382 research outputs found
The Generalized A* Architecture
We consider the problem of computing a lightest derivation of a global
structure using a set of weighted rules. A large variety of inference problems
in AI can be formulated in this framework. We generalize A* search and
heuristics derived from abstractions to a broad class of lightest derivation
problems. We also describe a new algorithm that searches for lightest
derivations using a hierarchy of abstractions. Our generalization of A* gives a
new algorithm for searching AND/OR graphs in a bottom-up fashion. We discuss
how the algorithms described here provide a general architecture for addressing
the pipeline problem --- the problem of passing information back and forth
between various stages of processing in a perceptual system. We consider
examples in computer vision and natural language processing. We apply the
hierarchical search algorithm to the problem of estimating the boundaries of
convex objects in grayscale images and compare it to other search methods. A
second set of experiments demonstrate the use of a new compositional model for
finding salient curves in images
CMS-RCNN: Contextual Multi-Scale Region-based CNN for Unconstrained Face Detection
Robust face detection in the wild is one of the ultimate components to
support various facial related problems, i.e. unconstrained face recognition,
facial periocular recognition, facial landmarking and pose estimation, facial
expression recognition, 3D facial model construction, etc. Although the face
detection problem has been intensely studied for decades with various
commercial applications, it still meets problems in some real-world scenarios
due to numerous challenges, e.g. heavy facial occlusions, extremely low
resolutions, strong illumination, exceptionally pose variations, image or video
compression artifacts, etc. In this paper, we present a face detection approach
named Contextual Multi-Scale Region-based Convolution Neural Network (CMS-RCNN)
to robustly solve the problems mentioned above. Similar to the region-based
CNNs, our proposed network consists of the region proposal component and the
region-of-interest (RoI) detection component. However, far apart of that
network, there are two main contributions in our proposed network that play a
significant role to achieve the state-of-the-art performance in face detection.
Firstly, the multi-scale information is grouped both in region proposal and RoI
detection to deal with tiny face regions. Secondly, our proposed network allows
explicit body contextual reasoning in the network inspired from the intuition
of human vision system. The proposed approach is benchmarked on two recent
challenging face detection databases, i.e. the WIDER FACE Dataset which
contains high degree of variability, as well as the Face Detection Dataset and
Benchmark (FDDB). The experimental results show that our proposed approach
trained on WIDER FACE Dataset outperforms strong baselines on WIDER FACE
Dataset by a large margin, and consistently achieves competitive results on
FDDB against the recent state-of-the-art face detection methods
Multi-Person Pose Estimation with Local Joint-to-Person Associations
Despite of the recent success of neural networks for human pose estimation,
current approaches are limited to pose estimation of a single person and cannot
handle humans in groups or crowds. In this work, we propose a method that
estimates the poses of multiple persons in an image in which a person can be
occluded by another person or might be truncated. To this end, we consider
multi-person pose estimation as a joint-to-person association problem. We
construct a fully connected graph from a set of detected joint candidates in an
image and resolve the joint-to-person association and outlier detection using
integer linear programming. Since solving joint-to-person association jointly
for all persons in an image is an NP-hard problem and even approximations are
expensive, we solve the problem locally for each person. On the challenging
MPII Human Pose Dataset for multiple persons, our approach achieves the
accuracy of a state-of-the-art method, but it is 6,000 to 19,000 times faster.Comment: Accepted to European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) Workshops,
Crowd Understanding, 201
Plan-view Trajectory Estimation with Dense Stereo Background Models
In a known environment, objects may be tracked in multiple views using a set of back-ground models. Stereo-based models can be illumination-invariant, but often have undefined values which inevitably lead to foreground classification errors. We derive dense stereo models for object tracking using long-term, extended dynamic-range imagery, and by detecting and interpolating uniform but unoccluded planar regions. Foreground points are detected quickly in new images using pruned disparity search. We adopt a 'late-segmentation' strategy, using an integrated plan-view density representation. Foreground points are segmented into object regions only when a trajectory is finally estimated, using a dynamic programming-based method. Object entry and exit are optimally determined and are not restricted to special spatial zones
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].
