Regularized Discriminant Embedding for Visual Descriptor Learning

Images can vary according to changes in viewpoint, resolution, noise, and illumination. In this paper, we aim to learn representations for an image, which are robust to wide changes in such environmental conditions, using training pairs of matching and non-matching local image patches that are collected under various environmental conditions. We present a regularized discriminant analysis that emphasizes two challenging categories among the given training pairs: (1) matching, but far apart pairs and (2) non-matching, but close pairs in the original feature space (e.g., SIFT feature space). Compared to existing work on metric learning and discriminant analysis, our method can better distinguish relevant images from irrelevant, but look-alike images.Comment: 3 pages + 1 additional page containing only cited references; The full version of this manuscript is currently under review in an international journa

Soft Locality Preserving Map (SLPM) for Facial Expression Recognition

For image recognition, an extensive number of methods have been proposed to overcome the high-dimensionality problem of feature vectors being used. These methods vary from unsupervised to supervised, and from statistics to graph-theory based. In this paper, the most popular and the state-of-the-art methods for dimensionality reduction are firstly reviewed, and then a new and more efficient manifold-learning method, named Soft Locality Preserving Map (SLPM), is presented. Furthermore, feature generation and sample selection are proposed to achieve better manifold learning. SLPM is a graph-based subspace-learning method, with the use of k-neighbourhood information and the class information. The key feature of SLPM is that it aims to control the level of spread of the different classes, because the spread of the classes in the underlying manifold is closely connected to the generalizability of the learned subspace. Our proposed manifold-learning method can be applied to various pattern recognition applications, and we evaluate its performances on facial expression recognition. Experiments on databases, such as the Bahcesehir University Multilingual Affective Face Database (BAUM-2), the Extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) Database, the Japanese Female Facial Expression (JAFFE) Database, and the Taiwanese Facial Expression Image Database (TFEID), show that SLPM can effectively reduce the dimensionality of the feature vectors and enhance the discriminative power of the extracted features for expression recognition. Furthermore, the proposed feature-generation method can improve the generalizability of the underlying manifolds for facial expression recognition

Face Recognition: From Traditional to Deep Learning Methods

Starting in the seventies, face recognition has become one of the most researched topics in computer vision and biometrics. Traditional methods based on hand-crafted features and traditional machine learning techniques have recently been superseded by deep neural networks trained with very large datasets. In this paper we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date literature review of popular face recognition methods including both traditional (geometry-based, holistic, feature-based and hybrid methods) and deep learning methods

Learning Expressionlets via Universal Manifold Model for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression is temporally dynamic event which can be decomposed into a set of muscle motions occurring in different facial regions over various time intervals. For dynamic expression recognition, two key issues, temporal alignment and semantics-aware dynamic representation, must be taken into account. In this paper, we attempt to solve both problems via manifold modeling of videos based on a novel mid-level representation, i.e. \textbf{expressionlet}. Specifically, our method contains three key stages: 1) each expression video clip is characterized as a spatial-temporal manifold (STM) formed by dense low-level features; 2) a Universal Manifold Model (UMM) is learned over all low-level features and represented as a set of local modes to statistically unify all the STMs. 3) the local modes on each STM can be instantiated by fitting to UMM, and the corresponding expressionlet is constructed by modeling the variations in each local mode. With above strategy, expression videos are naturally aligned both spatially and temporally. To enhance the discriminative power, the expressionlet-based STM representation is further processed with discriminant embedding. Our method is evaluated on four public expression databases, CK+, MMI, Oulu-CASIA, and FERA. In all cases, our method outperforms the known state-of-the-art by a large margin.Comment: 12 page

Kernel Methods on Riemannian Manifolds with Gaussian RBF Kernels

In this paper, we develop an approach to exploiting kernel methods with manifold-valued data. In many computer vision problems, the data can be naturally represented as points on a Riemannian manifold. Due to the non-Euclidean geometry of Riemannian manifolds, usual Euclidean computer vision and machine learning algorithms yield inferior results on such data. In this paper, we define Gaussian radial basis function (RBF)-based positive definite kernels on manifolds that permit us to embed a given manifold with a corresponding metric in a high dimensional reproducing kernel Hilbert space. These kernels make it possible to utilize algorithms developed for linear spaces on nonlinear manifold-valued data. Since the Gaussian RBF defined with any given metric is not always positive definite, we present a unified framework for analyzing the positive definiteness of the Gaussian RBF on a generic metric space. We then use the proposed framework to identify positive definite kernels on two specific manifolds commonly encountered in computer vision: the Riemannian manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices and the Grassmann manifold, i.e., the Riemannian manifold of linear subspaces of a Euclidean space. We show that many popular algorithms designed for Euclidean spaces, such as support vector machines, discriminant analysis and principal component analysis can be generalized to Riemannian manifolds with the help of such positive definite Gaussian kernels

MKL-RT: Multiple Kernel Learning for Ratio-trace Problems via Convex Optimization

