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Stego-images are often contaminated by interchannel noise or active noise attack when communicating on the Web. And it is challenging to restore embedded image from corrupted stego-image. This paper studies a kNN-bit approximation algorithm to remove noises in embedded image. The proposed algorithm distinguishes reliable bits from extracted bits, and estimates pixel values by keeping reliable bits unchanged and correcting unreliable bits. Specifically, the 8th (highest) unreliable bit of a pixel can be approximated with its nearest neighbor pixels. And then, if an unreliable bit locates at any one of the $5^{th}\sim 7^{th}$ 5 t h ∼ 7 t h bits of a pixel, it is adjusted with two nearest neighbors of the pixel, where the pixel is in-between these two nearest neighbors. Finally, for other unreliable bits, each one is approximated by the maximum and minimum possible values of nearest neighbors of its pixel. We conduct experiments for illustrating the efficiency, and demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can recover the embedded images with good visual quality from corrupted stego-images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing video summarization approaches mainly concentrate on the sequential or structural characteristic of video data. However, they do not pay enough attention to the video summarization task itself. In this article, we propose a meta learning method for performing task-driven video summarization, denoted by MetaL-TDVS, to explicitly explore the video summarization mechanism among summarizing processes on different videos. Particularly, MetaL-TDVS aims to excavate the latent mechanism for summarizing video by reformulating video summarization as a meta learning problem and promote the generalization ability of the trained model. MetaL-TDVS regards summarizing each video as a single task to make better use of the experience and knowledge learned from processes of summarizing other videos to summarize new ones. Furthermore, MetaL-TDVS updates models via a twofold backpropagation, which forces the model optimized on one video to obtain high accuracy on another video in every training step. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and better generalization ability of MetaL-TDVS against several state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congestion detection is an important aspect of vehicular management. However, most of the existing algorithms are insufficient for real applications. Traditional features are not discriminative which results in rather poor performance under complex scenarios. The deep features can better represent high-level information, but the training of deep network for regression is difficult. To promote the congestion detection, a robust hierarchical deep learning is proposed for the task. In this method, a deep network is designed for hierarchical semantic feature extraction. Different from traditional deep regression networks, which usually directly utilize mean squared error as loss function, a robust metric learning is employed to effectively train the network. Based on this, multiple networks are combined together to further improve the generalization ability. Extensive experiments are conducted and the proposed model is confirmed to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Segmentation of the prostate in magnetic resonance image has become more in need for its assistance to diagnosis and surgical planning of prostate carcinoma. Due to the natural variability of anatomical structures, statistical shape model has been widely applied in medical image segmentation. Robust and distinctive local features are critical for statistical shape model to achieve accurate segmentation results. The scale invariant feature transformation (SIFT) has been employed to capture the information of the local patch surrounding the boundary. However, when SIFT feature being used for segmentation, the scale and variance are not specified with the location of the point of interest. To deal with it, the discriminant analysis in machine learning is introduced to measure the distinctiveness of the learned SIFT features for each landmark directly and to make the scale and variance adaptive to the locations. As the gray values and gradients vary significantly over the boundary of the prostate, separate appearance descriptors are built for each landmark and then optimized. After that, a two stage coarse-to-fine segmentation approach is carried out by incorporating the local shape variations. Finally, the experiments on prostate segmentation from MR image are conducted to verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multi-Task Learning attempts to explore and mine the sufficient information within multiple related tasks for the better solutions. However, the performance of the existing multi-task approaches would largely degenerate when dealing with the polluted data, i.e., outliers. In this paper, we propose a novel robust multi-task model by incorporating a flexible manifold constraint (FMC-MTL) and a robust loss. Specifically speaking, multi-task subspace is embedded with a relaxed and generalized Stiefel Manifold for considering point-wise correlation and preserving the data structure simultaneously. In addition, a robust loss function is developed to ensure the robustness to outliers by smoothly interpolating between ℓ2,1-norm and squared Frobenius norm. Equipped with an efficient algorithm, FMC-MTL