Efficient Asymmetric Co-Tracking using Uncertainty Sampling

Adaptive tracking-by-detection approaches are popular for tracking arbitrary objects. They treat the tracking problem as a classification task and use online learning techniques to update the object model. However, these approaches are heavily invested in the efficiency and effectiveness of their detectors. Evaluating a massive number of samples for each frame (e.g., obtained by a sliding window) forces the detector to trade the accuracy in favor of speed. Furthermore, misclassification of borderline samples in the detector introduce accumulating errors in tracking. In this study, we propose a co-tracking based on the efficient cooperation of two detectors: a rapid adaptive exemplar-based detector and another more sophisticated but slower detector with a long-term memory. The sampling labeling and co-learning of the detectors are conducted by an uncertainty sampling unit, which improves the speed and accuracy of the system. We also introduce a budgeting mechanism which prevents the unbounded growth in the number of examples in the first detector to maintain its rapid response. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed tracker against its baselines and its superior performance against state-of-the-art trackers on various benchmark videos.Comment: Submitted to IEEE ICSIPA'201

On the Significance of Distance in Machine Learning

Avstandsbegrepet er grunnleggende i maskinlæring. Hvordan vi velger å måle avstand har betydning, men det er ofte utfordrende å finne et passende avstandsmål. Metrisk læring kan brukes til å lære funksjoner som implementerer avstand eller avstandslignende mål. Vanlige dyplæringsmodeller er sårbare for modifikasjoner av input som har til hensikt å lure modellen (adversarial examples, motstridende eksempler). Konstruksjon av modeller som er robuste mot denne typen angrep er av stor betydning for å kunne utnytte maskinlæringsmodeller i større skala, og et passende avstandsmål kan brukes til å studere slik motstandsdyktighet. Ofte eksisterer det hierarkiske relasjoner blant klasser, og disse relasjonene kan da representeres av den hierarkiske avstanden til klasser. I klassifiseringsproblemer som må ta i betraktning disse klasserelasjonene, kan hierarkiinformert klassifisering brukes. Jeg har utviklet en metode kalt /distance-ratio/-basert (DR) metrisk læring. I motsetning til den formuleringen som normalt anvendes har DR-formuleringen to gunstige egenskaper. For det første er det skala-invariant med hensyn til rommet det projiseres til. For det andre har optimale klassekonfidensverdier på klasserepresentantene. Dersom rommet for å konstruere modifikasjoner er tilstrekklig stort, vil man med standard adversarial accuracy (SAA, standard motstridende nøyaktighet) risikere at naturlige datapunkter blir betraktet som motstridende eksempler. Dette kan være en årsak til SAA ofte går på bekostning av nøyaktighet. For å løse dette problemet har jeg utviklet en ny definisjon på motstridende nøyaktighet kalt Voronoi-epsilon adversarial accuracy (VAA, Voronoi-epsilon motstridende nøyaktighet). VAA utvider studiet av lokal robusthet til global robusthet. Klassehierarkisk informasjon er ikke tilgjengelig for alle datasett. For å håndtere denne utfordringen har jeg undersøkt om klassifikasjonsbaserte metriske læringsmodeller kan brukes til å utlede klassehierarkiet. Videre har jeg undersøkt de mulige effektene av robusthet på feature space (egenskapsrom). Jeg fant da at avstandsstrukturen til et egenskapsrom trent for robusthet har større likhet med avstandsstrukturen i rådata enn et egenskapsrom trent uten robusthet.The notion of distance is fundamental in machine learning. The choice of distance matters, but it is often challenging to find an appropriate distance. Metric learning can be used for learning distance(-like) functions. Common deep learning models are vulnerable to the adversarial modification of inputs. Devising adversarially robust models is of immense importance for the wide deployment of machine learning models, and distance can be used for the study of adversarial robustness. Often, hierarchical relationships exist among classes, and these relationships can be represented by the hierarchical distance of classes. For classification problems that must take these class relationships into account, hierarchy-informed classification can be used. I propose distance-ratio-based (DR) formulation for metric learning. In contrast to the commonly used formulation, DR formulation has two favorable properties. First, it is invariant of the scale of an embedding. Secondly, it has optimal class confidence values on class representatives. For a large perturbation budget, standard adversarial accuracy (SAA) allows natural data points to be considered as adversarial examples. This could be a reason for the tradeoff between accuracy and SAA. To resolve the issue, I proposed a new definition of adversarial accuracy named Voronoi-epsilon adversarial accuracy (VAA). VAA extends the study of local robustness to global robustness. Class hierarchical information is not available for all datasets. To handle this challenge, I investigated whether classification-based metric learning models can be used to infer class hierarchy. Furthermore, I explored the possible effects of adversarial robustness on feature space. I found that the distance structure of robustly trained feature space resembles that of input space to a greater extent than does standard trained feature space.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Tree Edit Distance Learning via Adaptive Symbol Embeddings

