K-means clustering for efficient and robust registration of multi-view point sets

Generally, there are three main factors that determine the practical usability of registration, i.e., accuracy, robustness, and efficiency. In real-time applications, efficiency and robustness are more important. To promote these two abilities, we cast the multi-view registration into a clustering task. All the centroids are uniformly sampled from the initially aligned point sets involved in the multi-view registration, which makes it rather efficient and effective for the clustering. Then, each point is assigned to a single cluster and each cluster centroid is updated accordingly. Subsequently, the shape comprised by all cluster centroids is used to sequentially estimate the rigid transformation for each point set. For accuracy and stability, clustering and transformation estimation are alternately and iteratively applied to all point sets. We tested our proposed approach on several benchmark datasets and compared it with state-of-the-art approaches. Experimental results validate its efficiency and robustness for the registration of multi-view point sets

Supervised multiview learning based on simultaneous learning of multiview intact and single view classifier

Multiview learning problem refers to the problem of learning a classifier from multiple view data. In this data set, each data points is presented by multiple different views. In this paper, we propose a novel method for this problem. This method is based on two assumptions. The first assumption is that each data point has an intact feature vector, and each view is obtained by a linear transformation from the intact vector. The second assumption is that the intact vectors are discriminative, and in the intact space, we have a linear classifier to separate the positive class from the negative class. We define an intact vector for each data point, and a view-conditional transformation matrix for each view, and propose to reconstruct the multiple view feature vectors by the product of the corresponding intact vectors and transformation matrices. Moreover, we also propose a linear classifier in the intact space, and learn it jointly with the intact vectors. The learning problem is modeled by a minimization problem, and the objective function is composed of a Cauchy error estimator-based view-conditional reconstruction term over all data points and views, and a classification error term measured by hinge loss over all the intact vectors of all the data points. Some regularization terms are also imposed to different variables in the objective function. The minimization problem is solve by an iterative algorithm using alternate optimization strategy and gradient descent algorithm. The proposed algorithm shows it advantage in the compression to other multiview learning algorithms on benchmark data sets

A Fast and Accurate Unconstrained Face Detector

We propose a method to address challenges in unconstrained face detection, such as arbitrary pose variations and occlusions. First, a new image feature called Normalized Pixel Difference (NPD) is proposed. NPD feature is computed as the difference to sum ratio between two pixel values, inspired by the Weber Fraction in experimental psychology. The new feature is scale invariant, bounded, and is able to reconstruct the original image. Second, we propose a deep quadratic tree to learn the optimal subset of NPD features and their combinations, so that complex face manifolds can be partitioned by the learned rules. This way, only a single soft-cascade classifier is needed to handle unconstrained face detection. Furthermore, we show that the NPD features can be efficiently obtained from a look up table, and the detection template can be easily scaled, making the proposed face detector very fast. Experimental results on three public face datasets (FDDB, GENKI, and CMU-MIT) show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in detecting unconstrained faces with arbitrary pose variations and occlusions in cluttered scenes.Comment: This paper has been accepted by TPAMI. The source code is available on the project page http://www.cbsr.ia.ac.cn/users/scliao/projects/npdface/index.htm

Cell identification in whole-brain multiview images of neural activation

We present a scalable method for brain cell identification in multiview confocal light sheet microscopy images. Our algorithmic pipeline includes a hierarchical registration approach and a novel multiview version of semantic deconvolution that simultaneously enhance visibility of fluorescent cell bodies, equalize their contrast, and fuses adjacent views into a single 3D images on which cell identification is performed with mean shift. We present empirical results on a whole-brain image of an adult Arc-dVenus mouse acquired at 4micron resolution. Based on an annotated test volume containing 3278 cells, our algorithm achieves an $F_1$ measure of 0.89

Lifting Object Detection Datasets into 3D

While data has certainly taken the center stage in computer vision in recent years, it can still be difficult to obtain in certain scenarios. In particular, acquiring ground truth 3D shapes of objects pictured in 2D images remains a challenging feat and this has hampered progress in recognition-based object reconstruction from a single image. Here we propose to bypass previous solutions such as 3D scanning or manual design, that scale poorly, and instead populate object category detection datasets semi-automatically with dense, per-object 3D reconstructions, bootstrapped from:(i) class labels, (ii) ground truth figure-ground segmentations and (iii) a small set of keypoint annotations. Our proposed algorithm first estimates camera viewpoint using rigid structure-from-motion and then reconstructs object shapes by optimizing over visual hull proposals guided by loose within-class shape similarity assumptions. The visual hull sampling process attempts to intersect an object's projection cone with the cones of minimal subsets of other similar objects among those pictured from certain vantage points. We show that our method is able to produce convincing per-object 3D reconstructions and to accurately estimate cameras viewpoints on one of the most challenging existing object-category detection datasets, PASCAL VOC. We hope that our results will re-stimulate interest on joint object recognition and 3D reconstruction from a single image

