Video Acceleration Magnification

The ability to amplify or reduce subtle image changes over time is useful in contexts such as video editing, medical video analysis, product quality control and sports. In these contexts there is often large motion present which severely distorts current video amplification methods that magnify change linearly. In this work we propose a method to cope with large motions while still magnifying small changes. We make the following two observations: i) large motions are linear on the temporal scale of the small changes; ii) small changes deviate from this linearity. We ignore linear motion and propose to magnify acceleration. Our method is pure Eulerian and does not require any optical flow, temporal alignment or region annotations. We link temporal second-order derivative filtering to spatial acceleration magnification. We apply our method to moving objects where we show motion magnification and color magnification. We provide quantitative as well as qualitative evidence for our method while comparing to the state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted paper at CVPR 2017. Project webpage: http://acceleration-magnification.github.io

No Spare Parts: Sharing Part Detectors for Image Categorization

This work aims for image categorization using a representation of distinctive parts. Different from existing part-based work, we argue that parts are naturally shared between image categories and should be modeled as such. We motivate our approach with a quantitative and qualitative analysis by backtracking where selected parts come from. Our analysis shows that in addition to the category parts defining the class, the parts coming from the background context and parts from other image categories improve categorization performance. Part selection should not be done separately for each category, but instead be shared and optimized over all categories. To incorporate part sharing between categories, we present an algorithm based on AdaBoost to jointly optimize part sharing and selection, as well as fusion with the global image representation. We achieve results competitive to the state-of-the-art on object, scene, and action categories, further improving over deep convolutional neural networks

Objects2action: Classifying and localizing actions without any video example

The goal of this paper is to recognize actions in video without the need for examples. Different from traditional zero-shot approaches we do not demand the design and specification of attribute classifiers and class-to-attribute mappings to allow for transfer from seen classes to unseen classes. Our key contribution is objects2action, a semantic word embedding that is spanned by a skip-gram model of thousands of object categories. Action labels are assigned to an object encoding of unseen video based on a convex combination of action and object affinities. Our semantic embedding has three main characteristics to accommodate for the specifics of actions. First, we propose a mechanism to exploit multiple-word descriptions of actions and objects. Second, we incorporate the automated selection of the most responsive objects per action. And finally, we demonstrate how to extend our zero-shot approach to the spatio-temporal localization of actions in video. Experiments on four action datasets demonstrate the potential of our approach

Exploiting Photographic Style for Category-Level Image Classification by Generalizing the Spatial Pyramid

International audienceThis paper investigates the use of photographic style for category-level image classi cation. Speci cally, we exploit the assumption that images within a category share a similar style de ned by attributes such as colorfulness, lighting, depth of eld, viewpoint and saliency. For these style attributes we create correspondences across images by a generalized spatial pyramid matching scheme. Where the spatial pyramid groups features spatially, we allow more general feature grouping and in this paper we focus on grouping images on photographic style. We evaluate our approach in an object classi cation task and investigate style differences between professional and amateur photographs. We show that a generalized pyramid with style-based attributes improves performance on the professional Corel and amateur Pascal VOC 2009 image datasets