2,858 research outputs found
IST Austria Thesis
Modern computer vision systems heavily rely on statistical machine learning models, which typically require large amounts of labeled data to be learned reliably. Moreover, very recently computer vision research widely adopted techniques for representation learning, which further increase the demand for labeled data. However, for many important practical problems there is relatively small amount of labeled data available, so it is problematic to leverage full potential of the representation learning methods. One way to overcome this obstacle is to invest substantial resources into producing large labelled datasets. Unfortunately, this can be prohibitively expensive in practice. In this thesis we focus on the alternative way of tackling the aforementioned issue. We concentrate on methods, which make use of weakly-labeled or even unlabeled data. Specifically, the first half of the thesis is dedicated to the semantic image segmentation task. We develop a technique, which achieves competitive segmentation performance and only requires annotations in a form of global image-level labels instead of dense segmentation masks. Subsequently, we present a new methodology, which further improves segmentation performance by leveraging tiny additional feedback from a human annotator. By using our methods practitioners can greatly reduce the amount of data annotation effort, which is required to learn modern image segmentation models. In the second half of the thesis we focus on methods for learning from unlabeled visual data. We study a family of autoregressive models for modeling structure of natural images and discuss potential applications of these models. Moreover, we conduct in-depth study of one of these applications, where we develop the state-of-the-art model for the probabilistic image colorization task
Deep Markov Random Field for Image Modeling
Markov Random Fields (MRFs), a formulation widely used in generative image
modeling, have long been plagued by the lack of expressive power. This issue is
primarily due to the fact that conventional MRFs formulations tend to use
simplistic factors to capture local patterns. In this paper, we move beyond
such limitations, and propose a novel MRF model that uses fully-connected
neurons to express the complex interactions among pixels. Through theoretical
analysis, we reveal an inherent connection between this model and recurrent
neural networks, and thereon derive an approximated feed-forward network that
couples multiple RNNs along opposite directions. This formulation combines the
expressive power of deep neural networks and the cyclic dependency structure of
MRF in a unified model, bringing the modeling capability to a new level. The
feed-forward approximation also allows it to be efficiently learned from data.
Experimental results on a variety of low-level vision tasks show notable
improvement over state-of-the-arts.Comment: Accepted at ECCV 201
A Supervised Neural Autoregressive Topic Model for Simultaneous Image Classification and Annotation
Topic modeling based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) has been a
framework of choice to perform scene recognition and annotation. Recently, a
new type of topic model called the Document Neural Autoregressive Distribution
Estimator (DocNADE) was proposed and demonstrated state-of-the-art performance
for document modeling. In this work, we show how to successfully apply and
extend this model to the context of visual scene modeling. Specifically, we
propose SupDocNADE, a supervised extension of DocNADE, that increases the
discriminative power of the hidden topic features by incorporating label
information into the training objective of the model. We also describe how to
leverage information about the spatial position of the visual words and how to
embed additional image annotations, so as to simultaneously perform image
classification and annotation. We test our model on the Scene15, LabelMe and
UIUC-Sports datasets and show that it compares favorably to other topic models
such as the supervised variant of LDA.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure
Learning single-image 3D reconstruction by generative modelling of shape, pose and shading
We present a unified framework tackling two problems: class-specific 3D
reconstruction from a single image, and generation of new 3D shape samples.
These tasks have received considerable attention recently; however, most
existing approaches rely on 3D supervision, annotation of 2D images with
keypoints or poses, and/or training with multiple views of each object
instance. Our framework is very general: it can be trained in similar settings
to existing approaches, while also supporting weaker supervision. Importantly,
it can be trained purely from 2D images, without pose annotations, and with
only a single view per instance. We employ meshes as an output representation,
instead of voxels used in most prior work. This allows us to reason over
lighting parameters and exploit shading information during training, which
previous 2D-supervised methods cannot. Thus, our method can learn to generate
and reconstruct concave object classes. We evaluate our approach in various
settings, showing that: (i) it learns to disentangle shape from pose and
lighting; (ii) using shading in the loss improves performance compared to just
silhouettes; (iii) when using a standard single white light, our model
outperforms state-of-the-art 2D-supervised methods, both with and without pose
supervision, thanks to exploiting shading cues; (iv) performance improves
further when using multiple coloured lights, even approaching that of
state-of-the-art 3D-supervised methods; (v) shapes produced by our model
capture smooth surfaces and fine details better than voxel-based approaches;
and (vi) our approach supports concave classes such as bathtubs and sofas,
which methods based on silhouettes cannot learn.Comment: Extension of arXiv:1807.09259, accepted to IJCV. Differentiable
renderer available at https://github.com/pmh47/dir
A Deep and Autoregressive Approach for Topic Modeling of Multimodal Data
Topic modeling based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) has been a
framework of choice to deal with multimodal data, such as in image annotation
tasks. Another popular approach to model the multimodal data is through deep
neural networks, such as the deep Boltzmann machine (DBM). Recently, a new type
of topic model called the Document Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator
(DocNADE) was proposed and demonstrated state-of-the-art performance for text
document modeling. In this work, we show how to successfully apply and extend
this model to multimodal data, such as simultaneous image classification and
annotation. First, we propose SupDocNADE, a supervised extension of DocNADE,
that increases the discriminative power of the learned hidden topic features
and show how to employ it to learn a joint representation from image visual
words, annotation words and class label information. We test our model on the
LabelMe and UIUC-Sports data sets and show that it compares favorably to other
topic models. Second, we propose a deep extension of our model and provide an
efficient way of training the deep model. Experimental results show that our
deep model outperforms its shallow version and reaches state-of-the-art
performance on the Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR) Flickr data set.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures. A version has been accepted by TPAMI on Aug
4th, 2015. Add footnote about how to train the model in practice in Section
5.1. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1305.530
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