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Due to the exponential growth of multimedia data, multi-modal hashing as a promising technique to make cross-view retrieval scalable is attracting more and more attention. However, most of the existing multi-modal hashing methods either divide the learning process unnaturally into two separate stages or treat the discrete optimization problem simplistically as a continuous one, which leads to suboptimal results. Recently, a few discrete multi-modal hashing methods that try to address such issues have emerged, but they still ignore several important discrete constraints (such as the balance and decorrelation of hash bits). In this paper, we overcome those limitations by proposing a novel method named “Enhanced Discrete Multi-modal Hashing (EDMH)” which learns binary codes and hashing functions simultaneously from the pairwise similarity matrix of data, under the aforementioned discrete constraints. Although the model of EDMH looks a lot more complex than the other models for multi-modal hashing, we are actually able to develop a fast iterative learning algorithm for it, since the subproblems of its optimization all have closed-form solutions after introducing a couple of auxiliary variables. Our experimental results on three real-world datasets have revealed the usefulness of those previously ignored discrete constraints and demonstrated that EDMH not only performs much better than state-of-the-art competitors according to several retrieval metrics but also runs much faster than most of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversational videos (ERC) develops rapidly in recent years. To fully extract the relative context from video clips, most studies build their models on the entire dialogues which make them lack of real-time ERC ability. Different from related researches, a novel multimodal emotion recognition model for conversational videos based on reinforcement learning and domain knowledge (ERLDK) is proposed in this paper. In ERLDK, the reinforcement learning algorithm is introduced to conduct real-time ERC with the occurrence of conversations. The collection of history utterances is composed as an emotion-pair which represents the multimodal context of the following utterance to be recognized. Dueling deep-Q-network (DDQN) based on gated recurrent unit (GRU) layers is designed to learn the correct action from the alternative emotion categories. Domain knowledge is extracted from public dataset based on the former information of emotion-pairs. The extracted domain knowledge is used to revise the results from the RL module and is transformed into other dataset to examine the rationality. The experimental results on datasets show that ERLDK achieves the state-of-the-art results on weighted average and most of the specific emotion categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, several robust principle component analysis (RPCA) models have been proposed to improve the robustness of principle component analysis (PCA). But an important problem that the robustness to outliers affects the discrimination of correct samples has not been solved yet. To solve this problem, we propose a truncated robust principle component analysis (T-RPCA) model which treats correct samples and outliers separately. In fact, the proposed model performs an implicitly truncated weighted learning scheme which is more reasonable for robustness learning respective to previous works. Moreover, we propose a re-weighted (RW) optimization framework to solve a general problem and generalize two sub-frameworks upon it. To be specific, the first sub-framework orients a general truncated loss optimization problem which contains the objective problem of T-RPCA, and the second one focuses on a general singular-value based optimization problem. Besides, we provide rigorously theoretical guarantees for the proposed model, RW framework and sub-frameworks. Empirical studies demonstrate that the proposed T-RPCA model outperforms previous RPCA models on reconstruction and classification tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, many real-world applications exploit multi-view data, which is collected from diverse domains or obtained from various feature extractors and reflect different properties or distributions of the data. In this work, a novel unsupervised multi-view framework is proposed to cluster such data. The proposed method, called Multi-View clustering with Adaptive Sparse Memberships and Weight Allocation (MVASM), pays more attention to constructing a common membership matrix with proper sparseness over different views and learns the centroid matrix and its corresponding weight of each view. Concretely, MVASM method attempts to learn a common and flexible sparse membership matrix to indicate the clustering, which explores the underlying consensus information of multiple views, and solves the multiple centroid matrices and weights to utilize the view-specific information and further modifies the above-mentioned membership matrix. In addition, the theoretical analysis, including the determination of the power exponent parameter, convergence analysis, and complexity analysis are also presented. