Abstract: Designing discriminative powerful texture features robust to realistic imaging conditions is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications, including material recognition and analysis of satellite or aerial imagery. In the past, most texture description approaches were based on dense orderless statistical distribution of local features. However, most recent approaches to texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The de facto practice when learning these CNN models is to use RGB patches as input with training performed on large amounts of labeled data (ImageNet). In this paper, we show that Local Binary Patterns (LBP) encoded CNN models, codenamed TEX-Nets, trained using mapped coded images with explicit LBP based texture information provide complementary information to the standard RGB deep models. Additionally, two deep architectures, namely early and late fusion, are investigated to combine the texture and color information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Binary Patterns encoded CNNs and different deep network fusion architectures for texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification. We perform comprehensive experiments on four texture recognition datasets and four remote sensing scene classification benchmarks: UC-Merced with 21 scene categories, WHU-RS19 with 19 scene classes, RSSCN7 with 7 categories and the recently introduced large scale aerial image dataset (AID) with 30 aerial scene types. We demonstrate that TEX-Nets provide complementary information to standard RGB deep model of the same network architecture. Our late fusion TEX-Net architecture always improves the overall performance compared to the standard RGB network on both recognition problems. Furthermore, our final combination leads to consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art for remote sensing scene

Abstract: The property of smoothing while preserving edges makes the bilateral filter a very popular image processing tool. However, its non-linear nature results in a computationally costly operation. Various works propose fast approximations to the bilateral filter. However, the majority does not generalize to vector input as is the case with color images. We propose a fast approximation to the bilateral filter for color images. The filter is based on two ideas. First, the number of colors, which occur in a single natural image, is limited. We exploit this color sparseness to rewrite the initial non-linear bilateral filter as a number of linear filter operations. Second, we impose a statistical prior to the image values that are locally present within the filter window. We show that this statistical prior leads to a closed-form solution of the bilateral filter. Finally, we combine both ideas into a single fast and accurate bilateral filter for color images. Experimental results show that our bilateral filter based on the local prior yields an extremely fast bilateral filter approximation, but with limited accuracy, which has potential application in real-time video filtering. Our bilateral filter, which combines color sparseness and local statistics, yields a fast and accurate bilateral filter approximation and obtains the state-of-the-art results.

Abstract: In this paper, we extend the standard belief propagation (BP) sequential technique proposed in the tree-reweighted sequential method [15] to the fully connected CRF models with the geodesic distance affinity. The proposed method has been applied to the stereo matching problem. Also a new approach to the BP marginal solution is proposed that we call one-view occlusion detection (OVOD). In contrast to the standard winner takes all (WTA) estimation, the proposed OVOD solution allows to find occluded regions in the disparity map and simultaneously improve the matching result. As a result we can perform only
one energy minimization process and avoid the cost calculation for the second view and the left-right check procedure. We show that the OVOD approach considerably improves results for cost augmentation and energy minimization techniques in comparison with the standard one-view affinity space implementation. We apply our method to the Middlebury data set and reach state-ofthe-art especially for median, average and mean squared error metrics.