ParseNet: Looking Wider to See Better

We present a technique for adding global context to deep convolutional networks for semantic segmentation. The approach is simple, using the average feature for a layer to augment the features at each location. In addition, we study several idiosyncrasies of training, significantly increasing the performance of baseline networks (e.g. from FCN). When we add our proposed global feature, and a technique for learning normalization parameters, accuracy increases consistently even over our improved versions of the baselines. Our proposed approach, ParseNet, achieves state-of-the-art performance on SiftFlow and PASCAL-Context with small additional computational cost over baselines, and near current state-of-the-art performance on PASCAL VOC 2012 semantic segmentation with a simple approach. Code is available at https://github.com/weiliu89/caffe/tree/fcn .Comment: ICLR 2016 submissio

Solving Visual Madlibs with Multiple Cues

This paper focuses on answering fill-in-the-blank style multiple choice questions from the Visual Madlibs dataset. Previous approaches to Visual Question Answering (VQA) have mainly used generic image features from networks trained on the ImageNet dataset, despite the wide scope of questions. In contrast, our approach employs features derived from networks trained for specialized tasks of scene classification, person activity prediction, and person and object attribute prediction. We also present a method for selecting sub-regions of an image that are relevant for evaluating the appropriateness of a putative answer. Visual features are computed both from the whole image and from local regions, while sentences are mapped to a common space using a simple normalized canonical correlation analysis (CCA) model. Our results show a significant improvement over the previous state of the art, and indicate that answering different question types benefits from examining a variety of image cues and carefully choosing informative image sub-regions

Synthesizing Training Data for Object Detection in Indoor Scenes

Detection of objects in cluttered indoor environments is one of the key enabling functionalities for service robots. The best performing object detection approaches in computer vision exploit deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to simultaneously detect and categorize the objects of interest in cluttered scenes. Training of such models typically requires large amounts of annotated training data which is time consuming and costly to obtain. In this work we explore the ability of using synthetically generated composite images for training state-of-the-art object detectors, especially for object instance detection. We superimpose 2D images of textured object models into images of real environments at variety of locations and scales. Our experiments evaluate different superimposition strategies ranging from purely image-based blending all the way to depth and semantics informed positioning of the object models into real scenes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these object detector training strategies on two publicly available datasets, the GMU-Kitchens and the Washington RGB-D Scenes v2. As one observation, augmenting some hand-labeled training data with synthetic examples carefully composed onto scenes yields object detectors with comparable performance to using much more hand-labeled data. Broadly, this work charts new opportunities for training detectors for new objects by exploiting existing object model repositories in either a purely automatic fashion or with only a very small number of human-annotated examples.Comment: Added more experiments and link to project webpag

Video Highlight Prediction Using Audience Chat Reactions

Sports channel video portals offer an exciting domain for research on multimodal, multilingual analysis. We present methods addressing the problem of automatic video highlight prediction based on joint visual features and textual analysis of the real-world audience discourse with complex slang, in both English and traditional Chinese. We present a novel dataset based on League of Legends championships recorded from North American and Taiwanese Twitch.tv channels (will be released for further research), and demonstrate strong results on these using multimodal, character-level CNN-RNN model architectures.Comment: EMNLP 201

Fast Single Shot Detection and Pose Estimation

For applications in navigation and robotics, estimating the 3D pose of objects is as important as detection. Many approaches to pose estimation rely on detecting or tracking parts or keypoints [11, 21]. In this paper we build on a recent state-of-the-art convolutional network for slidingwindow detection [10] to provide detection and rough pose estimation in a single shot, without intermediate stages of detecting parts or initial bounding boxes. While not the first system to treat pose estimation as a categorization problem, this is the first attempt to combine detection and pose estimation at the same level using a deep learning approach. The key to the architecture is a deep convolutional network where scores for the presence of an object category, the offset for its location, and the approximate pose are all estimated on a regular grid of locations in the image. The resulting system is as accurate as recent work on pose estimation (42.4% 8 View mAVP on Pascal 3D+ [21] ) and significantly faster (46 frames per second (FPS) on a TITAN X GPU). This approach to detection and rough pose estimation is fast and accurate enough to be widely applied as a pre-processing step for tasks including high-accuracy pose estimation, object tracking and localization, and vSLAM