pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Optimizing 1-Nearest Prototype Classifiers
Authors: Paul Wohlhart, Martin Kostinger, Michael Donoser, Peter M. Roth, Horst Bischof
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

The development of complex, powerful classifiers and their constant improvement have contributed much to the progress in many fields of computer vision. However, the trend towards large scale datasets revived the interest in simpler classifiers to reduce runtime. Simple nearest neighbor classifiers have several beneficial properties, such as low complexity and inherent multi-class handling, however, they have a runtime linear in the size of the database. Recent related work represents data samples by assigning them to a set of prototypes that partition the input feature space and afterwards applies linear classifiers on top of this representation to approximate decision boundaries locally linear. In this paper, we go a step beyond these approaches and purely focus on 1-nearest prototype classification, where we propose a novel algorithm for deriving optimal prototypes in a discriminative manner from the training samples. Our method is implicitly multi-class capable, parameter free, avoids noise overfitting and, since during testing only comparisons to the derived prototypes are required, highly efficient. Experiments demonstrate that we are able to outperform related locally linear methods, while even getting close to the results of more complex classifiers.
Efficient 3D Endfiring TRUS Prostate Segmentation with Globally Optimized Rotational Symmetry
Authors: Jing Yuan, Wu Qiu, Eranga Ukwatta, Martin Rajchl, Xue-Cheng Tai, Aaron Fenster
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, global-optimization

Segmenting 3D endfiring transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) prostate images efficiently and accurately is of utmost importance for the planning and guiding 3D TRUS guided prostate biopsy. Poor image quality and imaging artifacts of 3D TRUS images often introduce a challenging task in computation to directly extract the 3D prostate surface. In this work, we propose a novel global optimization approach to delineate 3D prostate boundaries using its rotational resliced images around a specified axis, which properly enforces the inherent rotational symmetry of prostate shapes to jointly adjust a series of 2D slicewise segmentations in the global 3D sense. We show that the introduced challenging combinatorial optimization problem can be solved globally and exactly by means of convex relaxation. In this regard, we propose a novel coupled continuous max-flow model, which not only provides a powerful mathematical tool to analyze the proposed optimization problem but also amounts to a new and efficient duality-based algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-art methods in terms of efficiency, accuracy, reliability and less user-interactions, and reduces the execution time by a factor of 100.
Robust Canonical Time Warping for the Alignment of Grossly Corrupted Sequences
Authors: Yannis Panagakis, Mihalis A. Nicolaou, Stefanos Zafeiriou, Maja Pantic
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Dynamic Time Warping

Temporal alignment of human behaviour from visual data is a very challenging problem due to a numerous reasons, including possible large temporal scale differences, inter/intra subject variability and, more importantly, due to the presence of gross errors and outliers. Gross errors are often in abundance due to incorrect localization and tracking, presence of partial occlusion etc. Furthermore, such errors rarely follow a Gaussian distribution, which is the de-facto assumption in machine learning methods. In this paper, building on recent advances on rank minimization and compressive sensing, a novel, robust to gross errors temporal alignment method is proposed. While previous approaches combine the dynamic time warping (DTW) with low-dimensional projections that maximally correlate two sequences, we aim to learn two underlying projection matrices (one for each sequence), which not only maximally correlate the sequences but, at the same time, efficiently remove the possible corruptions in any datum in the sequences. The projections are obtained by minimizing the weighted sum of nuclear and 1 norms, by solving a sequence of convex optimization problems, while the temporal alignment is found by applying the DTW in an alternating fashion. The superiority of the proposed method against the state-of-the-art time alignment methods, namely the canonical time warping and the generalized time warping, is indicated by the experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets.
The Generalized Laplacian Distance and Its Applications for Visual Matching
Authors: Elhanan Elboer, Michael Werman, Yacov Hel-Or
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Clustering, Template Matching, Tone Mapping

The graph Laplacian operator, which originated in spectral graph theory, is commonly used for learning applications such as spectral clustering and embedding. In this paper we explore the Laplacian distance, a distance function related to the graph Laplacian, and use it for visual search. We show that previous techniques such as Matching by Tone Mapping (MTM) are particular cases of the Laplacian distance. Generalizing the Laplacian distance results in distance measures which are tolerant to various visual distortions. A novel algorithm based on linear decomposition makes it possible to compute these generalized distances efficiently. The proposed approach is demonstrated for tone mapping invariant, outlier robust and multimodal template matching.
A Sentence Is Worth a Thousand Pixels
Authors: Sanja Fidler, Abhishek Sharma, Raquel Urtasun
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Re-Ranking, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Parsing, Semantic Segmentation, Sentence

