3D Object Class Detection in the Wild

Object class detection has been a synonym for 2D bounding box localization for the longest time, fueled by the success of powerful statistical learning techniques, combined with robust image representations. Only recently, there has been a growing interest in revisiting the promise of computer vision from the early days: to precisely delineate the contents of a visual scene, object by object, in 3D. In this paper, we draw from recent advances in object detection and 2D-3D object lifting in order to design an object class detector that is particularly tailored towards 3D object class detection. Our 3D object class detection method consists of several stages gradually enriching the object detection output with object viewpoint, keypoints and 3D shape estimates. Following careful design, in each stage it constantly improves the performance and achieves state-ofthe-art performance in simultaneous 2D bounding box and viewpoint estimation on the challenging Pascal3D+ dataset

Modeling Visual Rhetoric and Semantics in Multimedia

Recent advances in machine learning have enabled computer vision algorithms to model complicated visual phenomena with accuracies unthinkable a mere decade ago. Their high-performance on a plethora of vision-related tasks has enabled computer vision researchers to begin to move beyond traditional visual recognition problems to tasks requiring higher-level image understanding. However, most computer vision research still focuses on describing what images, text, or other media literally portrays. In contrast, in this dissertation we focus on learning how and why such content is portrayed. Rather than viewing media for its content, we recast the problem as understanding visual communication and visual rhetoric. For example, the same content may be portrayed in different ways in order to present the story the author wishes to convey. We thus seek to model not only the content of the media, but its authorial intent and latent messaging. Understanding how and why visual content is portrayed a certain way requires understanding higher level abstract semantic concepts which are themselves latent within visual media. By latent, we mean the concept is not readily visually accessible within a single image (e.g. right vs left political bias), in contrast to explicit visual semantic concepts such as objects. Specifically, we study the problems of modeling photographic style (how professional photographers portray their subjects), understanding visual persuasion in image advertisements, modeling political bias in multimedia (image and text) news articles, and learning cross-modal semantic representations. While most past research in vision and natural language processing studies the case where visual content and paired text are highly aligned (as in the case of image captions), we target the case where each modality conveys complementary information to tell a larger story. We particularly focus on the problem of learning cross-modal representations from multimedia exhibiting weak alignment between the image and text modalities. A variety of techniques are presented which improve modeling of multimedia rhetoric in real-world data and enable more robust artificially intelligent systems

A Solution for a Fundamental Problem of 3D Inference based on 2D Representations

3D inference from monocular vision using neural networks is an important research area of computer vision. Applications of the research area are various with many proposed solutions and have shown remarkable performance. Although many efforts have been invested, there are still unanswered questions, some of which are fundamental. In this paper, I discuss a problem that I hope will come to be known as a generalization of the Blind Perspective-n-Point (Blind PnP) problem for object-driven 3D inference based on 2D representations. The vital difference between the fundamental problem and the Blind PnP problem is that 3D inference parameters in the fundamental problem are attached directly to 3D points and the camera concept will be represented through the sharing of the parameters of these points. By providing an explainable and robust gradient-decent solution based on 2D representations for an important special case of the problem, the paper opens up a new approach for using available information-based learning methods to solve problems related to 3D object pose estimation from 2D images