arXiv subjects

Thanh-Toan Do

Publications and source records attributed to Thanh-Toan Do.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Overcoming Data Limitation in Medical Visual Question Answering

Traditional approaches for Visual Question Answering (VQA) require large amount of labeled data for training. Unfortunately, such large scale data is usually not available for medical domain. In this paper, we propose a novel medical VQA framework that overcomes the labeled data limitation. The proposed framework explores the use of the unsupervised Denoising Auto-Encoder (DAE) and the supervised Meta-Learning. The advantage of DAE is to leverage the large amount of unlabeled images while the advantage of Meta-Learning is to learn meta-weights that quickly adapt to VQA problem with limited labeled data. By leveraging the advantages of these techniques, it allows the proposed framework to be efficiently trained using a small labeled training set. The experimental results show that our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art medical VQA.

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arXiv2019

Compact Trilinear Interaction for Visual Question Answering

In Visual Question Answering (VQA), answers have a great correlation with question meaning and visual contents. Thus, to selectively utilize image, question and answer information, we propose a novel trilinear interaction model which simultaneously learns high level associations between these three inputs. In addition, to overcome the interaction complexity, we introduce a multimodal tensor-based PARALIND decomposition which efficiently parameterizes trilinear interaction between the three inputs. Moreover, knowledge distillation is first time applied in Free-form Opened-ended VQA. It is not only for reducing the computational cost and required memory but also for transferring knowledge from trilinear interaction model to bilinear interaction model. The extensive experiments on benchmarking datasets TDIUC, VQA-2.0, and Visual7W show that the proposed compact trilinear interaction model achieves state-of-the-art results when using a single model on all three datasets.

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arXiv2019

Compact Hash Code Learning with Binary Deep Neural Network

Learning compact binary codes for image retrieval problem using deep neural networks has recently attracted increasing attention. However, training deep hashing networks is challenging due to the binary constraints on the hash codes. In this paper, we propose deep network models and learning algorithms for learning binary hash codes given image representations under both unsupervised and supervised manners. The novelty of our network design is that we constrain one hidden layer to directly output the binary codes. This design has overcome a challenging problem in some previous works: optimizing non-smooth objective functions because of binarization. In addition, we propose to incorporate independence and balance properties in the direct and strict forms into the learning schemes. We also include a similarity preserving property in our objective functions. The resulting optimizations involving these binary, independence, and balance constraints are difficult to solve. To tackle this difficulty, we propose to learn the networks with alternating optimization and careful relaxation. Furthermore, by leveraging the powerful capacity of convolutional neural networks, we propose an end-to-end architecture that jointly learns to extract visual features and produce binary hash codes. Experimental results for the benchmark datasets show that the proposed methods compare favorably or outperform the state of the art.

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arXiv2019

Scalable Place Recognition Under Appearance Change for Autonomous Driving

A major challenge in place recognition for autonomous driving is to be robust against appearance changes due to short-term (e.g., weather, lighting) and long-term (seasons, vegetation growth, etc.) environmental variations. A promising solution is to continuously accumulate images to maintain an adequate sample of the conditions and incorporate new changes into the place recognition decision. However, this demands a place recognition technique that is scalable on an ever growing dataset. To this end, we propose a novel place recognition technique that can be efficiently retrained and compressed, such that the recognition of new queries can exploit all available data (including recent changes) without suffering from visible growth in computational cost. Underpinning our method is a novel temporal image matching technique based on Hidden Markov Models. Our experiments show that, compared to state-of-the-art techniques, our method has much greater potential for large-scale place recognition for autonomous driving.

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arXiv2019

Bayesian Generative Active Deep Learning

Deep learning models have demonstrated outstanding performance in several problems, but their training process tends to require immense amounts of computational and human resources for training and labeling, constraining the types of problems that can be tackled. Therefore, the design of effective training methods that require small labeled training sets is an important research direction that will allow a more effective use of resources.Among current approaches designed to address this issue, two are particularly interesting: data augmentation and active learning. Data augmentation achieves this goal by artificially generating new training points, while active learning relies on the selection of the "most informative" subset of unlabeled training samples to be labelled by an oracle. Although successful in practice, data augmentation can waste computational resources because it indiscriminately generates samples that are not guaranteed to be informative, and active learning selects a small subset of informative samples (from a large un-annotated set) that may be insufficient for the training process. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian generative active deep learning approach that combines active learning with data augmentation -- we provide theoretical and empirical evidence (MNIST, CIFAR-$\{10,100\}$, and SVHN) that our approach has more efficient training and better classification results than data augmentation and active learning.

