Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Constrained Dominant Sets

The availability of large-scale data sets is an essential pre-requisite for deep learning based semantic segmentation schemes. Since obtaining pixel-level labels is extremely expensive, supervising deep semantic segmentation networks using low-cost weak annotations has been an attractive research problem in recent years. In this work, we explore the potential of Constrained Dominant Sets (CDS) for generating multi-labeled full mask predictions to train a fully convolutional network (FCN) for semantic segmentation. Our experimental results show that using CDS's yields higher-quality mask predictions compared to methods that have been adopted in the literature for the same purpose

A Scale Independent Selection Process for 3D Object Recognition in Cluttered Scenes

During the last years a wide range of algorithms and devices have been made available to easily acquire range images. The increasing abundance of depth data boosts the need for reliable and unsupervised analysis techniques, spanning from part registration to automated segmentation. In this context, we focus on the recognition of known objects in cluttered and incomplete 3D scans. Locating and fitting a model to a scene are very important tasks in many scenarios such as industrial inspection, scene understanding, medical imaging and even gaming. For this reason, these problems have been addressed extensively in the literature. Several of the proposed methods adopt local descriptor-based approaches, while a number of hurdles still hinder the use of global techniques. In this paper we offer a different perspective on the topic: We adopt an evolutionary selection algorithm that seeks global agreement among surface points, while operating at a local level. The approach effectively extends the scope of local descriptors by actively selecting correspondences that satisfy global consistency constraints, allowing us to attack a more challenging scenario where model and scene have different, unknown scales. This leads to a novel and very effective pipeline for 3D object recognition, which is validated with an extensive set of experiment

A game-theoretic approach to hypergraph clustering

Hypergraph clustering refers to the process of extracting maximally coherent groups from a set of objects using high-order (rather than pairwise) similarities. Traditional approaches to this problem are based on the idea of partitioning the input data into a predetermined number of classes, thereby obtaining the clusters as a by-product of the partitioning process. In this paper, we offer a radically different view of the problem. In contrast to the classical approach, we attempt to provide a meaningful formalization of the very notion of a cluster and we show that game theory offers an attractive and unexplored perspective that serves well our purpose. To this end, we formulate the hypergraph clustering problem in terms of a non-cooperative multi-player “clustering game, ” and show that a natural notion of a cluster turns out to be equivalent to a classical (evolutionary) gametheoretic equilibrium concept. We prove that the problem of finding the equilibria of our clustering game is equivalent to locally optimizing a polynomial function over the standard simplex, and we provide a discrete-time high-order replicator dynamics to perform this optimization, based on the Baum-Eagon inequality. Experiments over synthetic as well as real-world data are presented which show the superiority of our approach over the state of the art

Os paraísos fiscais e financeiros

none4Peter Kontschieder; Samuel Rota Bulò; Horst Bischof; Marcello PelilloPeter Kontschieder; Samuel Rota Bulò; Horst Bischof; Marcello Pelill

Boosting binary masks for multi-domain learning through affine transformations

In this work, we present a new, algorithm for multi-domain learning. Given a pretrained architecture and a set of visual domains received sequentially, the goal of multi-domain learning is to produce a single model performing a task in all the domains together. Recent works showed how we can address this problem by masking the internal weights of a given original convnet through learned binary variables. In this work, we provide a general formulation of binary mask-based models for multi-domain learning by affine transformations of the original network parameters. Our formulation obtains significantly higher levels of adaptation to new domains, achieving performances comparable to domain-specific models while requiring slightly more than 1 bit per network parameter per additional domain. Experiments on two popular benchmarks showcase the power of our approach, achieving performances close to state-of-the-art methods on the Visual Decathlon Challenge

Structured Labels in Random Forests for Semantic Labelling and Object Detection

Ensembles of randomized decision trees, known as Random Forests, have become a valuable machine learning tool for addressing many computer vision problems. Despite their popularity, few works have tried to exploit contextual and structural information in random forests in order to improve their performance. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective way to integrate contextual information in random forests, which is typically reflected in the structured output space of complex problems like semantic image labelling. Our paper has several contributions: We show how random forests can be augmented with structured label information and be used to deliver structured low-level predictions. The learning task is carried out by employing a novel split function evaluation criterion that exploits the joint distribution observed in the structured label space. This allows the forest to learn typical label transitions between object classes and avoid locally implausible label configurations. We provide two approaches for integrating the structured output predictions obtained at a local level from the forest into a concise, global, semantic labelling. We integrate our new ideas also in the Hough-forest framework with the view of exploiting contextual information at the classification level to improve the performance on the task of object detection. Finally, we provide experimental evidence for the effectiveness of our approach on different tasks: Semantic image labelling on the challenging MSRCv2 and CamVid databases, reconstruction of occluded handwritten Chinese characters on the Kaist database and pedestrian detection on the TU Darmstadt databases

An Efficient Radiographic Image Retrieval System Using Convolutional Neural Network

Content-Based Medical Image Retrieval (CBMIR) is an important research field in the context of medical data management. In this paper we propose a novel CBMIR system for the automatic retrieval of radiographic images. Our approach employs a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to obtain high- level image representations that enable a coarse retrieval of images that are in correspondence to a query image. The retrieved set of images is refined via a non-parametric estimation of putative classes for the query image, which are used to filter out potential outliers in favour of more relevant images belonging to those classes. The refined set of images is finally re-ranked using Edge Histogram Descriptor, i.e. a low-level edge-based image descriptor that allows to capture finer similarities between the retrieved set of images and the query image. To improve the computational efficiency of the system, we employ dimensionality reduction via Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Experiments were carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system on medical data from the “Image Retrieval in Medical Applications” (IRMA) benchmark database. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed CBMIR system in the field of medical image retrieval.QC 20161208</p