serves as a robust solution to tackling the severely polluted data. Moreover, extensive experiments are conducted to verify the superiority of our model. Compared to the state-of-the-art multi-task models, the proposed FMC-MTL model demonstrates remarkable robustness to the contaminated data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a fundamental and challenging task in bridging language and vision domains, Image-Text Retrieval (ITR) aims at searching for the target instances that are semantically relevant to the given query from the other modality, and its key challenge is to measure the semantic similarity across different modalities. Although significant progress has been achieved, existing approaches typically suffer from two major limitations: (1) It hurts the accuracy of the representation by directly exploiting the bottom-up attention based region-level features where each region is equally treated. (2) It limits the scale of negative sample pairs by employing the mini-batch based end-to-end training mechanism. To address these limitations, we propose a Unified Semantic Enhancement Momentum Contrastive Learning (USER) method for ITR. Specifically, we delicately design two simple but effective Global representation based Semantic Enhancement (GSE) modules. One learns the global representation via the self-attention algorithm, noted as Self-Guided Enhancement (SGE) module. The other module benefits from the pre-trained CLIP module, which provides a novel scheme to exploit and transfer the knowledge from an off-the-shelf model, noted as CLIP-Guided Enhancement (CGE) module. Moreover, we incorporate the training mechanism of MoCo into ITR, in which two dynamic queues are employed to enrich and enlarge the scale of negative sample pairs. Meanwhile, a Unified Training Objective (UTO) is developed to learn from mini-batch based and dynamic queue based samples. Extensive experiments on the benchmark MSCOCO and Flickr30K datasets demonstrate the superiority of both retrieval accuracy and inference efficiency. For instance, compared with the existing best method NAAF, the metric R@1 of our USER on the MSCOCO 5K Testing set is improved by 5% and 2.4% on caption retrieval and image retrieval without any external knowledge or pre-trained model while enjoying over 60 times faster inference speed. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/zhangy0822/USER. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crowd counting from a single image is a challenging task due to high appearance similarity, perspective changes, and severe congestion. Many methods only focus on the local appearance features and they cannot handle the aforementioned challenges. In order to tackle them, we propose a perspective crowd counting network (PCC Net), which consists of three parts: 1) density map estimation (DME) focuses on learning very local features of density map estimation; 2) random high-level density classification (R-HDC) extracts global features to predict the coarse density labels of random patches in images; and 3) fore-/background segmentation (FBS) encodes mid-level features to segments the foreground and background. Besides, the Down, Up, Left, and Right (DULR) module is embedded in PCC Net to encode the perspective changes on four directions (DULR). The proposed PCC Net is verified on five mainstream datasets, which achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the one and attains the competitive results on the other four datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/gjy3035/PCC-Net. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Change detection is an important technique providing insights to urban planning, resources monitoring, and environmental studies. For multispectral images, most semi-supervised change detection methods focus on improving the contribution of training samples hard to be classified to the trained classifier. However, hard training samples will weaken the discrimination of the training model for multispectral change detection. Besides, these methods only use the spectral information, while the limited spectral information cannot represent objects very well. In this paper, a method named as coarse-to-fine semi-supervised change detection is proposed to solve the aforementioned problems. First, a novel multiscale feature is exploited by concatenating the spectral vector of the pixel to be detected and its adjacent pixels by different scales. Second, the enhanced metric learning is proposed to acquire more discriminant metric by strengthening the contribution of training samples easy to be classified and weakening the contribution of training samples hard to be classified to the trained model. Finally, a coarse-to-fine strategy is adopted to detect testing samples from the viewpoint of distance metric and label information of neighborhood in spatial space. The coarse detection result obtained from the enhanced metric learning is used to guide the final detection. The effectiveness of our proposed method is verified on two real-life operating scenarios, Taizhou and Kunshan data sets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm has better performance than those of other state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most state-of-the-art methods in pedestrian detection are unable to achieve a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. For example, ACF has a fast speed but a relatively low detection rate, while checkerboards have a high detection