Popular Hough Transform-based object detection approaches usually construct an appearance codebook by clustering local image features. However, how to choose appropriate values for the parameters used in the clustering step remains an open problem. Moreover, some popular histogram features extracted from overlapping image blocks may cause a high degree of redundancy and multicollinearity. In this paper, we propose a novel Hough Transform-based object detection approach. First, to address the above issues, we exploit a Bridge Partial Least Squares (BPLS) technique to establish context-encoded Hough Regression Models (HRMs), which are linear regression models that cast probabilistic Hough votes to predict object locations. BPLS is an efficient variant of Partial Least Squares (PLS). PLS-based regression techniques (including BPLS) can reduce the redundancy and eliminate the multicollinearity of a feature set. And the appropriate value of the only parameter used in PLS (i.e., the number of latent components) can be determined by using a cross-validation procedure. Second, to efficiently handle object scale changes, we propose a novel multi-scale voting scheme. In this scheme, multiple Hough images corresponding to multiple object scales can be obtained simultaneously. Third, an object in a test image may correspond to multiple true and false positive hypotheses at different scales. Based on the proposed multi-scale voting scheme, a principled strategy is proposed to fuse hypotheses to reduce false positives by evaluating normalized pointwise mutual information between hypotheses. In the experiments, we also compare the proposed HRM approach with its several variants to evaluate the influences of its components on its performance. Experimental results show that the proposed HRM approach has achieved desirable performances on popular benchmark datasets.
However, the clustering step for building up a codebook in ISM and partISM is time-consuming. Moreover, in the clustering step, a distance threshold is used to determine whether a local feature should merge with a cluster. The threshold value can significantly influence the effectiveness of the derived codebook. In addition, the weights assigned to all Hough votes cast from a codebook entry are identical in the ISM approach. To address these issues, a number of improvements have been made to the ISM approach in recent years. Instead of unsupervised clustering, the Hough forests @cite_22 @cite_31 and DGHT @cite_0 approaches implement a supervised clustering step to construct random forests. The leaf nodes of a tree in a random forest are considered to form a discriminative codebook. Given a local feature in a test image, both its corresponding voting vectors and the probability that the feature belongs to foreground can be obtained from the leaf nodes of a tree. The probability is considered as the weight of any Hough vote cast by the feature. The MMHT @cite_11 approach adapts the probabilistic framework in the ISM approach and learns the weights of Hough votes in a discriminative max-margin framework.
@cite_0 @cite_31 @cite_22 @cite_11
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We present a method for the detection of instances of an object class, such as cars or pedestrians, in natural images. Similarly to some previous works, this is accomplished via generalized Hough transform, where the detections of individual object parts cast probabilistic votes for possible locations of the centroid of the whole object; the detection hypotheses then correspond to the maxima of the Hough image that accumulates the votes from all parts. However, whereas the previous methods detect object parts using generative codebooks of part appearances, we take a more discriminative approach to object part detection. Towards this end, we train a class-specific Hough forest, which is a random forest that directly maps the image patch appearance to the probabilistic vote about the possible location of the object centroid. We demonstrate that Hough forests improve the results of the Hough-transform object detection significantly and achieve state-of-the-art performance for several classes and datasets. The paper introduces Hough forests, which are random forests adapted to perform a generalized Hough transform in an efficient way. Compared to previous Hough-based systems such as implicit shape models, Hough forests improve the performance of the generalized Hough transform for object detection on a categorical level. At the same time, their flexibility permits extensions of the Hough transform to new domains such as object tracking and action recognition. Hough forests can be regarded as task-adapted codebooks of local appearance that allow fast supervised training and fast matching at test time. They achieve high detection accuracy since the entries of such codebooks are optimized to cast Hough votes with small variance and since their efficiency permits dense sampling of local image patches or video cuboids during detection. The efficacy of Hough forests for a set of computer vision tasks is validated through experiments on a large set of publicly available benchmark data sets and comparisons with the state-of-the-art. We present a discriminative Hough transform based object detector