Local Color Contrastive Descriptor for Image Classification

Image representation and classification are two fundamental tasks towards multimedia content retrieval and understanding. The idea that shape and texture information (e.g. edge or orientation) are the key features for visual representation is ingrained and dominated in current multimedia and computer vision communities. A number of low-level features have been proposed by computing local gradients (e.g. SIFT, LBP and HOG), and have achieved great successes on numerous multimedia applications. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient local descriptor for image classification, referred as Local Color Contrastive Descriptor (LCCD), by leveraging the neural mechanisms of color contrast. The idea originates from the observation in neural science that color and shape information are linked inextricably in visual cortical processing. The color contrast yields key information for visual color perception and provides strong linkage between color and shape. We propose a novel contrastive mechanism to compute the color contrast in both spatial location and multiple channels. The color contrast is computed by measuring \emph{f}-divergence between the color distributions of two regions. Our descriptor enriches local image representation with both color and contrast information. We verified experimentally that it can compensate strongly for the shape based descriptor (e.g. SIFT), while keeping computationally simple. Extensive experimental results on image classification show that our descriptor improves the performance of SIFT substantially by combinations, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three challenging benchmark datasets. It improves recent Deep Learning model (DeCAF) [1] largely from the accuracy of 40.94% to 49.68% in the large scale SUN397 database. Codes for the LCCD will be available

Robust Face Recognition with Structural Binary Gradient Patterns

This paper presents a computationally efficient yet powerful binary framework for robust facial representation based on image gradients. It is termed as structural binary gradient patterns (SBGP). To discover underlying local structures in the gradient domain, we compute image gradients from multiple directions and simplify them into a set of binary strings. The SBGP is derived from certain types of these binary strings that have meaningful local structures and are capable of resembling fundamental textural information. They detect micro orientational edges and possess strong orientation and locality capabilities, thus enabling great discrimination. The SBGP also benefits from the advantages of the gradient domain and exhibits profound robustness against illumination variations. The binary strategy realized by pixel correlations in a small neighborhood substantially simplifies the computational complexity and achieves extremely efficient processing with only 0.0032s in Matlab for a typical face image. Furthermore, the discrimination power of the SBGP can be enhanced on a set of defined orientational image gradient magnitudes, further enforcing locality and orientation. Results of extensive experiments on various benchmark databases illustrate significant improvements of the SBGP based representations over the existing state-of-the-art local descriptors in the terms of discrimination, robustness and complexity. Codes for the SBGP methods will be available at http://www.eee.manchester.ac.uk/research/groups/sisp/software/

Evaluation of Feature Detector-Descriptor for Real Object Matching under Various Conditions of Ilumination and Affine Transformation

This study attempts to provide explanations, descriptions and evaluations of some most popular and current combinations of description and descriptor frameworks, namely SIFT, SURF, MSER, and BRISK for keypoint extractors and SIFT, SURF, BRISK, and FREAK for descriptors. Evaluations are made based on the number of matches of keypoints and repeatability in various image variations. It is used as the main parameter to assess how well combinations of algorithms are in matching objects with different variations. There are many papers that describe the comparison of detection and description features to detect objects in images under various conditions, but the combination of algorithms attached to them has not been much discussed. The problem domain is limited to different illumination levels and affine transformations from different perspectives. To evaluate the robustness of all combinations of algorithms, we use a stereo image matching case

Covariance of Motion and Appearance Featuresfor Spatio Temporal Recognition Tasks

In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end framework for video analysis focused towards practical scenarios built on theoretical foundations from sparse representation, including a novel descriptor for general purpose video analysis. In our approach, we compute kinematic features from optical flow and first and second-order derivatives of intensities to represent motion and appearance respectively. These features are then used to construct covariance matrices which capture joint statistics of both low-level motion and appearance features extracted from a video. Using an over-complete dictionary of the covariance based descriptors built from labeled training samples, we formulate low-level event recognition as a sparse linear approximation problem. Within this, we pose the sparse decomposition of a covariance matrix, which also conforms to the space of semi-positive definite matrices, as a determinant maximization problem. Also since covariance matrices lie on non-linear Riemannian manifolds, we compare our former approach with a sparse linear approximation alternative that is suitable for equivalent vector spaces of covariance matrices. This is done by searching for the best projection of the query data on a dictionary using an Orthogonal Matching pursuit algorithm. We show the applicability of our video descriptor in two different application domains - namely low-level event recognition in unconstrained scenarios and gesture recognition using one shot learning. Our experiments provide promising insights in large scale video analysis

WxBS: Wide Baseline Stereo Generalizations

We have presented a new problem -- the wide multiple baseline stereo (WxBS) -- which considers matching of images that simultaneously differ in more than one image acquisition factor such as viewpoint, illumination, sensor type or where object appearance changes significantly, e.g. over time. A new dataset with the ground truth for evaluation of matching algorithms has been introduced and will be made public. We have extensively tested a large set of popular and recent detectors and descriptors and show than the combination of RootSIFT and HalfRootSIFT as descriptors with MSER and Hessian-Affine detectors works best for many different nuisance factors. We show that simple adaptive thresholding improves Hessian-Affine, DoG, MSER (and possibly other) detectors and allows to use them on infrared and low contrast images. A novel matching algorithm for addressing the WxBS problem has been introduced. We have shown experimentally that the WxBS-M matcher dominantes the state-of-the-art methods both on both the new and existing datasets.Comment: Descriptor and detector evaluation expande

