pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Story-Driven Summarization for Egocentric Video
Authors: Zheng Lu, Kristen Grauman
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Articles, Diversity, Video Summarization

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
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Face Recognition, Robust Face Recognition

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.
All About VLAD
Authors: Relja Arandjelovic, Andrew Zisserman
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: All, Retrieval

The objective of this paper is large scale object instance retrieval, given a query image. A starting point of such systems is feature detection and description, for example using SIFT. The focus of this paper, however, is towards very large scale retrieval where, due to storage requirements, very compact image descriptors are required and no information about the original SIFT descriptors can be accessed directly at run time. We start from VLAD, the state-of-the art compact descriptor introduced by J??gou et al. [8] for this purpose, and make three novel contributions: first, we show that a simple change to the normalization method significantly improves retrieval performance; second, we show that vocabulary adaptation can substantially alleviate problems caused when images are added to the dataset after initial vocabulary learning. These two methods set a new stateof-the-art over all benchmarks investigated here for both mid-dimensional (20k-D to 30k-D) and small (128-D) descriptors. Our third contribution is a multiple spatial VLAD representation, MultiVLAD, that allows the retrieval and localization of objects that only extend over a small part of an image (again without requiring use of the original image SIFT descriptors).
Graph-Based Discriminative Learning for Location Recognition
Authors: Song Cao, Noah Snavely
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Diversity

Recognizing the location of a query image by matching it to a database is an important problem in computer vision, and one for which the representation of the database is a key issue. We explore new ways for exploiting the structure of a database by representing it as a graph, and show how the rich information embedded in a graph can improve a bagof-words-based location recognition method. In particular, starting from a graph on a set of images based on visual connectivity, we propose a method for selecting a set of subgraphs and learning a local distance function for each using discriminative techniques. For a query image, each database image is ranked according to these local distance functions in order to place the image in the right part of the graph. In addition, we propose a probabilistic method for increasing the diversity of these ranked database images, again based on the structure of the image graph. We demonstrate that our methods improve performance over standard bag-of-words methods on several existing location recognition datasets.
Calibrating Photometric Stereo by Holistic Reflectance Symmetry Analysis
Authors: Zhe Wu, Ping Tan
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

Under unknown directional lighting, the uncalibrated Lambertian photometric stereo algorithm recovers the shape of a smooth surface up to the generalized bas-relief (GBR) ambiguity. We resolve this ambiguity from the halfvector symmetry, which is observed in many isotropic materials. Under this symmetry, a 2D BRDF slice with low-rank structure can be obtained from an image, if the surface normals and light directions are correctly recovered. In general, this structure is destroyed by the GBR ambiguity. As a result, we can resolve the ambiguity by restoring this structure. We develop a simple algorithm of auto-calibration from separable homogeneous specular reflection of real images. Compared with previous methods, this method takes a holistic approach to exploiting reflectance symmetry and produces superior results.
Relative Hidden Markov Models for Evaluating Motion Skill
Authors: Qiang Zhang, Baoxin Li
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Attribute

This paper is concerned with a novel problem: learning temporal models using only relative information. Such a problem arises naturally in many applications involving motion or video data. Our focus in this paper is on videobased surgical training, in which a key task is to rate the performance of a trainee based on a video capturing his motion. Compared with the conventional method of relying on ratings from senior surgeons, an automatic approach to this problem is desirable for its potential lower cost, better objectiveness, and real-time availability. To this end, we propose a novel formulation termed Relative Hidden Markov Model and develop an algorithm for obtaining a solution under this model. The proposed method utilizes only a relative ranking (based on an attribute of interest) between pairs of the inputs, which is easier to obtain and often more consistent, especially for the chosen application domain. The proposed algorithm effectively learns a model from the training data so that the attribute under consideration is linked to the likelihood of the inputs under the learned model. Hence the model can be used to compare new sequences. Synthetic data is first used to systematically evaluate the model and the algorithm, and then we experiment with real data from a surgical training system. The experimental results suggest that the proposed approach provides a promising solution to the real-world problem of motion skill evaluation from video.
Classification of Tumor Histology via Morphometric Context
Authors: Hang Chang, Alexander Borowsky, Paul Spellman, Bahram Parvin
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Nuclear Segmentation

Image-based classification of tissue histology, in terms of different components (e.g., normal signature, categories of aberrant signatures), provides a series of indices for tumor composition. Subsequently, aggregation of these indices in each whole slide image (WSI) from a large cohort can provide predictive models of clinical outcome. However, the performance of the existing techniques is hindered as a result of large technical and biological variations that are always present in a large cohort. In this paper, we propose two algorithms for classification of tissue histology based on robust representations of morphometric context, which are built upon nuclear level morphometric features at various locations and scales within the spatial pyramid matching (SPM) framework. These methods have been evaluated on two distinct datasets of different tumor types collected from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), and the experimental results indicate that our methods are (i) extensible to different tumor types; (ii) robust in the presence of wide technical and biological variations; (iii) invariant to different nuclear segmentation strategies; and (iv) scalable with varying training sample size. In addition, our experiments suggest that enforcing sparsity, during the construction of morphometric context, further improves the performance of the system.
Five Shades of Grey for Fast and Reliable Camera Pose Estimation
Authors: Adam Herout, Istvan Szentandrasi, Michal Zacharias, Marketa Dubska, Rudolf Kajan
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Camera Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

