Robust Place Categorization With Deep Domain Generalization

Traditional place categorization approaches in robot vision assume that training and test images have similar visual appearance. Therefore, any seasonal, illumination, and environmental changes typically lead to severe degradation in performance. To cope with this problem, recent works have been proposed to adopt domain adaptation techniques. While effective, these methods assume that some prior information about the scenario where the robot will operate is available at training time. Unfortunately, in many cases, this assumption does not hold, as we often do not know where a robot will be deployed. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we present an approach that aims at learning classification models able to generalize to unseen scenarios. Specifically, we propose a novel deep learning framework for domain generalization. Our method develops from the intuition that, given a set of different classification models associated to known domains (e.g., corresponding to multiple environments, robots), the best model for a new sample in the novel domain can be computed directly at test time by optimally combining the known models. To implement our idea, we exploit recent advances in deep domain adaptation and design a convolutional neural network architecture with novel layers performing a weighted version of batch normalization. Our experiments, conducted on three common datasets for robot place categorization, confirm the validity of our contribution

Action Recognition in Videos: from Motion Capture Labs to the Web

This paper presents a survey of human action recognition approaches based on visual data recorded from a single video camera. We propose an organizing framework which puts in evidence the evolution of the area, with techniques moving from heavily constrained motion capture scenarios towards more challenging, realistic, "in the wild" videos. The proposed organization is based on the representation used as input for the recognition task, emphasizing the hypothesis assumed and thus, the constraints imposed on the type of video that each technique is able to address. Expliciting the hypothesis and constraints makes the framework particularly useful to select a method, given an application. Another advantage of the proposed organization is that it allows categorizing newest approaches seamlessly with traditional ones, while providing an insightful perspective of the evolution of the action recognition task up to now. That perspective is the basis for the discussion in the end of the paper, where we also present the main open issues in the area.Comment: Preprint submitted to CVIU, survey paper, 46 pages, 2 figures, 4 table

Binary Patterns Encoded Convolutional Neural Networks for Texture Recognition and Remote Sensing Scene Classification

Designing discriminative powerful texture features robust to realistic imaging conditions is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications, including material recognition and analysis of satellite or aerial imagery. In the past, most texture description approaches were based on dense orderless statistical distribution of local features. However, most recent approaches to texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The d facto practice when learning these CNN models is to use RGB patches as input with training performed on large amounts of labeled data (ImageNet). In this paper, we show that Binary Patterns encoded CNN models, codenamed TEX-Nets, trained using mapped coded images with explicit texture information provide complementary information to the standard RGB deep models. Additionally, two deep architectures, namely early and late fusion, are investigated to combine the texture and color information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Binary Patterns encoded CNNs and different deep network fusion architectures for texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification. We perform comprehensive experiments on four texture recognition datasets and four remote sensing scene classification benchmarks: UC-Merced with 21 scene categories, WHU-RS19 with 19 scene classes, RSSCN7 with 7 categories and the recently introduced large scale aerial image dataset (AID) with 30 aerial scene types. We demonstrate that TEX-Nets provide complementary information to standard RGB deep model of the same network architecture. Our late fusion TEX-Net architecture always improves the overall performance compared to the standard RGB network on both recognition problems. Our final combination outperforms the state-of-the-art without employing fine-tuning or ensemble of RGB network architectures.Comment: To appear in ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensin

Fast Low-rank Representation based Spatial Pyramid Matching for Image Classification

Spatial Pyramid Matching (SPM) and its variants have achieved a lot of success in image classification. The main difference among them is their encoding schemes. For example, ScSPM incorporates Sparse Code (SC) instead of Vector Quantization (VQ) into the framework of SPM. Although the methods achieve a higher recognition rate than the traditional SPM, they consume more time to encode the local descriptors extracted from the image. In this paper, we propose using Low Rank Representation (LRR) to encode the descriptors under the framework of SPM. Different from SC, LRR considers the group effect among data points instead of sparsity. Benefiting from this property, the proposed method (i.e., LrrSPM) can offer a better performance. To further improve the generalizability and robustness, we reformulate the rank-minimization problem as a truncated projection problem. Extensive experimental studies show that LrrSPM is more efficient than its counterparts (e.g., ScSPM) while achieving competitive recognition rates on nine image data sets.Comment: accepted into knowledge based systems, 201