where each local part casts a weighted vote for the possible locations of the object center. We show that the weights can be learned in a max-margin framework which directly optimizes the classification performance. The discriminative training takes into account both the codebook appearance and the spatial distribution of its position with respect to the object center to derive its importance. On various datasets we show that the discriminative training improves the Hough detector. Combined with a verification step using a SVM based classifier, our approach achieves a detection rate of 91.9 at 0.3 false positives per image on the ETHZ shape dataset, a significant improvement over the state of the art, while running the verification step on at least an order of magnitude fewer windows than in a sliding window approach. We present a method to classify and localize human actions in video using a Hough transform voting framework. Random trees are trained to learn a mapping between densely-sampled feature patches and their corresponding votes in a spatio-temporal-action Hough space. The leaves of the trees form a discriminative multi-class codebook that share features between the action classes and vote for action centers in a probabilistic manner. Using low-level features such as gradients and optical flow, we demonstrate that Hough-voting can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several datasets covering a wide range of action-recognition scenarios. Object detection in cluttered, natural scenes has a high complexity since many local observations compete for object hypotheses. Voting methods provide an efficient solution to this problem. When Hough voting is extended to location and scale, votes naturally become lines through scale space due to the local scale-location-ambiguity. In contrast to this, current voting methods stick to the location-only setting and cast point votes, which require local estimates of scale. Rather than searching for object hypotheses in the Hough accumulator, we propose a weighted, pairwise clustering of voting lines to obtain globally consistent hypotheses directly. In essence, we propose a hierarchical approach that is based on a sparse representation of object boundary shape. Clustering of voting lines (CVL) condenses the information from these edge points in few, globally consistent candidate hypotheses. A final verification stage concludes by refining the candidates. Experiments on the ETHZ shape dataset show that clustering voting lines significantly improves state-of-the-art Hough voting techniques. This paper addresses the task of efficient object class detection by means of the Hough transform. This approach has been made popular by the Implicit Shape Model (ISM) and has been adopted many times. Although ISM exhibits robust detection performance, its probabilistic formulation is unsatisfactory. The PRincipled Implicit Shape Model (PRISM) overcomes these problems by interpreting Hough voting as a dual implementation of linear sliding-window detection. It thereby gives a sound justification to the voting procedure and imposes minimal constraints. We demonstrate PRISM's flexibility by two complementary implementations: a generatively trained Gaussian Mixture Model as well as a discriminatively trained histogram approach. Both systems achieve state-of-the-art performance. Detections are found by gradient-based or branch and bound search, respectively. The latter greatly benefits from PRISM's feature-centric view. It thereby avoids the unfavourable memory trade-off and any on-line pre-processing of the original Efficient Subwindow Search (ESS). Moreover, our approach takes account of the features' scale value while ESS does not. Finally, we show how to avoid soft-matching and spatial pyramid descriptors during detection without losing their positive effect. This makes algorithms simpler and faster. Both are possible if the object model is properly regularised and we discuss a modification of SVMs which allows for doing so. A novel algorithm based on random forests with surrogate splits is proposed to address the classification problem of incomplete data without imputation.The algorithm allows each tree to cast a vote even the voting process is interrupted by missing attributes.Experimental results on various acknowledged datasets show that the proposed method is robust and efficient. Random forests (RF) is known as an efficient algorithm in classification, however it depends on the integrity of datasets. Conventional methods in dealing with missing values usually employ estimation and imputation approaches whose efficiency is tied to the assumptions of data features. Recently, algorithm of surrogate decisions in RF was developed and this paper proposes a random forests algorithm with modified surrogate splits (Adjusted Weight Voting Random Forest, AWVRF) which is able to address the incomplete data without imputation.Differing from the present surrogate method, in AWVRF algorithm, when the primary splitting attribute and the surrogate attributes of an internal node are all missing, the undergoing instance is allowed to exit at the current node with a vote. Then the weight of the vote is adjusted by the strength of the involved attributes and the final decision is