Designing effective feature and handling the model drift problem are two important aspects for online visual tracking. For feature representation, gradient and color features are most widely used, but how to effectively combine them for visual tracking is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a rich feature descriptor, MC-HOG, by leveraging rich gradient information across multiple color channels or spaces. Then MC-HOG features are embedded into the correlation tracking framework to estimate the state of the target. For handling the model drift problem caused by occlusion or distracter, we propose saliency proposals as prior information to provide candidates and reduce background interference. In addition to saliency proposals, a ranking strategy is proposed to determine the importance of these proposals by exploiting the learnt appearance filter, historical preserved object samples and the distracting proposals. In this way, the proposed approach could effectively explore the color-gradient characteristics and alleviate the model drift problem. Extensive evaluations performed on the benchmark dataset show the superiority of the proposed method.

Sketch-based 3D shape retrieval, which returns a set of relevant 3D shapes based on users' input sketch queries, has been receiving increasing attentions in both graphics community and vision community. In this work, we address the sketch-based 3D shape retrieval problem with a novel Cross-Domain Neural Networks (CDNN) approach, which is further extended to Pyramid Cross-Domain Neural Networks (PCDNN) by cooperating with a hierarchical structure. In order to alleviate the discrepancies between sketch features and 3D shape features, a neural network pair that forces identical representations at the target layer for instances of the same class is trained for sketches and 3D shapes respectively. By constructing cross-domain neural networks at multiple pyramid levels, a many-to-one relationship is established between a 3D shape feature and sketch features extracted from different scales. We evaluate the effectiveness of both CDNN and PCDNN approach on the extended large-scale SHREC 2014 benchmark and compare with some other well established methods. Experimental results suggest that both CDNN and PCDNN can outperform state-of-the-art performance, where PCDNN can further improve CDNN when employing a hierarchical structure.

As an important yet challenging problem in computer vision, pedestrian detection has achieved impressive progress in recent years. However, the significant performance decline with decreasing resolution is a major bottleneck of current state-of-the-art methods. For the popular boosting-based detectors, one of the main reasons is that low resolution samples, which are usually more difficult to detect than high resolution ones, are treated by equal costs in the boosting process, leading to the consequence that they are more easily being rejected in early stages and can hardly be recovered in late stages as false negatives. To address this problem, we propose in this paper a new multi-resolution detection approach based on a novel group cost-sensitive boosting algorithm, which extends the popular AdaBoost by exploring different costs for different resolution groups in the boosting process, and places more emphases on low resolution group in order to better handle detection of hard samples. The proposed approach is evaluated on the challenging Caltech pedestrian benchmark, and outperforms other state-of-the-art on different resolution-specific test sets.

In this paper, we propose a novel similarity measure and then introduce an efficient strategy to learn it by using only similar pairs for person verification. Unlike existing metric learning methods, we consider both the difference and commonness of an image pair to increase its discriminativeness. Under a pairconstrained Gaussian assumption, we show how to obtain the Gaussian priors (i.e., corresponding covariance matrices) of dissimilar pairs from those of similar pairs. The application of a log likelihood ratio makes the learning process simple and fast and thus scalable to large datasets. Additionally, our method is able to handle heterogeneous data well. Results on the challenging datasets of face verification (LFW and Pub-Fig) and person re-identification (VIPeR) show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Parsing human into semantic parts is crucial to human-centric analysis. In this paper, we propose a human parsing pipeline that uses pose cues, i.e., estimates of human joint locations, to provide pose-guided segment proposals for semantic parts. These segment proposals are ranked using standard appearance cues, deep-learned semantic feature, and a novel pose feature called pose-context. Then these proposals are selected and assembled using an And-Or graph to output a parse of the person. The And-Or graph is able to deal with large human appearance variability due to pose, choice of clothes, etc. We evaluate our approach on the popular Penn-Fudan pedestrian parsing dataset, showing that it significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts, and perform diagnostics to demonstrate the effectiveness of different stages of our pipeline.

Graph matching plays an important role in many fields in computer vision. It is a well-known general NP-hard problem and has been investigated for decades. Among the large amount of algorithms for graph matching, the algorithms utilizing the path following strategy exhibited state-of-art performances. However, the main drawback of this category of algorithms lies in their high computational burden. In this paper, we propose a novel path following strategy for graph matching aiming to improve its computation efficiency. We first propose a path estimation method to reduce the computational cost at each iteration, and subsequently a method of adaptive step length to accelerate the convergence. The proposed approach is able to be integrated into all the algorithms that utilize the path following strategy. To validate our approach, we compare our approach with several recently proposed graph matching algorithms on three benchmark image datasets. Experimental results show that, our approach improves significantly the computation efficiency of the original algorithms, and offers similar or better matching results.

Pose-based action recognition in 3D is the task of recognizing an action (e.g., walking or running) from a sequence of 3D skeletal poses. This is challenging because of variations due to different ways of performing the same action and inaccuracies in the estimation of the skeletal poses. The training data is usually small and hence complex classifiers risk over-fitting the data. We address this task by action-snippets which are short sequences of consecutive skeletal poses capturing the temporal relationships between poses in an action. We propose a novel representation for action-snippets, called activated simplices. Each activity is represented by a manifold which is approximated by an arrangement of activated simplices. A sequence (of action-snippets) is classified by selecting the closest manifold and outputting the corresponding activity. This is a simple classifier which helps avoid over-fitting the data but which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) deals with the task that labeled training and unlabeled test data collected from source and target domains, respectively. In this paper, we particularly address the practical and challenging scenario of imbalanced cross-domain data. That is, we do not assume the label numbers across domains to be the same, and we also allow the data in each domain to be collected from multiple datasets/sub-domains. To solve the above task of imbalanced domain adaptation, we propose a novel algorithm of Domain-constraint Transfer Coding (DcTC). Our DcTC is able to exploit latent subdomains within and across data domains, and learns a common feature space for joint adaptation and classification purposes. Without assuming balanced cross-domain data as most existing UDA approaches do, we show that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on multiple cross-domain visual classification tasks.

The human visual system can spot an abnormal image, and reason about what makes it strange. This task has not received enough attention in computer vision. In this paper we study various types of atypicalities in images in a more comprehensive way than has been done before. We propose a new dataset of abnormal images showing a wide range of atypicalities. We design human subject experiments to discover a coarse taxonomy of the reasons for abnormality. Our experiments reveal three major categories of abnormality: object-centric, scene-centric, and contextual. Based on this taxonomy, we propose a comprehensive computational model that can predict all different types of abnormality in images and outperform prior arts in abnormality recognition.

The recent advanced face recognition systems werebuilt on large Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) or theirensembles, which have millions of parameters. However, the expensive computation of DNNs make theirdeployment difficult on mobile and embedded devices. This work addresses model compression for face recognition,where the learned knowledge of a large teachernetwork or its ensemble is utilized as supervisionto train a compact student network. Unlike previousworks that represent the knowledge by the soften labelprobabilities, which are difficult to fit, we represent theknowledge by using the neurons at the higher hiddenlayer, which preserve as much information as the label probabilities, but are more compact. By leveragingthe essential characteristics (domain knowledge) of thelearned face representation, a neuron selection methodis proposed to choose neurons that are most relevant toface recognition. Using the selected neurons as supervisionto mimic the single networks of DeepID2+ andDeepID3, which are the state-of-the-art face recognition systems, a compact student with simple network structure achieves better verification accuracy on LFW than its teachers, respectively. When using an ensemble of DeepID2+ as teacher, a mimicked student is able to outperform it and achieves 51.6 times compression ratio and 90 times speed-up in inference, making this cumbersome model applicable on portable devices.