We focus on the challenging problem of efficient mouse 3D pose estimation based on static images, and especially single depth images. We introduce an approach to discriminatively train the split nodes of trees in random forest to improve their performance on estimation of 3D joint positions of mouse. Our algorithm is capable of working with different types of rodents and with different types of depth cameras and imaging setups. In particular, it is demonstrated in this paper that when a top-mounted depth camera is combined with a bottom-mounted color camera, the final system is capable of delivering full-body pose estimation including four limbs and the paws. Empirical examinations on synthesized and real-world depth images confirm the applicability of our approach on mouse pose estimation, as well as the closely related task of part-based labeling of mouse.
In behavior phenotyping, existing systems rely on discriminative learning methods such as SVM and conditional random fields (CRFs) @cite_22 @cite_3 @cite_12 that directly focus on classifying behaviours or interactions. These discriminative methods are usually supported by extracting visual features from 2D videos, such as spatio-temporal interest points (STIP) @cite_22 obtained by convolution of video sequence with filters designed to respond to salient points in the video volume, on which the visual bag-of-word features can be constructed. One key drawback is that these approaches are based on highly sophisticated features that are usually inscrutable by behavioral neuroscientists. This might lead to undesirable consequences when one tries to interpret the empirical findings, even if the classification performance is acceptable. An alternative scheme is to instead rely on single-frame based pose estimation, which is a lot easier for domain experts to understand and interpret.
@cite_12 @cite_22 @cite_3
1805346680 2134557905 2883938080 2127856808
Conditional random fields (CRFs) are popular discriminative models for computer vision and have been successfully applied in the domain of image restoration, especially to image denoising. For image deblurring, however, discriminative approaches have been mostly lacking. We posit two reasons for this: First, the blur kernel is often only known at test time, requiring any discriminative approach to cope with considerable variability. Second, given this variability it is quite difficult to construct suitable features for discriminative prediction. To address these challenges we first show a connection between common half-quadratic inference for generative image priors and Gaussian CRFs. Based on this analysis, we then propose a cascade model for image restoration that consists of a Gaussian CRF at each stage. Each stage of our cascade is semi-parametric, i.e., it depends on the instance-specific parameters of the restoration problem, such as the blur kernel. We train our model by loss minimization with synthetically generated training data. Our experiments show that when applied to non-blind image deblurring, the proposed approach is efficient and yields state-of-the-art restoration quality on images corrupted with synthetic and real blur. Moreover, we demonstrate its suitability for image denoising, where we achieve competitive results for grayscale and color images. 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. Due to the emergence of Generative Adversarial Networks, video synthesis has witnessed exceptional breakthroughs. However, existing methods lack a proper representation to explicitly control the dynamics in videos. Human pose, on the other hand, can represent motion patterns intrinsically and interpretably, and impose the geometric constraints regardless of appearance. In this paper, we propose a pose guided method to synthesize human videos in a disentangled way: plausible motion prediction and coherent appearance generation. In the first stage, a Pose Sequence Generative Adversarial Network (PSGAN) learns in an adversarial manner to yield pose sequences conditioned on the class label. In the second stage, a Semantic Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (SCGAN) generates video frames from the poses while preserving coherent appearances in the input image. By enforcing semantic consistency between the generated and ground-truth poses at a high feature level, our SCGAN is robust to noisy or abnormal poses. Extensive experiments on both human action and human face datasets manifest the superiority of the proposed method over other state-of-the-arts. Until recently, the lack of ground truth data has hindered the application of discriminative structured prediction techniques to the stereo problem. In this paper we use ground truth data sets that we have recently constructed to explore different model structures and parameter learning techniques. To estimate parameters in Markov random fields (MRFs) via maximum likelihood one usually needs to perform approximate probabilistic inference. Conditional random fields (CRFs) are discriminative versions of traditional MRFs. We explore a number of novel CRF model structures including a CRF for stereo matching with an explicit occlusion model. CRFs require expensive inference steps for each iteration of optimization and inference is particularly slow when there are many discrete states. We explore belief propagation, variational message passing and graph cuts as inference methods during learning and compare with learning via pseudolikelihood. To accelerate approximate inference we have developed a new method called sparse variational message passing which can reduce inference time by an order of magnitude with negligible loss in quality. Learning using sparse variational message passing improves upon previous approaches using graph cuts and allows efficient learning over large data sets when energy functions violate the constraints imposed by graph cuts.