Pishchulin, Mykhaylo Andriluka, Peter Gehler, Bernt Schiele
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Pose Estimation

In this paper we consider the challenging problem of articulated human pose estimation in still images. We observe that despite high variability of the body articulations, human motions and activities often simultaneously constrain the positions of multiple body parts. Modelling such higher order part dependencies seemingly comes at a cost of more expensive inference, which resulted in their limited use in state-of-the-art methods. In this paper we propose a model that incorporates higher order part dependencies while remaining efficient. We achieve this by defining a conditional model in which all body parts are connected a-priori, but which becomes a tractable tree-structured pictorial structures model once the image observations are available. In order to derive a set of conditioning variables we rely on the poselet-based features that have been shown to be effective for people detection but have so far found limited application for articulated human pose estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three publicly available pose estimation benchmarks improving or being on-par with state of the art in each case.
Enriching Texture Analysis with Semantic Data
Authors: Tim Matthews, Mark S. Nixon, Mahesan Niranjan
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: feature selection, Retrieval, Texture Classification, Zero-Shot Learning

We argue for the importance of explicit semantic modelling in human-centred texture analysis tasks such as retrieval, annotation, synthesis, and zero-shot learning. To this end, low-level attributes are selected and used to define a semantic space for texture. 319 texture classes varying in illumination and rotation are positioned within this semantic space using a pairwise relative comparison procedure. Low-level visual features used by existing texture descriptors are then assessed in terms of their correspondence to the semantic space. Textures with strong presence of attributes connoting randomness and complexity are shown to be poorly modelled by existing descriptors. In a retrieval experiment semantic descriptors are shown to outperform visual descriptors. Semantic modelling of texture is thus shown to provide considerable value in both feature selection and in analysis tasks.
Scene Text Recognition Using Part-Based Tree-Structured Character Detection
Authors: Cunzhao Shi, Chunheng Wang, Baihua Xiao, Yang Zhang, Song Gao, Zhong Zhang
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Scene Text Recognition

Scene text recognition has inspired great interests from the computer vision community in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel scene text recognition method using part-based tree-structured character detection. Different from conventional multi-scale sliding window character detection strategy, which does not make use of the character-specific structure information, we use part-based tree-structure to model each type of character so as to detect and recognize the characters at the same time. While for word recognition, we build a Conditional Random Field model on the potential character locations to incorporate the detection scores, spatial constraints and linguistic knowledge into one framework. The final word recognition result is obtained by minimizing the cost function defined on the random field. Experimental results on a range of challenging public datasets (ICDAR 2003, ICDAR 2011, SVT) demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms stateof-the-art methods significantly both for character detection and word recognition.
MODEC: Multimodal Decomposable Models for Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Ben Sapp, Ben Taskar
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Pose Estimation

We propose a multimodal, decomposable model for articulated human pose estimation in monocular images. A typical approach to this problem is to use a linear structured model, which struggles to capture the wide range of appearance present in realistic, unconstrained images. In this paper, we instead propose a model of human pose that explicitly captures a variety of pose modes. Unlike other multimodal models, our approach includes both global and local pose cues and uses a convex objective and joint training for mode selection and pose estimation. We also employ a cascaded mode selection step which controls the trade-off between speed and accuracy, yielding a 5x speedup in inference and learning. Our model outperforms state-of-theart approaches across the accuracy-speed trade-off curve for several pose datasets. This includes our newly-collected dataset of people in movies, FLIC, which contains an order of magnitude more labeled data for training and testing than existing datasets. The new dataset and code are available online. 1
Multi-task Sparse Learning with Beta Process Prior for Action Recognition
Authors: Chunfeng Yuan, Weiming Hu, Guodong Tian, Shuang Yang, Haoran Wang
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Action Recognition, Sparse Learning, Temporal Action Localization