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method improves the performance of clustering on different public datasets and demonstrates its reasonability and superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection is one of the most important techniques to deal with the high-dimensional data for a variety of machine learning and data mining tasks, such clustering, classification, and retrieval, etc. Fuzziness is a widespread nature of data in nature human society. However, most existing feature selection methods ignore the existence of fuzziness in the data, resulting in sub-optimal feature subsets. To address the problem, we propose a novel unsupervised feature selection method, called Unsupervised Discriminative Projection for Feature Selection (UDPFS) to select discriminative features by conducting fuzziness learning and sparse learning, simultaneously. Specifically, we use projection matrix transform data as its low-dimensional representation, which are partitioned into clusters by using membership matrix with sparse constraint. In addition, $\ell _{2, 1}$ ℓ 2 , 1 -norm regularization is applied to the projection matrix. Then, a discriminative projection matrix with row sparse is obtained by perform fuzziness learning and sparse learning, simultaneously. An effective alternative optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the objective function. Evaluate experimental results on several real-world datasets show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed unsupervised feature selection method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting moving objects from the video sequences has been treated as a challenging computer vision task, since the problems of dynamic background, multi-scale moving objects and various noise interference impact the corresponding feasibility and efficiency. In this paper, a novel spatio-temporal online matrix factorization (STOMF) method is proposed to detect multi-scale moving objects under dynamic background. To accommodate a wide range of the real noise distractions, we apply a specific mixture of exponential power (MoEP) distributions to the framework of low-rank matrix factorization (LRMF). For the optimization of solution algorithm, a temporal difference motion prior (TDMP) model is proposed, which estimates the motion matrix and calculates the weight matrix. Moreover, a partial spatial motion information (PSMI) post-processing method is further designed to implement multi-scale objects extraction in varieties of complex dynamic scenes, which utilizes partial background and motion information. The superiority of the STOMF method is validated by massive experiments on practical datasets, as compared with state-of-the-art moving objects detection approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel interactive image segmentation approach with user scribbles using constrained Laplacian graph optimization. A novel energy framework is developed by adding the smoothing item in the cost function of Laplacian graph energy. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to incorporate the normalized cuts and graph cuts algorithms into a unified energy optimization framework. The proposed approach is further accelerated by running the proposed optimization method on a band region when we segment the large images. Our acceleration strategy enables our approach to efficiently segment the large images, which yields about a 20–80 times speedup. The proposed approach is evaluated on both the publicly available data sets and our own data set with large images. The benefits of the proposed unified framework are also demonstrated both qualitatively and quantitatively. The experimental results show that our segmentation method achieves better performance of both boundary recall and error rate than the existing state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As digital video databases grow, so grows the problem of effectively navigating through them. In this paper we propose a novel content-based video retrieval approach to searching such video databases, specifically those involving human actions, incorporating spatio-temporal localization. We outline a novel, highly efficient localization model that first performs temporal localization based on histograms of evenly spaced time-slices, then spatial localization based on histograms of a 2-D spatial grid. We further argue that our retrieval model, based on the aforementioned localization, followed by relevance ranking, results in a highly discriminative system, while remaining an order of magnitude faster than the current state-of-the-art method. We also show how relevance feedback can be applied to our localization and ranking algorithms. As a result, the presented system is more directly applicable to real-world problems than any prior content-based video retrieval system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to the inconsistent imaging environment, the styles of multitemporal multispectral images (MSIs) are quite different, such as image brightness and transparency. For multitemporal MSIs with different styles, the “same object with different spectra” problem is one of the biggest challenges in change detection. To overcome the challenge, a novel unsupervised spatial–spectral feature learning (FL) framework based on style transformation (ST) (called STFL-CD) is proposed for MSI change detection in this article. For dual-temporal MSIs, the proposed STFl-CD algorithm consists of two phases: ST and spatial–spectral FL. Since the image styles are inconsistent under different imaging environments, the first innovation is to transform the image styles through unmixing and reconstruction. Through ST, the challenge of the “same object with different spectra” problem will be reduced fundamentally. By introducing the attention mechanism, the other innovation is to extract the joint spectral–spatial change features based on a 3-D convolutional neural network with spatial and channel attention. In addition, for multitemporal MSIs, a multitemporal version STFL-CD (MT-STFL-CD) framework is designed based on a recurrent neural network to learn the correlation features between multitemporal remote sensing images. Both of the visual and quantitative results on the real MSI datasets indicate that the proposed unsupervised STFL-CD frameworks have significant advantages on multitemporal MSI change detection. In particular, the performance of the proposed unsupervised STFL-CD algorithm is even comparable to that of the state-of-the-art supervised or semisupervised methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data clustering, which is to partition the given data into different groups, has attracted much attention. Recently various effective algorithms have been developed to tackle the task. Among these methods, non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has been demonstrated to be a powerful tool. However, there are