175 research outputs found
Second-order Temporal Pooling for Action Recognition
Deep learning models for video-based action recognition usually generate
features for short clips (consisting of a few frames); such clip-level features
are aggregated to video-level representations by computing statistics on these
features. Typically zero-th (max) or the first-order (average) statistics are
used. In this paper, we explore the benefits of using second-order statistics.
Specifically, we propose a novel end-to-end learnable feature aggregation
scheme, dubbed temporal correlation pooling that generates an action descriptor
for a video sequence by capturing the similarities between the temporal
evolution of clip-level CNN features computed across the video. Such a
descriptor, while being computationally cheap, also naturally encodes the
co-activations of multiple CNN features, thereby providing a richer
characterization of actions than their first-order counterparts. We also
propose higher-order extensions of this scheme by computing correlations after
embedding the CNN features in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. We provide
experiments on benchmark datasets such as HMDB-51 and UCF-101, fine-grained
datasets such as MPII Cooking activities and JHMDB, as well as the recent
Kinetics-600. Our results demonstrate the advantages of higher-order pooling
schemes that when combined with hand-crafted features (as is standard practice)
achieves state-of-the-art accuracy.Comment: Accepted in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV
Scalable learning for geostatistics and speaker recognition
With improved data acquisition methods, the amount of data that is being collected has increased severalfold. One of the objectives in data collection is to learn useful underlying patterns. In order to work with data at this scale, the methods not only need to be effective with the underlying data, but also have to be scalable to handle larger data collections. This thesis focuses on developing scalable and effective methods targeted towards different domains, geostatistics and speaker recognition in particular.
Initially we focus on kernel based learning methods and develop a GPU based parallel framework for this class of problems. An improved numerical algorithm that utilizes the GPU parallelization to further enhance the computational performance of kernel regression is proposed. These methods are then demonstrated on problems arising in geostatistics and speaker recognition.
In geostatistics, data is often collected at scattered locations and factors like instrument malfunctioning lead to missing observations. Applications often require the ability interpolate this scattered spatiotemporal data on to a regular grid continuously over time. This problem can be formulated as a regression problem, and one of the most popular geostatistical interpolation techniques, kriging is analogous to a standard kernel method: Gaussian process regression. Kriging is computationally expensive and needs major modifications and accelerations in order to be used practically. The GPU framework developed for kernel methods is extended to kriging and further the GPU's texture memory is better utilized for enhanced computational performance.
Speaker recognition deals with the task of verifying a person's identity based on samples of his/her speech - "utterances". This thesis focuses on text-independent framework and three new recognition frameworks were developed for this problem. We proposed a kernelized Renyi distance based similarity scoring for speaker recognition. While its performance is promising, it does not generalize well for limited training data and therefore does not compare well to state-of-the-art recognition systems. These systems compensate for the variability in the speech data due to the message, channel variability, noise and reverberation. State-of-the-art systems model each speaker as a mixture of Gaussians (GMM) and compensate for the variability (termed "nuisance"). We propose a novel discriminative framework using a latent variable technique, partial least squares (PLS), for improved recognition. The kernelized version of this algorithm is used to achieve a state of the art speaker ID system, that shows results competitive with the best systems reported on in NIST's 2010 Speaker Recognition Evaluation
DART: Distribution Aware Retinal Transform for Event-based Cameras
We introduce a generic visual descriptor, termed as distribution aware
retinal transform (DART), that encodes the structural context using log-polar
grids for event cameras. The DART descriptor is applied to four different
problems, namely object classification, tracking, detection and feature
matching: (1) The DART features are directly employed as local descriptors in a
bag-of-features classification framework and testing is carried out on four
standard event-based object datasets (N-MNIST, MNIST-DVS, CIFAR10-DVS,
NCaltech-101). (2) Extending the classification system, tracking is
demonstrated using two key novelties: (i) For overcoming the low-sample problem
for the one-shot learning of a binary classifier, statistical bootstrapping is
leveraged with online learning; (ii) To achieve tracker robustness, the scale
and rotation equivariance property of the DART descriptors is exploited for the
one-shot learning. (3) To solve the long-term object tracking problem, an
object detector is designed using the principle of cluster majority voting. The
detection scheme is then combined with the tracker to result in a high
intersection-over-union score with augmented ground truth annotations on the
publicly available event camera dataset. (4) Finally, the event context encoded
by DART greatly simplifies the feature correspondence problem, especially for
spatio-temporal slices far apart in time, which has not been explicitly tackled
in the event-based vision domain.Comment: 12 pages, revision submitted to TPAMI in Nov 201
Feature Reduction and Representation Learning for Visual Applications
Computation on large-scale data spaces has been involved in many active problems in computer vision and pattern recognition. However, in realistic applications, most existing algorithms are heavily restricted by the large number of features, and tend to be inefficient and even infeasible. In this thesis, the solution to this problem is addressed in the following ways: (1) projecting features onto a lower-dimensional subspace; (2) embedding features into a Hamming space.
