When humans describe images they tend to use combinations of nouns and adjectives, corresponding to objects and their associated attributes respectively. To generate such a description automatically, one needs to model objects, attributes and their associations. Conventional methods require strong annotation of object and attribute locations, making them less scalable. In this paper, we model object-attribute associations from weakly labelled images, such as those widely available on media sharing sites (e.g. Flickr), where only image-level labels (either object or attributes) are given, without their locations and associations. This is achieved by introducing a novel weakly supervised non-parametric Bayesian model. Once learned, given a new image, our model can describe the image, including objects, attributes and their associations, as well as their locations and segmentation. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our weakly supervised model performs at par with strongly supervised models on tasks such as image description and retrieval based on object-attribute associations.
We propose a method for recognizing attributes, such as the gender, hair style and types of clothes of people under large variation in viewpoint, pose, articulation and occlusion typical of personal photo album images. Robust attribute classifiers under such conditions must be invariant to pose, but inferring the pose in itself is a challenging problem. We use a part-based approach based on poselets. Our parts implicitly decompose the aspect (the pose and viewpoint). We train attribute classifiers for each such aspect and we combine them together in a discriminative model. We propose a new dataset of 8000 people with annotated attributes. Our method performs very well on this dataset, significantly outperforming a baseline built on the spatial pyramid match kernel method. On gender recognition we outperform a commercial face recognition system. We consider the task of learning visual connections between object categories using the ImageNet dataset, which is a large-scale dataset ontology containing more than 15 thousand object classes. We want to discover visual relationships between the classes that are currently missing (such as similar colors or shapes or textures). In this work we learn 20 visual attributes and use them in a zero-shot transfer learning experiment as well as to make visual connections between semantically unrelated object categories. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised method for simultaneously learning scene parts and attributes from a collection of images associated with attributes in text, where the precise localization of the each attribute left unknown. Our method includes three aspects. (i) Compositional scene configuration. We learn the spatial layouts of the scene by Hierarchical Space Tiling (HST) representation, which can generate an excessive number of scene configurations through the hierarchical composition of a relatively small number of parts. (ii) Attribute association. The scene attributes contain nouns and adjectives corresponding to the objects and their appearance descriptions respectively. We assign the nouns to the nodes (parts) in HST using nonmaximum suppression of their correlation, then train an appearance model for each noun+adjective attribute pair. (iii) Joint inference and learning. For an image, we compute the most probable parse tree with the attributes as an instantiation of the HST by dynamic programming. Then update the HST and attribute association based on the inferred parse trees. We evaluate the proposed method by (i) showing the improvement of attribute recognition accuracy, and (ii) comparing the average precision of localizing attributes to the scene parts. When we look at an image, some properties or attributes of the image stand out more than others. When describing an image, people are likely to describe these dominant attributes first. Attribute dominance is a result of a complex interplay between the various properties present or absent in the image. Which attributes in an image are more dominant than others reveals rich information about the content of the image. In this paper we tap into this information by modeling attribute dominance. We show that this helps improve the performance of vision systems on a variety of human-centric applications such as zero-shot learning, image search and generating textual descriptions of images. Describing clothing appearance with semantic attributes is an appealing technique for many important applications. In this paper, we propose a fully automated system that is capable of generating a list of nameable attributes for clothes on human body in unconstrained images. We extract low-level features in a pose-adaptive manner, and combine complementary features for learning attribute classifiers. Mutual dependencies between the attributes are then explored by a Conditional Random Field to further improve the predictions from independent classifiers. We validate the performance of our system on a challenging clothing attribute dataset, and introduce a novel application of dressing style analysis that utilizes the semantic attributes produced by our system. The rapid development of social video sharing platforms has created a huge demand for automatic video classification and annotation techniques, in particular for videos containing social activities of a group of people (e.g. YouTube video of a wedding reception). Recently, attribute learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for transferring learning to sparsely labelled classes in object or single-object short action classification. In contrast to existing work, this paper for the first time, tackles the problem of attribute learning for understanding group social activities with sparse labels. This problem is more challenging because of the complex multi-object nature of social activities, and the unstructured nature of the activity context. To solve this problem, we (1) contribute an unstructured social activity attribute (USAA) dataset with both visual and audio attributes, (2) introduce the concept of semi-latent attribute space and (3) propose a novel model for learning the latent attributes which alleviate the dependence of existing models on exact and exhaustive manual specification of the attribute-space. We show that our framework is able to exploit latent attributes to outperform contemporary approaches for addressing a variety of realistic multi-media sparse data learning tasks including: multi-task learning, N-shot transfer learning, learning with label noise and importantly zero-shot learning.  We propose to shift the goal of recognition from naming to describing. Doing so allows us not only to name familiar objects, but also: to report unusual aspects of a familiar object (“spotty dog”, not just “dog”); to say something about unfamiliar objects (“hairy and four-legged”, not just “unknown”); and to learn how to recognize new objects with few or no visual examples. Rather than focusing on identity assignment, we make inferring attributes the core problem of recognition. These attributes can be semantic (“spotty”) or discriminative (“dogs have it but sheep do not”). Learning attributes presents a major new challenge: generalization across object categories, not just across instances within a category. In this paper, we also introduce a novel feature selection method for learning attributes that generalize well across categories. We support our claims by thorough evaluation that provides insights into the limitations of the standard recognition paradigm of naming and demonstrates the new abilities provided by our attribute-based framework.