PAC-Bayesian Majority Vote for Late Classifier Fusion

A lot of attention has been devoted to multimedia indexing over the past few years. In the literature, we often consider two kinds of fusion schemes: The early fusion and the late fusion. In this paper we focus on late classifier fusion, where one combines the scores of each modality at the decision level. To tackle this problem, we investigate a recent and elegant well-founded quadratic program named MinCq coming from the Machine Learning PAC-Bayes theory. MinCq looks for the weighted combination, over a set of real-valued functions seen as voters, leading to the lowest misclassification rate, while making use of the voters' diversity. We provide evidence that this method is naturally adapted to late fusion procedure. We propose an extension of MinCq by adding an order- preserving pairwise loss for ranking, helping to improve Mean Averaged Precision measure. We confirm the good behavior of the MinCq-based fusion approaches with experiments on a real image benchmark.Comment: 7 pages, Research repor

CentralNet: a Multilayer Approach for Multimodal Fusion

This paper proposes a novel multimodal fusion approach, aiming to produce best possible decisions by integrating information coming from multiple media. While most of the past multimodal approaches either work by projecting the features of different modalities into the same space, or by coordinating the representations of each modality through the use of constraints, our approach borrows from both visions. More specifically, assuming each modality can be processed by a separated deep convolutional network, allowing to take decisions independently from each modality, we introduce a central network linking the modality specific networks. This central network not only provides a common feature embedding but also regularizes the modality specific networks through the use of multi-task learning. The proposed approach is validated on 4 different computer vision tasks on which it consistently improves the accuracy of existing multimodal fusion approaches

ModDrop: adaptive multi-modal gesture recognition

We present a method for gesture detection and localisation based on multi-scale and multi-modal deep learning. Each visual modality captures spatial information at a particular spatial scale (such as motion of the upper body or a hand), and the whole system operates at three temporal scales. Key to our technique is a training strategy which exploits: i) careful initialization of individual modalities; and ii) gradual fusion involving random dropping of separate channels (dubbed ModDrop) for learning cross-modality correlations while preserving uniqueness of each modality-specific representation. We present experiments on the ChaLearn 2014 Looking at People Challenge gesture recognition track, in which we placed first out of 17 teams. Fusing multiple modalities at several spatial and temporal scales leads to a significant increase in recognition rates, allowing the model to compensate for errors of the individual classifiers as well as noise in the separate channels. Futhermore, the proposed ModDrop training technique ensures robustness of the classifier to missing signals in one or several channels to produce meaningful predictions from any number of available modalities. In addition, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed fusion scheme to modalities of arbitrary nature by experiments on the same dataset augmented with audio.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Multi-Modal Trip Hazard Affordance Detection On Construction Sites

Trip hazards are a significant contributor to accidents on construction and manufacturing sites, where over a third of Australian workplace injuries occur [1]. Current safety inspections are labour intensive and limited by human fallibility,making automation of trip hazard detection appealing from both a safety and economic perspective. Trip hazards present an interesting challenge to modern learning techniques because they are defined as much by affordance as by object type; for example wires on a table are not a trip hazard, but can be if lying on the ground. To address these challenges, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the performance characteristics of 11 different colour and depth fusion approaches, including 4 fusion and one non fusion approach; using colour and two types of depth images. Trained and tested on over 600 labelled trip hazards over 4 floors and 2000m$\mathrm{^{2}}$ in an active construction site,this approach was able to differentiate between identical objects in different physical configurations (see Figure 1). Outperforming a colour-only detector, our multi-modal trip detector fuses colour and depth information to achieve a 4% absolute improvement in F1-score. These investigative results and the extensive publicly available dataset moves us one step closer to assistive or fully automated safety inspection systems on construction sites.Comment: 9 Pages, 12 Figures, 2 Tables, Accepted to Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L

Saliency-guided video classification via adaptively weighted learning

Video classification is productive in many practical applications, and the recent deep learning has greatly improved its accuracy. However, existing works often model video frames indiscriminately, but from the view of motion, video frames can be decomposed into salient and non-salient areas naturally. Salient and non-salient areas should be modeled with different networks, for the former present both appearance and motion information, and the latter present static background information. To address this problem, in this paper, video saliency is predicted by optical flow without supervision firstly. Then two streams of 3D CNN are trained individually for raw frames and optical flow on salient areas, and another 2D CNN is trained for raw frames on non-salient areas. For the reason that these three streams play different roles for each class, the weights of each stream are adaptively learned for each class. Experimental results show that saliency-guided modeling and adaptively weighted learning can reinforce each other, and we achieve the state-of-the-art results.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, accepted by ICME 201

A Differential Approach for Gaze Estimation

Non-invasive gaze estimation methods usually regress gaze directions directly from a single face or eye image. However, due to important variabilities in eye shapes and inner eye structures amongst individuals, universal models obtain limited accuracies and their output usually exhibit high variance as well as biases which are subject dependent. Therefore, increasing accuracy is usually done through calibration, allowing gaze predictions for a subject to be mapped to his/her actual gaze. In this paper, we introduce a novel image differential method for gaze estimation. We propose to directly train a differential convolutional neural network to predict the gaze differences between two eye input images of the same subject. Then, given a set of subject specific calibration images, we can use the inferred differences to predict the gaze direction of a novel eye sample. The assumption is that by allowing the comparison between two eye images, annoyance factors (alignment, eyelid closing, illumination perturbations) which usually plague single image prediction methods can be much reduced, allowing better prediction altogether. Experiments on 3 public datasets validate our approach which constantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods even when using only one calibration sample or when the latter methods are followed by subject specific gaze adaptation.Comment: Extension to our paper A differential approach for gaze estimation with calibration (BMVC 2018) Submitted to PAMI on Aug. 7th, 2018 Accepted by PAMI short on Dec. 2019, in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligenc

Multimodal Deep Learning for Robust RGB-D Object Recognition

Robust object recognition is a crucial ingredient of many, if not all, real-world robotics applications. This paper leverages recent progress on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and proposes a novel RGB-D architecture for object recognition. Our architecture is composed of two separate CNN processing streams - one for each modality - which are consecutively combined with a late fusion network. We focus on learning with imperfect sensor data, a typical problem in real-world robotics tasks. For accurate learning, we introduce a multi-stage training methodology and two crucial ingredients for handling depth data with CNNs. The first, an effective encoding of depth information for CNNs that enables learning without the need for large depth datasets. The second, a data augmentation scheme for robust learning with depth images by corrupting them with realistic noise patterns. We present state-of-the-art results on the RGB-D object dataset and show recognition in challenging RGB-D real-world noisy settings.Comment: Final version submitted to IROS'2015, results unchanged, reformulation of some text passages in abstract and introductio

No Spare Parts: Sharing Part Detectors for Image Categorization

This work aims for image categorization using a representation of distinctive parts. Different from existing part-based work, we argue that parts are naturally shared between image categories and should be modeled as such. We motivate our approach with a quantitative and qualitative analysis by backtracking where selected parts come from. Our analysis shows that in addition to the category parts defining the class, the parts coming from the background context and parts from other image categories improve categorization performance. Part selection should not be done separately for each category, but instead be shared and optimized over all categories. To incorporate part sharing between categories, we present an algorithm based on AdaBoost to jointly optimize part sharing and selection, as well as fusion with the global image representation. We achieve results competitive to the state-of-the-art on object, scene, and action categories, further improving over deep convolutional neural networks