There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

Presents a review of 200 references in content-based image retrieval. The paper starts with discussing the working conditions of content-based retrieval: patterns of use, types of pictures, the role of semantics, and the sensory gap. Subsequent sections discuss computational steps for image retrieval systems. Step one of the review is image processing for retrieval sorted by color, texture, and local geometry. Features for retrieval are discussed next, sorted by: accumulative and global features, salient points, object and shape features, signs, and structural combinations thereof. Similarity of pictures and objects in pictures is reviewed for each of the feature types, in close connection to the types and means of feedback the user of the systems is capable of giving by interaction. We briefly discuss aspects of system engineering: databases, system architecture, and evaluation. In the concluding section, we present our view on: the driving force of the field, the heritage from computer vision, the influence on computer vision, the role of similarity and of interaction, the need for databases, the problem of evaluation, and the role of the semantic gap.

/pdf/content-based-image-retrieval-at-the-end-of-the-early-years-q45iy9ejai.pdf

Content-based image retrieval at the end of the early years

One of the main challenges in feature learning using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) for large-scale face recognition is the design of appropriate loss functions that can enhance the discriminative power. Centre loss penalises the distance between deep features and their corresponding class centres in the Euclidean space to achieve intra-class compactness. SphereFace assumes that the linear transformation matrix in the last fully connected layer can be used as a representation of the class centres in the angular space and therefore penalises the angles between deep features and their corresponding weights in a multiplicative way. Recently, a popular line of research is to incorporate margins in well-established loss functions in order to maximise face class separability. In this paper, we propose an Additive Angular Margin Loss (ArcFace) to obtain highly discriminative features for face recognition. The proposed ArcFace has a clear geometric interpretation due to its exact correspondence to geodesic distance on a hypersphere. We present arguably the most extensive experimental evaluation against all recent state-of-the-art face recognition methods on ten face recognition benchmarks which includes a new large-scale image database with trillions of pairs and a large-scale video dataset. We show that ArcFace consistently outperforms the state of the art and can be easily implemented with negligible computational overhead. To facilitate future research, the code has been made available.

/pdf/arcface-additive-angular-margin-loss-for-deep-face-7vvlem659h.pdf

ArcFace: Additive Angular Margin Loss for Deep Face Recognition

We have witnessed great interest and a wealth of promise in content-based image retrieval as an emerging technology. While the last decade laid foundation to such promise, it also paved the way for a large number of new techniques and systems, got many new people involved, and triggered stronger association of weakly related fields. In this article, we survey almost 300 key theoretical and empirical contributions in the current decade related to image retrieval and automatic image annotation, and in the process discuss the spawning of related subfields. We also discuss significant challenges involved in the adaptation of existing image retrieval techniques to build systems that can be useful in the real world. In retrospect of what has been achieved so far, we also conjecture what the future may hold for image retrieval research.

/pdf/image-retrieval-ideas-influences-and-trends-of-the-new-age-51whw4w7su.pdf

Image retrieval: Ideas, influences, and trends of the new age

1 Visual Information Retrieval 2 Image Retrieval by Color Similarity 3 Image Retrieval by Texture Similarity 4 Image Retrieval by Shape Similarity 5 Image Retrieval by Spatial Relationships 6 Content-Based Video Retrieval

Visual Information Retrieval

Recognizing human actions in 3-D video sequences is an important open problem that is currently at the heart of many research domains including surveillance, natural interfaces and rehabilitation. However, the design and development of models for action recognition that are both accurate and efficient is a challenging task due to the variability of the human pose, clothing and appearance. In this paper, we propose a new framework to extract a compact representation of a human action captured through a depth sensor, and enable accurate action recognition. The proposed solution develops on fitting a human skeleton model to acquired data so as to represent the 3-D coordinates of the joints and their change over time as a trajectory in a suitable action space. Thanks to such a 3-D joint-based framework, the proposed solution is capable to capture both the shape and the dynamics of the human body, simultaneously. The action recognition problem is then formulated as the problem of computing the similarity between the shape of trajectories in a Riemannian manifold. Classification using k-nearest neighbors is finally performed on this manifold taking advantage of Riemannian geometry in the open curve shape space. Experiments are carried out on four representative benchmarks to demonstrate the potential of the proposed solution in terms of accuracy/latency for a low-latency action recognition. Comparative results with state-of-the-art methods are reported.

/pdf/3-d-human-action-recognition-by-shape-analysis-of-motion-1q1y6vl5nk.pdf

3-D Human Action Recognition by Shape Analysis of Motion Trajectories on Riemannian Manifold

In this paper we introduce a method for person re-identification based on discriminative, sparse basis expansions of targets in terms of a labeled gallery of known individuals. We propose an iterative extension to sparse discriminative classifiers capable of ranking many candidate targets. The approach makes use of soft- and hard- re-weighting to redistribute energy among the most relevant contributing elements and to ensure that the best candidates are ranked at each iteration. Our approach also leverages a novel visual descriptor which we show to be discriminative while remaining robust to pose and illumination variations. An extensive comparative evaluation is given demonstrating that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on single- and multi-shot person re-identification scenarios on the VIPeR, i-LIDS, ETHZ, and CAVIAR4REID datasets. The combination of our descriptor and iterative sparse basis expansion improves state-of-the-art rank-1 performance by six percentage points on VIPeR and by 20 on CAVIAR4REID compared to other methods with a single gallery image per person. With multiple gallery and probe images per person our approach improves by 17 percentage points the state-of-the-art on i-LIDS and by 72 on CAVIAR4REID at rank-1. The approach is also quite efficient, capable of single-shot person re-identification over galleries containing hundreds of individuals at about 30 re-identifications per second.

/pdf/person-re-identification-by-iterative-re-weighted-sparse-4nnnw46b0v.pdf

Person Re-Identification by Iterative Re-Weighted Sparse Ranking

http://www.micc.unifi.it/bertini/download/papers/cviu2003-pp.pdf

Semantic annotation of soccer videos: automatic highlights identification

Understanding if a digital image is authentic or not, is a key purpose of image forensics. There are several different tampering attacks but, surely, one of the most common and immediate one is copy-move. A recent and effective approach for detecting copy-move forgeries is to use local visual features such as SIFT. In this kind of methods, SIFT matching is often followed by a clustering procedure to group keypoints that are spatially close. Often, this procedure could be unsatisfactory, in particular in those cases in which the copied patch contains pixels that are spatially very distant among them, and when the pasted area is near to the original source. In such cases, a better estimation of the cloned area is necessary in order to obtain an accurate forgery localization. In this paper a novel approach is presented for copy-move forgery detection and localization based on the JLinkage algorithm, which performs a robust clustering in the space of the geometric transformation. Experimental results, carried out on different datasets, show that the proposed method outperforms other similar state-of-the-art techniques both in terms of copy-move forgery detection reliability and of precision in the manipulated patch localization.

/pdf/copy-move-forgery-detection-and-localization-by-means-of-5exk9p4ve9.pdf

Alberto Del Bimbo

Papers

Visual Information Retrieval

3-D Human Action Recognition by Shape Analysis of Motion Trajectories on Riemannian Manifold

Person Re-Identification by Iterative Re-Weighted Sparse Ranking

Semantic annotation of soccer videos: automatic highlights identification

Copy-move forgery detection and localization by means of robust clustering with J-Linkage