Exploring Crosslingual Word Embeddings for Semantic Classification in Text and Dialogue

Current approaches to learning crosslingual word emebeddings provide a decent performance when based on a big amount of parallel data. Considering the fact, that most of the languages are under-resourced and lack structured lexical materials, it makes it difficult to implement them into such methods, and, respectively, into any human language technologies. In this thesis we explore whether crosslingual mapping between two sets of monolingual word embeddings obtained separately is strong enough to present competitive results on semantic classification tasks. Our experiment involves learning crosslingual transfer between German and French word vectors based on the combination of adversarial approach and the Procrustes algorithm. We evaluate embeddings on topic classification, sentiment analysis and humour detection tasks. We use a German subset of a multilingual data set for training, and a French subset for testing our models. Results across German and French languages prove that word vectors mapped into a shared vector space are able to obtain and transfer semantic information from one language to another successfully. We also show that crosslingual mapping does not weaken the monolingual connections between words in one language

Monocular 3d Object Recognition

Object recognition is one of the fundamental tasks of computer vision. Recent advances in the field enable reliable 2D detections from a single cluttered image. However, many challenges still remain. Object detection needs timely response for real world applications. Moreover, we are genuinely interested in estimating the 3D pose and shape of an object or human for the sake of robotic manipulation and human-robot interaction. In this thesis, a suite of solutions to these challenges is presented. First, Active Deformable Part Models (ADPM) is proposed for fast part-based object detection. ADPM dramatically accelerates the detection by dynamically scheduling the part evaluations and efficiently pruning the image locations. Second, we unleash the power of marrying discriminative 2D parts with an explicit 3D geometric representation. Several methods of such scheme are proposed for recovering rich 3D information of both rigid and non-rigid objects from monocular RGB images. (1) The accurate 3D pose of an object instance is recovered from cluttered images using only the CAD model. (2) A global optimal solution for simultaneous 2D part localization, 3D pose and shape estimation is obtained by optimizing a unified convex objective function. Both appearance and geometric compatibility are jointly maximized. (3) 3D human pose estimation from an image sequence is realized via an Expectation-Maximization algorithm. The 2D joint location uncertainties are marginalized out during inference and 3D pose smoothness is enforced across frames. By bridging the gap between 2D and 3D, our methods provide an end-to-end solution to 3D object recognition from images. We demonstrate a range of interesting applications using only a single image or a monocular video, including autonomous robotic grasping with a single image, 3D object image pop-up and a monocular human MoCap system. We also show empirical start-of-art results on a number of benchmarks on 2D detection and 3D pose and shape estimation

Advances in Character Recognition

This book presents advances in character recognition, and it consists of 12 chapters that cover wide range of topics on different aspects of character recognition. Hopefully, this book will serve as a reference source for academic research, for professionals working in the character recognition field and for all interested in the subject

Rekonstruktion und skalierbare Detektion und Verfolgung von 3D Objekten

The task of detecting objects in images is essential for autonomous systems to categorize, comprehend and eventually navigate or manipulate its environment. Since many applications demand not only detection of objects but also the estimation of their exact poses, 3D CAD models can prove helpful since they provide means for feature extraction and hypothesis refinement. This work, therefore, explores two paths: firstly, we will look into methods to create richly-textured and geometrically accurate models of real-life objects. Using these reconstructions as a basis, we will investigate on how to improve in the domain of 3D object detection and pose estimation, focusing especially on scalability, i.e. the problem of dealing with multiple objects simultaneously.Objekterkennung in Bildern ist für ein autonomes System von entscheidender Bedeutung, um seine Umgebung zu kategorisieren, zu erfassen und schließlich zu navigieren oder zu manipulieren. Da viele Anwendungen nicht nur die Erkennung von Objekten, sondern auch die Schätzung ihrer exakten Positionen erfordern, können sich 3D-CAD-Modelle als hilfreich erweisen, da sie Mittel zur Merkmalsextraktion und Verfeinerung von Hypothesen bereitstellen. In dieser Arbeit werden daher zwei Wege untersucht: Erstens werden wir Methoden untersuchen, um strukturreiche und geometrisch genaue Modelle realer Objekte zu erstellen. Auf der Grundlage dieser Konstruktionen werden wir untersuchen, wie sich der Bereich der 3D-Objekterkennung und der Posenschätzung verbessern lässt, wobei insbesondere die Skalierbarkeit im Vordergrund steht, d.h. das Problem der gleichzeitigen Bearbeitung mehrerer Objekte