In the recent past, automatic selection or combination of kernels (or features) based on multiple kernel learning (MKL) approaches has been receiving significant attention from various research communities. Though MKL has been extensively studied in the context of support vector machines (SVM), it is relatively less explored for ratio-trace problems. In this paper, we show that MKL can be formulated as a convex optimization problem for a general class of ratio-trace problems that encompasses many popular algorithms used in various computer vision applications. We also provide an optimization procedure that is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum of the proposed optimization problem. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed MKL approach, which we refer to as MKL-RT, can be successfully used to select features for discriminative dimensionality reduction and cross-modal retrieval. We also show that the proposed convex MKL-RT approach performs better than the recently proposed non-convex MKL-DR approach

Scalable Similarity Learning using Large Margin Neighborhood Embedding

Classifying large-scale image data into object categories is an important problem that has received increasing research attention. Given the huge amount of data, non-parametric approaches such as nearest neighbor classifiers have shown promising results, especially when they are underpinned by a learned distance or similarity measurement. Although metric learning has been well studied in the past decades, most existing algorithms are impractical to handle large-scale data sets. In this paper, we present an image similarity learning method that can scale well in both the number of images and the dimensionality of image descriptors. To this end, similarity comparison is restricted to each sample's local neighbors and a discriminative similarity measure is induced from large margin neighborhood embedding. We also exploit the ensemble of projections so that high-dimensional features can be processed in a set of lower-dimensional subspaces in parallel without much performance compromise. The similarity function is learned online using a stochastic gradient descent algorithm in which the triplet sampling strategy is customized for quick convergence of classification performance. The effectiveness of our proposed model is validated on several data sets with scales varying from tens of thousands to one million images. Recognition accuracies competitive with the state-of-the-art performance are achieved with much higher efficiency and scalability

Deep Linear Discriminant Analysis on Fisher Networks: A Hybrid Architecture for Person Re-identification

Person re-identification is to seek a correct match for a person of interest across views among a large number of imposters. It typically involves two procedures of non-linear feature extractions against dramatic appearance changes, and subsequent discriminative analysis in order to reduce intra- personal variations while enlarging inter-personal differences. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid architecture which combines Fisher vectors and deep neural networks to learn non-linear representations of person images to a space where data can be linearly separable. We reinforce a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) on top of the deep neural network such that linearly separable latent representations can be learnt in an end-to-end fashion. By optimizing an objective function modified from LDA, the network is enforced to produce feature distributions which have a low variance within the same class and high variance between classes. The objective is essentially derived from the general LDA eigenvalue problem and allows to train the network with stochastic gradient descent and back-propagate LDA gradients to compute the gradients involved in Fisher vector encoding. For evaluation we test our approach on four benchmark data sets in person re-identification (VIPeR [1], CUHK03 [2], CUHK01 [3], and Market1501 [4]). Extensive experiments on these benchmarks show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art results.Comment: 12 page

Optimized Kernel-based Projection Space of Riemannian Manifolds

It is proven that encoding images and videos through Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices, and considering the Riemannian geometry of the resulting space, can lead to increased classification performance. Taking into account manifold geometry is typically done via embedding the manifolds in tangent spaces, or Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS). Recently, it was shown that embedding such manifolds into a Random Projection Spaces (RPS), rather than RKHS or tangent space, leads to higher classification and clustering performance. However, based on structure and dimensionality of the randomly generated hyperplanes, the classification performance over RPS may vary significantly. In addition, fine-tuning RPS is data expensive (as it requires validation-data), time consuming, and resource demanding. In this paper, we introduce an approach to learn an optimized kernel-based projection (with fixed dimensionality), by employing the concept of subspace clustering. As such, we encode the association of data points to the underlying subspace of each point, to generate meaningful hyperplanes. Further, we adopt the concept of dictionary learning and sparse coding, and discriminative analysis, for the optimized kernel-based projection space (OPS) on SPD manifolds. We validate our algorithm on several classification tasks. The experiment results also demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on such manifolds.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, conferenc

Enhancing Person Re-identification in a Self-trained Subspace

Despite the promising progress made in recent years, person re-identification (re-ID) remains a challenging task due to the complex variations in human appearances from different camera views. For this challenging problem, a large variety of algorithms have been developed in the fully-supervised setting, requiring access to a large amount of labeled training data. However, the main bottleneck for fully-supervised re-ID is the limited availability of labeled training samples. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a self-trained subspace learning paradigm for person re-ID which effectively utilizes both labeled and unlabeled data to learn a discriminative subspace where person images across disjoint camera views can be easily matched. The proposed approach first constructs pseudo pairwise relationships among unlabeled persons using the k-nearest neighbors algorithm. Then, with the pseudo pairwise relationships, the unlabeled samples can be easily combined with the labeled samples to learn a discriminative projection by solving an eigenvalue problem. In addition, we refine the pseudo pairwise relationships iteratively, which further improves the learning performance. A multi-kernel embedding strategy is also incorporated into the proposed approach to cope with the non-linearity in person's appearance and explore the complementation of multiple kernels. In this way, the performance of person re-ID can be greatly enhanced when training data are insufficient. Experimental results on six widely-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and its performance can be comparable to the reported results of most state-of-the-art fully-supervised methods while using much fewer labeled data.Comment: Accepted by ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM