Comparing feature matching for object categorization in video surveillance

In this paper we consider an object categorization system using local HMAX features. Two feature matching techniques are compared: the MAX technique, originally proposed in the HMAX framework, and the histogram technique originating from Bag-of-Words literature. We have found that each of these techniques have their own field of operation. The histogram technique clearly outperforms the MAX technique with 5-15% for small dictionaries up to 500-1,000 features, favoring this technique for embedded (surveillance) applications. Additionally, we have evaluated the influence of interest point operators in the system. A first experiment analyzes the effect of dictionary creation and has showed that random dictionaries outperform dictionaries created from Hessian-Laplace points. Secondly, the effect of operators in the dictionary matching stage has been evaluated. Processing all image points outperforms the point selection from the Hessian-Laplace operator

Coding local and global binary visual features extracted from video sequences

Binary local features represent an effective alternative to real-valued descriptors, leading to comparable results for many visual analysis tasks, while being characterized by significantly lower computational complexity and memory requirements. When dealing with large collections, a more compact representation based on global features is often preferred, which can be obtained from local features by means of, e.g., the Bag-of-Visual-Word (BoVW) model. Several applications, including for example visual sensor networks and mobile augmented reality, require visual features to be transmitted over a bandwidth-limited network, thus calling for coding techniques that aim at reducing the required bit budget, while attaining a target level of efficiency. In this paper we investigate a coding scheme tailored to both local and global binary features, which aims at exploiting both spatial and temporal redundancy by means of intra- and inter-frame coding. In this respect, the proposed coding scheme can be conveniently adopted to support the Analyze-Then-Compress (ATC) paradigm. That is, visual features are extracted from the acquired content, encoded at remote nodes, and finally transmitted to a central controller that performs visual analysis. This is in contrast with the traditional approach, in which visual content is acquired at a node, compressed and then sent to a central unit for further processing, according to the Compress-Then-Analyze (CTA) paradigm. In this paper we experimentally compare ATC and CTA by means of rate-efficiency curves in the context of two different visual analysis tasks: homography estimation and content-based retrieval. Our results show that the novel ATC paradigm based on the proposed coding primitives can be competitive with CTA, especially in bandwidth limited scenarios.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processin

Aggregated Deep Local Features for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

Remote Sensing Image Retrieval remains a challenging topic due to the special nature of Remote Sensing Imagery. Such images contain various different semantic objects, which clearly complicates the retrieval task. In this paper, we present an image retrieval pipeline that uses attentive, local convolutional features and aggregates them using the Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) to produce a global descriptor. We study various system parameters such as the multiplicative and additive attention mechanisms and descriptor dimensionality. We propose a query expansion method that requires no external inputs. Experiments demonstrate that even without training, the local convolutional features and global representation outperform other systems. After system tuning, we can achieve state-of-the-art or competitive results. Furthermore, we observe that our query expansion method increases overall system performance by about 3%, using only the top-three retrieved images. Finally, we show how dimensionality reduction produces compact descriptors with increased retrieval performance and fast retrieval computation times, e.g. 50% faster than the current systems.Comment: Published in Remote Sensing. The first two authors have equal contributio

Assessing similarity of feature selection techniques in high-dimensional domains

Recent research efforts attempt to combine multiple feature selection techniques instead of using a single one. However, this combination is often made on an “ad hoc” basis, depending on the specific problem at hand, without considering the degree of diversity/similarity of the involved methods. Moreover, though it is recognized that different techniques may return quite dissimilar outputs, especially in high dimensional/small sample size domains, few direct comparisons exist that quantify these differences and their implications on classification performance. This paper aims to provide a contribution in this direction by proposing a general methodology for assessing the similarity between the outputs of different feature selection methods in high dimensional classification problems. Using as benchmark the genomics domain, an empirical study has been conducted to compare some of the most popular feature selection methods, and useful insight has been obtained about their pattern of agreement

Mining Mid-level Features for Image Classification

International audienceMid-level or semi-local features learnt using class-level information are potentially more distinctive than the traditional low-level local features constructed in a purely bottom-up fashion. At the same time they preserve some of the robustness properties with respect to occlusions and image clutter. In this paper we propose a new and effective scheme for extracting mid-level features for image classification, based on relevant pattern mining. In par- ticular, we mine relevant patterns of local compositions of densely sampled low-level features. We refer to the new set of obtained patterns as Frequent Local Histograms or FLHs. During this process, we pay special attention to keeping all the local histogram information and to selecting the most relevant reduced set of FLH patterns for classification. The careful choice of the visual primitives and an extension to exploit both local and global spatial information allow us to build powerful bag-of-FLH-based image representations. We show that these bag-of-FLHs are more discriminative than traditional bag-of-words and yield state-of-the-art results on various image classification benchmarks, including Pascal VOC