Abstract

t Automatic image annotation is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision and machine learning. Given an image, here the goal is to predict a set of textual labels that describe the semantics of that image. During the last decade, a large number of image annotation techniques have been proposed that have been shown to achieve encouragingresults on various annotation datasets. However, their scope has mostly remained restricted to quantitative results on the test data, thus ignoring various key aspects related to dataset properties and evaluation metrics that inherently affect the performance to a considerable extent. In this paper, first we evaluate ten state-of-the-art (both deep-learning based as well as non-deep-learning based) approaches for image annotation using the same baseline CNN features. Then we propose new quantitative measures to examine various issues/aspects in the image annotation domain, such as dataset specific biases, per-label versus per-image evaluation criteria, and the impact of changing the number and type of predicted labels. We believe the conclusions derived in this paper through thorough empirical analyzes would be helpful in making systematic advancements in this domain.

Abstract

We examine if EEG-based cognitive load (CL) estimation is generalizable across the character, spatial pattern, bar graph and pie chart-based visualizations for the n-back task. CL is estimated via two recent approaches: (a) Deep convolutional neural network [2], and (b) Proximal support vector machines [15]. Experiments reveal that CL estimation suffers across visualizations motivating the need for effective machine learning techniques to benchmark visual interface usability for a given analytic task.

Abstract

Semantic segmentation is a popular task in computer vision today, and deep neural network models have emerged as the popular solution to this problem in recent times. The typical loss function used to train neural networks for this task is the cross-entropy loss. However, the success of the learned models is measured using Intersection-OverUnion (IoU), which is inherently non-differentiable. This gap between performance measure and loss function results in a fall in performance, which has also been studied by few recent efforts. In this work, we propose a novel method to automatically learn a surrogate loss function that approximates the IoU loss and is better suited for good IoU performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such work that attempts to learn a loss function for this purpose. The proposed loss can be directly applied over any network. We validated our method over different networks (FCN, SegNet, UNet) on the PASCAL VOC and Cityscapes datasets. Our results on this work show consistent improvement over baseline methods.

Abstract

Overhead imageries play a crucial role in many applications such as urban planning, crop yield forecasting, mapping, and policy making. Semantic segmentation could enable automatic, efficient, and large-scale understanding of overhead imageries for these applications. However, semantic segmentation of overhead imageries is a challenging task, primarily due to the large domain gap from existing research in ground imageries, unavailability of large-scale dataset with pixel-level annotations, and inherent complexity in the task. Readily available vast amount of unlabeled overhead imageries share more common structures and patterns compared to the ground imageries, therefore, its large-scale analysis could benefit from unsupervised feature learning techniques. In this work, we study various self-supervised feature learning techniques for semantic segmentation of overhead imageries. We choose image semantic inpainting as a self-supervised task [36] for our experiments due to its proximity to the semantic segmentation task. We (i) show that existing approaches are inefficient for semantic segmentation, (ii) propose architectural changes towards self-supervised learning for semantic segmentation, (iii) propose an adversarial training scheme for self-supervised learning by increasing the pretext task’s difficulty gradually and show that it leads to learning better features, and (iv) propose a unified approach for overhead scene parsing, road network extraction, and land cover estimation. Our approach improves over training from scratch by more than 10% and ImageNet pre-trained network by more than 5% mIOU.

Abstract

With recent advances in the field of computer vision and especially deep learning, many fully connected and convolutional neural networks have been trained to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of tasks such as speech recognition, image classification and natural language processing. For classification tasks however, most of these deep learning models employ the softmax activation function for prediction and minimize cross-entropy loss. In contrast, we demonstrate a consistent advantage by replacing the softmax layer by a set of binary SVM classifiers organized in a tree or DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) structure. The idea is to not treat the multiclass classification problem as a whole but to break it down into smaller binary problems where each classifier acts as an expert by focusing on differentiating between only two classes and thus improves the overall accuracy. Furthermore, by arranging the classifiers in a DAG structure, we later also show how it is possible to further improve the performance of the binary classifiers by learning more discriminative features through the same deep network. We validated the proposed methodology on two benchmark datasets, and the results corroborated our claim.

