Relational Ecology: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding the Human-Animal Bond

This qualitative study investigated the perceived impact of companion animals on the psychological well-being of lesbian women over age 65. Twelve women, ranging in age from 65-80, were interviewed with a semi-structured interview guide. Four thematic findings are highlighted: love and attachment, animals in transitional spaces, challenges and rewards of caregiving, and preparation for death. The author offers the term relational ecology to explain how animals contribute to well-being. This integrates the growth task model of human development, object relations theory, liminality, and deep ecology

Local, Semi-Local and Global Models for Texture, Object and Scene Recognition

This dissertation addresses the problems of recognizing textures, objects, and scenes in photographs. We present approaches to these recognition tasks that combine salient local image features with spatial relations and effective discriminative learning techniques. First, we introduce a bag of features image model for recognizing textured surfaces under a wide range of transformations, including viewpoint changes and non-rigid deformations. We present results of a large-scale comparative evaluation indicating that bags of features can be effective not only for texture, but also for object categization, even in the presence of substantial clutter and intra-class variation. We also show how to augment the purely local image representation with statistical co-occurrence relations between pairs of nearby features, and develop a learning and classification framework for the task of classifying individual features in a multi-texture image. Next, we present a more structured alternative to bags of features for object recognition, namely, an image representation based on semi-local parts, or groups of features characterized by stable appearance and geometric layout. Semi-local parts are automatically learned from small sets of unsegmented, cluttered images. Finally, we present a global method for recognizing scene categories that works by partitioning the image into increasingly fine sub-regions and computing histograms of local features found inside each sub-region. The resulting spatial pyramid representation demonstrates significantly improved performance on challenging scene categorization tasks

Exploring Object Relation in Mean Teacher for Cross-Domain Detection

Rendering synthetic data (e.g., 3D CAD-rendered images) to generate annotations for learning deep models in vision tasks has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, simply applying the models learnt on synthetic images may lead to high generalization error on real images due to domain shift. To address this issue, recent progress in cross-domain recognition has featured the Mean Teacher, which directly simulates unsupervised domain adaptation as semi-supervised learning. The domain gap is thus naturally bridged with consistency regularization in a teacher-student scheme. In this work, we advance this Mean Teacher paradigm to be applicable for cross-domain detection. Specifically, we present Mean Teacher with Object Relations (MTOR) that novelly remolds Mean Teacher under the backbone of Faster R-CNN by integrating the object relations into the measure of consistency cost between teacher and student modules. Technically, MTOR firstly learns relational graphs that capture similarities between pairs of regions for teacher and student respectively. The whole architecture is then optimized with three consistency regularizations: 1) region-level consistency to align the region-level predictions between teacher and student, 2) inter-graph consistency for matching the graph structures between teacher and student, and 3) intra-graph consistency to enhance the similarity between regions of same class within the graph of student. Extensive experiments are conducted on the transfers across Cityscapes, Foggy Cityscapes, and SIM10k, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. More remarkably, we obtain a new record of single model: 22.8% of mAP on Syn2Real detection dataset.Comment: CVPR 2019; The codes and model of our MTOR are publicly available at: https://github.com/caiqi/mean-teacher-cross-domain-detectio