We are interested in holistic scene understanding where images are accompanied with text in the form of complex sentential descriptions. We propose a holistic conditional random field model for semantic parsing which reasons jointly about which objects are present in the scene, their spatial extent as well as semantic segmentation, and employs text as well as image information as input. We automatically parse the sentences and extract objects and their relationships, and incorporate them into the model, both via potentials as well as by re-ranking candidate detections. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in the challenging UIUC sentences dataset and show segmentation improvements of 12.5% over the visual only model and detection improvements of 5% AP over deformable part-based models [8].
Deep Convolutional Network Cascade for Facial Point Detection
Authors: Yi Sun, Xiaogang Wang, Xiaoou Tang
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

We propose a new approach for estimation of the positions of facial keypoints with three-level carefully designed convolutional networks. At each level, the outputs of multiple networks are fused for robust and accurate estimation. Thanks to the deep structures of convolutional networks, global high-level features are extracted over the whole face region at the initialization stage, which help to locate high accuracy keypoints. There are two folds of advantage for this. First, the texture context information over the entire face is utilized to locate each keypoint. Second, since the networks are trained to predict all the keypoints simultaneously, the geometric constraints among keypoints are implicitly encoded. The method therefore can avoid local minimum caused by ambiguity and data corruption in difficult image samples due to occlusions, large pose variations, and extreme lightings. The networks at the following two levels are trained to locally refine initial predictions and their inputs are limited to small regions around the initial predictions. Several network structures critical for accurate and robust facial point detection are investigated. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms state-ofthe-art methods in both detection accuracy and reliability 1 .
Scalable Sparse Subspace Clustering
Authors: Xi Peng, Lei Zhang, Zhang Yi
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Clustering, Image Clustering, Motion Segmentation, Online Clustering

In this paper, we address two problems in Sparse Subspace Clustering algorithm (SSC), i.e., scalability issue and out-of-sample problem. SSC constructs a sparse similarity graph for spectral clustering by using sp-minimization based coefficients, has achieved state-of-the-art results for image clustering and motion segmentation. However, the time complexity of SSC is proportion to the cubic of problem size such that it is inefficient to apply SSC into large scale setting. Moreover, SSC does not handle with out-ofsample data that are not used to construct the similarity graph. For each new datum, SSC needs recalculating the cluster membership of the whole data set, which makes SSC is not competitive in fast online clustering. To address the problems, this paper proposes out-of-sample extension of SSC, named as Scalable Sparse Subspace Clustering (SSSC), which makes SSC feasible to cluster large scale data sets. The solution of SSSC adopts a "sampling, clustering, coding, and classifying" strategy. Extensive experimental results on several popular data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method comparing with the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Nonlinearly Constrained MRFs: Exploring the Intrinsic Dimensions of Higher-Order Cliques
Authors: Yun Zeng, Chaohui Wang, Stefano Soatto, Shing-Tung Yau
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper introduces an efficient approach to integrating non-local statistics into the higher-order Markov Random Fields (MRFs) framework. Motivated by the observation that many non-local statistics (e.g., shape priors, color distributions) can usually be represented by a small number of parameters, we reformulate the higher-order MRF model by introducing additional latent variables to represent the intrinsic dimensions of the higher-order cliques. The resulting new model, called NC-MRF, not only provides the flexibility in representing the configurations of higher-order cliques, but also automatically decomposes the energy function into less coupled terms, allowing us to design an efficient algorithmic framework for maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference. Based on this novel modeling/inference framework, we achieve state-of-the-art solutions to the challenging problems of class-specific image segmentation and template-based 3D facial expression tracking, which demonstrate the potential of our approach.
Seeking the Strongest Rigid Detector
Authors: Rodrigo Benenson, Markus Mathias, Tinne Tuytelaars, Luc van Gool
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: feature selection, object-detection, Object Detection

The current state of the art solutions for object detection describe each class by a set of models trained on discovered sub-classes (so called "components"), with each model itself composed of collections of interrelated parts (deformable models). These detectors build upon the now classic Histogram of Oriented Gradients+linear SVM combo. In this paper we revisit some of the core assumptions in HOG+SVM and show that by properly designing the feature pooling, feature selection, preprocessing, and training methods, it is possible to reach top quality, at least for pedestrian detections, using a single rigid component. We provide experiments for a large design space, that give insights into the design of classifiers, as well as relevant information for practitioners. Our best detector is fully feed-forward, has a single unified architecture, uses only histograms of oriented gradients and colour information in monocular static images, and improves over 23 other methods on the INRIA, ETH and Caltech-USA datasets, reducing the average miss-rate over HOG+SVM by more than 30%.
An Approach to Pose-Based Action Recognition
Authors: Chunyu Wang, Yizhou Wang, Alan L. Yuille
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Action Recognition, Action Recognition In Videos, Temporal Action Localization