rate but a slow speed. Inspired by some simple inherent attributes of pedestrians (i.e., appearance constancy and shape symmetry), we propose two new types of non-neighboring features: side-inner difference features (SIDF) and symmetrical similarity features (SSFs). SIDF can characterize the difference between the background and pedestrian and the difference between the pedestrian contour and its inner part. SSF can capture the symmetrical similarity of pedestrian shape. However, it is difficult for neighboring features to have such above characterization abilities. Finally, we propose to combine both non-neighboring features and neighboring features for pedestrian detection. It is found that non-neighboring features can further decrease the log-average miss rate by 4.44%. The relationship between our proposed method and some state-of-the-art methods is also given. Experimental results on INRIA, Caltech, and KITTI data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods without using CNN, our method achieves the best detection performance on Caltech, outperforming the second best method (i.e., checkerboards) by 2.27%. Using the new annotations of Caltech, it can achieve 11.87% miss rate, which outperforms other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Binarized neural networks (BNNs) have drawn significant attention in recent years, owing to great potential in reducing computation and storage consumption. While it is attractive, traditional BNNs usually suffer from slow convergence speed and dramatical accuracy-degradation on large-scale classification datasets. To minimize the gap between BNNs and deep neural networks (DNNs), we propose a new framework of designing BNNs, dubbed Hyper-BinaryNet, from the aspect of enhanced information-flow. Our contributions are threefold: 1) Considering the capacity-limitation in the backward pass, we propose an 1-bit convolution module named HyperConv. By exploiting the capacity of auxiliary neural networks, BNNs gain better performance on large-scale image classification task. 2) Considering the slow convergence speed in BNNs, we rethink the gradient accumulation mechanism and propose a hyper accumulation technique. By accumulating gradients in multiple variables rather than one as before, the gradient paths for each weight increase, which escapes BNNs from the gradient bottleneck problem during training. 3) Considering the ill-posed optimization problem, a novel gradient estimation warmup strategy, dubbed STE-Warmup, is developed. This strategy prevents BNNs from the unstable optimization process by progressively transferring neural networks from 32-bit to 1-bit. We conduct evaluations with variant architectures on three public datasets: CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet. Compared with state-of-the-art BNNs, Hyper-BinaryNet shows faster convergence speed and outperforms existing BNNs by a large margin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dense feature extraction is becoming increasingly popular in face recognition tasks. Systems based on this approach have demonstrated impressive performance in a range of challenging scenarios. However, improvements in discriminative power come at a computational cost and with a risk of over-fitting. In this paper, we propose a new approach to dense feature extraction for face recognition, which consists of two steps. First, an encoding scheme is devised that compresses high-dimensional dense features into a compact representation by maximizing the intrauser correlation. Second, we develop an adaptive feature matching algorithm for effective classification. This matching method, in contrast to the previous methods, constructs and chooses a small subset of training samples for adaptive matching, resulting in further performance gains. Experiments using several challenging face databases, including labeled Faces in the Wild data set, Morph Album 2, CUHK optical-infrared, and FERET, demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the current state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a multivariate data analysis tool, canonical correlation analysis (CCA) has been widely used in computer vision and pattern recognition. However, CCA uses Euclidean distance as a metric, which is sensitive to noise or outliers in the data. Furthermore, CCA demands that the two training sets must have the same number of training samples, which limits the performance of CCA-based methods. To overcome these limitations of CCA, two novel canonical correlation learning methods based on low-rank learning are proposed in this paper for image representation, named robust canonical correlation analysis (robust-CCA) and low-rank representation canonical correlation analysis (LRR-CCA). By introducing two regular matrices, the training sample numbers of the two training datasets can be set as any values without any limitation in the two proposed methods. Specifically, robust-CCA uses low-rank learning to remove the noise in the data and extracts the maximization correlation features from the two learned clean data matrices. The nuclear norm and $L_{1}$ -norm are used as constraints for the learned clean matrices and noise matrices, respectively. LRR-CCA introduces low-rank representation into CCA to ensure that the correlative features can be obtained in low-rank representation. To verify the performance of the proposed methods, five publicly image databases are used to conduct extensive experiments. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art CCA-based and low-rank learning methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cartoonization as a special type of artistic style transfer is a difficult image processing task. The current existing artistic style transfer methods cannot generate satisfactory cartoon-style images due to that artistic style images often have delicate strokes and rich hierarchical color changes while cartoon-style images have smooth surfaces without obvious color changes, and sharp edges. To this end, we propose a cartoon loss based generative adversarial network (CartoonLossGAN) for cartoonization. Particularly, we first reuse the encoder part of the discriminator to build a compact generative adversarial network (GAN) based cartoonization architecture. Then we propose a novel cartoon loss function for the architecture. It can imitate the process of sketching to learn the smooth surface of the cartoon image, and imitate the coloring process to learn the coloring of the cartoon image. Furthermore, we also propose an initialization strategy, which is used in the scenario of reusing the discriminator to make our model training easier and more stable. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed CartoonLossGAN can generate fantastic cartoon-style images, and outperforms four representative methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual tracking is a very critical issue in computer vision and video processing. For Discriminative Correlation Filter (DCF)-based tracking methods, it is very essential and meaningful to adaptively incorporate reliable target and surrounding information from video frames. However, most existing DCF-based trackers solely rely on pre-defined and fixed constraints such as a binary mask or quadratic function-based regularization to improve the discrimination. Unfortunately, such attempts fail to adjust the constraints according to the change of tracking circumstance in the video sequence, and thus lead to the lack of reliability of learned filters. To mitigate these problems, we present a novel DCF-based tracking method that introduces an adaptive target-and-surrounding soft mask (ATSM) into the learning formula. The adaptive soft mask that is represented by float numbers contains the detail information for both target region and its surrounding information: first, for the background area, it introduces meaningful background information and suppressing uninformative one; second, for the target area inside the bounding box, it helps to focus on the reliable area and repress the rapidly changing area; third, the target-and-surrounding soft mask is adaptively adjusted based on the variations of the target and its surrounding during the tracking process. By jointly modeling the filter and the adaptive soft mask, our ATSM tracker achieves an efficient integration of meaningful information of both foreground and background and performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms on seven well-known benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional regression methods, such as multivariate linear regression (MLR) and its extension principal component regression (PCR), deal well with the situations that the data are of the form of low-dimensional vector. When the dimension grows higher, it leads to the under sample problem (USP): the dimensionality of the feature space is much higher than the number of training samples. However, little attention has been paid to such a problem. This paper first adopts an in-depth investigation to the USP in PCR, which answers three questions: 1) Why is USP produced? 2) What is the condition for USP, and 3) How is the influence of USP on regression. With the help of the above analysis, the principal components selection problem of PCR is presented. Subsequently, to address the problem of PCR, a multivariate multilinear regression (MMR) model is proposed which gives a substitutive solution to MLR, under the condition of multilinear objects. The basic idea of MMR is to transfer the multilinear structure of objects into the regression coefficients as a constraint. As a result, the regression problem is reduced to find two low-dimensional coefficients so that the principal components selection problem is avoided. Moreover, the sample size needed for solving MMR is greatly reduced so that USP is alleviated. As there is no closed-form solution for MMR, an alternative projection procedure is designed to obtain the regression matrices. For the sake of completeness, the analysis of computational cost and the proof of convergence are studied subsequently. Furthermore, MMR is applied to model the fitting procedure in the active appearance model (AAM). Experiments are conducted on both the carefully designed synthesizing data set and AAM fitting databases verified the theoretical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Semisupervised dimensionality reduction has been attracting much attention as it not only utilizes both labeled and unlabeled data simultaneously, but also works well in the situation of out-of-sample. This paper proposes an effective approach of semisupervised dimensionality reduction through label propagation and label regression. Different from previous efforts, the new approach propagates the label information from labeled to unlabeled data with a well-designed mechanism of random walks, in which outliers are effectively detected and the obtained virtual labels of unlabeled data can be well encoded