Cross-View Image Synthesis using Conditional GANs

Learning to generate natural scenes has always been a challenging task in computer vision. It is even more painstaking when the generation is conditioned on images with drastically different views. This is mainly because understanding, corresponding, and transforming appearance and semantic information across the views is not trivial. In this paper, we attempt to solve the novel problem of cross-view image synthesis, aerial to street-view and vice versa, using conditional generative adversarial networks (cGAN). Two new architectures called Crossview Fork (X-Fork) and Crossview Sequential (X-Seq) are proposed to generate scenes with resolutions of 64x64 and 256x256 pixels. X-Fork architecture has a single discriminator and a single generator. The generator hallucinates both the image and its semantic segmentation in the target view. X-Seq architecture utilizes two cGANs. The first one generates the target image which is subsequently fed to the second cGAN for generating its corresponding semantic segmentation map. The feedback from the second cGAN helps the first cGAN generate sharper images. Both of our proposed architectures learn to generate natural images as well as their semantic segmentation maps. The proposed methods show that they are able to capture and maintain the true semantics of objects in source and target views better than the traditional image-to-image translation method which considers only the visual appearance of the scene. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations support the effectiveness of our frameworks, compared to two state of the art methods, for natural scene generation across drastically different views.

Analysis of Hand Segmentation in the Wild

A large number of works in egocentric vision have concentrated on action and object recognition. Detection and segmentation of hands in first-person videos, however, has less been explored. For many applications in this domain, it is necessary to accurately segment not only hands of the camera wearer but also the hands of others with whom he is interacting. Here, we take an in-depth look at the hand segmentation problem. In the quest for robust hand segmentation methods, we evaluated the performance of the state of the art semantic segmentation methods, off the shelf and fine-tuned, on existing datasets. We fine-tune RefineNet, a leading semantic segmentation method, for hand segmentation and find that it does much better than the best contenders. Existing hand segmentation datasets are collected in the laboratory settings. To overcome this limitation, we contribute by collecting two new datasets: a) EgoYouTubeHands including egocentric videos containing hands in the wild, and b) HandOverFace to analyze the performance of our models in presence of similar appearance occlusions. We further explore whether conditional random fields can help refine generated hand segmentations. To demonstrate the benefit of accurate hand maps, we train a CNN for hand-based activity recognition and achieve higher accuracy when a CNN was trained using hand maps produced by the fine-tuned RefineNet. Finally, we annotate a subset of the EgoHands dataset for fine-grained action recognition and show that an accuracy of 58.6% can be achieved by just looking at a single hand pose which is much better than the chance level (12.5%).

Three Birds One Stone: A Unified Framework for Salient Object Segmentation, Edge Detection and Skeleton Extraction

In this paper, we aim at solving pixel-wise binary problems, including salient object segmentation, skeleton extraction, and edge detection, by introducing a unified architecture. Previous works have proposed tailored methods for solving each of the three tasks independently. Here, we show that these tasks share some similarities that can be exploited for developing a unified framework. In particular, we introduce a horizontal cascade, each component of which is densely connected to the outputs of previous component. Stringing these components together allows us to effectively exploit features across different levels hierarchically to effectively address the multiple pixel-wise binary regression tasks. To assess the performance of our proposed network on these tasks, we carry out exhaustive evaluations on multiple representative datasets. Although these tasks are inherently very different, we show that our unified approach performs very well on all of them and works far better than current single-purpose state-of-the-art methods. All the code in this paper will be publicly available.

What Catches the Eye? Visualizing and Understanding Deep Saliency Models

Deep convolutional neural networks have demonstrated high performances for fixation prediction in recent years. How they achieve this, however, is less explored and they remain to be black box models. Here, we attempt to shed light on the internal structure of deep saliency models and study what features they extract for fixation prediction. Specifically, we use a simple yet powerful architecture, consisting of only one CNN and a single resolution input, combined with a new loss function for pixel-wise fixation prediction during free viewing of natural scenes. We show that our simple method is on par or better than state-of-the-art complicated saliency models. Furthermore, we propose a method, related to saliency model evaluation metrics, to visualize deep models for fixation prediction. Our method reveals the inner representations of deep models for fixation prediction and provides evidence that saliency, as experienced by humans, is likely to involve high-level semantic knowledge in addition to low-level perceptual cues. Our results can be useful to measure the gap between current saliency models and the human inter-observer model and to build new models to close this gap.

Deeply supervised salient object detection with short connections

Recent progress on saliency detection is substantial, benefiting mostly from the explosive development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Semantic segmentation and saliency detection algorithms developed lately have been mostly based on Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs). There is still a large room for improvement over the generic FCN models that do not explicitly deal with the scale-space problem. Holistically-Nested Edge Detector (HED) provides a skip-layer structure with deep supervision for edge and boundary detection, but the performance gain of HED on salience detection is not obvious. In this paper, we propose a new method for saliency detection by introducing short connections to the skip-layer structures within the HED architecture. Our framework provides rich multi-scale feature maps at each layer, a property that is critically needed to perform segment detection. Our method produces state-of-the-art results on 5 widely tested salient object detection benchmarks, with advantages in terms of efficiency (0.15 seconds per image), effectiveness, and simplicity over the existing algorithms.

