Weakly-supervised learning of visual relations

This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling visual relations between pairs of objects. We call relation a triplet of the form (subject, predicate, object) where the predicate is typically a preposition (eg. 'under', 'in front of') or a verb ('hold', 'ride') that links a pair of objects (subject, object). Learning such relations is challenging as the objects have different spatial configurations and appearances depending on the relation in which they occur. Another major challenge comes from the difficulty to get annotations, especially at box-level, for all possible triplets, which makes both learning and evaluation difficult. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we design strong yet flexible visual features that encode the appearance and spatial configuration for pairs of objects. Second, we propose a weakly-supervised discriminative clustering model to learn relations from image-level labels only. Third we introduce a new challenging dataset of unusual relations (UnRel) together with an exhaustive annotation, that enables accurate evaluation of visual relation retrieval. We show experimentally that our model results in state-of-the-art results on the visual relationship dataset significantly improving performance on previously unseen relations (zero-shot learning), and confirm this observation on our newly introduced UnRel dataset

Weakly-supervised learning of visual relations

This paper introduces a novel approach for modeling visual relations between pairs of objects. We call relation a triplet of the form (subject, predicate, object) where the predicate is typically a preposition (eg. 'under', 'in front of') or a verb ('hold', 'ride') that links a pair of objects (subject, object). Learning such relations is challenging as the objects have different spatial configurations and appearances depending on the relation in which they occur. Another major challenge comes from the difficulty to get annotations, especially at box-level, for all possible triplets, which makes both learning and evaluation difficult. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we design strong yet flexible visual features that encode the appearance and spatial configuration for pairs of objects. Second, we propose a weakly-supervised discriminative clustering model to learn relations from image-level labels only. Third we introduce a new challenging dataset of unusual relations (UnRel) together with an exhaustive annotation, that enables accurate evaluation of visual relation retrieval. We show experimentally that our model results in state-of-the-art results on the visual relationship dataset significantly improving performance on previously unseen relations (zero-shot learning), and confirm this observation on our newly introduced UnRel dataset

Streetscore -- Predicting the Perceived Safety of One Million Streetscapes

Social science literature has shown a strong connection between the visual appearance of a city's neighborhoods and the behavior and health of its citizens. Yet, this research is limited by the lack of methods that can be used to quantify the appearance of streetscapes across cities or at high enough spatial resolutions. In this paper, we describe 'Streetscore', a scene understanding algorithm that predicts the perceived safety of a streetscape, using training data from an online survey with contributions from more than 7000 participants. We first study the predictive power of commonly used image features using support vector regression, finding that Geometric Texton and Color Histograms along with GIST are the best performers when it comes to predict the perceived safety of a streetscape. Using Streetscore, we create high resolution maps of perceived safety for 21 cities in the Northeast and Midwest of the United States at a resolution of 200 images/square mile, scoring ~1 million images from Google Streetview. These datasets should be useful for urban planners, economists and social scientists looking to explain the social and economic consequences of urban perception.MIT Media Lab ConsortiumGoogle (Firm). Living Labs Tides Foundatio

Learning Everything about Anything: Webly-Supervised Visual Concept Learning

Figure 1: We introduce a fully-automated method that, given any concept, discovers an exhaustive vocabulary explaining all its appearance variations (i.e., actions, interactions, attributes, etc.), and trains full-fledged detection models for it. This figure shows a few of the many variations that our method has learned for four different classes of concepts: object (horse), scene (kitchen), event (Christmas), and action (walking). Recognition is graduating from labs to real-world ap-plications. While it is encouraging to see its potential being tapped, it brings forth a fundamental challenge to the vision researcher: scalability. How can we learn a model for any concept that exhaustively covers all its appearance varia-tions, while requiring minimal or no human supervision for compiling the vocabulary of visual variance, gathering the training images and annotations, and learning the models? In this paper, we introduce a fully-automated approach for learning extensive models for a wide range of variations (e.g. actions, interactions, attributes and beyond) within any concept. Our approach leverages vast resources of on-line books to discover the vocabulary of variance, and in-tertwines the data collection and modeling steps to alleviate the need for explicit human supervision in training the mod-els. Our approach organizes the visual knowledge about a concept in a convenient and useful way, enabling a variety of applications across vision and NLP. Our online system has been queried by users to learn models for several inter-esting concepts including breakfast, Gandhi, beautiful, etc. To date, our system has models available for over 50,000 variations within 150 concepts, and has annotated more than 10 million images with bounding boxes. 1

Reconocimiento y clasificación de escenas utilizando descriptores semánticos

Con la evolución en el campo de visión por computador, se encuentran constantemente propuestas de mejoras a los métodos tradicionales de clasificación y representación de imágenes. Desde propuestas basadas en la explotación de características por medio de redes neuronales artificiales hasta métodos de representación de imágenes basados en extracción de características locales. Dado que los algoritmos de clasificación de imágenes aumentan su eficacia en función de características aprendidas previamente y los algoritmos de representación de imágenes por características locales tratan de explotar rasgos distintivos en muestras de estudio disminuyendo el efecto de variaciones como recortes o giros en la capacidad de clasificar eficientemente, el objetivo de este trabajo será el análisis de resultados de según el método elegido para extraer características y discriminar imágenes distintas entre sí que pueden o no tener ciertos rasgos comunes..

Understanding Complex Human Behaviour in Images and Videos.