in a weighted regression model. These virtual labels are thereafter regressed with a linear model to calculate the projection matrix for dimensionality reduction. By this means, when the manifold or the clustering assumption of data is satisfied, the labels of labeled data can be correctly propagated to the unlabeled data; and thus, the proposed approach utilizes the labeled and the unlabeled data more effectively than previous work. Experimental results are carried out upon several databases, and the advantage of the new approach is well demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of machine learning, it is a key issue to learn and represent similarity. This paper focuses on the problem of learning similarity with a multikernel method. Motivated by geometric intuition and computability, similarity between patterns is proposed to be measured by their included angle in a kernel-induced Hilbert space. Having noticed that the cosine of such an included angle can be represented by a normalized kernel, it can be said that the task of learning similarity is equivalent to learning an appropriate normalized kernel. In addition, an error bound is also established for learning similarity with the multikernel method. Based on this bound, a boosting-style algorithm is developed. The preliminary experiments validate the effectiveness of the algorithm for learning similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smoke has semi-transparency property leading to highly complicated mixture of background and smoke. Sparse or small smoke is visually inconspicuous, and its boundary is often ambiguous. These reasons result in a very challenging task of separating smoke from a single image. To solve these problems, we propose a Classification-assisted Gated Recurrent Network (CGRNet) for smoke semantic segmentation. To discriminate smoke and smoke-like objects, we present a smoke segmentation strategy with dual classification assistance. Our classification module outputs two prediction probabilities for smoke. The first assistance is to use one probability to explicitly regulate the segmentation module for accuracy improvement by supervising a cross-entropy classification loss. The second one is to multiply the segmentation result by another probability for further refinement. This dual classification assistance greatly improves performance at image level. In the segmentation module, we design an Attention Convolutional GRU module (Att-ConvGRU) to learn the long-range context dependence of features. To perceive small or inconspicuous smoke, we design a Multi-scale Context Contrasted Local Feature structure (MCCL) and a Dense Pyramid Pooling Module (DPPM) for improving the representation ability of our network. Extensive experiments validate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-art algorithms on smoke datasets, and also obtain satisfactory results on challenging images with inconspicuous smoke and smoke-like objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme instance imbalance among categories and combinatorial explosion make the recognition of Human-Object Interaction (HOI) a challenging task. Few studies have addressed both challenges directly. Motivated by the success of few-shot learning that learns a robust model from a few instances, we formulate HOI as a few-shot task in a meta-learning framework to alleviate the above challenges. Due to the fact that the intrinsical characteristic of HOI is diverse and interactive, we propose a Semantic-guided Attentive Prototypes Network (SAPNet) framework to learn a semantic-guided metric space where HOI recognition can be performed by computing distances to attentive prototypes of each class. Specifically, the model generates attentive prototypes guided by the category names of actions and objects, which highlight the commonalities of images from the same class in HOI. In addition, we design two alternative prototypes calculation methods, i.e., Prototypes Shift (PS) approach and Hallucinatory Graph Prototypes (HGP) approach, which explore to learn a suitable category prototypes representations in HOI. Finally, in order to realize the task of few-shot HOI, we reorganize 2 HOI benchmark datasets with 2 split strategies, i.e., HICO-NN, TUHOI-NN, HICO-NF, and TUHOI-NF. Extensive experimental results on these datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed SAPNet approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the explosive growth of data, the multi-view data is widely used in many fields, such as data mining, machine learning, computer vision, and so on. Because such data always has a complex structure, i.e., many categories, many perspectives of description and high dimension, how to formulate an accurate and reliable framework for the multi-view classification is a very challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view classification method by using multiple multi-class Support Vector Machines (SVMs) with a novel collaborative strategy. Here, each multi-class SVM embeds the scaling factor to renewedly adjust the weight allocation of all features, which is beneficial to highlight more important and discriminative features. Furthermore, we adopt the decision function values to integrate multiple multi-class learners and introduce the confidence score across multiple classes to determine the final classification result. In addition, through a series of the mathematical deduction, we bridge the proposed model with the solvable problem