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.

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning

Visual understanding of complex urban street scenes is an enabling factor for a wide range of applications. Object detection has benefited enormously from large-scale datasets, especially in the context of deep learning. For semantic urban scene understanding, however, no current dataset adequately captures the complexity of real-world urban scenes. To address this, we introduce Cityscapes, a benchmark suite and large-scale dataset to train and test approaches for pixel-level and instance-level semantic labeling. Cityscapes is comprised of a large, diverse set of stereo video sequences recorded in streets from 50 different cities. 5000 of these images have high quality pixel-level annotations, 20 000 additional images have coarse annotations to enable methods that leverage large volumes of weakly-labeled data. Crucially, our effort exceeds previous attempts in terms of dataset size, annotation richness, scene variability, and complexity. Our accompanying empirical study provides an in-depth analysis of the dataset characteristics, as well as a performance evaluation of several state-of-the-art approaches based on our benchmark.

https://www.cityscapes-dataset.com/wordpress/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/cordts2016cityscapes.pdf

The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding

The Pascal Visual Object Classes (VOC) challenge consists of two components: (i) a publicly available dataset of images together with ground truth annotation and standardised evaluation software; and (ii) an annual competition and workshop. There are five challenges: classification, detection, segmentation, action classification, and person layout. In this paper we provide a review of the challenge from 2008---2012. The paper is intended for two audiences: algorithm designers, researchers who want to see what the state of the art is, as measured by performance on the VOC datasets, along with the limitations and weak points of the current generation of algorithms; and, challenge designers, who want to see what we as organisers have learnt from the process and our recommendations for the organisation of future challenges. To analyse the performance of submitted algorithms on the VOC datasets we introduce a number of novel evaluation methods: a bootstrapping method for determining whether differences in the performance of two algorithms are significant or not; a normalised average precision so that performance can be compared across classes with different proportions of positive instances; a clustering method for visualising the performance across multiple algorithms so that the hard and easy images can be identified; and the use of a joint classifier over the submitted algorithms in order to measure their complementarity and combined performance. We also analyse the community's progress through time using the methods of Hoiem et al. (Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision, 2012) to identify the types of occurring errors. We conclude the paper with an appraisal of the aspects of the challenge that worked well, and those that could be improved in future challenges.

/pdf/the-pascal-visual-object-classes-challenge-a-retrospective-28ab0g4997.pdf

The Pascal Visual Object Classes Challenge: A Retrospective

This paper addresses the problem of generating possible object locations for use in object recognition. We introduce selective search which combines the strength of both an exhaustive search and segmentation. Like segmentation, we use the image structure to guide our sampling process. Like exhaustive search, we aim to capture all possible object locations. Instead of a single technique to generate possible object locations, we diversify our search and use a variety of complementary image partitionings to deal with as many image conditions as possible. Our selective search results in a small set of data-driven, class-independent, high quality locations, yielding 99 % recall and a Mean Average Best Overlap of 0.879 at 10,097 locations. The reduced number of locations compared to an exhaustive search enables the use of stronger machine learning techniques and stronger appearance models for object recognition. In this paper we show that our selective search enables the use of the powerful Bag-of-Words model for recognition. The selective search software is made publicly available (Software: http://disi.unitn.it/~uijlings/SelectiveSearch.html ).

/pdf/selective-search-for-object-recognition-3yqeb0u837.pdf

Selective Search for Object Recognition

The PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge

This paper revisits the classical multiple hypotheses tracking (MHT) algorithm in a tracking-by-detection framework. The success of MHT largely depends on the ability to maintain a small list of potential hypotheses, which can be facilitated with the accurate object detectors that are currently available. We demonstrate that a classical MHT implementation from the 90's can come surprisingly close to the performance of state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmark datasets. In order to further utilize the strength of MHT in exploiting higher-order information, we introduce a method for training online appearance models for each track hypothesis. We show that appearance models can be learned efficiently via a regularized least squares framework, requiring only a few extra operations for each hypothesis branch. We obtain state-of-the-art results on popular tracking-by-detection datasets such as PETS and the recent MOT challenge.

