Most existing zero-shot learning approaches exploit transfer learning via an intermediate semantic representation shared between an annotated auxiliary dataset and a target dataset with different classes and no annotation. A projection from a low-level feature space to the semantic representation space is learned from the auxiliary dataset and applied without adaptation to the target dataset. In this paper we identify two inherent limitations with these approaches. First, due to having disjoint and potentially unrelated classes, the projection functions learned from the auxiliary dataset domain are biased when applied directly to the target dataset domain. We call this problem the projection domain shift problem and propose a novel framework, transductive multi-view embedding , to solve it. The second limitation is the prototype sparsity problem which refers to the fact that for each target class, only a single prototype is available for zero-shot learning given a semantic representation. To overcome this problem, a novel heterogeneous multi-view hypergraph label propagation method is formulated for zero-shot learning in the transductive embedding space. It effectively exploits the complementary information offered by different semantic representations and takes advantage of the manifold structures of multiple representation spaces in a coherent manner. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that the proposed approach (1) rectifies the projection shift between the auxiliary and target domains, (2) exploits the complementarity of multiple semantic representations, (3) significantly outperforms existing methods for both zero-shot and N-shot recognition on three image and video benchmark datasets, and (4) enables novel cross-view annotation tasks.
While knowledge transfer (KT) between object classes has been accepted as a promising route towards scalable recognition, most experimental KT studies are surprisingly limited in the number of object classes considered. To support claims of KT w.r.t. scalability we thus advocate to evaluate KT in a large-scale setting. To this end, we provide an extensive evaluation of three popular approaches to KT on a recently proposed large-scale data set, the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition 2010 data set. In a first setting they are directly compared to one-vs-all classification often neglected in KT papers and in a second setting we evaluate their ability to enable zero-shot learning. While none of the KT methods can improve over one-vs-all classification they prove valuable for zero-shot learning, especially hierarchical and direct similarity based KT. We also propose and describe several extensions of the evaluated approaches that are necessary for this large-scale study. Category models for objects or activities typically rely on supervised learning requiring sufficiently large training sets. Transferring knowledge from known categories to novel classes with no or only a few labels is far less researched even though it is a common scenario. In this work, we extend transfer learning with semi-supervised learning to exploit unlabeled instances of (novel) categories with no or only a few labeled instances. Our proposed approach Propagated Semantic Transfer combines three techniques. First, we transfer information from known to novel categories by incorporating external knowledge, such as linguistic or expert-specified information, e.g., by a mid-level layer of semantic attributes. Second, we exploit the manifold structure of novel classes. More specifically we adapt a graph-based learning algorithm - so far only used for semi-supervised learning -to zero-shot and few-shot learning. Third, we improve the local neighborhood in such graph structures by replacing the raw feature-based representation with a mid-level object- or attribute-based representation. We evaluate our approach on three challenging datasets in two different applications, namely on Animals with Attributes and ImageNet for image classification and on MPII Composites for activity recognition. Our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art transfer and semi-supervised approaches on all datasets. 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. The rapid development of social media sharing has created a huge demand for automatic media classification and annotation techniques. Attribute learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for bridging the semantic gap and addressing data sparsity via transferring attribute knowledge in object recognition and relatively simple action classification. In this paper, we address the task of attribute learning for understanding multimedia data with sparse and incomplete labels. In particular, we focus on videos of social group activities, which are particularly challenging and topical examples of this task because of their multimodal content and complex and unstructured nature relative to the density of annotations. To solve this problem, we 1) introduce a concept of semilatent attribute space, expressing user-defined and latent attributes in a unified framework, and 2) propose a novel scalable probabilistic topic model for learning multimodal semilatent attributes, which dramatically reduces requirements for an exhaustive accurate attribute ontology and expensive annotation effort. We show that our framework is able to exploit latent attributes to outperform contemporary approaches for addressing a variety of realistic multimedia sparse data learning tasks including: multitask learning, learning with label noise, N-shot transfer learning, and importantly zero-shot learning. We study the problem of object classification when training and test classes are disjoint, i.e. no training examples of the target classes are available. This setup has hardly been studied in computer vision research, but it is the rule rather than the exception, because the world contains tens of thousands of different object classes and for only a very few of them image, collections have been formed and annotated with suitable class labels. In this paper, we tackle the problem by introducing attribute-based classification. It performs object detection based on a human-specified high-level description of the target objects instead of training images. The description consists of arbitrary semantic attributes, like shape, color or even geographic information. Because such properties transcend the specific learning task at hand, they can be pre-learned, e.g. from image datasets unrelated to the current task. Afterwards, new classes can be detected based on their attribute representation, without the need for a new training phase. In order to evaluate our method and to facilitate research in this area, we have assembled a new large-scale dataset, “Animals with Attributes”, of over 30,000 animal images that match the 50 classes in Osherson's classic table of how strongly humans associate 85 semantic attributes with animal classes. Our experiments show that by using an attribute layer it is indeed possible to build a learning object detection system that does not require any training images of the target classes. We study the problem of object recognition for categories for which we have no training examples, a task also called zero--data or zero-shot learning. This situation has hardly been studied in computer vision research, even though it occurs frequently; the world contains tens of thousands of different object classes, and image collections have been formed and suitably annotated for only a few of them. To tackle the problem, we introduce attribute-based classification: Objects are identified based on a high-level description that is phrased in terms of semantic attributes, such as the object's color or shape. Because the identification of each such property transcends the specific learning task at hand, the attribute classifiers can be prelearned independently, for example, from existing image data sets unrelated to the current task. Afterward, new classes can be detected based on their attribute representation, without the need for a new training phase. In this paper, we also introduce a new data set, Animals with Attributes, of over 30,000 images of 50 animal classes, annotated with 85 semantic attributes. Extensive experiments on this and two more data sets show that attribute-based classification indeed is able to categorize images without access to any training images of the target classes. Door lock apparatus in which a door latch mechanism is operated by inner and outer door handles coupled to a latch shaft extending through the latch mechanism. Handles are coupled to ends of latch shaft by coupling devices enabling door to be locked from the inside to prevent entry from the outside but can still be opened from the inside by normal operation of outside handle. Inside coupling device has limited lost-motion which is used to operate cam device to unlock the door on actuation of inner handles. This work introduces a model that can recognize objects in images even if no training data is available for the objects. The only necessary knowledge about the unseen categories comes from unsupervised large text corpora. In our zero-shot framework distributional information in language can be seen as spanning a semantic basis for understanding what objects look like. Most previous zero-shot learning models can only differentiate between unseen classes. In contrast, our model can both obtain state of the art performance on classes that have thousands of training images and obtain reasonable performance on unseen classes. This is achieved by first using outlier detection in the semantic space and then two separate recognition models. Furthermore, our model does not require any manually defined semantic features for either words or images.