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arXiv2019

Simultaneous Feature Aggregating and Hashing for Compact Binary Code Learning

Representing images by compact hash codes is an attractive approach for large-scale content-based image retrieval. In most state-of-the-art hashing-based image retrieval systems, for each image, local descriptors are first aggregated as a global representation vector. This global vector is then subjected to a hashing function to generate a binary hash code. In previous works, the aggregating and the hashing processes are designed independently. Hence these frameworks may generate suboptimal hash codes. In this paper, we first propose a novel unsupervised hashing framework in which feature aggregating and hashing are designed simultaneously and optimized jointly. Specifically, our joint optimization generates aggregated representations that can be better reconstructed by some binary codes. This leads to more discriminative binary hash codes and improved retrieval accuracy. In addition, the proposed method is flexible. It can be extended for supervised hashing. When the data label is available, the framework can be adapted to learn binary codes which minimize the reconstruction loss w.r.t. label vectors. Furthermore, we also propose a fast version of the state-of-the-art hashing method Binary Autoencoder to be used in our proposed frameworks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets under various settings show that the proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised hashing methods.

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arXiv2019

A Theoretically Sound Upper Bound on the Triplet Loss for Improving the Efficiency of Deep Distance Metric Learning

We propose a method that substantially improves the efficiency of deep distance metric learning based on the optimization of the triplet loss function. One epoch of such training process based on a naive optimization of the triplet loss function has a run-time complexity O(N^3), where N is the number of training samples. Such optimization scales poorly, and the most common approach proposed to address this high complexity issue is based on sub-sampling the set of triplets needed for the training process. Another approach explored in the field relies on an ad-hoc linearization (in terms of N) of the triplet loss that introduces class centroids, which must be optimized using the whole training set for each mini-batch - this means that a naive implementation of this approach has run-time complexity O(N^2). This complexity issue is usually mitigated with poor, but computationally cheap, approximate centroid optimization methods. In this paper, we first propose a solid theory on the linearization of the triplet loss with the use of class centroids, where the main conclusion is that our new linear loss represents a tight upper-bound to the triplet loss. Furthermore, based on the theory above, we propose a training algorithm that no longer requires the centroid optimization step, which means that our approach is the first in the field with a guaranteed linear run-time complexity. We show that the training of deep distance metric learning methods using the proposed upper-bound is substantially faster than triplet-based methods, while producing competitive retrieval accuracy results on benchmark datasets (CUB-200-2011 and CAR196).

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arXiv2019

SDRSAC: Semidefinite-Based Randomized Approach for Robust Point Cloud Registration without Correspondences

This paper presents a novel randomized algorithm for robust point cloud registration without correspondences. Most existing registration approaches require a set of putative correspondences obtained by extracting invariant descriptors. However, such descriptors could become unreliable in noisy and contaminated settings. In these settings, methods that directly handle input point sets are preferable. Without correspondences, however, conventional randomized techniques require a very large number of samples in order to reach satisfactory solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address this problem. In particular, our work enables the use of randomized methods for point cloud registration without the need of putative correspondences. By considering point cloud alignment as a special instance of graph matching and employing an efficient semi-definite relaxation, we propose a novel sampling mechanism, in which the size of the sampled subsets can be larger-than-minimal. Our tight relaxation scheme enables fast rejection of the outliers in the sampled sets, resulting in high-quality hypotheses. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Importantly, our proposed method serves as a generic framework which can be extended to problems with known correspondences.

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arXiv2019

V2CNet: A Deep Learning Framework to Translate Videos to Commands for Robotic Manipulation

We propose V2CNet, a new deep learning framework to automatically translate the demonstration videos to commands that can be directly used in robotic applications. Our V2CNet has two branches and aims at understanding the demonstration video in a fine-grained manner. The first branch has the encoder-decoder architecture to encode the visual features and sequentially generate the output words as a command, while the second branch uses a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to learn the fine-grained actions. By jointly training both branches, the network is able to model the sequential information of the command, while effectively encodes the fine-grained actions. The experimental results on our new large-scale dataset show that V2CNet outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin, while its output can be applied in real robotic applications. The source code and trained models will be made available.

