Learning Robust Representations for Computer Vision

Unsupervised learning techniques in computer vision often require learning latent representations, such as low-dimensional linear and non-linear subspaces. Noise and outliers in the data can frustrate these approaches by obscuring the latent spaces. Our main goal is deeper understanding and new development of robust approaches for representation learning. We provide a new interpretation for existing robust approaches and present two specific contributions: a new robust PCA approach, which can separate foreground features from dynamic background, and a novel robust spectral clustering method, that can cluster facial images with high accuracy. Both contributions show superior performance to standard methods on real-world test sets.Comment: 8 pages, 7 page

Kernelized Low Rank Representation on Grassmann Manifolds

Low rank representation (LRR) has recently attracted great interest due to its pleasing efficacy in exploring low-dimensional subspace structures embedded in data. One of its successful applications is subspace clustering which means data are clustered according to the subspaces they belong to. In this paper, at a higher level, we intend to cluster subspaces into classes of subspaces. This is naturally described as a clustering problem on Grassmann manifold. The novelty of this paper is to generalize LRR on Euclidean space onto an LRR model on Grassmann manifold in a uniform kernelized framework. The new methods have many applications in computer vision tasks. Several clustering experiments are conducted on handwritten digit images, dynamic textures, human face clips and traffic scene sequences. The experimental results show that the proposed methods outperform a number of state-of-the-art subspace clustering methods.Comment: 13 page

Modeling of Facial Aging and Kinship: A Survey

Computational facial models that capture properties of facial cues related to aging and kinship increasingly attract the attention of the research community, enabling the development of reliable methods for age progression, age estimation, age-invariant facial characterization, and kinship verification from visual data. In this paper, we review recent advances in modeling of facial aging and kinship. In particular, we provide an up-to date, complete list of available annotated datasets and an in-depth analysis of geometric, hand-crafted, and learned facial representations that are used for facial aging and kinship characterization. Moreover, evaluation protocols and metrics are reviewed and notable experimental results for each surveyed task are analyzed. This survey allows us to identify challenges and discuss future research directions for the development of robust facial models in real-world conditions

Visual Tracking via Dynamic Graph Learning

Existing visual tracking methods usually localize a target object with a bounding box, in which the performance of the foreground object trackers or detectors is often affected by the inclusion of background clutter. To handle this problem, we learn a patch-based graph representation for visual tracking. The tracked object is modeled by with a graph by taking a set of non-overlapping image patches as nodes, in which the weight of each node indicates how likely it belongs to the foreground and edges are weighted for indicating the appearance compatibility of two neighboring nodes. This graph is dynamically learned and applied in object tracking and model updating. During the tracking process, the proposed algorithm performs three main steps in each frame. First, the graph is initialized by assigning binary weights of some image patches to indicate the object and background patches according to the predicted bounding box. Second, the graph is optimized to refine the patch weights by using a novel alternating direction method of multipliers. Third, the object feature representation is updated by imposing the weights of patches on the extracted image features. The object location is predicted by maximizing the classification score in the structured support vector machine. Extensive experiments show that the proposed tracking algorithm performs well against the state-of-the-art methods on large-scale benchmark datasets.Comment: Submitted to TPAMI 201

Recognizing Partial Biometric Patterns

Biometric recognition on partial captured targets is challenging, where only several partial observations of objects are available for matching. In this area, deep learning based methods are widely applied to match these partial captured objects caused by occlusions, variations of postures or just partial out of view in person re-identification and partial face recognition. However, most current methods are not able to identify an individual in case that some parts of the object are not obtainable, while the rest are specialized to certain constrained scenarios. To this end, we propose a robust general framework for arbitrary biometric matching scenarios without the limitations of alignment as well as the size of inputs. We introduce a feature post-processing step to handle the feature maps from FCN and a dictionary learning based Spatial Feature Reconstruction (SFR) to match different sized feature maps in this work. Moreover, the batch hard triplet loss function is applied to optimize the model. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated by the results from experiments on three person re-identification datasets (Market1501, CUHK03, DukeMTMC-reID), two partial person datasets (Partial REID and Partial iLIDS) and two partial face datasets (CASIA-NIR-Distance and Partial LFW), on which state-of-the-art performance is ensured in comparison with several state-of-the-art approaches. The code is released online and can be found on the website: https://github.com/lingxiao-he/Partial-Person-ReID.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure

