arXiv subjects

Larry Davis

Publications and source records attributed to Larry Davis.

41 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

SSH: Single Stage Headless Face Detector

We introduce the Single Stage Headless (SSH) face detector. Unlike two stage proposal-classification detectors, SSH detects faces in a single stage directly from the early convolutional layers in a classification network. SSH is headless. That is, it is able to achieve state-of-the-art results while removing the "head" of its underlying classification network -- i.e. all fully connected layers in the VGG-16 which contains a large number of parameters. Additionally, instead of relying on an image pyramid to detect faces with various scales, SSH is scale-invariant by design. We simultaneously detect faces with different scales in a single forward pass of the network, but from different layers. These properties make SSH fast and light-weight. Surprisingly, with a headless VGG-16, SSH beats the ResNet-101-based state-of-the-art on the WIDER dataset. Even though, unlike the current state-of-the-art, SSH does not use an image pyramid and is 5X faster. Moreover, if an image pyramid is deployed, our light-weight network achieves state-of-the-art on all subsets of the WIDER dataset, improving the AP by 2.5%. SSH also reaches state-of-the-art results on the FDDB and Pascal-Faces datasets while using a small input size, leading to a runtime of 50 ms/image on a GPU. The code is available at https://github.com/mahyarnajibi/SSH.

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arXiv2017

The Amazing Mysteries of the Gutter: Drawing Inferences Between Panels in Comic Book Narratives

Visual narrative is often a combination of explicit information and judicious omissions, relying on the viewer to supply missing details. In comics, most movements in time and space are hidden in the "gutters" between panels. To follow the story, readers logically connect panels together by inferring unseen actions through a process called "closure". While computers can now describe what is explicitly depicted in natural images, in this paper we examine whether they can understand the closure-driven narratives conveyed by stylized artwork and dialogue in comic book panels. We construct a dataset, COMICS, that consists of over 1.2 million panels (120 GB) paired with automatic textbox transcriptions. An in-depth analysis of COMICS demonstrates that neither text nor image alone can tell a comic book story, so a computer must understand both modalities to keep up with the plot. We introduce three cloze-style tasks that ask models to predict narrative and character-centric aspects of a panel given n preceding panels as context. Various deep neural architectures underperform human baselines on these tasks, suggesting that COMICS contains fundamental challenges for both vision and language.

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arXiv2016

Weakly Supervised Learning of Heterogeneous Concepts in Videos

Typical textual descriptions that accompany online videos are 'weak': i.e., they mention the main concepts in the video but not their corresponding spatio-temporal locations. The concepts in the description are typically heterogeneous (e.g., objects, persons, actions). Certain location constraints on these concepts can also be inferred from the description. The goal of this paper is to present a generalization of the Indian Buffet Process (IBP) that can (a) systematically incorporate heterogeneous concepts in an integrated framework, and (b) enforce location constraints, for efficient classification and localization of the concepts in the videos. Finally, we develop posterior inference for the proposed formulation using mean-field variational approximation. Comparative evaluations on the Casablanca and the A2D datasets show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques: 24% relative improvement for pairwise concept classification in the Casablanca dataset and 9% relative improvement for localization in the A2D dataset as compared to the most competitive baseline.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Learning Discriminative Features via Label Consistent Neural Network

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) enforces supervised information only at the output layer, and hidden layers are trained by back propagating the prediction error from the output layer without explicit supervision. We propose a supervised feature learning approach, Label Consistent Neural Network, which enforces direct supervision in late hidden layers. We associate each neuron in a hidden layer with a particular class label and encourage it to be activated for input signals from the same class. More specifically, we introduce a label consistency regularization called "discriminative representation error" loss for late hidden layers and combine it with classification error loss to build our overall objective function. This label consistency constraint alleviates the common problem of gradient vanishing and tends to faster convergence; it also makes the features derived from late hidden layers discriminative enough for classification even using a simple $k$-NN classifier, since input signals from the same class will have very similar representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances on several public benchmarks for action and object category recognition.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Learning Structured Ordinal Measures for Video based Face Recognition

This paper presents a structured ordinal measure method for video-based face recognition that simultaneously learns ordinal filters and structured ordinal features. The problem is posed as a non-convex integer program problem that includes two parts. The first part learns stable ordinal filters to project video data into a large-margin ordinal space. The second seeks self-correcting and discrete codes by balancing the projected data and a rank-one ordinal matrix in a structured low-rank way. Unsupervised and supervised structures are considered for the ordinal matrix. In addition, as a complement to hierarchical structures, deep feature representations are integrated into our method to enhance coding stability. An alternating minimization method is employed to handle the discrete and low-rank constraints, yielding high-quality codes that capture prior structures well. Experimental results on three commonly used face video databases show that our method with a simple voting classifier can achieve state-of-the-art recognition rates using fewer features and samples.

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