We propose a novel cascaded framework, namely deep deformation network (DDN), for localizing landmarks in non-rigid objects. The hallmarks of DDN are its incorporation of geometric constraints within a convolutional neural network (CNN) framework, ease and efficiency of training, as well as generality of application. A novel shape basis network (SBN) forms the first stage of the cascade, whereby landmarks are initialized by combining the benefits of CNN features and a learned shape basis to reduce the complexity of the highly nonlinear pose manifold. In the second stage, a point transformer network (PTN) estimates local deformation parameterized as thin-plate spline transformation for a finer refinement. Our framework does not incorporate either handcrafted features or part connectivity, which enables an end-to-end shape prediction pipeline during both training and testing. In contrast to prior cascaded networks for landmark localization that learn a mapping from feature space to landmark locations, we demonstrate that the regularization induced through geometric priors in the DDN makes it easier to train, yet produces superior results. The efficacy and generality of the architecture is demonstrated through state-of-the-art performances on several benchmarks for multiple tasks such as facial landmark localization, human body pose estimation and bird part localization.
Bird part localization Birds display significant appearance variations between classes and shape variations within the same class. An early work that incorporates a probabilistic model and user responses to localize bird parts is presented in @cite_24 . Chai al @cite_53 apply symbiotic segmentation for part detection. The exemplar-based model of @cite_43 , similar to @cite_10 , enforces pose and subcategory consistency to localize bird parts. Recently, CNN-based methods, for example, part-based R-CNN @cite_0 and Deep LAC @cite_5 have demonstrated significant performance improvements.
@cite_53 @cite_24 @cite_43 @cite_0 @cite_5 @cite_10
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We propose a visual recognition system that is designed for fine-grained visual categorization. The system is composed of a machine and a human user. The user, who is unable to carry out the recognition task by himself, is interactively asked to provide two heterogeneous forms of information: clicking on object parts and answering binary questions. The machine intelligently selects the most informative question to pose to the user in order to identify the object's class as quickly as possible. By leveraging computer vision and analyzing the user responses, the overall amount of human effort required, measured in seconds, is minimized. We demonstrate promising results on a challenging dataset of uncropped images, achieving a significant average reduction in human effort over previous methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for bird part localization, targeting fine-grained categories with wide variations in appearance due to different poses (including aspect and orientation) and subcategories. As it is challenging to represent such variations across a large set of diverse samples with tractable parametric models, we turn to individual exemplars. Specifically, we extend the exemplar-based models in [4] by enforcing pose and subcategory consistency at the parts. During training, we build pose-specific detectors scoring part poses across subcategories, and subcategory-specific detectors scoring part appearance across poses. At the testing stage, likely exemplars are matched to the image, suggesting part locations whose pose and subcategory consistency are well-supported by the image cues. From these hypotheses, part configuration can be predicted with very high accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains from our method on an extensive dataset: CUB-200-2011 [30], for both localization and classification tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel part-pair representation for part localization. In this representation, an object is treated as a collection of part pairs to model its shape and appearance. By changing the set of pairs to be used, we are able to impose either stronger or weaker geometric constraints on the part configuration. As for the appearance, we build pair detectors for each part pair, which model the appearance of an object at different levels of granularities. Our method of part localization exploits the part-pair representation, featuring the combination of non-parametric exemplars and parametric regression models. Non-parametric exemplars help generate reliable part hypotheses from very noisy pair detections. Then, the regression models are used to group the part hypotheses in a flexible way to predict the part locations. We evaluate our method extensively on the dataset CUB-200-2011 [32], where we achieve significant improvement over the state-of-the-art method on bird part localization. We also experiment with human pose estimation, where our method produces comparable results to existing works. A system and method are provided. The system includes a processor. The processor is configured to generate a response map for an image, using a four stage convolutional structure. The processor is further configured to generate a plurality of landmark points for the image based on the response map, using a shape basis neural network. The processor is additionally configured to generate an optimal shape for the image based on the plurality of landmark points for the image and the response map, using a point deformation neural network. A recognition system configured to identify the image based on the generated optimal shape to generate a recognition result of the image. The processor is also configured to operate a hardware-based machine based on the recognition result. We present a novel approach to localizing parts in images of human faces. The approach combines the output of local detectors with a non-parametric set of global models for the part locations based on over one thousand hand-labeled exemplar images. By assuming that the global models generate the part locations as hidden variables, we derive a Bayesian objective function. This function is optimized using a consensus of models for these hidden variables. The resulting localizer handles a much wider range of expression, pose, lighting and occlusion than prior ones. We show excellent performance on a new dataset gathered from the internet and show that our localizer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the less challenging BioID dataset.