beta-risk: a New Surrogate Risk for Learning from Weakly Labeled Data

International audienceDuring the past few years, the machine learning community has paid attention to developing new methods for learning from weakly labeled data. This field covers different settings like semi-supervised learning, learning with label proportions, multi-instance learning, noise-tolerant learning, etc. This paper presents a generic framework to deal with these weakly labeled scenarios. We introduce the \betarisk as a generalized formulation of the standard empirical risk based on surrogate margin-based loss functions. This risk allows us to express the reliability on the labels and to derive different kinds of learning algorithms. We specifically focus on SVMs and propose a soft margin \betasvm algorithm which behaves better that the state of the art

A Sequential Topic Model for Mining Recurrent Activities from Long Term Video Logs

This paper introduces a novel probabilistic activity modeling approach that mines recurrent sequential patterns called motifs from documents given as word $$\times$$ time count matrices (e.g., videos). In this model, documents are represented as a mixture of sequential activity patterns (our motifs) where the mixing weights are defined by the motif starting time occurrences. The novelties are multi fold. First, unlike previous approaches where topics modeled only the co-occurrence of words at a given time instant, our motifs model the co-occurrence and temporal order in which the words occur within a temporal window. Second, unlike traditional Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN), our model accounts for the important case where activities occur concurrently in the video (but not necessarily in synchrony), i.e., the advent of activity motifs can overlap. The learning of the motifs in these difficult situations is made possible thanks to the introduction of latent variables representing the activity starting times, enabling us to implicitly align the occurrences of the same pattern during the joint inference of the motifs and their starting times. As a third novelty, we propose a general method that favors the recovery of sparse distributions, a highly desirable property in many topic model applications, by adding simple regularization constraints on the searched distributions to the data likelihood optimization criteria. We substantiate our claims with experiments on synthetic data to demonstrate the algorithm behavior, and on four video datasets with significant variations in their activity content obtained from static cameras. We observe that using low-level motion features from videos, our algorithm is able to capture sequential patterns that implicitly represent typical trajectories of scene object

What to Show? - Automatic Stream Selection among Multiple Sensors

International audienceThe installation of surveillance networks has been growing exponentially in the last decade. In practice, videos from large surveillance networks are almost never watched, and it is frequent to see surveillance video wall monitors showing empty scenes. There is thus a need to design methods to continuously select streams to be shown to human operators. This paper addresses this issue and make three main contributions: it introduces and investigates, for the first time in the literature, the live stream selection task; based on the theory of social attention, it formalizes a way of obtaining some ground truth for the task and hence a way of evaluating stream selection algorithms; and finally, it proposes a two-step approach to solve this task and compares different approaches for interestingness rating using our framework. Experiments conducted on 9 cameras from a metro station and 5 hours of data randomly selected over one week show that, while complex unsupervised activity modeling algorithms achieve good performance, simpler approaches based on amount of motion perform almost as well for this type of indoor setting

Perceptive Services Composition using semantic language and distributed knowledge

International audienceBuilding applications composing perceptive services in a pervasive environment can lead to an inextricable problem: they were built by several people, using different programming languages and multiple conventions and protocols. Moreover, services can be volatile, so appear or disappear during running time of the application. This paper proposes the use of a dedicated human-readable semantic language to describe perceptive services. After converting this description into a more common language, one can recruit services using inference engines to build complex applications. In order to increase robustness of the whole system, descriptions of services are distributed over the network using a crosslanguage crossplateform open-source middleware of our own called OMiSCID

