Improving Landmark Localization with Semi-Supervised Learning

We present two techniques to improve landmark localization in images from partially annotated datasets. Our primary goal is to leverage the common situation where precise landmark locations are only provided for a small data subset, but where class labels for classification or regression tasks related to the landmarks are more abundantly available. First, we propose the framework of sequential multitasking and explore it here through an architecture for landmark localization where training with class labels acts as an auxiliary signal to guide the landmark localization on unlabeled data. A key aspect of our approach is that errors can be backpropagated through a complete landmark localization model. Second, we propose and explore an unsupervised learning technique for landmark localization based on having a model predict equivariant landmarks with respect to transformations applied to the image. We show that these techniques, improve landmark prediction considerably and can learn effective detectors even when only a small fraction of the dataset has landmark labels. We present results on two toy datasets and four real datasets, with hands and faces, and report new state-of-the-art on two datasets in the wild, e.g. with only 5\% of labeled images we outperform previous state-of-the-art trained on the AFLW dataset.Comment: Published as a conference paper in CVPR 201

Occlusion Coherence: Detecting and Localizing Occluded Faces

The presence of occluders significantly impacts object recognition accuracy. However, occlusion is typically treated as an unstructured source of noise and explicit models for occluders have lagged behind those for object appearance and shape. In this paper we describe a hierarchical deformable part model for face detection and landmark localization that explicitly models part occlusion. The proposed model structure makes it possible to augment positive training data with large numbers of synthetically occluded instances. This allows us to easily incorporate the statistics of occlusion patterns in a discriminatively trained model. We test the model on several benchmarks for landmark localization and detection including challenging new data sets featuring significant occlusion. We find that the addition of an explicit occlusion model yields a detection system that outperforms existing approaches for occluded instances while maintaining competitive accuracy in detection and landmark localization for unoccluded instances

UAV first view landmark localization with active reinforcement learning

We present an active reinforcement learning framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) first view landmark localization. We formulate the problem of landmark localization as that of a Markov decision process and introduce an active landmark-localization network (ALLNet) to address it. The aim of the ALLNet is to locate a bounding box that surrounds the landmark in a first view image sequence. To this end, it is trained in a reinforcement learning fashion. Specifically, it employs support vector machine (SVM) scores on the bounding box patches as rewards and learns the bounding box transformations as actions. Furthermore, each SVM score indicates whether or not the landmark is detected by the bounding box such that it enables the ALLNet to have the capability of judging whether the landmark leaves or re-enters a first view image. Therefore, the operation of the ALLNet is not only dominated by the reinforcement learning process but also supplemented by an active learning motivated manner. Once the landmark is considered to leave the first view image, the ALLNet stops operating until the SVM detects its re-entry to the view. The active reinforcement learning model enables training a robust ALLNet for landmark localization. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed model for UAV first view landmark localization