From images via symbols to contexts: using augmented reality for interactive model acquisition

Systems that perform in real environments need to bind the internal state to externally perceived objects, events, or complete scenes. How to learn this correspondence has been a long standing problem in computer vision as well as artificial intelligence. Augmented Reality provides an interesting perspective on this problem because a human user can directly relate displayed system results to real environments. In the following we present a system that is able to bootstrap internal models from user-system interactions. Starting from pictorial representations it learns symbolic object labels that provide the basis for storing observed episodes. In a second step, more complex relational information is extracted from stored episodes that enables the system to react on specific scene contexts

An Approximate Bayesian Long Short-Term Memory Algorithm for Outlier Detection

Long Short-Term Memory networks trained with gradient descent and back-propagation have received great success in various applications. However, point estimation of the weights of the networks is prone to over-fitting problems and lacks important uncertainty information associated with the estimation. However, exact Bayesian neural network methods are intractable and non-applicable for real-world applications. In this study, we propose an approximate estimation of the weights uncertainty using Ensemble Kalman Filter, which is easily scalable to a large number of weights. Furthermore, we optimize the covariance of the noise distribution in the ensemble update step using maximum likelihood estimation. To assess the proposed algorithm, we apply it to outlier detection in five real-world events retrieved from the Twitter platform

Graphs in machine learning: an introduction

Graphs are commonly used to characterise interactions between objects of interest. Because they are based on a straightforward formalism, they are used in many scientific fields from computer science to historical sciences. In this paper, we give an introduction to some methods relying on graphs for learning. This includes both unsupervised and supervised methods. Unsupervised learning algorithms usually aim at visualising graphs in latent spaces and/or clustering the nodes. Both focus on extracting knowledge from graph topologies. While most existing techniques are only applicable to static graphs, where edges do not evolve through time, recent developments have shown that they could be extended to deal with evolving networks. In a supervised context, one generally aims at inferring labels or numerical values attached to nodes using both the graph and, when they are available, node characteristics. Balancing the two sources of information can be challenging, especially as they can disagree locally or globally. In both contexts, supervised and un-supervised, data can be relational (augmented with one or several global graphs) as described above, or graph valued. In this latter case, each object of interest is given as a full graph (possibly completed by other characteristics). In this context, natural tasks include graph clustering (as in producing clusters of graphs rather than clusters of nodes in a single graph), graph classification, etc. 1 Real networks One of the first practical studies on graphs can be dated back to the original work of Moreno [51] in the 30s. Since then, there has been a growing interest in graph analysis associated with strong developments in the modelling and the processing of these data. Graphs are now used in many scientific fields. In Biology [54, 2, 7], for instance, metabolic networks can describe pathways of biochemical reactions [41], while in social sciences networks are used to represent relation ties between actors [66, 56, 36, 34]. Other examples include powergrids [71] and the web [75]. Recently, networks have also been considered in other areas such as geography [22] and history [59, 39]. In machine learning, networks are seen as powerful tools to model problems in order to extract information from data and for prediction purposes. This is the object of this paper. For more complete surveys, we refer to [28, 62, 49, 45]. In this section, we introduce notations and highlight properties shared by most real networks. In Section 2, we then consider methods aiming at extracting information from a unique network. We will particularly focus on clustering methods where the goal is to find clusters of vertices. Finally, in Section 3, techniques that take a series of networks into account, where each network i

The Evolution of First Person Vision Methods: A Survey

The emergence of new wearable technologies such as action cameras and smart-glasses has increased the interest of computer vision scientists in the First Person perspective. Nowadays, this field is attracting attention and investments of companies aiming to develop commercial devices with First Person Vision recording capabilities. Due to this interest, an increasing demand of methods to process these videos, possibly in real-time, is expected. Current approaches present a particular combinations of different image features and quantitative methods to accomplish specific objectives like object detection, activity recognition, user machine interaction and so on. This paper summarizes the evolution of the state of the art in First Person Vision video analysis between 1997 and 2014, highlighting, among others, most commonly used features, methods, challenges and opportunities within the field.Comment: First Person Vision, Egocentric Vision, Wearable Devices, Smart Glasses, Computer Vision, Video Analytics, Human-machine Interactio