Predicting a Community's Flu Dynamics with Mobile Phone Data

International audienceHuman interactions that are sensed ubiquitously by mobile phones can improve a significant number of public health problems, particularly helping to track the spread of disease. In this paper, we evaluate multiple avenues for the integration of high-resolution face to face Bluetooth-sensed interaction networks into standard epidemic models. Our goal is to evaluate the capacity of the different avenues of integration to track the spread of seasonal influenza on a real-world community of 72 individuals over a period of 17 weeks. The dataset considered contains real-time tracking of individual flu symptoms over the whole observation period, providing a concrete individualized source for evaluation. We obtain an error of less than 2 infected people on average for predicting the total number of individuals affected by the flu and precision of approximately 30% when predicting exactly which individual will become infected at a given time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study considering mobile phone Bluetooth-sensed interaction data for dynamic infectious disease simulation that is evaluated against real human influenza occurrence. Our remarkable results indicate that high-resolution mobile phone data can increase the predictive power of even the simplest of epidemic models

A Lightweight Speech Detection System for Perceptive Environments

International audienceIn this paper, we address the problem of speech activity detection in multimodal perceptive environments. Such space may contain many different microphones (lapel, distant or table top). Thus, we need a generic speech activity detector in order to cope with different speech conditions (from closetalking to noisy distant speech). Moreover, as the number of microphones in the room can be high, we also need a very light system. The speech activity detector presented in this article works efficiently on dozens of microphones in parallel. We will see that even if its absolute score of the evaluation is not perfect (30% and 40% of error rate respectively on the two tasks), its accuracy is good enough in the context we are using it

Segmentation de scènes extérieures à partir d'ensembles d'étiquettes à granularité et sémantique variables

International audienceIn this work, we present an approach that leverages multiple datasets annotated using different classes (different labelsets) to improve the classification accuracy on each individual dataset. We focus on semantic full scene labeling of outdoor scenes. To achieve our goal, we use the KITTI dataset as it illustrates very well the focus of our paper : it has been sparsely labeled by multiple research groups over the past few years but the semantics and the granularity of the labels differ from one set to another. We propose a method to train deep convolutional networks using multiple datasets with potentially inconsistent labelsets and a selective loss function to train it with all the available labeled data while being reliant to inconsistent labelings. Experiments done on all the KITTI dataset's labeled subsets show that our approach consistently improves the classification accuracy by exploiting the correlations across data-sets both at the feature level and at the label level.Ce papier présente une approche permettant d'utiliser plusieurs bases de données annotées avec différents ensembles d'étiquettes pour améliorer la précision d'un classifieur entrainé sur une tâche de segmentation sémantique de scènes extérieures. Dans ce contexte, la base de données KITTI nous fournit un cas d'utilisation particulièrement pertinent : des sous-ensembles distincts de cette base ont été annotés par plusieurs équipes en utilisant des étiquettes différentes pour chaque sous-ensemble. Notre méthode permet d'entraîner un réseau de neurones convolutionnel (CNN) en utilisant plusieurs bases de données avec des étiquettes possiblement incohérentes. Nous présentons une fonction de perte sélective pour entrainer ce réseau et plusieurs approches de fusion permettant d'exploiter les corrélations entre les différents ensembles d'étiquettes. Le réseau utilise ainsi toutes les données disponibles pour améliorer les performances de classification sur chaque ensemble. Les expériences faites sur les différents sous-ensembles de la base de données KITTI montrent comment chaque proposition contribue à améliorer le classifieur

Mixed Pooling Neural Networks for Color Constancy

International audienceColor constancy is the ability of the human visual system to perceive constant colors for a surface despite changes in the spectrum of the illumination. In computer vision, the main approach consists in estimating the illuminant color and then to remove its impact on the color of the objects. Many image processing algorithms have been proposed to tackle this problem automatically. However, most of these approaches are handcrafted and mostly rely on strong empirical assumptions, e.g., that the average reflectance in a scene is gray. State-of-the-art approaches can perform very well on some given datasets but poorly adapt on some others. In this paper, we have investigated how neural networks-based approaches can be used to deal with the color constancy problem. We have proposed a new network architecture based on existing successful hand-crafted approaches and a large number of improvements to tackle this problem by learning a suitable deep model. We show our results on most of the standard benchmarks used in the color constancy domain