See the Difference: Direct Pre-Image Reconstruction and Pose Estimation by Differentiating HOG

The Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG) descriptor has led to many advances in computer vision over the last decade and is still part of many state of the art approaches. We realize that the associated feature computation is piecewise differentiable and therefore many pipelines which build on HOG can be made differentiable. This lends to advanced introspection as well as opportunities for end-to-end optimization. We present our implementation of $\nabla$HOG based on the auto-differentiation toolbox Chumpy and show applications to pre-image visualization and pose estimation which extends the existing differentiable renderer OpenDR pipeline. Both applications improve on the respective state-of-the-art HOG approaches

Mono3D++: Monocular 3D Vehicle Detection with Two-Scale 3D Hypotheses and Task Priors

We present a method to infer 3D pose and shape of vehicles from a single image. To tackle this ill-posed problem, we optimize two-scale projection consistency between the generated 3D hypotheses and their 2D pseudo-measurements. Specifically, we use a morphable wireframe model to generate a fine-scaled representation of vehicle shape and pose. To reduce its sensitivity to 2D landmarks, we jointly model the 3D bounding box as a coarse representation which improves robustness. We also integrate three task priors, including unsupervised monocular depth, a ground plane constraint as well as vehicle shape priors, with forward projection errors into an overall energy function.Comment: Proc. of the AAAI, September 201

View synthesis for pose computation

International audienceGeometrical registration of a query image with respect to a 3D model, or pose estimation, is the cornerstone of many computer vision applications. It is often based on the matching of local photometric descriptors invariant to limited viewpoint changes. However, when the query image has been acquired from a camera position not covered by the model images, pose estimation is often not accurate and sometimes even fails, precisely because of the limited invariance of descriptors. In this paper, we propose to add descriptors to the model, obtained from synthesized views associated with virtual cameras completing the covering of the scene by the real cameras. We propose an efficient strategy to localize the virtual cameras in the scene and generate valuable descriptors from synthetic views. We also discuss a guided sampling strategy for registration in this context. Experiments show that the accuracy of pose estimation is dramatically improved when large viewpoint changes makes the matching of classic descriptors a challenging task

Efficient Belief Propagation for Perception and Manipulation in Clutter

Autonomous service robots are required to perform tasks in common human indoor environments. To achieve goals associated with these tasks, the robot should continually perceive, reason its environment, and plan to manipulate objects, which we term as goal-directed manipulation. Perception remains the most challenging aspect of all stages, as common indoor environments typically pose problems in recognizing objects under inherent occlusions with physical interactions among themselves. Despite recent progress in the field of robot perception, accommodating perceptual uncertainty due to partial observations remains challenging and needs to be addressed to achieve the desired autonomy. In this dissertation, we address the problem of perception under uncertainty for robot manipulation in cluttered environments using generative inference methods. Specifically, we aim to enable robots to perceive partially observable environments by maintaining an approximate probability distribution as a belief over possible scene hypotheses. This belief representation captures uncertainty resulting from inter-object occlusions and physical interactions, which are inherently present in clutterred indoor environments. The research efforts presented in this thesis are towards developing appropriate state representations and inference techniques to generate and maintain such belief over contextually plausible scene states. We focus on providing the following features to generative inference while addressing the challenges due to occlusions: 1) generating and maintaining plausible scene hypotheses, 2) reducing the inference search space that typically grows exponentially with respect to the number of objects in a scene, 3) preserving scene hypotheses over continual observations. To generate and maintain plausible scene hypotheses, we propose physics informed scene estimation methods that combine a Newtonian physics engine within a particle based generative inference framework. The proposed variants of our method with and without a Monte Carlo step showed promising results on generating and maintaining plausible hypotheses under complete occlusions. We show that estimating such scenarios would not be possible by the commonly adopted 3D registration methods without the notion of a physical context that our method provides. To scale up the context informed inference to accommodate a larger number of objects, we describe a factorization of scene state into object and object-parts to perform collaborative particle-based inference. This resulted in the Pull Message Passing for Nonparametric Belief Propagation (PMPNBP) algorithm that caters to the demands of the high-dimensional multimodal nature of cluttered scenes while being computationally tractable. We demonstrate that PMPNBP is orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art Nonparametric Belief Propagation method. Additionally, we show that PMPNBP successfully estimates poses of articulated objects under various simulated occlusion scenarios. To extend our PMPNBP algorithm for tracking object states over continuous observations, we explore ways to propose and preserve hypotheses effectively over time. This resulted in an augmentation-selection method, where hypotheses are drawn from various proposals followed by the selection of a subset using PMPNBP that explained the current state of the objects. We discuss and analyze our augmentation-selection method with its counterparts in belief propagation literature. Furthermore, we develop an inference pipeline for pose estimation and tracking of articulated objects in clutter. In this pipeline, the message passing module with the augmentation-selection method is informed by segmentation heatmaps from a trained neural network. In our experiments, we show that our proposed pipeline can effectively maintain belief and track articulated objects over a sequence of observations under occlusion.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163159/1/kdesingh_1.pd