still some problems. First, the standard NMF is sensitive to noises and outliers. Although $\ell _{2,1}$ ℓ 2 , 1 norm based NMF improves the robustness, it is still affected easily by large noises. Second, for most graph regularized NMF, the performance highly depends on the initial similarity graph. Third, many graph-based NMF models perform the graph construction and matrix factorization in two separated steps. Thus the learned graph structure may not be optimal. To overcome the above drawbacks, we propose a robust bi-stochastic graph regularized matrix factorization (RBSMF) framework for data clustering. Specifically, we present a general loss function, which is more robust than the commonly used $L_2$ L 2 and $L_1$ L 1 functions. Besides, instead of keeping the graph fixed, we learn an adaptive similarity graph. Furthermore, the graph updating and matrix factorization are processed simultaneously, which can make the learned graph more appropriate for clustering. Extensive experiments have shown the proposed RBSMF outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing image captioning (RSIC), which aims at generating a well-formed sentence for a remote sensing image, has attracted more attention in recent years. The general framework for RSIC is the encoder–decoder architecture containing two submodels of encoder and decoder. Although the significant performance is obtained, the encoder–decoder architecture is a black-box model with a lack of explainability. To overcome this drawback, in this article, we propose a new explainable word–sentence framework for RSIC. The proposed word–sentence framework consists of two parts: word extractor and sentence generator, where the former extracts the valuable words in the given remote sensing image, while the latter organizes these words into a well-formed sentence. The proposed framework decomposes RSIC into a word classification task and a word sorting task, which is more in line with human intuitive understanding. On the basis of the word–sentence framework, some ablation experiments are conducted on the three public RSIC data sets of Sydney-captions, UCM-captions, and RSICD to explore the specific and effective network structures. In order to evaluate the proposed word–sentence framework objectively, we further conduct some comparative experiments on these three data sets and achieve comparable results in comparison with the encoder–decoder-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semisupervised band selection (BS) technique plays an important role in processing hyperspectral images (HSIs) because of its superiority of using the limited labeled data and plentiful unlabeled data to select the discriminative and informative feature, which copes with the problem of high-dimensional and scare labeled samples of HSIs. Among semisupervised BS models, graph-based methods are superior to others in many situations and have received more and more attention. However, traditional graph-based models construct a similarity matrix and select valuable bands independently. The similarity matrix remains constant, which will damage the local manifold structure and lead to a suboptimal result. To solve this problem, we propose a semisupervised band selection with an optimal graph (BSOG) approach, which performs BS and local structure learning simultaneously. Instead of fixing the input similarity matrix, the similarity matrix is updated constantly to learn a better local structure. Besides, the learned similarity matrix is adaptive. Then, the optimal band subset can be selected by analyzing the obtained projection matrix $\boldsymbol W$. An efficient and simple optimization algorithm is proposed to solve this model. Experiments on four real HSIs data validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectral clustering methods are gaining more and more interests and successfully applied in many fields because of their superior performance. However, there still exist two main problems to be solved: 1) spectral clustering methods consist of two successive optimization stages—spectral embedding and spectral rotation, which may not lead to globally optimal solutions, 2) and it is known that spectral methods are time-consuming with very high computational complexity. There are methods proposed to reduce the complexity for data vectors but not for graphs that only have information about similarity matrices. In this paper, we propose a new method to solve these two challenging problems for graph clustering. In the new method, a new framework is established to perform spectral embedding and spectral rotation simultaneously. The newly designed objective function consists of both terms of embedding and rotation, and we use an improved spectral rotation method to make it mathematically rigorous for the optimization. To further accelerate the algorithm, we derive a low-dimensional representation matrix from a graph by using label propagation, with which, in return, we can reconstruct a double-stochastic and positive semidefinite similarity matrix. Experimental results demonstrate that our method has excellent performance in time cost and accuracy. [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]

