1,333 research outputs found
Fine-graind Image Classification via Combining Vision and Language
Fine-grained image classification is a challenging task due to the large
intra-class variance and small inter-class variance, aiming at recognizing
hundreds of sub-categories belonging to the same basic-level category. Most
existing fine-grained image classification methods generally learn part
detection models to obtain the semantic parts for better classification
accuracy. Despite achieving promising results, these methods mainly have two
limitations: (1) not all the parts which obtained through the part detection
models are beneficial and indispensable for classification, and (2)
fine-grained image classification requires more detailed visual descriptions
which could not be provided by the part locations or attribute annotations. For
addressing the above two limitations, this paper proposes the two-stream model
combining vision and language (CVL) for learning latent semantic
representations. The vision stream learns deep representations from the
original visual information via deep convolutional neural network. The language
stream utilizes the natural language descriptions which could point out the
discriminative parts or characteristics for each image, and provides a flexible
and compact way of encoding the salient visual aspects for distinguishing
sub-categories. Since the two streams are complementary, combining the two
streams can further achieves better classification accuracy. Comparing with 12
state-of-the-art methods on the widely used CUB-200-2011 dataset for
fine-grained image classification, the experimental results demonstrate our CVL
approach achieves the best performance.Comment: 9 pages, to appear in CVPR 201
Automatic annotation for weakly supervised learning of detectors
PhDObject detection in images and action detection in videos are among the most widely studied
computer vision problems, with applications in consumer photography, surveillance, and automatic
media tagging. Typically, these standard detectors are fully supervised, that is they require
a large body of training data where the locations of the objects/actions in images/videos have
been manually annotated. With the emergence of digital media, and the rise of high-speed internet,
raw images and video are available for little to no cost. However, the manual annotation
of object and action locations remains tedious, slow, and expensive. As a result there has been
a great interest in training detectors with weak supervision where only the presence or absence
of object/action in image/video is needed, not the location. This thesis presents approaches for
weakly supervised learning of object/action detectors with a focus on automatically annotating
object and action locations in images/videos using only binary weak labels indicating the presence
or absence of object/action in images/videos.
First, a framework for weakly supervised learning of object detectors in images is presented.
In the proposed approach, a variation of multiple instance learning (MIL) technique for automatically
annotating object locations in weakly labelled data is presented which, unlike existing
approaches, uses inter-class and intra-class cue fusion to obtain the initial annotation. The initial
annotation is then used to start an iterative process in which standard object detectors are used to
refine the location annotation. Finally, to ensure that the iterative training of detectors do not drift
from the object of interest, a scheme for detecting model drift is also presented. Furthermore,
unlike most other methods, our weakly supervised approach is evaluated on data without manual
pose (object orientation) annotation.
Second, an analysis of the initial annotation of objects, using inter-class and intra-class cues,
is carried out. From the analysis, a new method based on negative mining (NegMine) is presented
for the initial annotation of both object and action data. The NegMine based approach is a
much simpler formulation using only inter-class measure and requires no complex combinatorial
optimisation but can still meet or outperform existing approaches including the previously pre3
sented inter-intra class cue fusion approach. Furthermore, NegMine can be fused with existing
approaches to boost their performance.
