CVPR 2017 论文列表

This paper describes a joint intensity metric learning method to improve the robustness of gait recognition with silhouette-based descriptors such as gait energy images. Because existing methods often use the difference of image intensities between a matching pair (e.g., the absolute difference of gait energies for the l_1-norm) to measure a dissimilarity, large intrasubject differences derived from covariate conditions (e.g., large gait energies caused by carried objects vs. small gait energies caused by the background), may wash out subtle intersubject differences (e.g., the difference of middle-level gait energies derived from motion differences). We therefore introduce a metric on joint intensity to mitigate the large intrasubject differences as well as leverage the subtle intersubject differences. More specifically, we formulate the joint intensity and spatial metric learning in a unified framework and alternately optimize it by linear or ranking support vector machines. Experiments using the OU-ISIR treadmill data set B with the largest clothing variation and large population data set with bag, b version containing carrying status in the wild demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We state a combinatorial optimization problem whose feasible solutions define both a decomposition and a node labeling of a given graph. This problem offers a common mathematical abstraction of seemingly unrelated computer vision tasks, including instance-separating semantic segmentation, articulated human body pose estimation and multiple object tracking. Conceptually, it generalizes the unconstrained integer quadratic program and the minimum cost lifted multicut problem, both of which are NP-hard. In order to find feasible solutions efficiently, we define two local search algorithms that converge monotonously to a local optimum, offering a feasible solution at any time. To demonstrate the effectiveness of these algorithms in tackling computer vision tasks, we apply them to instances of the problem that we construct from published data, using published algorithms. We report state-of-the-art application-specific accuracy in the three above-mentioned applications.

This paper presents a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method for cross-domain visual recognition. We propose a unified framework that reduces the shift between domains both statistically and geometrically, referred to as Joint Geometrical and Statistical Alignment (JGSA). Specifically, we learn two coupled projections that project the source domain and target domain data into low-dimensional subspaces where the geometrical shift and distribution shift are reduced simultaneously. The objective function can be solved efficiently in a closed form. Extensive experiments have verified that the proposed method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods on a synthetic dataset and three different real world cross-domain visual recognition tasks.

We propose a novel data-driven approach for automatically detecting and completing gaps in line drawings with a Convolutional Neural Network. In the case of existing inpainting approaches for natural images, masks indicating the missing regions are generally required as input. Here, we show that line drawings have enough structures that can be learned by the CNN to allow automatic detection and completion of the gaps without any such input. Thus, our method can find the gaps in line drawings and complete them without user interaction. Furthermore, the completion realistically conserves thickness and curvature of the line segments. All the necessary heuristics for such realistic line completion are learned naturally from a dataset of line drawings, where various patterns of line completion are generated on the fly as training pairs to improve the model generalization. We evaluate our method qualitatively on a diverse set of challenging line drawings and also provide quantitative results with a user study, where it significantly outperforms the state of the art.

We propose to jointly learn a Discriminative Bayesian dictionary along a linear classifier using coupled Beta-Bernoulli Processes. Our representation model uses separate base measures for the dictionary and the classifier, but associates them to the class-specific training data using the same Bernoulli distributions. The Bernoulli distributions control the frequency with which the factors (e.g. dictionary atoms) are used in data representations, and they are inferred while accounting for the class labels in our approach. To further encourage discrimination in the dictionary, our model uses separate (sets of) Bernoulli distributions to represent data from different classes. Our approach adaptively learns the association between the dictionary atoms and the class labels while tailoring the classifier to this relation with a joint inference over the dictionary and the classifier. Once a test sample is represented over the dictionary, its representation is accurately labelled by the classifier due to the strong coupling between the dictionary and the classifier. We derive the Gibbs Sampling equations for our joint representation model and test our approach for face, object, scene and action recognition to establish its effectiveness.

