Click Carving: Segmenting Objects in Video with Point Clicks

We present a novel form of interactive video object segmentation where a few clicks by the user helps the system produce a full spatio-temporal segmentation of the object of interest. Whereas conventional interactive pipelines take the user's initialization as a starting point, we show the value in the system taking the lead even in initialization. In particular, for a given video frame, the system precomputes a ranked list of thousands of possible segmentation hypotheses (also referred to as object region proposals) using image and motion cues. Then, the user looks at the top ranked proposals, and clicks on the object boundary to carve away erroneous ones. This process iterates (typically 2-3 times), and each time the system revises the top ranked proposal set, until the user is satisfied with a resulting segmentation mask. Finally, the mask is propagated across the video to produce a spatio-temporal object tube. On three challenging datasets, we provide extensive comparisons with both existing work and simpler alternative methods. In all, the proposed Click Carving approach strikes an excellent balance of accuracy and human effort. It outperforms all similarly fast methods, and is competitive or better than those requiring 2 to 12 times the effort.Comment: A preliminary version of the material in this document was filed as University of Texas technical report no. UT AI16-0

Self-taught Object Localization with Deep Networks

This paper introduces self-taught object localization, a novel approach that leverages deep convolutional networks trained for whole-image recognition to localize objects in images without additional human supervision, i.e., without using any ground-truth bounding boxes for training. The key idea is to analyze the change in the recognition scores when artificially masking out different regions of the image. The masking out of a region that includes the object typically causes a significant drop in recognition score. This idea is embedded into an agglomerative clustering technique that generates self-taught localization hypotheses. Our object localization scheme outperforms existing proposal methods in both precision and recall for small number of subwindow proposals (e.g., on ILSVRC-2012 it produces a relative gain of 23.4% over the state-of-the-art for top-1 hypothesis). Furthermore, our experiments show that the annotations automatically-generated by our method can be used to train object detectors yielding recognition results remarkably close to those obtained by training on manually-annotated bounding boxes.Comment: WACV 201

Context-Dependent Diffusion Network for Visual Relationship Detection

Visual relationship detection can bridge the gap between computer vision and natural language for scene understanding of images. Different from pure object recognition tasks, the relation triplets of subject-predicate-object lie on an extreme diversity space, such as \textit{person-behind-person} and \textit{car-behind-building}, while suffering from the problem of combinatorial explosion. In this paper, we propose a context-dependent diffusion network (CDDN) framework to deal with visual relationship detection. To capture the interactions of different object instances, two types of graphs, word semantic graph and visual scene graph, are constructed to encode global context interdependency. The semantic graph is built through language priors to model semantic correlations across objects, whilst the visual scene graph defines the connections of scene objects so as to utilize the surrounding scene information. For the graph-structured data, we design a diffusion network to adaptively aggregate information from contexts, which can effectively learn latent representations of visual relationships and well cater to visual relationship detection in view of its isomorphic invariance to graphs. Experiments on two widely-used datasets demonstrate that our proposed method is more effective and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 2018 ACM Multimedia Conference (MM'18

Anchor Loss: Modulating Loss Scale Based on Prediction Difficulty

We propose a novel loss function that dynamically re-scales the cross entropy based on prediction difficulty regarding a sample. Deep neural network architectures in image classification tasks struggle to disambiguate visually similar objects. Likewise, in human pose estimation symmetric body parts often confuse the network with assigning indiscriminative scores to them. This is due to the output prediction, in which only the highest confidence label is selected without taking into consideration a measure of uncertainty. In this work, we define the prediction difficulty as a relative property coming from the confidence score gap between positive and negative labels. More precisely, the proposed loss function penalizes the network to avoid the score of a false prediction being significant. To demonstrate the efficacy of our loss function, we evaluate it on two different domains: image classification and human pose estimation. We find improvements in both applications by achieving higher accuracy compared to the baseline methods