11,836 research outputs found
Improving Facial Analysis and Performance Driven Animation through Disentangling Identity and Expression
We present techniques for improving performance driven facial animation,
emotion recognition, and facial key-point or landmark prediction using learned
identity invariant representations. Established approaches to these problems
can work well if sufficient examples and labels for a particular identity are
available and factors of variation are highly controlled. However, labeled
examples of facial expressions, emotions and key-points for new individuals are
difficult and costly to obtain. In this paper we improve the ability of
techniques to generalize to new and unseen individuals by explicitly modeling
previously seen variations related to identity and expression. We use a
weakly-supervised approach in which identity labels are used to learn the
different factors of variation linked to identity separately from factors
related to expression. We show how probabilistic modeling of these sources of
variation allows one to learn identity-invariant representations for
expressions which can then be used to identity-normalize various procedures for
facial expression analysis and animation control. We also show how to extend
the widely used techniques of active appearance models and constrained local
models through replacing the underlying point distribution models which are
typically constructed using principal component analysis with
identity-expression factorized representations. We present a wide variety of
experiments in which we consistently improve performance on emotion
recognition, markerless performance-driven facial animation and facial
key-point tracking.Comment: to appear in Image and Vision Computing Journal (IMAVIS
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
A Unified Framework for Compositional Fitting of Active Appearance Models
Active Appearance Models (AAMs) are one of the most popular and
well-established techniques for modeling deformable objects in computer vision.
In this paper, we study the problem of fitting AAMs using Compositional
Gradient Descent (CGD) algorithms. We present a unified and complete view of
these algorithms and classify them with respect to three main characteristics:
i) cost function; ii) type of composition; and iii) optimization method.
Furthermore, we extend the previous view by: a) proposing a novel Bayesian cost
function that can be interpreted as a general probabilistic formulation of the
well-known project-out loss; b) introducing two new types of composition,
asymmetric and bidirectional, that combine the gradients of both image and
appearance model to derive better conver- gent and more robust CGD algorithms;
and c) providing new valuable insights into existent CGD algorithms by
reinterpreting them as direct applications of the Schur complement and the
Wiberg method. Finally, in order to encourage open research and facilitate
future comparisons with our work, we make the implementa- tion of the
algorithms studied in this paper publicly available as part of the Menpo
Project.Comment: 39 page
Object Detection at the Optimal Scale with Hidden State Shape Models
Hidden State Shape Models (HSSMs) [2], a variant of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) [9], were proposed to detect shape classes of variable structure in cluttered images. In this paper, we formulate a probabilistic framework for HSSMs which provides two major improvements in comparison to the previous method [2]. First, while the method in [2] required the scale of the object to be passed as an input, the method proposed here estimates the scale of the object automatically. This is achieved by introducing a new term for the observation probability that is based on a object-clutter feature model. Second, a segmental HMM [6, 8] is applied to model the "duration probability" of each HMM state, which is learned from the shape statistics in a training set and helps obtain meaningful registration results. Using a segmental HMM provides a principled way to model dependencies between the scales of different parts of the object. In object localization experiments on a dataset of real hand images, the proposed method significantly outperforms the method of [2], reducing the incorrect localization rate from 40% to 15%. The improvement in accuracy becomes more significant if we consider that the method proposed here is scale-independent, whereas the method of [2] takes as input the scale of the object we want to localize
Active Object Localization in Visual Situations
We describe a method for performing active localization of objects in
instances of visual situations. A visual situation is an abstract
concept---e.g., "a boxing match", "a birthday party", "walking the dog",
"waiting for a bus"---whose image instantiations are linked more by their
common spatial and semantic structure than by low-level visual similarity. Our
system combines given and learned knowledge of the structure of a particular
situation, and adapts that knowledge to a new situation instance as it actively
searches for objects. More specifically, the system learns a set of probability
distributions describing spatial and other relationships among relevant
objects. The system uses those distributions to iteratively sample object
proposals on a test image, but also continually uses information from those
object proposals to adaptively modify the distributions based on what the
system has detected. We test our approach's ability to efficiently localize
objects, using a situation-specific image dataset created by our group. We
compare the results with several baselines and variations on our method, and
demonstrate the strong benefit of using situation knowledge and active
context-driven localization. Finally, we contrast our method with several other
approaches that use context as well as active search for object localization in
images.Comment: 14 page
Deep Learning for Semantic Part Segmentation with High-Level Guidance
In this work we address the task of segmenting an object into its parts, or
semantic part segmentation. We start by adapting a state-of-the-art semantic
segmentation system to this task, and show that a combination of a
fully-convolutional Deep CNN system coupled with Dense CRF labelling provides
excellent results for a broad range of object categories. Still, this approach
remains agnostic to high-level constraints between object parts. We introduce
such prior information by means of the Restricted Boltzmann Machine, adapted to
our task and train our model in an discriminative fashion, as a hidden CRF,
demonstrating that prior information can yield additional improvements. We also
investigate the performance of our approach ``in the wild'', without
information concerning the objects' bounding boxes, using an object detector to
guide a multi-scale segmentation scheme. We evaluate the performance of our
approach on the Penn-Fudan and LFW datasets for the tasks of pedestrian parsing
and face labelling respectively. We show superior performance with respect to
competitive methods that have been extensively engineered on these benchmarks,
as well as realistic qualitative results on part segmentation, even for
occluded or deformable objects. We also provide quantitative and extensive
qualitative results on three classes from the PASCAL Parts dataset. Finally, we
show that our multi-scale segmentation scheme can boost accuracy, recovering
segmentations for finer parts.Comment: 11 pages (including references), 3 figures, 2 table
Generalized Kernel-based Visual Tracking
In this work we generalize the plain MS trackers and attempt to overcome
standard mean shift trackers' two limitations.
It is well known that modeling and maintaining a representation of a target
object is an important component of a successful visual tracker.
However, little work has been done on building a robust template model for
kernel-based MS tracking. In contrast to building a template from a single
frame, we train a robust object representation model from a large amount of
data. Tracking is viewed as a binary classification problem, and a
discriminative classification rule is learned to distinguish between the object
and background. We adopt a support vector machine (SVM) for training. The
tracker is then implemented by maximizing the classification score. An
iterative optimization scheme very similar to MS is derived for this purpose.Comment: 12 page
Semantic Image Retrieval via Active Grounding of Visual Situations
We describe a novel architecture for semantic image retrieval---in
particular, retrieval of instances of visual situations. Visual situations are
concepts such as "a boxing match," "walking the dog," "a crowd waiting for a
bus," or "a game of ping-pong," whose instantiations in images are linked more
by their common spatial and semantic structure than by low-level visual
similarity. Given a query situation description, our architecture---called
Situate---learns models capturing the visual features of expected objects as
well the expected spatial configuration of relationships among objects. Given a
new image, Situate uses these models in an attempt to ground (i.e., to create a
bounding box locating) each expected component of the situation in the image
via an active search procedure. Situate uses the resulting grounding to compute
a score indicating the degree to which the new image is judged to contain an
instance of the situation. Such scores can be used to rank images in a
collection as part of a retrieval system. In the preliminary study described
here, we demonstrate the promise of this system by comparing Situate's
performance with that of two baseline methods, as well as with a related
semantic image-retrieval system based on "scene graphs.
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