Low Rank Representation on Grassmann Manifolds: An Extrinsic Perspective

Many computer vision algorithms employ subspace models to represent data. The Low-rank representation (LRR) has been successfully applied in subspace clustering for which data are clustered according to their subspace structures. The possibility of extending LRR on Grassmann manifold is explored in this paper. Rather than directly embedding Grassmann manifold into a symmetric matrix space, an extrinsic view is taken by building the self-representation of LRR over the tangent space of each Grassmannian point. A new algorithm for solving the proposed Grassmannian LRR model is designed and implemented. Several clustering experiments are conducted on handwritten digits dataset, dynamic texture video clips and YouTube celebrity face video data. The experimental results show our method outperforms a number of existing methods.Comment: 9 page

Low-Rank Modeling and Its Applications in Image Analysis

Low-rank modeling generally refers to a class of methods that solve problems by representing variables of interest as low-rank matrices. It has achieved great success in various fields including computer vision, data mining, signal processing and bioinformatics. Recently, much progress has been made in theories, algorithms and applications of low-rank modeling, such as exact low-rank matrix recovery via convex programming and matrix completion applied to collaborative filtering. These advances have brought more and more attentions to this topic. In this paper, we review the recent advance of low-rank modeling, the state-of-the-art algorithms, and related applications in image analysis. We first give an overview to the concept of low-rank modeling and challenging problems in this area. Then, we summarize the models and algorithms for low-rank matrix recovery and illustrate their advantages and limitations with numerical experiments. Next, we introduce a few applications of low-rank modeling in the context of image analysis. Finally, we conclude this paper with some discussions.Comment: To appear in ACM Computing Survey

Leveraging the Power of Gabor Phase for Face Identification: A Block Matching Approach

Different from face verification, face identification is much more demanding. To reach comparable performance, an identifier needs to be roughly N times better than a verifier. To expect a breakthrough in face identification, we need a fresh look at the fundamental building blocks of face recognition. In this paper we focus on the selection of a suitable signal representation and better matching strategy for face identification. We demonstrate how Gabor phase could be leveraged to improve the performance of face identification by using the Block Matching method. Compared to the existing approaches, the proposed method features much lower algorithmic complexity: face images are only filtered by a single-scale Gabor filter pair and the matching is performed between any pairs of face images at hand without involving any training process. Benchmark evaluations show that the proposed approach is totally comparable to and even better than state-of-the-art algorithms, which are typically based on more features extracted from a large set of Gabor faces and/or rely on heavy training processes

A survey of sparse representation: algorithms and applications

Sparse representation has attracted much attention from researchers in fields of signal processing, image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition. Sparse representation also has a good reputation in both theoretical research and practical applications. Many different algorithms have been proposed for sparse representation. The main purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive study and an updated review on sparse representation and to supply a guidance for researchers. The taxonomy of sparse representation methods can be studied from various viewpoints. For example, in terms of different norm minimizations used in sparsity constraints, the methods can be roughly categorized into five groups: sparse representation with $l_0$-norm minimization, sparse representation with $l_p$-norm (0$<$p$<$1) minimization, sparse representation with $l_1$-norm minimization and sparse representation with $l_{2,1}$-norm minimization. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of sparse representation is provided. The available sparse representation algorithms can also be empirically categorized into four groups: greedy strategy approximation, constrained optimization, proximity algorithm-based optimization, and homotopy algorithm-based sparse representation. The rationales of different algorithms in each category are analyzed and a wide range of sparse representation applications are summarized, which could sufficiently reveal the potential nature of the sparse representation theory. Specifically, an experimentally comparative study of these sparse representation algorithms was presented. The Matlab code used in this paper can be available at: http://www.yongxu.org/lunwen.html.Comment: Published on IEEE Access, Vol. 3, pp. 490-530, 201

cvpaper.challenge in 2015 - A review of CVPR2015 and DeepSurvey

The "cvpaper.challenge" is a group composed of members from AIST, Tokyo Denki Univ. (TDU), and Univ. of Tsukuba that aims to systematically summarize papers on computer vision, pattern recognition, and related fields. For this particular review, we focused on reading the ALL 602 conference papers presented at the CVPR2015, the premier annual computer vision event held in June 2015, in order to grasp the trends in the field. Further, we are proposing "DeepSurvey" as a mechanism embodying the entire process from the reading through all the papers, the generation of ideas, and to the writing of paper.Comment: Survey Pape