pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sparse Subspace Denoising for Image Manifolds
Authors: Bo Wang, Zhuowen Tu
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Denoising, Dimensionality Reduction

With the increasing availability of high dimensional data and demand in sophisticated data analysis algorithms, manifold learning becomes a critical technique to perform dimensionality reduction, unraveling the intrinsic data structure. The real-world data however often come with noises and outliers; seldom, all the data live in a single linear subspace. Inspired by the recent advances in sparse subspace learning and diffusion-based approaches, we propose a new manifold denoising algorithm in which data neighborhoods are adaptively inferred via sparse subspace reconstruction; we then derive a new formulation to perform denoising to the original data. Experiments carried out on both toy and real applications demonstrate the effectiveness of our method; it is insensitive to parameter tuning and we show significant improvement over the competing algorithms.
Adding Unlabeled Samples to Categories by Learned Attributes
Authors: Jonghyun Choi, Mohammad Rastegari, Ali Farhadi, Larry S. Davis
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

We propose a method to expand the visual coverage of training sets that consist of a small number of labeled examples using learned attributes. Our optimization formulation discovers category specific attributes as well as the images that have high confidence in terms of the attributes. In addition, we propose a method to stably capture example-specific attributes for a small sized training set. Our method adds images to a category from a large unlabeled image pool, and leads to significant improvement in category recognition accuracy evaluated on a large-scale dataset, ImageNet.
Auxiliary Cuts for General Classes of Higher Order Functionals
Authors: Ismail Ben Ayed, Lena Gorelick, Yuri Boykov
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

Several recent studies demonstrated that higher order (non-linear) functionals can yield outstanding performances in the contexts of segmentation, co-segmentation and tracking. In general, higher order functionals result in difficult problems that are not amenable to standard optimizers, and most of the existing works investigated particular forms of such functionals. In this study, we derive general bounds for a broad class of higher order functionals. By introducing auxiliary variables and invoking the Jensen's inequality as well as some convexity arguments, we prove that these bounds are auxiliary functionals for various non-linear terms, which include but are not limited to several affinity measures on the distributions or moments of segment appearance and shape, as well as soft constraints on segment volume. From these general-form bounds, we state various non-linear problems as the optimization of auxiliary functionals by graph cuts. The proposed bound optimizers are derivative-free, and consistently yield very steep functional decreases, thereby converging within a few graph cuts. We report several experiments on color and medical data, along with quantitative comparisons to stateof-the-art methods. The results demonstrate competitive performances of the proposed algorithms in regard to accuracy and convergence speed, and confirm their potential in various vision and medical applications.
Template-Based Isometric Deformable 3D Reconstruction with Sampling-Based Focal Length Self-Calibration
Authors: Adrien Bartoli, Toby Collins
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

It has been shown that a surface deforming isometrically can be reconstructed from a single image and a template 3D shape. Methods from the literature solve this problem efficiently. However, they all assume that the camera model is calibrated, which drastically limits their applicability. We propose (i) a general variational framework that applies to (calibrated and uncalibrated) general camera models and (ii) self-calibrating 3D reconstruction algorithms for the weak-perspective and full-perspective camera models. In the former case, our algorithm returns the normal field and camera's scale factor. In the latter case, our algorithm returns the normal field, depth and camera's focal length. Our algorithms are the first to achieve deformable 3D reconstruction including camera self-calibration. They apply to much more general setups than existing methods. Experimental results on simulated and real data show that our algorithms give results with the same level of accuracy as existing methods (which use the true focal length) on perspective images, and correctly find the normal field on affine images for which the existing methods fail.
Binary Code Ranking with Weighted Hamming Distance
Authors: Lei Zhang, Yongdong Zhang, Jinhu Tang, Ke Lu, Qi Tian
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

Binary hashing has been widely used for efficient similarity search due to its query and storage efficiency. In most existing binary hashing methods, the high-dimensional data are embedded into Hamming space and the distance or similarity of two points are approximated by the Hamming distance between their binary codes. The Hamming distance calculation is efficient, however, in practice, there are often lots of results sharing the same Hamming distance to a query, which makes this distance measure ambiguous and poses a critical issue for similarity search where ranking is important. In this paper, we propose a weighted Hamming distance ranking algorithm (WhRank) to rank the binary codes of hashing methods. By assigning different bit-level weights to different hash bits, the returned binary codes are ranked at a finer-grained binary code level. We give an algorithm to learn the data-adaptive and query-sensitive weight for each hash bit. Evaluations on two large-scale image data sets demonstrate the efficacy of our weighted Hamming distance for binary code ranking.
Video Editing with Temporal, Spatial and Appearance Consistency
Authors: Xiaojie Guo, Xiaochun Cao, Xiaowu Chen, Yi Ma
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Image Matting, Video Editing

Given an area of interest in a video sequence, one may want to manipulate or edit the area, e.g. remove occlusions from or replace with an advertisement on it. Such a task involves three main challenges including temporal consistency, spatial pose, and visual realism. The proposed method effectively seeks an optimal solution to simultaneously deal with temporal alignment, pose rectification, as well as precise recovery of the occlusion. To make our method applicable to long video sequences, we propose a batch alignment method for automatically aligning and rectifying a small number of initial frames, and then show how to align the remaining frames incrementally to the aligned base images. From the error residual of the robust alignment process, we automatically construct a trimap of the region for each frame, which is used as the input to alpha matting methods to extract the occluding foreground. Experimental results on both simulated and real data demonstrate the accurate and robust performance of our method.
Unsupervised Joint Object Discovery and Segmentation in Internet Images
Authors: Michael Rubinstein, Armand Joulin, Johannes Kopf, Ce Liu
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Object, Object Discovery, Segmentation

We present a new unsupervised algorithm to discover and segment out common objects from large and diverse image collections. In contrast to previous co-segmentation methods, our algorithm performs well even in the presence of significant amounts of noise images (images not containing a common object), as typical for datasets collected from Internet search. The key insight to our algorithm is that common object patterns should be salient within each image, while being sparse with respect to smooth transformations across images. We propose to use dense correspondences between images to capture the sparsity and visual variability of the common object over the entire database, which enables us to ignore noise objects that may be salient within their own images but do not commonly occur in others. We performed extensive numerical evaluation on established co-segmentation datasets, as well as several new datasets generated using Internet search. Our approach is able to effectively segment out the common object for diverse object categories, while naturally identifying images where the common object is not present.
Learning SURF Cascade for Fast and Accurate Object Detection
Authors: Jianguo Li, Yimin Zhang
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

This paper presents a novel learning framework for training boosting cascade based object detector from large scale dataset. The framework is derived from the wellknown Viola-Jones (VJ) framework but distinguished by three key differences. First, the proposed framework adopts multi-dimensional SURF features instead of single dimensional Haar features to describe local patches. In this way, the number of used local patches can be reduced from hundreds of thousands to several hundreds. Second, it adopts logistic regression as weak classifier for each local patch instead of decision trees in the VJ framework. Third, we adopt AUC as a single criterion for the convergence test during cascade training rather than the two trade-off criteria (false-positive-rate and hit-rate) in the VJ framework. The benefit is that the false-positive-rate can be adaptive among different cascade stages, and thus yields much faster convergence speed of SURF cascade. Combining these points together, the proposed approach has three good properties. First, the boosting cascade can be trained very efficiently. Experiments show that the proposed approach can train object detectors from billions of negative samples within one hour even on personal computers. Second, the built detector is comparable to the stateof-the-art algorithm not only on the accuracy but also on the processing speed. Third, the built detector is small in model-size due to short cascade stages.
Efficient Computation of Shortest Path-Concavity for 3D Meshes
Authors: Henrik Zimmer, Marcel Campen, Leif Kobbelt
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Retrieval

In the context of shape segmentation and retrieval object-wide distributions of measures are needed to accurately evaluate and compare local regions of shapes. Lien et al. [16] proposed two point-wise concavity measures in the context of Approximate Convex Decompositions of polygons measuring the distance from a point to the polygon's convex hull: an accurate Shortest Path-Concavity (SPC) measure and a Straight Line-Concavity (SLC) approximation of the same. While both are practicable on 2D shapes, the exponential costs of SPC in 3D makes it inhibitively expensive for a generalization to meshes [14]. In this paper we propose an efficient and straight forward approximation of the Shortest Path-Concavity measure to 3D meshes. Our approximation is based on discretizing the space between mesh and convex hull, thereby reducing the continuous Shortest Path search to an efficiently solvable graph problem. Our approach works outof-the-box on complex mesh topologies and requires no complicated handling of genus. Besides presenting a rigorous evaluation of our method on a variety of input meshes, we also define an SPC-based Shape Descriptor and show its superior retrieval and runtime performance compared with the recently presented results on the Convexity Distribution by Lian et al. [12].
Learning Discriminative Illumination and Filters for Raw Material Classification with Optimal Projections of Bidirectional Texture Functions
Authors: Chao Liu, Geifei Yang, Jinwei Gu
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Material Classification