Grid Loss: Detecting Occluded Faces
Detection of partially occluded objects is a challenging computer vision
problem. Standard Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) detectors fail if parts of
the detection window are occluded, since not every sub-part of the window is
discriminative on its own. To address this issue, we propose a novel loss layer
for CNNs, named grid loss, which minimizes the error rate on sub-blocks of a
convolution layer independently rather than over the whole feature map. This
results in parts being more discriminative on their own, enabling the detector
to recover if the detection window is partially occluded. By mapping our loss
layer back to a regular fully connected layer, no additional computational cost
is incurred at runtime compared to standard CNNs. We demonstrate our method for
face detection on several public face detection benchmarks and show that our
method outperforms regular CNNs, is suitable for realtime applications and
achieves state-of-the-art performance.Comment: accepted to ECCV 201
Contextual Object Detection with a Few Relevant Neighbors
A natural way to improve the detection of objects is to consider the
contextual constraints imposed by the detection of additional objects in a
given scene. In this work, we exploit the spatial relations between objects in
order to improve detection capacity, as well as analyze various properties of
the contextual object detection problem. To precisely calculate context-based
probabilities of objects, we developed a model that examines the interactions
between objects in an exact probabilistic setting, in contrast to previous
methods that typically utilize approximations based on pairwise interactions.
Such a scheme is facilitated by the realistic assumption that the existence of
an object in any given location is influenced by only few informative locations
in space. Based on this assumption, we suggest a method for identifying these
relevant locations and integrating them into a mostly exact calculation of
probability based on their raw detector responses. This scheme is shown to
improve detection results and provides unique insights about the process of
contextual inference for object detection. We show that it is generally
difficult to learn that a particular object reduces the probability of another,
and that in cases when the context and detector strongly disagree this learning
becomes virtually impossible for the purposes of improving the results of an
object detector. Finally, we demonstrate improved detection results through use
of our approach as applied to the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets
'Part'ly first among equals: Semantic part-based benchmarking for state-of-the-art object recognition systems
An examination of object recognition challenge leaderboards (ILSVRC,
PASCAL-VOC) reveals that the top-performing classifiers typically exhibit small
differences amongst themselves in terms of error rate/mAP. To better
differentiate the top performers, additional criteria are required. Moreover,
the (test) images, on which the performance scores are based, predominantly
contain fully visible objects. Therefore, `harder' test images, mimicking the
challenging conditions (e.g. occlusion) in which humans routinely recognize
objects, need to be utilized for benchmarking. To address the concerns
mentioned above, we make two contributions. First, we systematically vary the
level of local object-part content, global detail and spatial context in images
from PASCAL VOC 2010 to create a new benchmarking dataset dubbed PPSS-12.
Second, we propose an object-part based benchmarking procedure which quantifies
classifiers' robustness to a range of visibility and contextual settings. The
benchmarking procedure relies on a semantic similarity measure that naturally
addresses potential semantic granularity differences between the category
labels in training and test datasets, thus eliminating manual mapping. We use
our procedure on the PPSS-12 dataset to benchmark top-performing classifiers
trained on the ILSVRC-2012 dataset. Our results show that the proposed
benchmarking procedure enables additional differentiation among
state-of-the-art object classifiers in terms of their ability to handle missing
content and insufficient object detail. Given this capability for additional
differentiation, our approach can potentially supplement existing benchmarking
procedures used in object recognition challenge leaderboards.Comment: Extended version of our ACCV-2016 paper. Author formatting modifie
Graph Mining for Object Tracking in Videos
International audienceThis paper shows a concrete example of the use of graph mining for tracking objects in videos with moving cameras and without any contextual information on the objects to track. To make the mining algorithm efficient, we benefit from a video representation based on dy- namic (evolving through time) planar graphs. We then define a number of constraints to efficiently find our so-called spatio-temporal graph pat- terns. Those patterns are linked through an occurrences graph to allow us to tackle occlusion or graph features instability problems in the video. Experiments on synthetic and real videos show that our method is effec- tive and allows us to find relevant patterns for our tracking application
Image Co-localization by Mimicking a Good Detector's Confidence Score Distribution
Given a set of images containing objects from the same category, the task of
image co-localization is to identify and localize each instance. This paper
shows that this problem can be solved by a simple but intriguing idea, that is,
a common object detector can be learnt by making its detection confidence
scores distributed like those of a strongly supervised detector. More
specifically, we observe that given a set of object proposals extracted from an
image that contains the object of interest, an accurate strongly supervised
object detector should give high scores to only a small minority of proposals,
and low scores to most of them. Thus, we devise an entropy-based objective
function to enforce the above property when learning the common object
detector. Once the detector is learnt, we resort to a segmentation approach to
refine the localization. We show that despite its simplicity, our approach
outperforms state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Accepted to Proc. European Conf. Computer Vision 201
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