1,645 research outputs found
Feature and Region Selection for Visual Learning
Visual learning problems such as object classification and action recognition
are typically approached using extensions of the popular bag-of-words (BoW)
model. Despite its great success, it is unclear what visual features the BoW
model is learning: Which regions in the image or video are used to discriminate
among classes? Which are the most discriminative visual words? Answering these
questions is fundamental for understanding existing BoW models and inspiring
better models for visual recognition.
To answer these questions, this paper presents a method for feature selection
and region selection in the visual BoW model. This allows for an intermediate
visualization of the features and regions that are important for visual
learning. The main idea is to assign latent weights to the features or regions,
and jointly optimize these latent variables with the parameters of a classifier
(e.g., support vector machine). There are four main benefits of our approach:
(1) Our approach accommodates non-linear additive kernels such as the popular
and intersection kernel; (2) our approach is able to handle both
regions in images and spatio-temporal regions in videos in a unified way; (3)
the feature selection problem is convex, and both problems can be solved using
a scalable reduced gradient method; (4) we point out strong connections with
multiple kernel learning and multiple instance learning approaches.
Experimental results in the PASCAL VOC 2007, MSR Action Dataset II and YouTube
illustrate the benefits of our approach
Image classification by visual bag-of-words refinement and reduction
This paper presents a new framework for visual bag-of-words (BOW) refinement
and reduction to overcome the drawbacks associated with the visual BOW model
which has been widely used for image classification. Although very influential
in the literature, the traditional visual BOW model has two distinct drawbacks.
Firstly, for efficiency purposes, the visual vocabulary is commonly constructed
by directly clustering the low-level visual feature vectors extracted from
local keypoints, without considering the high-level semantics of images. That
is, the visual BOW model still suffers from the semantic gap, and thus may lead
to significant performance degradation in more challenging tasks (e.g. social
image classification). Secondly, typically thousands of visual words are
generated to obtain better performance on a relatively large image dataset. Due
to such large vocabulary size, the subsequent image classification may take
sheer amount of time. To overcome the first drawback, we develop a graph-based
method for visual BOW refinement by exploiting the tags (easy to access
although noisy) of social images. More notably, for efficient image
classification, we further reduce the refined visual BOW model to a much
smaller size through semantic spectral clustering. Extensive experimental
results show the promising performance of the proposed framework for visual BOW
refinement and reduction
Automatic annotation for weakly supervised learning of detectors
PhDObject detection in images and action detection in videos are among the most widely studied
computer vision problems, with applications in consumer photography, surveillance, and automatic
media tagging. Typically, these standard detectors are fully supervised, that is they require
a large body of training data where the locations of the objects/actions in images/videos have
been manually annotated. With the emergence of digital media, and the rise of high-speed internet,
raw images and video are available for little to no cost. However, the manual annotation
of object and action locations remains tedious, slow, and expensive. As a result there has been
a great interest in training detectors with weak supervision where only the presence or absence
of object/action in image/video is needed, not the location. This thesis presents approaches for
weakly supervised learning of object/action detectors with a focus on automatically annotating
object and action locations in images/videos using only binary weak labels indicating the presence
or absence of object/action in images/videos.
First, a framework for weakly supervised learning of object detectors in images is presented.
In the proposed approach, a variation of multiple instance learning (MIL) technique for automatically
annotating object locations in weakly labelled data is presented which, unlike existing
approaches, uses inter-class and intra-class cue fusion to obtain the initial annotation. The initial
annotation is then used to start an iterative process in which standard object detectors are used to
refine the location annotation. Finally, to ensure that the iterative training of detectors do not drift
from the object of interest, a scheme for detecting model drift is also presented. Furthermore,
unlike most other methods, our weakly supervised approach is evaluated on data without manual
pose (object orientation) annotation.
Second, an analysis of the initial annotation of objects, using inter-class and intra-class cues,
is carried out. From the analysis, a new method based on negative mining (NegMine) is presented
for the initial annotation of both object and action data. The NegMine based approach is a
much simpler formulation using only inter-class measure and requires no complex combinatorial
optimisation but can still meet or outperform existing approaches including the previously pre3
sented inter-intra class cue fusion approach. Furthermore, NegMine can be fused with existing
approaches to boost their performance.
Finally, the thesis will take a step back and look at the use of generic object detectors as prior
knowledge in weakly supervised learning of object detectors. These generic object detectors are
typically based on sampling saliency maps that indicate if a pixel belongs to the background
or foreground. A new approach to generating saliency maps is presented that, unlike existing
approaches, looks beyond the current image of interest and into images similar to the current
image. We show that our generic object proposal method can be used by itself to annotate the
weakly labelled object data with surprisingly high accuracy
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