Existing person re-identification benchmarks and methods mainly focus on matching cropped pedestrian images between queries and candidates. However, it is different from real-world scenarios where the annotations of pedestrian bounding boxes are unavailable and the target person needs to be searched from a gallery of whole scene images. To close the gap, we propose a new deep learning framework for person search. Instead of breaking it down into two separate tasks---pedestrian detection and person re-identification, we jointly handle both aspects in a single convolutional neural network. An Online Instance Matching (OIM) loss function is proposed to train the network effectively, which is scalable to datasets with numerous identities. To validate our approach, we collect and annotate a large-scale benchmark dataset for person search. It contains 18,184 images, 8,432 identities, and 96,143 pedestrian bounding boxes. Experiments show that our framework outperforms other separate approaches, and the proposed OIM loss function converges much faster and better than the conventional Softmax loss.

In this paper, we establish a theoretical connection between the classical Lucas & Kanade (LK) algorithm and the emerging topic of Spatial Transformer Networks (STNs). STNs are of interest to the vision and learning communities due to their natural ability to combine alignment and classification within the same theoretical framework. Inspired by the Inverse Compositional (IC) variant of the LK algorithm, we present Inverse Compositional Spatial Transformer Networks (IC-STNs). We demonstrate that IC-STNs can achieve better performance than conventional STNs with less model capacity; in particular, we show superior performance in pure image alignment tasks as well as joint alignment/classification problems on real-world problems.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a fundamental method for estimating a linear subspace approximation to high-dimensional data. Many algorithms exist in literature to achieve a statistically robust version of PCA called RPCA. In this paper, we present a geometric framework for computing the principal linear subspaces in both situations that amounts to computing the intrinsic average on the space of all subspaces (the Grassmann manifold). Points on this manifold are defined as the subspaces spanned by K-tuples of observations. We show that the intrinsic Grassmann average of these subspaces coincide with the principal components of the observations when they are drawn from a Gaussian distribution. Similar results are also shown to hold for the RPCA. Further, we propose an efficient online algorithm to do subspace averaging which is of linear complexity in terms of number of samples and has a linear convergence rate. When the data has outliers, our proposed online robust subspace averaging algorithm shows significant performance (accuracy and computation time) gain over a recently published RPCA methods with publicly accessible code. We have demonstrated competitive performance of our proposed online subspace algorithm method on one synthetic and two real data sets. Experimental results depicting stability of our proposed method are also presented. Furthermore, on two real outlier corrupted datasets, we present comparison experiments showing lower reconstruction error using our online RPCA algorithm. In terms of reconstruction error and time required, both our algorithms outperform the competition.

We present a method for localizing facial keypoints on animals by transferring knowledge gained from human faces. Instead of directly finetuning a network trained to detect keypoints on human faces to animal faces (which is sub-optimal since human and animal faces can look quite different), we propose to first adapt the animal images to the pre-trained human detection network by correcting for the differences in animal and human face shape. We first find the nearest human neighbors for each animal image using an unsupervised shape matching method. We use these matches to train a thin plate spline warping network to warp each animal face to look more human-like. The warping network is then jointly finetuned with a pre-trained human facial keypoint detection network using an animal dataset. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on both horse and sheep facial keypoint detection, and significant improvement over simple finetuning, especially when training data is scarce. Additionally, we present a new dataset with 3717 images with horse face and facial keypoint annotations.

This paper develops a general framework for learning interpretable data representation via Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks over hierarchal graph structures. Instead of learning LSTM models over the pre-fixed structures, we propose to further learn the intermediate interpretable multi-level graph structures in a progressive and stochastic way from data during the LSTM network optimization. We thus call this model the structure-evolving LSTM. In particular, starting with an initial element-level graph representation where each node is a small data element, the structure-evolving LSTM gradually evolves the multi-level graph representations by stochastically merging the graph nodes with high compatibilities along the stacked LSTM layers. In each LSTM layer, we estimate the compatibility of two connected nodes from their corresponding LSTM gate outputs, which is used to generate a merging probability. The candidate graph structures are accordingly generated where the nodes are grouped into cliques with their merging probabilities. We then produce the new graph structure with a Metropolis-Hasting algorithm, which alleviates the risk of getting stuck in local optimums by stochastic sampling with an acceptance probability. Once a graph structure is accepted, a higher-level graph is then constructed by taking the partitioned cliques as its nodes. During the evolving process, representation becomes more abstracted in higher-levels where redundant information is filtered out, allowing more efficient propagation of long-range data dependencies. We evaluate the effectiveness of structure-evolving LSTM in the application of semantic object parsing and demonstrate its advantage over state-of-the-art LSTM models on standard benchmarks.

Sparse-to-dense interpolation for optical flow is a fundamental phase in the pipeline of most of the leading optical flow estimation algorithms. The current state-of-the-art method for interpolation, EpicFlow, is a local average method based on an edge aware geodesic distance. We propose a new data-driven sparse-to-dense interpolation algorithm based on a fully convolutional network. We draw inspiration from the filling-in process in the visual cortex and introduce lateral dependencies between neurons and multi-layer supervision into our learning process. We also show the importance of the image contour to the learning process. Our method is robust and outperforms EpicFlow on competitive optical flow benchmarks with several underlying matching algorithms. This leads to state-of-the-art performance on the Sintel and KITTI 2012 benchmarks.

This work addresses the task of instance-aware semantic segmentation. Our key motivation is to design a simple method with a new modelling-paradigm, which therefore has a different trade-off between advantages and disadvantages compared to known approaches. Our approach, we term InstanceCut, represents the problem by two output modalities: (i) an instance-agnostic semantic segmentation and (ii) all instance-boundaries. The former is computed from a standard convolutional neural network for semantic segmentation, and the latter is derived from a new instance-aware edge detection model. To reason globally about the optimal partitioning of an image into instances, we combine these two modalities into a novel MultiCut formulation. We evaluate our approach on the challenging CityScapes dataset. Despite the conceptual simplicity of our approach, we achieve the best result among all published methods, and perform particularly well for rare object classes.

Image saliency detection has recently witnessed rapid progress due to deep convolutional neural networks. However, none of the existing methods is able to identify object instances in the detected salient regions. In this paper, we present a salient instance segmentation method that produces a saliency mask with distinct object instance labels for an input image. Our method consists of three steps, estimating saliency map, detecting salient object contours and identifying salient object instances. For the first two steps, we propose a multiscale saliency refinement network, which generates high-quality salient region masks and salient object contours. Once integrated with multiscale combinatorial grouping and a MAP-based subset optimization framework, our method can generate very promising salient object instance segmentation results. To promote further research and evaluation of salient instance segmentation, we also construct a new database of 1000 images and their pixelwise salient instance annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method is capable of achieving state-of-the-art performance on all public benchmarks for salient region detection as well as on our new dataset for salient instance segmentation.

Effective image and sentence matching depends on how to well measure their global visual-semantic similarity. Based on the observation that such a global similarity arises from a complex aggregation of multiple local similarities between pairwise instances of image (objects) and sentence (words), we propose a selective multimodal Long Short-Term Memory network (sm-LSTM) for instance-aware image and sentence matching. The sm-LSTM includes a multimodal context-modulated attention scheme at each timestep that can selectively attend to a pair of instances of image and sentence, by predicting pairwise instance-aware saliency maps for image and sentence. For selected pairwise instances, their representations are obtained based on the predicted saliency maps, and then compared to measure their local similarity. By similarly measuring multiple local similarities within a few timesteps, the sm-LSTM sequentially aggregates them with hidden states to obtain a final matching score as the desired global similarity. Extensive experiments show that our model can well match image and sentence with complex content, and achieve the state-of-the-art results on two public benchmark datasets.

This paper presents an infinite variational autoencoder (VAE) whose capacity adapts to suit the input data. This is achieved using a mixture model where the mixing coefficients are modeled by a Dirichlet process, allowing us to integrate over the coefficients when performing inference. Critically, this then allows us to automatically vary the number of autoencoders in the mixture based on the data. Experiments show the flexibility of our method, particularly for semi-supervised learning, where only a small number of training samples are available.

