Takeo Kanade

Bio: Takeo Kanade is an academic researcher from Carnegie Mellon University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Motion estimation & Image processing. The author has an hindex of 147, co-authored 799 publications receiving 103237 citations. Previous affiliations of Takeo Kanade include National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology & Hitachi.

Robust L/sub 1/ norm factorization in the presence of outliers and missing data by alternative convex programming

Abstract: Matrix factorization has many applications in computer vision. Singular value decomposition (SVD) is the standard algorithm for factorization. When there are outliers and missing data, which often happen in real measurements, SVD is no longer applicable. For robustness iteratively re-weighted least squares (IRLS) is often used for factorization by assigning a weight to each element in the measurements. Because it uses L/sub 2/ norm, good initialization in IRLS is critical for success, but is nontrivial. In this paper, we formulate matrix factorization as a L/sub 1/ norm minimization problem that is solved efficiently by alternative convex programming. Our formulation 1) is robust without requiring initial weighting, 2) handles missing data straightforwardly, and 3) provides a framework in which constraints and prior knowledge (if available) can be conveniently incorporated. In the experiments we apply our approach to factorization-based structure from motion. It is shown that our approach achieves better results than other approaches (including IRLS) on both synthetic and real data.

Hallucinating faces

Abstract: Faces often appear very small in surveillance imagery because of the wide fields of view that are typically used and the relatively large distance between the cameras and the scene. For tasks such as face recognition, resolution enhancement techniques are therefore generally needed. Although numerous resolution enhancement algorithms have been proposed in the literature, most of them are limited by the fact that they make weak, if any, assumptions about the scene. We propose an algorithm to learn a prior on the spatial distribution of the image gradient for frontal images of faces. We proceed to show how such a prior can be incorporated into a resolution enhancement algorithm to yield 4- to 8-fold improvements in resolution (i.e., 16 to 64 times as many pixels). The additional pixels are, in effect, hallucinated.

Visual tracking of a moving target by a camera mounted on a robot: a combination of control and vision

Abstract: The authors present algorithms for robotic (eye-in-hand configuration) real-time visual tracking of arbitrary 3D objects traveling at unknown velocities in a 2D space (depth is given as known). Visual tracking is formulated as a problem of combining control with computer vision. A mathematical formulation of the control problem that includes information from a novel feedback vision sensor and represents everything with respect to the camera frame is presented. The sum-of-squared differences (SSD) optical flow is used to compute the vector of discrete displacements each instant of time. These displacements can be fed either directly to a PI (proportional-integral) controller or to a pole assignment controller or discrete steady-state Kalman filter. In the latter case, the Kalman filter calculates the estimated values of the system's states and the exogenous disturbances, and a discrete LQG (linear-quadratic Gaussian) controller computes the desired motion of the robotic system. The outputs of the controllers are sent to the Cartesian robotic controller. Performance results are presented. >

Rotation invariant neural network-based face detection

Abstract: In this paper, we present a neural network-based face detection system. Unlike similar systems which are limited to detecting upright, frontal faces, this system detects faces at any degree of rotation in the image plane. The system employs multiple networks; a "router" network first processes each input window to determine its orientation and then uses this information to prepare the window for one or more "detector" networks. We present the training methods for both types of networks. We also perform sensitivity analysis on the networks, and present empirical results on a large test set. Finally, we present preliminary results for detecting faces rotated out of the image plane, such as profiles and semi-profiles.

A cooperative algorithm for stereo matching and occlusion detection

Abstract: Presents a stereo algorithm for obtaining disparity maps with occlusion explicitly detected. To produce smooth and detailed disparity maps, two assumptions that were originally proposed by Marr and Poggio (1976, 1979) are adopted: uniqueness and continuity. That is, the disparity maps have a unique value per pixel and are continuous almost everywhere. These assumptions are enforced within a three-dimensional array of match values in disparity space. Each match value corresponds to a pixel in an image and a disparity relative to another image. An iterative algorithm updates the match values by diffusing support among neighboring values and inhibiting others along similar lines of sight. By applying the uniqueness assumption, occluded regions can be explicitly identified. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm, we present the processing results from synthetic and real image pairs, including ones with ground-truth values for quantitative comparison with other methods.

Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition

Abstract: Multilayer neural networks trained with the back-propagation algorithm constitute the best example of a successful gradient based learning technique. Given an appropriate network architecture, gradient-based learning algorithms can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters, with minimal preprocessing. This paper reviews various methods applied to handwritten character recognition and compares them on a standard handwritten digit recognition task. Convolutional neural networks, which are specifically designed to deal with the variability of 2D shapes, are shown to outperform all other techniques. Real-life document recognition systems are composed of multiple modules including field extraction, segmentation recognition, and language modeling. A new learning paradigm, called graph transformer networks (GTN), allows such multimodule systems to be trained globally using gradient-based methods so as to minimize an overall performance measure. Two systems for online handwriting recognition are described. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of global training, and the flexibility of graph transformer networks. A graph transformer network for reading a bank cheque is also described. It uses convolutional neural network character recognizers combined with global training techniques to provide record accuracy on business and personal cheques. It is deployed commercially and reads several million cheques per day.

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.

I and i

Abstract: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality. Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection

Abstract: We study the question of feature sets for robust visual object recognition; adopting linear SVM based human detection as a test case. After reviewing existing edge and gradient based descriptors, we show experimentally that grids of histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors significantly outperform existing feature sets for human detection. We study the influence of each stage of the computation on performance, concluding that fine-scale gradients, fine orientation binning, relatively coarse spatial binning, and high-quality local contrast normalization in overlapping descriptor blocks are all important for good results. The new approach gives near-perfect separation on the original MIT pedestrian database, so we introduce a more challenging dataset containing over 1800 annotated human images with a large range of pose variations and backgrounds.

Rich Feature Hierarchies for Accurate Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation

Abstract: Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC dataset, has plateaued in the last few years. The best-performing methods are complex ensemble systems that typically combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 30% relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012 -- achieving a mAP of 53.3%. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data is scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, yields a significant performance boost. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call our method R-CNN: Regions with CNN features. We also present experiments that provide insight into what the network learns, revealing a rich hierarchy of image features. Source code for the complete system is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rbg/rcnn.