A location-aware embedding technique for accurate landmark recognition

The current state of the research in landmark recognition highlights the good accuracy which can be achieved by embedding techniques, such as Fisher vector and VLAD. All these techniques do not exploit spatial information, i.e. consider all the features and the corresponding descriptors without embedding their location in the image. This paper presents a new variant of the well-known VLAD (Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors) embedding technique which accounts, at a certain degree, for the location of features. The driving motivation comes from the observation that, usually, the most interesting part of an image (e.g., the landmark to be recognized) is almost at the center of the image, while the features at the borders are irrelevant features which do no depend on the landmark. The proposed variant, called locVLAD (location-aware VLAD), computes the mean of the two global descriptors: the VLAD executed on the entire original image, and the one computed on a cropped image which removes a certain percentage of the image borders. This simple variant shows an accuracy greater than the existing state-of-the-art approach. Experiments are conducted on two public datasets (ZuBuD and Holidays) which are used both for training and testing. Morever a more balanced version of ZuBuD is proposed.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, ICDSC 201

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