Semantic Visual Localization

Robust visual localization under a wide range of viewing conditions is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Handling the difficult cases of this problem is not only very challenging but also of high practical relevance, e.g., in the context of life-long localization for augmented reality or autonomous robots. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on a joint 3D geometric and semantic understanding of the world, enabling it to succeed under conditions where previous approaches failed. Our method leverages a novel generative model for descriptor learning, trained on semantic scene completion as an auxiliary task. The resulting 3D descriptors are robust to missing observations by encoding high-level 3D geometric and semantic information. Experiments on several challenging large-scale localization datasets demonstrate reliable localization under extreme viewpoint, illumination, and geometry changes

Component-based Attention for Large-scale Trademark Retrieval

The demand for large-scale trademark retrieval (TR) systems has significantly increased to combat the rise in international trademark infringement. Unfortunately, the ranking accuracy of current approaches using either hand-crafted or pre-trained deep convolution neural network (DCNN) features is inadequate for large-scale deployments. We show in this paper that the ranking accuracy of TR systems can be significantly improved by incorporating hard and soft attention mechanisms, which direct attention to critical information such as figurative elements and reduce attention given to distracting and uninformative elements such as text and background. Our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on a challenging large-scale trademark dataset.Comment: Fix typos related to authors' informatio

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: A Survey

Recognizing pedestrian attributes is an important task in computer vision community due to it plays an important role in video surveillance. Many algorithms has been proposed to handle this task. The goal of this paper is to review existing works using traditional methods or based on deep learning networks. Firstly, we introduce the background of pedestrian attributes recognition (PAR, for short), including the fundamental concepts of pedestrian attributes and corresponding challenges. Secondly, we introduce existing benchmarks, including popular datasets and evaluation criterion. Thirdly, we analyse the concept of multi-task learning and multi-label learning, and also explain the relations between these two learning algorithms and pedestrian attribute recognition. We also review some popular network architectures which have widely applied in the deep learning community. Fourthly, we analyse popular solutions for this task, such as attributes group, part-based, \emph{etc}. Fifthly, we shown some applications which takes pedestrian attributes into consideration and achieve better performance. Finally, we summarized this paper and give several possible research directions for pedestrian attributes recognition. The project page of this paper can be found from the following website: \url{https://sites.google.com/view/ahu-pedestrianattributes/}.Comment: Check our project page for High Resolution version of this survey: https://sites.google.com/view/ahu-pedestrianattributes

The Parallel Distributed Image Search Engine (ParaDISE)

Image retrieval is a complex task that differs according to the context and the user requirements in any specific field, for example in a medical environment. Search by text is often not possible or optimal and retrieval by the visual content does not always succeed in modelling high-level concepts that a user is looking for. Modern image retrieval techniques consists of multiple steps and aim to retrieve information from large–scale datasets and not only based on global image appearance but local features and if possible in a connection between visual features and text or semantics. This paper presents the Parallel Distributed Image Search Engine (ParaDISE), an image retrieval system that combines visual search with text–based retrieval and that is available as open source and free of charge. The main design concepts of ParaDISE are flexibility, expandability, scalability and interoperability. These concepts constitute the system, able to be used both in real–world applications and as an image retrieval research platform. Apart from the architecture and the implementation of the system, two use cases are described, an application of ParaDISE in retrieval of images from the medical literature and a visual feature evaluation for medical image retrieval. Future steps include the creation of an open source community that will contribute and expand this platform based on the existing parts