made by weighted voting. AWVRF does not comprise imputation step, thus it is independent of data features.AWVRF is compared with the methods of mean imputation, LeoFill, knnimpute, BPCAfill and conventional RF with surrogate decisions (surrRF) using 50 times repeated 5-fold cross validation on 10 acknowledged datasets. In a total of 22 experiment settings, the method of AWVRF harvests the highest accuracy in 14 settings and the largest AUC in 7 settings, exhibiting its superiority over other methods. Compared with surrRF, AWVRF is significantly more efficient and remain good discrimination of prediction. Experimental results show that the present AWVRF algorithm can successfully handle the classification task for incomplete data. This paper presents a novel approach to detect and track people and cars based on the combined information retrieved from a camera and a laser range scanner. Laser data points are classified by using boosted Conditional Random Fields, while the image based detector uses an extension of the Implicit Shape Model (ISM), which learns a codebook of local descriptors from a set of hand-labeled images and uses them to vote for centers of detected objects. Our extensions to ISM include the learning of object parts and template masks to obtain more distinctive votes for the particular object classes. The detections from both sensors are then fused and the objects are tracked using a Kalman Filter with multiple motion models. Experiments conducted in real-world urban scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The codebooks play a decisive role in the Hough Transform based object detection. We propose a novel approach to generate the codebooks in the manner of parametric regression and integrate inside semantic information drawn from objects and background. Clustering is a popular method for deriving codebooks, but it generally relies on some parameters, which heavily affect the performance of the approaches. By exploiting Partial Least Squares and tuning only one parameter, we map the most informative latent components of an image patch directly to the displacement vectors from the possible object centroids to the patch, and obtain the Parameterized Semantic Codebook Group (PSCG). Experiments show that PSCG generates accurate voting vectors and performs superiorly on some challenging datasets. In this paper we propose a new technique for learning a discriminative codebook for local feature descriptors, specifically designed for scalable landmark classification. The key contribution lies in exploiting the knowledge of correspondences within sets of feature descriptors during code-book learning. Feature correspondences are obtained using structure from motion (SfM) computation on Internet photo collections which serve as the training data. Our codebook is defined by a random forest that is trained to map corresponding feature descriptors into identical codes. Unlike prior forest-based codebook learning methods, we utilize fine-grained descriptor labels and address the challenge of training a forest with an extremely large number of labels. Our codebook is used with various existing feature encoding schemes and also a variant we propose for importance-weighted aggregation of local features. We evaluate our approach on a public dataset of 25 landmarks and our new dataset of 620 landmarks (614K images). Our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art in landmark classification. Furthermore, our method is memory efficient and scalable. This paper present a part-based approach for detecting objects with large variation of appearance. We extract local image patches as local features both from the object and from the background in training images to learn an object part model discriminatively. Our object part model discriminates the local features whether they are an object part or not. Based on the discrimination results, each local feature casts probabilistic votes for the object location and size which are learned from the training images. Our object part model also requires regression performance for predicting the object location and size through the voting procedure. We build such an object part model with an ensemble of randomized trees trained by splitting each tree node so as to reduce the entropy of class label distribution and the variance of object location and size. Experimental results on hand detection with large pose variation show that our approach outperforms conventional generalized Hough transform. We verified the performance on a public dataset of side-view cars. We describe an approach for detecting and segmenting humans with extensive posture articulations in crowded video sequences. In our method we learn a set of mean posture clusters, and a codebook of local shape distributions for humans in various postures. Detection proceeds in two stages: first instances of the codebook entries cast votes for locations of humans in the video and their respective postures. Subsequently, consistent hypotheses are found as maxima within a voting space. The segmentation of humans in the scene is initialized by the corresponding posture clusters and contours are evolved to obtain precise and consistent segmentations. Our experimental results indicate that the framework