Robust reversible watermarking (RRW) methods are popular in multimedia for protecting copyright, while preserving intactness of host images and providing robustness against unintentional attacks. However, conventional RRW methods are not readily applicable in practice. That is mainly because: 1) they fail to offer satisfactory reversibility on large-scale image datasets; 2) they have limited robustness in extracting watermarks from the watermarked images destroyed by different unintentional attacks; and 3) some of them suffer from extremely poor invisibility for watermarked images. Therefore, it is necessary to have a framework to address these three problems, and further improve its performance. This paper presents a novel pragmatic framework, wavelet-domain statistical quantity histogram shifting and clustering (WSQH-SC). Compared with conventional methods, WSQH-SC ingeniously constructs new watermark embedding and extraction procedures by histogram shifting and clustering, which are important for improving robustness and reducing run-time complexity. Additionally, WSQH-SC includes the property-inspired pixel adjustment to effectively handle overflow and underflow of pixels. This results in satisfactory reversibility and invisibility. Furthermore, to increase its practical applicability, WSQH-SC designs an enhanced pixel-wise masking to balance robustness and invisibility. We perform extensive experiments over natural, medical, and synthetic aperture radar images to show the effectiveness of WSQH-SC by comparing with the histogram rotation-based and histogram distribution constrained methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results of traditional clustering methods are usually unreliable as there is not any guidance from the data labels, while the class labels can be predicted more reliable by the semisupervised learning if the labels of partial data are given. In this paper, we propose an actively self-training clustering method, in which the samples are actively selected as training set to minimize an estimated Bayes error, and then explore semisupervised learning to perform clustering. Traditional graph-based semisupervised learning methods are not convenient to estimate the Bayes error; we develop a specific regularization framework on graph to perform semisupervised learning, in which the Bayes error can be effectively estimated. In addition, the proposed clustering algorithm can be readily applied in a semisupervised setting with partial class labels. Experimental results on toy data and real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed clustering method on the unsupervised and the semisupervised setting. It is worthy noting that the proposed clustering method is free of initialization, while traditional clustering methods are usually dependent on initialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to pattern recognition, feature selection is often used to identify relevant features and discard irrelevant ones for obtaining improved analysis results. In this paper, we aim to develop an unsupervised feature ranking algorithm that evaluates features using discovered local coherent patterns, which are known as biclusters. The biclusters (viewed as submatrices) are discovered from a data matrix. These submatrices are used for scoring relevant features from two aspects, i.e., the interdependence of features and the separability of instances. The features are thereby ranked with respect to their accumulated scores from the total discovered biclusters before the pattern classification. Experimental results show that this proposed method can yield comparable or even better performance in comparison with the well-known Fisher score, Laplacian score, and variance score using three UCI data sets, well improve the results of gene expression data analysis using gene ontology annotation, and finally demonstrate its advantage of unsupervised feature ranking for high-dimensional data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiframe super-resolution (SR) reconstruction aims to produce a high-resolution (HR) image using a set of low-resolution (LR) images. In the process of reconstruction, fuzzy registration usually plays a critical role. It mainly focuses on the correlation between pixels of the candidate and the reference images to reconstruct each pixel by averaging all its neighboring pixels. Therefore, the fuzzy-registration-based SR performs well and has been widely applied in practice. However, if some objects appear or disappear among LR images or different angle rotations exist among them, the correlation between corresponding pixels becomes weak. Thus, it will be difficult to use LR images effectively in the process of SR reconstruction. Moreover, if the LR images are noised, the reconstruction quality will be affected seriously. To address or at least reduce these problems, this paper presents a novel SR method based on the Zernike moment, to make the most of possible details in each LR image for high-quality SR reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of robustness and visual effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Recently, with the explosive increase in Internet data, the traditional Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning (GSSL) model is not suitable to deal with large scale data as the high computation complexity. Besides, GSSL models perform classification on a fixed input data graph. The quality of initialized graph has a great effect on the classification result. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel approach, named optimal bipartite graph-based SSL (OBGSSL). Instead of fixing the input data graph, we learn a new bipartite graph to make the result more robust. Based on the learned bipartite graph, the labels of the original data and anchors can be calculated simultaneously, which solves co-classification problem in SSL. Then, we use the label of anchor to handle out-of-sample problem, which preserves well classification performance and saves much time. The computational complexity of OBGSSL is O(ndmt + nm2), which is a significant improvement compared with traditional GSSL methods that need O(n2d + n3) , where n, d, m and t are the number of samples, features anchors and iterations, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our OBGSSL model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single-stage detectors have gained great attention due to their high detection accuracy and real-time speed. To detect multi-scale objects, single-stage detectors make scale-aware predictions based on multiple pyramid layers. However, the insufficient context exploration in shallow pyramid layers leads to the detection accuracy of small objects being far from satisfactory. To tackle this problem, we propose a scheme to selectively extract multi-scale context with attention-adaptive weights. Specifically, we propose an efficient selective context network for accurate object