Over the years, indoor scene parsing has attracted a growing interest in the computer vision community. Existing methods have typically focused on diverse subtasks of this challenging problem. In particular, while some of them aim at segmenting the image into regions, such as object or surface instances, others aim at inferring the semantic labels of given regions, or their support relationships. These different tasks are typically treated as separate ones. However, they bear strong connections: good regions should respect the semantic labels; support can only be defined for meaningful regions; support relationships strongly depend on semantics. In this paper, we therefore introduce an approach to jointly segment the instances and infer their semantic labels and support relationships from a single input image. By exploiting a hierarchical segmentation, we formulate our problem as that of jointly finding the regions in the hierarchy that correspond to instances and estimating their class labels and pairwise support relationships. We express this via a Markov Random Field, which allows us to further encode links between the different types of variables. Inference in this model can be done exactly via integer linear programming, and we learn its parameters in a structural SVM framework. Our experiments on NYUv2 demonstrate the benefits of reasoning jointly about all these subtasks of indoor scene parsing.

Novelty detection, which aims to determine whether a given data belongs to any category of training data or not, is considered to be an important and challenging problem in areas of Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning, etc. Recently, kernel null space method (KNDA) was reported to have state-of-the-art performance in novelty detection. However, KNDA is hard to scale up because of its high computational cost. With the ever-increasing size of data, accelerating the implementing speed of KNDA is desired and critical. Moreover, it becomes incapable when there exist successively injected data. To address these issues, we propose the Incremental Kernel Null Space based Discriminant Analysis (IKNDA) algorithm. The key idea is to extract new information brought by newly-added samples and integrate it with the existing model by an efficient updating scheme. Experiments conducted on two publicly-available datasets demonstrate that the proposed IKNDA yields comparable performance as the batch KNDA yet significantly reduces the computational complexity, and our IKNDA based novelty detection methods markedly outperform approaches using deep neural network (DNN) classifiers. This validates the superiority of our IKNDA against the state of the art in novelty detection for large-scale data.

Image captioning often requires a large set of training image-sentence pairs. In practice, however, acquiring sufficient training pairs is always expensive, making the recent captioning models limited in their ability to describe objects outside of training corpora (i.e., novel objects). In this paper, we present Long Short-Term Memory with Copying Mechanism (LSTM-C) --- a new architecture that incorporates copying into the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) plus Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) image captioning framework, for describing novel objects in captions. Specifically, freely available object recognition datasets are leveraged to develop classifiers for novel objects. Our LSTM-C then nicely integrates the standard word-by-word sentence generation by a decoder RNN with copying mechanism which may instead select words from novel objects at proper places in the output sentence. Extensive experiments are conducted on both MSCOCO image captioning and ImageNet datasets, demonstrating the ability of our proposed LSTM-C architecture to describe novel objects. Furthermore, superior results are reported when compared to state-of-the-art deep models.

Deep learning methods achieve great success recently on many computer vision problems. In spite of these practical successes, optimization of deep networks remains an active topic in deep learning research. In this work, we focus on investigation of the network solution properties that can potentially lead to good performance. Our research is inspired by theoretical and empirical results that use orthogonal matrices to initialize networks, but we are interested in investigating how orthogonal weight matrices perform when network training converges. To this end, we propose to constrain the solutions of weight matrices in the orthogonal feasible set during the whole process of network training, and achieve this by a simple yet effective method called Singular Value Bounding (SVB). In SVB, all singular values of each weight matrix are simply bounded in a narrow band around the value of 1. Based on the same motivation, we also propose Bounded Batch Normalization (BBN), which improves Batch Normalization by removing its potential risk of ill-conditioned layer transform. We present both theoretical and empirical results to justify our proposed methods. Experiments on benchmark image classification datasets show the efficacy of our proposed SVB and BBN. In particular, we achieve the state-of-the-art results of 3.06% error rate on CIFAR10 and 16.90% on CIFAR100, using off-the-shelf network architectures (Wide ResNets). Our preliminary results on ImageNet also show the promise in large-scale learning. We release the implementation code of our methods at www.aperture-lab.net/research/svb.