Finally, the thesis will take a step back and look at the use of generic object detectors as prior
knowledge in weakly supervised learning of object detectors. These generic object detectors are
typically based on sampling saliency maps that indicate if a pixel belongs to the background
or foreground. A new approach to generating saliency maps is presented that, unlike existing
approaches, looks beyond the current image of interest and into images similar to the current
image. We show that our generic object proposal method can be used by itself to annotate the
weakly labelled object data with surprisingly high accuracy
VIP: Finding Important People in Images
People preserve memories of events such as birthdays, weddings, or vacations
by capturing photos, often depicting groups of people. Invariably, some
individuals in the image are more important than others given the context of
the event. This paper analyzes the concept of the importance of individuals in
group photographs. We address two specific questions -- Given an image, who are
the most important individuals in it? Given multiple images of a person, which
image depicts the person in the most important role? We introduce a measure of
importance of people in images and investigate the correlation between
importance and visual saliency. We find that not only can we automatically
predict the importance of people from purely visual cues, incorporating this
predicted importance results in significant improvement in applications such as
im2text (generating sentences that describe images of groups of people)
Variational recurrent sequence-to-sequence retrieval for stepwise illustration
We address and formalise the task of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) cross-modal retrieval. Given a sequence of text passages as query, the goal is to retrieve a sequence of images that best describes and aligns with the query. This new task extends the traditional cross-modal retrieval, where each image-text pair is treated independently ignoring broader context. We propose a novel variational recurrent seq2seq (VRSS) retrieval model for this seq2seq task. Unlike most cross-modal methods, we generate an image vector corresponding to the latent topic obtained from combining the text semantics and context. This synthetic image embedding point associated with every text embedding point can then be employed for either image generation or image retrieval as desired. We evaluate the model for the application of stepwise illustration of recipes, where a sequence of relevant images are retrieved to best match the steps described in the text. To this end, we build and release a new Stepwise Recipe dataset for research purposes, containing 10K recipes (sequences of image-text pairs) having a total of 67K image-text pairs. To our knowledge, it is the first publicly available dataset to offer rich semantic descriptions in a focused category such as food or recipes. Our model is shown to outperform several competitive and relevant baselines in the experiments. We also provide qualitative analysis of how semantically meaningful the results produced by our model are through human evaluation and comparison with relevant existing methods
Simple to Complex Cross-modal Learning to Rank
The heterogeneity-gap between different modalities brings a significant
challenge to multimedia information retrieval. Some studies formalize the
cross-modal retrieval tasks as a ranking problem and learn a shared multi-modal
embedding space to measure the cross-modality similarity. However, previous
methods often establish the shared embedding space based on linear mapping
functions which might not be sophisticated enough to reveal more complicated
inter-modal correspondences. Additionally, current studies assume that the
rankings are of equal importance, and thus all rankings are used
simultaneously, or a small number of rankings are selected randomly to train
the embedding space at each iteration. Such strategies, however, always suffer
from outliers as well as reduced generalization capability due to their lack of
insightful understanding of procedure of human cognition. In this paper, we
involve the self-paced learning theory with diversity into the cross-modal
learning to rank and learn an optimal multi-modal embedding space based on
non-linear mapping functions. This strategy enhances the model's robustness to
outliers and achieves better generalization via training the model gradually
from easy rankings by diverse queries to more complex ones. An efficient
alternative algorithm is exploited to solve the proposed challenging problem
with fast convergence in practice. Extensive experimental results on several
benchmark datasets indicate that the proposed method achieves significant
improvements over the state-of-the-arts in this literature.Comment: 14 pages; Accepted by Computer Vision and Image Understandin
Towards Understanding User Preferences from User Tagging Behavior for Personalization
Personalizing image tags is a relatively new and growing area of research,
and in order to advance this research community, we must review and challenge
the de-facto standard of defining tag importance. We believe that for greater
progress to be made, we must go beyond tags that merely describe objects that
are visually represented in the image, towards more user-centric and subjective
notions such as emotion, sentiment, and preferences.
We focus on the notion of user preferences and show that the order that users
list tags on images is correlated to the order of preference over the tags that
they provided for the image. While this observation is not completely
surprising, to our knowledge, we are the first to explore this aspect of user
tagging behavior systematically and report empirical results to support this
observation. We argue that this observation can be exploited to help advance
the image tagging (and related) communities.
Our contributions include: 1.) conducting a user study demonstrating this
observation, 2.) collecting a dataset with user tag preferences explicitly
collected.Comment: 6 page
Show from Tell: Audio-Visual Modelling in Clinical Settings
Auditory and visual signals usually present together and correlate with each
other, not only in natural environments but also in clinical settings. However,
the audio-visual modelling in the latter case can be more challenging, due to
the different sources of audio/video signals and the noise (both signal-level
and semantic-level) in auditory signals -- usually speech. In this paper, we
consider audio-visual modelling in a clinical setting, providing a solution to
learn medical representations that benefit various clinical tasks, without
human expert annotation. A simple yet effective multi-modal self-supervised
learning framework is proposed for this purpose. The proposed approach is able
to localise anatomical regions of interest during ultrasound imaging, with only
speech audio as a reference. Experimental evaluations on a large-scale clinical
multi-modal ultrasound video dataset show that the proposed self-supervised
method learns good transferable anatomical representations that boost the
performance of automated downstream clinical tasks, even outperforming
fully-supervised solutions
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