Recognition of materials has proven to be a challenging problem due to the wide variation in appearance within and between categories. Global image context, such as where the material is or what object it makes up, can be crucial to recognizing the material. Existing methods, however, operate on an implicit fusion of materials and context by using large receptive fields as input (i.e., large image patches). Many recent material recognition methods treat materials as yet another set of labels like objects. Materials are, however, fundamentally different from objects as they have no inherent shape or defined spatial extent. Approaches that ignore this can only take advantage of limited implicit context as it appears during training. We instead show that recognizing materials purely from their local appearance and integrating separately recognized global contextual cues including objects and places leads to superior dense, per-pixel, material recognition. We achieve this by training a fully-convolutional material recognition network end-to-end with only material category supervision. We integrate object and place estimates to this network from independent CNNs. This approach avoids the necessity of preparing an impractically-large amount of training data to cover the product space of materials, objects, and scenes, while fully leveraging contextual cues for dense material recognition. Furthermore, we perform a detailed analysis of the effects of context granularity, spatial resolution, and the network level at which we introduce context. On a recently introduced comprehensive and diverse material database Schwartz2016 , we confirm that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with significantly less training data compared to past methods.
The use of context as a means to reduce ambiguity, whether in materials or other cases, appears promising. Hu al @cite_6 showed that a simple addition of object category predictions as features could potentially improve material recognition. On an unrelated topic, Iizuka al @cite_15 use scene place category predictions to improve the accuracy of greyscale image colorization. Our work, in contrast to these previous methods, takes advantage of multiple sources of context and investigates the ideal granularity of context categories. Within the framework of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), we evaluate how the hierarchical level at which we introduce context influences the accuracy of the corresponding material predictions.
@cite_15 @cite_6
2461158874 2075019799
We present a novel technique to automatically colorize grayscale images that combines both global priors and local image features. Based on Convolutional Neural Networks, our deep network features a fusion layer that allows us to elegantly merge local information dependent on small image patches with global priors computed using the entire image. The entire framework, including the global and local priors as well as the colorization model, is trained in an end-to-end fashion. Furthermore, our architecture can process images of any resolution, unlike most existing approaches based on CNN. We leverage an existing large-scale scene classification database to train our model, exploiting the class labels of the dataset to more efficiently and discriminatively learn the global priors. We validate our approach with a user study and compare against the state of the art, where we show significant improvements. Furthermore, we demonstrate our method extensively on many different types of images, including black-and-white photography from over a hundred years ago, and show realistic colorizations. Material recognition is a fundamental problem in perception that is receiving increasing attention. Following the recent work using Flickr [16, 23], we empirically study material recognition of real-world objects using a rich set of local features. We use the Kernel Descriptor framework [5] and extend the set of descriptors to include materialmotivated attributes using variances of gradient orientation and magnitude. Large-Margin Nearest Neighbor learning is used for a 30-fold dimension reduction. We improve the state-of-the-art accuracy on the Flickr dataset [16] from 45 to 54 . We also introduce two new datasets using ImageNet and macro photos, extensively evaluating our set of features and showing promising connections between material and object recognition.