Firstly, a novel subspace learning algorithm called Local Feature Discriminant Projection (LFDP) is proposed for discriminant analysis of local features. LFDP is able to efficiently seek a subspace to improve the discriminability of local features for classification. Extensive experimental validation on three benchmark datasets demonstrates that the proposed LFDP outperforms other dimensionality reduction methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance for image classification. Secondly, for action recognition, a novel binary local representation for RGB-D video data fusion is presented. In this approach, a general local descriptor called Local Flux Feature (LFF) is obtained for both RGB and depth data by computing the local fluxes of the gradient fields of video data. Then the LFFs from RGB and depth channels are fused into a Hamming space via the Structure Preserving Projection (SPP), which preserves not only the pairwise feature structure, but also a higher level connection between samples and classes. Comprehensive experimental results show the superiority of both LFF and SPP. Thirdly, in respect of unsupervised learning, SPP is extended to the Binary Set Embedding (BSE) for cross-modal retrieval. BSE outputs meaningful hash codes for local features from the image domain and word vectors from text domain. Extensive evaluation on two widely-used image-text datasets demonstrates the superior performance of BSE compared with state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing methods. Finally, a generalized multiview spectral embedding algorithm called Kernelized Multiview Projection (KMP) is proposed to fuse the multimedia data from multiple sources. Different features/views in the reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces are linearly fused together and then projected onto a low-dimensional subspace by KMP, whose performance is thoroughly evaluated on both image and video datasets compared with other multiview embedding methods
Grassmann Learning for Recognition and Classification
Computational performance associated with high-dimensional data is a common challenge for real-world classification and recognition systems. Subspace learning has received considerable attention as a means of finding an efficient low-dimensional representation that leads to better classification and efficient processing. A Grassmann manifold is a space that promotes smooth surfaces, where points represent subspaces and the relationship between points is defined by a mapping of an orthogonal matrix. Grassmann learning involves embedding high dimensional subspaces and kernelizing the embedding onto a projection space where distance computations can be effectively performed. In this dissertation, Grassmann learning and its benefits towards action classification and face recognition in terms of accuracy and performance are investigated and evaluated. Grassmannian Sparse Representation (GSR) and Grassmannian Spectral Regression (GRASP) are proposed as Grassmann inspired subspace learning algorithms. GSR is a novel subspace learning algorithm that combines the benefits of Grassmann manifolds with sparse representations using least squares loss §¤1-norm minimization for improved classification. GRASP is a novel subspace learning algorithm that leverages the benefits of Grassmann manifolds and Spectral Regression in a framework that supports high discrimination between classes and achieves computational benefits by using manifold modeling and avoiding eigen-decomposition. The effectiveness of GSR and GRASP is demonstrated for computationally intensive classification problems: (a) multi-view action classification using the IXMAS Multi-View dataset, the i3DPost Multi-View dataset, and the WVU Multi-View dataset, (b) 3D action classification using the MSRAction3D dataset and MSRGesture3D dataset, and (c) face recognition using the ATT Face Database, Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW), and the Extended Yale Face Database B (YALE). Additional contributions include the definition of Motion History Surfaces (MHS) and Motion Depth Surfaces (MDS) as descriptors suitable for activity representations in video sequences and 3D depth sequences. An in-depth analysis of Grassmann metrics is applied on high dimensional data with different levels of noise and data distributions which reveals that standardized Grassmann kernels are favorable over geodesic metrics on a Grassmann manifold. Finally, an extensive performance analysis is made that supports Grassmann subspace learning as an effective approach for classification and recognition
Batch kernel SOM and related Laplacian methods for social network analysis
Large graphs are natural mathematical models for describing the structure of
the data in a wide variety of fields, such as web mining, social networks,
information retrieval, biological networks, etc. For all these applications,
automatic tools are required to get a synthetic view of the graph and to reach
a good understanding of the underlying problem. In particular, discovering
groups of tightly connected vertices and understanding the relations between
those groups is very important in practice. This paper shows how a kernel
version of the batch Self Organizing Map can be used to achieve these goals via
kernels derived from the Laplacian matrix of the graph, especially when it is
used in conjunction with more classical methods based on the spectral analysis
of the graph. The proposed method is used to explore the structure of a
medieval social network modeled through a weighted graph that has been directly
built from a large corpus of agrarian contracts
Connectionist-Symbolic Machine Intelligence using Cellular Automata based Reservoir-Hyperdimensional Computing
We introduce a novel framework of reservoir computing, that is capable of
both connectionist machine intelligence and symbolic computation. Cellular
automaton is used as the reservoir of dynamical systems. Input is randomly
projected onto the initial conditions of automaton cells and nonlinear
computation is performed on the input via application of a rule in the
automaton for a period of time. The evolution of the automaton creates a
space-time volume of the automaton state space, and it is used as the
reservoir. The proposed framework is capable of long short-term memory and it
requires orders of magnitude less computation compared to Echo State Networks.
We prove that cellular automaton reservoir holds a distributed representation
of attribute statistics, which provides a more effective computation than local
representation. It is possible to estimate the kernel for linear cellular
automata via metric learning, that enables a much more efficient distance
computation in support vector machine framework. Also, binary reservoir feature
vectors can be combined using Boolean operations as in hyperdimensional
computing, paving a direct way for concept building and symbolic processing.Comment: Corrected Typos. Responded some comments on section 8. Added appendix
for details. Recurrent architecture emphasize
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