Junsong Yuan

Bio: Junsong Yuan is an academic researcher from University at Buffalo. The author has contributed to research in topics: Computer science & Object detection. The author has an hindex of 59, co-authored 401 publications receiving 15651 citations. Previous affiliations of Junsong Yuan include Zhejiang University & Northwestern University.

Mining actionlet ensemble for action recognition with depth cameras

Abstract: Human action recognition is an important yet challenging task. The recently developed commodity depth sensors open up new possibilities of dealing with this problem but also present some unique challenges. The depth maps captured by the depth cameras are very noisy and the 3D positions of the tracked joints may be completely wrong if serious occlusions occur, which increases the intra-class variations in the actions. In this paper, an actionlet ensemble model is learnt to represent each action and to capture the intra-class variance. In addition, novel features that are suitable for depth data are proposed. They are robust to noise, invariant to translational and temporal misalignments, and capable of characterizing both the human motion and the human-object interactions. The proposed approach is evaluated on two challenging action recognition datasets captured by commodity depth cameras, and another dataset captured by a MoCap system. The experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach achieves superior performance to the state of the art algorithms.

Sparse reconstruction cost for abnormal event detection

Abstract: We propose to detect abnormal events via a sparse reconstruction over the normal bases. Given an over-complete normal basis set (e.g., an image sequence or a collection of local spatio-temporal patches), we introduce the sparse reconstruction cost (SRC) over the normal dictionary to measure the normalness of the testing sample. To condense the size of the dictionary, a novel dictionary selection method is designed with sparsity consistency constraint. By introducing the prior weight of each basis during sparse reconstruction, the proposed SRC is more robust compared to other outlier detection criteria. Our method provides a unified solution to detect both local abnormal events (LAE) and global abnormal events (GAE). We further extend it to support online abnormal event detection by updating the dictionary incrementally. Experiments on three benchmark datasets and the comparison to the state-of-the-art methods validate the advantages of our algorithm.

Robust Part-Based Hand Gesture Recognition Using Kinect Sensor

Abstract: The recently developed depth sensors, e.g., the Kinect sensor, have provided new opportunities for human-computer interaction (HCI). Although great progress has been made by leveraging the Kinect sensor, e.g., in human body tracking, face recognition and human action recognition, robust hand gesture recognition remains an open problem. Compared to the entire human body, the hand is a smaller object with more complex articulations and more easily affected by segmentation errors. It is thus a very challenging problem to recognize hand gestures. This paper focuses on building a robust part-based hand gesture recognition system using Kinect sensor. To handle the noisy hand shapes obtained from the Kinect sensor, we propose a novel distance metric, Finger-Earth Mover's Distance (FEMD), to measure the dissimilarity between hand shapes. As it only matches the finger parts while not the whole hand, it can better distinguish the hand gestures of slight differences. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our hand gesture recognition system is accurate (a 93.2% mean accuracy on a challenging 10-gesture dataset), efficient (average 0.0750 s per frame), robust to hand articulations, distortions and orientation or scale changes, and can work in uncontrolled environments (cluttered backgrounds and lighting conditions). The superiority of our system is further demonstrated in two real-life HCI applications.

Learning Actionlet Ensemble for 3D Human Action Recognition

Abstract: Human action recognition is an important yet challenging task. Human actions usually involve human-object interactions, highly articulated motions, high intra-class variations, and complicated temporal structures. The recently developed commodity depth sensors open up new possibilities of dealing with this problem by providing 3D depth data of the scene. This information not only facilitates a rather powerful human motion capturing technique, but also makes it possible to efficiently model human-object interactions and intra-class variations. In this paper, we propose to characterize the human actions with a novel actionlet ensemble model, which represents the interaction of a subset of human joints. The proposed model is robust to noise, invariant to translational and temporal misalignment, and capable of characterizing both the human motion and the human-object interactions. We evaluate the proposed approach on three challenging action recognition datasets captured by Kinect devices, a multiview action recognition dataset captured with Kinect device, and a dataset captured by a motion capture system. The experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Robust hand gesture recognition based on finger-earth mover's distance with a commodity depth camera

Abstract: The recently developed depth sensors, e.g., the Kinect sensor, have provided new opportunities for human-computer interaction (HCI). Although great progress has been made by leveraging the Kinect sensor, e.g. in human body tracking and body gesture recognition, robust hand gesture recognition remains an open problem. Compared to the entire human body, the hand is a smaller object with more complex articulations and more easily affected by segmentation errors. It is thus a very challenging problem to recognize hand gestures. This paper focuses on building a robust hand gesture recognition system using the Kinect sensor. To handle the noisy hand shape obtained from the Kinect sensor, we propose a novel distance metric for hand dissimilarity measure, called Finger-Earth Mover's Distance (FEMD). As it only matches fingers while not the whole hand shape, it can better distinguish hand gestures of slight differences. The extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of our hand gesture recognition system.

Going deeper with convolutions

Abstract: We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.

Machine learning

Abstract: 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.).