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Digitally unwrapping images of paper sheets is crucial for accurate document scanning and text recognition. This paper presents a method for automatically rectifying curved or folded paper sheets from a few images captured from multiple viewpoints. Prior methods either need expensive 3D scanners or model deformable surfaces using over-simplified parametric representations. In contrast, our method uses regular images and is based on general developable surface models that can represent a wide variety of paper deformations. Our main contribution is a new robust rectification method based on ridge-aware 3D reconstruction of a paper sheet and unwrapping the reconstructed surface using properties of developable surfaces via $\ell _1$ conformal mapping. We present results on several examples including book pages, folded letters and shopping receipts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attacks the challenging problem of video retrieval by text. In such a retrieval paradigm, an end user searches for unlabeled videos by ad-hoc queries described exclusively in the form of a natural-language sentence, with no visual example provided. Given videos as sequences of frames and queries as sequences of words, an effective sequence-to-sequence cross-modal matching is crucial. To that end, the two modalities need to be first encoded into real-valued vectors and then projected into a common space. In this paper we achieve this by proposing a dual deep encoding network that encodes videos and queries into powerful dense representations of their own. Our novelty is two-fold. First, different from prior art that resorts to a specific single-level encoder, the proposed network performs multi-level encoding that represents the rich content of both modalities in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Second, different from a conventional common space learning algorithm which is either concept based or latent space based, we introduce hybrid space learning which combines the high performance of the latent space and the good interpretability of the concept space. Dual encoding is conceptually simple, practically effective and end-to-end trained with hybrid space learning. Extensive experiments on four challenging video datasets show the viability of the new method. Code and data are available at https://github.com/danieljf24/hybrid_space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem of matching common node correspondences among multiple graphs referring to an identical or related structure. This multi-graph matching problem involves two correlated components: i) the local pairwise matching affinity across pairs of graphs; ii) the global matching consistency that measures the uniqueness of the pairwise matchings by different composition orders. Previous studies typically either enforce the matching consistency constraints in the beginning of an iterative optimization, which may propagate matching error both over iterations and across graph pairs; or separate affinity optimization and consistency enforcement into two steps. This paper is motivated by the observation that matching consistency can serve as a regularizer in the affinity objective function especially when the function is biased due to noises or inappropriate modeling. We propose composition-based multi-graph matching methods to incorporate the two aspects by optimizing the affinity score, meanwhile gradually infusing the consistency. We also propose two mechanisms to elicit the common inliers against outliers. Compelling results on synthetic and real images show the competency of our algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents regional attraction of line segment maps, and hereby poses the problem of line segment detection (LSD) as a problem of region coloring. Given a line segment map, the proposed regional attraction first establishes the relationship between line segments and regions in the image lattice. Based on this, the line segment map is equivalently transformed to an attraction field map (AFM), which can be remapped to a set of line segments without loss of information. Accordingly, we develop an end-to-end framework to learn attraction field maps for raw input images, followed by a squeeze module to detect line segments. Apart from existing works, the proposed detector properly handles the local ambiguity and does not rely on the accurate identification of edge pixels. Comprehensive experiments on the Wireframe dataset and the YorkUrban dataset demonstrate the superiority of our method. In particular, we achieve an F-measure of 0.831 on the Wireframe dataset, advancing the state-of-the-art performance by 10.3 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In crowdsourced preference aggregation, it is often assumed that all the annotators are subject to a common preference or social utility function which generates their comparison behaviors in experiments. However, in reality, annotators are subject to variations due to multi-criteria, abnormal, or a mixture of such behaviors. In this paper, we propose a parsimonious mixed-effects model, which takes into account both the fixed effect that the majority of annotators follows a common linear utility model, and the random effect that some annotators might deviate from the common significantly and exhibit strongly personalized preferences. The key algorithm in this paper establishes a dynamic path from the social utility to individual variations, with different levels of sparsity on personalization. The algorithm is based on the Linearized Bregman Iterations, which leads to easy parallel implementations to meet the need of large-scale data analysis. In this unified framework, three kinds of random utility models are presented, including the basic linear model with $L_2$ loss, Bradley-Terry model, and Thurstone-Mosteller model. The validity of these multi-level models are supported by experiments with both simulated and real-world datasets, which shows that the parsimonious multi-level models exhibit improvements in both interpretability and predictive precision compared with traditional HodgeRank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though many tasks in computer vision can be formulated elegantly as pixel-labeling problems, a typical challenge discouraging such a discrete formulation is often due to computational efficiency. Recent studies on fast cost volume filtering based on efficient edge-aware filters provide a fast alternative to solve discrete labeling problems, with the complexity independent of the support window size. However, these methods still have to step through the entire cost volume exhaustively, which makes the solution speed scale linearly with the label space size. When the label space is huge or even infinite, which is often the case for (subpixel-accurate) stereo and optical flow estimation, their computational complexity becomes quickly unacceptable. Developed to search approximate nearest neighbors rapidly, the PatchMatch method can significantly reduce the complexity dependency on the search space size. But, its pixel-wise randomized search and fragmented