This paper focuses on structured-output learning using deep neural networks for 3D human pose estimation from monocular images. Our network takes an image and 3D pose as inputs and outputs a score value, which is high when the image-pose pair matches and low otherwise. The network structure consists of a convolutional neural network for image feature extraction, followed by two sub-networks for transforming the image features and pose into a joint embedding. The score function is then the dot-product between the image and pose embeddings. The image-pose embedding and score function are jointly trained using a maximum-margin cost function. Our proposed framework can be interpreted as a special form of structured support vector machines where the joint feature space is discriminatively learned using deep neural networks. We test our framework on the Human3.6m dataset and obtain state-of-the-art results compared to other recent methods. Finally, we present visualizations of the image-pose embedding space, demonstrating the network has learned a high-level embedding of body-orientation and pose-configuration.
A system and method for comparing a text image and a character string are provided. The method includes embedding a character string into a vectorial space by extracting a set of features from the character string and generating a character string representation based on the extracted features, such as a spatial pyramid bag of characters (SPBOC) representation. A text image is embedded into a vectorial space by extracting a set of features from the text image and generating a text image representation based on the text image extracted features. A compatibility between the text image representation and the character string representation is computed, which includes computing a function of the text image representation and character string representation. We describe a novel method for simultaneously detecting faces and estimating their pose in real time. The method employs a convolutional network to map images of faces to points on a low-dimensional manifold parametrized by pose, and images of non-faces to points far away from that manifold. Given an image, detecting a face and estimating its pose is viewed as minimizing an energy function with respect to the face non-face binary variable and the continuous pose parameters. The system is trained to minimize a loss function that drives correct combinations of labels and pose to be associated with lower energy values than incorrect ones. The system is designed to handle very large range of poses without retraining. The performance of the system was tested on three standard data sets---for frontal views, rotated faces, and profiles---is comparable to previous systems that are designed to handle a single one of these data sets. We show that a system trained simuiltaneously for detection and pose estimation is more accurate on both tasks than similar systems trained for each task separately. In this paper, we present a novel method for the segmentation of breast masses from mammograms exploring structured and deep learning. Specifically, using structured support vector machine (SSVM), we formulate a model that combines different types of potential functions, including one that classifies image regions using deep learning. Our main goal with this work is to show the accuracy and efficiency improvements that these relatively new techniques can provide for the segmentation of breast masses from mammograms. We also propose an easily reproducible quantitative analysis to assess the performance of breast mass segmentation methodologies based on widely accepted accuracy and running time measurements on public datasets, which will facilitate further comparisons for this segmentation problem. In particular, we use two publicly available datasets (DDSM-BCRP and INbreast) and propose the computation of the running time taken for the methodology to produce a mass segmentation given an input image and the use of the Dice index to quantitatively measure the segmentation accuracy. For both databases, we show that our proposed methodology produces competitive results in terms of accuracy and running time.