Learning Whole-Image Descriptors for Real-time Loop Detection andKidnap Recovery under Large Viewpoint Difference

We present a real-time stereo visual-inertial-SLAM system which is able to recover from complicatedkidnap scenarios and failures online in realtime. We propose to learn the whole-image-descriptorin a weakly supervised manner based on NetVLAD and decoupled convolutions. We analyse thetraining difficulties in using standard loss formulations and propose an allpairloss and show itseffect through extensive experiments. Compared to standard NetVLAD, our network takes an orderof magnitude fewer computations and model parameters, as a result runs about three times faster.We evaluate the representation power of our descriptor on standard datasets with precision-recall.Unlike previous loop detection methods which have been evaluated only on fronto-parallel revisits,we evaluate the performace of our method with competing methods on scenarios involving largeviewpoint difference. Finally, we present the fully functional system with relative computation andhandling of multiple world co-ordinate system which is able to reduce odometry drift, recover fromcomplicated kidnap scenarios and random odometry failures. We open source our fully functional system as an add-on for the popular VINS-Fusion

Exploiting SIFT Descriptor for Rotation Invariant Convolutional Neural Network

This paper presents a novel approach to exploit the distinctive invariant features in convolutional neural network. The proposed CNN model uses Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) descriptor instead of the max-pooling layer. Max-pooling layer discards the pose, i.e., translational and rotational relationship between the low-level features, and hence unable to capture the spatial hierarchies between low and high level features. The SIFT descriptor layer captures the orientation and the spatial relationship of the features extracted by convolutional layer. The proposed SIFT Descriptor CNN therefore combines the feature extraction capabilities of CNN model and rotation invariance of SIFT descriptor. Experimental results on the MNIST and fashionMNIST datasets indicates reasonable improvements over conventional methods available in literature.Comment: Accepted in IEEE INDICON 201

Multi-feature Distance Metric Learning for Non-rigid 3D Shape Retrieval

In the past decades, feature-learning-based 3D shape retrieval approaches have been received widespread attention in the computer graphic community. These approaches usually explored the hand-crafted distance metric or conventional distance metric learning methods to compute the similarity of the single feature. The single feature always contains onefold geometric information, which cannot characterize the 3D shapes well. Therefore, the multiple features should be used for the retrieval task to overcome the limitation of single feature and further improve the performance. However, most conventional distance metric learning methods fail to integrate the complementary information from multiple features to construct the distance metric. To address these issue, a novel multi-feature distance metric learning method for non-rigid 3D shape retrieval is presented in this study, which can make full use of the complimentary geometric information from multiple shape features by utilizing the KL-divergences. Minimizing KL-divergence between different metric of features and a common metric is a consistency constraints, which can lead the consistency shared latent feature space of the multiple features. We apply the proposed method to 3D model retrieval, and test our method on well known benchmark database. The results show that our method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art non-rigid 3D shape retrieval methods

LOAD: Local Orientation Adaptive Descriptor for Texture and Material Classification

In this paper, we propose a novel local feature, called Local Orientation Adaptive Descriptor (LOAD), to capture regional texture in an image. In LOAD, we proposed to define point description on an Adaptive Coordinate System (ACS), adopt a binary sequence descriptor to capture relationships between one point and its neighbors and use multi-scale strategy to enhance the discriminative power of the descriptor. The proposed LOAD enjoys not only discriminative power to capture the texture information, but also has strong robustness to illumination variation and image rotation. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets of texture classification and real-world material recognition show that the proposed LOAD yields the state-of-the-art performance. It is worth to mention that we achieve a 65.4\% classification accuracy-- which is, to the best of our knowledge, the highest record by far --on Flickr Material Database by using a single feature. Moreover, by combining LOAD with the feature extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), we obtain significantly better performance than both the LOAD and CNN. This result confirms that the LOAD is complementary to the learning-based features.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Recent Advances in Features Extraction and Description Algorithms: A Comprehensive Survey

Computer vision is one of the most active research fields in information technology today. Giving machines and robots the ability to see and comprehend the surrounding world at the speed of sight creates endless potential applications and opportunities. Feature detection and description algorithms can be indeed considered as the retina of the eyes of such machines and robots. However, these algorithms are typically computationally intensive, which prevents them from achieving the speed of sight real-time performance. In addition, they differ in their capabilities and some may favor and work better given a specific type of input compared to others. As such, it is essential to compactly report their pros and cons as well as their performances and recent advances. This paper is dedicated to provide a comprehensive overview on the state-of-the-art and recent advances in feature detection and description algorithms. Specifically, it starts by overviewing fundamental concepts. It then compares, reports and discusses their performance and capabilities. The Maximally Stable Extremal Regions algorithm and the Scale Invariant Feature Transform algorithms, being two of the best of their type, are selected to report their recent algorithmic derivatives.Comment: Annual IEEE Industrial Electronics Societys 18th International Conf. on Industrial Technology (ICIT), 22-25 March, 201