The optimization of functions to find the best solution according to one or several objectives has a central role in many engineering and research fields. Recently, a new family of optimization algorithms, named Quality-Diversity optimization, has been introduced, and contrasts with classic algorithms. Instead of searching for a single solution, Quality-Diversity algorithms are searching for a large collection of both diverse and high-performing solutions. The role of this collection is to cover the range of possible solution types as much as possible, and to contain the best solution for each type. The contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we present a unifying framework of Quality-Diversity optimization algorithms that covers the two main algorithms of this family (Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic Elites and the Novelty Search with Local Competition), and that highlights the large variety of variants that can be investigated within this family. Secondly, we propose algorithms with a new selection mechanism for Quality-Diversity algorithms that outperforms all the algorithms tested in this paper. Lastly, we present a new collection management that overcomes the erosion issues observed when using unstructured collections. These three contributions are supported by extensive experimental comparisons of Quality-Diversity algorithms on three different experimental scenarios.
The first applications of NSLC consisted of evolving both the morphology and the behavior of virtual creatures in order to generate a population containing diverse species, ranging from slow and massive quadrupeds to fast and lightweight unipedal hoppers by comparing velocity only between similar species @cite_42 . In this experiment, the solution descriptor was defined as the height, the mass and the number of active joints, while the quality of the solutions was governed by their walking speed. At the end of the evolutionary process, the population contained 1,000 different species. These results represent the very first step in the direction of generating a collection of diverse and high-performing solutions covering a significant part of the spectrum of possibilities.
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In this paper we introduce a real-time system for action detection. The system uses a small set of robust features extracted from 3D skeleton data. Features are effectively described based on the probability distribution of skeleton data. The descriptor computes a pyramid of sample covariance matrices and mean vectors to encode the relationship between the features. For handling the intra-class variations of actions, such as action temporal scale variations, the descriptor is computed using different window scales for each action. Discriminative elements of the descriptor are mined using feature selection. The system achieves accurate detection results on difficult unsegmented sequences. Experiments on MSRC-12 and G3D datasets show that the proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art in detection accuracy with very low latency. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose using multi-scale description in action detection from 3D skeleton data. We address the problem of identifying individual cetaceans from images showing the trailing edge of their fins. Given the trailing edge from an unknown individual, we produce a ranking of known individuals from a database. The nicks and notches along the trailing edge define an individual's unique signature. We define a representation based on integral curvature that is robust to changes in viewpoint and pose, and captures the pattern of nicks and notches in a local neighborhood at multiple scales. We explore two ranking methods that use this representation. The first uses a dynamic programming time-warping algorithm to align two representations, and interprets the alignment cost as a measure of similarity. This algorithm also exploits learned spatial weights to downweight matches from regions of unstable curvature. The second interprets the representation as a feature descriptor. Feature keypoints are defined at the local extrema of the representation. Descriptors for the set of known individuals are stored in a tree structure, which allows us to perform queries given the descriptors from an unknown trailing edge. We evaluate the top-k accuracy on two real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the curvature representation, achieving top-1 accuracy scores of approximately 95 and 80 for bottlenose dolphins and humpback whales, respectively. Extracting 3D shape of deforming objects in monocular videos, a task known as non-rigid structure-from-motion (NRSfM), has so far been studied only on synthetic datasets and controlled environments. Typically, the objects to reconstruct are pre-segmented, they exhibit limited rotations and occlusions, or full-length trajectories are assumed. In order to integrate NRSfM into current video analysis pipelines, one needs to consider as input realistic -thus incomplete- tracking, and perform spatio-temporal grouping to segment the objects from their surroundings. Furthermore, NRSfM needs to be robust to noise in both segmentation and tracking, e.g., drifting, segmentation "leaking", optical flow "bleeding" etc. In this paper, we make a first attempt towards this goal, and propose a method that combines dense optical flow tracking, motion trajectory clustering and NRSfM for 3D reconstruction of objects in videos. For each trajectory cluster, we compute multiple reconstructions by minimizing the reprojection error and the rank of the 3D shape under different rank bounds of the trajectory matrix. We show that dense 3D shape is extracted and trajectories are completed across occlusions and low textured regions, even under mild relative motion between the object and the camera. We achieve competitive results on a public NRSfM benchmark while using fixed parameters across all sequences and handling incomplete trajectories, in contrast to existing approaches. We further test our approach on popular video segmentation datasets. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to extract dense object models from realistic videos, such as those found in Youtube or Hollywood movies, without object-specific priors. The use of depth maps is of increasing interest after the advent of cheap multisensor devices based on structured light, such as Kinect. In this context, there is a strong need of powerful 3-D shape descriptors able to generate rich object representations. Although several 3-D descriptors have been already proposed in the literature, the research of discriminative and computationally efficient descriptors is still an open issue. In this paper, we propose a novel point cloud descriptor called spherical blurred shape model (SBSM) that successfully encodes the structure density and local variabilities of an object based on shape voxel distances and a neighborhood propagation strategy. The proposed SBSM is proven to be rotation and scale invariant, robust to noise and occlusions, highly discriminative for multiple categories of complex objects like the human hand, and computationally efficient since the SBSM complexity is linear to the number of object voxels. Experimental evaluation in public depth multiclass object data, 3-D facial expressions data, and a novel hand poses data sets show significant performance improvements in relation to state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposal is also proved for object spotting in 3-D scenes and for real-time automatic hand pose recognition in human computer interaction scenarios. This paper proposes an improved particle swarm optimizer using the notion of species to determine its neighbourhood best values, for solving multimodal optimization problems. In the proposed species- based PSO (SPSO), the swarm population is divided into species sub- populations based on their similarity. Each species is grouped around a dominating particle called the species seed. At each iteration step, species seeds are identified from the entire population and then adopted as neig- hbourhood bests for these individual species groups separately. Species are formed adaptively at each step based on the feedback obtained from the multimodal fitness landscape. Over successive iterations, species are able to simultaneously optimize towards multiple optima, regardless of if they are global or local optima. Our experiments demonstrated that SPSO is very effective in dealing with multimodal optimization functions with lower dimensions. This paper describes the participation of the Floristic consortium to the LifeCLEF 2016 plant identification challenge[18]. The aim of the task was to produce a list of relevant species for a large set of plant images related to 1000 species of trees, herbs and ferns living in Western Europe, knowing that some of these images belonged to unseen categories in the training set like plant species from other areas, horticultural plants or even off topic images (people, keyboards, animals, etc). To address this challenge, we first experimented as a baseline, without any rejection procedure, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approach based on a slightly modified GoogLeNet model. In a second run, we applied a simple rejection criteria based on probability threshold estimation on the output of the CNN, one for each species, for removing automatically species propositions judged irrelevant. In the third run, rather than definitely eliminating some species predictions with the risk to remove false negative propositions, we applied various attenuation factors in order to revise the probability distributions given by the CNN as confident score expressing how much a query was related or not to the known species. More precisely, for this last run we used the geographical information and several cohesion measures in terms of observation, "organ" tags and taxonomy (genus and family levels) based on a knn similarity search results within the training set. We propose a set of features derived from skeleton tracking of the human body and depth maps for the purpose of action recognition. The descriptors proposed are easy to implement, produce relatively small-sized feature sets, and the multi-class classification scheme is fast and suitable for real-time applications. We intuitively characterize actions using pairwise affinities between view-invariant joint angles features over the performance of an action. Additionally, a new descriptor for spatio-temporal feature extraction from color and depth images is introduced. This descriptor involves an application of a modified histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) algorithm. The application produces