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Koen E.A. van de Sande, Theo Gevers, & Cees G.M. Snoek. (2011). Empowering Visual Categorization with the GPU. TMM - IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 13(1), 60–70.
Abstract: Visual categorization is important to manage large collections of digital images and video, where textual meta-data is often incomplete or simply unavailable. The bag-of-words model has become the most powerful method for visual categorization of images and video. Despite its high accuracy, a severe drawback of this model is its high computational cost. As the trend to increase computational power in newer CPU and GPU architectures is to increase their level of parallelism, exploiting this parallelism becomes an important direction to handle the computational cost of the bag-of-words approach. When optimizing a system based on the bag-of-words approach, the goal is to minimize the time it takes to process batches of images. Additionally, we also consider power usage as an evaluation metric. In this paper, we analyze the bag-of-words model for visual categorization in terms of computational cost and identify two major bottlenecks: the quantization step and the classification step. We address these two bottlenecks by proposing two efficient algorithms for quantization and classification by exploiting the GPU hardware and the CUDA parallel programming model. The algorithms are designed to (1) keep categorization accuracy intact, (2) decompose the problem and (3) give the same numerical results. In the experiments on large scale datasets it is shown that, by using a parallel implementation on the Geforce GTX260 GPU, classifying unseen images is 4.8 times faster than a quad-core CPU version on the Core i7 920, while giving the exact same numerical results. In addition, we show how the algorithms can be generalized to other applications, such as text retrieval and video retrieval. Moreover, when the obtained speedup is used to process extra video frames in a video retrieval benchmark, the accuracy of visual categorization is improved by 29%.
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Bhaskar Chakraborty, Michael Holte, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Selective Spatio-Temporal Interest Points. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 116(3), 396–410.
Abstract: Recent progress in the field of human action recognition points towards the use of Spatio-TemporalInterestPoints (STIPs) for local descriptor-based recognition strategies. In this paper, we present a novel approach for robust and selective STIP detection, by applying surround suppression combined with local and temporal constraints. This new method is significantly different from existing STIP detection techniques and improves the performance by detecting more repeatable, stable and distinctive STIPs for human actors, while suppressing unwanted background STIPs. For action representation we use a bag-of-video words (BoV) model of local N-jet features to build a vocabulary of visual-words. To this end, we introduce a novel vocabulary building strategy by combining spatial pyramid and vocabulary compression techniques, resulting in improved performance and efficiency. Action class specific Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers are trained for categorization of human actions. A comprehensive set of experiments on popular benchmark datasets (KTH and Weizmann), more challenging datasets of complex scenes with background clutter and camera motion (CVC and CMU), movie and YouTube video clips (Hollywood 2 and YouTube), and complex scenes with multiple actors (MSR I and Multi-KTH), validates our approach and show state-of-the-art performance. Due to the unavailability of ground truth action annotation data for the Multi-KTH dataset, we introduce an actor specific spatio-temporal clustering of STIPs to address the problem of automatic action annotation of multiple simultaneous actors. Additionally, we perform cross-data action recognition by training on source datasets (KTH and Weizmann) and testing on completely different and more challenging target datasets (CVC, CMU, MSR I and Multi-KTH). This documents the robustness of our proposed approach in the realistic scenario, using separate training and test datasets, which in general has been a shortcoming in the performance evaluation of human action recognition techniques.
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Noha Elfiky, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Joost Van de Weijer, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2012). Discriminative Compact Pyramids for Object and Scene Recognition. PR - Pattern Recognition, 45(4), 1627–1636.
Abstract: Spatial pyramids have been successfully applied to incorporating spatial information into bag-of-words based image representation. However, a major drawback is that it leads to high dimensional image representations. In this paper, we present a novel framework for obtaining compact pyramid representation. First, we investigate the usage of the divisive information theoretic feature clustering (DITC) algorithm in creating a compact pyramid representation. In many cases this method allows us to reduce the size of a high dimensional pyramid representation up to an order of magnitude with little or no loss in accuracy. Furthermore, comparison to clustering based on agglomerative information bottleneck (AIB) shows that our method obtains superior results at significantly lower computational costs. Moreover, we investigate the optimal combination of multiple features in the context of our compact pyramid representation. Finally, experiments show that the method can obtain state-of-the-art results on several challenging data sets.
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Hamdi Dibeklioglu, M.O. Hortas, I. Kosunen, P. Zuzánek, Albert Ali Salah, & Theo Gevers. (2011). Design and implementation of an affect-responsive interactive photo frame. JMUI - Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, 81–95.
Abstract: This paper describes an affect-responsive interactive photo-frame application that offers its user a different experience with every use. It relies on visual analysis of activity levels and facial expressions of its users to select responses from a database of short video segments. This ever-growing database is automatically prepared by an offline analysis of user-uploaded videos. The resulting system matches its user’s affect along dimensions of valence and arousal, and gradually adapts its response to each specific user. In an extended mode, two such systems are coupled and feed each other with visual content. The strengths and weaknesses of the system are assessed through a usability study, where a Wizard-of-Oz response logic is contrasted with the fully automatic system that uses affective and activity-based features, either alone, or in tandem.
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A. Toet, M. Henselmans, M.P. Lucassen, & Theo Gevers. (2011). Emotional effects of dynamic textures. iPER - i-Perception, 969 – 991.
Abstract: This study explores the effects of various spatiotemporal dynamic texture characteristics on human emotions. The emotional experience of auditory (eg, music) and haptic repetitive patterns has been studied extensively. In contrast, the emotional experience of visual dynamic textures is still largely unknown, despite their natural ubiquity and increasing use in digital media. Participants watched a set of dynamic textures, representing either water or various different media, and self-reported their emotional experience. Motion complexity was found to have mildly relaxing and nondominant effects. In contrast, motion change complexity was found to be arousing and dominant. The speed of dynamics had arousing, dominant, and unpleasant effects. The amplitude of dynamics was also regarded as unpleasant. The regularity of the dynamics over the textures’ area was found to be uninteresting, nondominant, mildly relaxing, and mildly pleasant. The spatial scale of the dynamics had an unpleasant, arousing, and dominant effect, which was larger for textures with diverse content than for water textures. For water textures, the effects of spatial contrast were arousing, dominant, interesting, and mildly unpleasant. None of these effects were observed for textures of diverse content. The current findings are relevant for the design and synthesis of affective multimedia content and for affective scene indexing and retrieval.
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