Learnable PINs: Cross-Modal Embeddings for Person Identity

We propose and investigate an identity sensitive joint embedding of face and voice. Such an embedding enables cross-modal retrieval from voice to face and from face to voice. We make the following four contributions: first, we show that the embedding can be learnt from videos of talking faces, without requiring any identity labels, using a form of cross-modal self-supervision; second, we develop a curriculum learning schedule for hard negative mining targeted to this task, that is essential for learning to proceed successfully; third, we demonstrate and evaluate cross-modal retrieval for identities unseen and unheard during training over a number of scenarios and establish a benchmark for this novel task; finally, we show an application of using the joint embedding for automatically retrieving and labelling characters in TV dramas.Comment: To appear in ECCV 201

Deep Adaptive Feature Embedding with Local Sample Distributions for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (re-id) aims to match pedestrians observed by disjoint camera views. It attracts increasing attention in computer vision due to its importance to surveillance system. To combat the major challenge of cross-view visual variations, deep embedding approaches are proposed by learning a compact feature space from images such that the Euclidean distances correspond to their cross-view similarity metric. However, the global Euclidean distance cannot faithfully characterize the ideal similarity in a complex visual feature space because features of pedestrian images exhibit unknown distributions due to large variations in poses, illumination and occlusion. Moreover, intra-personal training samples within a local range are robust to guide deep embedding against uncontrolled variations, which however, cannot be captured by a global Euclidean distance. In this paper, we study the problem of person re-id by proposing a novel sampling to mine suitable \textit{positives} (i.e. intra-class) within a local range to improve the deep embedding in the context of large intra-class variations. Our method is capable of learning a deep similarity metric adaptive to local sample structure by minimizing each sample's local distances while propagating through the relationship between samples to attain the whole intra-class minimization. To this end, a novel objective function is proposed to jointly optimize similarity metric learning, local positive mining and robust deep embedding. This yields local discriminations by selecting local-ranged positive samples, and the learned features are robust to dramatic intra-class variations. Experiments on benchmarks show state-of-the-art results achieved by our method.Comment: Published on Pattern Recognitio

Energy Confused Adversarial Metric Learning for Zero-Shot Image Retrieval and Clustering

Deep metric learning has been widely applied in many computer vision tasks, and recently, it is more attractive in \emph{zero-shot image retrieval and clustering}(ZSRC) where a good embedding is requested such that the unseen classes can be distinguished well. Most existing works deem this 'good' embedding just to be the discriminative one and thus race to devise powerful metric objectives or hard-sample mining strategies for leaning discriminative embedding. However, in this paper, we first emphasize that the generalization ability is a core ingredient of this 'good' embedding as well and largely affects the metric performance in zero-shot settings as a matter of fact. Then, we propose the Energy Confused Adversarial Metric Learning(ECAML) framework to explicitly optimize a robust metric. It is mainly achieved by introducing an interesting Energy Confusion regularization term, which daringly breaks away from the traditional metric learning idea of discriminative objective devising, and seeks to 'confuse' the learned model so as to encourage its generalization ability by reducing overfitting on the seen classes. We train this confusion term together with the conventional metric objective in an adversarial manner. Although it seems weird to 'confuse' the network, we show that our ECAML indeed serves as an efficient regularization technique for metric learning and is applicable to various conventional metric methods. This paper empirically and experimentally demonstrates the importance of learning embedding with good generalization, achieving state-of-the-art performances on the popular CUB, CARS, Stanford Online Products and In-Shop datasets for ZSRC tasks. \textcolor[rgb]{1, 0, 0}{Code available at http://www.bhchen.cn/}.Comment: AAAI 2019, Spotligh