arXiv subjects

Piotr Dollár

Publications and source records attributed to Piotr Dollár.

40 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

From Captions to Visual Concepts and Back

This paper presents a novel approach for automatically generating image descriptions: visual detectors, language models, and multimodal similarity models learnt directly from a dataset of image captions. We use multiple instance learning to train visual detectors for words that commonly occur in captions, including many different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The word detector outputs serve as conditional inputs to a maximum-entropy language model. The language model learns from a set of over 400,000 image descriptions to capture the statistics of word usage. We capture global semantics by re-ranking caption candidates using sentence-level features and a deep multimodal similarity model. Our system is state-of-the-art on the official Microsoft COCO benchmark, producing a BLEU-4 score of 29.1%. When human judges compare the system captions to ones written by other people on our held-out test set, the system captions have equal or better quality 34% of the time.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context

We present a new dataset with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in object recognition by placing the question of object recognition in the context of the broader question of scene understanding. This is achieved by gathering images of complex everyday scenes containing common objects in their natural context. Objects are labeled using per-instance segmentations to aid in precise object localization. Our dataset contains photos of 91 objects types that would be easily recognizable by a 4 year old. With a total of 2.5 million labeled instances in 328k images, the creation of our dataset drew upon extensive crowd worker involvement via novel user interfaces for category detection, instance spotting and instance segmentation. We present a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset in comparison to PASCAL, ImageNet, and SUN. Finally, we provide baseline performance analysis for bounding box and segmentation detection results using a Deformable Parts Model.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2014

Fast Edge Detection Using Structured Forests

Edge detection is a critical component of many vision systems, including object detectors and image segmentation algorithms. Patches of edges exhibit well-known forms of local structure, such as straight lines or T-junctions. In this paper we take advantage of the structure present in local image patches to learn both an accurate and computationally efficient edge detector. We formulate the problem of predicting local edge masks in a structured learning framework applied to random decision forests. Our novel approach to learning decision trees robustly maps the structured labels to a discrete space on which standard information gain measures may be evaluated. The result is an approach that obtains realtime performance that is orders of magnitude faster than many competing state-of-the-art approaches, while also achieving state-of-the-art edge detection results on the BSDS500 Segmentation dataset and NYU Depth dataset. Finally, we show the potential of our approach as a general purpose edge detector by showing our learned edge models generalize well across datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2014

Local Decorrelation For Improved Detection

Even with the advent of more sophisticated, data-hungry methods, boosted decision trees remain extraordinarily successful for fast rigid object detection, achieving top accuracy on numerous datasets. While effective, most boosted detectors use decision trees with orthogonal (single feature) splits, and the topology of the resulting decision boundary may not be well matched to the natural topology of the data. Given highly correlated data, decision trees with oblique (multiple feature) splits can be effective. Use of oblique splits, however, comes at considerable computational expense. Inspired by recent work on discriminative decorrelation of HOG features, we instead propose an efficient feature transform that removes correlations in local neighborhoods. The result is an overcomplete but locally decorrelated representation ideally suited for use with orthogonal decision trees. In fact, orthogonal trees with our locally decorrelated features outperform oblique trees trained over the original features at a fraction of the computational cost. The overall improvement in accuracy is dramatic: on the Caltech Pedestrian Dataset, we reduce false positives nearly tenfold over the previous state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