Cross-Paced Representation Learning with Partial Curricula for Sketch-based Image Retrieval

In this paper we address the problem of learning robust cross-domain representations for sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR). While most SBIR approaches focus on extracting low- and mid-level descriptors for direct feature matching, recent works have shown the benefit of learning coupled feature representations to describe data from two related sources. However, cross-domain representation learning methods are typically cast into non-convex minimization problems that are difficult to optimize, leading to unsatisfactory performance. Inspired by self-paced learning, a learning methodology designed to overcome convergence issues related to local optima by exploiting the samples in a meaningful order (i.e. easy to hard), we introduce the cross-paced partial curriculum learning (CPPCL) framework. Compared with existing self-paced learning methods which only consider a single modality and cannot deal with prior knowledge, CPPCL is specifically designed to assess the learning pace by jointly handling data from dual sources and modality-specific prior information provided in the form of partial curricula. Additionally, thanks to the learned dictionaries, we demonstrate that the proposed CPPCL embeds robust coupled representations for SBIR. Our approach is extensively evaluated on four publicly available datasets (i.e. CUFS, Flickr15K, QueenMary SBIR and TU-Berlin Extension datasets), showing superior performance over competing SBIR methods

Localized Manifold Harmonics for Spectral Shape Analysis

The use of Laplacian eigenfunctions is ubiquitous in a wide range of computer graphics and geometry processing applications. In particular, Laplacian eigenbases allow generalizing the classical Fourier analysis to manifolds. A key drawback of such bases is their inherently global nature, as the Laplacian eigenfunctions carry geometric and topological structure of the entire manifold. In this paper, we introduce a new framework for local spectral shape analysis. We show how to efficiently construct localized orthogonal bases by solving an optimization problem that in turn can be posed as the eigendecomposition of a new operator obtained by a modification of the standard Laplacian. We study the theoretical and computational aspects of the proposed framework and showcase our new construction on the classical problems of shape approximation and correspondence. We obtain significant improvement compared to classical Laplacian eigenbases as well as other alternatives for constructing localized bases

WxBS: Wide Baseline Stereo Generalizations

We have presented a new problem -- the wide multiple baseline stereo (WxBS) -- which considers matching of images that simultaneously differ in more than one image acquisition factor such as viewpoint, illumination, sensor type or where object appearance changes significantly, e.g. over time. A new dataset with the ground truth for evaluation of matching algorithms has been introduced and will be made public. We have extensively tested a large set of popular and recent detectors and descriptors and show than the combination of RootSIFT and HalfRootSIFT as descriptors with MSER and Hessian-Affine detectors works best for many different nuisance factors. We show that simple adaptive thresholding improves Hessian-Affine, DoG, MSER (and possibly other) detectors and allows to use them on infrared and low contrast images. A novel matching algorithm for addressing the WxBS problem has been introduced. We have shown experimentally that the WxBS-M matcher dominantes the state-of-the-art methods both on both the new and existing datasets.Comment: Descriptor and detector evaluation expande

Many-to-Many Graph Matching: a Continuous Relaxation Approach

Graphs provide an efficient tool for object representation in various computer vision applications. Once graph-based representations are constructed, an important question is how to compare graphs. This problem is often formulated as a graph matching problem where one seeks a mapping between vertices of two graphs which optimally aligns their structure. In the classical formulation of graph matching, only one-to-one correspondences between vertices are considered. However, in many applications, graphs cannot be matched perfectly and it is more interesting to consider many-to-many correspondences where clusters of vertices in one graph are matched to clusters of vertices in the other graph. In this paper, we formulate the many-to-many graph matching problem as a discrete optimization problem and propose an approximate algorithm based on a continuous relaxation of the combinatorial problem. We compare our method with other existing methods on several benchmark computer vision datasets.Comment: 1