We address action recognition in videos by modeling the spatial-temporal structures of human poses. We start by improving a state of the art method for estimating human joint locations from videos. More precisely, we obtain the K-best estimations output by the existing method and incorporate additional segmentation cues and temporal constraints to select the "best" one. Then we group the estimated joints into five body parts (e.g. the left arm) and apply data mining techniques to obtain a representation for the spatial-temporal structures of human actions. This representation captures the spatial configurations of body parts in one frame (by spatial-part-sets) as well as the body part movements(by temporal-part-sets) which are characteristic of human actions. It is interpretable, compact, and also robust to errors on joint estimations. Experimental results first show that our approach is able to localize body joints more accurately than existing methods. Next we show that it outperforms state of the art action recognizers on the UCF sport, the Keck Gesture and the MSR-Action3D datasets.
Pattern-Driven Colorization of 3D Surfaces
Authors: George Leifman, Ayellet Tal
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Colorization

Colorization refers to the process of adding color to black & white images or videos. This paper extends the term to handle surfaces in three dimensions. This is important for applications in which the colors of an object need to be restored and no relevant image exists for texturing it. We focus on surfaces with patterns and propose a novel algorithm for adding colors to these surfaces. The user needs only to scribble a few color strokes on one instance of each pattern, and the system proceeds to automatically colorize the whole surface. For this scheme to work, we address not only the problem of colorization, but also the problem of pattern detection on surfaces.
Dense Reconstruction Using 3D Object Shape Priors
Authors: Amaury Dame, Victor A. Prisacariu, Carl Y. Ren, Ian Reid
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Object

We propose a formulation of monocular SLAM which combines live dense reconstruction with shape priors-based 3D tracking and reconstruction. Current live dense SLAM approaches are limited to the reconstruction of visible surfaces. Moreover, most of them are based on the minimisation of a photo-consistency error, which usually makes them sensitive to specularities. In the 3D pose recovery literature, problems caused by imperfect and ambiguous image information have been dealt with by using prior shape knowledge. At the same time, the success of depth sensors has shown that combining joint image and depth information drastically increases the robustness of the classical monocular 3D tracking and 3D reconstruction approaches. In this work we link dense SLAM to 3D object pose and shape recovery. More specifically, we automatically augment our SLAM system with object specific identity, together with 6D pose and additional shape degrees of freedom for the object(s) of known class in the scene, combining image data and depth information for the pose and shape recovery. This leads to a system that allows for full scaled 3D reconstruction with the known object(s) segmented from the scene. The segmentation enhances the clarity, accuracy and completeness of the maps built by the dense SLAM system, while the dense 3D data aids the segmentation process, yielding faster and more reliable convergence than when using 2D image data alone.
Modeling Actions through State Changes
Authors: Alireza Fathi, James M. Rehg
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

In this paper we present a model of action based on the change in the state of the environment. Many actions involve similar dynamics and hand-object relationships, but differ in their purpose and meaning. The key to differentiating these actions is the ability to identify how they change the state of objects and materials in the environment. We propose a weakly supervised method for learning the object and material states that are necessary for recognizing daily actions. Once these state detectors are learned, we can apply them to input videos and pool their outputs to detect actions. We further demonstrate that our method can be used to segment discrete actions from a continuous video of an activity. Our results outperform state-of-the-art action recognition and activity segmentation results.
GRASP Recurring Patterns from a Single View
Authors: Jingchen Liu, Yanxi Liu
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

We propose a novel unsupervised method for discovering recurring patterns from a single view. A key contribution of our approach is the formulation and validation of a joint assignment optimization problem where multiple visual words and object instances of a potential recurring pattern are considered simultaneously. The optimization is achieved by a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) with moves specifically designed for fast convergence. We have quantified systematically the performance of our approach under stressed conditions of the input (missing features, geometric distortions). We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms state of the art methods for recurring pattern discovery on a diverse set of 400+ real world and synthesized test images.
Texture Enhanced Image Denoising via Gradient Histogram Preservation
Authors: Wangmeng Zuo, Lei Zhang, Chunwei Song, David Zhang
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Image denoising is a classical yet fundamental problem in low level vision, as well as an ideal test bed to evaluate various statistical image modeling methods. One of the most challenging problems in image denoising is how to preserve the fine scale texture structures while removing noise. Various natural image priors, such as gradient based prior, nonlocal self-similarity prior, and sparsity prior, have been extensively exploited for noise removal. The denoising algorithms based on these priors, however, tend to smooth the detailed image textures, degrading the image visual quality. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a texture enhanced image denoising (TEID) method by enforcing the gradient distribution of the denoised image to be close to the estimated gradient distribution of the original image. A novel gradient histogram preservation (GHP) algorithm is developed to enhance the texture structures while removing noise. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GHP based TEID can well preserve the texture features of the denoised images, making them look more natural.
Analyzing Semantic Segmentation Using Hybrid Human-Machine CRFs
Authors: Roozbeh Mottaghi, Sanja Fidler, Jian Yao, Raquel Urtasun, Devi Parikh
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Image Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Recognition, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recent trends in semantic image segmentation have pushed for holistic scene understanding models that jointly reason about various tasks such as object detection, scene recognition, shape analysis, contextual reasoning. In this work, we are interested in understanding the roles of these different tasks in aiding semantic segmentation. Towards this goal, we "plug-in" human subjects for each of the various components in a state-of-the-art conditional random field model (CRF) on the MSRC dataset. Comparisons among various hybrid human-machine CRFs give us indications of how much "head room" there is to improve segmentation by focusing research efforts on each of the tasks. One of the interesting findings from our slew of studies was that human classification of isolated super-pixels, while being worse than current machine classifiers, provides a significant boost in performance when plugged into the CRF! Fascinated by this finding, we conducted in depth analysis of the human generated potentials. This inspired a new machine potential which significantly improves state-of-the-art performance on the MRSC dataset.
Multi-source Multi-scale Counting in Extremely Dense Crowd Images
Authors: Haroon Idrees, Imran Saleemi, Cody Seibert, Mubarak Shah
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Human Detection

We propose to leverage multiple sources of information to compute an estimate of the number of individuals present in an extremely dense crowd visible in a single image. Due to problems including perspective, occlusion, clutter, and few pixels per person, counting by human detection in such images is almost impossible. Instead, our approach relies on multiple sources such as low confidence head detections, repetition of texture elements (using SIFT), and frequency-domain analysis to estimate counts, along with confidence associated with observing individuals, in an image region. Secondly, we employ a global consistency constraint on counts using Markov Random Field. This caters for disparity in counts in local neighborhoods and across scales. We tested our approach on a new dataset of fifty crowd images containing 64K annotated humans, with the head counts ranging from 94 to 4543. This is in stark contrast to datasets used for existing methods which contain not more than tens of individuals. We experimentally demonstrate the efficacy and reliability of the proposed approach by quantifying the counting performance.
Non-uniform Motion Deblurring for Bilayer Scenes
Authors: Chandramouli Paramanand, Ambasamudram N. Rajagopalan
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6
Tasks: Deblurring

We address the problem of estimating the latent image of a static bilayer scene (consisting of a foreground and a background at different depths) from motion blurred observations captured with a handheld camera. The camera motion is considered to be composed of in-plane rotations and translations. Since the blur at an image location depends both on camera motion and depth, deblurring becomes a difficult task. We initially propose a method to estimate the transformation spread function (TSF) corresponding to one of the depth layers. The estimated TSF (which reveals the camera motion during exposure) is used to segment the scene into the foreground and background layers and determine the relative depth value. The deblurred image of the scene is finally estimated within a regularization framework by accounting for blur variations due to camera motion as well as depth.
Specular Reflection Separation Using Dark Channel Prior
Authors: Hyeongwoo Kim, Hailin Jin, Sunil Hadap, In-So Kweon
Date: 2013-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2013 6

We present a novel method to separate specular reflection from a single image. Separating an image into diffuse and specular components is an ill-posed problem due to lack of observations. Existing methods rely on a specularfree image to detect and estimate specularity, which however may confuse diffuse pixels with the same hue but a different saturation value as specular pixels. Our method is based on a novel observation that for most natural images the dark channel can provide an approximate specular-free image. We also propose a maximum a posteriori formulation which robustly recovers the specular reflection and chromaticity despite of the hue-saturation ambiguity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on real and synthetic examples. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-theart methods in separating specular reflection.