arXiv subjects

Fatih Porikli

Publications and source records attributed to Fatih Porikli.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Deep Edge-Aware Saliency Detection

There has been profound progress in visual saliency thanks to the deep learning architectures, however, there still exist three major challenges that hinder the detection performance for scenes with complex compositions, multiple salient objects, and salient objects of diverse scales. In particular, output maps of the existing methods remain low in spatial resolution causing blurred edges due to the stride and pooling operations, networks often neglect descriptive statistical and handcrafted priors that have potential to complement saliency detection results, and deep features at different layers stay mainly desolate waiting to be effectively fused to handle multi-scale salient objects. In this paper, we tackle these issues by a new fully convolutional neural network that jointly learns salient edges and saliency labels in an end-to-end fashion. Our framework first employs convolutional layers that reformulate the detection task as a dense labeling problem, then integrates handcrafted saliency features in a hierarchical manner into lower and higher levels of the deep network to leverage available information for multi-scale response, and finally refines the saliency map through dilated convolutions by imposing context. In this way, the salient edge priors are efficiently incorporated and the output resolution is significantly improved while keeping the memory requirements low, leading to cleaner and sharper object boundaries. Extensive experimental analyses on ten benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves consistently superior performance and attains robustness for complex scenes in comparison to the very recent state-of-the-art approaches.

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arXiv2017

Super-Trajectory for Video Segmentation

We introduce a novel semi-supervised video segmentation approach based on an efficient video representation, called as "super-trajectory". Each super-trajectory corresponds to a group of compact trajectories that exhibit consistent motion patterns, similar appearance and close spatiotemporal relationships. We generate trajectories using a probabilistic model, which handles occlusions and drifts in a robust and natural way. To reliably group trajectories, we adopt a modified version of the density peaks based clustering algorithm that allows capturing rich spatiotemporal relations among trajectories in the clustering process. The presented video representation is discriminative enough to accurately propagate the initial annotations in the first frame onto the remaining video frames. Extensive experimental analysis on challenging benchmarks demonstrate our method is capable of distinguishing the target objects from complex backgrounds and even reidentifying them after long-term occlusions.

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arXiv2017

Integrated Deep and Shallow Networks for Salient Object Detection

Deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based salient object detection methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance and outperform those unsupervised methods with a wide margin. In this paper, we propose to integrate deep and unsupervised saliency for salient object detection under a unified framework. Specifically, our method takes results of unsupervised saliency (Robust Background Detection, RBD) and normalized color images as inputs, and directly learns an end-to-end mapping between inputs and the corresponding saliency maps. The color images are fed into a Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNN) adapted from semantic segmentation to exploit high-level semantic cues for salient object detection. Then the results from deep FCNN and RBD are concatenated to feed into a shallow network to map the concatenated feature maps to saliency maps. Finally, to obtain a spatially consistent saliency map with sharp object boundaries, we fuse superpixel level saliency map at multi-scale. Extensive experimental results on 8 benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches with a margin.

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arXiv2017

Learning deep structured network for weakly supervised change detection

Conventional change detection methods require a large number of images to learn background models or depend on tedious pixel-level labeling by humans. In this paper, we present a weakly supervised approach that needs only image-level labels to simultaneously detect and localize changes in a pair of images. To this end, we employ a deep neural network with DAG topology to learn patterns of change from image-level labeled training data. On top of the initial CNN activations, we define a CRF model to incorporate the local differences and context with the dense connections between individual pixels. We apply a constrained mean-field algorithm to estimate the pixel-level labels, and use the estimated labels to update the parameters of the CNN in an iterative EM framework. This enables imposing global constraints on the observed foreground probability mass function. Our evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate superior detection and localization performance.

