A Multiple Component Matching Framework for Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification consists in recognizing an individual that has already been observed over a network of cameras. It is a novel and challenging research topic in computer vision, for which no reference framework exists yet. Despite this, previous works share similar representations of human body based on part decomposition and the implicit concept of multiple instances. Building on these similarities, we propose a Multiple Component Matching (MCM) framework for the person re-identification problem, which is inspired by Multiple Component Learning, a framework recently proposed for object detection. We show that previous techniques for person re-identification can be considered particular implementations of our MCM framework. We then present a novel person re-identification technique as a direct, simple implementation of our framework, focused in particular on robustness to varying lighting conditions, and show that it can attain state of the art performances.Comment: Accepted paper, 16th Int. Conf. on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP 2011), Ravenna, Italy, 14/09/201

An empirical evaluation of nuclei segmentation from H&E images in a real application scenario

Cell nuclei segmentation is a challenging task, especially in real applications, when the target images significantly differ between them. This task is also challenging for methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have recently boosted the performance of cell nuclei segmentation systems. However, when training data are scarce or not representative of deployment scenarios, they may suffer from overfitting to a different extent, and may hardly generalise to images that differ from the ones used for training. In this work, we focus on real-world, challenging application scenarios when no annotated images from a given dataset are available, or when few images (even unlabelled) of the same domain are available to perform domain adaptation. To simulate this scenario, we performed extensive cross-dataset experiments on several CNN-based state-of-the-art cell nuclei segmentation methods. Our results show that some of the existing CNN-based approaches are capable of generalising to target images which resemble the ones used for training. In contrast, their effectiveness considerably degrades when target and source significantly differ in colours and scale

Is Deep Learning Safe for Robot Vision? Adversarial Examples against the iCub Humanoid

Deep neural networks have been widely adopted in recent years, exhibiting impressive performances in several application domains. It has however been shown that they can be fooled by adversarial examples, i.e., images altered by a barely-perceivable adversarial noise, carefully crafted to mislead classification. In this work, we aim to evaluate the extent to which robot-vision systems embodying deep-learning algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial examples, and propose a computationally efficient countermeasure to mitigate this threat, based on rejecting classification of anomalous inputs. We then provide a clearer understanding of the safety properties of deep networks through an intuitive empirical analysis, showing that the mapping learned by such networks essentially violates the smoothness assumption of learning algorithms. We finally discuss the main limitations of this work, including the creation of real-world adversarial examples, and sketch promising research directions.Comment: Accepted for publication at the ICCV 2017 Workshop on Vision in Practice on Autonomous Robots (ViPAR

Designing multi-label classifiers that maximize F measures: state of the art

Multi-label classification problems usually occur in tasks related to information retrieval, like text and image annotation, and are receiving increasing attention from the machine learning and pattern recognition fields. One of the main issues under investigation is the development of classification algorithms capable of maximizing specific accuracy measures based on precision and recall. We focus on the widely used F measure, defined for binary, single-label problems as the weighted harmonic mean of precision and recall, and later extended to multi-label problems in three ways: macro-averaged, micro-averaged and instance-wise. In this paper we give a comprehensive survey of theoretical results and algorithms aimed at maximizing F measures. We subdivide it according to the two main existing approaches: empirical utility maximization, and decision-theoretic. Under the former approach, we also derive the optimal (Bayes) classifier at the population level for the instance-wise and micro-averaged F, extending recent results about the single-label F. In a companion paper we shall focus on the micro-averaged F measure, for which relatively fewer solutions exist, and shall develop novel maximization algorithms under both approaches

Investigating Synthetic Data Sets for Crowd Counting in Cross-scene Scenarios

Crowd counting and density estimation are crucial functionalities in intelligent video surveillance systems but are also very challenging computer vision tasks in scenarios characterised by dense crowds, due to scale and perspective variations, overlapping and occlusions. Regression-based crowd counting models are used for dense crowd scenes, where pedestrian detection is infeasible. We focus on real-world, cross-scene application scenarios where no manually annotated images of the target scene are available for training regression models, but only images with different backgrounds and camera views can be used (e.g., from publicly available data sets), which can lead to low accuracy. To overcome this issue, we propose to build the training set using emph{synthetic} images of the target scene, which can be automatically annotated with no manual effort. This work provides a preliminary empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of the above solution. To this aim, we carry out experiments using real data sets as the target scenes (testing set) and using different kinds of synthetically generated crowd images of the target scenes as training data. Our results show that synthetic training images can be effective, provided that also their background, beside their perspective, closely reproduces the one of the target scene

Scene-specific crowd counting using synthetic training images

Crowd counting is a computer vision task on which considerable progress has recently been made thanks to convolutional neural networks. However, it remains a challenging task even in scene-specific settings, in real-world application scenarios where no representative images of the target scene are available, not even unlabelled, for training or fine-tuning a crowd counting model. Inspired by previous work in other computer vision tasks, we propose a simple but effective solution for the above application scenario, which consists of automatically building a scene-specific training set of synthetic images. Our solution does not require from end-users any manual annotation effort nor the collection of representative images of the target scene. Extensive experiments on several benchmark data sets show that the proposed solution can improve the effectiveness of existing crowd counting methods

An Empirical Evaluation of Cross-scene Crowd Counting Performance

Crowd counting and density estimation are useful but also challenging tasks in many video surveillance systems, especially in cross-scene settings with dense crowds, if the target scene significantly differs from the ones used for training. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have boosted the performance of crowd counting systems, but they require massive amounts of annotated training data. As a consequence, when training data is scarce or not representative of deployment scenarios, also CNNs may suffer from over-fitting to a different extent, and may hardly generalise to images coming from different scenes. In this work we focus on real-world, challenging application scenarios when no annotated crowd images from a given target scene are available, and evaluate the cross-scene effectiveness of several regression-based state-of-the-art methods, including the most recent, CNN-based ones, through extensive cross-data set experiments. Our results show that some of the existing CNN-based approaches are capable of generalising to target scenes which differ from the ones used for training in the background or lighting conditions, whereas their effectiveness considerably degrades under different perspective and scale

A parameter randomization approach for constructing classifier ensembles

Randomization-based techniques for classifier ensemble construction, like Bagging and Random Forests, are well known and widely used. They consist of independently training the ensemble members on random perturbations of the training data or random changes of the learning algorithm. We argue that randomization techniques can be defined also by directly manipulating the parameters of the base classifier, i.e., by sampling their values from a given probability distribution. A classifier ensemble can thus be built without manipulating the training data or the learning algorithm, and then running the learning algorithm to obtain the individual classifiers. The key issue is to define a suitable parameter distribution for a given base classifier. This also allows one to re-implement existing randomization techniques by sampling the classifier parameters from the distribution implicitly defined by such techniques, if it is known or can be approximated, instead of explicitly manipulating the training data and running the learning algorithm. In this work we provide a first investigation of our approach, starting from an existing randomization technique (Bagging): we analytically approximate the parameter distribution for three well-known classifiers (nearest-mean, linear and quadratic discriminant), and empirically show that it generates ensembles very similar to Bagging. We also give a first example of the definition of a novel randomization technique based on our approach