Ahmed Elgammal

Bio: Ahmed Elgammal is an academic researcher from Rutgers University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Nonlinear dimensionality reduction & Generative model. The author has an hindex of 46, co-authored 240 publications receiving 11203 citations. Previous affiliations of Ahmed Elgammal include University of Maryland, College Park & SRI International.

Non-parametric Model for Background Subtraction

Abstract: Background subtraction is a method typically used to segment moving regions in image sequences taken from a static camera by comparing each new frame to a model of the scene background. We present a novel non-parametric background model and a background subtraction approach. The model can handle situations where the background of the scene is cluttered and not completely static but contains small motions such as tree branches and bushes. The model estimates the probability of observing pixel intensity values based on a sample of intensity values for each pixel. The model adapts quickly to changes in the scene which enables very sensitive detection of moving targets. We also show how the model can use color information to suppress detection of shadows. The implementation of the model runs in real-time for both gray level and color imagery. Evaluation shows that this approach achieves very sensitive detection with very low false alarm rates.

Background and foreground modeling using nonparametric kernel density estimation for visual surveillance

Abstract: Automatic understanding of events happening at a site is the ultimate goal for many visual surveillance systems. Higher level understanding of events requires that certain lower level computer vision tasks be performed. These may include detection of unusual motion, tracking targets, labeling body parts, and understanding the interactions between people. To achieve many of these tasks, it is necessary to build representations of the appearance of objects in the scene. This paper focuses on two issues related to this problem. First, we construct a statistical representation of the scene background that supports sensitive detection of moving objects in the scene, but is robust to clutter arising out of natural scene variations. Second, we build statistical representations of the foreground regions (moving objects) that support their tracking and support occlusion reasoning. The probability density functions (pdfs) associated with the background and foreground are likely to vary from image to image and will not in general have a known parametric form. We accordingly utilize general nonparametric kernel density estimation techniques for building these statistical representations of the background and the foreground. These techniques estimate the pdf directly from the data without any assumptions about the underlying distributions. Example results from applications are presented.

Inferring 3D body pose from silhouettes using activity manifold learning

Abstract: We aim to infer 3D body pose directly from human silhouettes. Given a visual input (silhouette), the objective is to recover the intrinsic body configuration, recover the viewpoint, reconstruct the input and detect any spatial or temporal outliers. In order to recover intrinsic body configuration (pose) from the visual input (silhouette), we explicitly learn view-based representations of activity manifolds as well as learn mapping functions between such central representations and both the visual input space and the 3D body pose space. The body pose can be recovered in a closed form in two steps by projecting the visual input to the learned representations of the activity manifold, i.e., finding the point on the learned manifold representation corresponding to the visual input, followed by interpolating 3D pose.

A Generative Adversarial Approach for Zero-Shot Learning from Noisy Texts

Abstract: Most existing zero-shot learning methods consider the problem as a visual semantic embedding one. Given the demonstrated capability of Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs) to generate images, we instead leverage GANs to imagine unseen categories from text descriptions and hence recognize novel classes with no examples being seen. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective generative model that takes as input noisy text descriptions about an unseen class (e.g. Wikipedia articles) and generates synthesized visual features for this class. With added pseudo data, zero-shot learning is naturally converted to a traditional classification problem. Additionally, to preserve the inter-class discrimination of the generated features, a visual pivot regularization is proposed as an explicit supervision. Unlike previous methods using complex engineered regularizers, our approach can suppress the noise well without additional regularization. Empirically, we show that our method consistently outperforms the state of the art on the largest available benchmarks on Text-based Zero-shot Learning.

Write a Classifier: Zero-Shot Learning Using Purely Textual Descriptions

Abstract: The main question we address in this paper is how to use purely textual description of categories with no training images to learn visual classifiers for these categories. We propose an approach for zero-shot learning of object categories where the description of unseen categories comes in the form of typical text such as an encyclopedia entry, without the need to explicitly defined attributes. We propose and investigate two baseline formulations, based on regression and domain adaptation. Then, we propose a new constrained optimization formulation that combines a regression function and a knowledge transfer function with additional constraints to predict the classifier parameters for new classes. We applied the proposed approach on two fine-grained categorization datasets, and the results indicate successful classifier prediction.

Mean shift: a robust approach toward feature space analysis

Abstract: A general non-parametric technique is proposed for the analysis of a complex multimodal feature space and to delineate arbitrarily shaped clusters in it. The basic computational module of the technique is an old pattern recognition procedure: the mean shift. For discrete data, we prove the convergence of a recursive mean shift procedure to the nearest stationary point of the underlying density function and, thus, its utility in detecting the modes of the density. The relation of the mean shift procedure to the Nadaraya-Watson estimator from kernel regression and the robust M-estimators; of location is also established. Algorithms for two low-level vision tasks discontinuity-preserving smoothing and image segmentation - are described as applications. In these algorithms, the only user-set parameter is the resolution of the analysis, and either gray-level or color images are accepted as input. Extensive experimental results illustrate their excellent performance.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Abstract: Probability Distributions.- Linear Models for Regression.- Linear Models for Classification.- Neural Networks.- Kernel Methods.- Sparse Kernel Machines.- Graphical Models.- Mixture Models and EM.- Approximate Inference.- Sampling Methods.- Continuous Latent Variables.- Sequential Data.- Combining Models.

Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning

Abstract: We propose Prototypical Networks for the problem of few-shot classification, where a classifier must generalize to new classes not seen in the training set, given only a small number of examples of each new class. Prototypical Networks learn a metric space in which classification can be performed by computing distances to prototype representations of each class. Compared to recent approaches for few-shot learning, they reflect a simpler inductive bias that is beneficial in this limited-data regime, and achieve excellent results. We provide an analysis showing that some simple design decisions can yield substantial improvements over recent approaches involving complicated architectural choices and meta-learning. We further extend Prototypical Networks to zero-shot learning and achieve state-of-the-art results on the CU-Birds dataset.

Object tracking: A survey

Abstract: The goal of this article is to review the state-of-the-art tracking methods, classify them into different categories, and identify new trends. Object tracking, in general, is a challenging problem. Difficulties in tracking objects can arise due to abrupt object motion, changing appearance patterns of both the object and the scene, nonrigid object structures, object-to-object and object-to-scene occlusions, and camera motion. Tracking is usually performed in the context of higher-level applications that require the location and/or shape of the object in every frame. Typically, assumptions are made to constrain the tracking problem in the context of a particular application. In this survey, we categorize the tracking methods on the basis of the object and motion representations used, provide detailed descriptions of representative methods in each category, and examine their pros and cons. Moreover, we discuss the important issues related to tracking including the use of appropriate image features, selection of motion models, and detection of objects.

Kernel-based object tracking

Abstract: A new approach toward target representation and localization, the central component in visual tracking of nonrigid objects, is proposed. The feature histogram-based target representations are regularized by spatial masking with an isotropic kernel. The masking induces spatially-smooth similarity functions suitable for gradient-based optimization, hence, the target localization problem can be formulated using the basin of attraction of the local maxima. We employ a metric derived from the Bhattacharyya coefficient as similarity measure, and use the mean shift procedure to perform the optimization. In the presented tracking examples, the new method successfully coped with camera motion, partial occlusions, clutter, and target scale variations. Integration with motion filters and data association techniques is also discussed. We describe only a few of the potential applications: exploitation of background information, Kalman tracking using motion models, and face tracking.