detection. It incorporates an enhanced context module and a triple attention module. The enhanced context module consists of multi-branches to extract original-scale, small-scale, and large-scale contextual information. To make full use of this context and filter out noisy information, the triple attention module, which contains global-level, channel-level, and spatial-level attentions, is introduced to carry out selective context fusion. The two modules are easy to implement and can efficiently boost the accuracy of object detection. The performance of our method is validated on two benchmarks: PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. For a $512\times 512$ input, our detector with VGG16 achieves competitive results (80.9 on the Pascal VOC 2012 test set in the case of single-scale inference without MS COCO pre-training). On the MS COCO test-dev set, our detector with ResNet101 outperforms RetinaNet500 by 2.5% AP in terms of overall performance and its speed is 48 milliseconds on a Titan XP GPU. As a result, ESCNet achieves a better trade-off between accuracy and speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fusion of a low-spatial-resolution hyperspectral image (HSI) (LR-HSI) with its corresponding high-spatial-resolution multispectral image (MSI) (HR-MSI) to reconstruct a high-spatial-resolution HSI (HR-HSI) has been a significant subject in recent years. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to achieve the cross-mode information fusion of spatial mode and spectral mode when reconstructing HR-HSI for the existing methods. In this article, based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), an interpretable spatial–spectral reconstruction network (SSR-NET) is proposed for more efficient HSI and MSI fusion. More specifically, the proposed SSR-NET is a physical straightforward model that consists of three components: 1) cross-mode message inserting (CMMI); this operation can produce the preliminary fused HR-HSI, preserving the most valuable information of LR-HSI and HR-MSI; 2) spatial reconstruction network (SpatRN); the SpatRN concentrates on reconstructing the lost spatial information of LR-HSI with the guidance of spatial edge loss (Lspat); and 3) spectral reconstruction network (SpecRN); the SpecRN pays attention to reconstruct the lost spectral information of HR-MSI under the constraint of spatial edge loss ({Lspec). Comparative experiments are conducted on six HSI data sets of Urban, Pavia University (PU), Pavia Center (PC), Botswana, Indian Pines (IP), and Washington DC Mall (WDCM), and the proposed SSR-NET achieves the superior or competitive results in comparison with seven state-of-the-art methods. The code of SSR-NET is available at https://github.com/hw2hwei/SSRNET. [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]

Segmentation of the breast ultrasound (BUS) image is an important step for subsequent assessment and diagnosis of breast lesions. Recently, Deep-learning-based methods have achieved satisfactory performance in many computer vision tasks, especially in medical image segmentation. Nevertheless, those methods always require a large number of pixel-wise labeled data that is expensive in medical practices. In this study, we propose a new segmentation method by dense prediction and local fusion of superpixels for breast anatomy with scarce labeled data. First, the proposed method generates superpixels from the BUS image enhanced by histogram equalization, a bilateral filter, and a pyramid mean shift filter. Second, using a convolutional neural network (CNN) and distance metric learning-based classifier, the superpixels are projected onto the embedding space and then classified by calculating the distance between superpixels’ embeddings and the centers of categories. By using superpixels, we can generate a large number of training samples from each BUS image. Therefore, the problem of the scarcity of labeled data can be better solved. To avoid the misclassification of the superpixels, $K$ -nearest neighbor (KNN) is used to reclassify the superpixels within every local region based on the spatial relationships among them. Fivefold cross-validation was taken and the experimental results show that our method outperforms several often used deep-learning methods under the condition of the absence of a large number of labeled data (48 BUS images for training and 12 BUS images for testing). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, crowd counting and localization attract much attention of researchers due to its wide-spread applications, including crowd monitoring, public safety, space design, etc. Many convolutional neural networks (CNN) are designed for tackling this task. However, currently released datasets are so small-scale that they can not meet the needs of the supervised CNN-based algorithms. To remedy this problem, we construct a large-scale congested crowd counting and localization dataset, NWPU-Crowd, consisting of 5,109 images, in a total of 2,133,375 annotated heads with points and boxes. Compared with other real-world datasets, it contains various illumination scenes and has the largest density range (0 ∼ 20,033). Besides, a benchmark website is developed for impartially evaluating the different methods, which allows researchers to submit the results of the test set. Based on the proposed dataset, we further describe the data characteristics, evaluate the performance of some mainstream state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, and analyze the new problems that arise on the new data. What’s more, the benchmark is deployed at https://www.crowdbenchmark.com/ , and the dataset/code/models/results are available at https://gjy3035.github.io/NWPU-Crowd-Sample-Code/. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is one of the most successful supervised dimensionality reduction methods and has been widely used in many real-world applications. However, ℓ2-norm is employed as the distance metric in the objective of LDA, which is sensitive to outliers. Many previous works improve the robustness of LDA by using ℓ1-norm distance. However, the robustness against outliers is limited and the solver of ℓ1-norm is mostly based on the greedy search strategy, which is time-consuming and easy to get stuck in a local optimum. In this paper, we propose a novel robust LDA measured by ℓ2,1-norm to learn robust discriminative projections. The proposed model is challenging to solve since it needs to minimize and maximize (minmax) ℓ2,1-norm terms simultaneously. As a result, we first systematically derive an efficient iterative optimization algorithm to solve a general ratio minimization problem, and then rigorously prove its convergence. More importantly, an alternately non-greedy iterative re-weighted optimization algorithm is developed based on the preceding approach for solving proposed ℓ2,1-norm minmax problem. Besides, an optimal weighted mean mechanism is driven according to the designed objective and solver, which can be applied to other approaches for robustness improvement. Experimental results on several real-world datasets show the effectiveness of proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectral clustering is a quite simple but effective method for solving graph clustering problem. It projects the original data points into a lower dimensional space with spectral embedding, and then relies on an algorithm to obtain the cluster labels. Since it involves eigendecomposition of the graph Laplacian matrix for embedding, spectral clustering has high time complexity and is not able to process large scale data. The performance of spectral clustering is also limited by a post-processing algorithm such as kmeans. To tackle the two issues, we propose a method called Orthogonal and Nonnegative Graph Reconstruction (ONGR) for large scale clustering. The two constraints serve as a structure constraint with which the graph reconstructed by the indicator matrix is structured. The proposed method has linear time complexity with respect to the data size that it mainly needs to implicitly construct a graph and iteratively perform economical singular value decomposition for a small size matrix. Moreover, the interpretability of the indicator matrix is offered due to the nonnegative constraint, and thus our method can provide the cluster labels with no post-processing. The experiments on benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed scalable clustering method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simultaneous feature selection and clustering is a major challenge in unsupervised learning. In particular, there has been significant research into saliency measures for features that result in good clustering. However, as datasets become larger and more complex, there is a need to adopt a finer-grained approach to saliency by measuring it in relation to a part of a model. Another issue is learning the feature saliency and advanced model parameters. We address the first by presenting a novel Gaussian mixture model, which explicitly models the dependency of individual mixture components on each feature giving a new component-based feature saliency measure. For the second, we use Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling to estimate the model and hidden variables. Using a synthetic dataset, we demonstrate the superiority of our approach, in terms of clustering accuracy and model parameter estimation, over an approach using a model-based feature saliency with expectation maximisation. We performed an evaluation of our approach with six synthetic trajectory datasets obtaining an average clustering accuracy of 97 percent. To demonstrate the generality of our approach, we applied it to a network traffic flow dataset obtaining an accuracy of 93 percent for intrusion detection. Finally, we performed a comparison with state-of-the-art clustering techniques using three real-world trajectory datasets of vehicle traffic. Our approach achieved an average clustering accuracy of 96 percent compared to 77-95 percent for the other techniques. In conclusion, for the datasets considered, component based feature saliency measures gave improved clustering over those based on whole models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dimensionality reduction has attracted much research interest in the past few decades. Existing dimensionality reduction methods like linear discriminant analysis and principal component analysis have achieved promising performance, but the single and linear projection properties limit further improvements of performance. A novel convolutional two-dimensional nonlinear discriminant analysis method is proposed for dimensionality reduction in this article. In order to handle nonlinear data properly, we present a newly designed structure with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to realize an equivalent objective function with classical two-dimensional linear discriminant analysis (2DLDA) and thus embed the original 2DLDA into an end-to-end network. In this way, the proposed dimensionality reduction network can utilize the nonlinearity of the CNN and benefit from the learning ability. The results of experiment on different image-related applications demonstrate that our method outperforms other comparable approaches, and its effectiveness is proved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semi-supervised learning models for multiview data are important in image classification tasks, since heterogeneous features are easy to obtain and semi-supervised schemes are economical and effective. To model the view importance, conventional graph-based multiview learning models learn a linear combination of views while assuming a priori weights distribution. In this paper, we present a novel structural regularized semi-supervised model for multiview data, termed Adaptive MUltiview SEmi-supervised model (AMUSE). Our new model learns weights from a priori graph structure, which is more reasonable than weight regularization. Theoretical analysis reveals the significant difference between AMUSE and the prior arts. An efficient optimization algorithm is provided to solve