Abstract: Part detection is an important aspect of object recognition. Most approaches apply object proposals to generate hundreds of possible part bounding box candidates which are then evaluated by part classifiers. Recently several methods have investigated directly regressing to a limited set of bounding boxes from deep neural network representation. However, for object parts such methods may be unfeasible due to their relatively small size with respect to the image. We propose a hierarchical method for object and part detection. In a single network we first detect the object and then regress to part location proposals based only on the feature representation inside the object. Experiments show that our hierarchical approach outperforms a network which directly regresses the part locations. We also show that our approach obtains part detection accuracy comparable or better than state-of-the-art on the CUB-200 bird and Fashionista clothing item datasets with only a fraction of the number of part proposals.

Abstract: The ChaLearn AutoML Challenge team conducted a large scale evaluation of fully automatic, black-box learning machines for feature-based classification and regression problems. The test bed was composed of 30 data sets from a wide variety of application domains and ranged across different types of complexity. Over six rounds, participants succeeded in delivering AutoML software capable of being trained and tested without human intervention. Although improvements can still be made to close the gap between human-tweaked and AutoML models, this competition contributes to the development of fully automated environments by challenging practitioners to solve problems under specific constraints and sharing their approaches; the platform will remain available for post-challenge submissions at http://codalab.org/AutoML.

Abstract: Despite the outperformance of Support Vector Machine (SVM) on many practical classification problems, the algorithm is not directly applicable to multi-dimensional trajectories having different lengths. In this paper, a new class of SVM that is applicable to trajectory classification, such as action recognition, is developed by incorporating two efficient time-series distances measures into the kernel function.
Dynamic Time Warping and Longest Common Subsequence distance measures along with their derivatives are
employed as the SVM kernel. In addition, the pairwise proximity learning strategy is utilized in order to make use of non-positive semi-definite kernels in the SVM formulation. The proposed method is employed for a challenging classification problem: action recognition by depth cameras using only skeleton data; and evaluated on three benchmark action datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the outperformance of our methodology compared to the state-ofthe-art on the considered datasets.

Abstract: This paper presents a computational model to recover the most likely interpretation of the 3D scene structure from a planar image, where some objects may occlude others. The estimated scene interpretation is obtained by integrating some global and local cues and provides both the complete disoccluded objects that form the scene and their ordering according to depth. Our method first computes several distal scenes which are compatible with the proximal planar image. To compute these different hypothesized scenes, we propose a perceptually inspired object disocclusion method, which works by minimizing the Euler's elastica as well as by incorporating the relatability of partially occluded contours and the convexity of the disoccluded objects. Then, to estimate the preferred scene we rely on a Bayesian model and define probabilities taking into account the global complexity of the objects in the hypothesized scenes as well as the effort of bringing these objects in their relative position in the planar image, which is also measured by an Euler's elastica-based quantity. The model is illustrated with numerical experiments on, both, synthetic and real images showing the ability of our model to reconstruct the occluded objects and the preferred perceptual order among them. We also present results on images of the Berkeley dataset with provided figure-ground ground-truth labeling.

Abstract: Many scene text understanding methods approach the endtoend recognition problem from a word-spotting perspective and take huge benet from using small per-image lexicons. Such customized lexicons are normally assumed as given and their source is rarely discussed.
In this paper we propose a method that generates contextualized lexicons
for scene images using only visual information. For this, we exploit
the correlation between visual and textual information in a dataset consisting
of images and textual content associated with them. Using the topic modeling framework to discover a set of latent topics in such a dataset allows us to re-rank a xed dictionary in a way that prioritizes the words that are more likely to appear in a given image. Moreover, we train a CNN that is able to reproduce those word rankings but using only the image raw pixels as input. We demonstrate that the quality of the automatically obtained custom lexicons is superior to a generic frequency-based baseline.