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arXiv2017

Learning an Invariant Hilbert Space for Domain Adaptation

This paper introduces a learning scheme to construct a Hilbert space (i.e., a vector space along its inner product) to address both unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation problems. This is achieved by learning projections from each domain to a latent space along the Mahalanobis metric of the latent space to simultaneously minimizing a notion of domain variance while maximizing a measure of discriminatory power. In particular, we make use of the Riemannian optimization techniques to match statistical properties (e.g., first and second order statistics) between samples projected into the latent space from different domains. Upon availability of class labels, we further deem samples sharing the same label to form more compact clusters while pulling away samples coming from different classes.We extensively evaluate and contrast our proposal against state-of-the-art methods for the task of visual domain adaptation using both handcrafted and deep-net features. Our experiments show that even with a simple nearest neighbor classifier, the proposed method can outperform several state-of-the-art methods benefitting from more involved classification schemes.

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arXiv2017

Domain Adaptation by Mixture of Alignments of Second- or Higher-Order Scatter Tensors

In this paper, we propose an approach to the domain adaptation, dubbed Second- or Higher-order Transfer of Knowledge (So-HoT), based on the mixture of alignments of second- or higher-order scatter statistics between the source and target domains. The human ability to learn from few labeled samples is a recurring motivation in the literature for domain adaptation. Towards this end, we investigate the supervised target scenario for which few labeled target training samples per category exist. Specifically, we utilize two CNN streams: the source and target networks fused at the classifier level. Features from the fully connected layers fc7 of each network are used to compute second- or even higher-order scatter tensors; one per network stream per class. As the source and target distributions are somewhat different despite being related, we align the scatters of the two network streams of the same class (within-class scatters) to a desired degree with our bespoke loss while maintaining good separation of the between-class scatters. We train the entire network in end-to-end fashion. We provide evaluations on the standard Office benchmark (visual domains), RGB-D combined with Caltech256 (depth-to-rgb transfer) and Pascal VOC2007 combined with the TU Berlin dataset (image-to-sketch transfer). We attain state-of-the-art results.

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arXiv2017

Simultaneous Stereo Video Deblurring and Scene Flow Estimation

Videos for outdoor scene often show unpleasant blur effects due to the large relative motion between the camera and the dynamic objects and large depth variations. Existing works typically focus monocular video deblurring. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to deblurring from stereo videos. In particular, we exploit the piece-wise planar assumption about the scene and leverage the scene flow information to deblur the image. Unlike the existing approach [31] which used a pre-computed scene flow, we propose a single framework to jointly estimate the scene flow and deblur the image, where the motion cues from scene flow estimation and blur information could reinforce each other, and produce superior results than the conventional scene flow estimation or stereo deblurring methods. We evaluate our method extensively on two available datasets and achieve significant improvement in flow estimation and removing the blur effect over the state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2017

Ordered Pooling of Optical Flow Sequences for Action Recognition

Training of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on long video sequences is computationally expensive due to the substantial memory requirements and the massive number of parameters that deep architectures demand. Early fusion of video frames is thus a standard technique, in which several consecutive frames are first agglomerated into a compact representation, and then fed into the CNN as an input sample. For this purpose, a summarization approach that represents a set of consecutive RGB frames by a single dynamic image to capture pixel dynamics is proposed recently. In this paper, we introduce a novel ordered representation of consecutive optical flow frames as an alternative and argue that this representation captures the action dynamics more effectively than RGB frames. We provide intuitions on why such a representation is better for action recognition. We validate our claims on standard benchmark datasets and demonstrate that using summaries of flow images lead to significant improvements over RGB frames while achieving accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art on UCF101 and HMDB datasets.

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arXiv2017

Action Representation Using Classifier Decision Boundaries

Most popular deep learning based models for action recognition are designed to generate separate predictions within their short temporal windows, which are often aggregated by heuristic means to assign an action label to the full video segment. Given that not all frames from a video characterize the underlying action, pooling schemes that impose equal importance to all frames might be unfavorable. In an attempt towards tackling this challenge, we propose a novel pooling scheme, dubbed SVM pooling, based on the notion that among the bag of features generated by a CNN on all temporal windows, there is at least one feature that characterizes the action. To this end, we learn a decision hyperplane that separates this unknown yet useful feature from the rest. Applying multiple instance learning in an SVM setup, we use the parameters of this separating hyperplane as a descriptor for the video. Since these parameters are directly related to the support vectors in a max-margin framework, they serve as robust representations for pooling of the CNN features. We devise a joint optimization objective and an efficient solver that learns these hyperplanes per video and the corresponding action classifiers over the hyperplanes. Showcased experiments on the standard HMDB and UCF101 datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.