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arXiv2019

From Selective Deep Convolutional Features to Compact Binary Representations for Image Retrieval

In the large-scale image retrieval task, the two most important requirements are the discriminability of image representations and the efficiency in computation and storage of representations. Regarding the former requirement, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proven to be a very powerful tool to extract highly discriminative local descriptors for effective image search. Additionally, in order to further improve the discriminative power of the descriptors, recent works adopt fine-tuned strategies. In this paper, taking a different approach, we propose a novel, computationally efficient, and competitive framework. Specifically, we firstly propose various strategies to compute masks, namely SIFT-mask, SUM-mask, and MAX-mask, to select a representative subset of local convolutional features and eliminate redundant features. Our in-depth analyses demonstrate that proposed masking schemes are effective to address the burstiness drawback and improve retrieval accuracy. Secondly, we propose to employ recent embedding and aggregating methods which can significantly boost the feature discriminability. Regarding the computation and storage efficiency, we include a hashing module to produce very compact binary image representations. Extensive experiments on six image retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art retrieval performances.

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arXiv2019

SASSE: Scalable and Adaptable 6-DOF Pose Estimation

Visual localization has become a key enabling component of many place recognition and SLAM systems. Contemporary research has primarily focused on improving accuracy and precision-recall type metrics, with relatively little attention paid to a system's absolute storage scaling characteristics, its flexibility to adapt to available computational resources, and its longevity with respect to easily incorporating newly learned or hand-crafted image descriptors. Most significantly, improvement in one of these aspects typically comes at the cost of others: for example, a snapshot-based system that achieves sub-linear storage cost typically provides no metric pose estimation, or, a highly accurate pose estimation technique is often ossified in adapting to recent advances in appearance-invariant features. In this paper, we present a novel 6-DOF localization system that for the first time simultaneously achieves all the three characteristics: significantly sub-linear storage growth, agnosticism to image descriptors, and customizability to available storage and computational resources. The key features of our method are developed based on a novel adaptation of multiple-label learning, together with effective dimensional reduction and learning techniques that enable simple and efficient optimization. We evaluate our system on several large benchmarking datasets and provide detailed comparisons to state-of-the-art systems. The proposed method demonstrates competitive accuracy with existing pose estimation methods while achieving better sub-linear storage scaling, significantly reduced absolute storage requirements, and faster training and deployment speeds.

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arXiv2019

Learning Pairwise Relationship for Multi-object Detection in Crowded Scenes

As the post-processing step for object detection, non-maximum suppression (GreedyNMS) is widely used in most of the detectors for many years. It is efficient and accurate for sparse scenes, but suffers an inevitable trade-off between precision and recall in crowded scenes. To overcome this drawback, we propose a Pairwise-NMS to cure GreedyNMS. Specifically, a pairwise-relationship network that is based on deep learning is learned to predict if two overlapping proposal boxes contain two objects or zero/one object, which can handle multiple overlapping objects effectively. Through neatly coupling with GreedyNMS without losing efficiency, consistent improvements have been achieved in heavily occluded datasets including MOT15, TUD-Crossing and PETS. In addition, Pairwise-NMS can be integrated into any learning based detectors (Both of Faster-RCNN and DPM detectors are tested in this paper), thus building a bridge between GreedyNMS and end-to-end learning detectors.

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arXiv2018

Binary Constrained Deep Hashing Network for Image Retrieval without Manual Annotation

Learning compact binary codes for image retrieval task using deep neural networks has attracted increasing attention recently. However, training deep hashing networks for the task is challenging due to the binary constraints on the hash codes, the similarity preserving property, and the requirement for a vast amount of labelled images. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing methods has tackled all of these challenges completely in a unified framework. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning approach for the task, in which the network is trained to produce binary codes directly from image pixels without the need of manual annotation. In particular, to deal with the non-smoothness of binary constraints, we propose a novel pairwise constrained loss function, which simultaneously encodes the distances between pairs of hash codes, and the binary quantization error. In order to train the network with the proposed loss function, we propose an efficient parameter learning algorithm. In addition, to provide similar / dissimilar training images to train the network, we exploit 3D models reconstructed from unlabelled images for automatic generation of enormous training image pairs. The extensive experiments on image retrieval benchmark datasets demonstrate the improvements of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art compact representation methods on the image retrieval problem.

