Landmark Image Retrieval Using Visual Synonyms

In this paper, we consider the incoherence problem of the visual words in bag-of-words vocabularies. Different from existing work, which performs assignment of words based solely on closeness in descriptor space, we focus on identifying pairs of independent, distant words - the visual synonyms - that are still likely to host image patches with similar appearance. To study this problems we focus on landmark images, where we can examine whether image geometry is an appropriate vehicle for detecting visual synonyms. We propose an algorithm for the extraction of visual synonyms in landmark images. To show the merit of visual synonyms, we perform two experiments. We examine closeness of synonyms in descriptor space and we show a first application of visual synonyms in a landmark image retrieval setting. Using visual synonyms, we perform on par with the state-of-the-art, but with six times less visual words

Feature-Supervised Action Modality Transfer

This paper strives for action recognition and detection in video modalities like RGB, depth maps or 3D-skeleton sequences when only limited modality-specific labeled examples are available. For the RGB, and derived optical-flow, modality many large-scale labeled datasets have been made available. They have become the de facto pre-training choice when recognizing or detecting new actions from RGB datasets that have limited amounts of labeled examples available. Unfortunately, large-scale labeled action datasets for other modalities are unavailable for pre-training. In this paper, our goal is to recognize actions from limited examples in non-RGB video modalities, by learning from large-scale labeled RGB data. To this end, we propose a two-step training process: (i) we extract action representation knowledge from an RGB-trained teacher network and adapt it to a non-RGB student network. (ii) we then fine-tune the transfer model with available labeled examples of the target modality. For the knowledge transfer we introduce feature-supervision strategies, which rely on unlabeled pairs of two modalities (the RGB and the target modality) to transfer feature level representations from the teacher to the student network. Ablations and generalizations with two RGB source datasets and two non-RGB target datasets demonstrate that an optical-flow teacher provides better action transfer features than RGB for both depth maps and 3D-skeletons, even when evaluated on a different target domain, or for a different task. Compared to alternative cross-modal action transfer methods we show a good improvement in performance especially when labeled non-RGB examples to learn from are scarce

Few-Shot Transformation of Common Actions into Time and Space

This paper introduces the task of few-shot common action localization in time and space. Given a few trimmed support videos containing the same but unknown action, we strive for spatio-temporal localization of that action in a long untrimmed query video. We do not require any class labels, interval bounds, or bounding boxes. To address this challenging task, we introduce a novel few-shot transformer architecture with a dedicated encoder-decoder structure optimized for joint commonality learning and localization prediction, without the need for proposals. Experiments on our reorganizations of the AVA and UCF101-24 datasets show the effectiveness of our approach for few-shot common action localization, even when the support videos are noisy. Although we are not specifically designed for common localization in time only, we also compare favorably against the few-shot and one-shot state-of-the-art in this setting. Lastly, we demonstrate that the few-shot transformer is easily extended to common action localization per pixel

Self-Ordering Point Clouds

In this paper we address the task of finding representative subsets of points in a 3D point cloud by means of a point-wise ordering. Only a few works have tried to address this challenging vision problem, all with the help of hard to obtain point and cloud labels. Different from these works, we introduce the task of point-wise ordering in 3D point clouds through self-supervision, which we call selfordering. We further contribute the first end-to-end trainable network that learns a point-wise ordering in a selfsupervised fashion. It utilizes a novel differentiable point scoring-sorting strategy and it constructs an hierarchical contrastive scheme to obtain self-supervision signals. We extensively ablate the method and show its scalability and superior performance even compared to supervised ordering methods on multiple datasets and tasks including zeroshot ordering of point clouds from unseen categories