Cultural Event Recognition with Visual ConvNets and Temporal Models

This paper presents our contribution to the ChaLearn Challenge 2015 on Cultural Event Classification. The challenge in this task is to automatically classify images from 50 different cultural events. Our solution is based on the combination of visual features extracted from convolutional neural networks with temporal information using a hierarchical classifier scheme. We extract visual features from the last three fully connected layers of both CaffeNet (pretrained with ImageNet) and our fine tuned version for the ChaLearn challenge. We propose a late fusion strategy that trains a separate low-level SVM on each of the extracted neural codes. The class predictions of the low-level SVMs form the input to a higher level SVM, which gives the final event scores. We achieve our best result by adding a temporal refinement step into our classification scheme, which is applied directly to the output of each low-level SVM. Our approach penalizes high classification scores based on visual features when their time stamp does not match well an event-specific temporal distribution learned from the training and validation data. Our system achieved the second best result in the ChaLearn Challenge 2015 on Cultural Event Classification with a mean average precision of 0.767 on the test set.Comment: Initial version of the paper accepted at the CVPR Workshop ChaLearn Looking at People 201

Where and Who? Automatic Semantic-Aware Person Composition

Image compositing is a method used to generate realistic yet fake imagery by inserting contents from one image to another. Previous work in compositing has focused on improving appearance compatibility of a user selected foreground segment and a background image (i.e. color and illumination consistency). In this work, we instead develop a fully automated compositing model that additionally learns to select and transform compatible foreground segments from a large collection given only an input image background. To simplify the task, we restrict our problem by focusing on human instance composition, because human segments exhibit strong correlations with their background and because of the availability of large annotated data. We develop a novel branching Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that jointly predicts candidate person locations given a background image. We then use pre-trained deep feature representations to retrieve person instances from a large segment database. Experimental results show that our model can generate composite images that look visually convincing. We also develop a user interface to demonstrate the potential application of our method.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

DeepSketch2Face: A Deep Learning Based Sketching System for 3D Face and Caricature Modeling

Face modeling has been paid much attention in the field of visual computing. There exist many scenarios, including cartoon characters, avatars for social media, 3D face caricatures as well as face-related art and design, where low-cost interactive face modeling is a popular approach especially among amateur users. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based sketching system for 3D face and caricature modeling. This system has a labor-efficient sketching interface, that allows the user to draw freehand imprecise yet expressive 2D lines representing the contours of facial features. A novel CNN based deep regression network is designed for inferring 3D face models from 2D sketches. Our network fuses both CNN and shape based features of the input sketch, and has two independent branches of fully connected layers generating independent subsets of coefficients for a bilinear face representation. Our system also supports gesture based interactions for users to further manipulate initial face models. Both user studies and numerical results indicate that our sketching system can help users create face models quickly and effectively. A significantly expanded face database with diverse identities, expressions and levels of exaggeration is constructed to promote further research and evaluation of face modeling techniques.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figures, to appear in SIGGRAPH 201

Scene Graph Generation with External Knowledge and Image Reconstruction

Scene graph generation has received growing attention with the advancements in image understanding tasks such as object detection, attributes and relationship prediction,~\etc. However, existing datasets are biased in terms of object and relationship labels, or often come with noisy and missing annotations, which makes the development of a reliable scene graph prediction model very challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel scene graph generation algorithm with external knowledge and image reconstruction loss to overcome these dataset issues. In particular, we extract commonsense knowledge from the external knowledge base to refine object and phrase features for improving generalizability in scene graph generation. To address the bias of noisy object annotations, we introduce an auxiliary image reconstruction path to regularize the scene graph generation network. Extensive experiments show that our framework can generate better scene graphs, achieving the state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets: Visual Relationship Detection and Visual Genome datasets.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Accepted in CVPR 201