Abstract: Training a Siamese architecture for re-identification with a large number of identities is a challenging task due to the difficulty of finding relevant negative samples efficiently. In this work we present Bag of Negatives (BoN), a method for accelerated and improved training of Siamese networks that scales well on datasets with a very large number of identities. BoN is an efficient and loss-independent method, able to select a bag of high quality negatives, based on a novel online hashing strategy.

Abstract: Visual recognition is one of the main problems in computer vision that attempts to solve image understanding by deciding what objects are in images. This problem can be computationally solved by using relevant sets of visual features, such as edges, corners, color or more complex object parts. This thesis contributes to how color features have to be represented for recognition tasks.
Image features can be extracted following two different approaches. A first approach is defining handcrafted descriptors of images which is then followed by a learning scheme to classify the content (named flat schemes in Kruger et al. (2013). In this approach, perceptual considerations are habitually used to define efficient color features. Here we propose a new flat color descriptor based on the extension of color channels to boost the representation of spatio-chromatic contrast that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. However, flat schemes present a lack of generality far away from the capabilities of biological systems. A second approach proposes evolving these flat schemes into a hierarchical process, like in the visual cortex. This includes an automatic process to learn optimal features. These deep schemes, and more specifically Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have shown an impressive performance to solve various vision problems. However, there is a lack of understanding about the internal representation obtained, as a result of automatic learning. In this thesis we propose a new methodology to explore the internal representation of trained CNNs by defining the Neuron Feature as a visualization of the intrinsic features encoded in each individual neuron. Additionally, and inspired by physiological techniques, we propose to compute different neuron selectivity indexes (e.g., color, class, orientation or symmetry, amongst others) to label and classify the full CNN neuron population to understand learned representations.
Finally, using the proposed methodology, we show an in-depth study on how color is represented on a specific CNN, trained for object recognition, that competes with primate representational abilities (Cadieu et al (2014)). We found several parallelisms with biological visual systems: (a) a significant number of color selectivity neurons throughout all the layers; (b) an opponent and low frequency representation of color oriented edges and a higher sampling of frequency selectivity in brightness than in color in 1st layer like in V1; (c) a higher sampling of color hue in the second layer aligned to observed hue maps in V2; (d) a strong color and shape entanglement in all layers from basic features in shallower layers (V1 and V2) to object and background shapes in deeper layers (V4 and IT); and (e) a strong correlation between neuron color selectivities and color dataset bias.

Abstract: We address the problem of estimating high-level semantic labels for videos of recorded people by means of analysing their facial expressions. This problem, to which we refer as facial behavior categorization, is a weakly-supervised learning problem where we do not have access to frame-by-frame facial gesture annotations but only weak-labels at the video level are available. Therefore, the goal is to learn a set of discriminative expressions and how they determine the video weak-labels. Facial behavior categorization can be posed as a Multi-Instance-Learning (MIL) problem and we propose a novel MIL method called Regularized Multi-Concept MIL to solve it. In contrast to previous approaches applied in facial behavior analysis, RMC-MIL follows a Multi-Concept assumption which allows different facial expressions (concepts) to contribute differently to the video-label. Moreover, to handle with the high-dimensional nature of facial-descriptors, RMC-MIL uses a discriminative approach to model the concepts and structured sparsity regularization to discard non-informative features. RMC-MIL is posed as a convex-constrained optimization problem where all the parameters are jointly learned using the Projected-Quasi-Newton method. In our experiments, we use two public data-sets to show the advantages of the Regularized Multi-Concept approach and its improvement compared to existing MIL methods. RMC-MIL outperforms state-of-the-art results in the UNBC data-set for pain detection.

Abstract: We describe an equivalence of categories between the category of mixed Hodge structures and a category of equivariant vector bundles on a toric model of the complex projective plane which verify some semistability condition. We then apply this correspondence to define an invariant which generalizes the notion of R-split mixed Hodge structure and give calculations for the first group of cohomology of possibly non smooth or non-complete curves of genus 0 and 1. Finally, we describe some extension groups of mixed Hodge structures in terms of equivariant extensions of coherent sheaves. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Abstract: We present a method to estimate the direction and color of the scene light source from a single image. Our method is based on two main ideas: (a) we use a new synthetic dataset with strong shadow effects with similar constraints to the SID dataset; (b) we define a deep architecture trained on the mentioned dataset to estimate the direction and color of the scene light source. Apart from showing good performance on synthetic images, we additionally propose a preliminary procedure to obtain light positions of the Multi-Illumination dataset, and, in this way, we also prove that our trained model achieves good performance when it is applied to real scenes.

Abstract: We propose a saliency model termed SIM (saliency by induction mechanisms), which is based on a low-level spatiochromatic model that has successfully predicted chromatic induction phenomena. In so doing, we hypothesize that the low-level visual mechanisms that enhance or suppress image detail are also responsible for making some image regions more salient. Moreover, SIM adds geometrical grouplets to enhance complex low-level features such as corners, and suppress relatively simpler features such as edges. Since our model has been fitted on psychophysical chromatic induction data, it is largely nonparametric. SIM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in predicting eye fixations on two datasets and using two metrics.

Abstract: With the ever-expanding volume of visual content available, the ability to organize and navigate such content by aesthetic preference is becoming increasingly important. While still in its nascent stage, research into computational models of aesthetic preference already shows great potential. However, to advance research, realistic, diverse and challenging databases are needed. To this end, we introduce a new large-scale database for conducting Aesthetic Visual Analysis: AVA. It contains over 250,000 images along with a rich variety of meta-data including a large number of aesthetic scores for each image, semantic labels for over 60 categories as well as labels related to photographic style. We show the advantages of AVA with respect to existing databases in terms of scale, diversity, and heterogeneity of annotations. We then describe several key insights into aesthetic preference afforded by AVA. Finally, we demonstrate, through three applications, how the large scale of AVA can be leveraged to improve performance on existing preference tasks