data access within the 3D cost volume seriously hinder the application of efficient cost slice filtering. This paper presents a generic and fast computational framework for general multi-labeling problems called PatchMatch Filter (PMF). We explore effective and efficient strategies to weave together these two fundamental techniques developed in isolation, i.e., PatchMatch-based randomized search and efficient edge-aware image filtering. By decompositing an image into compact superpixels, we also propose superpixel-based novel search strategies that generalize and improve the original PatchMatch method. Further motivated to improve the regularization strength, we propose a simple yet effective cross-scale consistency constraint, which handles labeling estimation for large low-textured regions more reliably than a single-scale PMF algorithm. Focusing on dense correspondence field estimation in this paper, we demonstrate PMF’s applications in stereo and optical flow. Our PMF methods achieve top-tier correspondence accuracy but run much faster than other related competing methods, often giving over 10-100 times speedup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting coherent groups is fundamentally important for crowd behavior analysis. In the past few decades, plenty of works have been conducted on this topic, but most of them have limitations due to the insufficient utilization of crowd properties and the arbitrary processing of individuals. In this study, a Multiview-based Parameter Free framework (MPF) is proposed. Based on the L1-norm and L2-norm, we design two versions of the multiview clustering method, which is the main part of the proposed framework. This paper presents the contributions on three aspects: (1) a new structural context descriptor is designed to characterize the structural properties of individuals in crowd scenes; (2) a self-weighted multiview clustering method is proposed to cluster feature points by incorporating their orientation and context similarities; and (3) a novel framework is introduced for group detection, which is able to determine the group number automatically without any parameter or threshold to be tuned. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is evaluated on real-world crowd videos, and the experimental results show its promising performance on group detection. In addition, the proposed multiview clustering method is also evaluated on a synthetic dataset and several standard benchmarks, and its superiority over the state-of-the-art competitors is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-scale representations deeply learned via convolutional neural networks have shown tremendous importance for various pixel-level prediction problems. In this paper we present a novel approach that advances the state of the art on pixel-level prediction in a fundamental aspect, i.e. structured multi-scale features learning and fusion. In contrast to previous works directly considering multi-scale feature maps obtained from the inner layers of a primary CNN architecture, and simply fusing the features with weighted averaging or concatenation, we propose a probabilistic graph attention network structure based on a novel Attention-Gated Conditional Random Fields (AG-CRFs) model for learning and fusing multi-scale representations in a principled manner. In order to further improve the learning capacity of the network structure, we propose to exploit feature dependant conditional kernels within the deep probabilistic framework. Extensive experiments are conducted on four publicly available datasets (i.e. BSDS500, NYUD-V2, KITTI and Pascal-Context) and on three challenging pixel-wise prediction problems involving both discrete and continuous labels (i.e. monocular depth estimation, object contour prediction and semantic segmentation). Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed latent AG-CRF model and the overall probabilistic graph attention network with feature conditional kernels for structured feature learning and pixel-wise prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part-level representations are important for robust person re-identification (ReID), but in practice feature quality suffers due to the body part misalignment problem. In this paper, we present a robust, compact, and easy-to-use method called the Multi-task Part-aware Network (MPN), which is designed to extract semantically aligned part-level features from pedestrian images. MPN solves the body part misalignment problem via multi-task learning (MTL) in the training stage. More specifically, it builds one main task (MT) and one auxiliary task (AT) for each body part on the top of the same backbone model. The ATs are equipped with a coarse prior of the body part locations for training images. ATs then transfer the concept of the body parts to the MTs via optimizing the MT parameters to identify part-relevant channels from the backbone model. Concept transfer is accomplished by means of two novel alignment strategies: namely, parameter space alignment via hard parameter sharing and feature space alignment in a class-wise manner. With the aid of the learned high-quality parameters, MTs can independently extract semantically aligned part-level features from relevant channels in the testing stage. MPN has three key advantages: 1) it does not need to conduct body part detection in the inference stage; 2) its model is very compact and efficient for both training and testing; 3) in the training stage, it requires only coarse priors of body part locations, which are easy to obtain. Systematic experiments on four large-scale ReID databases demonstrate that MPN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by significant margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most object detectors contain two important components: a feature extractor and an object classifier. The feature extractor has rapidly evolved with significant research efforts leading to better deep convolutional architectures. The object classifier, however, has not received much attention and many recent systems (like SPPnet and Fast/Faster R-CNN) use simple multi-layer perceptrons. This paper demonstrates that carefully designing deep networks for object classification is just as important. We experiment with region-wise classifier networks that use shared, region-independent convolutional features. We call them “Networks on Convolutional feature maps” (NoCs). We discover that aside from deep feature maps, a deep and convolutional per-region classifier is of particular importance for object detection, whereas latest superior image classification models (such as ResNets and GoogLeNets) do not directly lead to good detection accuracy without using such a per-region classifier. We show by experiments that despite the effective ResNets and Faster R-CNN systems, the design of NoCs is an essential element for the 1st-place winning entries in ImageNet and MS COCO challenges 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies the problem of recovering the authentic samples that lie on a union of multiple subspaces from their corrupted observations. Due to the high-dimensional and massive nature