We propose visual variation learning to improve object recognition with convolutional neural networks (CNN). While a typical CNN regard visual variations as nuisances and marginalizes them from the data, we speculate that some variations are informative. We study the impact of visual variation as an auxiliary task, during training only, on classification and similarity embedding problems. To train

Single-stage object detectors have been widely applied in many computer vision applications due to their simpleness and high efficiency. However, the low correlation between the classification score and localization accuracy in detection results severely hurts the average precision of the detection model. To solve this problem, an IoU-aware single-stage object detector is proposed in this paper. Specifically

Image search can be tackled using deep features from pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The feature map from the last convolutional layer of a CNN encodes descriptive information from which a discriminative global descriptor can be obtained. We propose a new representation of co-occurrences from deep convolutional features to extract additional relevant information from this last convolutional

Small object detection is a challenging problem in computer vision. It has been widely applied in defense military, transportation, industry, etc. To facilitate in-depth understanding of small object detection, we comprehensively review the existing small object detection methods based on deep learning from five aspects, including multi-scale feature learning, data augmentation, training strategy,

This work introduces a high-efficiency approach for face recognition applications based on features using a recent algorithm called Floor of Log (FoL). The advantage of this method is the reduction of storage and energy, maintaining accuracy. K-Nearest Neighbors and Support Vector Machine algorithm was applied to learn the better parameter of the FoL algorithm using cross-validation. Accuracy and the

In this paper, we address a problem of correcting upright orientation of a reconstructed object to search. We first reconstruct an input object appearing in an image sequence, and generate a query shape using multi-view object co-segmentation. In the next phase, we utilize the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to determine category-specific upright orientation of the queried shape for

Object pose recovery has gained increasing attention in the computer vision field as it has become an important problem in rapidly evolving technological areas related to autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. Existing review-related studies have addressed the problem at visual level in 2D, going through the methods which produce 2D bounding boxes of objects of interest in RGB images

While the problem of estimating shapes and diffuse reflectances of human faces from images has been extensively studied, there is relatively less work done on recovering the specular albedo. This paper presents a lightweight solution for inferring photorealistic facial reflectance and geometry. Our system processes video streams from two views of a subject, and outputs two reflectance maps for diffuse

In this paper, we explore illustrations in children's books as a new domain in unpaired image-to-image translation. We show that although the current state-of-the-art image-to-image translation models successfully transfer either the style or the content, they fail to transfer both at the same time. We propose a new generator network to address this issue and show that the resulting network strikes

Image alignment is a crucial step to generate a high quality panorama. The state-of-the-art approaches use local-adaptive transformations to deal with multi-view parallax, but still suffer from unreliable feature correspondences and high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a local-adaptive and outlier-tolerant image alignment method using RBF (radial basis function) approximation. To eliminate

Existing advanced saliency systems have been proposed using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), the prior knowledge of objectness is crucial for saliency detection. However, we show that the use of objectness may also limit the power of CNNs on the images which do not contain a salient object. Besides, one previous study has shown applying a deeper CNN model may not improve the performance, the reason

Most of the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based RGBD saliency models either regard the RGB and depth cues as the same status or trust the depth information excessively. However, they ignore that the low-quality depth map is an interference factor and the multi-level deep features originated from RGB images contain abundant appearance information. Therefore, we propose a novel RGBD saliency

This paper proposes a complementary regression network (CRN) that combines global and local regression methods to align faces. A global regression network (GRN) generates the coordinates of facial landmark points directly such that all facial feature points are fitted to the input face on the whole and a local regression network (LRN) generates the heatmap of facial landmark points such that each channel

This paper presents a Riemannian approach for free-space extraction and path planning using color catadioptric vision. The problem is formulated considering color catadioptric images as Riemannian manifolds and solved using the Riemannian Eikonal equation with an anisotropic fast marching numerical scheme. This formulation allows the integration of adapted color and spatial metrics in an incremental

The Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) with encoder-decoder architecture has shown powerful ability in semantic segmentation and it has also been applied in saliency detection. In most researches, the parameters of the backbone network which have been pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset will be retrained using the new training dataset to let CNNs adapt to the new task better. But the retraining will

In the person re-identification (re-ID) community, pedestrians often have great changes in appearance, and there are many similar persons, which incurs will degrades the accuracy. Re-ranking is an effective method to solve these problems, this paper proposes an expanded neighborhoods distance (END) to re-rank the re-ID results. We assume that if the two persons in different image are same, their initial

Light field imaging has recently become a promising technology for 3D rendering and displaying. However, capturing real-world light field images still faces many challenges in both the quantity and quality. In this paper, we develop a learning based technique to reconstruct light field from a single 2D RGB image. It includes three steps: unsupervised monocular depth estimation, view synthesis and depth-guided

Single-object tracking is a significant and challenging computer vision problem. Recently, discriminative correlation filters (DCF) have shown excellent performance. But there is a theoretical defects that the boundary effect, caused by the periodic assumption of training samples, greatly limit the tracking performance. Spatially regularized DCF (SRDCF) introduces a spatial regularization to penalize

Collective activity recognition is an important subtask of human action recognition, where the existing datasets are mostly limited. In this paper, we look into this issue and introduce the “Collective Sports (C-Sports)” dataset, which is a novel benchmark dataset for multi-task recognition of both collective activity and sports categories. Various state-of-the-art techniques are evaluated on this

Recent advances in system resources provide ease in the applicability of deep learning approaches in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based unsupervised image segmentation approach for natural image segmentation. Image segmentation aims to transform an image into regions, representing various objects in the image. Our method consists of a fully convolutional dense network-based

Both images and point clouds are beneficial for object detection in a visual navigation module for autonomous driving. The spatial relationships between different objects at different times in a bimodal space can vary significantly. It is difficult to combine bimodal descriptions into a unified model to effectively detect objects in an efficient amount of time. In addition, conventional voxelization

Face presentation attack detection (PAD) in unconstrained conditions is one of the key issues in face biometric-based authentication and security applications. In this paper, we propose a perturbation layer — a learnable pre-processing layer for low-level deep features — to enhance the discriminative ability of deep features in face PAD. The perturbation layer takes the deep features of a candidate

This paper presents a fast and accurate iterative method for camera pose estimation problem. The dependence on initial values is reduced by replacing unknown angular parameters with three independent non-angular parameters. Image point coordinates are treated as observations with errors and a new model is built using a conditional adjustment with parameters for relative orientation. This model allows

Aggregating different image features for image retrieval has recently shown its effectiveness. While highly effective, though, the question of how to uplift the impact of the best features for a specific query image persists as an open computer vision problem. In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient approach to fuse several hand-crafted and deep features, based on the probabilistic distribution

An individual's privacy is a significant concern in surveillance videos. Existing research work into the location of individuals on the basis of detecting their skin is focused either on different techniques for detecting human skin on protecting individuals from the consequences of applying such techniques. This paper considers both lines of research and proposes a hybrid scheme for human skin detection

In traffic surveillance video analysis systems, the cast shadows of vehicles often have a negative effect on video analysis results. A novel cast shadow detection framework, which consists of a new foreground detection method and a cast shadow detection method, is presented in this paper to detect and remove the cast shadows from the foreground. The new foreground detection method applies an innovative

This paper proposes the first known to us iris recognition methodology designed specifically for post-mortem samples. We propose to use deep learning-based iris segmentation models to extract highly irregular iris texture areas in post-mortem iris images. We show how to use segmentation masks predicted by neural networks in conventional, Gabor-based iris recognition method, which employs circular approximations

In general images, it is practically hard to distinguish only the desired object using the conventional image segmentation methods. In many cases, we can segment the desired object by using the shape information of the object in addition to the standard image segmentation. Chan and Zhu's model is not robust to the intensity changes of objects. In this paper, we propose a novel model for the shape prior