Salient Object Detection: A Benchmark

We extensively compare, qualitatively and quantitatively, 40 state-of-the-art models (28 salient object detection, 10 fixation prediction, 1 objectness, and 1 baseline) over 6 challenging datasets for the purpose of benchmarking salient object detection and segmentation methods. From the results obtained so far, our evaluation shows a consistent rapid progress over the last few years in terms of both accuracy and running time. The top contenders in this benchmark significantly outperform the models identified as the best in the previous benchmark conducted just two years ago. We find that the models designed specifically for salient object detection generally work better than models in closely related areas, which in turn provides a precise definition and suggests an appropriate treatment of this problem that distinguishes it from other problems. In particular, we analyze the influences of center bias and scene complexity in model performance, which, along with the hard cases for state-of-the-art models, provide useful hints towards constructing more challenging large scale datasets and better saliency models. Finally, we propose probable solutions for tackling several open problems such as evaluation scores and dataset bias, which also suggest future research directions in the rapidly-growing field of salient object detection.

Visual Weather Temperature Prediction

In this paper, we attempt to employ convolutional recurrent neural networks for weather temperature estimation using only image data. We study ambient temperature estimation based on deep neural networks in two scenarios a) estimating temperature of a single outdoor image, and b) predicting temperature of the last image in an image sequence. In the first scenario, visual features are extracted by a convolutional neural network trained on a large-scale image dataset. We demonstrate that promising performance can be obtained, and analyze how volume of training data influences performance. In the second scenario, we consider the temporal evolution of visual appearance, and construct a recurrent neural network to predict the temperature of the last image in a given image sequence. We obtain better prediction accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art models. Further, we investigate how performance varies when information is extracted from different scene regions, and when images are captured in different daytime hours. Our approach further reinforces the idea of using only visual information for cost efficient weather prediction in the future.

Segmenting Sky Pixels in Images

Outdoor scene parsing models are often trained on ideal datasets and produce quality results. However, this leads to a discrepancy when applied to the real world. The quality of scene parsing, particularly sky classification, decreases in night time images, images involving varying weather conditions, and scene changes due to seasonal weather. This project focuses on approaching these challenges by using a state-of-the-art model in conjunction with a non-ideal dataset: SkyFinder and a subset from SUN database with Sky object. We focus specifically on sky segmentation, the task of determining sky and not-sky pixels, and improving upon an existing state-of-the-art model: RefineNet. As a result of our efforts, we have seen an improvement of 10-15% in the average MCR compared to the prior methods on SkyFinder dataset. We have also improved from an off-the shelf-model in terms of average mIOU by nearly 35%. Further, we analyze our trained models on images w.r.t two aspects: times of day and weather, and find that, in spite of facing same challenges as prior methods, our trained models significantly outperform them.

Human-like Clustering with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Classification and clustering have been studied separately in machine learning and computer vision. Inspired by the recent success of deep learning models in solving various vision problems (e.g., object recognition, semantic segmentation) and the fact that humans serve as the gold standard in assessing clustering algorithms, here, we advocate for a unified treatment of the two problems and suggest that hierarchical frameworks that progressively build complex patterns on top of the simpler ones (e.g., convolutional neural networks) offer a promising solution. We do not dwell much on the learning mechanisms in these frameworks as they are still a matter of debate, with respect to biological constraints. Instead, we emphasize on the compositionality of the real world structures and objects. In particular, we show that CNNs, trained end to end using back propagation with noisy labels, are able to cluster data points belonging to several overlapping shapes, and do so much better than the state of the art algorithms. The main takeaway lesson from our study is that mechanisms of human vision, particularly the hierarchal organization of the visual ventral stream should be taken into account in clustering algorithms (e.g., for learning representations in an unsupervised manner or with minimum supervision) to reach human level clustering performance. This, by no means, suggests that other methods do not hold merits. For example, methods relying on pairwise affinities (e.g., spectral clustering) have been very successful in many scenarios but still fail in some cases (e.g., overlapping clusters).

An Unsupervised Game-Theoretic Approach to Saliency Detection

We propose a novel unsupervised game-theoretic salient object detection algorithm that does not require labeled training data. First, saliency detection problem is formulated as a non-cooperative game, hereinafter referred to as Saliency Game, in which image regions are players who choose to be "background" or "foreground" as their pure strategies. A payoff function is constructed by exploiting multiple cues and combining complementary features. Saliency maps are generated according to each region's strategy in the Nash equilibrium of the proposed Saliency Game. Second, we explore the complementary relationship between color and deep features and propose an Iterative Random Walk algorithm to combine saliency maps produced by the Saliency Game using different features. Iterative random walk allows sharing information across feature spaces, and detecting objects that are otherwise very hard to detect. Extensive experiments over 6 challenging datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed unsupervised algorithm compared to several state of the art supervised algorithms.