Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have been proven to be effective for various computer vision problems. In this work, we demonstrate its effectiveness on a continuous object orientation estimation task, which requires prediction of 0 to 360 degrees orientation of the objects. We do so by proposing and comparing three continuous orientation prediction approaches designed for the DCNNs. The first two approaches work by representing an orientation as a point on a unit circle and minimizing either L2 loss or angular difference loss. The third method works by first converting the continuous orientation estimation task into a set of discrete orientation estimation tasks and then converting the discrete orientation outputs back to the continuous orientation using a mean-shift algorithm. By evaluating on a vehicle orientation estimation task and a pedestrian orientation estimation task, we demonstrate that the discretization-based approach not only works better than the other two approaches but also achieves state-of-the-art performance. We also demonstrate that finding an appropriate feature representation is critical to achieve a good performance when adapting a DCNN trained for an image recognition task.
Several works consider learning a suitable representation for the orientation estimation task. In @cite_5 , an embedded representation that reflects the local features and their spatial arrangement as well as enforces supervised manifold constraints on the data is proposed. Then a regression model to estimate the orientation is learned using the proposed representation. Similarly to @cite_5 , @cite_43 @cite_28 learn a representation using spectral clustering and then train a single regression for each cluster while enforcing geometric constraints. @cite_29 formulates the task as a MAP inference task, where the likelihood function is composed of a generative term based on the prediction error generated by the ensemble of Fisher regressors as well as a discriminative term based on SVM classifiers.
@cite_28 @cite_5 @cite_29 @cite_43
2114125949 2208030666 2082487847 2937970997
We present an algorithm for automatic image orientation estimation using a Bayesian learning framework. We demonstrate that a small codebook (the optimal size of codebook is selected using a modified MDL criterion) extracted from a learning vector quantizer (LVQ) can be used to estimate the class-conditional densities of the observed features needed for the Bayesian methodology. We further show how principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) can be used as a feature extraction mechanism to remove redundancies in the high-dimensional feature vectors used for classification. The proposed method is compared with four different commonly used classifiers, namely k-nearest neighbor, support vector machine (SVM), a mixture of Gaussians, and hierarchical discriminating regression (HDR) tree. Experiments on a database of 16 344 images have shown that our proposed algorithm achieves an accuracy of approximately 98 on the training set and over 97 on an independent test set. A slight improvement in classification accuracy is achieved by employing classifier combination techniques. In this paper, we treat the problem of continuous pose estimation for object categories as a regression problem on the basis of only 2D training information. While regression is a natural framework for continuous problems, regression methods so far achieved inferior results with respect to 3D-based and 2D-based classification-and-refinement approaches. This may be attributed to their weakness to high intra-class variability as well as to noisy matching procedures and lack of geometrical constraints. We propose to apply regression to Fisher-encoded vectors computed from large cells by learning an array of Fisher regressors. Fisher encoding makes our algorithm flexible to variations in class appearance, while the array structure permits to indirectly introduce spatial context information in the approach. We formulate our problem as a MAP inference problem, where the likelihood function is composed of a generative term based on the prediction error generated by the ensemble of Fisher regressors as well as a discriminative term based on SVM classifiers. We test our algorithm on three publicly available datasets that envisage several difficulties, such as high intra-class variability, truncations, occlusions, and motion blur, obtaining state-of-the-art results. This paper presents a simple and robust method, namely discriminative histograms of local dominant orientation (D-HLDO), for biometric image feature extraction. In D-HLDO, the local dominant orientation map and the corresponding relative energy map are obtained by applying the singular value decomposition (SVD) to the collected gradient vectors over a local patch. The dominant orientation map and the relative energy map are then used to construct the concatenated histogram features. Local mean based nearest neighbor discriminant analysis (LM-NNDA) is finally employed to reduce the redundancy information and get the low-dimensional and discriminative features. The proposed method is applied to face, finger-knuckle-print and Palm biometrics and is examined using the AR, CMU PIE and FRGCv2.0 face image databases, the PolyU Palmprint database, and the PolyU Finger-Knuckle-Print database. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed D-HLDO method. Many state-of-the-art approaches for object recognition reduce the problem to a 0-1 classification task. This allows one to leverage sophisticated machine learning techniques for training classifiers from labeled examples. However, these models are typically trained independently for each class using positive and negative examples cropped from images. At test-time, various post-processing heuristics such as non-maxima suppression (NMS) are required to reconcile multiple detections within and between different classes for each image. Though crucial to good performance on benchmarks, this post-processing is usually defined heuristically. We introduce a unified model for multi-class object recognition that casts the problem as a structured prediction task. Rather than predicting a binary label for each image window independently, our model simultaneously predicts a structured labeling of the entire image (Fig. 1). Our model learns statistics that capture the spatial arrangements of various object classes in real images, both in terms of which arrangements to suppress through NMS and which arrangements to favor through spatial co-occurrence statistics. We formulate parameter estimation in our model as a max-margin learning problem. Given training images with ground-truth object locations, we show how to formulate learning as a convex optimization problem. We employ the cutting plane algorithm of (Mach. Learn. 2009) to efficiently learn a model from thousands of training images. We show state-of-the-art results on the PASCAL VOC benchmark that indicate the benefits of learning a global model encapsulating the spatial layout of multiple object classes (a preliminary version of this work appeared in ICCV 2009, , IEEE international conference on computer vision, 2009).