Abstract

Abstract—Convolutional Neural Networks have been shown to be promising for image tampering detection in the recent years. However, the number of tampered images available to train a network is still small. This is mainly due to the cumbersomeness involved in creating lots of tampered images. As a result, the potential offered by these networks is not completely exploited. In this work, we propose a simple method to address this problem by augmenting data using inpainting and compositing schemes. We consider different forms of inpainting like simple inpainting and semantic inpainting as well as compositing schemes like feathering in order to augment the data. A domain adaptation technique is employed to reduce the domain shift between the augmented data and the data available using proprietary softwares. We demonstrate that this method of augmentation is effective in improving the detection accuracies. We present experimental evaluation on two popular datasets for image tampering detection to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

t—Deep neural networks for image classification typically consists of a convolutional feature extractor followed by a fully connected classifier network. The predicted and the ground truth labels are represented as one hot vectors. Such a representation assumes that all classes are equally dissimilar. However, classes have visual similarities and often form a hierarchy. Learning this latent hierarchy explicitly in the architecture could provide invaluable insights. We propose an alternate architecture to the classifier network called the Latent Hierarchy (LH) Classifier and an end to end learned Class2Str mapping which discovers a latent hierarchy of the classes. We show that for some of the best performing architectures on CIFAR and Imagenet datasets, the proposed replacement and training by LH classifier recovers the accuracy, with a fraction of the number of parameters in the classifier part. Compared to the previous work of HDCNN, which also learns a 2 level hierarchy, we are able to learn a hierarchy at an arbitrary number of levels as well as obtain an accuracy improvement on the Imagenet classification task over them. We also verify that many visually similar classes are grouped together, under the learnt hierarchy

Abstract

We are motivated by the fact that multiple representations of the environment are required to stand for the changes in appearance with time and for changes that appear in a cyclic manner. These changes are, for example, from day to night time, and from day to day across seasons. In such situations, the robot visits the same routes multiple times and collects different appearances of it. Multiple visual experiences usually find robotic vision applications like visual localization, mapping, place recognition, and autonomous navigation. The novelty in this paper is an algorithm that connects multiple visual experiences via aligning multiple image sequences. This problem is solved by finding the maximum flow in a directed graph flow-network, whose vertices represent the matches between frames in the test and reference sequences. Edges of the graph represent the cost of these matches. The problem of finding the best match is reduced to finding the minimum-cut surface, which is solved as a maximum flow network problem. Application to visual localization is considered in this paper to show the effectiveness of the proposed multiple image sequence alignment method, without loosing its generality. Experimental evaluations show that the precision of sequence matching is improved by considering multiple visual sequences for the same route, and that the method performs favorably against state-of-the-art single representation methods like SeqSLAM and ABLE-M.

Abstract

We consider the task of learning to estimate human pose in still images. In order to avoid the high cost of full supervision, we propose to use a diverse data set, which consists of two types of annotations: (i) a small number of images are labeled using the expensive ground-truth pose; and (ii) other images are labeled using the inexpensive action label. As action information helps narrow down the pose of a human, we argue that this approach can help reduce the cost of training without significantly affecting the accuracy. To demonstrate this we design a probabilistic framework that employs two distributions: (i) a conditional distribution to model the uncertainty over the human pose given the image and the action; and (ii) a prediction distribution, which provides the pose of an image without using any action information. We jointly estimate the parameters of the two aforementioned distributions by minimizing their dissimilarity coefficient, as measured by a task-specific loss function. During both training and testing, we only require an efficient sampling strategy for both the aforementioned distributions. This allows us to use deep probabilistic networks that are capable of providing accurate pose estimates for previously unseen images. Using the MPII data set, we show that our approach outperforms baseline methods that either do not use the diverse annotations or rely on pointwise estimates of the pose.

Abstract

The immense success of deep learning based methods in computer vision heavily relies on large scale training datasets. These richly annotated datasets help the network learn discriminative visual features. Collecting and annotating such datasets requires a tremendous amount of human effort and annotations are limited to popular set of classes. As an alternative, learning visual features by designing auxiliary tasks which make use of freely available self-supervision has become increasingly popular in the computer vision community. In this paper, we put forward an idea to take advantage of multi-modal context to provide self-supervision for the training of computer vision algorithms. We show that adequate visual features can be learned efficiently by training a CNN to predict the semantic textual context in which a particular image is more probable to appear as an illustration. More specifically we use popular text embedding techniques to provide the self-supervision for the training of deep CNN.