In this paper, we formulate human action recognition as a novel Multi-Task Sparse Learning(MTSL) framework which aims to construct a test sample with multiple features from as few bases as possible. Learning the sparse representation under each feature modality is considered as a single task in MTSL. Since the tasks are generated from multiple features associated with the same visual input, they are not independent but inter-related. We introduce a Beta process(BP) prior to the hierarchical MTSL model, which efficiently learns a compact dictionary and infers the sparse structure shared across all the tasks. The MTSL model enforces the robustness in coefficient estimation compared with performing each task independently. Besides, the sparseness is achieved via the Beta process formulation rather than the computationally expensive l 1 norm penalty. In terms of non-informative gamma hyper-priors, the sparsity level is totally decided by the data. Finally, the learning problem is solved by Gibbs sampling inference which estimates the full posterior on the model parameters. Experimental results on the KTH and UCF sports datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MTSL approach for action recognition.
Decoding, Calibration and Rectification for Lenselet-Based Plenoptic Cameras
Authors: Donald G. Dansereau, Oscar Pizarro, Stefan B. Williams
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

Plenoptic cameras are gaining attention for their unique light gathering and post-capture processing capabilities. We describe a decoding, calibration and rectification procedure for lenselet-based plenoptic cameras appropriate for a range of computer vision applications. We derive a novel physically based 4D intrinsic matrix relating each recorded pixel to its corresponding ray in 3D space. We further propose a radial distortion model and a practical objective function based on ray reprojection. Our 15-parameter camera model is of much lower dimensionality than camera array models, and more closely represents the physics of lenselet-based cameras. Results include calibration of a commercially available camera using three calibration grid sizes over five datasets. Typical RMS ray reprojection errors are 0.0628, 0.105 and 0.363 mm for 3.61, 7.22 and 35.1 mm calibration grids, respectively. Rectification examples include calibration targets and real-world imagery.
Hierarchical Video Representation with Trajectory Binary Partition Tree
Authors: Guillem Palou, Philippe Salembier
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

As early stage of video processing, we introduce an iterative trajectory merging algorithm that produces a regionbased and hierarchical representation of the video sequence, called the Trajectory Binary Partition Tree (BPT). From this representation, many analysis and graph cut techniques can be used to extract partitions or objects that are useful in the context of specific applications. In order to define trajectories and to create a precise merging algorithm, color and motion cues have to be used. Both types of informations are very useful to characterize objects but present strong differences of behavior in the spatial and the temporal dimensions. On the one hand, scenes and objects are rich in their spatial color distributions, but these distributions are rather stable over time. Object motion, on the other hand, presents simple structures and low spatial variability but may change from frame to frame. The proposed algorithm takes into account this key difference and relies on different models and associated metrics to deal with color and motion information. We show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing hierarchical video segmentation algorithms and provides more stable and precise regions.
Cloud Motion as a Calibration Cue
Authors: Nathan Jacobs, Mohammad T. Islam, Scott Workman
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

We propose cloud motion as a natural scene cue that enables geometric calibration of static outdoor cameras. This work introduces several new methods that use observations of an outdoor scene over days and weeks to estimate radial distortion, focal length and geo-orientation. Cloud-based cues provide strong constraints and are an important alternative to methods that require specific forms of static scene geometry or clear sky conditions. Our method makes simple assumptions about cloud motion and builds upon previous work on motion-based and line-based calibration. We show results on real scenes that highlight the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
FasT-Match: Fast Affine Template Matching
Authors: Simon Korman, Daniel Reichman, Gilad Tsur, Shai Avidan
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Template Matching

Fast-Match is a fast algorithm for approximate template matching under 2D affine transformations that minimizes the Sum-of-Absolute-Differences (SAD) error measure. There is a huge number of transformations to consider but we prove that they can be sampled using a density that depends on the smoothness of the image. For each potential transformation, we approximate the SAD error using a sublinear algorithm that randomly examines only a small number of pixels. We further accelerate the algorithm using a branch-and-bound scheme. As images are known to be piecewise smooth, the result is a practical affine template matching algorithm with approximation guarantees, that takes a few seconds to run on a standard machine. We perform several experiments on three different datasets, and report very good results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first template matching algorithm which is guaranteed to handle arbitrary 2D affine transformations.