Hierarchies allow feature sharing between objects at multiple levels of representation, can code exponential variability in a very compact way and enable fast inference. This makes them potentially suitable for learning and recognizing a higher number of object classes. However, the success of the hierarchical approaches so far has been hindered by the use of hand-crafted features or predetermined grouping rules. This paper presents a novel framework for learning a hierarchical compositional shape vocabulary for representing multiple object classes. The approach takes simple contour fragments and learns their frequent spatial configurations. These are recursively combined into increasingly more complex and class-specific shape compositions, each exerting a high degree of shape variability. At the top-level of the vocabulary, the compositions are sufficiently large and complex to represent the whole shapes of the objects. We learn the vocabulary layer after layer, by gradually increasing the size of the window of analysis and reducing the spatial resolution at which the shape configurations are learned. The lower layers are learned jointly on images of all classes, whereas the higher layers of the vocabulary are learned incrementally, by presenting the algorithm with one object class after another. The experimental results show that the learned multi-class object representation scales favorably with the number of object classes and achieves a state-of-the-art detection performance at both, faster inference as well as shorter training times.
Ommer and Buhmann @cite_39 proposed an unsupervised hierarchical learning approach, which has been successfully utilized for object classification. The features at each layer are defined as histograms over a larger, spatially constrained area. Our approach explicitly models the spatial relations among the features, which should allow for a more reliable detection of objects with lower sensitivity to background clutter.
@cite_39
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We propose a novel unsupervised learning approach to build features suitable for object detection and classification. The features are pre-trained on a large dataset without human annotation and later transferred via fine-tuning on a different, smaller and labeled dataset. The pre-training consists of solving jigsaw puzzles of natural images. To facilitate the transfer of features to other tasks, we introduce the context-free network (CFN), a siamese-ennead convolutional neural network. The features correspond to the columns of the CFN and they process image tiles independently (i.e., free of context). The later layers of the CFN then use the features to identify their geometric arrangement. Our experimental evaluations show that the learned features capture semantically relevant content. We pre-train the CFN on the training set of the ILSVRC2012 dataset and transfer the features on the combined training and validation set of Pascal VOC 2007 for object detection (via fast RCNN) and classification. These features outperform all current unsupervised features with (51.8 , ) for detection and (68.6 , ) for classification, and reduce the gap with supervised learning ( (56.5 , ) and (78.2 , ) respectively). We present a latent hierarchical structural learning method for object detection. An object is represented by a mixture of hierarchical tree models where the nodes represent object parts. The nodes can move spatially to allow both local and global shape deformations. The models can be trained discriminatively using latent structural SVM learning, where the latent variables are the node positions and the mixture component. But current learning methods are slow, due to the large number of parameters and latent variables, and have been restricted to hierarchies with two layers. In this paper we describe an incremental concave-convex procedure (iCCCP) which allows us to learn both two and three layer models efficiently. We show that iCCCP leads to a simple training algorithm which avoids complex multi-stage layer-wise training, careful part selection, and achieves good performance without requiring elaborate initialization. We perform object detection using our learnt models and obtain performance comparable with state-of-the-art methods when evaluated on challenging public PASCAL datasets. We demonstrate the advantages of three layer hierarchies – outperforming 's two layer models on all 20 classes. We present a method for performing hierarchical object detection in images guided by a deep reinforcement learning agent. The key idea is to focus on those parts of the image that contain richer information and zoom on them. We train an intelligent agent that, given an image window, is capable of deciding where to focus the attention among five different predefined region candidates (smaller windows). This procedure is iterated providing a hierarchical image analysis.We compare two different candidate proposal strategies to guide the object search: with and without overlap. Moreover, our work compares two different strategies to extract features from a convolutional neural network for each region proposal: a first one that computes new feature maps for each region proposal, and a second one that computes the feature maps for the whole image to later generate crops for each region proposal. Experiments indicate better results for the overlapping candidate proposal strategy and a loss of performance for the cropped image features due to the loss of spatial resolution. We argue that, while this loss seems unavoidable when working with large amounts of object candidates, the much more reduced amount of region proposals generated by our reinforcement learning agent allows considering to extract features for each location without sharing convolutional computation among regions. In this work we propose a hierarchical approach for labeling semantic objects and regions in scenes. Our approach is reminiscent of early vision literature in that we use a decomposition of the image in order to encode relational and spatial information. In contrast to much existing work on structured prediction for scene understanding, we bypass a global probabilistic model and instead directly train a hierarchical inference procedure inspired by the message passing mechanics of some approximate inference procedures in graphical models. This approach mitigates both the theoretical and empirical difficulties of learning probabilistic models when exact inference is intractable. In particular, we draw from recent work in machine learning and break the complex inference process into a hierarchical series of simple machine learning subproblems. Each subproblem in the hierarchy is designed to capture the image and contextual statistics in the scene. This hierarchy spans coarse-to-fine regions and explicitly models the mixtures of semantic labels that may be present due to imperfect segmentation. To avoid cascading of errors and overfitting, we train the learning problems in sequence to ensure robustness to likely errors earlier in the inference sequence and leverage the stacking approach developed by