We address the problem of localisation of objects as bounding boxes in images and videos with weak labels. This weakly supervised object localisation problem has been tackled in the past using discriminative models where each object class is localised independently from other classes. In this paper, a novel framework based on Bayesian joint topic modelling is proposed, which differs significantly from the existing ones in that: (1) All foreground object classes are modelled jointly in a single generative model that encodes multiple object co-existence so that "explaining away" inference can resolve ambiguity and lead to better learning and localisation. (2) Image backgrounds are shared across classes to better learn varying surroundings and "push out" objects of interest. (3) Our model can be learned with a mixture of weakly labelled and unlabelled data, allowing the large volume of unlabelled images on the Internet to be exploited for learning. Moreover, the Bayesian formulation enables the exploitation of various types of prior knowledge to compensate for the limited supervision offered by weakly labelled data, as well as Bayesian domain adaptation for transfer learning. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC, ImageNet and YouTube-Object videos datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our Bayesian joint model for weakly supervised object localisation.
An approach similar in spirit to ours in the sense of jointly learning a model for all classes is that of Cabral al @cite_41 . This study formulates multi-label image classification as a matrix completion problem, which is also related to our factoring images into a mixture of topics. However we add two key components of (i) a stronger notion of the spatial location and extent of each object, and (ii) the ability to encode human knowledge or transferred knowledge through a Bayesian prior. As a result, we are able to address more challenging data than @cite_41 such PASCAL VOC. Multi-instance multi-label (MIML) @cite_67 approaches provide a mechanism to jointly learn a model for all classes @cite_49 @cite_17 . However, because these methods must search for a discrete space (of positive instance subsets), their optimisation problem is harder than the smooth probabilistic optimisation here. Finally, while more elaborate joint generative learning methods @cite_53 @cite_33 exist, they are more complicated than necessary for WSOL and do not scale to the size of data required here.
@cite_67 @cite_33 @cite_41 @cite_53 @cite_49 @cite_17
2937970997 2154840533 2079267072 2056974656
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). In this paper, we address the problem of multi-instance multi-label learning (MIML) where each example is associated with not only multiple instances but also multiple class labels. In our novel approach, given an MIML example, each instance in the example is only associated with a single label and the label set of the example is the aggregation of all instance labels. Many real-world tasks such as scene classification, text categorization and gene sequence encoding can be properly formalized under our proposed approach. We formulate our MIML problem as a combination of two optimizations: (1) a quadratic programming (QP) that minimizes the empirical risk with L2-norm regularization, and (2) an integer programing (IP) assigning each instance to a single label. We also present an efficient method combining the stochastic gradient decent and alternating optimization approaches to solve our QP and IP optimizations. In our experiments with both an artificially generated data set and real-world applications, i.e. scene classification and text categorization, our proposed method achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art MIML methods such as MIMLBOOST, MIMLSVM, M @math MIML and MIMLRBF. We address the problem of localisation of objects as bounding boxes in images with weak labels. This weakly supervised object localisation problem has been tackled in the past using discriminative models where each object class is localised independently from other classes. We propose a novel framework based on Bayesian joint topic modelling. Our framework has three distinctive advantages over previous works: (1) All object classes and image backgrounds are modelled jointly together in a single generative model so that "explaining away" inference can resolve ambiguity and lead to better learning and localisation. (2) The Bayesian formulation of the model enables easy integration of prior knowledge about object appearance to compensate for limited supervision. (3) Our model can be learned with a mixture of weakly labelled and unlabelled data, allowing the large volume of unlabelled images on the Internet to be exploited for learning. Extensive experiments on the challenging VOC dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors. We present a novel framework for multi-label learning that explicitly addresses the challenge arising from the large number of classes and a small size of training data. The key assumption behind this work is that two examples tend to have large overlap in their assigned class memberships if they share high similarity in their input patterns. We capitalize this assumption by first computing two sets of similarities, one based on the input patterns of examples, and the other based on the class memberships of the examples. We then search for the optimal assignment of class memberships to the unlabeled data that minimizes the difference between these two sets of similarities. The optimization problem is formulated as a constrained Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) problem, and an algorithm is presented to efficiently find the solution. Compared to the existing approaches for multi-label learning, the proposed approach is advantageous in that it is able to explore both the unlabeled data and the correlation among different classes simultaneously. Experiments with text categorization show that our approach performs significantly better than several state-of-the-art classification techniques when the number of classes is large and the size of training data is small.