We tackle the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation, i.e. pixel-level object classification of the images in video sequences using very limited ground truth training data of its corresponding video. We present FLow Adaptive Video Object Segmentation, an efficient pipeline based on a novel online adaptation algorithm that utilizes optical flow, capable of tracking objects effectively throughout

In this paper, we address the problem of online multi-object tracking based on the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) framework. Given the observations up to the current frame, we estimate the optimal object trajectories via two MAP estimation stages: object detection and data association. By introducing the sequential trajectory prior, i.e, the prior information from previous frames about “good” trajectories

The large modality gap between faces captured in different spectra makes heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a coupled generative adversarial network (CpGAN) to address the problem of matching non-visible facial imagery against a gallery of visible faces. Our CpGAN architecture consists of two sub-networks one dedicated to the visible spectrum and the

The vulnerability of face recognition systems to different presentation attacks has aroused increasing concern in the biometric community. Face presentation detection (PAD) techniques, which aim to distinguish real face samples from spoof artifacts, are the efficient countermeasure. In recent years, various methods have been proposed to address 2D type face presentation attacks, including photo print

Among the various cues that help us understand and interact with our surroundings, depth is of particular importance. It allows us to move in space and grab objects to complete different tasks. Therefore, depth prediction has been an active research field for decades and many algorithms have been proposed to retrieve depth. Some imitate human vision and compute depth through triangulation on correspondences

Ship segmentation is an important task in maritime surveillance systems. A great deal of research on image segmentation has been done in the past few years, but there appears to be some problems when directly utilizing them for ship segmentation under complex maritime background. The interference factors decreasing segmentation performance usually are from the peculiarity of complex maritime background

Projective methods generally achieve better results in 3D object recognition in recent years. This may be similar to that human visual 3D shapes rely on various 2D observations which are unconscious on retina. Each projection is treated fairly in existing methods. However, we note that different viewpoint images of the same object have different discriminative features, and only some of images are

Conventional head pose estimation methods are regarded as a classification or regression paradigm, individually. The accuracy of classification-based approaches is limited to pose quantized interval and regression-based methods are fragile due to extremely large pose in non-ideal conditions. On the contrary to these methods, this paper introduces a novel head pose estimation method using two-stage

The process of splitting an image into specular and diffuse components is a fundamental problem in computer vision, because most computer vision algorithms, such as image segmentation and tracking, assume diffuse surfaces, so existence of specular reflection can mislead algorithms to make incorrect decisions. Existing decomposition methods tend to work well for images with low specularity and high

In this paper, we propose a novel saliency model based on double random walks with dual restarts. Two agents (also known as walkers) respectively representing the foreground and background properties simultaneously walk on a graph to explore saliency distribution. First, we propose the propagation distance measure and use it to calculate the initial distributions of the two agents instead of using

Fine-Grained Image Retrieval is an important problem in computer vision. It is more challenging than the task of content-based image retrieval because it has small diversity within the different classes but large diversity in the same class. Recently, the cross entropy loss can be utilized to make Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) generate distinguish feature for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval, and

Oceanographers rely on advanced digital imaging systems to assess the health of marine ecosystems. The majority of the imagery collected by these systems do not get annotated due to lack of resources. Consequently, the expert labeled data is not enough to train dedicated deep networks. Meanwhile, in the deep learning community, much focus is on how to use pre-trained deep networks to classify out-of-domain

Human action recognition is one of the most important and challenging topic in the fields of image processing. Unlike object recognition, action recognition requires motion feature modeling which contains not only spatial but also temporal information. In this paper, we use multiple models to characterize both global and local motion features. Global motion patterns are represented efficiently by the

In the designing field, designers usually retrieve the images for reference according to product attributes when designing new proposals. To obtain the attributes of the product, the designers take lots of time and effort to collect product images and annotate them with multiple labels. However, the labels of product images represent the concept of subjective perception, which makes the multi-label

We present RFOVE, a region-based method for approximating an arbitrary 2D shape with an automatically determined number of possibly overlapping ellipses. RFOVE is completely unsupervised, operates without any assumption or prior knowledge on the object's shape and extends and improves the Decremental Ellipse Fitting Algorithm (DEFA) [1]. Both RFOVE and DEFA solve the multi-ellipse fitting problem by