3D human pose estimation from depth maps using a deep combination of poses

Many real-world applications require the estimation of human body joints for higher-level tasks as, for example, human behaviour understanding. In recent years, depth sensors have become a popular approach to obtain three-dimensional information. The depth maps generated by these sensors provide information that can be employed to disambiguate the poses observed in two-dimensional images. This work addresses the problem of 3D human pose estimation from depth maps employing a Deep Learning approach. We propose a model, named Deep Depth Pose (DDP), which receives a depth map containing a person and a set of predefined 3D prototype poses and returns the 3D position of the body joints of the person. In particular, DDP is defined as a ConvNet that computes the specific weights needed to linearly combine the prototypes for the given input. We have thoroughly evaluated DDP on the challenging 'ITOP' and 'UBC3V' datasets, which respectively depict realistic and synthetic samples, defining a new state-of-the-art on them.Comment: Accepted for publication at "Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation

Effective Image Retrieval via Multilinear Multi-index Fusion

Multi-index fusion has demonstrated impressive performances in retrieval task by integrating different visual representations in a unified framework. However, previous works mainly consider propagating similarities via neighbor structure, ignoring the high order information among different visual representations. In this paper, we propose a new multi-index fusion scheme for image retrieval. By formulating this procedure as a multilinear based optimization problem, the complementary information hidden in different indexes can be explored more thoroughly. Specially, we first build our multiple indexes from various visual representations. Then a so-called index-specific functional matrix, which aims to propagate similarities, is introduced for updating the original index. The functional matrices are then optimized in a unified tensor space to achieve a refinement, such that the relevant images can be pushed more closer. The optimization problem can be efficiently solved by the augmented Lagrangian method with theoretical convergence guarantee. Unlike the traditional multi-index fusion scheme, our approach embeds the multi-index subspace structure into the new indexes with sparse constraint, thus it has little additional memory consumption in online query stage. Experimental evaluation on three benchmark datasets reveals that the proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance, i.e., N-score 3.94 on UKBench, mAP 94.1\% on Holiday and 62.39\% on Market-1501.Comment: 12 page

Multiview Detection with Feature Perspective Transformation

Incorporating multiple camera views for detection alleviates the impact of occlusions in crowded scenes. In a multiview system, we need to answer two important questions when dealing with ambiguities that arise from occlusions. First, how should we aggregate cues from the multiple views? Second, how should we aggregate unreliable 2D and 3D spatial information that has been tainted by occlusions? To address these questions, we propose a novel multiview detection system, MVDet. For multiview aggregation, existing methods combine anchor box features from the image plane, which potentially limits performance due to inaccurate anchor box shapes and sizes. In contrast, we take an anchor-free approach to aggregate multiview information by projecting feature maps onto the ground plane (bird's eye view). To resolve any remaining spatial ambiguity, we apply large kernel convolutions on the ground plane feature map and infer locations from detection peaks. Our entire model is end-to-end learnable and achieves 88.2% MODA on the standard Wildtrack dataset, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 14.1%. We also provide detailed analysis of MVDet on a newly introduced synthetic dataset, MultiviewX, which allows us to control the level of occlusion. Code and MultiviewX dataset are available at https://github.com/hou-yz/MVDet

Investigating and Mitigating the Side Effects of Noisy Views in Multi-view Clustering in Practical Scenarios

Multi-view clustering (MvC) aims at exploring category structures among multi-view data without label supervision. Multiple views provide more information than single views and thus existing MvC methods can achieve satisfactory performance. However, their performance might seriously degenerate when the views are noisy in practical scenarios. In this paper, we first formally investigate the drawback of noisy views and then propose a theoretically grounded deep MvC method (namely MvCAN) to address this issue. Specifically, we propose a novel MvC objective that enables un-shared parameters and inconsistent clustering predictions across multiple views to reduce the side effects of noisy views. Furthermore, a non-parametric iterative process is designed to generate a robust learning target for mining multiple views' useful information. Theoretical analysis reveals that MvCAN works by achieving the multi-view consistency, complementarity, and noise robustness. Finally, experiments on extensive public datasets demonstrate that MvCAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods and is robust against the existence of noisy views

Learning Articulated Motion Models from Visual and Lingual Signals

In order for robots to operate effectively in homes and workplaces, they must be able to manipulate the articulated objects common within environments built for and by humans. Previous work learns kinematic models that prescribe this manipulation from visual demonstrations. Lingual signals, such as natural language descriptions and instructions, offer a complementary means of conveying knowledge of such manipulation models and are suitable to a wide range of interactions (e.g., remote manipulation). In this paper, we present a multimodal learning framework that incorporates both visual and lingual information to estimate the structure and parameters that define kinematic models of articulated objects. The visual signal takes the form of an RGB-D image stream that opportunistically captures object motion in an unprepared scene. Accompanying natural language descriptions of the motion constitute the lingual signal. We present a probabilistic language model that uses word embeddings to associate lingual verbs with their corresponding kinematic structures. By exploiting the complementary nature of the visual and lingual input, our method infers correct kinematic structures for various multiple-part objects on which the previous state-of-the-art, visual-only system fails. We evaluate our multimodal learning framework on a dataset comprised of a variety of household objects, and demonstrate a 36% improvement in model accuracy over the vision-only baseline