a feature set at every frame, and these features are collected into a 2D array which then the same algorithm is applied to again (the approach is termed HOG2). Both feature sets are evaluated in a bag-of-words scheme using a linear SVM, showing state-of-the-art results on public datasets from different domains of human-computer interaction. Detecting poorly textured objects and estimating their 3D pose reliably is still a very challenging problem. We introduce a simple but powerful approach to computing descriptors for object views that efficiently capture both the object identity and 3D pose. By contrast with previous manifold-based approaches, we can rely on the Euclidean distance to evaluate the similarity between descriptors, and therefore use scalable Nearest Neighbor search methods to efficiently handle a large number of objects under a large range of poses. To achieve this, we train a Convolutional Neural Network to compute these descriptors by enforcing simple similarity and dissimilarity constraints between the descriptors. We show that our constraints nicely untangle the images from different objects and different views into clusters that are not only well-separated but also structured as the corresponding sets of poses: The Euclidean distance between descriptors is large when the descriptors are from different objects, and directly related to the distance between the poses when the descriptors are from the same object. These important properties allow us to outperform state-of-the-art object views representations on challenging RGB and RGB-D data. The extreme variability in the appearance of a place across the four seasons of the year is one of the most challenging problems in life-long visual topological localization for mobile robotic systems and intelligent vehicles. Traditional solutions to this problem are based on the description of images using hand-crafted features, which have been shown to offer moderate invariance against seasonal changes. In this paper, we present a new proposal focused on automatically learned descriptors, which are processed by means of a technique recently popularized in the computer vision community: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The novelty of our approach relies on fusing the image information from multiple convolutional layers at several levels and granularities. In addition, we compress the redundant data of CNN features into a tractable number of bits for efficient and robust place recognition. The final descriptor is reduced by applying simple compression and binarization techniques for fast matching using the Hamming distance. An exhaustive experimental evaluation confirms the improved performance of our proposal (CNN-VTL) with respect to state-of-the-art methods over varied long-term datasets recorded across seasons. In this paper differential evolution is extended by using the notion of speciation for solving multimodal optimization problems. The proposed species-based DE (SDE) is able to locate multiple global optima simultaneously through adaptive formation of multiple species (or subpopulations) in an DE population at each iteration step. Each species functions as an DE by itself. Successive local improvements through species formation can eventually transform into global improvements in identifying multiple global optima. In this study the performance of SDE is compared with another recently proposed DE variant CrowdingDE. The computational complexity of SDE, the effect of population size and species radius on SDE are investigated. SDE is found to be more computationally efficient than CrowdingDE over a number of benchmark multimodal test functions. We assess the applicability of several popular learning methods for the problem of recognizing generic visual categories with invariance to pose, lighting, and surrounding clutter. A large dataset comprising stereo image pairs of 50 uniform-colored toys under 36 azimuths, 9 elevations, and 6 lighting conditions was collected (for a total of 194,400 individual images). The objects were 10 instances of 5 generic categories: four-legged animals, human figures, airplanes, trucks, and cars. Five instances of each category were used for training, and the other five for testing. Low-resolution grayscale images of the objects with various amounts of variability and surrounding clutter were used for training and testing. Nearest neighbor methods, support vector machines, and convolutional networks, operating on raw pixels or on PCA-derived features were tested. Test error rates for unseen object instances placed on uniform backgrounds were around 13 for SVM and 7 for convolutional nets. On a segmentation recognition task with highly cluttered images, SVM proved impractical, while convolutional nets yielded 16 7 error. A real-time version of the system was implemented that can detect and classify objects in natural scenes at around 10 frames per second. This paper presents a fast, accurate, and novel method for the problem of estimating the number of humans and their positions from background differenced images obtained from a single camera where inter-human occlusion is significant. The problem is challenging firstly because the state space formed by the number, positions, and articulations of people is large. Secondly, in spite of many advances in background maintenance and change detection, background differencing