of today’s data-driven community, it is arguable that the target matrix (i.e., authentic sample matrix) to recover is often low-rank. In this case, the recently established Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) method already provides us a convenient way to solve the problem of recovering mixture data. However, in general, RPCA is not good enough because the incoherent condition assumed by RPCA is not so consistent with the mixture structure of multiple subspaces. Namely, when the subspace number grows, the row-coherence of data keeps heightening and, accordingly, RPCA degrades. To overcome the challenges arising from mixture data, we suggest to consider LRR in this paper. We elucidate that LRR can well handle mixture data, as long as its dictionary is configured appropriately. More precisely, we mathematically prove that LRR can weaken the dependence on the row-coherence, provided that the dictionary is well-conditioned and has a rank of not too high. In particular, if the dictionary itself is sufficiently low-rank, then the dependence on the row-coherence can be completely removed. These provide some elementary principles for dictionary learning and naturally lead to a practical algorithm for recovering mixture data. Our experiments on randomly generated matrices and real motion sequences show promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an efficient algorithm for solving orthogonal canonical correlation analysis (OCCA) in the form of trace-fractional structure and orthogonal linear projections. Even though orthogonality has been widely used and proved to be a useful criterion for visualization, pattern recognition and feature extraction, existing methods for solving OCCA problem are either numerically unstable by relying on a deflation scheme, or less efficient by directly using generic optimization methods. In this paper, we propose an alternating numerical scheme whose core is the sub-maximization problem in the trace-fractional form with an orthogonality constraint. A customized self-consistent-field (SCF) iteration for this sub-maximization problem is devised. It is proved that the SCF iteration is globally convergent to a KKT point and that the alternating numerical scheme always converges. We further formulate a new trace-fractional maximization problem for orthogonal multiset CCA and propose an efficient algorithm with an either Jacobi-style or Gauss-Seidel-style updating scheme based on the SCF iteration. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms against existing methods, including real-world applications of multi-label classification and multi-view feature extraction. Experimental results show that our methods not only perform competitively to or better than the existing methods but also are more efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detectors based on deep learning tend to detect multi-scale objects on a single input image for efficiency. Recent works, such as FPN and SSD, generally use feature maps from multiple layers with different spatial resolutions to detect objects at different scales, e.g., high-resolution feature maps for small objects. However, we find that objects at all scales can also be well detected with features from a single layer of the network. In this paper, we carefully examine the factors affecting detection performance across a large range of scales, and conclude that the balance of training samples, including both positive and negative ones, at different scales is the key. We propose a group sampling method which divides the anchors into several groups according to the scale, and ensure that the number of samples for each group is the same during training. Our approach using only one single layer of FPN as features is able to advance the state-of-the-arts. Comprehensive analysis and extensive experiments have been conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Moreover, we show that our approach is favorably applicable to other tasks, such as object detection on COCO dataset, and to other detection pipelines, such as YOLOv3, SSD and R-FCN. Our approach, evaluated on face detection benchmarks including FDDB and WIDER FACE datasets, achieves state-of-the-art results without bells and whistles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiview clustering partitions data into different groups according to their heterogeneous features. Most existing methods degenerate the applicability of models due to their intractable hyper-parameters triggered by various regularization terms. Moreover, traditional spectral based methods always encounter the expensive time overheads and fail in exploring the explicit clusters from graphs. In this paper, we present a scalable and parameter-free graph fusion framework for multiview clustering, seeking for a joint graph compatible across multiple views in a self-supervised weighting manner. Our formulation coalesces multiple view-wise graphs straightforward and learns the weights as well as the joint graph interactively, which could actively release the model from any weight-related hyper-parameters. Meanwhile, we manipulate the joint graph by a connectivity constraint such that the connected components indicate clusters directly. The designed algorithm is initialization-independent and time-economical which obtains the stable performance and scales well with the data size. Substantial experiments on toy data as well as real datasets are conducted that verify the superiority of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-arts over the clustering performance and time expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representation-based classification (RC) methods such as sparse RC (SRC) have attracted great interest in pattern recognition recently. Despite their empirical success, few theoretical results are reported to justify their effectiveness. In this paper, we establish the theoretical guarantees for a general unified framework termed as atomic representation-based classification (ARC), which includes most RC methods as special cases. We introduce a new condition called atomic classification condition (ACC), which reveals important geometric insights for the theory of ARC. We show that under such condition ARC is provably effective in correctly recognizing any new test sample, even corrupted with noise. Our theoretical analysis significantly broadens the range of conditions under which RC methods succeed for classification in the following two aspects: (1) prior theoretical advances of RC are mainly concerned with the single SRC method while our theory can apply to the general unified ARC framework, including SRC and many other RC methods; and (2) previous works are confined to the analysis of noiseless test data while we provide theoretical guarantees for ARC using both noiseless and noisy test data. Numerical results are provided to validate and complement our theoretical analysis of ARC and its important special cases for both noiseless and noisy test data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we tackle the problem of common object (multiple classes) discovery from a set of input images, where we assume the presence of one