/pdf/multiple-hypothesis-tracking-revisited-yvhzsvutic.pdf

Multiple Hypothesis Tracking Revisited

We propose an unsupervised video segmentation approach by simultaneously tracking multiple holistic figure-ground segments. Segment tracks are initialized from a pool of segment proposals generated from a figure-ground segmentation algorithm. Then, online non-local appearance models are trained incrementally for each track using a multi-output regularized least squares formulation. By using the same set of training examples for all segment tracks, a computational trick allows us to track hundreds of segment tracks efficiently, as well as perform optimal online updates in closed-form. Besides, a new composite statistical inference approach is proposed for refining the obtained segment tracks, which breaks down the initial segment proposals and recombines for better ones by utilizing high-order statistic estimates from the appearance model and enforcing temporal consistency. For evaluating the algorithm, a dataset, SegTrack v2, is collected with about 1,000 frames with pixel-level annotations. The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in the dataset, showing its efficiency and robustness to challenges in different video sequences.

/pdf/video-segmentation-by-tracking-many-figure-ground-segments-44yp80h081.pdf

Video Segmentation by Tracking Many Figure-Ground Segments

Deep learning has greatly improved visual recognition in recent years. However, recent research has shown that there exist many adversarial examples that can negatively impact the performance of such an architecture. This paper focuses on detecting those adversarial examples by analyzing whether they come from the same distribution as the normal examples. Instead of directly training a deep neural network to detect adversarials, a much simpler approach was proposed based on statistics on outputs from convolutional layers. A cascade classifier was designed to efficiently detect adversarials. Furthermore, trained from one particular adversarial generating mechanism, the resulting classifier can successfully detect adversarials from a completely different mechanism as well. The resulting classifier is non-subdifferentiable, hence creates a difficulty for adversaries to attack by using the gradient of the classifier. After detecting adversarial examples, we show that many of them can be recovered by simply performing a small average filter on the image. Those findings should lead to more insights about the classification mechanisms in deep convolutional neural networks.

Adversarial Examples Detection in Deep Networks with Convolutional Filter Statistics

In open set recognition, a classifier must label instances of known classes while detecting instances of unknown classes not encountered during training. To detect unknown classes while still generalizing to new instances of existing classes, we introduce a dataset augmentation technique that we call counterfactual image generation. Our approach, based on generative adversarial networks, generates examples that are close to training set examples yet do not belong to any training category. By augmenting training with examples generated by this optimization, we can reformulate open set recognition as classification with one additional class, which includes the set of novel and unknown examples. Our approach outperforms existing open set recognition algorithms on a selection of image classification tasks.

/pdf/open-set-learning-with-counterfactual-images-35xirlmf1p.pdf

Open Set Learning with Counterfactual Images.

We present an approach for joint inference of 3D scene structure and semantic labeling for monocular video. Starting with monocular image stream, our framework produces a 3D volumetric semantic + occupancy map, which is much more useful than a series of 2D semantic label images or a sparse point cloud produced by traditional semantic segmentation and Structure from Motion(SfM) pipelines respectively. We derive a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model defined in the 3D space, that jointly infers the semantic category and occupancy for each voxel. Such a joint inference in the 3D CRF paves the way for more informed priors and constraints, which is otherwise not possible if solved separately in their traditional frameworks. We make use of class specific semantic cues that constrain the 3D structure in areas, where multiview constraints are weak. Our model comprises of higher order factors, which helps when the depth is unobservable.We also make use of class specific semantic cues to reduce either the degree of such higher order factors, or to approximately model them with unaries if possible. We demonstrate improved 3D structure and temporally consistent semantic segmentation for difficult, large scale, forward moving monocular image sequences.

/pdf/joint-semantic-segmentation-and-3d-reconstruction-from-4y1gkndp5e.pdf

Fuxin Li

Papers

Multiple Hypothesis Tracking Revisited

Video Segmentation by Tracking Many Figure-Ground Segments

Adversarial Examples Detection in Deep Networks with Convolutional Filter Statistics

Open Set Learning with Counterfactual Images.

Joint Semantic Segmentation and 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Video