Expanded Parts Model for Semantic Description of Humans in Still Images

We introduce an Expanded Parts Model (EPM) for recognizing human attributes (e.g. young, short hair, wearing suit) and actions (e.g. running, jumping) in still images. An EPM is a collection of part templates which are learnt discriminatively to explain specific scale-space regions in the images (in human centric coordinates). This is in contrast to current models which consist of a relatively few (i.e. a mixture of) 'average' templates. EPM uses only a subset of the parts to score an image and scores the image sparsely in space, i.e. it ignores redundant and random background in an image. To learn our model, we propose an algorithm which automatically mines parts and learns corresponding discriminative templates together with their respective locations from a large number of candidate parts. We validate our method on three recent challenging datasets of human attributes and actions. We obtain convincing qualitative and state-of-the-art quantitative results on the three datasets.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI

Sparse Modeling for Image and Vision Processing

In recent years, a large amount of multi-disciplinary research has been conducted on sparse models and their applications. In statistics and machine learning, the sparsity principle is used to perform model selection---that is, automatically selecting a simple model among a large collection of them. In signal processing, sparse coding consists of representing data with linear combinations of a few dictionary elements. Subsequently, the corresponding tools have been widely adopted by several scientific communities such as neuroscience, bioinformatics, or computer vision. The goal of this monograph is to offer a self-contained view of sparse modeling for visual recognition and image processing. More specifically, we focus on applications where the dictionary is learned and adapted to data, yielding a compact representation that has been successful in various contexts.Comment: 205 pages, to appear in Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Visio

Non-negative matrix factorization with sparseness constraints

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a recently developed technique for finding parts-based, linear representations of non-negative data. Although it has successfully been applied in several applications, it does not always result in parts-based representations. In this paper, we show how explicitly incorporating the notion of `sparseness' improves the found decompositions. Additionally, we provide complete MATLAB code both for standard NMF and for our extension. Our hope is that this will further the application of these methods to solving novel data-analysis problems

Non-Negative Local Sparse Coding for Subspace Clustering

Subspace sparse coding (SSC) algorithms have proven to be beneficial to clustering problems. They provide an alternative data representation in which the underlying structure of the clusters can be better captured. However, most of the research in this area is mainly focused on enhancing the sparse coding part of the problem. In contrast, we introduce a novel objective term in our proposed SSC framework which focuses on the separability of data points in the coding space. We also provide mathematical insights into how this local-separability term improves the clustering result of the SSC framework. Our proposed non-linear local SSC algorithm (NLSSC) also benefits from the efficient choice of its sparsity terms and constraints. The NLSSC algorithm is also formulated in the kernel-based framework (NLKSSC) which can represent the nonlinear structure of data. In addition, we address the possibility of having redundancies in sparse coding results and its negative effect on graph-based clustering problems. We introduce the link-restore post-processing step to improve the representation graph of non-negative SSC algorithms such as ours. Empirical evaluations on well-known clustering benchmarks show that our proposed NLSSC framework results in better clusterings compared to the state-of-the-art baselines and demonstrate the effectiveness of the link-restore post-processing in improving the clustering accuracy via correcting the broken links of the representation graph.Comment: 15 pages, IDA 2018 conferenc