object class in each image. This problem is, loosely speaking, unsupervised since we do not know a priori about the object type, location, and scale in each image. We observe that the general task of object class discovery in a fully unsupervised manner is intrinsically ambiguous; here we adopt saliency detection to propose candidate image windows/patches to turn an unsupervised learning problem into a weakly-supervised learning problem. In the paper, we propose an algorithm for simultaneously localizing objects and discovering object classes via bottom-up (saliency-guided) multiple class learning (bMCL). Our contributions are three-fold: (1) we adopt saliency detection to convert unsupervised learning into multiple instance learning, formulated as bottom-up multiple class learning (bMCL); (2) we propose an integrated framework that simultaneously performs object localization, object class discovery, and object detector training; (3) we demonstrate that our framework yields significant improvements over existing methods for multi-class object discovery and possess evident advantages over competing methods in computer vision. In addition, although saliency detection has recently attracted much attention, its practical usage for high-level vision tasks has yet to be justified. Our method validates the usefulness of saliency detection to output “noisy input” for a top-down method to extract common patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a method for localizing functional objects and predicting human intents and trajectories in surveillance videos of public spaces, under no supervision in training. People in public spaces are expected to intentionally take shortest paths (subject to obstacles) toward certain objects (e.g., vending machine, picnic table, dumpster etc.) where they can satisfy certain needs (e.g., quench thirst). Since these objects are typically very small or heavily occluded, they cannot be inferred by their visual appearance but indirectly by their influence on people's trajectories. Therefore, we call them “dark matter”, by analogy to cosmology, since their presence can only be observed as attractive or repulsive “fields” in the public space. A person in the scene is modeled as an intelligent agent engaged in one of the “fields” selected depending his/her intent. An agent's trajectory is derived from an Agent-based Lagrangian Mechanics. The agents can change their intents in the middle of motion and thus alter the trajectory. For evaluation, we compiled and annotated a new dataset. The results demonstrate our effectiveness in predicting human intent behaviors and trajectories, and localizing and discovering distinct types of “dark matter” in wide public spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the observables at particular time instants in a temporal sequence exhibit dependencies, they are not independent samples. Thus, it is not plausible to apply i.i.d. assumption-based dimensionality reduction methods to sequence data. This paper presents a novel supervised dimensionality reduction approach for sequence data, called Linear Sequence Discriminant Analysis (LSDA). It learns a linear discriminative projection of the feature vectors in sequences to a lower-dimensional subspace by maximizing the separability of the sequence classes such that the entire sequences are holistically discriminated. The sequence class separability is constructed based on the sequence statistics, and the use of different statistics produces different LSDA methods. This paper presents and compares two novel LSDA methods, namely M-LSDA and D-LSDA. M-LSDA extracts model-based statistics by exploiting the dynamical structure of the sequence classes, and D-LSDA extracts the distance-based statistics by computing the pairwise similarity of samples from the same sequence class. Extensive experiments on several different tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness and the general applicability of the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object detection has recently experienced substantial progress. Yet, the widely adopted horizontal bounding box representation is not appropriate for ubiquitous oriented objects such as objects in aerial images and scene texts. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework to detect multi-oriented objects. Instead of directly regressing the four vertices, we glide the vertex of the horizontal bounding box on each corresponding side to accurately describe a multi-oriented object. Specifically, We regress four length ratios characterizing the relative gliding offset on each corresponding side. This may facilitate the offset learning and avoid the confusion issue of sequential label points for oriented objects. To further remedy the confusion issue for nearly horizontal objects, we also introduce an obliquity factor based on area ratio between the object and its horizontal bounding box, guiding the selection of horizontal or oriented detection for each object. We add these five extra target variables to the regression head of faster R-CNN, which requires ignorable extra computation time. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that without bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves superior performances on multiple multi-oriented object detection benchmarks including object detection in aerial images, scene text detection, pedestrian detection in fisheye images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often, tasks are collected for multi-task learning (MTL) because they share similar feature structures. Based on this observation, in this paper, we present novel algorithm-dependent generalization bounds for MTL by exploiting the notion of algorithmic stability. We focus on the performance of one particular task and the average performance over multiple tasks by analyzing the generalization ability of a common parameter that is shared in MTL. When focusing on one particular task, with the help of a mild assumption on the feature structures, we interpret the function of the other tasks as a regularizer that produces a specific inductive bias. The algorithm for learning the common parameter, as well as the predictor, is thereby uniformly stable with respect to the domain of the particular task and has a generalization bound with a fast convergence rate of order \mathcal O(1/n), where n is the sample size of the particular task. When focusing on the average performance over multiple tasks, we prove that a similar inductive bias exists under certain conditions on the feature structures. Thus, the corresponding algorithm for learning the common parameter is also uniformly stable with respect to the domains of the multiple tasks, and its generalization bound is of the order \mathcal {O}(1/T) , where T$ is the number of tasks. These theoretical analyses naturally show that the similarity of feature structures in MTL will lead to specific regularizations for predicting, which enables the learning algorithms to generalize fast and correctly from a few examples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper casts surface registration as the problem of finding a set of discrete