Deep Human Parsing with Active Template Regression

In this work, the human parsing task, namely decomposing a human image into semantic fashion/body regions, is formulated as an Active Template Regression (ATR) problem, where the normalized mask of each fashion/body item is expressed as the linear combination of the learned mask templates, and then morphed to a more precise mask with the active shape parameters, including position, scale and visibility of each semantic region. The mask template coefficients and the active shape parameters together can generate the human parsing results, and are thus called the structure outputs for human parsing. The deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is utilized to build the end-to-end relation between the input human image and the structure outputs for human parsing. More specifically, the structure outputs are predicted by two separate networks. The first CNN network is with max-pooling, and designed to predict the template coefficients for each label mask, while the second CNN network is without max-pooling to preserve sensitivity to label mask position and accurately predict the active shape parameters. For a new image, the structure outputs of the two networks are fused to generate the probability of each label for each pixel, and super-pixel smoothing is finally used to refine the human parsing result. Comprehensive evaluations on a large dataset well demonstrate the significant superiority of the ATR framework over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F1-score reaches $64.38\%$ by our ATR framework, significantly higher than $44.76\%$ based on the state-of-the-art algorithm.Comment: This manuscript is the accepted version for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 201

Shape Recognition by Bag of Skeleton-associated Contour Parts

Contour and skeleton are two complementary representations for shape recognition. However combining them in a principal way is nontrivial, as they are generally abstracted by different structures (closed string vs graph), respectively. This paper aims at addressing the shape recognition problem by combining contour and skeleton according to the correspondence between them. The correspondence provides a straightforward way to associate skeletal information with a shape contour. More specifically, we propose a new shape descriptor. named Skeleton-associated Shape Context (SSC), which captures the features of a contour fragment associated with skeletal information. Benefited from the association, the proposed shape descriptor provides the complementary geometric information from both contour and skeleton parts, including the spatial distribution and the thickness change along the shape part. To form a meaningful shape feature vector for an overall shape, the Bag of Features framework is applied to the SSC descriptors extracted from it. Finally, the shape feature vector is fed into a linear SVM classifier to recognize the shape. The encouraging experimental results demonstrate that the proposed way to combine contour and skeleton is effective for shape recognition, which achieves the state-of-the-art performances on several standard shape benchmarks.Comment: 10 pages. Has been Accepted by Pattern Recognition Letters 201

Eigen Evolution Pooling for Human Action Recognition

We introduce Eigen Evolution Pooling, an efficient method to aggregate a sequence of feature vectors. Eigen evolution pooling is designed to produce compact feature representations for a sequence of feature vectors, while maximally preserving as much information about the sequence as possible, especially the temporal evolution of the features over time. Eigen evolution pooling is a general pooling method that can be applied to any sequence of feature vectors, from low-level RGB values to high-level Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) feature vectors. We show that eigen evolution pooling is more effective than average, max, and rank pooling for encoding the dynamics of human actions in video. We demonstrate the power of eigen evolution pooling on UCF101 and Hollywood2 datasets, two human action recognition benchmarks, and achieve state-of-the-art performance

Learning Local Shape Descriptors from Part Correspondences With Multi-view Convolutional Networks

We present a new local descriptor for 3D shapes, directly applicable to a wide range of shape analysis problems such as point correspondences, semantic segmentation, affordance prediction, and shape-to-scan matching. The descriptor is produced by a convolutional network that is trained to embed geometrically and semantically similar points close to one another in descriptor space. The network processes surface neighborhoods around points on a shape that are captured at multiple scales by a succession of progressively zoomed out views, taken from carefully selected camera positions. We leverage two extremely large sources of data to train our network. First, since our network processes rendered views in the form of 2D images, we repurpose architectures pre-trained on massive image datasets. Second, we automatically generate a synthetic dense point correspondence dataset by non-rigid alignment of corresponding shape parts in a large collection of segmented 3D models. As a result of these design choices, our network effectively encodes multi-scale local context and fine-grained surface detail. Our network can be trained to produce either category-specific descriptors or more generic descriptors by learning from multiple shape categories. Once trained, at test time, the network extracts local descriptors for shapes without requiring any part segmentation as input. Our method can produce effective local descriptors even for shapes whose category is unknown or different from the ones used while training. We demonstrate through several experiments that our learned local descriptors are more discriminative compared to state of the art alternatives, and are effective in a variety of shape analysis applications