We present a computational imaging method for raw material classification using features of Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTF). Texture is an intrinsic feature for many materials, such as wood, fabric, and granite. At appropriate scales, even "uniform" materials will also exhibit texture features that can be helpful for recognition, such as paper, metal, and ceramic. To cope with the high-dimensionality of BTFs, in this paper, we proposed to learn discriminative illumination patterns and texture filters, with which we can directly measure optimal projections of BTFs for classification. We also studied the effects of texture rotation and scale variation for material classification. We built an LED-based multispectral dome, with which we have acquired a BTF database of a variety of materials and demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach for material classification.
Illumination Estimation Based on Bilayer Sparse Coding
Authors: Bing Li, Weihua Xiong, Weiming Hu, Houwen Peng
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Color Constancy

Computational color constancy is a very important topic in computer vision and has attracted many researchers' attention. Recently, lots of research has shown the effects of using high level visual content cues for improving illumination estimation. However, nearly all the existing methods are essentially combinational strategies in which image's content analysis is only used to guide the combination or selection from a variety of individual illumination estimation methods. In this paper, we propose a novel bilayer sparse coding model for illumination estimation that considers image similarity in terms of both low level color distribution and high level image scene content simultaneously. For the purpose, the image's scene content information is integrated with its color distribution to obtain optimal illumination estimation model. The experimental results on real-world image sets show that our algorithm is superior to some prevailing illumination estimation methods, even better than some combinational methods.
Leveraging Structure from Motion to Learn Discriminative Codebooks for Scalable Landmark Classification
Authors: Alessandro Bergamo, Sudipta N. Sinha, Lorenzo Torresani
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: General Classification

In this paper we propose a new technique for learning a discriminative codebook for local feature descriptors, specifically designed for scalable landmark classification. The key contribution lies in exploiting the knowledge of correspondences within sets of feature descriptors during codebook learning. Feature correspondences are obtained using structure from motion (SfM) computation on Internet photo collections which serve as the training data. Our codebook is defined by a random forest that is trained to map corresponding feature descriptors into identical codes. Unlike prior forest-based codebook learning methods, we utilize fine-grained descriptor labels and address the challenge of training a forest with an extremely large number of labels. Our codebook is used with various existing feature encoding schemes and also a variant we propose for importanceweighted aggregation of local features. We evaluate our approach on a public dataset of 25 landmarks and our new dataset of 620 landmarks (614K images). Our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art in landmark classification. Furthermore, our method is memory efficient and scalable.
Efficient 2D-to-3D Correspondence Filtering for Scalable 3D Object Recognition
Authors: Qiang Hao, Rui Cai, Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhang, Yanwei Pang, Feng Wu, Yong Rui
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: 3D Object Recognition, CPU, Object Recognition, Pose Estimation

3D model-based object recognition has been a noticeable research trend in recent years. Common methods find 2D-to-3D correspondences and make recognition decisions by pose estimation, whose efficiency usually suffers from noisy correspondences caused by the increasing number of target objects. To overcome this scalability bottleneck, we propose an efficient 2D-to-3D correspondence filtering approach, which combines a light-weight neighborhoodbased step with a finer-grained pairwise step to remove spurious correspondences based on 2D/3D geometric cues. On a dataset of 300 3D objects, our solution achieves ~10 times speed improvement over the baseline, with a comparable recognition accuracy. A parallel implementation on a quad-core CPU can run at ~3fps for 1280x720 images.
Weakly Supervised Learning for Attribute Localization in Outdoor Scenes
Authors: Shuo Wang, Jungseock Joo, Yizhou Wang, Song-Chun Zhu
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Attribute, Weakly-supervised Learning

In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised method for simultaneously learning scene parts and attributes from a collection of images associated with attributes in text, where the precise localization of the each attribute left unknown. Our method includes three aspects. (i) Compositional scene configuration. We learn the spatial layouts of the scene by Hierarchical Space Tiling (HST) representation, which can generate an excessive number of scene configurations through the hierarchical composition of a relatively small number of parts. (ii) Attribute association. The scene attributes contain nouns and adjectives corresponding to the objects and their appearance descriptions respectively. We assign the nouns to the nodes (parts) in HST using nonmaximum suppression of their correlation, then train an appearance model for each noun+adjective attribute pair. (iii) Joint inference and learning. For an image, we compute the most probable parse tree with the attributes as an instantiation of the HST by dynamic programming. Then update the HST and attribute association based on the inferred parse trees. We evaluate the proposed method by (i) showing the improvement of attribute recognition accuracy; and (ii) comparing the average precision of localizing attributes to the scene parts.
Jointly Aligning and Segmenting Multiple Web Photo Streams for the Inference of Collective Photo Storylines
Authors: Gunhee Kim, Eric P. Xing
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