correspondences through the minimization of an energy function, which is composed of geometric and appearance matching costs, as well as higher-order deformation priors. Two higher-order graph-based formulations are proposed under different deformation assumptions. The first formulation encodes isometric deformations using conformal geometry in a higher-order graph matching problem, which is solved through dual-decomposition and is able to handle partial matching. Despite the isometry assumption, this approach is able to robustly match sparse feature point sets on surfaces undergoing highly anisometric deformations. Nevertheless, its performance degrades significantly when addressing anisometric registration for a set of densely sampled points. This issue is rigorously addressed subsequently through a novel deformation model that is able to handle arbitrary diffeomorphisms between two surfaces. Such a deformation model is introduced into a higher-order Markov Random Field for dense surface registration, and is inferred using a new parallel and memory efficient algorithm. To deal with the prohibitive search space, we also design an efficient way to select a number of matching candidates for each point of the source surface based on the matching results of a sparse set of points. A series of experiments demonstrate the accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed framework, notably in challenging cases of large and/or anisometric deformations, or surfaces that are partially occluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Object detection is one of the most important challenges in computer vision. Object detectors are usually trained on bounding-boxes from still images. Recently, video has been used as an alternative source of data. Yet, for a given test domain (image or video), the performance of the detector depends on the domain it was trained on. In this paper, we examine the reasons behind this performance gap. We define and evaluate different domain shift factors: spatial location accuracy, appearance diversity, image quality and aspect distribution. We examine the impact of these factors by comparing performance before and after factoring them out. The results show that all four factors affect the performance of the detectors and their combined effect explains nearly the whole performance gap. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Weakly Supervised Object Detection (WSOD), using only image-level annotations to train object detectors, is of growing importance in object recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel deep network for WSOD. Unlike previous networks that transfer the object detection problem to an image classification problem using Multiple Instance Learning (MIL), our strategy generates proposal clusters to learn refined instance classifiers by an iterative process. The proposals in the same cluster are spatially adjacent and associated with the same object. This prevents the network from concentrating too much on parts of objects instead of whole objects. We first show that instances can be assigned object or background labels directly based on proposal clusters for instance classifier refinement, and then show that treating each cluster as a small new bag yields fewer ambiguities than the directly assigning label method. The iterative instance classifier refinement is implemented online using multiple streams in convolutional neural networks, where the first is an MIL network and the others are for instance classifier refinement supervised by the preceding one. Experiments are conducted on the PASCAL VOC, ImageNet detection, and MS-COCO benchmarks for WSOD. Results show that our method outperforms the previous state of the art significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of cross-domain matching (CDM) is to find correspondences between two sets of objects in different domains in an unsupervised way. CDM has various interesting applications, including photo album summarization where photos are automatically aligned into a designed frame expressed in the Cartesian coordinate system, and temporal alignment which aligns sequences such as videos that are potentially expressed using different features. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic CDM framework based on squared-loss mutual information (SMI). The proposed approach can directly handle non-linearly related objects/sequences with different dimensions, with the ability that hyper-parameters can be objectively optimized by cross-validation. We apply the proposed method to several real-world problems including image matching, unpaired voice conversion, photo album summarization, cross-feature video and cross-domain video-to-mocap alignment, and Kinect-based action recognition, and experimentally demonstrate that the proposed method is a promising alternative to state-of-the-art CDM methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) is a successful technique in multi-class classification, which is a core problem in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. A major advantage of ECOC over other methods is that the multi-class problem is decoupled into a set of binary problems that are solved independently. However, literature defines a general error-correcting capability for ECOCs without analyzing how it distributes among classes, hindering a deeper analysis of pair-wise error-correction. To address these limitations this paper proposes an Error-Correcting Factorization (ECF) method. Our contribution is three fold: (I) We propose a novel representation of the error-correction capability, called the design matrix, that enables us to build an ECOC on the basis of allocating correction to pairs of classes. (II) We derive the optimal code length of an ECOC using rank properties of the design matrix. (III) ECF is formulated as a discrete optimization problem, and a relaxed solution is found using an efficient constrained block coordinate descent approach. (IV) Enabled by the flexibility introduced with the design matrix we propose to allocate the error-correction on classes that are prone to confusion. Experimental results in several databases show that when allocating the error-correction to confusable classes ECF outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a method for line segment detection in digital images. We propose a novel linelet-based representation to model intrinsic properties of line segments in rasterized image space. Based on this, line segment detection, validation, and aggregation frameworks are constructed. For a numerical evaluation on real images, we propose a new benchmark dataset of real images with annotated lines called YorkUrban-LineSegment. The results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods numerically and visually. To our best knowledge, this is the first report of numerical evaluation of line segment detection on real images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently, significant improvement has been made on semantic object segmentation due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). Training such a DCNN usually relies on a large number of images with pixel-level