the new model. Experimental results on six real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the structural regularized weights learning scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many real-world applications, we are often confronted with high dimensional data which are represented by various heterogeneous views. How to cluster this kind of data is still a challenging problem due to the curse of dimensionality and effectively integration of different views. To address this problem, we propose two parameter-free weighted multi-view projected clustering methods which perform structured graph learning and dimensionality reduction simultaneously. We can use the obtained structured graph directly to extract the clustering indicators, without performing other discretization procedures as previous graph-based clustering methods have to do. Moreover, two parameter-free strategies are adopted to learn an optimal weight for each view automatically, without introducing a regularization parameter as previous methods do. Extensive experiments on several public datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform other state-of-the-art approaches and can be used more practically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better solve scale variance problem, deep multi-scale methods usually detect objects of different scales by different in-network layers. However, the semantic levels of features from different layers are usually inconsistent. In this paper, we propose a multi-branch and high-level semantic network by gradually splitting a base network into multiple different branches. As a result, the different branches have same depth and the output features of different branches have similarly high-level semantics. Due to the difference of receptive fields, the different branches are suitable to detect objects of different scales. Meanwhile, the multi-branch network does not introduce additional parameters by sharing the convolutional weights of different branches. To further improve detection performance, skip-layer connections are used to add context to the branch of relatively small receptive field, and dilated convolution is incorporated to enlarge the resolutions of output feature maps. When they are embedded into Faster RCNN architecture, the weighted scores of proposal generation network and proposal classification network are further proposed. Experiments on three pedestrian datasets (i.e., the KITTI dataset, the Caltech dataset, and the Citypersons dataset), one face dataset (i.e., the WIDER FACE dataset), and two general object datasets (i.e., the COCO benchmark and the PASCAL VOC dataset) demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of proposed method. On these datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) has drawn a significant attention of late due to its importance in many military and civilian applications. In this article, a fast hyperspectral anomaly detector that combines multiple features and isolation forest is proposed. This approach, which is based on the assumption that the anomalous pixels are more susceptible to isolation than the background pixels, consists of two main parts. First, the spectral, Gabor, extended morphological profile (EMP) and extended multiattribute profile (EMAP) features are extracted from the hyperspectral image (HSI). Next, the isolation forest of each feature is constructed using the subsampling strategy. This combination of multiple features can exploit both the spectral and spatial information of the HSI, thereby improving the anomaly detection performance significantly. Compared with eight state-of-the-art HAD methods, the experimental results on four real hyperspectral data sets demonstrate that the performance of our proposed approach is quite competitive in terms of detection accuracy and running time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dictionary learning plays a significant role in the field of machine learning. Existing works mainly focus on learning dictionary from a single domain. In this paper, we propose a novel projective double reconstructions (PDR) based dictionary learning algorithm for cross-domain recognition. Owing the distribution discrepancy between different domains, the label information is hard utilized for improving discriminability of dictionary fully. Thus, we propose a more flexible label consistent term and associate it with each dictionary item, which makes the reconstruction coefficients have more discriminability as much as possible. Due to the intrinsic correlation between cross-domain data, the data should be reconstructed with each other. Based on this consideration, we further propose a projective double reconstructions scheme to guarantee that the learned dictionary has the abilities of data itself reconstruction and data cross-reconstruction. This also guarantees that the data from different domains can be boosted mutually for obtaining a good data alignment, making the learned dictionary have more transferability. We integrate the double reconstructions, label consistency constraint and classifier learning into a unified objective and its solution can be obtained by proposed optimization algorithm that is more efficient than the conventional $\ell _{1}$ optimization based dictionary learning methods. The experiments show that the proposed PDR not only greatly reduces the time complexity for both training and testing, but also outperforms over the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success in several face-related tasks, such as face detection, alignment and recognition. As a fundamental problem in computer vision, face tracking plays a crucial role in various applications, such as video surveillance, human emotion detection and human-computer interaction. However, few CNN-based approaches are proposed for face (bounding box) tracking. In this article, we propose a face tracking method based on Siamese CNNs, which takes advantages of powerful representations of hierarchical CNN features learned from massive face images. The proposed method captures