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Lichao Zhang, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Joost Van de Weijer, Martin Danelljan, & Fahad Shahbaz Khan. (2019). Synthetic Data Generation for End-to-End Thermal Infrared Tracking. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 28(4), 1837–1850.
Abstract: The usage of both off-the-shelf and end-to-end trained deep networks have significantly improved the performance of visual tracking on RGB videos. However, the lack of large labeled datasets hampers the usage of convolutional neural networks for tracking in thermal infrared (TIR) images. Therefore, most state-of-the-art methods on tracking for TIR data are still based on handcrafted features. To address this problem, we propose to use image-to-image translation models. These models allow us to translate the abundantly available labeled RGB data to synthetic TIR data. We explore both the usage of paired and unpaired image translation models for this purpose. These methods provide us with a large labeled dataset of synthetic TIR sequences, on which we can train end-to-end optimal features for tracking. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to train end-to-end features for TIR tracking. We perform extensive experiments on the VOT-TIR2017 dataset. We show that a network trained on a large dataset of synthetic TIR data obtains better performance than one trained on the available real TIR data. Combining both data sources leads to further improvement. In addition, when we combine the network with motion features, we outperform the state of the art with a relative gain of over 10%, clearly showing the efficiency of using synthetic data to train end-to-end TIR trackers.
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Aymen Azaza, Joost Van de Weijer, Ali Douik, & Marc Masana. (2018). Context Proposals for Saliency Detection. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 174, 1–11.
Abstract: One of the fundamental properties of a salient object region is its contrast
with the immediate context. The problem is that numerous object regions
exist which potentially can all be salient. One way to prevent an exhaustive
search over all object regions is by using object proposal algorithms. These
return a limited set of regions which are most likely to contain an object. Several saliency estimation methods have used object proposals. However, they focus on the saliency of the proposal only, and the importance of its immediate context has not been evaluated.
In this paper, we aim to improve salient object detection. Therefore, we extend object proposal methods with context proposals, which allow to incorporate the immediate context in the saliency computation. We propose several saliency features which are computed from the context proposals. In the experiments, we evaluate five object proposal methods for the task of saliency segmentation, and find that Multiscale Combinatorial Grouping outperforms the others. Furthermore, experiments show that the proposed context features improve performance, and that our method matches results on the FT datasets and obtains competitive results on three other datasets (PASCAL-S, MSRA-B and ECSSD).
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Xinhang Song, Shuqiang Jiang, Luis Herranz, & Chengpeng Chen. (2019). Learning Effective RGB-D Representations for Scene Recognition. TIP - IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 28(2), 980–993.
Abstract: Deep convolutional networks can achieve impressive results on RGB scene recognition thanks to large data sets such as places. In contrast, RGB-D scene recognition is still underdeveloped in comparison, due to two limitations of RGB-D data we address in this paper. The first limitation is the lack of depth data for training deep learning models. Rather than fine tuning or transferring RGB-specific features, we address this limitation by proposing an architecture and a two-step training approach that directly learns effective depth-specific features using weak supervision via patches. The resulting RGB-D model also benefits from more complementary multimodal features. Another limitation is the short range of depth sensors (typically 0.5 m to 5.5 m), resulting in depth images not capturing distant objects in the scenes that RGB images can. We show that this limitation can be addressed by using RGB-D videos, where more comprehensive depth information is accumulated as the camera travels across the scenes. Focusing on this scenario, we introduce the ISIA RGB-D video data set to evaluate RGB-D scene recognition with videos. Our video recognition architecture combines convolutional and recurrent neural networks that are trained in three steps with increasingly complex data to learn effective features (i.e., patches, frames, and sequences). Our approach obtains the state-of-the-art performances on RGB-D image (NYUD2 and SUN RGB-D) and video (ISIA RGB-D) scene recognition.
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Mikhail Mozerov, Fei Yang, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2019). Sparse Data Interpolation Using the Geodesic Distance Affinity Space. SPL - IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 26(6), 943–947.
Abstract: In this letter, we adapt the geodesic distance-based recursive filter to the sparse data interpolation problem. The proposed technique is general and can be easily applied to any kind of sparse data. We demonstrate its superiority over other interpolation techniques in three experiments for qualitative and quantitative evaluation. In addition, we compare our method with the popular interpolation algorithm presented in the paper on EpicFlow optical flow, which is intuitively motivated by a similar geodesic distance principle. The comparison shows that our algorithm is more accurate and considerably faster than the EpicFlow interpolation technique.
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Carola Figueroa Flores, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Joost Van de Weijer, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2019). Saliency for fine-grained object recognition in domains with scarce training data. PR - Pattern Recognition, 94, 62–73.
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.
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