In this paper, we tackle the problem of indoor scene understanding using RGBD data. Towards this goal, we propose a holistic approach that exploits 2D segmentation, 3D geometry, as well as contextual ...relations between scenes and objects. Specifically, we extend the CPMC 3 framework to 3D in order to generate candidate cuboids, and develop a conditional random field to integrate information from different sources to classify the cuboids. With this formulation, scene classification and 3D object recognition are coupled and can be jointly solved through probabilistic inference. We test the effectiveness of our approach on the challenging NYU v2 dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that through effective evidence integration and holistic reasoning, our approach achieves substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art.
In this paper, we develop a new framework for face recognition based on nonparametric discriminant analysis (NDA) and multi-classifier integration. Traditional LDA-based methods suffer a fundamental ...limitation originating from the parametric nature of scatter matrices, which are based on the Gaussian distribution assumption. The performance of these methods notably degrades when the actual distribution is Non-Gaussian. To address this problem, we propose a new formulation of scatter matrices to extend the two-class nonparametric discriminant analysis to multi-class cases. Then, we develop two more improved multi-class NDA-based algorithms (NSA and NFA) with each one having two complementary methods based on the principal space and the null space of the intra-class scatter matrix respectively. Comparing to the NSA, the NFA is more effective in the utilization of the classification boundary information. In order to exploit the complementary nature of the two kinds of NFA (PNFA and NNFA), we finally develop a dual NFA-based multi-classifier fusion framework by employing the over complete Gabor representation to boost the recognition performance. We show the improvements of the developed new algorithms over the traditional subspace methods through comparative experiments on two challenging face databases, Purdue AR database and XM2VTS database.
Neural net classifiers trained on data with annotated class labels can also capture apparent visual similarity among categories without being directed to do so. We study whether this observation can ...be extended beyond the conventional domain of supervised learning: Can we learn a good feature representation that captures apparent similarity among instances, instead of classes, by merely asking the feature to be discriminative of individual instances? We formulate this intuition as a non-parametric classification problem at the instance-level, and use noise-contrastive estimation to tackle the computational challenges imposed by the large number of instance classes. Our experimental results demonstrate that, under unsupervised learning settings, our method surpasses the state-of-the-art on ImageNet classification by a large margin. Our method is also remarkable for consistently improving test performance with more training data and better network architectures. By fine-tuning the learned feature, we further obtain competitive results for semi-supervised learning and object detection tasks. Our non-parametric model is highly compact: With 128 features per image, our method requires only 600MB storage for a million images, enabling fast nearest neighbour retrieval at the run time.
Temporal Segment Networks for Action Recognition in Videos Wang, Limin; Xiong, Yuanjun; Wang, Zhe ...
IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence,
2019-Nov.-1, 2019-Nov, 2019-11-1, 20191101, Volume:
41, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We present a general and flexible video-level framework for learning action models in videos. This method, called temporal segment network (TSN), aims to model long-range temporal structure with a ...new segment-based sampling and aggregation scheme. This unique design enables the TSN framework to efficiently learn action models by using the whole video. The learned models could be easily deployed for action recognition in both trimmed and untrimmed videos with simple average pooling and multi-scale temporal window integration, respectively. We also study a series of good practices for the implementation of the TSN framework given limited training samples. Our approach obtains the state-the-of-art performance on five challenging action recognition benchmarks: HMDB51 (71.0 percent), UCF101 (94.9 percent), THUMOS14 (80.1 percent), ActivityNet v1.2 (89.6 percent), and Kinetics400 (75.7 percent). In addition, using the proposed RGB difference as a simple motion representation, our method can still achieve competitive accuracy on UCF101 (91.0 percent) while running at 340 FPS. Furthermore, based on the proposed TSN framework, we won the video classification track at the ActivityNet challenge 2016 among 24 teams.
Relationships among objects play a crucial role in image understanding. Despite the great success of deep learning techniques in recognizing individual objects, reasoning about the relationships ...among objects remains a challenging task. Previous methods often treat this as a classification problem, considering each type of relationship (e.g. ride) or each distinct visual phrase (e.g. person-ride-horse) as a category. Such approaches are faced with significant difficulties caused by the high diversity of visual appearance for each kind of relationships or the large number of distinct visual phrases. We propose an integrated framework to tackle this problem. At the heart of this framework is the Deep Relational Network, a novel formulation designed specifically for exploiting the statistical dependencies between objects and their relationships. On two large data sets, the proposed method achieves substantial improvement over state-of-the-art.