provides a simple yet effective means for aggregating local and global shape-based cues. The proposed method is capable of detecting and segmenting humans in crowded scenes as they perform a diverse set of activities and undergo a wide range of articulations within different contexts. Object detection and 6D pose estimation in the crowd (scenes with multiple object instances, severe foreground occlusions and background distractors), has become an important problem in many rapidly evolving technological areas such as robotics and augmented reality. Single shot-based 6D pose estimators with manually designed features are still unable to tackle the above challenges, motivating the research towards unsupervised feature learning and next-best-view estimation. In this work, we present a complete framework for both single shot-based 6D object pose estimation and next-best-view prediction based on Hough Forests, the state of the art object pose estimator that performs classification and regression jointly. Rather than using manually designed features we a) propose an unsupervised feature learnt from depth-invariant patches using a Sparse Autoencoder and b) offer an extensive evaluation of various state of the art features. Furthermore, taking advantage of the clustering performed in the leaf nodes of Hough Forests, we learn to estimate the reduction of uncertainty in other views, formulating the problem of selecting the next-best-view. To further improve pose estimation, we propose an improved joint registration and hypotheses verification module as a final refinement step to reject false detections. We provide two additional challenging datasets inspired from realistic scenarios to extensively evaluate the state of the art and our framework. One is related to domestic environments and the other depicts a bin-picking scenario mostly found in industrial settings. We show that our framework significantly outperforms state of the art both on public and on our datasets. 6D object detection and pose estimation in the crowd (scenes with multiple object instances, severe foreground occlusions and background distractors), has become an important problem in many rapidly evolving technological areas such as robotics and augmented reality. Single shot-based 6D pose estimators with manually designed features are still unable to tackle the above challenges, motivating the research towards unsupervised feature learning and next-best-view estimation. In this work, we present a complete framework for both single shot-based 6D object pose estimation and next-best-view prediction based on Hough Forests, the state of the art object pose estimator that performs classification and regression jointly. Rather than using manually designed features we a) propose an unsupervised feature learnt from depth-invariant patches using a Sparse Autoencoder and b) offer an extensive evaluation of various state of the art features. Furthermore, taking advantage of the clustering performed in the leaf nodes of Hough Forests, we learn to estimate the reduction of uncertainty in other views, formulating the problem of selecting the next-best-view. To further improve 6D object pose estimation, we propose an improved joint registration and hypotheses verification module as a final refinement step to reject false detections. We provide two additional challenging datasets inspired from realistic scenarios to extensively evaluate the state of the art and our framework. One is related to domestic environments and the other depicts a bin-picking scenario mostly found in industrial settings. We show that our framework significantly outperforms state of the art both on public and on our datasets. In this paper we present Latent-Class Hough Forests , a method for object detection and 6 DoF pose estimation in heavily cluttered and occluded scenarios. We adapt a state of the art template matching feature into a scale-invariant patch descriptor and integrate it into a regression forest using a novel template-based split function. We train with positive samples only and we treat class distributions at the leaf nodes as latent variables. During testing we infer by iteratively updating these distributions, providing accurate estimation of background clutter and foreground occlusions and, thus, better detection rate. Furthermore, as a by-product, our Latent-Class Hough Forests can provide accurate occlusion aware segmentation masks, even in the multi-instance scenario. In addition to an existing public dataset, which contains only single-instance sequences with large amounts of clutter, we have collected two, more challenging, datasets for multiple-instance detection containing heavy 2D and 3D clutter as well as foreground occlusions. We provide extensive experiments on the various parameters of the framework such as patch size, number of trees and number of iterations to infer class distributions at test time. We also evaluate the Latent-Class Hough Forests on all datasets where we outperform state of the art methods. Hough voting methods efficiently handle the high complexity of multiscale, category-level object detection in cluttered scenes. The primary weakness of this approach is however that mutually dependent local observations are independently voting for intrinsically