discriminative face information at both local and global levels. At the local level, representations for attribute patches (i.e., eyes, nose and mouth) are learned to distinguish a face from another one, which are robust to pose changes and occlusions. At the global level, representations for each whole face are learned, which take into account the spatial relationships among local patches and facial characters, such as skin color and nevus. In addition, we build a new large-scale challenging face tracking dataset to evaluate face tracking methods and to facilitate the research forward in this field. Extensive experiments on the collected dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in comparison to several state-of-the-art visual tracking methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small-scale pedestrian detection and occluded pedestrian detection are two challenging tasks. However, most state-of-the-art methods merely handle one single task each time, thus giving rise to relatively poor performance when the two tasks, in practice, are required simultaneously. In this paper, it is found that small-scale pedestrian detection and occluded pedestrian detection actually have a common problem, i.e., an inaccurate location problem. Therefore, solving this problem enables to improve the performance of both tasks. To this end, we pay more attention to the predicted bounding box with worse location precision and extract more contextual information around objects, where two modules (i.e., location bootstrap and semantic transition) are proposed. The location bootstrap is used to reweight regression loss, where the loss of the predicted bounding box far from the corresponding ground-truth is upweighted and the loss of the predicted bounding box near the corresponding ground-truth is downweighted. Additionally, the semantic transition adds more contextual information and relieves semantic inconsistency of the skip-layer fusion. Since the location bootstrap is not used at the test stage and the semantic transition is lightweight, the proposed method does not add many extra computational costs during inference. Experiments on the challenging CityPersons and Caltech datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the small-scale pedestrians and occluded pedestrians (e.g., 5.20% and 4.73% improvements on the Caltech). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subspace learning based transfer learning methods commonly find a common subspace where the discrepancy of the source and target domains is reduced. The final classification is also performed in such subspace. However, the minimum discrepancy does not guarantee the best classification performance and thus the common subspace may be not the best discriminative. In this paper, we propose a latent elastic-net transfer learning (LET) method by simultaneously learning a latent subspace and a discriminative subspace. Specifically, the data from different domains can be well interlaced in the latent subspace by minimizing Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). Since the latent subspace decouples inputs and outputs and, thus a more compact data representation is obtained for discriminative subspace learning. Based on the latent subspace, we further propose a low-rank constraint based matrix elastic-net regression to learn another subspace in which the intrinsic intra-class structure correlations of data from different domains is well captured. In doing so, a better discriminative alignment is guaranteed and thus LET finally learns another discriminative subspace for classification. Experiments on visual domains adaptation tasks show the superiority of the proposed LET method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smoke density estimation from a single image is a totally new but highly ill-posed problem. To solve the problem, we stack several convolutional encoder-decoder structures together to propose a wave-shaped neural network, termed W-Net. Stacking encoder-decoders directly increases the network depth, leading to the enlargement of receptive fields for encoding more semantic information. To maximize the degrees of feature re-usage, we copy and resize the outputs of encoding layers to corresponding decoding layers, and then concatenate them to implement short-cut connections for improving spatial accuracy. The crests and troughs of W-Net are special structures containing abundant localization and semantic information, so we also use short-cut connections between these structures and decoding layers. Estimated smoke density is useful in many applications, such as smoke segmentation, smoke detection, disaster simulation. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing methods on both smoke density estimation and segmentation. It also achieves satisfying results in visual detection of auto exhausts. [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]

The human action is an important information source for human social interaction, and it simultaneously plays a crucial role in human–robot interaction (HRI). For a natural and fluent interaction, robots are required to understand human actions and have the capacity to predict action intentions and to imitate human actions for an appropriate response. Currently, existing survey papers for the action recognition mainly summarize algorithms that perform action recognition in experimental scenarios, and survey papers of the HRI mainly introduced various interaction interfaces in the HRI. Different from these surveys, we focus on the human action analysis on robot platforms for the HRI application, including the body motion and gestures. We review the existing HRI related references involving the action recognition, prediction, and the robot imitation of the human action. Moreover, we give a summary of robot platforms and action datasets that are frequently used in the study of HRI. Finally, we give an analysis on the development trend and future research directions of action analysis for the HRI applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]