In this paper we present a hierarchical method to discover mid-level elements with the objective of modeling visual compatibility between objects. At the base-level, our method identifies patterns of CNN activations with the aim of modeling different variations styles in which objects of the classes of interest may occur. At the top-level, the proposed method discovers patterns of co-occurring activations of base-level elements that define visual compatibility between pairs of object classes. Experiments on the massive Amazon dataset show the strength of our method at describing object classes and the characteristics that drive the compatibility between them.
In recent years, mid-level visual elements have been proposed as a bottom-up means to represent visual information. These mid-level elements are both representative, i.e. they can be adapted to describe different images, and discriminative, i.e. they can be detected with high precision and recall. Given these properties, mid-level visual elements have proven to be very effective for several computer vision tasks such as image classification @cite_28 @cite_8 @cite_3 , action recognition @cite_24 @cite_26 , geometry estimation @cite_7 , etc. More recently, mid-level visual elements were successfully applied to summarize large sets of images @cite_18 . In addition, their performance was further improved by exploiting more advanced features at the lower level, combinations of activations of Convolutional Neural Networks, and association rule mining @cite_10 . In this work we propose a hierarchical method based on mid-level elements to model visual compatibility between objects depicted in images. At the base-level, our method gets closer to existing work by extracting mid-level elements in a class-specific fashion. Different from existing work at the top-level, our method exploits co-occurrences of base-level elements between images of compatible objects in order to discover a set of patterns or rules that link such objects.
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_3 @cite_24 @cite_10
2139594308 2146814781 2107698128 12634471 1590510366 1998605630 2952540894
This paper proposes motionlet, a mid-level and spatiotemporal part, for human motion recognition. Motion let can be seen as a tight cluster in motion and appearance space, corresponding to the moving process of different body parts. We postulate three key properties of motion let for action recognition: high motion saliency, multiple scale representation, and representative-discriminative ability. Towards this goal, we develop a data-driven approach to learn motion lets from training videos. First, we extract 3D regions with high motion saliency. Then we cluster these regions and preserve the centers as candidate templates for motion let. Finally, we examine the representative and discriminative power of the candidates, and introduce a greedy method to select effective candidates. With motion lets, we present a mid-level representation for video, called motionlet activation vector. We conduct experiments on three datasets, KTH, HMDB51, and UCF50. The results show that the proposed methods significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods. What primitives should we use to infer the rich 3D world behind an image? We argue that these primitives should be both visually discriminative and geometrically informative and we present a technique for discovering such primitives. We demonstrate the utility of our primitives by using them to infer 3D surface normals given a single image. Our technique substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art and shows improved cross-dataset performance. Obtaining effective mid-level representations has become an increasingly important task in computer vision. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic algorithm which harvests visual concepts from a large number of Internet images (more than a quarter of a million) using text-based queries. Existing approaches to visual concept learning from Internet images either rely on strong supervision with detailed manual annotations or learn image-level classifiers only. Here, we take the advantage of having massive well organized Google and Bing image data, visual concepts (around 14, 000) are automatically exploited from images using word-based queries. Using the learned visual concepts, we show state-of-the-art performances on a variety of benchmark datasets, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the learned mid-level representations: being able to generalize well to general natural images. Our method shows significant improvement over the competing systems in image classification, including those with strong supervision. In this paper we address the problem of automatically recognizing pictured dishes. To this end, we introduce a novel method to mine discriminative parts using Random Forests (rf), which allows us to mine for parts simultaneously for all classes and to share knowledge among them. To improve efficiency of mining and classification, we only consider patches that are aligned with image superpixels, which we call components. To measure the performance of our rf component mining for food recognition, we introduce a novel and challenging dataset of 101 food categories, with 101’000 images. With an average accuracy of 50.76 , our model outperforms alternative classification methods except for cnn, including svm classification on Improved Fisher Vectors and existing discriminative part-mining algorithms by 11.88 and 8.13 , respectively. On the challenging mit-Indoor dataset, our method compares nicely to other s-o-a component-based classification methods. The goal of this paper is to discover a set of discriminative patches which can serve as a fully unsupervised mid-level visual representation. The desired patches need to satisfy two requirements: 1) to be representative, they need to occur frequently enough in the visual world; 2) to be discriminative, they need to be different enough from the rest of the visual world. The patches could correspond to parts, objects, "visual phrases", etc. but are not restricted to be any one of them. We pose this as an unsupervised discriminative clustering problem on a huge dataset of image patches. We use an iterative procedure which alternates between clustering and training discriminative classifiers, while applying careful cross-validation at each step to prevent overfitting. The paper experimentally demonstrates the effectiveness of discriminative patches as an unsupervised mid-level visual representation, suggesting that it could be used in place of visual words for many tasks. Furthermore, discriminative patches can also be used in a supervised regime, such as scene classification, where they demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Indoor-67 dataset. How should a video be represented? We propose a new representation for videos based on mid-level discriminative spatio-temporal patches. These spatio-temporal patches might correspond to a primitive human action, a semantic object, or perhaps a random but informative spatio-temporal patch in the video. What defines these spatio-temporal patches is their discriminative and representative properties. We automatically mine these patches from hundreds of training videos and experimentally demonstrate that these patches establish correspondence across videos and align the videos for label transfer techniques. Furthermore, these patches can be used as a discriminative vocabulary for action classification where they demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on UCF50 and Olympics datasets. The purpose of mid-level visual element discovery is to find clusters of image patches that are both representative and discriminative. Here we study this problem from the prospective of pattern mining while relying on the recently popularized Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We observe that a fully-connected CNN activation extracted from an image patch typically possesses two appealing properties that enable its seamless integration with pattern mining techniques. The marriage between CNN activations and association rule mining, a well-known pattern mining technique in the literature, leads to fast and effective discovery of representative and discriminative patterns from a huge number of image patches. When we retrieve and visualize image patches with the same pattern, surprisingly, they are not only visually similar but also semantically consistent, and thus give rise to a mid-level visual element in our work. Given the patterns and retrieved mid-level visual elements, we propose two methods to generate image feature representations for each. The first method is to use the patterns as codewords in a dictionary, similar to the Bag-of-Visual-Words model, we compute a Bag-of-Patterns representation. The second one relies on the retrieved mid-level visual elements to construct a Bag-of-Elements representation. We evaluate the two encoding methods on scene and object classification tasks, and demonstrate that our approach outperforms or matches recent works using CNN activations for these tasks.