Semantic Object Parsing with Local-Global Long Short-Term Memory

Semantic object parsing is a fundamental task for understanding objects in detail in computer vision community, where incorporating multi-level contextual information is critical for achieving such fine-grained pixel-level recognition. Prior methods often leverage the contextual information through post-processing predicted confidence maps. In this work, we propose a novel deep Local-Global Long Short-Term Memory (LG-LSTM) architecture to seamlessly incorporate short-distance and long-distance spatial dependencies into the feature learning over all pixel positions. In each LG-LSTM layer, local guidance from neighboring positions and global guidance from the whole image are imposed on each position to better exploit complex local and global contextual information. Individual LSTMs for distinct spatial dimensions are also utilized to intrinsically capture various spatial layouts of semantic parts in the images, yielding distinct hidden and memory cells of each position for each dimension. In our parsing approach, several LG-LSTM layers are stacked and appended to the intermediate convolutional layers to directly enhance visual features, allowing network parameters to be learned in an end-to-end way. The long chains of sequential computation by stacked LG-LSTM layers also enable each pixel to sense a much larger region for inference benefiting from the memorization of previous dependencies in all positions along all dimensions. Comprehensive evaluations on three public datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our LG-LSTM over other state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 10 page

Semantic Object Parsing with Graph LSTM

By taking the semantic object parsing task as an exemplar application scenario, we propose the Graph Long Short-Term Memory (Graph LSTM) network, which is the generalization of LSTM from sequential data or multi-dimensional data to general graph-structured data. Particularly, instead of evenly and fixedly dividing an image to pixels or patches in existing multi-dimensional LSTM structures (e.g., Row, Grid and Diagonal LSTMs), we take each arbitrary-shaped superpixel as a semantically consistent node, and adaptively construct an undirected graph for each image, where the spatial relations of the superpixels are naturally used as edges. Constructed on such an adaptive graph topology, the Graph LSTM is more naturally aligned with the visual patterns in the image (e.g., object boundaries or appearance similarities) and provides a more economical information propagation route. Furthermore, for each optimization step over Graph LSTM, we propose to use a confidence-driven scheme to update the hidden and memory states of nodes progressively till all nodes are updated. In addition, for each node, the forgets gates are adaptively learned to capture different degrees of semantic correlation with neighboring nodes. Comprehensive evaluations on four diverse semantic object parsing datasets well demonstrate the significant superiority of our Graph LSTM over other state-of-the-art solutions.Comment: 18 page

Re-identification and semantic retrieval of pedestrians in video surveillance scenarios

Person re-identification consists of recognizing individuals across different sensors of a camera network. Whereas clothing appearance cues are widely used, other modalities could be exploited as additional information sources, like anthropometric measures and gait. In this work we investigate whether the re-identification accuracy of clothing appearance descriptors can be improved by fusing them with anthropometric measures extracted from depth data, using RGB-Dsensors, in unconstrained settings. We also propose a dissimilaritybased framework for building and fusing multi-modal descriptors of pedestrian images for re-identification tasks, as an alternative to the widely used score-level fusion. The experimental evaluation is carried out on two data sets including RGB-D data, one of which is a novel, publicly available data set that we acquired using Kinect sensors. In this dissertation we also consider a related task, named semantic retrieval of pedestrians in video surveillance scenarios, which consists of searching images of individuals using a textual description of clothing appearance as a query, given by a Boolean combination of predefined attributes. This can be useful in applications like forensic video analysis, where the query can be obtained froma eyewitness report. We propose a general method for implementing semantic retrieval as an extension of a given re-identification system that uses any multiple part-multiple component appearance descriptor. Additionally, we investigate on deep learning techniques to improve both the accuracy of attribute detectors and generalization capabilities. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our methods on several benchmark datasets originally built for re-identification task