We introduce here an improved design of the Uniform Marker Fields and an algorithm for their fast and reliable detection. Our concept of the marker field is designed so that it can be detected and recognized for camera pose estimation: in various lighting conditions, under a severe perspective, while heavily occluded, and under a strong motion blur. Our marker field detection harnesses the fact that the edges within the marker field meet at two vanishing points and that the projected planar grid of squares can be defined by a detectable mathematical formalism. The modules of the grid are greyscale and the locations within the marker field are defined by the edges between the modules. The assumption that the marker field is planar allows for a very cheap and reliable camera pose estimation in the captured scene. The detection rates and accuracy are slightly better compared to state-of-the-art marker-based solutions. At the same time, and more importantly, our detector of the marker field is several times faster and the reliable real-time detection can be thus achieved on mobile and low-power devices. We show three targeted applications where the planarity is assured and where the presented marker field design and detection algorithm provide a reliable and extremely fast solution.
Fast Patch-Based Denoising Using Approximated Patch Geodesic Paths
Authors: Xiaogang Chen, Sing Bing Kang, Jie Yang, Jingyi Yu
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Patch-based methods such as Non-Local Means (NLM) and BM3D have become the de facto gold standard for image denoising. The core of these approaches is to use similar patches within the image as cues for denoising. The operation usually requires expensive pair-wise patch comparisons. In this paper, we present a novel fast patch-based denoising technique based on Patch Geodesic Paths (PatchGP). PatchGPs treat image patches as nodes and patch differences as edge weights for computing the shortest (geodesic) paths. The path lengths can then be used as weights of the smoothing/denoising kernel. We first show that, for natural images, PatchGPs can be effectively approximated by minimum hop paths (MHPs) that generally correspond to Euclidean line paths connecting two patch nodes. To construct the denoising kernel, we further discretize the MHP search directions and use only patches along the search directions. Along each MHP, we apply a weight propagation scheme to robustly and efficiently compute the path distance. To handle noise at multiple scales, we conduct wavelet image decomposition and apply PatchGP scheme at each scale. Comprehensive experiments show that our approach achieves comparable quality as the state-of-the-art methods such as NLM and BM3D but is a few orders of magnitude faster.
Boosting Binary Keypoint Descriptors
Authors: Tomasz Trzcinski, Mario Christoudias, Pascal Fua, Vincent Lepetit
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

Binary keypoint descriptors provide an efficient alternative to their floating-point competitors as they enable faster processing while requiring less memory. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to learn an extremely compact binary descriptor we call BinBoost that is very robust to illumination and viewpoint changes. Each bit of our descriptor is computed with a boosted binary hash function, and we show how to efficiently optimize the different hash functions so that they complement each other, which is key to compactness and robustness. The hash functions rely on weak learners that are applied directly to the image patches, which frees us from any intermediate representation and lets us automatically learn the image gradient pooling configuration of the final descriptor. Our resulting descriptor significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art binary descriptors and performs similarly to the best floating-point descriptors at a fraction of the matching time and memory footprint.
Structured Face Hallucination
Authors: Chih-Yuan Yang, Sifei Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Face Hallucination, Hallucination, Patch Matching

The goal of face hallucination is to generate highresolution images with fidelity from low-resolution ones. In contrast to existing methods based on patch similarity or holistic constraints in the image space, we propose to exploit local image structures for face hallucination. Each face image is represented in terms of facial components, contours and smooth regions. The image structure is maintained via matching gradients in the reconstructed highresolution output. For facial components, we align input images to generate accurate exemplars and transfer the high-frequency details for preserving structural consistency. For contours, we learn statistical priors to generate salient structures in the high-resolution images. A patch matching method is utilized on the smooth regions where the image gradients are preserved. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm generates hallucinated face images with favorable quality and adaptability.
Adaptive Active Learning for Image Classification
Authors: Xin Li, Yuhong Guo
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Active Learning, Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Object Recognition, Scene Recognition

Recently active learning has attracted a lot of attention in computer vision field, as it is time and cost consuming to prepare a good set of labeled images for vision data analysis. Most existing active learning approaches employed in computer vision adopt most uncertainty measures as instance selection criteria. Although most uncertainty query selection strategies are very effective in many circumstances, they fail to take information in the large amount of unlabeled instances into account and are prone to querying outliers. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive active learning approach that combines an information density measure and a most uncertainty measure together to select critical instances to label for image classifications. Our experiments on two essential tasks of computer vision, object recognition and scene recognition, demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Improving an Object Detector and Extracting Regions Using Superpixels
Authors: Guang Shu, Afshin Dehghan, Mubarak Shah
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Object, Superpixels

