Abstract: In this work we contribute a novel pipeline to automatically generate training data, and to improve over state-of-the-art multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) methods. Our proposed track mining algorithm turns raw street-level videos into high-fidelity MOTS training data, is scalable and overcomes the need of expensive and time-consuming manual annotation approaches. We leverage state-of-the-art instance segmentation results in combination with optical flow predictions, also trained on automatically harvested training data. Our second major contribution is MOTSNet – a deep learning, tracking-by-detection architecture for MOTS – deploying a novel mask-pooling layer for improved object association over time. Training MOTSNet with our automatically extracted data leads to significantly improved sMOTSA scores on the novel KITTI MOTS dataset (+1.9%/+7.5% on cars/pedestrians), and MOTSNet improves by +4.1% over previously best methods on the MOTSChallenge dataset. Our most impressive finding is that we can improve over previous best-performing works, even in complete absence of manually annotated MOTS training data.

Abstract: Human drivers produce a vast amount of data which could, in principle, be used to improve autonomous driving systems. Unfortunately, seemingly straightforward approaches for creating end-to-end driving models that map sensor data directly into driving actions are problematic in terms of interpretability, and typically have significant difficulty dealing with spurious correlations. Alternatively, we propose to use this kind of action-based driving data for learning representations. Our experiments show that an affordance-based driving model pre-trained with this approach can leverage a relatively small amount of weakly annotated imagery and outperform pure end-to-end driving models, while being more interpretable. Further, we demonstrate how this strategy outperforms previous methods based on learning inverse dynamics models as well as other methods based on heavy human supervision (ImageNet).

Abstract: Differently from the regular classification task, in ordinal classification there is an order in the classes. As a consequence not all classification errors matter the same: a predicted class close to the groundtruth one is better than predicting a farther away class. To account for this, most previous works employ loss functions based on the absolute difference between the predicted and groundtruth class labels. We argue that there are many cases in ordinal classification where label values are arbitrary (for instance 1. . . C, being C the number of classes) and thus such loss functions may not be the best choice. We instead propose a network architecture that produces not a single class prediction but an ordered vector, or ranking, of all the possible classes from most to least likely. This is thanks to a loss function that compares groundtruth and predicted rankings of these class labels, not the labels themselves. Another advantage of this new formulation is that we can enforce consistency in the predictions, namely, predicted rankings come from some unimodal vector of scores with mode at the groundtruth class. We compare with the state of the art ordinal classification methods, showing
that ours attains equal or better performance, as measured by common ordinal classification metrics, on three benchmark datasets. Furthermore, it is also suitable for a new task on image aesthetics assessment, i.e. most voted score prediction. Finally, we also apply it to building damage assessment from satellite images, providing an analysis of its performance depending on the degree of imbalance of the dataset.

Abstract: Human detection is a key component in fields such as advanced driving assistance and video surveillance. However, even detecting non-occluded standing humans remains a challenge of intensive research. Finding good features to build human models for further detection is probably one of the most important issues to face. Currently, shape, texture and motion features have deserve extensive attention in the literature. However, color-based features, which are important in other domains (e.g., image categorization), have received much less attention. In fact, the use of RGB color space has become a kind of choice by default. The focus has been put in developing first and second order features on top of RGB space (e.g., HOG and co-occurrence matrices, resp.). In this paper we evaluate the opponent colors (OPP) space as a biologically inspired alternative for human detection. In particular, by feeding OPP space in the baseline framework of Dalal et al. for human detection (based on RGB, HOG and linear SVM), we will obtain better detection performance than by using RGB space. This is a relevant result since, up to the best of our knowledge, OPP space has not been previously used for human detection. This suggests that in the future it could be worth to compute co-occurrence matrices, self-similarity features, etc., also on top of OPP space, i.e., as we have done with HOG in this paper.