3D Object Representations for Recognition.

Object recognition from images is a longstanding and challenging problem in computer vision. The main challenge is that the appearance of objects in images is affected by a number of factors, such as illumination, scale, camera viewpoint, intra-class variability, occlusion, truncation, and so on. How to handle all these factors in object recognition is still an open problem. In this dissertation, I present my efforts in building 3D object representations for object recognition. Compared to 2D appearance based object representations, 3D object representations can capture the 3D nature of objects and better handle viewpoint variation, occlusion and truncation in object recognition. I introduce three new 3D object representations: the 3D aspect part representation, the 3D aspectlet representation and the 3D voxel pattern representation. These representations are built to handle different challenging factors in object recognition. The 3D aspect part representation is able to capture the appearance change of object categories due to viewpoint transformation. The 3D aspectlet representation and the 3D voxel pattern representation are designed to handle occlusions between objects in addition to viewpoint change. Based on these representations, we propose new object recognition methods and conduct experiments on benchmark datasets to verify the advantages of our methods. Furthermore, we introduce, PASCAL3D+, a new large scale dataset for 3D object recognition by aligning objects in images with 3D CAD models. We also propose two novel methods to tackle object co-detection and multiview object tracking using our 3D aspect part representation, and a novel Convolutional Neural Network-based approach for object detection using our 3D voxel pattern representation. In order to track multiple objects in videos, we introduce a new online multi-object tracking framework based on Markov Decision Processes. Lastly, I conclude the dissertation and discuss future steps for 3D object recognition.PhDElectrical Engineering: SystemsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120836/1/yuxiang_1.pd

Deep learning with 3D and label geometry

A fine-grained understanding of an image is two-fold: visual understanding and semantic understanding. The former strives to understand the intrinsic properties of the object in the image, whereas the latter aims at associating the diverse objects with certain semantics. All of these form the basis of an in-depth understanding of images. Today’s default architectures of deep convolutional networks have already shown a remarkable ability in capturing the 2D visual appearances of images, and mapping visual content to semantic classes thereafter. However, research on fine-grained image understanding, such as inferring the intrinsic 3D information and more structured semantics, is less explored. In this thesis, we look at the problems by asking "How to better utilize geometry for better image understanding?" In the first part, we research visual image understanding with 3D geometry. We show that it is possible to automatically explain a variety of visual contents in the image with texture-free 3D shapes. Furthermore, we develop a deep learning framework to reliably recover a set of 3D geometric attributes, such as the pose of an object and the surface normal of its shape, from a 2D image. In the second part, we explore label geometry for semantic image understanding. We find that a set of image classification problems have geometrically similar probability spaces. Therefore, label geometry is introduced, unifying one-vs.-rest classification, multi-label classification, and out-of-distribution classification in one framework. Moreover, we show that learned hierarchical label geometries can balance the accuracy and specificity of an image classifier