Despite the substantial progress in recent years, the image captioning techniques are still far from being perfect. Sentences produced by existing methods, e.g. those based on RNNs, are often overly ...rigid and lacking in variability. This issue is related to a learning principle widely used in practice, that is, to maximize the likelihood of training samples. This principle encourages high resemblance to the "ground-truth" captions, while suppressing other reasonable descriptions. Conventional evaluation metrics, e.g. BLEU and METEOR, also favor such restrictive methods. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach, with the aim to improve the naturalness and diversity - two essential properties of human expression. Specifically, we propose a new framework based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGAN), which jointly learns a generator to produce descriptions conditioned on images and an evaluator to assess how well a description fits the visual content. It is noteworthy that training a sequence generator is nontrivial. We overcome the difficulty by Policy Gradient, a strategy stemming from Reinforcement Learning, which allows the generator to receive early feedback along the way. We tested our method on two large datasets, where it performed competitively against real people in our user study and outperformed other methods on various tasks.
On public benchmarks, current action recognition techniques have achieved great success. However, when used in real-world applications, e.g. sport analysis, which requires the capability of parsing ...an activity into phases and differentiating between subtly different actions, their performances remain far from being satisfactory. To take action recognition to a new level, we develop FineGym, a new dataset built on top of gymnasium videos. Compared to existing action recognition datasets, FineGym is distinguished in richness, quality, and diversity. In particular, it provides temporal annotations at both action and sub-action levels with a three-level semantic hierarchy. For example, a "balance beam" activity will be annotated as a sequence of elementary sub-actions derived from five sets: "leap-jump-hop", "beam-turns", "flight-salto", "flight-handspring", and "dismount", where the sub-action in each set will be further annotated with finely defined class labels. This new level of granularity presents significant challenges for action recognition, e.g. how to parse the temporal structures from a coherent action, and how to distinguish between subtly different action classes. We systematically investigates different methods on this dataset and obtains a number of interesting findings. We hope this dataset could advance research towards action understanding.
Compared with model architectures, the training process, which is also crucial to the success of detectors, has received relatively less attention in object detection. In this work, we carefully ...revisit the standard training practice of detectors, and find that the detection performance is often limited by the imbalance during the training process, which generally consists in three levels - sample level, feature level, and objective level. To mitigate the adverse effects caused thereby, we propose Libra R-CNN, a simple but effective framework towards balanced learning for object detection. It integrates three novel components: IoU-balanced sampling, balanced feature pyramid, and balanced L1 loss, respectively for reducing the imbalance at sample, feature, and objective level. Benefitted from the overall balanced design, Libra R-CNN significantly improves the detection performance. Without bells and whistles, it achieves 2.5 points and 2.0 points higher Average Precision (AP) than FPN Faster R-CNN and RetinaNet respectively on MSCOCO.
Conventionally, deep neural networks are trained offline, relying on a large dataset prepared in advance. This paradigm is often challenged in real-world applications, e.g. online services that ...involve continuous streams of incoming data. Recently, incremental learning receives increasing attention, and is considered as a promising solution to the practical challenges mentioned above. However, it has been observed that incremental learning is subject to a fundamental difficulty -- catastrophic forgetting, namely adapting a model to new data often results in severe performance degradation on previous tasks or classes. Our study reveals that the imbalance between previous and new data is a crucial cause to this problem. In this work, we develop a new framework for incrementally learning a unified classifier, e.g. a classifier that treats both old and new classes uniformly. Specifically, we incorporate three components, cosine normalization, less-forget constraint, and inter-class separation, to mitigate the adverse effects of the imbalance. Experiments show that the proposed method can effectively rebalance the training process, thus obtaining superior performance compared to the existing methods. On CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, our method can reduce the classification errors by more than 6% and 13% respectively, under the incremental setting of 10 phases.
Detecting actions in untrimmed videos is an important yet challenging task. In this paper, we present the structured segment network (SSN), a novel framework which models the temporal structure of ...each action instance via a structured temporal pyramid. On top of the pyramid, we further introduce a decomposed discriminative model comprising two classifiers, respectively for classifying actions and determining completeness. This allows the framework to effectively distinguish positive proposals from background or incomplete ones, thus leading to both accurate recognition and localization. These components are integrated into a unified network that can be efficiently trained in an end-to-end fashion. Additionally, a simple yet effective temporal action proposal scheme, dubbed temporal actionness grouping (TAG) is devised to generate high quality action proposals. On two challenging benchmarks, THUMOS14 and ActivityNet, our method remarkably outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating superior accuracy and strong adaptivity in handling actions with various temporal structures.
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