Probabilistic Models of Motor Production

N. Bernstein defined the ability of the central neural system (CNS) to control many degrees of freedom of a physical body with all its redundancy and flexibility as the main problem in motor control. He pointed at that man-made mechanisms usually have one, sometimes two degrees of freedom (DOF); when the number of DOF increases further, it becomes prohibitively hard to control them. The brain, however, seems to perform such control effortlessly. He suggested the way the brain might deal with it: when a motor skill is being acquired, the brain artificially limits the degrees of freedoms, leaving only one or two. As the skill level increases, the brain gradually "frees" the previously fixed DOF, applying control when needed and in directions which have to be corrected, eventually arriving to the control scheme where all the DOF are "free". This approach of reducing the dimensionality of motor control remains relevant even today. One the possibles solutions of the Bernstetin's problem is the hypothesis of motor primitives (MPs) - small building blocks that constitute complex movements and facilitite motor learnirng and task completion. Just like in the visual system, having a homogenious hierarchical architecture built of similar computational elements may be beneficial. Studying such a complicated object as brain, it is important to define at which level of details one works and which questions one aims to answer. David Marr suggested three levels of analysis: 1. computational, analysing which problem the system solves; 2. algorithmic, questioning which representation the system uses and which computations it performs; 3. implementational, finding how such computations are performed by neurons in the brain. In this thesis we stay at the first two levels, seeking for the basic representation of motor output. In this work we present a new model of motor primitives that comprises multiple interacting latent dynamical systems, and give it a full Bayesian treatment. Modelling within the Bayesian framework, in my opinion, must become the new standard in hypothesis testing in neuroscience. Only the Bayesian framework gives us guarantees when dealing with the inevitable plethora of hidden variables and uncertainty. The special type of coupling of dynamical systems we proposed, based on the Product of Experts, has many natural interpretations in the Bayesian framework. If the dynamical systems run in parallel, it yields Bayesian cue integration. If they are organized hierarchically due to serial coupling, we get hierarchical priors over the dynamics. If one of the dynamical systems represents sensory state, we arrive to the sensory-motor primitives. The compact representation that follows from the variational treatment allows learning of a motor primitives library. Learned separately, combined motion can be represented as a matrix of coupling values. We performed a set of experiments to compare different models of motor primitives. In a series of 2-alternative forced choice (2AFC) experiments participants were discriminating natural and synthesised movements, thus running a graphics Turing test. When available, Bayesian model score predicted the naturalness of the perceived movements. For simple movements, like walking, Bayesian model comparison and psychophysics tests indicate that one dynamical system is sufficient to describe the data. For more complex movements, like walking and waving, motion can be better represented as a set of coupled dynamical systems. We also experimentally confirmed that Bayesian treatment of model learning on motion data is superior to the simple point estimate of latent parameters. Experiments with non-periodic movements show that they do not benefit from more complex latent dynamics, despite having high kinematic complexity. By having a fully Bayesian models, we could quantitatively disentangle the influence of motion dynamics and pose on the perception of naturalness. We confirmed that rich and correct dynamics is more important than the kinematic representation. There are numerous further directions of research. In the models we devised, for multiple parts, even though the latent dynamics was factorized on a set of interacting systems, the kinematic parts were completely independent. Thus, interaction between the kinematic parts could be mediated only by the latent dynamics interactions. A more flexible model would allow a dense interaction on the kinematic level too. Another important problem relates to the representation of time in Markov chains. Discrete time Markov chains form an approximation to continuous dynamics. As time step is assumed to be fixed, we face with the problem of time step selection. Time is also not a explicit parameter in Markov chains. This also prohibits explicit optimization of time as parameter and reasoning (inference) about it. For example, in optimal control boundary conditions are usually set at exact time points, which is not an ecological scenario, where time is usually a parameter of optimization. Making time an explicit parameter in dynamics may alleviate this

Tracking by Prediction: A Deep Generative Model for Mutli-Person localisation and Tracking

Current multi-person localisation and tracking systems have an over reliance on the use of appearance models for target re-identification and almost no approaches employ a complete deep learning solution for both objectives. We present a novel, complete deep learning framework for multi-person localisation and tracking. In this context we first introduce a light weight sequential Generative Adversarial Network architecture for person localisation, which overcomes issues related to occlusions and noisy detections, typically found in a multi person environment. In the proposed tracking framework we build upon recent advances in pedestrian trajectory prediction approaches and propose a novel data association scheme based on predicted trajectories. This removes the need for computationally expensive person re-identification systems based on appearance features and generates human like trajectories with minimal fragmentation. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple public benchmarks including both static and dynamic cameras and is capable of generating outstanding performance, especially among other recently proposed deep neural network based approaches.Comment: To appear in IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 201