In this paper, we explore deep learning methods for estimating when objects were made. Automatic methods for this task could potentially be useful for historians, collectors, or any individual interested in estimating when their artifact was created. Direct applications include large-scale data organization or retrieval. Toward this goal, we utilize features from existing deep networks and also fine-tune new networks for temporal estimation. In addition, we create two new datasets of 67,771 dated clothing items from Flickr and museum collections. Our method outperforms both a color-based baseline and previous state of the art methods for temporal estimation. We also provide several analyses of what our networks have learned, and demonstrate applications to identifying temporal inspiration in fashion collections.
Visual Data Mining: Several visual data mining approaches have been used for tasks such as unsupervised discovery of object categories in image collections @cite_26 @cite_18 @cite_23 @cite_11 , or for finding discriminative parts of actions @cite_8 , cities @cite_13 , or objects @cite_27 . There has also been related work on discovering localized attributes @cite_28 @cite_19 @cite_24 for improved fine-grained recognition. Most of these approaches start from existing hand-crafted feature representations and pre-defined measures of visual similarity, then based on discovered patterns of features in the data, group visual elements into discovered entities. The most relevant work is from @cite_27 which go beyond simply detecting recurring visual elements to model the stylistic differences between objects over time or space. Unlike this prior work, we do not use hand-crafted visual representations. Instead, we use representations learned by CNN models and achieve significantly improved performance. Additionally, we analyze what the network has learned, temporally, and in comparison to the existing data mining approach @cite_27 .
@cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_8 @cite_28 @cite_24 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_23 @cite_13 @cite_11
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This paper presents an approach to object discovery in a given unlabeled image set, based on mining repetitive spatial configurations of image contours. Contours that similarly deform from one image to another are viewed as collaborating, or, otherwise, conflicting. This is captured by a graph over all pairs of matching contours, whose maximum a posteriori multicoloring assignment is taken to represent the shapes of discovered objects. Multicoloring is conducted by our new Coordinate Ascent Swendsen-Wang cut (CASW). CASW uses the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) reversible jumps to probabilistically sample graph edges, and color nodes. CASW extends SW cut by introducing a regularization in the posterior of multicoloring assignments that prevents the MH jumps to arrive at trivial solutions. Also, CASW seeks to learn parameters of the posterior via maximizing a lower bound of the MH acceptance rate. This speeds up multicoloring iterations, and facilitates MH jumps from local minima. On benchmark datasets, we outperform all existing approaches to unsupervised object discovery. We present a method to automatically learn object categories from unlabeled images. Each image is represented by an unordered set of local features, and all sets are embedded into a space where they cluster according to their partial-match feature correspondences. After efficiently computing the pairwise affinities between the input images in this space, a spectral clustering technique is used to recover the primary groupings among the images. We introduce an efficient means of refining these groupings according to intra-cluster statistics over the subsets of features selected by the partial matches between the images, and based on an optional, variable amount of user supervision. We compute the consistent subsets of feature correspondences within a grouping to infer category feature masks. The output of the algorithm is a partition of the data into a set of learned categories, and a set of classifiers trained from these ranked partitions that can recognize the categories in novel images. We describe a mid-level approach for action recognition. From an input video, we extract salient spatio-temporal structures by forming clusters of trajectories that serve as candidates for the parts of an action. The assembly of these clusters into an action class is governed by a graphical model that incorporates appearance and motion constraints for the individual parts and pairwise constraints for the spatio-temporal dependencies among them. During training, we estimate the model parameters discriminatively. During classification, we efficiently match the model to a video using discrete optimization. We validate the model's classification ability in standard benchmark datasets and illustrate its potential to support a fine-grained analysis that not only gives a label to a video, but also identifies and localizes its constituent parts. It is common to use domain specific terminology - attributes - to describe the visual appearance of objects. In order to scale the use of these describable visual attributes to a large number of categories, especially those not well studied by psychologists or linguists, it will be necessary to find alternative techniques for identifying attribute vocabularies and for learning to recognize attributes without hand labeled training data. We demonstrate that it is possible to accomplish both these tasks automatically by mining text and image data sampled from the Internet. The proposed approach also characterizes attributes according to their visual representation: global or local, and type: color, texture, or shape. This work focuses on discovering attributes and their visual appearance, and is as agnostic as possible about the textual description. We present images with binary codes in a way that balances discrimination and learnability of the codes. In our method, each image claims its own code in a way that maintains discrimination while being predictable from visual data. Category memberships are usually good proxies for visual similarity but should not be enforced as a hard constraint. Our method learns codes that maximize separability of categories unless there is strong visual evidence against it. Simple linear SVMs can achieve state-of-the-art results with our short codes. In fact, our method produces state-of-the-art results on Caltech256 with only 128-dimensional bit vectors and outperforms state of the art by using longer codes. We also evaluate our method on ImageNet and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art binary code methods on this large scale dataset. Lastly, our codes can discover a discriminative set of attributes. We present a weakly-supervised visual data mining approach that discovers connections between recurring mid-level visual elements in historic (temporal) and geographic (spatial) image collections, and attempts to capture the underlying visual style. In contrast to existing discovery methods that mine for patterns that remain visually consistent throughout the dataset, our goal is to discover visual elements whose appearance changes due to change in time or location; i.e., exhibit consistent stylistic variations across the label space (date or geo-location). To discover these elements, we first identify groups of patches that are style-sensitive. We then incrementally build correspondences to find the same element across the entire dataset. Finally, we train style-aware regressors that model each element's range of stylistic differences. We apply our approach to date and geo-location prediction and show substantial improvement over several baselines that do not model visual style. We also demonstrate the method's effectiveness on the related task of fine-grained classification. Given a large repository of geotagged imagery, we seek to automatically find visual elements, e. g. windows, balconies, and street signs, that are most distinctive for a certain geo-spatial area, for example the city of Paris. This is a tremendously difficult task as the visual features distinguishing architectural elements of different places can be very subtle. In addition, we face a hard search problem: given all possible patches in all images, which of them are both frequently occurring and geographically informative? To address these issues, we propose to use a discriminative clustering approach able to take into account the weak geographic supervision. We show that geographically representative image elements can be discovered automatically from Google Street View imagery in a discriminative manner. We demonstrate that these elements are visually interpretable and perceptually geo-informative. The discovered visual elements can also support a variety of computational geography tasks, such as mapping architectural correspondences and influences within and across cities, finding representative elements at different geo-spatial scales, and geographically-informed image retrieval. We seek to discover the object categories depicted in a set of unlabelled images. We achieve this using a model developed in the statistical text literature: probabilistic latent semantic analysis (pLSA). In text analysis, this is used to discover topics in a corpus using the bag-of-words document representation. Here we treat object categories as topics, so that an image containing instances of several categories is modeled as a mixture of topics. The model is applied to images by using a visual analogue of a word, formed by vector quantizing SIFT-like region descriptors. The topic discovery approach successfully translates to the visual domain: for a small set of objects, we show that both the object categories and their approximate spatial layout are found without supervision. Performance of this unsupervised method is compared to the supervised approach of (2003) on a set of unseen images containing only one object per image. We also extend the bag-of-words vocabulary to include 'doublets' which encode spatially local co-occurring regions. It is demonstrated that this extended vocabulary gives a cleaner image segmentation. Finally, the classification and segmentation methods are applied to a set of images containing multiple objects per image. These results demonstrate that we can successfully build object class models from an unsupervised analysis of images.