Metric learning has the aim to improve classification accuracy by learning a distance measure which brings data points from the same class closer together and pushes data points from different classes further apart. Recent research has demonstrated that metric learning approaches can also be applied to trees, such as molecular structures, abstract syntax trees of computer programs, or syntax trees of natural language, by learning the cost function of an edit distance, i.e. the costs of replacing, deleting, or inserting nodes in a tree. However, learning such costs directly may yield an edit distance which violates metric axioms, is challenging to interpret, and may not generalize well. In this contribution, we propose a novel metric learning approach for trees which we call embedding edit distance learning (BEDL) and which learns an edit distance indirectly by embedding the tree nodes as vectors, such that the Euclidean distance between those vectors supports class discrimination. We learn such embeddings by reducing the distance to prototypical trees from the same class and increasing the distance to prototypical trees from different classes. In our experiments, we show that BEDL improves upon the state-of-the-art in metric learning for trees on six benchmark data sets, ranging from computer science over biomedical data to a natural-language processing data set containing over 300,000 nodes.Comment: Paper at the International Conference of Machine Learning (2018), 2018-07-10 to 2018-07-15 in Stockholm, Swede

Efficient object detection via structured learning and local classifiers

Object detection has made great strides recently. However, it is still facing two big challenges: detection accuracy and computational efficiency. In this thesis, we present an automatic efficient object detection frarnework to detect object instances ·in images using bounding boxes, which can be trained and tested easily on current personal computers. Our framework is a sliding-window based approach, and consists of two major components: (1) efficient object proposal generation, predicting possible object bounding boxes, and (2) efficient object proposal verification, classifying each bounding box in a multiclass manner. For object proposal generation, we formulate this problem as a structured learning problem and investigate structural support vector machines (SSVMs) with our proposed scale/aspect-ratio quantization scheme and ranking constraints. A general ranking-order decomposition algorithm is developed for solving the formulation efficiently, and applied to generate proposals using a two-stage cascade. Using image gradients as features, our object proposal generation method achieves state-of-the-art results in terms Df object recall at a low cost in computation. For object proposal verification, we propose two locally linear and one locally nonlinear classifiers to approximate the nonlinear decision boundaries in the feature space efficiently. Inspired by the kernel trick, these classifiers map the original features into another feature space explicitly where linear classifiers are employed for classification, and thus have linear computational complexity in both training and testing, similar to that of linear classifiers. Therefore, in general, our classifiers can achieve comparable accuracy to kernel based classifiers at the cost of lower computational time. To demonstrate its efficiency and generality, our framework is applied to four different object detection tasks: VOC detection challenges, traffic sign detection, pedestrian detection, and face detection. In each task, it can perform reasonably well with acceptable detection accuracy and good computational efficiency. For instance, on VOC datasets with 20 object classes, our method achieved about 0.1 mean average precision (AP) within 2 hours of training and 0.05 second of testing a 500 x 300 pixel image using a mixture of MATLAB and C++ code on a current personal computer

TagBook: A Semantic Video Representation without Supervision for Event Detection

We consider the problem of event detection in video for scenarios where only few, or even zero examples are available for training. For this challenging setting, the prevailing solutions in the literature rely on a semantic video representation obtained from thousands of pre-trained concept detectors. Different from existing work, we propose a new semantic video representation that is based on freely available social tagged videos only, without the need for training any intermediate concept detectors. We introduce a simple algorithm that propagates tags from a video's nearest neighbors, similar in spirit to the ones used for image retrieval, but redesign it for video event detection by including video source set refinement and varying the video tag assignment. We call our approach TagBook and study its construction, descriptiveness and detection performance on the TRECVID 2013 and 2014 multimedia event detection datasets and the Columbia Consumer Video dataset. Despite its simple nature, the proposed TagBook video representation is remarkably effective for few-example and zero-example event detection, even outperforming very recent state-of-the-art alternatives building on supervised representations.Comment: accepted for publication as a regular paper in the IEEE Transactions on Multimedi