An image related question defines a specific visual task that is required in order to produce an appropriate answer. The answer may depend on a minor detail in the image and require complex reasoning and use of prior knowledge. When humans perform this task, they are able to do it in a flexible and robust manner, integrating modularly any novel visual capability with diverse options for various elaborations of the task. In contrast, current approaches to solve this problem by a machine are based on casting the problem as an end-to-end learning problem, which lacks such abilities. We present a different approach, inspired by the aforementioned human capabilities. The approach is based on the compositional structure of the question. The underlying idea is that a question has an abstract representation based on its structure, which is compositional in nature. The question can consequently be answered by a composition of procedures corresponding to its substructures. The basic elements of the representation are logical patterns, which are put together to represent the question. These patterns include a parametric representation for object classes, properties and relations. Each basic pattern is mapped into a basic procedure that includes meaningful visual tasks, and the patterns are composed to produce the overall answering procedure. The UnCoRd (Understand Compose and Respond) system, based on this approach, integrates existing detection and classification schemes for a set of object classes, properties and relations. These schemes are incorporated in a modular manner, providing elaborated answers and corrections for negative answers. In addition, an external knowledge base is queried for required common-knowledge. We performed a qualitative analysis of the system, which demonstrates its representation capabilities and provide suggestions for future developments.
Incorporating the question information is largely addressed by seeking mechanisms for image-language features fusion. A large focus in this line of works was in simplifying bilinear pulling (which is based on the outer product of the two feature vectors) by reducing dimensionality of the features @cite_29 or a low rank factorization @cite_28 @cite_0 .
@cite_28 @cite_29 @cite_0
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Since the emergence of extensive multimedia data, feature fusion has been more and more important for image and video retrieval, indexing and annotation. Existing feature fusion techniques simply concatenate a pair of different features or use canonical correlation analysis based methods for joint dimensionality reduction in the feature space. However, how to fuse multiple features in a generalized way is still an open problem. In this paper, we reformulate the multiple feature fusion as a general subspace learning problem. The objective of the framework is to find a general linear subspace in which the cumulative pairwise canonical correlation between every pair of feature sets is maximized after the dimension normalization and subspace projection. The learned subspace couples dimensionality reduction and feature fusion together, which can be applied to both unsupervised and supervised learning cases. In the supervised case, the pairwise canonical correlations of feature sets within the same classes are also counted in the objective function for maximization. To better model the high-order feature structure and overcome the computational difficulty, the features extracted from the same pattern source are represented by a single 2D tensor. The tensor-based dimensionality reduction methods are used to further extract low-dimensional discriminative features from the fused feature ensemble. Extensive experiments on visual data classification demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed methods. Abstract This paper mainly focuses on dimensional reduction of fused dataset of holistic and geometrical face features vectors by solving singularity problem of linear discriminant analysis and maximizing the Fisher ratio in nonlinear subspace region with the preservation of local discriminative features. The combinational feature vector space is projected into low dimensional subspace using proposed Kernel Locality Preserving Symmetrical Weighted Fisher Discriminant Analysis (KLSWFDA) method. Matching score level fusion technique has been applied on projected subspace and combinational entire Gabor subspace is framed. Euclidean distance metric (L2) and support vector machine (SVM) classifier has been implemented to recognize and classify the expressions. Performance of proposed approach is evaluated and compared with state of art approaches. Experimental results on JAFFE, YALE and FD expression database demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We present a novel way of extracting features from short texts, based on the activation values of an inner layer of a deep convolutional neural network. We use the extracted features in multimodal sentiment analysis of short video clips representing one sentence each. We use the combined feature vectors of textual, visual, and audio modalities to train a classifier based on multiple kernel learning, which is known to be good at heterogeneous data. We obtain 14 performance improvement over the state of the art and present a parallelizable decision-level data fusion method, which is much faster, though slightly less accurate. Visual question answering (VQA) is challenging, because it requires a simultaneous understanding of both visual content of images and textual content of questions. To support the VQA task, we need to find good solutions for the following three issues: 1) fine-grained feature representations for both the image and the question; 2) multimodal feature fusion that is able to capture the complex interactions between multimodal features; and 3) automatic answer prediction that is able to consider the complex correlations between multiple diverse answers for the same question. For fine-grained image and question representations, a “coattention” mechanism is developed using a deep neural network (DNN) architecture to jointly learn the attentions for both the image and the question, which can allow us to reduce the irrelevant features effectively and obtain more discriminative features for image and question representations. For multimodal feature fusion, a generalized multimodal factorized high-order pooling approach (MFH) is developed to achieve more effective fusion of multimodal features by exploiting their correlations sufficiently, which can further result in superior VQA performance as compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. For answer prediction, the Kullback–Leibler divergence is used as the loss function to achieve precise characterization of the complex correlations between multiple diverse answers with the same or similar meaning, which can allow us to achieve faster convergence rate and obtain slightly better accuracy on answer prediction. A DNN architecture is designed to integrate all these aforementioned modules into a unified model for achieving superior VQA performance. With an ensemble of our MFH models, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale VQA data sets and win the runner-up in VQA Challenge 2017. We propose the use of a hierarchical, two-stage discriminant transformation for obtaining audio-visual features that improve automatic speech recognition. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA), followed by a maximum likelihood linear transform (MLLT) is first applied to MFCC based audio-only features, as well as on visual only features, obtained by a discrete cosine transform of the video region of interest. Subsequently, a second stage of LDA and MLLT is applied to the concatenation of the resulting single modality features. The obtained audio-visual features are used to train a traditional HMM based speech recognizer. Experiments on the IBM ViaVoice sup TM audio-visual database demonstrate that the proposed feature fusion method improves speaker-independent, large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) for both clean and noisy audio conditions considered. A 24 relative word error rate reduction over an audio-only system is achieved in the latter case. Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task of taking as input an image and a free-form natural language question about the image, and producing an accurate answer. In this work we view VQA as a "feature extraction" module to extract image and caption representations. We employ these representations for the task of image-caption ranking. Each feature dimension captures (imagines) whether a fact (question-answer pair) could plausibly be true for the image and caption. This allows the model to interpret images and captions from a wide variety of perspectives. We propose score-level and representation-level fusion models to incorporate VQA knowledge in an existing state-of-the-art VQA-agnostic image-caption ranking model. We find that incorporating and reasoning about consistency between images and captions significantly improves performance. Concretely, our model improves state-of-the-art on caption retrieval by 7.1 and on image retrieval by 4.4 on the MSCOCO dataset. Visual question answering (VQA) is challenging because it requires a simultaneous understanding of both the visual content of images and the textual content of questions. The approaches used to represent the images and questions in a fine-grained manner and questions and to fuse these multimodal features play key roles in performance. Bilinear pooling based models have been shown to outperform traditional linear models for VQA, but their high-dimensional representations and high computational complexity may seriously limit their applicability in practice. For multimodal feature fusion, here we develop a Multi-modal Factorized Bilinear (MFB) pooling approach to efficiently and effectively combine multi-modal features, which results in superior performance for VQA compared with other bilinear pooling approaches. For fine-grained image and question representation, we develop a ‘co-attention’ mechanism using an end-to-end deep network architecture to jointly learn both the image and question attentions. Combining the proposed MFB approach with co-attention learning in a new network architecture provides a unified model for VQA. Our experimental results demonstrate that the single MFB with co-attention model achieves new state-of-theart performance on the real-world VQA dataset. Code available at https: github.com yuzcccc mfb. Modeling textual or visual information with vector representations trained from large language or visual datasets has been successfully explored in recent years. However, tasks such as visual question answering require combining these vector representations with each other. Approaches to multimodal pooling include element-wise product or sum, as well as concatenation of the visual and textual representations. We hypothesize that these methods are not as expressive as an outer product of the visual and textual vectors. As the outer product is typically infeasible due to its high dimensionality, we instead propose utilizing Multimodal Compact Bilinear pooling (MCB) to efficiently and expressively combine multimodal features. We extensively evaluate MCB on the visual question answering and grounding tasks. We consistently show the benefit of MCB over ablations without MCB. For visual question answering, we present an architecture which uses MCB twice, once for predicting attention over spatial features and again to combine the attended representation with the question representation. This model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Visual7W dataset and the VQA challenge. In Bag-of-Words (BoW) based image retrieval, the SIFT visual word has a low discriminative power, so false positive matches occur prevalently. Apart from the information loss during quantization, another cause is that the SIFT feature only describes the local gradient distribution. To address this problem, this paper proposes a coupled Multi-Index (c-MI) framework to perform feature fusion at indexing level. Basically, complementary features are coupled into a multi-dimensional inverted index. Each dimension of c-MI corresponds to one kind of feature, and the retrieval process votes for images similar in both SIFT and other feature spaces. Specifically, we exploit the fusion of local color feature into c-MI. While the precision of visual match is greatly enhanced, we adopt Multiple Assignment to improve recall. The joint cooperation of SIFT and color features significantly reduces the impact of false positive matches. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that c-MI improves the retrieval accuracy significantly, while consuming only half of the query time compared to the baseline. Importantly, we show that c-MI is well complementary to many prior techniques. Assembling these methods, we have obtained an mAP of 85.8 and N-S score of 3.85 on Holidays and Ukbench datasets, respectively, which compare favorably with the state-of-the-arts. We propose a method for unsupervised linear feature extraction through tensor decomposition. The linear feature extraction can be formulated as a canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) of a third-order tensor when transformation matrix is constrained to be equal to the Khatri-Rao product of two matrices. Therefore, standard algorithms for computing CPD decomposition can be used for feature extraction. The proposed method is validated on publicly available low-resolutionmass spectra of cancerous and non-cancerous samples. Obtained results indicate that this approach could be of practical importance in analysis of protein expression profiles. Visual question answering (VQA) is challenging because it requires a simultaneous understanding of both the visual content of images and the textual content of questions. The approaches used to represent the images and questions in a fine-grained manner and questions and to fuse these multi-modal features play key roles in performance. Bilinear pooling based models have been shown to outperform traditional linear models for VQA, but their high-dimensional representations and high computational complexity may seriously limit their applicability in practice. For multi-modal feature fusion, here we develop a Multi-modal Factorized Bilinear (MFB) pooling approach to efficiently and effectively combine multi-modal features, which results in superior performance for VQA compared with other bilinear pooling approaches. For fine-grained image and question representation, we develop a co-attention mechanism using an end-to-end deep network architecture to jointly learn both the image and question attentions. Combining the proposed MFB approach with co-attention learning in a new network architecture provides a unified model for VQA. Our experimental results demonstrate that the single MFB with co-attention model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the real-world VQA dataset. Code available at this https URL. Bilinear models provide an appealing framework for mixing and merging information in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. They help to learn high level associations between question meaning and visual concepts in the image, but they suffer from huge dimensionality issues. We introduce MUTAN, a multimodal tensor-based Tucker decomposition to efficiently parametrize bilinear interactions between visual and textual representations. Additionally to the Tucker framework, we design a low-rank matrix-based decomposition to explicitly constrain the interaction rank. With MUTAN, we control the complexity of the merging scheme while keeping nice interpretable fusion relations. We show how our MUTAN model generalizes some of the latest VQA architectures, providing state-of-the-art results. Multi-focus image fusion has emerged as a major topic in image processing to generate all-focus images with increased depth-of-field from multi-focus photographs. Different approaches have been used in spatial or transform domain for this purpose. But most of them are subject to one or more of image fusion quality degradations such as blocking artifacts, ringing effects, artificial edges, halo artifacts, contrast decrease, sharpness reduction, and misalignment of decision map with object boundaries. In this paper we present a novel multi-focus image fusion method in spatial domain that utilizes a dictionary which is learned from local patches of source images. Sparse representation of relative sharpness measure over this trained dictionary are pooled together to get the corresponding pooled features. Correlation of the pooled features with sparse representations of input images produces a pixel level score for decision map of fusion. Final regularized decision map is obtained using Markov Random Field (MRF) optimization. We also gathered a new color multi-focus image dataset which has more variety than traditional multi-focus image sets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, in terms of visual and quantitative evaluations. Combining multiple low-level visual features is a proven and effective strategy for a range of computer vision tasks. However, limited attention has been paid to combining such features with information from other modalities, such as audio and videotext, for large scale analysis of web videos. In our work, we rigorously analyze and combine a large set of low-level features that capture appearance, color, motion, audio and audio-visual co-occurrence patterns in videos. We also evaluate the utility of high-level (i.e., semantic) visual information obtained from detecting scene, object, and action concepts. Further, we exploit multimodal information by analyzing available spoken and videotext content using state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) and videotext recognition systems. We combine these diverse features using a two-step strategy employing multiple kernel learning (MKL) and late score level fusion methods. Based on the TRECVID MED 2011 evaluations for detecting 10 events in a large benchmark set of ∼45000 videos, our system showed the best performance among the 19 international teams. In this paper, we report our extension of the use of feature selection based on mutual information and feature fusion to improve gender classification of face images. We compare the results of fusing three groups of features, three spatial scales, and four different mutual information measures to select features. We also showed improved results by fusion of LBP features with different radii and spatial scales, and the selection of features using mutual information. As measures of mutual