Weakly Supervised Localization using Deep Feature Maps

Object localization is an important computer vision problem with a variety of applications. The lack of large scale object-level annotations and the relative abundance of image-level labels makes a compelling case for weak supervision in the object localization task. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks are a class of state-of-the-art methods for the related problem of object recognition. In this paper, we describe a novel object localization algorithm which uses classification networks trained on only image labels. This weakly supervised method leverages local spatial and semantic patterns captured in the convolutional layers of classification networks. We propose an efficient beam search based approach to detect and localize multiple objects in images. The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in standard object localization data-sets with a 8 point increase in mAP scores

A Cross-Season Correspondence Dataset for Robust Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we present a method to utilize 2D-2D point matches between images taken during different image conditions to train a convolutional neural network for semantic segmentation. Enforcing label consistency across the matches makes the final segmentation algorithm robust to seasonal changes. We describe how these 2D-2D matches can be generated with little human interaction by geometrically matching points from 3D models built from images. Two cross-season correspondence datasets are created providing 2D-2D matches across seasonal changes as well as from day to night. The datasets are made publicly available to facilitate further research. We show that adding the correspondences as extra supervision during training improves the segmentation performance of the convolutional neural network, making it more robust to seasonal changes and weather conditions.Comment: In Proc. CVPR 201

Track, then Decide: Category-Agnostic Vision-based Multi-Object Tracking

The most common paradigm for vision-based multi-object tracking is tracking-by-detection, due to the availability of reliable detectors for several important object categories such as cars and pedestrians. However, future mobile systems will need a capability to cope with rich human-made environments, in which obtaining detectors for every possible object category would be infeasible. In this paper, we propose a model-free multi-object tracking approach that uses a category-agnostic image segmentation method to track objects. We present an efficient segmentation mask-based tracker which associates pixel-precise masks reported by the segmentation. Our approach can utilize semantic information whenever it is available for classifying objects at the track level, while retaining the capability to track generic unknown objects in the absence of such information. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art tracking-by-detection methods for popular object categories such as cars and pedestrians. Additionally, we show that the proposed method can discover and robustly track a large variety of other objects.Comment: ICRA'18 submissio

Unsupervised Object Discovery and Tracking in Video Collections

This paper addresses the problem of automatically localizing dominant objects as spatio-temporal tubes in a noisy collection of videos with minimal or even no supervision. We formulate the problem as a combination of two complementary processes: discovery and tracking. The first one establishes correspondences between prominent regions across videos, and the second one associates successive similar object regions within the same video. Interestingly, our algorithm also discovers the implicit topology of frames associated with instances of the same object class across different videos, a role normally left to supervisory information in the form of class labels in conventional image and video understanding methods. Indeed, as demonstrated by our experiments, our method can handle video collections featuring multiple object classes, and substantially outperforms the state of the art in colocalization, even though it tackles a broader problem with much less supervision

ClassCut for Unsupervised Class Segmentation

Abstract. We propose a novel method for unsupervised class segmentation on a set of images. It alternates between segmenting object instances and learning a class model. The method is based on a segmentation energy defined over all images at the same time, which can be optimized efficiently by techniques used before in interactive segmentation. Over iterations, our method progressively learns a class model by integrating observations over all images. In addition to appearance, this model captures the location and shape of the class with respect to an automatically determined coordinate frame common across images. This frame allows us to build stronger shape and location models, similar to those used in object class detection. Our method is inspired by interactive segmentation methods [1], but it is fully automatic and learns models characteristic for the object class rather than specific to one particular object/image. We experimentally demonstrate on the Caltech4, Caltech101, and Weizmann horses datasets that our method (a) transfers class knowledge across images and this improves results compared to segmenting every image independently; (b) outperforms Grabcut [1] for the task of unsupervised segmentation; (c) offers competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art in unsupervised segmentation and in particular it outperforms the topic model [2].

Geometric Supervision and Deep Structured Models for Image Segmentation

The task of semantic segmentation aims at understanding an image at a pixel level. Due to its applicability in many areas, such as autonomous vehicles, robotics and medical surgery assistance, semantic segmentation has become an essential task in image analysis. During the last few years a lot of progress have been made for image segmentation algorithms, mainly due to the introduction of deep learning methods, in particular the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). CNNs are powerful for modeling complex connections between input and output data but have two drawbacks when it comes to semantic segmentation. Firstly, CNNs lack the ability to directly model dependent output structures, for instance, explicitly enforcing properties such as label smoothness and coherence. This drawback motivates the use of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), applied as a post-processing step in semantic segmentation. Secondly, training CNNs requires large amounts of annotated data. For segmentation this amounts to dense, pixel-level, annotations that are very time-consuming to acquire.This thesis summarizes the content of five papers addressing the two aforementioned drawbacks of CNNs. The first two papers present methods on how geometric 3D models can be used to improve segmentation models. The 3D models can be created with little human labour and can be used as a supervisory signal to improve the robustness of semantic segmentation and long-term visual localization methods. The last three papers focuses on models combining CNNs and CRFs for semantic segmentation. The models consist of a CNN capable of learning complex image features coupled with a CRF capable of learning dependencies between output variables. Emphasis has been on creating models that are possible to train end-to-end, giving the CNN and the CRF a chance to learn how to interact and exploit complementary information to achieve better performance