Abstract: In general, discretization in the motion vector domain yields an intractable number of labels. In this paper we propose an approach that can reduce general optical flow to the constrained matching problem by pre-estimating a 2D disparity labeling map of the desired discrete motion vector function. One of the goals of the proposed paper is estimating coarse distribution of motion vectors and then utilizing this distribution as global constraints for discrete optical flow estimation. This pre-estimation is done with a simple frame-to-frame correlation technique also known as the digital symmetric-phase-only-filter (SPOF). We discover a strong correlation between the output of the SPOF and the motion vector distribution of the related optical flow. The two step matching paradigm for optical flow estimation is applied: pixel accuracy (integer flow), and subpixel accuracy estimation. The matching problem is solved by global optimization. Experiments on the Middlebury optical flow datasets confirm our intuitive assumptions about strong correlation between motion vector distribution of optical flow and maximal peaks of SPOF outputs. The overall performance of the proposed method is promising and achieves state-of-the-art results on the Middlebury benchmark.

Abstract: Person description is a challenging problem in computer vision. We investigated two major aspects of person description: 1) gender and 2) action recognition in still images. Most state-of-the-art approaches for gender and action recognition rely on the description of a single body part, such as face or full-body. However, relying on a single body part is suboptimal due to significant variations in scale, viewpoint, and pose in real-world images. This paper proposes a semantic pyramid approach for pose normalization. Our approach is fully automatic and based on combining information from full-body, upper-body, and face regions for gender and action recognition in still images. The proposed approach does not require any annotations for upper-body and face of a person. Instead, we rely on pretrained state-of-the-art upper-body and face detectors to automatically extract semantic information of a person. Given multiple bounding boxes from each body part detector, we then propose a simple method to select the best candidate bounding box, which is used for feature extraction. Finally, the extracted features from the full-body, upper-body, and face regions are combined into a single representation for classification. To validate the proposed approach for gender recognition, experiments are performed on three large data sets namely: 1) human attribute; 2) head-shoulder; and 3) proxemics. For action recognition, we perform experiments on four data sets most used for benchmarking action recognition in still images: 1) Sports; 2) Willow; 3) PASCAL VOC 2010; and 4) Stanford-40. Our experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed approach, despite its simplicity, outperforms state-of-the-art methods for gender and action recognition.

Abstract: This paper presents a fast and flexible curve, and surface reconstruction technique based on implicit B-spline. This representation does not require any parameterization and it is locally supported. This fact has been exploited in this paper to propose a reconstruction technique through solving a sparse system of equations. This method is further accelerated to reduce the dimension to the active control lattice. Moreover, the surface smoothness and user interaction are allowed for controlling the surface. Finally, a novel weighting technique has been introduced in order to blend small patches and smooth them in the overlapping regions. The whole framework is very fast and efficient and can handle large cloud of points with very low computational cost. The experimental results show the flexibility and accuracy of the proposed algorithm to describe objects with complex topologies. Comparisons with other fitting methods highlight the superiority of the proposed approach in the presence of noise and missing data.

Abstract: In stereo matching cost filtering methods and energy minimization algorithms are considered as two different techniques. Due to their global extend energy minimization methods obtain good stereo matching results. However, they tend to fail in occluded regions, in which cost filtering approaches obtain better results. In this paper we intend to combine both approaches with the aim to improve overall stereo matching results. We show that a global optimization with a fully connected model can be solved by cost fil tering methods. Based on this observation we propose to perform stereo matching as a two-step energy minimization algorithm. We consider two MRF models: a fully connected model defined on the complete set of pixels in an image and a conventional locally connected model. We solve the energy minimization problem for the fully connected model, after which the marginal function of the solution is used as the unary potential in the locally connected MRF model. Experiments on the Middlebury stereo datasets show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-arts results.

Abstract: Action recognition in still images is a challenging problem in computer vision. To facilitate comparative evaluation independently of person detection, the standard evaluation protocol for action recognition uses an oracle person detector to obtain perfect bounding box information at both training and test time. The assumption is that, in practice, a general person detector will provide candidate bounding boxes for action recognition. In this paper, we argue that this paradigm is suboptimal and that action class labels should already be considered during the detection stage. Motivated by the observation that body pose is strongly conditioned on action class, we show that: 1) the existing state-of-the-art generic person detectors are not adequate for proposing candidate bounding boxes for action classification; 2) due to limited training examples, the direct training of action-specific person detectors is also inadequate; and 3) using only a small number of labeled action examples, the transfer learning is able to adapt an existing detector to propose higher quality bounding boxes for subsequent action classification. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate transfer learning for the task of action-specific person detection in still images. We perform extensive experiments on two benchmark data sets: 1) Stanford-40 and 2) PASCAL VOC 2012. For the action detection task (i.e., both person localization and classification of the action performed), our approach outperforms methods based on general person detection by 5.7% mean average precision (MAP) on Stanford-40 and 2.1% MAP on PASCAL VOC 2012. Our approach also significantly outperforms the state of the art with a MAP of 45.4% on Stanford-40 and 31.4% on PASCAL VOC 2012. We also evaluate our action detection approach for the task of action classification (i.e., recognizing actions without localizing them). For this task, our approach, without using any ground-truth person localization at test tim- , outperforms on both data sets state-of-the-art methods, which do use person locations.

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: Before the big data era, scene recognition was often approached with two-step inference using localized intermediate representations (objects, topics, and so on). One of such approaches is the semantic manifold (SM), in which patches and images are modeled as points in a semantic probability simplex. Patch models are learned resorting to weak supervision via image labels, which leads to the problem of scene categories co-occurring in this semantic space. Fortunately, each category has its own co-occurrence patterns that are consistent across the images in that category. Thus, discovering and modeling these patterns are critical to improve the recognition performance in this representation. Since the emergence of large data sets, such as ImageNet and Places, these approaches have been relegated in favor of the much more powerful convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which can automatically learn multi-layered representations from the data. In this paper, we address many limitations of the original SM approach and related works. We propose discriminative patch representations using neural networks and further propose a hybrid architecture in which the semantic manifold is built on top of multiscale CNNs. Both representations can be computed significantly faster than the Gaussian mixture models of the original SM. To combine multiple scales, spatial relations, and multiple features, we formulate rich context models using Markov random fields. To solve the optimization problem, we analyze global and local approaches, where a top-down hierarchical algorithm has the best performance. Experimental results show that exploiting different types of contextual relations jointly consistently improves the recognition accuracy.