global object properties such as object scale. All the votes are added up to obtain object hypotheses. The assumption is thus that object hypotheses are a sum of independent part votes. Popular representation schemes are, however, based on an overlapping sampling of semi-local image features with large spatial support (e.g. SIFT or geometric blur). Features are thus mutually dependent and we incorporate these dependences into probabilistic Hough voting by presenting an objective function that combines three intimately related problems: i) grouping of mutually dependent parts, ii) solving the correspondence problem conjointly for dependent parts, and iii) finding concerted object hypotheses using extended groups rather than based on local observations alone. Experiments successfully demonstrate that state-of-the-art Hough voting and even sliding windows are significantly improved by utilizing part dependences and jointly optimizing groups, correspondences, and votes. Dictionary learning has became an increasingly important task in machine learning, as it is fundamental to the representation problem. A number of emerging techniques specifically include a codebook learning step, in which a critical knowledge abstraction process is carried out. Existing approaches in dictionary (codebook) learning are either generative (unsupervised e.g. k-means) or discriminative (supervised e.g. extremely randomized forests). In this paper, we propose a multiple instance learning (MIL) strategy (along the line of weakly supervised learning) for dictionary learning. Each code is represented by a classifier, such as a linear SVM, which naturally performs metric fusion for multi-channel features. We design a formulation to simultaneously learn mixtures of codes by maximizing classification margins in MIL. State-of-the-art results are observed in image classification benchmarks based on the learned codebooks, which observe both compactness and effectiveness. This paper proposes a novel closed-form solution to complete line-segment extraction. Given a voting angle in image space, the voting distribution is analyzed and two functional relationships are deduced. Regarding the corresponding column in Hough space, voting along the distance axis is considered as being a random variable, and voting values in cells are considered as forming a probability distribution. Statistical characteristics of this distribution are used to fit a quadratic polynomial curve and a linear curve. Direction, length, and width of a line segment are simultaneously computed in a closed form based on coefficients of fitted quadratic polynomial curves. The midpoint of a line segment is determined based on the fitted linear curve. The method is tested on simulated and real-world images; results show that the proposed closed-form solution is feasible in the presence of quantization errors or image noise. HighlightsWe proposed a method for obtaining the complete set of line-segment parameters.The direction, length and width of a line-segment are extracted simul- taneously in a closed form.We provided a complete theoretical derivation of voting variance with respect to voting angle.The midpoint of a line-segment is determined by the coefficients of the fitted linear curve.Parallel, crossing, and aligned line-segments are discussed by analysing events in image space and Hough space. We present a new approach to general-activity human pose estimation from depth images, building on Hough forests. We extend existing techniques in several ways: real time prediction of multiple 3D joints, explicit learning of voting weights, vote compression to allow larger training sets, and a comparison of several decision-tree training objectives. Key aspects of our work include: regression directly from the raw depth image, without the use of an arbitrary intermediate representation; applicability to general motions (not constrained to particular activities) and the ability to localize occluded as well as visible body joints. Experimental results demonstrate that our method produces state of the art results on several data sets including the challenging MSRC-5000 pose estimation test set, at a speed of about 200 frames per second. Results on silhouettes suggest broader applicability to other imaging modalities. We propose a structured Hough voting method for detecting objects with heavy occlusion in indoor environments. First, we extend the Hough hypothesis space to include both object location and its visibility pattern, and design a new score function that accumulates votes for object detection and occlusion prediction. In addition, we explore the correlation between objects and their environment, building a depth-encoded object-context model based on RGB-D data. Particularly, we design a layered context representation and allow image patches from both objects and backgrounds voting for the object hypotheses. We demonstrate that using a data-driven 2.1D representation we can learn visual codebooks with better quality, and more interpretable detection results in terms of spatial relationship between objects and viewer. We test our algorithm on two challenging RGB-D datasets with significant occlusion and intraclass variation, and demonstrate the superior performance of our method.