Shape Classification using Spectral Graph Wavelets

Spectral shape descriptors have been used extensively in a broad spectrum of geometry processing applications ranging from shape retrieval and segmentation to classification. In this pa- per, we propose a spectral graph wavelet approach for 3D shape classification using the bag-of-features paradigm. In an effort to capture both the local and global geometry of a 3D shape, we present a three-step feature description framework. First, local descriptors are extracted via the spectral graph wavelet transform having the Mexican hat wavelet as a generating ker- nel. Second, mid-level features are obtained by embedding lo- cal descriptors into the visual vocabulary space using the soft- assignment coding step of the bag-of-features model. Third, a global descriptor is constructed by aggregating mid-level fea- tures weighted by a geodesic exponential kernel, resulting in a matrix representation that describes the frequency of appearance of nearby codewords in the vocabulary. Experimental results on two standard 3D shape benchmarks demonstrate the effective- ness of the proposed classification approach in comparison with state-of-the-art methods

Exploiting Deep Features for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval: A Systematic Investigation

Remote sensing (RS) image retrieval is of great significant for geological information mining. Over the past two decades, a large amount of research on this task has been carried out, which mainly focuses on the following three core issues: feature extraction, similarity metric and relevance feedback. Due to the complexity and multiformity of ground objects in high-resolution remote sensing (HRRS) images, there is still room for improvement in the current retrieval approaches. In this paper, we analyze the three core issues of RS image retrieval and provide a comprehensive review on existing methods. Furthermore, for the goal to advance the state-of-the-art in HRRS image retrieval, we focus on the feature extraction issue and delve how to use powerful deep representations to address this task. We conduct systematic investigation on evaluating correlative factors that may affect the performance of deep features. By optimizing each factor, we acquire remarkable retrieval results on publicly available HRRS datasets. Finally, we explain the experimental phenomenon in detail and draw conclusions according to our analysis. Our work can serve as a guiding role for the research of content-based RS image retrieval

A Classifier-guided Approach for Top-down Salient Object Detection

We propose a framework for top-down salient object detection that incorporates a tightly coupled image classification module. The classifier is trained on novel category-aware sparse codes computed on object dictionaries used for saliency modeling. A misclassification indicates that the corresponding saliency model is inaccurate. Hence, the classifier selects images for which the saliency models need to be updated. The category-aware sparse coding produces better image classification accuracy as compared to conventional sparse coding with a reduced computational complexity. A saliency-weighted max-pooling is proposed to improve image classification, which is further used to refine the saliency maps. Experimental results on Graz-02 and PASCAL VOC-07 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of salient object detection. Although the role of the classifier is to support salient object detection, we evaluate its performance in image classification and also illustrate the utility of thresholded saliency maps for image segmentation.Comment: To appear in Signal Processing: Image Communication, Elsevier. Available online from April 201

From BoW to CNN: Two Decades of Texture Representation for Texture Classification

Texture is a fundamental characteristic of many types of images, and texture representation is one of the essential and challenging problems in computer vision and pattern recognition which has attracted extensive research attention. Since 2000, texture representations based on Bag of Words (BoW) and on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been extensively studied with impressive performance. Given this period of remarkable evolution, this paper aims to present a comprehensive survey of advances in texture representation over the last two decades. More than 200 major publications are cited in this survey covering different aspects of the research, which includes (i) problem description; (ii) recent advances in the broad categories of BoW-based, CNN-based and attribute-based methods; and (iii) evaluation issues, specifically benchmark datasets and state of the art results. In retrospect of what has been achieved so far, the survey discusses open challenges and directions for future research.Comment: Accepted by IJC

Deep Boosting: Joint Feature Selection and Analysis Dictionary Learning in Hierarchy

This work investigates how the traditional image classification pipelines can be extended into a deep architecture, inspired by recent successes of deep neural networks. We propose a deep boosting framework based on layer-by-layer joint feature boosting and dictionary learning. In each layer, we construct a dictionary of filters by combining the filters from the lower layer, and iteratively optimize the image representation with a joint discriminative-generative formulation, i.e. minimization of empirical classification error plus regularization of analysis image generation over training images. For optimization, we perform two iterating steps: i) to minimize the classification error, select the most discriminative features using the gentle adaboost algorithm; ii) according to the feature selection, update the filters to minimize the regularization on analysis image representation using the gradient descent method. Once the optimization is converged, we learn the higher layer representation in the same way. Our model delivers several distinct advantages. First, our layer-wise optimization provides the potential to build very deep architectures. Second, the generated image representation is compact and meaningful. In several visual recognition tasks, our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches

Recent Advance in Content-based Image Retrieval: A Literature Survey

The explosive increase and ubiquitous accessibility of visual data on the Web have led to the prosperity of research activity in image search or retrieval. With the ignorance of visual content as a ranking clue, methods with text search techniques for visual retrieval may suffer inconsistency between the text words and visual content. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR), which makes use of the representation of visual content to identify relevant images, has attracted sustained attention in recent two decades. Such a problem is challenging due to the intention gap and the semantic gap problems. Numerous techniques have been developed for content-based image retrieval in the last decade. The purpose of this paper is to categorize and evaluate those algorithms proposed during the period of 2003 to 2016. We conclude with several promising directions for future research.Comment: 22 page