Understanding human motions and activities in images and videos is an important problem in many application domains, including surveillance, robotics, video indexing, and sports analysis. Although much progress has been made in classifying single person's activities in simple videos, little efforts have been made toward the interpretation of behaviors of multiple people in natural videos. In this thesis, I will present my research endeavor toward the understanding of behaviors of multiple people in natural images and videos. I identify four major challenges in this problem: i) identifying individual properties of people in videos, ii) modeling and recognizing the behavior of multiple people, iii) understanding human activities in multiple levels of resolutions and iv) learning characteristic patterns of interactions between people or people and surrounding environment. I discuss how we solve these challenging problems using various computer vision and machine learning technologies. I conclude with final remarks, observations, and possible future research directions.PhDElectrical Engineering: SystemsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99956/1/wgchoi_1.pd

Richer object representations for object class detection in challenging real world images

Object class detection in real world images has been a synonym for object localization for the longest time. State-of-the-art detection methods, inspired by renowned detection benchmarks, typically target 2D bounding box localization of objects. At the same time, due to the rapid technological and scientific advances, high-level vision applications, aiming at understanding the visual world as a whole, are coming into the focus. The diversity of the visual world challenges these applications in terms of representational complexity, robust inference and training data. As objects play a central role in any vision system, it has been argued that richer object representations, providing higher level of detail than modern detection methods, are a promising direction towards understanding visual scenes. Besides bridging the gap between object class detection and high-level tasks, richer object representations also lead to more natural object descriptions, bringing computer vision closer to human perception. Inspired by these prospects, this thesis explores four different directions towards richer object representations, namely, 3D object representations, fine-grained representations, occlusion representations, as well as understanding convnet representations. Moreover, this thesis illustrates that richer object representations can facilitate high-level applications, providing detailed and natural object descriptions. In addition, the presented representations attain high performance rates, at least on par or often superior to state-of-the-art methods.Detektion von Objektklassen in natürlichen Bildern war lange Zeit gleichbedeutend mit Lokalisierung von Objekten. Von anerkannten Detektions-Benchmarks inspirierte Detektionsmethoden, die auf dem neuesten Stand der Forschung sind, zielen üblicherweise auf die Lokalisierung von Objekten im Bild. Gleichzeitig werden durch den schnellen technologischen und wissenschaftlichen Fortschritt abstraktere Bildverarbeitungsanwendungen, die ein Verständnis der visuellen Welt als Ganzes anstreben, immer interessanter. Die Diversität der visuellen Welt ist eine Herausforderung für diese Anwendungen hinsichtlich der Komplexität der Darstellung, robuster Inferenz und Trainingsdaten. Da Objekte eine zentrale Rolle in jedem Visionssystem spielen, wurde argumentiert, dass reichhaltige Objektrepräsentationen, die höhere Detailgenauigkeit als gegenwärtige Detektionsmethoden bieten, ein vielversprechender Schritt zum Verständnis visueller Szenen sind. Reichhaltige Objektrepräsentationen schlagen eine Brücke zwischen der Detektion von Objektklassen und abstrakteren Aufgabenstellungen, und sie führen auch zu natürlicheren Objektbeschreibungen, wodurch sie die Bildverarbeitung der menschlichen Wahrnehmung weiter annähern. Aufgrund dieser Perspektiven erforscht die vorliegende Arbeit vier verschiedene Herangehensweisen zu reichhaltigeren Objektrepräsentationen

Richer object representations for object class detection in challenging real world images

Object class detection in real world images has been a synonym for object localization for the longest time. State-of-the-art detection methods, inspired by renowned detection benchmarks, typically target 2D bounding box localization of objects. At the same time, due to the rapid technological and scientific advances, high-level vision applications, aiming at understanding the visual world as a whole, are coming into the focus. The diversity of the visual world challenges these applications in terms of representational complexity, robust inference and training data. As objects play a central role in any vision system, it has been argued that richer object representations, providing higher level of detail than modern detection methods, are a promising direction towards understanding visual scenes. Besides bridging the gap between object class detection and high-level tasks, richer object representations also lead to more natural object descriptions, bringing computer vision closer to human perception. Inspired by these prospects, this thesis explores four different directions towards richer object representations, namely, 3D object representations, fine-grained representations, occlusion representations, as well as understanding convnet representations. Moreover, this thesis illustrates that richer object representations can facilitate high-level applications, providing detailed and natural object descriptions. In addition, the presented representations attain high performance rates, at least on par or often superior to state-of-the-art methods.Detektion von Objektklassen in natürlichen Bildern war lange Zeit gleichbedeutend mit Lokalisierung von Objekten. Von anerkannten Detektions-Benchmarks inspirierte Detektionsmethoden, die auf dem neuesten Stand der Forschung sind, zielen üblicherweise auf die Lokalisierung von Objekten im Bild. Gleichzeitig werden durch den schnellen technologischen und wissenschaftlichen Fortschritt abstraktere Bildverarbeitungsanwendungen, die ein Verständnis der visuellen Welt als Ganzes anstreben, immer interessanter. Die Diversität der visuellen Welt ist eine Herausforderung für diese Anwendungen hinsichtlich der Komplexität der Darstellung, robuster Inferenz und Trainingsdaten. Da Objekte eine zentrale Rolle in jedem Visionssystem spielen, wurde argumentiert, dass reichhaltige Objektrepräsentationen, die höhere Detailgenauigkeit als gegenwärtige Detektionsmethoden bieten, ein vielversprechender Schritt zum Verständnis visueller Szenen sind. Reichhaltige Objektrepräsentationen schlagen eine Brücke zwischen der Detektion von Objektklassen und abstrakteren Aufgabenstellungen, und sie führen auch zu natürlicheren Objektbeschreibungen, wodurch sie die Bildverarbeitung der menschlichen Wahrnehmung weiter annähern. Aufgrund dieser Perspektiven erforscht die vorliegende Arbeit vier verschiedene Herangehensweisen zu reichhaltigeren Objektrepräsentationen