information we use minimum redundancy and maximal relevance (mRMR), normalized mutual information feature selection (NMIFS), conditional mutual information feature selection (CMIFS), and conditional mutual information maximization (CMIM). We tested the results on four databases: FERET and UND, under controlled conditions, the LFW database under unconstrained scenarios, and AR for occlusions. It is shown that selection of features together with fusion of LBP features significantly improved gender classification accuracy compared to previously published results. We also show a significant reduction in processing time because of the feature selection, which makes real-time applications of gender classification feasible. Bilinear models provide an appealing framework for mixing and merging information in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. They help to learn high level associations between question meaning and visual concepts in the image, but they suffer from huge dimensionality issues.,,We introduce MUTAN, a multimodal tensor-based Tucker decomposition to efficiently parametrize bilinear interactions between visual and textual representations. Additionally to the Tucker framework, we design a low-rank matrix-based decomposition to explicitly constrain the interaction rank. With MUTAN, we control the complexity of the merging scheme while keeping nice interpretable fusion relations. We show how the Tucker decomposition framework generalizes some of the latest VQA architectures, providing state-of-the-art results. The real world image databases such as Flickr are characterized by continuous addition of new images. The recent approaches for image annotation, i.e. the problem of assigning tags to images, have two major drawbacks. First, either models are learned using the entire training data, or to handle the issue of dataset imbalance, tag-specific discriminative models are trained. Such models become obsolete and require relearning when new images and tags are added to database. Second, the task of feature-fusion is typically dealt using ad-hoc approaches. In this paper, we present a weighted extension of Multi-view Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to address the aforementioned drawbacks. The key idea is to learn query-specific generative model on the features of nearest-neighbors and tags using the proposed NMF-KNN approach which imposes consensus constraint on the coefficient matrices across different features. This results in coefficient vectors across features to be consistent and, thus, naturally solves the problem of feature fusion, while the weight matrices introduced in the proposed formulation alleviate the issue of dataset imbalance. Furthermore, our approach, being query-specific, is unaffected by addition of images and tags in a database. We tested our method on two datasets used for evaluation of image annotation and obtained competitive results. A key solution to visual question answering (VQA) exists in how to fuse visual and language features extracted from an input image and question. We show that an attention mechanism that enables dense, bi-directional interactions between the two modalities contributes to boost accuracy of prediction of answers. Specifically, we present a simple architecture that is fully symmetric between visual and language representations, in which each question word attends on image regions and each image region attends on question words. It can be stacked to form a hierarchy for multi-step interactions between an image-question pair. We show through experiments that the proposed architecture achieves a new state-of-the-art on VQA and VQA 2.0 despite its small size. We also present qualitative evaluation, demonstrating how the proposed attention mechanism can generate reasonable attention maps on images and questions, which leads to the correct answer prediction. A key solution to visual question answering (VQA) exists in how to fuse visual and language features extracted from an input image and question. We show that an attention mechanism that enables dense, bi-directional interactions between the two modalities contributes to boost accuracy of prediction of answers. Specifically, we present a simple architecture that is fully symmetric between visual and language representations, in which each question word attends on image regions and each image region attends on question words. It can be stacked to form a hierarchy for multi-step interactions between an image-question pair. We show through experiments that the proposed architecture achieves a new state-of-the-art on VQA and VQA 2.0 despite its small size. We also present qualitative evaluation, demonstrating how the proposed attention mechanism can generate reasonable attention maps on images and questions, which leads to the correct answer prediction. Contemporary Vision and Pattern Recognition problems such as face recognition, fingerprinting identification, image categorization, and DNA sequencing often have an arbitrarily large number of classes and properties to consider. To deal with such complex problems using just one feature descriptor is a difficult task and feature fusion may become mandatory. Although normal feature fusion is quite effective for some problems, it can yield unexpected classification results when the different features are not properly normalized and preprocessed. Besides it has the drawback of increasing the dimensionality which might require more training data. To cope with these problems, this paper introduces a unified approach that can combine many features and classifiers that requires less training and is more adequate to some problems than a naive method, where all features are simply concatenated and fed independently to each classification algorithm. Besides that, the presented technique is amenable to continuous learning, both when refining a learned model and also when adding new classes to be discriminated. The introduced fusion approach is validated using a multi-class fruit-and-vegetable categorization task in a semi-controlled environment, such as a distribution center or the supermarket cashier. The results show that the solution is able to reduce the classification error in up to 15 percentage points with respect to the baseline.