segmentation masks, and annotating these images is very costly in terms of both finance and human effort. In this paper, we propose a simple to complex (STC) framework in which only image-level annotations are utilized to learn DCNNs for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we first train an initial segmentation network called Initial-DCNN with the saliency maps of simple images (i.e., those with a single category of major object(s) and clean background). These saliency maps can be automatically obtained by existing bottom-up salient object detection techniques, where no supervision information is needed. Then, a better network called Enhanced-DCNN is learned with supervision from the predicted segmentation masks of simple images based on the Initial-DCNN as well as the image-level annotations. Finally, more pixel-level segmentation masks of complex images (two or more categories of objects with cluttered background), which are inferred by using Enhanced-DCNN and image-level annotations, are utilized as the supervision information to learn the Powerful-DCNN for semantic segmentation. Our method utilizes 40K simple images from Flickr.com and 10K complex images from PASCAL VOC for step-wisely boosting the segmentation network. Extensive experimental results on PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark well demonstrate the superiority of the proposed STC framework compared with other state-of-the-arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluating image segmentation quality is a critical step for generating desirable segmented output and comparing performance of algorithms, among others. However, automatic evaluation of segmented results is inherently challenging since image segmentation is an ill-posed problem. This paper presents a framework to evaluate segmentation quality using multiple labeled segmentations which are considered as references. For a segmentation to be evaluated, we adaptively compose a reference segmentation using multiple labeled segmentations, which locally matches the input segments while preserving structural consistency. The quality of a given segmentation is then measured by its distance to the composed reference. A new dataset of 200 images, where each one has 6 to 15 labeled segmentations, is developed for performance evaluation of image segmentation. Furthermore, to quantitatively compare the proposed segmentation evaluation algorithm with the state-of-the-art methods, a benchmark segmentation evaluation dataset is proposed. Extensive experiments are carried out to validate the proposed segmentation evaluation framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trajectory analysis is essential in many applications. In this paper, we address the problem of representing motion trajectories in a highly informative way, and consequently utilize it for analyzing trajectories. Our approach first leverages the complete information from given trajectories to construct a thermal transfer field which provides a context-rich way to describe the global motion pattern in a scene. Then, a 3D tube is derived which depicts an input trajectory by integrating its surrounding motion patterns contained in the thermal transfer field. The 3D tube effectively: 1) maintains the movement information of a trajectory, 2) embeds the complete contextual motion pattern around a trajectory, 3) visualizes information about a trajectory in a clear and unified way. We further introduce a droplet-based process. It derives a droplet vector from a 3D tube, so as to characterize the high-dimensional 3D tube information in a simple but effective way. Finally, we apply our tube-and-droplet representation to trajectory analysis applications including trajectory clustering, trajectory classification & abnormality detection, and 3D action recognition. Experimental comparisons with state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recently proposed low-rank representation (LRR) method has been empirically shown to be useful in various tasks such as motion segmentation, image segmentation, saliency detection and face recognition. While potentially powerful, LRR depends heavily on the configuration of its key parameter, $\lambda$ . In realistic environments where the prior knowledge about data is lacking, however, it is still unknown how to choose $\lambda$ in a suitable way. Even more, there is a lack of rigorous analysis about the success conditions of the method, and thus the significance of LRR is a little bit vague. In this paper we therefore establish a theoretical analysis for LRR, striving for figuring out under which conditions LRR can be successful, and deriving a moderately good estimate to the key parameter $\lambda$ as well. Simulations on synthetic data points and experiments on real motion sequences verify our claims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Active learning techniques have gained popularity to reduce human effort in labeling data instances for inducing a classifier. When faced with large amounts of unlabeled data, such algorithms automatically identify the exemplar instances for manual annotation. More recently, there have been attempts towards a batch mode form of active learning, where a batch of data points is simultaneously selected from an unlabeled set. In this paper, we propose two novel batch mode active learning (BMAL) algorithms: BatchRank and BatchRand. We first formulate the batch selection task as an NP-hard optimization problem; we then propose two convex relaxations, one based on linear programming and the other based on semi-definite programming to solve the batch selection problem. Finally, a deterministic bound is derived on the solution quality for the first relaxation and a probabilistic bound for the second. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research effort to derive mathematical guarantees on the solution quality of the BMAL problem. Our extensive empirical studies on $15$ binary, multi-class and multi-label challenging datasets corroborate that the proposed algorithms perform at par with the state-of-the-art techniques, deliver high quality solutions and are robust to real-world issues like label noise and class imbalance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Subspace clustering is an effective method that has been successfully applied to many applications. Here, we propose a novel subspace clustering model for multi-view data using a latent representation termed Latent Multi-View Subspace Clustering (LMSC). Unlike most existing single-view subspace clustering methods, which directly reconstruct data points using original features, our method explores underlying complementary information from multiple views and simultaneously seeks the underlying latent representation. Using the complementarity of multiple views, the latent representation depicts data more comprehensively than each individual view, accordingly making subspace representation more accurate and robust. We proposed two LMSC formulations: linear LMSC (lLMSC), based on linear correlations between latent representation and each view, and generalized LMSC (gLMSC), based on neural networks to handle general relationships. The proposed method can be efficiently optimized under the Augmented Lagrangian Multiplier with Alternating Direction Minimization (ALM-ADM) framework. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a large variation in the activities that humans perform in their everyday lives. We consider modeling these composite human activities which comprises multiple basic level actions in a completely unsupervised setting. Our model learns high-level co-occurrence and temporal relations between the actions. We consider the video as a sequence of short-term action clips, which contains human-words and object-words. An activity is about a set of action-topics and object-topics indicating which actions are present and which objects are interacting with. We then propose a new probabilistic model relating the words and the topics. It allows us to model long-range action relations that commonly exist in the composite activities, which is challenging in previous works. We apply our model to the unsupervised action segmentation and clustering, and to a novel application that detects forgotten actions, which we call action patching. For evaluation, we contribute a new challenging RGB-D activity video dataset recorded by the new Kinect v2, which contains several human daily activities as compositions of multiple actions interacting with different objects. Moreover, we develop a robotic system that watches and reminds people using our action patching algorithm. Our robotic setup can be easily deployed on any assistive robots. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We comment on a paper that describes a closed-form formulation to Tensor Voting, a technique to perceptually group clouds of points, usually applied to infer features in images. The authors proved an analytic solution to the technique, a highly relevant contribution considering that the original formulation required numerical integration, a time-consuming task. Their work constitutes the first closed-form expression for the Tensor Voting framework. In this work we first observe that the proposed formulation leads to unexpected results which do not satisfy the constraints for a Tensor Voting output, hence they cannot be interpreted. Given that the closed-form expression is said to be an analytic equivalent solution, unexpected outputs should not be encountered unless there are flaws in the proof. We analyzed the underlying math to find which were the causes of these unexpected results. In this commentary we show that their proposal does not in fact provide a proper analytic solution to Tensor Voting and we indicate the flaws in the proof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wiberg matrix factorization breaks a matrix $Y$ into low-rank factors $U$ and $V$ by solving for $V$ in closed form given $U$ , linearizing $V(U)$ about $U$ , and iteratively minimizing $Y - UV(U)_2$ with respect to $U$ only. This approach factors the matrix while effectively removing $V$ from the minimization. Recently Eriksson and van den Hengel extended this approach to $L_1$ , minimizing $Y - UV(U)_1$ . We generalize their approach beyond factorization to minimize $Y - f(U, V)_1$ for more general functions $f(U, V)$ that are nonlinear in each of two sets of variables. We demonstrate the idea with a practical Wiberg algorithm for $L_1$ bundle adjustment. One Wiberg minimization can be nested inside another, effectively removing two of three sets of variables from a minimization. We demonstrate this idea with a nested Wiberg algorithm for $L_1$ projective bundle adjustment, solving for camera matrices, points, and projective depths. Wiberg minimization also generalizes to handle nonlinear constraints, and we demonstrate this idea with Constrained Wiberg Minimization for Multiple Instance Learning (CWM-MIL), which removes one set of variables from the constrained optimization. Our experiments emphasize isolating the effect of Wiberg by comparing against the algorithm it modifies, successive linear programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address the problem of finding reliable dense correspondences between a pair of images. This is a challenging task due to strong appearance differences between the corresponding scene elements and ambiguities generated by repetitive patterns. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, inspired by the classic idea of disambiguating feature matches using semi-local constraints, we develop an end-to-end trainable convolutional neural network architecture that identifies sets of spatially consistent matches by analyzing neighbourhood consensus patterns in the 4D space of all possible correspondences between a pair of images without the need for a global geometric model. Second, we demonstrate that the model can be trained effectively from weak supervision in the form of matching and non-matching image pairs without the need for costly manual annotation of point to point correspondences. Third, we show the proposed neighbourhood consensus network can be applied to a range of matching tasks including both category- and instance-level matching, obtaining the state-of-the-art results on the PF, TSS, InLoc, and HPatches benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeded segmentation methods have gained a lot of attention due to their good performance in fragmenting complex images, easy usability and synergism with graph-based representations. These methods usually rely on sophisticated computational tools whose performance strongly depends on how good the training data reflect a sought image pattern. Moreover, poor adherence to the image contours, lack of unique solution, and high computational cost are other common issues present in most seeded segmentation methods. In this work we introduce Laplacian Coordinates, a quadratic energy minimization framework that tackles the issues above in an effective and mathematically sound manner. The proposed formulation builds upon graph Laplacian operators, quadratic energy functions, and fast minimization schemes to produce highly accurate segmentations. Moreover, the presented energy functions are not prone to local minima, i.e., the solution is guaranteed to be globally optimal, a trait not present in most image segmentation methods. Another key property is that the minimization procedure leads to a constrained sparse linear system of equations, enabling the segmentation of high-resolution images at interactive rates. The effectiveness of Laplacian Coordinates is attested by a comprehensive set of comparisons involving nine state-of-the-art methods and several benchmarks extensively used in the image segmentation literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been applied to visual tracking with demonstrated success in recent years. Most CNN-based trackers utilize hierarchical features extracted from a certain layer to represent the target. However, features from a certain layer are not always effective for distinguishing the target object from the backgrounds especially in the presence of complicated interfering factors (e.g., heavy occlusion, background clutter, illumination variation, and shape deformation). In this work, we