OperatorNet: Recovering 3D Shapes From Difference Operators

This paper proposes a learning-based framework for reconstructing 3D shapes from functional operators, compactly encoded as small-sized matrices. To this end we introduce a novel neural architecture, called OperatorNet, which takes as input a set of linear operators representing a shape and produces its 3D embedding. We demonstrate that this approach significantly outperforms previous purely geometric methods for the same problem. Furthermore, we introduce a novel functional operator, which encodes the extrinsic or pose-dependent shape information, and thus complements purely intrinsic pose-oblivious operators, such as the classical Laplacian. Coupled with this novel operator, our reconstruction network achieves very high reconstruction accuracy, even in the presence of incomplete information about a shape, given a soft or functional map expressed in a reduced basis. Finally, we demonstrate that the multiplicative functional algebra enjoyed by these operators can be used to synthesize entirely new unseen shapes, in the context of shape interpolation and shape analogy applications.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 201

Recent Advances in Transfer Learning for Cross-Dataset Visual Recognition: A Problem-Oriented Perspective

This paper takes a problem-oriented perspective and presents a comprehensive review of transfer learning methods, both shallow and deep, for cross-dataset visual recognition. Specifically, it categorises the cross-dataset recognition into seventeen problems based on a set of carefully chosen data and label attributes. Such a problem-oriented taxonomy has allowed us to examine how different transfer learning approaches tackle each problem and how well each problem has been researched to date. The comprehensive problem-oriented review of the advances in transfer learning with respect to the problem has not only revealed the challenges in transfer learning for visual recognition, but also the problems (e.g. eight of the seventeen problems) that have been scarcely studied. This survey not only presents an up-to-date technical review for researchers, but also a systematic approach and a reference for a machine learning practitioner to categorise a real problem and to look up for a possible solution accordingly

Particular object retrieval with integral max-pooling of CNN activations

Recently, image representation built upon Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been shown to provide effective descriptors for image search, outperforming pre-CNN features as short-vector representations. Yet such models are not compatible with geometry-aware re-ranking methods and still outperformed, on some particular object retrieval benchmarks, by traditional image search systems relying on precise descriptor matching, geometric re-ranking, or query expansion. This work revisits both retrieval stages, namely initial search and re-ranking, by employing the same primitive information derived from the CNN. We build compact feature vectors that encode several image regions without the need to feed multiple inputs to the network. Furthermore, we extend integral images to handle max-pooling on convolutional layer activations, allowing us to efficiently localize matching objects. The resulting bounding box is finally used for image re-ranking. As a result, this paper significantly improves existing CNN-based recognition pipeline: We report for the first time results competing with traditional methods on the challenging Oxford5k and Paris6k datasets