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arXiv2018

On-device Scalable Image-based Localization via Prioritized Cascade Search and Fast One-Many RANSAC

We present the design of an entire on-device system for large-scale urban localization using images. The proposed design integrates compact image retrieval and 2D-3D correspondence search to estimate the location in extensive city regions. Our design is GPS agnostic and does not require network connection. In order to overcome the resource constraints of mobile devices, we propose a system design that leverages the scalability advantage of image retrieval and accuracy of 3D model-based localization. Furthermore, we propose a new hashing-based cascade search for fast computation of 2D-3D correspondences. In addition, we propose a new one-many RANSAC for accurate pose estimation. The new one-many RANSAC addresses the challenge of repetitive building structures (e.g. windows, balconies) in urban localization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 2D-3D correspondence search achieves state-of-the-art localization accuracy on multiple benchmark datasets. Furthermore, our experiments on a large Google Street View (GSV) image dataset show the potential of large-scale localization entirely on a typical mobile device.

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arXiv2018

A Binary Optimization Approach for Constrained K-Means Clustering

K-Means clustering still plays an important role in many computer vision problems. While the conventional Lloyd method, which alternates between centroid update and cluster assignment, is primarily used in practice, it may converge to a solution with empty clusters. Furthermore, some applications may require the clusters to satisfy a specific set of constraints, e.g., cluster sizes, must-link/cannot-link. Several methods have been introduced to solve constrained K-Means clustering. Due to the non-convex nature of K-Means, however, existing approaches may result in sub-optimal solutions that poorly approximate the true clusters. In this work, we provide a new perspective to tackle this problem. Particularly, we reconsider constrained K-Means as a Binary Optimization Problem and propose a novel optimization scheme to search for feasible solutions in the binary domain. This approach allows us to solve constrained K-Means where multiple types of constraints can be simultaneously enforced. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets show that our method provides better clustering accuracy with faster runtime compared to several commonly used techniques.

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arXiv2018

Supervised Hashing with End-to-End Binary Deep Neural Network

Image hashing is a popular technique applied to large scale content-based visual retrieval due to its compact and efficient binary codes. Our work proposes a new end-to-end deep network architecture for supervised hashing which directly learns binary codes from input images and maintains good properties over binary codes such as similarity preservation, independence, and balancing. Furthermore, we also propose a new learning scheme that can cope with the binary constrained loss function. The proposed algorithm not only is scalable for learning over large-scale datasets but also outperforms state-of-the-art supervised hashing methods, which are illustrated throughout extensive experiments from various image retrieval benchmarks.

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arXiv2018

Deterministic Approximate Methods for Maximum Consensus Robust Fitting

Maximum consensus estimation plays a critically important role in robust fitting problems in computer vision. Currently, the most prevalent algorithms for consensus maximization draw from the class of randomized hypothesize-and-verify algorithms, which are cheap but can usually deliver only rough approximate solutions. On the other extreme, there are exact algorithms which are exhaustive search in nature and can be costly for practical-sized inputs. This paper fills the gap between the two extremes by proposing deterministic algorithms to approximately optimize the maximum consensus criterion. Our work begins by reformulating consensus maximization with linear complementarity constraints. Then, we develop two novel algorithms: one based on non-smooth penalty method with a Frank-Wolfe style optimization scheme, the other based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Both algorithms solve convex subproblems to efficiently perform the optimization. We demonstrate the capability of our algorithms to greatly improve a rough initial estimate, such as those obtained using least squares or a randomized algorithm. Compared to the exact algorithms, our approach is much more practical on realistic input sizes. Further, our approach is naturally applicable to estimation problems with geometric residuals

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arXiv2018

Bayesian Semantic Instance Segmentation in Open Set World

This paper addresses the semantic instance segmentation task in the open-set conditions, where input images can contain known and unknown object classes. The training process of existing semantic instance segmentation methods requires annotation masks for all object instances, which is expensive to acquire or even infeasible in some realistic scenarios, where the number of categories may increase boundlessly. In this paper, we present a novel open-set semantic instance segmentation approach capable of segmenting all known and unknown object classes in images, based on the output of an object detector trained on known object classes. We formulate the problem using a Bayesian framework, where the posterior distribution is approximated with a simulated annealing optimization equipped with an efficient image partition sampler. We show empirically that our method is competitive with state-of-the-art supervised methods on known classes, but also performs well on unknown classes when compared with unsupervised methods.

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