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arXiv2017

Going Deeper into Action Recognition: A Survey

Understanding human actions in visual data is tied to advances in complementary research areas including object recognition, human dynamics, domain adaptation and semantic segmentation. Over the last decade, human action analysis evolved from earlier schemes that are often limited to controlled environments to nowadays advanced solutions that can learn from millions of videos and apply to almost all daily activities. Given the broad range of applications from video surveillance to human-computer interaction, scientific milestones in action recognition are achieved more rapidly, eventually leading to the demise of what used to be good in a short time. This motivated us to provide a comprehensive review of the notable steps taken towards recognizing human actions. To this end, we start our discussion with the pioneering methods that use handcrafted representations, and then, navigate into the realm of deep learning based approaches. We aim to remain objective throughout this survey, touching upon encouraging improvements as well as inevitable fallbacks, in the hope of raising fresh questions and motivating new research directions for the reader.

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arXiv2017

Robust and Real-time Deep Tracking Via Multi-Scale Domain Adaptation

Visual tracking is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Recently, some deep-learning-based tracking algorithms have been achieving record-breaking performances. However, due to the high complexity of deep learning, most deep trackers suffer from low tracking speed, and thus are impractical in many real-world applications. Some new deep trackers with smaller network structure achieve high efficiency while at the cost of significant decrease on precision. In this paper, we propose to transfer the feature for image classification to the visual tracking domain via convolutional channel reductions. The channel reduction could be simply viewed as an additional convolutional layer with the specific task. It not only extracts useful information for object tracking but also significantly increases the tracking speed. To better accommodate the useful feature of the target in different scales, the adaptation filters are designed with different sizes. The yielded visual tracker is real-time and also illustrates the state-of-the-art accuracies in the experiment involving two well-adopted benchmarks with more than 100 test videos.

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arXiv2016

Tensor Representations via Kernel Linearization for Action Recognition from 3D Skeletons (Extended Version)

In this paper, we explore tensor representations that can compactly capture higher-order relationships between skeleton joints for 3D action recognition. We first define RBF kernels on 3D joint sequences, which are then linearized to form kernel descriptors. The higher-order outer-products of these kernel descriptors form our tensor representations. We present two different kernels for action recognition, namely (i) a sequence compatibility kernel that captures the spatio-temporal compatibility of joints in one sequence against those in the other, and (ii) a dynamics compatibility kernel that explicitly models the action dynamics of a sequence. Tensors formed from these kernels are then used to train an SVM. We present experiments on several benchmark datasets and demonstrate state of the art results, substantiating the effectiveness of our representations.

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arXiv2016

Pushing the Limits of Deep CNNs for Pedestrian Detection

Compared to other applications in computer vision, convolutional neural networks have under-performed on pedestrian detection. A breakthrough was made very recently by using sophisticated deep CNN models, with a number of hand-crafted features, or explicit occlusion handling mechanism. In this work, we show that by re-using the convolutional feature maps (CFMs) of a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model as image features to train an ensemble of boosted decision models, we are able to achieve the best reported accuracy without using specially designed learning algorithms. We empirically identify and disclose important implementation details. We also show that pixel labelling may be simply combined with a detector to boost the detection performance. By adding complementary hand-crafted features such as optical flow, the DCNN based detector can be further improved. We set a new record on the Caltech pedestrian dataset, lowering the log-average miss rate from $11.7\%$ to $8.9\%$, a relative improvement of $24\%$. We also achieve a comparable result to the state-of-the-art approaches on the KITTI dataset.