With an explosion of popularity of online photo sharing, we can trivially collect a huge number of photo streams for any interesting topics such as scuba diving as an outdoor recreational activity class. Obviously, the retrieved photo streams are neither aligned nor calibrated since they are taken in different temporal, spatial, and personal perspectives. However, at the same time, they are likely to share common storylines that consist of sequences of events and activities frequently recurred within the topic. In this paper, as a first technical step to detect such collective storylines, we propose an approach to jointly aligning and segmenting uncalibrated multiple photo streams. The alignment task discovers the matched images between different photo streams, and the image segmentation task parses each image into multiple meaningful regions to facilitate the image understanding. We close a loop between the two tasks so that solving one task helps enhance the performance of the other in a mutually rewarding way. To this end, we design a scalable message-passing based optimization framework to jointly achieve both tasks for the whole input image set at once. With evaluation on the new Flickr dataset of 15 outdoor activities that consist of 1.5 millions of images of 13 thousands of photo streams, our empirical results show that the proposed algorithms are more successful than other candidate methods for both tasks.
Studying Relationships between Human Gaze, Description, and Computer Vision
Authors: Kiwon Yun, Yifan Peng, Dimitris Samaras, Gregory J. Zelinsky, Tamara L. Berg
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

We posit that user behavior during natural viewing of images contains an abundance of information about the content of images as well as information related to user intent and user defined content importance. In this paper, we conduct experiments to better understand the relationship between images, the eye movements people make while viewing images, and how people construct natural language to describe images. We explore these relationships in the context of two commonly used computer vision datasets. We then further relate human cues with outputs of current visual recognition systems and demonstrate prototype applications for gaze-enabled detection and annotation.
SLAM++: Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping at the Level of Objects
Authors: Renato F. Salas-Moreno, Richard A. Newcombe, Hauke Strasdat, Paul H. J. Kelly, Andrew J. Davison
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: 3D Object Recognition, Descriptive, Object, Object Recognition, Surface Reconstruction

We present the major advantages of a new 'object oriented' 3D SLAM paradigm, which takes full advantage in the loop of prior knowledge that many scenes consist of repeated, domain-specific objects and structures. As a hand-held depth camera browses a cluttered scene, realtime 3D object recognition and tracking provides 6DoF camera-object constraints which feed into an explicit graph of objects, continually refined by efficient pose-graph optimisation. This offers the descriptive and predictive power of SLAM systems which perform dense surface reconstruction, but with a huge representation compression. The object graph enables predictions for accurate ICP-based camera to model tracking at each live frame, and efficient active search for new objects in currently undescribed image regions. We demonstrate real-time incremental SLAM in large, cluttered environments, including loop closure, relocalisation and the detection of moved objects, and of course the generation of an object level scene description with the potential to enable interaction.
A Theory of Refractive Photo-Light-Path Triangulation
Authors: Visesh Chari, Peter Sturm
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

3D reconstruction of transparent refractive objects like a plastic bottle is challenging: they lack appearance related visual cues and merely reflect and refract light from the surrounding environment. Amongst several approaches to reconstruct such objects, the seminal work of Light-Path triangulation [17] is highly popular because of its general applicability and analysis of minimal scenarios. A lightpath is defined as the piece-wise linear path taken by a ray of light as it passes from source, through the object and into the camera. Transparent refractive objects not only affect the geometric configuration of light-paths but also their radiometric properties. In this paper, we describe a method that combines both geometric and radiometric information to do reconstruction. We show two major consequences of the addition of radiometric cues to the light-path setup. Firstly, we extend the case of scenarios in which reconstruction is plausible while reducing the minimal requirements for a unique reconstruction. This happens as a consequence of the fact that radiometric cues add an additional known variable to the already existing system of equations. Secondly, we present a simple algorithm for reconstruction, owing to the nature of the radiometric cue. We present several synthetic experiments to validate our theories, and show high quality reconstructions in challenging scenarios.