Unsupervised learning of clutter-resistant visual representations from natural videos

Populations of neurons in inferotemporal cortex (IT) maintain an explicit code for object identity that also tolerates transformations of object appearance e.g., position, scale, viewing angle [1, 2, 3]. Though the learning rules are not known, recent results [4, 5, 6] suggest the operation of an unsupervised temporal-association-based method e.g., Foldiak's trace rule [7]. Such methods exploit the temporal continuity of the visual world by assuming that visual experience over short timescales will tend to have invariant identity content. Thus, by associating representations of frames from nearby times, a representation that tolerates whatever transformations occurred in the video may be achieved. Many previous studies verified that such rules can work in simple situations without background clutter, but the presence of visual clutter has remained problematic for this approach. Here we show that temporal association based on large class-specific filters (templates) avoids the problem of clutter. Our system learns in an unsupervised way from natural videos gathered from the internet, and is able to perform a difficult unconstrained face recognition task on natural images: Labeled Faces in the Wild [8]

Automatic landmark annotation and dense correspondence registration for 3D human facial images

Dense surface registration of three-dimensional (3D) human facial images holds great potential for studies of human trait diversity, disease genetics, and forensics. Non-rigid registration is particularly useful for establishing dense anatomical correspondences between faces. Here we describe a novel non-rigid registration method for fully automatic 3D facial image mapping. This method comprises two steps: first, seventeen facial landmarks are automatically annotated, mainly via PCA-based feature recognition following 3D-to-2D data transformation. Second, an efficient thin-plate spline (TPS) protocol is used to establish the dense anatomical correspondence between facial images, under the guidance of the predefined landmarks. We demonstrate that this method is robust and highly accurate, even for different ethnicities. The average face is calculated for individuals of Han Chinese and Uyghur origins. While fully automatic and computationally efficient, this method enables high-throughput analysis of human facial feature variation.Comment: 33 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

Object Detection in 20 Years: A Survey

Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Its development in the past two decades can be regarded as an epitome of computer vision history. If we think of today's object detection as a technical aesthetics under the power of deep learning, then turning back the clock 20 years we would witness the wisdom of cold weapon era. This paper extensively reviews 400+ papers of object detection in the light of its technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2019). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed up techniques, and the recent state of the art detection methods. This paper also reviews some important detection applications, such as pedestrian detection, face detection, text detection, etc, and makes an in-deep analysis of their challenges as well as technical improvements in recent years.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE TPAMI for possible publicatio