and solve it through an alternating iteration optimization method. We evaluate the proposed method on several image and face datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method performs better than other state-of-the-art learning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two fundamental problems: 1) learning discriminative model parameters and 2) avoiding over-fitting, which often occurs in regression-based classification tasks. We formulate these two problems in terms of relaxing both the strict binary label matrix and graph regularization term into more flexible forms so that the margins between different classes are enlarged as much as possible and the problem of over-fitting is avoided to some extent. This task is accomplished by the proposed double relaxed regression (DRR) method. The convex problem of DRR is solved efficiently with an iterative procedure. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real world image data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of both classification accuracy and running time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scene classification of remote sensing images has drawn great attention because of its wide applications. In this paper, with the guidance of the human visual system (HVS), we explore the attention mechanism and propose a novel end-to-end attention recurrent convolutional network (ARCNet) for scene classification. It can learn to focus selectively on some key regions or locations and just process them at high-level features, thereby discarding the noncritical information and promoting the classification performance. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we design a novel recurrent attention structure to squeeze high-level semantic and spatial features into several simplex vectors for the reduction of learning parameters. Second, an end-to-end network named ARCNet is proposed to adaptively select a series of attention regions and then to generate powerful predictions by learning to process them sequentially. Third, we construct a new data set named OPTIMAL-31, which contains more categories than popular data sets and gives researchers an extra platform to validate their algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our model makes great promotion in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sufficient training examples are the fundamental requirement for most of the learning tasks. However, collecting well-labelled training examples is costly. Inspired by Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) that can make use of visual attributes or natural language semantics as an intermediate level clue to associate low-level features with high-level classes, in a novel extension of this idea, we aim to synthesise training data for novel classes using only semantic attributes. Despite the simplicity of this idea, there are several challenges. First, how to prevent the synthesised data from over-fitting to training classes? Second, how to guarantee the synthesised data is discriminative for ZSL tasks? Third, we observe that only a few dimensions of the learnt features gain high variances whereas most of the remaining dimensions are not informative. Thus, the question is how to make the concentrated information diffuse to most of the dimensions of synthesised data. To address the above issues, we propose a novel embedding algorithm named Unseen Visual Data Synthesis (UVDS) that projects semantic features to the high-dimensional visual feature space. Two main techniques are introduced in our proposed algorithm. (1) We introduce a latent embedding space which aims to reconcile the structural difference between the visual and semantic spaces, meanwhile preserve the local structure. (2) We propose a novel Diffusion Regularisation (DR) that explicitly forces the variances to diffuse over most dimensions of the synthesised data. By an orthogonal rotation (more precisely, an orthogonal transformation), DR can remove the redundant correlated attributes and further alleviate the over-fitting problem. On four benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the benefit of using synthesised unseen data for zero-shot learning. Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study content-based learning to rank from the perspective of learning distance functions. Standardly, the two key issues of learning to rank, feature mappings and score functions, are usually modeled separately, and the learning is usually restricted to modeling a linear distance function such as the Mahalanobis distance. However, the modeling of feature mappings and score functions are mutually interacted, and the patterns underlying the data are probably complicated and nonlinear. Thus, as a general nonlinear distance family, the Bregman distance is a suitable distance function for learning to rank, due to its strong generalization ability for distance functions, and its nonlinearity for exploring the general patterns of data distributions. In this paper, we study learning to rank as a structural learning problem, and devise a Bregman distance function to build the ranking model based on structural SVM. To improve the model robustness to outliers, we develop a robust structural learning framework for the ranking model. The proposed model Robust Structural Bregman distance functions Learning to Rank (RSBLR) is a general and unified framework for learning distance functions to rank. The experiments of data ranking on real-world