Automating image analysis by annotating landmarks with deep neural networks

Image and video analysis is often a crucial step in the study of animal behavior and kinematics. Often these analyses require that the position of one or more animal landmarks are annotated (marked) in numerous images. The process of annotating landmarks can require a significant amount of time and tedious labor, which motivates the need for algorithms that can automatically annotate landmarks. In the community of scientists that use image and video analysis to study the 3D flight of animals, there has been a trend of developing more automated approaches for annotating landmarks, yet they fall short of being generally applicable. Inspired by the success of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on many problems in the field of computer vision, we investigate how suitable DNNs are for accurate and automatic annotation of landmarks in video datasets representative of those collected by scientists studying animals. Our work shows, through extensive experimentation on videos of hawkmoths, that DNNs are suitable for automatic and accurate landmark localization. In particular, we show that one of our proposed DNNs is more accurate than the current best algorithm for automatic localization of landmarks on hawkmoth videos. Moreover, we demonstrate how these annotations can be used to quantitatively analyze the 3D flight of a hawkmoth. To facilitate the use of DNNs by scientists from many different fields, we provide a self contained explanation of what DNNs are, how they work, and how to apply them to other datasets using the freely available library Caffe and supplemental code that we provide.https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00583Published versio

RotationNet: Joint Object Categorization and Pose Estimation Using Multiviews from Unsupervised Viewpoints

We propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based model "RotationNet," which takes multi-view images of an object as input and jointly estimates its pose and object category. Unlike previous approaches that use known viewpoint labels for training, our method treats the viewpoint labels as latent variables, which are learned in an unsupervised manner during the training using an unaligned object dataset. RotationNet is designed to use only a partial set of multi-view images for inference, and this property makes it useful in practical scenarios where only partial views are available. Moreover, our pose alignment strategy enables one to obtain view-specific feature representations shared across classes, which is important to maintain high accuracy in both object categorization and pose estimation. Effectiveness of RotationNet is demonstrated by its superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods of 3D object classification on 10- and 40-class ModelNet datasets. We also show that RotationNet, even trained without known poses, achieves the state-of-the-art performance on an object pose estimation dataset. The code is available on https://github.com/kanezaki/rotationnetComment: 24 pages, 23 figures. Accepted to CVPR 201

Event-based Vision: A Survey

Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that differ from conventional frame cameras: Instead of capturing images at a fixed rate, they asynchronously measure per-pixel brightness changes, and output a stream of events that encode the time, location and sign of the brightness changes. Event cameras offer attractive properties compared to traditional cameras: high temporal resolution (in the order of microseconds), very high dynamic range (140 dB vs. 60 dB), low power consumption, and high pixel bandwidth (on the order of kHz) resulting in reduced motion blur. Hence, event cameras have a large potential for robotics and computer vision in challenging scenarios for traditional cameras, such as low-latency, high speed, and high dynamic range. However, novel methods are required to process the unconventional output of these sensors in order to unlock their potential. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of event-based vision, with a focus on the applications and the algorithms developed to unlock the outstanding properties of event cameras. We present event cameras from their working principle, the actual sensors that are available and the tasks that they have been used for, from low-level vision (feature detection and tracking, optic flow, etc.) to high-level vision (reconstruction, segmentation, recognition). We also discuss the techniques developed to process events, including learning-based techniques, as well as specialized processors for these novel sensors, such as spiking neural networks. Additionally, we highlight the challenges that remain to be tackled and the opportunities that lie ahead in the search for a more efficient, bio-inspired way for machines to perceive and interact with the world