We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network predicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detectors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is less likely to predict false positives on background. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, when generalizing from natural images to other domains like artwork.

/pdf/you-only-look-once-unified-real-time-object-detection-3gan6roe1o.pdf

You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection

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

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

We consider the problem of automatically recognizing human faces from frontal views with varying expression and illumination, as well as occlusion and disguise. We cast the recognition problem as one of classifying among multiple linear regression models and argue that new theory from sparse signal representation offers the key to addressing this problem. Based on a sparse representation computed by C1-minimization, we propose a general classification algorithm for (image-based) object recognition. This new framework provides new insights into two crucial issues in face recognition: feature extraction and robustness to occlusion. For feature extraction, we show that if sparsity in the recognition problem is properly harnessed, the choice of features is no longer critical. What is critical, however, is whether the number of features is sufficiently large and whether the sparse representation is correctly computed. Unconventional features such as downsampled images and random projections perform just as well as conventional features such as eigenfaces and Laplacianfaces, as long as the dimension of the feature space surpasses certain threshold, predicted by the theory of sparse representation. This framework can handle errors due to occlusion and corruption uniformly by exploiting the fact that these errors are often sparse with respect to the standard (pixel) basis. The theory of sparse representation helps predict how much occlusion the recognition algorithm can handle and how to choose the training images to maximize robustness to occlusion. We conduct extensive experiments on publicly available databases to verify the efficacy of the proposed algorithm and corroborate the above claims.

/pdf/robust-face-recognition-via-sparse-representation-4bfqv6y74o.pdf

Robust Face Recognition via Sparse Representation

Computational single-cell RNA-seq (scRNA-seq) methods have been successfully applied to experiments representing a single condition, technology, or species to discover and define cellular phenotypes. However, identifying subpopulations of cells that are present across multiple data sets remains challenging. Here, we introduce an analytical strategy for integrating scRNA-seq data sets based on common sources of variation, enabling the identification of shared populations across data sets and downstream comparative analysis. We apply this approach, implemented in our R toolkit Seurat (http://satijalab.org/seurat/), to align scRNA-seq data sets of peripheral blood mononuclear cells under resting and stimulated conditions, hematopoietic progenitors sequenced using two profiling technologies, and pancreatic cell 'atlases' generated from human and mouse islets. In each case, we learn distinct or transitional cell states jointly across data sets, while boosting statistical power through integrated analysis. Our approach facilitates general comparisons of scRNA-seq data sets, potentially deepening our understanding of how distinct cell states respond to perturbation, disease, and evolution.

/pdf/integrating-single-cell-transcriptomic-data-across-different-3dtsi5w7ob.pdf

Integrating single-cell transcriptomic data across different conditions, technologies, and species.

This paper presents a method for detecting corner points on 3D space curves. It is an extension of a previous work of distance accumulation for detecting corner points on 2D planar curves.6•7 A quantitative measure is proposed to define the "cornerness" of a 3D curve at a curve point, which has the advantage of being more stable and causing much less shape distortion than the traditional smoothing methods. In particular, this measure is invariant to scale, an attractive property for corner detection. Strategies are presented for reliable maximum selection. Experimental results with simulated data shows that the robustness and accuracy of the cornerness method. 

Keywords - Corner detection, curvature, distance accumulation, maxima selection, curve representation, 3D curves.

Detection of corners on 3D space curves

In this letter, we focus on how to boost the performance of person re-identification by exploring the discriminative information among person pairs. A novel dependence-aware feature coding framework is proposed for this task. Specifically, we employ the Hilbert–Schmidt independence criterion as the discriminative term, which is to explore the dependence between different kinds of person pairs, i.e., the same person pairs should be dependence maximized, while the different ones should be dependence minimized. Theoretical discussion and analysis on the convexity of the proposed constraint, as well as the convergence of our algorithm, are provided. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets have demonstrated the advantages of our method over the state-of-the-art alternatives.

Dependence-Aware Feature Coding for Person Re-Identification

Although the anchor-based detectors have taken a big step forward in pedestrian detection, the overall performance of algorithm still needs further improvement for practical applications, \emph{e.g.}, a good trade-off between the accuracy and efficiency. To this end, this paper proposes a series of systematic optimization strategies for the detection pipeline of one-stage detector, forming a single shot anchor-based detector (SADet) for efficient and accurate pedestrian detection, which includes three main improvements. Firstly, we optimize the sample generation process by assigning soft tags to the outlier samples to generate semi-positive samples with continuous tag value between $0$ and $1$, which not only produces more valid samples, but also strengthens the robustness of the model. Secondly, a novel Center-$IoU$ loss is applied as a new regression loss for bounding box regression, which not only retains the good characteristics of IoU loss, but also solves some defects of it. Thirdly, we also design Cosine-NMS for the postprocess of predicted bounding boxes, and further propose adaptive anchor matching to enable the model to adaptively match the anchor boxes to full or visible bounding boxes according to the degree of occlusion, making the NMS and anchor matching algorithms more suitable for occluded pedestrian detection. Though structurally simple, it presents state-of-the-art result and real-time speed of $20$ FPS for VGA-resolution images ($640 \times 480$) on challenging pedestrian detection benchmarks, i.e., CityPersons, Caltech, and human detection benchmark CrowdHuman, leading to a new attractive pedestrian detector.

SADet: Learning An Efficient and Accurate Pedestrian Detector

Pedestrian detection in crowded scenes is a challenging problem, because occlusion happens frequently among different pedestrians. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient detection network to hunt pedestrians in crowd scenes. The proposed method, namely PedHunter, introduces strong occlusion handling ability to existing region-based detection networks without bringing extra computations in the inference stage. Specifically, we design a mask-guided module to leverage the head information to enhance the feature representation learning of the backbone network. Moreover, we develop a strict classification criterion by improving the quality of positive samples during training to eliminate common false positives of pedestrian detection in crowded scenes. Besides, we present an occlusion-simulated data augmentation to enrich the pattern and quantity of occlusion samples to improve the occlusion robustness. As a consequent, we achieve state-of-the-art results on three pedestrian detection datasets including CityPersons, Caltech-USA and CrowdHuman. To facilitate further studies on the occluded pedestrian detection in surveillance scenes, we release a new pedestrian dataset, called SUR-PED, with a total of over 162k high-quality manually labeled instances in 10k images. The proposed dataset, source codes and trained models will be released.

PedHunter: Occlusion Robust Pedestrian Detector in Crowded Scenes

This paper presents a two level automatic feature points management method for constructing a seamless entire panorama from video sequence. In the first level, through fusing the number of tracked feature points and the estimated ratio of lost information of the mosaicing image, a feature point quantity management module is developed to select the key frames. In the second level, a feature points quality management technique is used to choose the key points for mosaicing. This module includes a coarse-to-fine method with two steps: (1) Feature points quality based key point subset creation; and (2) Multi-resolution based key point selection. The main contribution of the algorithm is that it is able to achieve robust and fast mosaicing result while maintain the most valuable information of the scene. Experiments are performed using video sequences under different conditions. The results show that the proposed algorithm could achieve robust and efficient video mosaic image.

/pdf/automated-feature-points-management-for-video-mosaic-2slk5pyhm3.pdf

Stan Z. Li

Papers

Detection of corners on 3D space curves

Dependence-Aware Feature Coding for Person Re-Identification

SADet: Learning An Efficient and Accurate Pedestrian Detector

PedHunter: Occlusion Robust Pedestrian Detector in Crowded Scenes

Automated feature points management for video mosaic construction