We propose an approach to improve the detection performance of a generic detector when it is applied to a particular video. The performance of offline-trained objects detectors are usually degraded in unconstrained video environments due to variant illuminations, backgrounds and camera viewpoints. Moreover, most object detectors are trained using Haar-like features or gradient features but ignore video specific features like consistent color patterns. In our approach, we apply a Superpixel-based Bag-of-Words (BoW) model to iteratively refine the output of a generic detector. Compared to other related work, our method builds a video-specific detector using superpixels, hence it can handle the problem of appearance variation. Most importantly, using Conditional Random Field (CRF) along with our super pixel-based BoW model, we develop and algorithm to segment the object from the background . Therefore our method generates an output of the exact object regions instead of the bounding boxes generated by most detectors. In general, our method takes detection bounding boxes of a generic detector as input and generates the detection output with higher average precision and precise object regions. The experiments on four recent datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and significantly improves the state-of-art detector by 5-16% in average precision.
HDR Deghosting: How to Deal with Saturation?
Authors: Jun Hu, Orazio Gallo, Kari Pulli, Xiaobai Sun
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

We present a novel method for aligning images in an HDR (high-dynamic-range) image stack to produce a new exposure stack where all the images are aligned and appear as if they were taken simultaneously, even in the case of highly dynamic scenes. Our method produces plausible results even where the image used as a reference is either too dark or bright to allow for an accurate registration.
Transfer Sparse Coding for Robust Image Representation
Authors: Mingsheng Long, Guiguang Ding, Jian-Min Wang, Jiaguang Sun, Yuchen Guo, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

Sparse coding learns a set of basis functions such that each input signal can be well approximated by a linear combination of just a few of the bases. It has attracted increasing interest due to its state-of-the-art performance in BoW based image representation. However, when labeled and unlabeled images are sampled from different distributions, they may be quantized into different visual words of the codebook and encoded with different representations, which may severely degrade classification performance. In this paper, we propose a Transfer Sparse Coding (TSC) approach to construct robust sparse representations for classifying cross-distribution images accurately. Specifically, we aim to minimize the distribution divergence between the labeled and unlabeled images, and incorporate this criterion into the objective function of sparse coding to make the new representations robust to the distribution difference. Experiments show that TSC can significantly outperform state-ofthe-art methods on three types of computer vision datasets.
Semi-supervised Learning of Feature Hierarchies for Object Detection in a Video
Authors: Yang Yang, Guang Shu, Mubarak Shah
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

We propose a novel approach to boost the performance of generic object detectors on videos by learning videospecific features using a deep neural network. The insight behind our proposed approach is that an object appearing in different frames of a video clip should share similar features, which can be learned to build better detectors. Unlike many supervised detector adaptation or detection-bytracking methods, our method does not require any extra annotations or utilize temporal correspondence. We start with the high-confidence detections from a generic detector, then iteratively learn new video-specific features and refine the detection scores. In order to learn discriminative and compact features, we propose a new feature learning method using a deep neural network based on auto encoders. It differs from the existing unsupervised feature learning methods in two ways: first it optimizes both discriminative and generative properties of the features simultaneously, which gives our features better discriminative ability; second, our learned features are more compact, while the unsupervised feature learning methods usually learn a redundant set of over-complete features. Extensive experimental results on person and horse detection show that significant performance improvement can be achieved with our proposed method.
Computationally Efficient Regression on a Dependency Graph for Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Kota Hara, Rama Chellappa
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Pose Estimation, regression, Transductive Learning

We present a hierarchical method for human pose estimation from a single still image. In our approach, a dependency graph representing relationships between reference points such as body joints is constructed and the positions of these reference points are sequentially estimated by a successive application of multidimensional output regressions along the dependency paths, starting from the root node. Each regressor takes image features computed from an image patch centered on the current node's position estimated by the previous regressor and is specialized for estimating its child nodes' positions. The use of the dependency graph allows us to decompose a complex pose estimation problem into a set of local pose estimation problems that are less complex. We design a dependency graph for two commonly used human pose estimation datasets, the Buffy Stickmen dataset and the ETHZ PASCAL Stickmen dataset, and demonstrate that our method achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art results on both datasets with significantly lower computation time than existing methods. Furthermore, we propose an importance weighted boosted regression trees method for transductive learning settings and demonstrate the resulting improved performance for pose estimation tasks.
In Defense of Sparsity Based Face Recognition
Authors: Weihong Deng, Jiani Hu, Jun Guo
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Face Recognition, Sparse Representation-based Classification

The success of sparse representation based classification (SRC) has largely boosted the research of sparsity based face recognition in recent years. A prevailing view is that the sparsity based face recognition performs well only when the training images have been carefully controlled and the number of samples per class is sufficiently large. This paper challenges the prevailing view by proposing a "prototype plus variation" representation model for sparsity based face recognition. Based on the new model, a Superposed SRC (SSRC), in which the dictionary is assembled by the class centroids and the sample-to-centroid differences, leads to a substantial improvement on SRC. The experiments results on AR, FERET and FRGC databases validate that, if the proposed prototype plus variation representation model is applied, sparse coding plays a crucial role in face recognition, and performs well even when the dictionary bases are collected under uncontrolled conditions and only a single sample per classes is available.