remains a noisy and imprecise process, and its output is far from ideal: holes, fill-ins, irregular boundaries etc. pose additional challenges for our "mid- level" problem of segmenting it to localize humans. We propose a novel example-based algorithm which maps the global shape feature by Fourier descriptors to various configurations of humans directly. We use locally weighted averaging to interpolate for the best possible candidate configuration. The inherent ambiguity resulting from the lack of depth and layer information in the background difference images is mitigated by the use of dynamic programming, which finds the trajectory in state space that best explains the evolution of the projected shapes. The key components of our solution are simple and fast. We demonstrate the accuracy and speed of our approach on real image sequences. The research focus of designing local patch descriptors has gradually shifted from handcrafted ones (e.g., SIFT) to learned ones. In this paper, we propose to learn high performance descriptor in Euclidean space via the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our method is distinctive in four aspects: (i) We propose a progressive sampling strategy which enables the network to access billions of training samples in a few epochs. (ii) Derived from the basic concept of local patch matching problem, we empha-size the relative distance between descriptors. (iii) Extra supervision is imposed on the intermediate feature maps. (iv) Compactness of the descriptor is taken into account. The proposed network is named as L2-Net since the output descriptor can be matched in Euclidean space by L2 distance. L2-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Brown datasets [16], Oxford dataset [18] and the newly proposed Hpatches dataset [11]. The good generalization ability shown by experiments indicates that L2-Net can serve as a direct substitution of the existing handcrafted descriptors. The pre-trained L2-Net is publicly available. This paper presents a novel video descriptor based on substantial derivative, an important concept in fluid mechanics, that captures the rate of change of a fluid property as it travels through a velocity field. Unlike standard approaches that only use temporal motion information, our descriptor exploits the spatio-temporal characteristic of substantial derivative. In particular, the spatial and temporal motion patterns are captured by respectively the convective and local accelerations. After estimating the convective and local field from the optic flow, we followed the standard bag-of-word procedure for each motion pattern separately, and we concatenated the two resulting histograms to form the final descriptor. We extensively evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed method on five benchmarks, including three standard datasets (Violence in Movies, Violence In Crowd, and BEHAVE), and two new video-survelliance sequences downloaded from Youtube. Our experiments show how the proposed approach sets the new state-of-the-art on all benchmarks and how the structural information captured by convective acceleration is essential to detect violent episodes in crowded scenarios. A standard way of approximating or discretizing a metric space is by taking its Rips complexes. These approximations for all parameters are often bound together into a filtration, to which we apply the fundamental group or the first homology. We call the resulting object persistence. Recent results demonstrate that persistence of a compact geodesic locally contractible space X carries a lot of geometric information. However, by definition the corresponding Rips complexes have uncountably many vertices. In this paper we show that nonetheless, the whole persistence of X may be obtained by an appropriate finite sample (subset of X), and that persistence of any subset of X is well interleaved with the persistence of X. It follows that the persistence of X is the minimum of persistences obtained by all finite samples. Furthermore, we prove a much improved Stability theorem for such approximations. As a special case we provide for each (r>0 ) a density (s>0 ), so that for each s-dense sample (S X ) the corresponding fundamental group (and the first homology) of the Rips complex of S is isomorphic to the one of X, leading to an improved reconstruction result. Recent advances on human motion analysis have made the extraction of human skeleton structure feasible, even from single depth images. This structure has been proven quite informative for discriminating actions in a recognition scenario. In this context, we propose a local skeleton descriptor that encodes the relative position of joint quadruples. Such a coding implies a similarity normalisation transform that leads to a compact (6D) view-invariant skelet al feature, referred to as skelet al quad. Further, the use of a Fisher kernel representation is suggested to describe the skelet al quads contained in a (sub)action. A Gaussian mixture model is learnt from training data, so that the generation of any set of quads is encoded by its Fisher vector. Finally, a multi-level representation of Fisher vectors leads to an action description that roughly carries the order of sub-action within each action sequence. Efficient classification is here achieved by linear SVMs. The proposed action representation is tested on widely used datasets, MSRAction3D and HDM05. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms that rely only on joints, while it competes with methods that combine joints with extra cues. Reconstructing the evolutionary history of a set of species is a fundamental problem in biology and methods for solving this problem are gaged based on two characteristics: accuracy and efficiency. Neighbor Joining (NJ) is a so-called distance-based method that, thanks to its good accuracy and speed, has been embraced by the phylogeny community. It takes the distances between n taxa and produces in @Q(n^3) time a phylogenetic tree, i.e., a tree which aims to describe the evolutionary history of the taxa. In addition to performing well in practice, the NJ algorithm has optimal reconstruction radius. The contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) we present an algorithm called Fast Neighbor Joining (FNJ) with optimal reconstruction radius and optimal run time complexity O(n^2) and (2) we present a greatly simplified proof for the correctness of NJ. Initial experiments show that FNJ in practice has almost the same accuracy as NJ, indicating that the property of optimal reconstruction radius has great importance to their good performance. Moreover, we show how improved running time can be achieved for computing the so-called correction formulas. During the last years a wide range of algorithms and devices have been made available to easily acquire range images. The increasing abundance of depth data boosts the need for reliable and unsupervised analysis techniques, spanning from part registration to automated segmentation. In this context, we focus on the recognition of known objects in cluttered and incomplete 3D scans. Locating and fitting a model to a scene are very important tasks in many scenarios such as industrial inspection, scene understanding, medical imaging and even gaming. For this reason, these problems have been addressed extensively in the literature. Several of the proposed methods adopt local descriptor-based approaches, while a number of hurdles still hinder the use of global techniques. In this paper we offer a different perspective on the topic: We adopt an evolutionary selection algorithm that seeks global agreement among surface points, while operating at a local level. The approach effectively extends the scope of local descriptors by actively selecting correspondences that satisfy global consistency constraints, allowing us to attack a more challenging scenario where model and scene have different, unknown scales. This leads to a novel and very effective pipeline for 3D object recognition, which is validated with an extensive set of experiments and comparisons with recent techniques at the state of the art. We present a new local descriptor for 3D shapes, directly applicable to a wide range of shape analysis problems such as point correspondences, semantic segmentation, affordance prediction, and shape-to-scan matching. The descriptor is produced by a convolutional network that is trained to embed geometrically and semantically similar points close to one another in descriptor space. The network processes surface neighborhoods around points on a shape that are captured at multiple scales by a succession of progressively zoomed-out views, taken from carefully selected camera positions. We leverage two extremely large sources of data to train our network. First, since our network processes rendered views in the form of 2D images, we repurpose architectures pretrained on massive image datasets. Second, we automatically generate a synthetic dense point correspondence dataset by nonrigid alignment of corresponding shape parts in a large collection of segmented 3D models. As a result of these design choices, our network effectively encodes multiscale local context and fine-grained surface detail. Our network can be trained to produce either category-specific descriptors or more generic descriptors by learning from multiple shape categories. Once trained, at test time, the network extracts local descriptors for shapes without requiring any part segmentation as input. Our method can produce effective local descriptors even for shapes whose category is unknown or different from the ones used while training. We demonstrate through several experiments that our learned local descriptors are more discriminative compared to state-of-the-art alternatives and are effective in a variety of shape analysis applications. This work addresses the problem of real-time 3D shape based object class recognition, its scaling to many categories and the reliable perception of categories. A novel shape descriptor for partial point clouds based on shape functions is presented, capable of training on synthetic data and classifying objects from a depth sensor in a single partial view in a fast and robust manner. The classification task is stated as a 3D retrieval task finding the nearest neighbors from synthetically generated views of CAD-models to the sensed point cloud with a Kinect-style depth sensor. The presented shape descriptor shows that the combination of angle, point-distance and area shape functions gives a significant boost in recognition rate against the baseline descriptor and outperforms the state-of-the-art descriptors in our experimental evaluation on a publicly available dataset of real-world objects in table scene contexts with up to 200 categories.