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arXiv2016

Beyond Local Search: Tracking Objects Everywhere with Instance-Specific Proposals

Most tracking-by-detection methods employ a local search window around the predicted object location in the current frame assuming the previous location is accurate, the trajectory is smooth, and the computational capacity permits a search radius that can accommodate the maximum speed yet small enough to reduce mismatches. These, however, may not be valid always, in particular for fast and irregularly moving objects. Here, we present an object tracker that is not limited to a local search window and has ability to probe efficiently the entire frame. Our method generates a small number of "high-quality" proposals by a novel instance-specific objectness measure and evaluates them against the object model that can be adopted from an existing tracking-by-detection approach as a core tracker. During the tracking process, we update the object model concentrating on hard false-positives supplied by the proposals, which help suppressing distractors caused by difficult background clutters, and learn how to re-rank proposals according to the object model. Since we reduce significantly the number of hypotheses the core tracker evaluates, we can use richer object descriptors and stronger detector. Our method outperforms most recent state-of-the-art trackers on popular tracking benchmarks, and provides improved robustness for fast moving objects as well as for ultra low-frame-rate videos.

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arXiv2016

A Novel Performance Evaluation Methodology for Single-Target Trackers

This paper addresses the problem of single-target tracker performance evaluation. We consider the performance measures, the dataset and the evaluation system to be the most important components of tracker evaluation and propose requirements for each of them. The requirements are the basis of a new evaluation methodology that aims at a simple and easily interpretable tracker comparison. The ranking-based methodology addresses tracker equivalence in terms of statistical significance and practical differences. A fully-annotated dataset with per-frame annotations with several visual attributes is introduced. The diversity of its visual properties is maximized in a novel way by clustering a large number of videos according to their visual attributes. This makes it the most sophistically constructed and annotated dataset to date. A multi-platform evaluation system allowing easy integration of third-party trackers is presented as well. The proposed evaluation methodology was tested on the VOT2014 challenge on the new dataset and 38 trackers, making it the largest benchmark to date. Most of the tested trackers are indeed state-of-the-art since they outperform the standard baselines, resulting in a highly-challenging benchmark. An exhaustive analysis of the dataset from the perspective of tracking difficulty is carried out. To facilitate tracker comparison a new performance visualization technique is proposed.

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arXiv2015

Tracking Randomly Moving Objects on Edge Box Proposals

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arXiv2015

Compositional Memory for Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) emerges as one of the most fascinating topics in computer vision recently. Many state of the art methods naively use holistic visual features with language features into a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) module, neglecting the sophisticated interaction between them. This coarse modeling also blocks the possibilities of exploring finer-grained local features that contribute to the question answering dynamically over time. This paper addresses this fundamental problem by directly modeling the temporal dynamics between language and all possible local image patches. When traversing the question words sequentially, our end-to-end approach explicitly fuses the features associated to the words and the ones available at multiple local patches in an attention mechanism, and further combines the fused information to generate dynamic messages, which we call episode. We then feed the episodes to a standard question answering module together with the contextual visual information and linguistic information. Motivated by recent practices in deep learning, we use auxiliary loss functions during training to improve the performance. Our experiments on two latest public datasets suggest that our method has a superior performance. Notably, on the DARQUAR dataset we advanced the state of the art by 6$\%$, and we also evaluated our approach on the most recent MSCOCO-VQA dataset.

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arXiv2015

Fast detection of multiple objects in traffic scenes with a common detection framework

Traffic scene perception (TSP) aims to real-time extract accurate on-road environment information, which in- volves three phases: detection of objects of interest, recognition of detected objects, and tracking of objects in motion. Since recognition and tracking often rely on the results from detection, the ability to detect objects of interest effectively plays a crucial role in TSP. In this paper, we focus on three important classes of objects: traffic signs, cars, and cyclists. We propose to detect all the three important objects in a single learning based detection framework. The proposed framework consists of a dense feature extractor and detectors of three important classes. Once the dense features have been extracted, these features are shared with all detectors. The advantage of using one common framework is that the detection speed is much faster, since all dense features need only to be evaluated once in the testing phase. In contrast, most previous works have designed specific detectors using different features for each of these objects. To enhance the feature robustness to noises and image deformations, we introduce spatially pooled features as a part of aggregated channel features. In order to further improve the generalization performance, we propose an object subcategorization method as a means of capturing intra-class variation of objects. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework in three detection applications: traffic sign detection, car detection, and cyclist detection. The proposed framework achieves the competitive performance with state-of- the-art approaches on several benchmark datasets.

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