datasets show the superiority of this method to the state-of-the-art literature, as well as its robustness to the noisily labeled outliers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we study Stochastic Composite Optimization (SCO) for sparse learning that aims to learn a sparse solution from a composite function. Most of the recent SCO algorithms have already reached the optimal expected convergence rate \mathcal O(1/\lambda T) , but they often fail to deliver sparse solutions at the end either due to the limited sparsity regularization during stochastic optimization (SO) or due to the limitation in online-to-batch conversion. Even when the objective function is strongly convex, their high probability bounds can only attain \mathcal O(\sqrt\log (1/\delta)/T) with $\delta$ is the failure probability, which is much worse than the expected convergence rate. To address these limitations, we propose a simple yet effective two-phase Stochastic Composite Optimization scheme by adding a novel powerful sparse online-to-batch conversion to the general Stochastic Optimization algorithms. We further develop three concrete algorithms, OptimalSL, LastSL and AverageSL, directly under our scheme to prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Both the theoretical analysis and the experiment results show that our methods can really outperform the existing methods at the ability of sparse learning and at the meantime we can improve the high probability bound to approximately \mathcal {O}(\log (\log (T)/\delta)/\lambda T) . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new fine-grained image categorization system that improves spatial pyramid matching is developed. In this method, multiple cells are combined into cellets in the proposed categorization model, which are highly responsive to an object's fine categories. The object components are represented by cellets that can connect spatially adjacent cells within the same pyramid level. Here, image categorization can be formulated as the matching between the cellets of corresponding images. Toward an effective matching process, an active learning algorithm that can effectively select a few representative cells for constructing the cellets is adopted. A linear-discriminant-analysis-like scheme is employed to select discriminative cellets. Then, fine-grained image categorization can be conducted with a trained linear support vector machine. Experimental results on three real-world data sets demonstrate that our proposed system outperforms the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sketch–photo synthesis plays an important role in sketch-based face photo retrieval and photo-based face sketch retrieval systems. In this paper, we propose an automatic sketch–photo synthesis and retrieval algorithm based on sparse representation. The proposed sketch–photo synthesis method works at patch level and is composed of two steps: sparse neighbor selection (SNS) for an initial estimate of the pseudoimage (pseudosketch or pseudophoto) and sparse-representation-based enhancement (SRE) for further improving the quality of the synthesized image. SNS can find closely related neighbors adaptively and then generate an initial estimate for the pseudoimage. In SRE, a coupled sparse representation model is first constructed to learn the mapping between sketch patches and photo patches, and a patch-derivative-based sparse representation method is subsequently applied to enhance the quality of the synthesized photos and sketches. Finally, four retrieval modes, namely, sketch-based, photo-based, pseudosketch-based, and pseudophoto-based retrieval are proposed, and a retrieval algorithm is developed by using sparse representation. Extensive experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed face sketch–photo synthesis and retrieval algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until now, neighbor-embedding-based (NE) algorithms for super-resolution (SR) have carried out two independent processes to synthesize high-resolution (HR) image patches. In the first process, neighbor search is performed using the Euclidean distance metric, and in the second process, the optimal weights are determined by solving a constrained least squares problem. However, the separate processes are not optimal. In this paper, we propose a sparse neighbor selection scheme for SR reconstruction. We first predetermine a larger number of neighbors as potential candidates and develop an extended Robust-SL0 algorithm to simultaneously find the neighbors and to solve the reconstruction weights. Recognizing that the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) for reconstruction should have similar local geometric structures based on clustering, we employ a local statistical feature, namely histograms of oriented gradients (HoG) of low-resolution (LR) image patches, to perform such clustering. By conveying local structural information of HoG in the synthesis stage, the k-NN of each LR input patch is adaptively chosen from their associated subset, which significantly improves the speed of synthesizing the HR image while preserving the quality of reconstruction. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method can achieve competitive SR quality compared with other state-of-the-art baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we study the problem of detecting sudden pedestrian crossings to assist drivers in avoiding accidents. This application has two major requirements: to detect crossing pedestrians as early as possible just as they enter the view of the car-mounted camera and to maintain a false alarm rate as low as possible for practical purposes. Although many current sliding-window-based approaches using various features and classification algorithms have been proposed for image-/video-based pedestrian detection, their performance in terms of accuracy and processing speed falls far short of practical application requirements. To address this problem, we propose a three-level coarse-to-fine video-based framework that detects partially visible pedestrians just as they enter the camera view, with low false alarm rate and high speed. The framework is tested on a new collection of high-resolution videos captured from a moving vehicle and yields a performance better than that of state-of-the-art pedestrian detection while running at a frame rate of 55 fps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The neighbor-embedding (NE) algorithm for single-image super-resolution (SR) reconstruction assumes that the feature spaces of low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) patches are locally isometric. However, this is not true for SR because of one-to-many mappings between LR and HR patches. To overcome or at least to reduce the problem for NE-based SR reconstruction, we apply a joint learning technique to train two projection matrices simultaneously and to map the original LR and HR feature spaces onto a unified feature subspace. Subsequently, the k-nearest neighbor selection of the input LR image patches is conducted in the unified feature subspace to estimate the reconstruction weights. To handle a large number of samples, joint learning locally exploits a coupled constraint by linking the LR–HR counterparts together with the K-nearest grouping patch pairs. In order to refine further the initial SR estimate, we impose a global reconstruction constraint on the SR outcome based on the maximum a posteriori framework. Preliminary experiments suggest that the proposed algorithm outperforms NE-related baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biologically inspired model (BIM) proposed by Serre presents a promising solution to object categorization. It emulates the process of object recognition in primates' visual cortex by constructing a set of scale- and position-tolerant features whose properties are similar to those of the cells along the ventral stream of visual cortex. However, BIM has potential to be further improved in two aspects: mismatch by dense input and randomly feature selection due to the feedforward framework. To solve or alleviate these limitations, we develop an enhanced BIM (EBIM) in terms of the following two aspects: 1) removing uninformative inputs by imposing sparsity constraints, 2) apply a feedback loop to middle level feature selection. Each aspect is motivated by relevant psychophysical research findings. To show the effectiveness of the EBIM, we apply it to object categorization and conduct empirical studies on four computer vision data sets. Experimental results demonstrate that the EBIM outperforms the BIM and is comparable to state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy. Moreover, the new system is about 20 times faster than the BIM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual surveillance from low-altitude airborne platforms plays a key role in urban traffic surveillance. Moving vehicle detection and motion analysis are very important for such a system. However, illumination variance, scene complexity, and platform motion make the tasks very challenging. In addition, the used algorithms have to be computationally efficient in order to be used on a real-time platform. To deal with these problems, a new framework for vehicle detection and motion analysis from low-altitude airborne videos is proposed. Our paper has two major contributions. First, to speed up feature extraction and to retain additional global features in different scales for higher classification accuracy, a boosting light and pyramid sampling histogram of oriented gradients feature extraction method is proposed. Second, to efficiently correlate vehicles across different frames for vehicle motion trajectories computation, a spatio-temporal appearance-related similarity measure is proposed. Compared to other representative existing methods, our experimental results showed that the proposed method is able to achieve better performance with higher detection rate, lower false positive rate, and faster detection speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eye detection plays an important role in many practical applications. This paper presents a novel two-step scheme for eye detection. The first step models an eye by a newly defined visual-context pattern (VCP), and the second step applies semisupervised boosting for precise detection. VCP describes both the space and appearance relations between an eye region (region of eye) and a reference region (region of reference). The context feature of a VCP is extracted by using the integral image. Aiming to reduce the human labeling efforts, we apply semisupervised boosting, which integrates the context feature and the Haar-like features for precise eye detection. Experimental results on several standard face data sets demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective, robust, and efficient. We finally show that this approach is ready for practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]