Multi-task learning aims to improve generalization performance of multiple prediction tasks by appropriately sharing relevant information across them. In the context of deep neural networks, this idea is often realized by hand-designed network architectures with layers that are shared across tasks and branches that encode task-specific features. However, the space of possible multi-task deep architectures is combinatorially large and often the final architecture is arrived at by manual exploration of this space subject to designer's bias, which can be both error-prone and tedious. In this work, we propose a principled approach for designing compact multi-task deep learning architectures. Our approach starts with a thin network and dynamically widens it in a greedy manner during training using a novel criterion that promotes grouping of similar tasks together. Our Extensive evaluation on person attributes classification tasks involving facial and clothing attributes suggests that the models produced by the proposed method are fast, compact and can closely match or exceed the state-of-the-art accuracy from strong baselines by much more expensive models.
Person Attribute Classification. Methods for recognizing attributes of people, such as facial and clothing attributes, have received increased attention in the past few years. In the visual surveillance domain, person attributes serve as features for improving person re-identification @cite_47 and enable search of suspects based on their description @cite_39 @cite_4 . In e-commerce applications, these attributes have proven effective in improving clothing retrieval @cite_6 , and fashion recommendation @cite_17 . It has also been shown that facial attribute prediction is helpful as an auxiliary task for improving face detection @cite_20 and face alignment @cite_19 .
@cite_4 @cite_6 @cite_39 @cite_19 @cite_47 @cite_20 @cite_17
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We address the problem of attribute-based people search in real surveillance environments. The system we developed is capable of answering user queries such as "show me all people with a beard and sunglasses, wearing a white hat and a patterned blue shirt, from all metro cameras in the downtown area, from 2pm to 4pm last Saturday". In this paper, we describe the lessons we learned from practical deployments of our system, and how we made our algorithms achieve the accuracy and efficiency required by many police departments around the world. In particular, we show that a novel set of multimodal integral filters and proper normalization of attribute scores are critical to obtain good performance. We conduct a comprehensive experimental analysis on video footage captured from a large set of surveillance cameras monitoring metro chokepoints, in both crowded and normal activity periods. Moreover, we show impressive results using images from the recent Boston marathon bombing event, where our system can rapidly retrieve the two suspects based on their attributes from a database containing more than one thousand people present at the event. We address the problem of cross-domain image retrieval, considering the following practical application: given a user photo depicting a clothing image, our goal is to retrieve the same or attribute-similar clothing items from online shopping stores. This is a challenging problem due to the large discrepancy between online shopping images, usually taken in ideal lighting pose background conditions, and user photos captured in uncontrolled conditions. To address this problem, we propose a Dual Attribute-aware Ranking Network (DARN) for retrieval feature learning. More specifically, DARN consists of two sub-networks, one for each domain, whose retrieval feature representations are driven by semantic attribute learning. We show that this attribute-guided learning is a key factor for retrieval accuracy improvement. In addition, to further align with the nature of the retrieval problem, we impose a triplet visual similarity constraint for learning to rank across the two sub-networks. Another contribution of our work is a large-scale dataset which makes the network learning feasible. We exploit customer review websites to crawl a large set of online shopping images and corresponding offline user photos with fine-grained clothing attributes, i.e., around 450,000 online shopping images and about 90,000 exact offline counterpart images of those online ones. All these images are collected from real-world consumer websites reflecting the diversity of the data modality, which makes this dataset unique and rare in the academic community. We extensively evaluate the retrieval performance of networks in different configurations. The top-20 retrieval accuracy is doubled when using the proposed DARN other than the current popular solution using pre-trained CNN features only (0.570 vs. 0.268). We propose a novel framework for searching for people in surveillance environments. Rather than relying on face recognition technology, which is known to be sensitive to typical surveillance conditions such as lighting changes, face pose variation, and low-resolution imagery, we approach the problem in a different way: we search for people based on a parsing of human parts and their attributes, including facial hair, eyewear, clothing color, etc. These attributes can be extracted using detectors learned from large amounts of training data. A complete system that implements our framework is presented. At the interface, the user can specify a set of personal characteristics, and the system then retrieves events that match the provided description. For example, a possible query is “show me the bald people who entered a given building last Saturday wearing a red shirt and sunglasses.” This capability is useful in several applications, such as finding suspects or missing people. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we present extensive experiments on a set of images collected from the Internet, on infrared imagery, and on two-and-a-half months of video from a real surveillance environment. We are not aware of any similar surveillance system capable of automatically finding people in video based on their fine-grained body parts and attributes. In this study, we show that landmark detection or face alignment task is not a single and independent problem. Instead, its robustness can be greatly improved with auxiliary information. Specifically, we jointly optimize landmark detection together with the recognition of heterogeneous but subtly correlated facial attributes, such as gender, expression, and appearance attributes. This is non-trivial since different attribute inference tasks have different learning difficulties and convergence rates. To address this problem, we formulate a novel tasks-constrained deep model, which not only learns the inter-task correlation but also employs dynamic task coefficients to facilitate the optimization convergence when learning multiple complex tasks. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed task-constrained learning (i) outperforms existing face alignment methods, especially in dealing with faces with severe occlusion and pose variation, and (ii) reduces model complexity drastically compared to the state-of-the-art methods based on cascaded deep model. In this paper, we propose a novel deep convolutional network (DCN) that achieves outstanding performance on FDDB, PASCAL Face, and AFW. Specifically, our method achieves a high recall rate of 90.99 on the challenging FDDB benchmark, outperforming the state-of-the-art method by a large margin of 2.91 . Importantly, we consider finding faces from a new perspective through scoring facial parts responses by their spatial structure and arrangement. The scoring mechanism is carefully formulated considering challenging cases where faces are only partially visible. This consideration allows our network to detect faces under severe occlusion and unconstrained pose variation, which are the main difficulty and bottleneck of most existing face detection approaches. We show that despite the use of DCN, our network can achieve practical runtime speed. Beauty e-Experts, a fully automatic system for makeover recommendation and synthesis, is developed in this work. The makeover recommendation and synthesis system simultaneously considers many kinds of makeover items on hairstyle and makeup. Given a user-provided frontal face image with short bound hair and no light makeup, the Beauty e-Experts system not only recommends the most suitable hairdo and makeup, but also synthesizes the virtual hairdo and makeup effects. To acquire enough knowledge for beauty modeling, we built the Beauty e-Experts Database, which contains 1,505 female photos with a variety of attributes annotated with different discrete values. We organize these attributes into two different categories, beauty attributes and beauty-related attributes. Beauty attributes refer to those values that are changeable during the makeover process and thus need to be recommended by the system. Beauty-related attributes are those values that cannot be changed during the makeup process but can help the system to perform recommendation. Based on this Beauty e-Experts Dataset, two problems are addressed for the Beauty e-Experts system: what to recommend and how to wear it, which describes a similar process of selecting hairstyle and cosmetics in daily life. For the what-to-recommend problem, we propose a multiple tree-structured supergraph model to explore the complex relationships among high-level beauty attributes, mid-level beauty-related attributes, and low-level image features. Based on this model, the most compatible beauty attributes for a given facial image can be efficiently inferred. For the how-to-wear-it problem, an effective and efficient facial image synthesis module is designed to seamlessly synthesize the recommended makeovers into the user facial image. We have conducted extensive experiments on testing images of various conditions to evaluate and analyze the proposed system. The experimental results well demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed system.