propose a CNN-based tracking algorithm which hedges deep features from different CNN layers to better distinguish target objects and background clutters. Correlation filters are applied to feature maps of each CNN layer to construct a weak tracker, and all weak trackers are hedged into a strong one. For robust visual tracking, we propose a hedge method to adaptively determine weights of weak classifiers by considering both the difference between the historical as well as instantaneous performance, and the difference among all weak trackers over time. In addition, we design a Siamese network to define the loss of each weak tracker for the proposed hedge method. Extensive experiments on large benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm against the state-of-the-art tracking methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an approach to capture the 3D motion of a group of people engaged in a social interaction. The core challenges in capturing social interactions are: (1) occlusion is functional and frequent; (2) subtle motion needs to be measured over a space large enough to host a social group; (3) human appearance and configuration variation is immense; and (4) attaching markers to the body may prime the nature of interactions. The Panoptic Studio is a system organized around the thesis that social interactions should be measured through the integration of perceptual analyses over a large variety of view points. We present a modularized system designed around this principle, consisting of integrated structural, hardware, and software innovations. The system takes, as input, 480 synchronized video streams of multiple people engaged in social activities, and produces, as output, the labeled time-varying 3D structure of anatomical landmarks on individuals in the space. Our algorithm is designed to fuse the “weak” perceptual processes in the large number of views by progressively generating skeletal proposals from low-level appearance cues, and a framework for temporal refinement is also presented by associating body parts to reconstructed dense 3D trajectory stream. Our system and method are the first in reconstructing full body motion of more than five people engaged in social interactions without using markers. We also empirically demonstrate the impact of the number of views in achieving this goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of fusing probability scores from a set of classifiers to estimate a final fused probability score. Our interest is in scenarios where the classifiers are statistically dependent. To that end, we propose a new classifier fusion approach that is data driven and founded on the statistical theory of copulas. Numerical results with both simulated and real data show that our copula based classifier fusion approach produces better probability scores than individual classifiers and outperforms existing probability score fusion approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We tackle the problem of large scale visual place recognition, where the task is to quickly and accurately recognize the location of a given query photograph. We present the following four principal contributions. First, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that is trainable in an end-to-end manner directly for the place recognition task. The main component of this architecture, NetVLAD, is a new generalized VLAD layer, inspired by the “Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors” image representation commonly used in image retrieval. The layer is readily pluggable into any CNN architecture and amenable to training via backpropagation. Second, we create a new weakly supervised ranking loss, which enables end-to-end learning of the architecture's parameters from images depicting the same places over time downloaded from Google Street View Time Machine. Third, we develop an efficient training procedure which can be applied on very large-scale weakly labelled tasks. Finally, we show that the proposed architecture and training procedure significantly outperform non-learnt image representations and off-the-shelf CNN descriptors on challenging place recognition and image retrieval benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We are motivated by the need for a generic object proposal generation algorithm which achieves good balance between object detection recall, proposal localization quality and computational efficiency. We propose a novel object proposal algorithm, BING++, which inherits the virtue of good computational efficiency of BING [1] but significantly improves its proposal localization quality. At high level we formulate the problem of object proposal generation from a novel probabilistic perspective, based on which our BING++ manages to improve the localization quality by employing edges and segments to estimate object boundaries and update the proposals sequentially. We propose learning the parameters efficiently by searching for approximate solutions in a quantized parameter space for complexity reduction. We demonstrate the generalization of BING++ with the same fixed parameters across different object classes and datasets. Empirically our BING++ can run at half speed of BING on CPU, but significantly improve the localization quality by 18.5 and 16.7 percent on both VOC2007 and Microhsoft COCO datasets, respectively. Compared with other state-of-the-art approaches, BING++ can achieve comparable performance, but run significantly faster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a novel approach to reconstructing curvilinear tree structures evolving over time, such as road networks in 2D aerial images or neural structures in 3D microscopy stacks acquired in vivo. To enforce temporal consistency, we simultaneously process all images in a sequence, as opposed to reconstructing structures of interest in each image independently. We formulate the problem as a Quadratic Mixed Integer Program and demonstrate the additional robustness that comes from using all available visual clues at once, instead of working frame by frame. Furthermore, when the linear structures undergo local changes over time, our approach automatically detects them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a novel approach to automated delineation of curvilinear structures that form complex and potentially loopy networks. By representing the image data as a graph of potential paths, we first show how to weight these paths using discriminatively-trained classifiers that are both robust and generic enough to be applied to very different imaging modalities. We then present an Integer Programming approach to finding the optimal subset of paths, subject to structural and topological constraints that eliminate implausible solutions. Unlike earlier approaches that assume a tree topology for the networks, ours explicitly models the fact that the networks may contain loops, and can reconstruct both cyclic and acyclic ones. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a variety of challenging datasets including aerial images of road networks and micrographs of neural arbors, and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]