Luc Van Gool

Bio: Luc Van Gool is an academic researcher from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The author has contributed to research in topics: Computer science & Object detection. The author has an hindex of 133, co-authored 1307 publications receiving 107743 citations. Previous affiliations of Luc Van Gool include Microsoft & ETH Zurich.

The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation

Abstract: We present the 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation, a public dataset, benchmark, and competition specifically designed for the task of video object segmentation. Following the footsteps of other successful initiatives, such as ILSVRC and PASCAL VOC, which established the avenue of research in the fields of scene classification and semantic segmentation, the DAVIS Challenge comprises a dataset, an evaluation methodology, and a public competition with a dedicated workshop co-located with CVPR 2017. The DAVIS Challenge follows up on the recent publication of DAVIS (Densely-Annotated VIdeo Segmentation), which has fostered the development of several novel state-of-the-art video object segmentation techniques. In this paper we describe the scope of the benchmark, highlight the main characteristics of the dataset, define the evaluation metrics of the competition, and present a detailed analysis of the results of the participants to the challenge.

Robust tracking-by-detection using a detector confidence particle filter

Abstract: We propose a novel approach for multi-person tracking-by-detection in a particle filtering framework In addition to final high-confidence detections, our algorithm uses the continuous confidence of pedestrian detectors and online trained, instance-specific classifiers as a graded observation model Thus, generic object category knowledge is complemented by instance-specific information A main contribution of this paper is the exploration of how these unreliable information sources can be used for multi-person tracking The resulting algorithm robustly tracks a large number of dynamically moving persons in complex scenes with occlusions, does not rely on background modeling, and operates entirely in 2D (requiring no camera or ground plane calibration) Our Markovian approach relies only on information from the past and is suitable for online applications We evaluate the performance on a variety of datasets and show that it improves upon state-of-the-art methods

Pedestrian detection at 100 frames per second

Abstract: We present a new pedestrian detector that improves both in speed and quality over state-of-the-art. By efficiently handling different scales and transferring computation from test time to training time, detection speed is improved. When processing monocular images, our system provides high quality detections at 50 fps. We also propose a new method for exploiting geometric context extracted from stereo images. On a single CPU+GPU desktop machine, we reach 135 fps, when processing street scenes, from rectified input to detections output.

DEX: Deep EXpectation of Apparent Age from a Single Image

Abstract: In this paper we tackle the estimation of apparent age in still face images with deep learning. Our convolutional neural networks (CNNs) use the VGG-16 architecture [13] and are pretrained on ImageNet for image classification. In addition, due to the limited number of apparent age annotated images, we explore the benefit of finetuning over crawled Internet face images with available age. We crawled 0.5 million images of celebrities from IMDB and Wikipedia that we make public. This is the largest public dataset for age prediction to date. We pose the age regression problem as a deep classification problem followed by a softmax expected value refinement and show improvements over direct regression training of CNNs. Our proposed method, Deep EXpectation (DEX) of apparent age, first detects the face in the test image and then extracts the CNN predictions from an ensemble of 20 networks on the cropped face. The CNNs of DEX were finetuned on the crawled images and then on the provided images with apparent age annotations. DEX does not use explicit facial landmarks. Our DEX is the winner (1st place) of the ChaLearn LAP 2015 challenge on apparent age estimation with 115 registered teams, significantly outperforming the human reference.

Creating Summaries from User Videos

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel approach and a new benchmark for video summarization. Thereby we focus on user videos, which are raw videos containing a set of interesting events. Our method starts by segmenting the video by using a novel “superframe” segmentation, tailored to raw videos. Then, we estimate visual interestingness per superframe using a set of low-, mid- and high-level features. Based on this scoring, we select an optimal subset of superframes to create an informative and interesting summary. The introduced benchmark comes with multiple human created summaries, which were acquired in a controlled psychological experiment. This data paves the way to evaluate summarization methods objectively and to get new insights in video summarization. When evaluating our method, we find that it generates high-quality results, comparable to manual, human-created summaries.

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.

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---8x deeper than VGG nets 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 competitions, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

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.