Discovering automatically the semantic structure of tagged visual data (e.g. web videos and images) is important for visual data analysis and interpretation, enabling the machine intelligence for effectively processing the fast-growing amount of multi-media data. However, this is non-trivial due to the need for jointly learning underlying correlations between heterogeneous visual and tag data. The task is made more challenging by inherently sparse and incomplete tags. In this work, we develop a method for modelling the inherent visual data concept structures based on a novel Hierarchical-Multi-Label Random Forest model capable of correlating structured visual and tag information so as to more accurately interpret the visual semantics, e.g. disclosing meaningful visual groups with similar high-level concepts, and recovering missing tags for individual visual data samples. Specifically, our model exploits hierarchically structured tags of different semantic abstractness and multiple tag statistical correlations in addition to modelling visual and tag interactions. As a result, our model is able to discover more accurate semantic correlation between textual tags and visual features, and finally providing favourable visual semantics interpretation even with highly sparse and incomplete tags. We demonstrate the advantages of our proposed approach in two fundamental applications, visual data clustering and missing tag completion, on benchmarking video (i.e. TRECVID MED 2011) and image (i.e. NUS-WIDE) datasets.
Tagged visual data structure analysis : Compared with low-level visual features, textual information provides high-level semantic meanings which can help bridge the gap between video features and human cognition. Textual tags have been widely employed along with visual features to help solve a variety of challenging computer vision problems, such as visual recognition @cite_42 and retrieval @cite_54 , image annotation @cite_51 . Rather than these supervised methods, we focus on structurally-constrained learning approach without the need of particular human labelling . Whilst a simple combination of visual features and textural tags may give rise to the difficult heteroscedasticity problem, @cite_64 alternatively seek an optimal combination of similarity measures derived black from different data modalities. The fused pairwise similarity can be then utilised for data clustering by existing graph based clustering algorithms such as spectral clustering @cite_60 . As the interaction between visual appearance and textual tags is not modelled in the raw feature space but on the similarity graphs, the information loss in graph construction can not be recovered. Also, this model considers no inter-tag correlation.
@cite_64 @cite_60 @cite_54 @cite_42 @cite_51
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This paper investigates the problem of modeling Internet images and associated text or tags for tasks such as image-to-image search, tag-to-image search, and image-to-tag search (image annotation). We start with canonical correlation analysis (CCA), a popular and successful approach for mapping visual and textual features to the same latent space, and incorporate a third view capturing high-level image semantics, represented either by a single category or multiple non-mutually-exclusive concepts. We present two ways to train the three-view embedding: supervised, with the third view coming from ground-truth labels or search keywords; and unsupervised, with semantic themes automatically obtained by clustering the tags. To ensure high accuracy for retrieval tasks while keeping the learning process scalable, we combine multiple strong visual features and use explicit nonlinear kernel mappings to efficiently approximate kernel CCA. To perform retrieval, we use a specially designed similarity function in the embedded space, which substantially outperforms the Euclidean distance. The resulting system produces compelling qualitative results and outperforms a number of two-view baselines on retrieval tasks on three large-scale Internet image datasets. Sufficient training examples are the fundamental requirement for most of the learning tasks. However, collecting well-labelled training examples is costly. Inspired by Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) that can make use of visual attributes or natural language semantics as an intermediate level clue to associate low-level features with high-level classes, in a novel extension of this idea, we aim to synthesise training data for novel classes using only semantic attributes. Despite the simplicity of this idea, there are several challenges. First, how to prevent the synthesised data from over-fitting to training classes? Second, how to guarantee the synthesised data is discriminative for ZSL tasks? Third, we observe that only a few dimensions of the learnt features gain high variances whereas most of the remaining dimensions are not informative. Thus, the question is how to make the concentrated information diffuse to most of the dimensions of synthesised data. To address the above issues, we propose a novel embedding algorithm named Unseen Visual Data Synthesis (UVDS) that projects semantic features to the high-dimensional visual feature space. Two main techniques are introduced in our proposed algorithm. (1) We introduce a latent embedding space which aims to reconcile the structural difference between the visual and semantic spaces, meanwhile preserve the local structure. (2) We propose a novel Diffusion Regularisation (DR) that explicitly forces the variances to diffuse over most dimensions of the synthesised data. By an orthogonal rotation (more precisely, an orthogonal transformation), DR can remove the redundant correlated attributes and further alleviate the over-fitting problem. On four benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the benefit of using synthesised unseen data for zero-shot learning. Extensive experimental results suggest that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. We address the task of learning a semantic segmentation from weakly supervised data. Our aim is to devise a system that predicts an object label for each pixel by making use of only image level labels during training – the information whether a certain object is present or not in the image. Such coarse tagging of images is faster and easier to obtain as opposed to the tedious task of pixelwise labeling required in state of the art systems. We cast this task naturally as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. We use Semantic Texton Forest (STF) as the basic framework and extend it for the MIL setting. We make use of multitask learning (MTL) to regularize our solution. Here, an external task of geometric context estimation is used to improve on the task of semantic segmentation. We report experimental results on the MSRC21 and the very challenging VOC2007 datasets. On MSRC21 dataset we are able, by using 276 weakly labeled images, to achieve the performance of a supervised STF trained on pixelwise labeled training set of 56 images, which is a significant reduction in supervision needed. Matching images and sentences demands a fine understanding of both modalities. In this paper, we propose a new system to discriminatively embed the image and text to a shared visual-textual space. In this field, most existing works apply the ranking loss to pull the positive image text pairs close and push the negative pairs apart from each other. However, directly deploying the ranking loss is hard for network learning, since it starts from the two heterogeneous features to build inter-modal relationship. To address this problem, we propose the instance loss which explicitly considers the intra-modal data distribution. It is based on an unsupervised assumption that each image text group can be viewed as a class. So the network can learn the fine granularity from every image text group. The experiment shows that the instance loss offers better weight initialization for the ranking loss, so that more discriminative embeddings can be learned. Besides, existing works usually apply the off-the-shelf features, i.e., word2vec and fixed visual feature. So in a minor contribution, this paper constructs an end-to-end dual-path convolutional network to learn the image and text representations. End-to-end learning allows the system to directly learn from the data and fully utilize the supervision. On two generic retrieval datasets (Flickr30k and MSCOCO), experiments demonstrate that our method yields competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, in language based person retrieval, we improve the state of the art by a large margin. The code has been made publicly available.