Abstract: Food photos are widely used in food logs for diet monitoring and in social networks to share social and gastronomic experiences. A large number of these images are taken in restaurants. Dish recognition in general is very challenging, due to different cuisines, cooking styles, and the intrinsic difficulty of modeling food from its visual appearance. However, contextual knowledge can be crucial to improve recognition in such scenario. In particular, geocontext has been widely exploited for outdoor landmark recognition. Similarly, we exploit knowledge about menus and location of restaurants and test images. We first adapt a framework based on discarding unlikely categories located far from the test image. Then, we reformulate the problem using a probabilistic model connecting dishes, restaurants, and locations. We apply that model in three different tasks: dish recognition, restaurant recognition, and location refinement. Experiments on six datasets show that by integrating multiple evidences (visual, location, and external knowledge) our system can boost the performance in all tasks.

Abstract: Visual illusions expand our understanding of the visual system by imposing constraints in the models in two different ways: i) visual illusions for humans should induce equivalent illusions in the model, and ii) illusions synthesized from the model should be compelling for human viewers too. These constraints are alternative strategies to find good vision models. Following the first research strategy, recent studies have shown that artificial neural network architectures also have human-like illusory percepts when stimulated with classical hand-crafted stimuli designed to fool humans. In this work we focus on the second (less explored) strategy: we propose a framework to synthesize new visual illusions using the optimization abilities of current automatic differentiation techniques. The proposed framework can be used with classical vision models as well as with more recent artificial neural network architectures. This framework, validated by psychophysical experiments, can be used to study the difference between a vision model and the actual human perception and to optimize the vision model to decrease this difference.

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of saliency to improve the classification accuracy of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the case when scarce training data is available. Our approach consists in adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture which is used to modulate the standard bottom-up visual features from the original image input, acting as an attentional mechanism that guides the feature extraction process. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enable the effective training of a fine-grained recognition model with limited training samples and to improve the performance on the task, thereby alleviating the need to annotate a large dataset. The vast majority of saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline. Our proposed pipeline allows to evaluate saliency methods for the high-level task of object recognition. We perform extensive experiments on various fine-grained datasets (Flowers, Birds, Cars, and Dogs) under different conditions and show that saliency can considerably improve the network’s performance, especially for the case of scarce training data. Furthermore, our experiments show that saliency methods that obtain improved saliency maps (as measured by traditional saliency benchmarks) also translate to saliency methods that yield improved performance gains when applied in an object recognition pipeline.