Circulant temporal encoding for video retrieval and temporal alignment

We address the problem of specific video event retrieval. Given a query video of a specific event, e.g., a concert of Madonna, the goal is to retrieve other videos of the same event that temporally overlap with the query. Our approach encodes the frame descriptors of a video to jointly represent their appearance and temporal order. It exploits the properties of circulant matrices to efficiently compare the videos in the frequency domain. This offers a significant gain in complexity and accurately localizes the matching parts of videos. The descriptors can be compressed in the frequency domain with a product quantizer adapted to complex numbers. In this case, video retrieval is performed without decompressing the descriptors. We also consider the temporal alignment of a set of videos. We exploit the matching confidence and an estimate of the temporal offset computed for all pairs of videos by our retrieval approach. Our robust algorithm aligns the videos on a global timeline by maximizing the set of temporally consistent matches. The global temporal alignment enables synchronous playback of the videos of a given scene

DeepFlow: Large displacement optical flow with deep matching

International audienceOptical flow computation is a key component in many computer vision systems designed for tasks such as action detection or activity recognition. However, despite several major advances over the last decade, handling large displacement in optical flow remains an open problem. Inspired by the large displacement optical flow of Brox and Malik, our approach, termed DeepFlow, blends a matching algorithm with a variational approach for optical flow. We propose a descriptor matching algorithm, tailored to the optical flow problem, that allows to boost performance on fast motions. The matching algorithm builds upon a multi-stage architecture with 6 layers, interleaving convolutions and max-pooling, a construction akin to deep convolutional nets. Using dense sampling, it allows to efficiently retrieve quasi-dense correspondences, and enjoys a built-in smoothing effect on descriptors matches, a valuable asset for integration into an energy minimization framework for optical flow estimation. DeepFlow efficiently handles large displacements occurring in realistic videos, and shows competitive performance on optical flow benchmarks. Furthermore, it sets a new state-of-the-art on the MPI-Sintel dataset

Selection itérative de transformations pour la classification d'images

National audienceEn classification d'images, une stratégie efficace pour apprendre un classifieur invariant à certaines transformations consiste à augmenter l'échantillon d'apprentissage par le même ensemble d'exemples mais auxquels les transformations ont été appliquées. Néanmoins, lorsque l'ensemble des transformations possibles est grand, il peut s'avérer difficile de sélectionner un petit nombre de transformations pertinentes parmi elles tout en conservant une taille d'échantillon d'apprentissage raisonnable. optimal. En effet, toutes les transformations n'apportent pas le même impact sur la performance ; certains peuvent même dégrader la performance. Nous proposons un algorithme de sélection automatique de transformations : à chaque itération, la transformation qui donne le plus grand gain en performance est sélectionnée. Nous évaluons notre approche sur les images de la compétition ImageNet 2010 et améliorons la performance en top-5 accuracy de 70.1% à 74.9%

Selection itérative de transformations pour la classification d'images

National audienceEn classification d'images, une stratégie efficace pour apprendre un classifieur invariant à certaines transformations consiste à augmenter l'échantillon d'apprentissage par le même ensemble d'exemples mais auxquels les transformations ont été appliquées. Néanmoins, lorsque l'ensemble des transformations possibles est grand, il peut s'avérer difficile de sélectionner un petit nombre de transformations pertinentes parmi elles tout en conservant une taille d'échantillon d'apprentissage raisonnable. optimal. En effet, toutes les transformations n'apportent pas le même impact sur la performance ; certains peuvent même dégrader la performance. Nous proposons un algorithme de sélection automatique de transformations : à chaque itération, la transformation qui donne le plus grand gain en performance est sélectionnée. Nous évaluons notre approche sur les images de la compétition ImageNet 2010 et améliorons la performance en top-5 accuracy de 70.1% à 74.9%

Correlation-Based Burstiness for Logo Retrieval

International audienceDetecting logos in photos is challenging. A reason is that logos locally resemble patterns frequently seen in random images. We propose to learn a statistical model for the distribution of incorrect detections output by an image matching algorithm. It results in a novel scoring criterion in which the weight of correlated keypoint matches is reduced, penalizing irrelevant logo detections. In experiments on two very diff erent logo retrieval benchmarks, our approach largely improves over the standard matching criterion as well as other state-of-the-art approaches

Transformation Pursuit for Image Classification

International audienceA simple approach to learning invariances in image classification consists in augmenting the training set with transformed versions of the original images. However, given a large set of possible transformations, selecting a compact subset is challenging. Indeed, all transformations are not equally informative and adding uninformative transformations increases training time with no gain in accuracy. We propose a principled algorithm – Image Transformation Pursuit (ITP) – for the automatic selection of a compact set of transformations. ITP works in a greedy fashion, by selecting at each iteration the one that yields the highest accuracy gain. ITP also allows to efficiently explore complex transformations, that combine basic transformations. We report results on two public benchmarks: the CUB dataset of bird images and the ImageNet 2010 challenge. Using Fisher Vector representations, we achieve an improvement from 28.2% to 45.2% in top-1 accuracy on CUB, and an improvement from 70.1% to 74.9% in top-5 accuracy on ImageNet. We also show significant improvements for deep convnet features: from 47.3% to 55.4% on CUB and from 77.9% to 81.4% on ImageNet

CroCo v2: Improved Cross-view Completion Pre-training for Stereo Matching and Optical Flow

Despite impressive performance for high-level downstream tasks, self-supervised pre-training methods have not yet fully delivered on dense geometric vision tasks such as stereo matching or optical flow. The application of self-supervised concepts, such as instance discrimination or masked image modeling, to geometric tasks is an active area of research. In this work, we build on the recent cross-view completion framework, a variation of masked image modeling that leverages a second view from the same scene which makes it well suited for binocular downstream tasks. The applicability of this concept has so far been limited in at least two ways: (a) by the difficulty of collecting real-world image pairs -- in practice only synthetic data have been used -- and (b) by the lack of generalization of vanilla transformers to dense downstream tasks for which relative position is more meaningful than absolute position. We explore three avenues of improvement. First, we introduce a method to collect suitable real-world image pairs at large scale. Second, we experiment with relative positional embeddings and show that they enable vision transformers to perform substantially better. Third, we scale up vision transformer based cross-completion architectures, which is made possible by the use of large amounts of data. With these improvements, we show for the first time that state-of-the-art results on stereo matching and optical flow can be reached without using any classical task-specific techniques like correlation volume, iterative estimation, image warping or multi-scale reasoning, thus paving the way towards universal vision models.Comment: ICCV 202

AXES at TRECVID 2012: KIS, INS, and MED

The AXES project participated in the interactive instance search task (INS), the known-item search task (KIS), and the multimedia event detection task (MED) for TRECVid 2012. As in our TRECVid 2011 system, we used nearly identical search systems and user interfaces for both INS and KIS. Our interactive INS and KIS systems focused this year on using classifiers trained at query time with positive examples collected from external search engines. Participants in our KIS experiments were media professionals from the BBC; our INS experiments were carried out by students and researchers at Dublin City University. We performed comparatively well in both experiments. Our best KIS run found 13 of the 25 topics, and our best INS runs outperformed all other submitted runs in terms of P@100. For MED, the system presented was based on a minimal number of low-level descriptors, which we chose to be as large as computationally feasible. These descriptors are aggregated to produce high-dimensional video-level signatures, which are used to train a set of linear classifiers. Our MED system achieved the second-best score of all submitted runs in the main track, and best score in the ad-hoc track, suggesting that a simple system based on state-of-the-art low-level descriptors can give relatively high performance. This paper describes in detail our KIS, INS, and MED systems and the results and findings of our experiments