A novel similarity-covariant feature detector that extracts points whose neighborhoods, when treated as a 3D intensity surface, have a saddle-like intensity profile is presented. The saddle condition is verified efficiently by intensity comparisons on two concentric rings that must have exactly two dark-to-bright and two bright-to-dark transitions satisfying certain geometric constraints. Saddle is

We propose a novel convolutional neural network approach to address the fine-grained recognition problem of multi-view dynamic facial action unit detection. We leverage recent gains in large-scale object recognition by formulating the task of predicting the presence or absence of a specific action unit in a still image of a human face as holistic classification. We then explore the design space of

A baby's gestational age determines whether or not they are premature, which helps clinicians decide on suitable post-natal treatment. The most accurate dating methods use Ultrasound Scan (USS) machines, but these are expensive, require trained personnel and cannot always be deployed to remote areas. In the absence of USS, the Ballard Score, a postnatal clinical examination, can be used. However, this

Facial action units (AUs) may be represented spatially, temporally, and in terms of their correlation. Previous research focuses on one or another of these aspects or addresses them disjointly. We propose a hybrid network architecture that jointly models spatial and temporal representations and their correlation. In particular, we use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to learn spatial representations

To enable real-time, person-independent 3D registration from 2D video, we developed a 3D cascade regression approach in which facial landmarks remain invariant across pose over a range of approximately 60 degrees. From a single 2D image of a person's face, a dense 3D shape is registered in real time for each frame. The algorithm utilizes a fast cascade regression framework trained on high-resolution

Accurate reconstruction of 3D geometrical shape from a set of calibrated 2D multiview images is an active yet challenging task in computer vision. The existing multiview stereo methods usually perform poorly in recovering deeply concave and thinly protruding structures, and suffer from several common problems like slow convergence, sensitivity to initial conditions, and high memory requirements. To

The relationship between nonverbal behavior and severity of depression was investigated by following depressed participants over the course of treatment and video recording a series of clinical interviews. Facial expressions and head pose were analyzed from video using manual and automatic systems. Both systems were highly consistent for FACS action units (AUs) and showed similar effects for change

Automatic pain recognition from videos is a vital clinical application and, owing to its spontaneous nature, poses interesting challenges to automatic facial expression recognition (AFER) research. Previous pain vs no-pain systems have highlighted two major challenges: (1) ground truth is provided for the sequence, but the presence or absence of the target expression for a given frame is unknown, and

In this paper we present a new discriminative approach to achieve consistent and efficient tracking of non-rigid object motion, such as facial expressions. By utilizing both spatial and temporal appearance coherence at the patch level, the proposed approach can reduce ambiguity and increase accuracy. Recent research demonstrates that feature based approaches, such as constrained local models (CLMs)

This paper presents a whole body surface imaging system based on stereo vision technology. We have adopted a compact and economical configuration which involves only four stereo units to image the frontal and rear sides of the body. The success of the system depends on a stereo matching process that can effectively segment the body from the background in addition to recovering sufficient geometric

The manual signs in sign languages are generated and interpreted using three basic building blocks: handshape, motion, and place of articulation. When combined, these three components (together with palm orientation) uniquely determine the meaning of the manual sign. This means that the use of pattern recognition techniques that only employ a subset of these components is inappropriate for interpreting

Foreground-background segmentation has recently been applied [26,12] to the detection and segmentation of specific objects or structures of interest from the background as an efficient alternative to techniques such as deformable templates [27]. We introduce a graphical model (i.e. Markov random field)-based formulation of structure-specific figure-ground segmentation based on simple geometric features

Active appearance models (AAMs) have demonstrated great utility when being employed for non-rigid face alignment/tracking. The "simultaneous" algorithm for fitting an AAM achieves good non-rigid face registration performance, but has poor real time performance (2-3 fps). The "project-out" algorithm for fitting an AAM achieves faster than real time performance (> 200 fps) but suffers from poor generic