Deep learning with 3D and label geometry

A fine-grained understanding of an image is two-fold: visual understanding and semantic understanding. The former strives to understand the intrinsic properties of the object in the image, whereas the latter aims at associating the diverse objects with certain semantics. All of these form the basis of an in-depth understanding of images. Today’s default architectures of deep convolutional networks have already shown a remarkable ability in capturing the 2D visual appearances of images, and mapping visual content to semantic classes thereafter. However, research on fine-grained image understanding, such as inferring the intrinsic 3D information and more structured semantics, is less explored. In this thesis, we look at the problems by asking "How to better utilize geometry for better image understanding?" In the first part, we research visual image understanding with 3D geometry. We show that it is possible to automatically explain a variety of visual contents in the image with texture-free 3D shapes. Furthermore, we develop a deep learning framework to reliably recover a set of 3D geometric attributes, such as the pose of an object and the surface normal of its shape, from a 2D image. In the second part, we explore label geometry for semantic image understanding. We find that a set of image classification problems have geometrically similar probability spaces. Therefore, label geometry is introduced, unifying one-vs.-rest classification, multi-label classification, and out-of-distribution classification in one framework. Moreover, we show that learned hierarchical label geometries can balance the accuracy and specificity of an image classifier

Semantic Graph for Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning aims to classify visual objects without any training data via knowledge transfer between seen and unseen classes. This is typically achieved by exploring a semantic embedding space where the seen and unseen classes can be related. Previous works differ in what embedding space is used and how different classes and a test image can be related. In this paper, we utilize the annotation-free semantic word space for the former and focus on solving the latter issue of modeling relatedness. Specifically, in contrast to previous work which ignores the semantic relationships between seen classes and focus merely on those between seen and unseen classes, in this paper a novel approach based on a semantic graph is proposed to represent the relationships between all the seen and unseen class in a semantic word space. Based on this semantic graph, we design a special absorbing Markov chain process, in which each unseen class is viewed as an absorbing state. After incorporating one test image into the semantic graph, the absorbing probabilities from the test data to each unseen class can be effectively computed; and zero-shot classification can be achieved by finding the class label with the highest absorbing probability. The proposed model has a closed-form solution which is linear with respect to the number of test images. We demonstrate the effectiveness and computational efficiency of the proposed method over the state-of-the-arts on the AwA (animals with attributes) dataset.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Image Semantics in the Description and Categorization of Journalistic Photographs

This paper reports a study on the description and categorization of images. The aim of the study was to evaluate existing indexing frameworks in the context of reportage photographs and to find out how the use of this particular image genre influences the results. The effect of different tasks on image description and categorization was also studied. Subjects performed keywording and free description tasks and the elicited terms were classified using the most extensive one of the reviewed frameworks. Differences were found in the terms used in constrained and unconstrained descriptions. Summarizing terms such as abstract concepts, themes, settings and emotions were used more frequently in keywording than in free description. Free descriptions included more terms referring to locations within the images, people and descriptive terms due to the narrative form the subjects used without prompting. The evaluated framework was found to lack some syntactic and semantic classes present in the data and modifications were suggested. According to the results of this study image categorization is based on high-level interpretive concepts, including affective and abstract themes. The results indicate that image genre influences categorization and keywording modifies and truncates natural image description

Improving Semantic Embedding Consistency by Metric Learning for Zero-Shot Classification

This paper addresses the task of zero-shot image classification. The key contribution of the proposed approach is to control the semantic embedding of images -- one of the main ingredients of zero-shot learning -- by formulating it as a metric learning problem. The optimized empirical criterion associates two types of sub-task constraints: metric discriminating capacity and accurate attribute prediction. This results in a novel expression of zero-shot learning not requiring the notion of class in the training phase: only pairs of image/attributes, augmented with a consistency indicator, are given as ground truth. At test time, the learned model can predict the consistency of a test image with a given set of attributes , allowing flexible ways to produce recognition inferences. Despite its simplicity, the proposed approach gives state-of-the-art results on four challenging datasets used for zero-shot recognition evaluation.Comment: in ECCV 2016, Oct 2016, amsterdam, Netherlands. 201

Objects2action: Classifying and localizing actions without any video example

The goal of this paper is to recognize actions in video without the need for examples. Different from traditional zero-shot approaches we do not demand the design and specification of attribute classifiers and class-to-attribute mappings to allow for transfer from seen classes to unseen classes. Our key contribution is objects2action, a semantic word embedding that is spanned by a skip-gram model of thousands of object categories. Action labels are assigned to an object encoding of unseen video based on a convex combination of action and object affinities. Our semantic embedding has three main characteristics to accommodate for the specifics of actions. First, we propose a mechanism to exploit multiple-word descriptions of actions and objects. Second, we incorporate the automated selection of the most responsive objects per action. And finally, we demonstrate how to extend our zero-shot approach to the spatio-temporal localization of actions in video. Experiments on four action datasets demonstrate the potential of our approach

Semantic Autoencoder for Zero-Shot Learning

Existing zero-shot learning (ZSL) models typically learn a projection function from a feature space to a semantic embedding space (e.g.~attribute space). However, such a projection function is only concerned with predicting the training seen class semantic representation (e.g.~attribute prediction) or classification. When applied to test data, which in the context of ZSL contains different (unseen) classes without training data, a ZSL model typically suffers from the project domain shift problem. In this work, we present a novel solution to ZSL based on learning a Semantic AutoEncoder (SAE). Taking the encoder-decoder paradigm, an encoder aims to project a visual feature vector into the semantic space as in the existing ZSL models. However, the decoder exerts an additional constraint, that is, the projection/code must be able to reconstruct the original visual feature. We show that with this additional reconstruction constraint, the learned projection function from the seen classes is able to generalise better to the new unseen classes. Importantly, the encoder and decoder are linear and symmetric which enable us to develop an extremely efficient learning algorithm. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SAE outperforms significantly the existing ZSL models with the additional benefit of lower computational cost. Furthermore, when the SAE is applied to supervised clustering problem, it also beats the state-of-the-art.Comment: accepted to CVPR201