Andrew Zisserman

Bio: Andrew Zisserman is an academic researcher from University of Oxford. The author has contributed to research in topics: Real image & Convolutional neural network. The author has an hindex of 167, co-authored 808 publications receiving 261717 citations. Previous affiliations of Andrew Zisserman include University of Edinburgh & Microsoft.

Of Gods and Goats: Weakly Supervised Learning of Figurative Art

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to automatically annotate images of gods and animals in decorations on classical Greek vases. Such images often require expert knowledge in labelling. We start from a large dataset of images of vases with associated brief text descriptions. We develop a weakly supervised learning approach to solve the correspondence problem between the descriptions and unknown image regions. The approach progressively strengthens the supervision so that eventually a Deformable Part Model (DPM) sliding window detector can be learnt (for each god/animal) and used to annotate all vases by detection. There are two key steps: first, text mining the vase descriptions to obtain clusters for each god where there is a visual consistency between at least a subset of the images; and second, discriminatively searching within these clusters for consistent regions that are used as positive training examples for the DPM. The method successfully annotates a large variety of Gods and other animals, and we include a quantitative evaluation over hundreds of images.

LSD-C: Linearly Separable Deep Clusters

Abstract: We present LSD-C, a novel method to identify clusters in an unlabeled dataset Our algorithm first establishes pairwise connections in the feature space between the samples of the minibatch based on a similarity metric Then it regroups in clusters the connected samples and enforces a linear separation between clusters This is achieved by using the pairwise connections as targets together with a binary cross-entropy loss on the predictions that the associated pairs of samples belong to the same cluster This way, the feature representation of the network will evolve such that similar samples in this feature space will belong to the same linearly separated cluster Our method draws inspiration from recent semi-supervised learning practice and proposes to combine our clustering algorithm with self-supervised pretraining and strong data augmentation We show that our approach significantly outperforms competitors on popular public image benchmarks including CIFAR 10/100, STL 10 and MNIST, as well as the document classification dataset Reuters 10K

Automated audiovisual behavior recognition in wild primates.

Abstract: Large video datasets of wild animal behavior are crucial to produce longitudinal research and accelerate conservation efforts; however, large-scale behavior analyses continue to be severely constra...

Deep Frank-Wolfe For Neural Network Optimization

Abstract: Learning a deep neural network requires solving a challenging optimization problem: it is a high-dimensional, non-convex and non-smooth minimization problem with a large number of terms. The current practice in neural network optimization is to rely on the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm or its adaptive variants. However, SGD requires a hand-designed schedule for the learning rate. In addition, its adaptive variants tend to produce solutions that generalize less well on unseen data than SGD with a hand-designed schedule. We present an optimization method that offers empirically the best of both worlds: our algorithm yields good generalization performance while requiring only one hyper-parameter. Our approach is based on a composite proximal framework, which exploits the compositional nature of deep neural networks and can leverage powerful convex optimization algorithms by design. Specifically, we employ the Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm for SVM, which computes an optimal step-size in closed-form at each time-step. We further show that the descent direction is given by a simple backward pass in the network, yielding the same computational cost per iteration as SGD. We present experiments on the CIFAR and SNLI data sets, where we demonstrate the significant superiority of our method over Adam, Adagrad, as well as the recently proposed BPGrad and AMSGrad. Furthermore, we compare our algorithm to SGD with a hand-designed learning rate schedule, and show that it provides similar generalization while converging faster. The code is publicly available at this https URL.

Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition

Abstract: Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers—8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

Abstract: In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition

Abstract: In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database

Abstract: The explosion of image data on the Internet has the potential to foster more sophisticated and robust models and algorithms to index, retrieve, organize and interact with images and multimedia data. But exactly how such data can be harnessed and organized remains a critical problem. We introduce here a new database called “ImageNet”, a large-scale ontology of images built upon the backbone of the WordNet structure. ImageNet aims to populate the majority of the 80,000 synsets of WordNet with an average of 500-1000 clean and full resolution images. This will result in tens of millions of annotated images organized by the semantic hierarchy of WordNet. This paper offers a detailed analysis of ImageNet in its current state: 12 subtrees with 5247 synsets and 3.2 million images in total. We show that ImageNet is much larger in scale and diversity and much more accurate than the current image datasets. Constructing such a large-scale database is a challenging task. We describe the data collection scheme with Amazon Mechanical Turk. Lastly, we illustrate the usefulness of ImageNet through three simple applications in object recognition, image classification and automatic object clustering. We hope that the scale, accuracy, diversity and hierarchical structure of ImageNet can offer unparalleled opportunities to researchers in the computer vision community and beyond.

U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation

Abstract: There is large consent that successful training of deep networks requires many thousand annotated training samples. In this paper, we present a network and training strategy that relies on the strong use of data augmentation to use the available annotated samples more efficiently. The architecture consists of a contracting path to capture context and a symmetric expanding path that enables precise localization. We show that such a network can be trained end-to-end from very few images and outperforms the prior best method (a sliding-window convolutional network) on the ISBI challenge for segmentation of neuronal structures in electron microscopic stacks. Using the same network trained on transmitted light microscopy images (phase contrast and DIC) we won the ISBI cell tracking challenge 2015 in these categories by a large margin. Moreover, the network is fast. Segmentation of a 512x512 image takes less than a second on a recent GPU. The full implementation (based on Caffe) and the trained networks are available at http://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/people/ronneber/u-net .