We present a novel reinforcement learning-based natural media painting algorithm. Our goal is to reproduce a reference image using brush strokes and we encode the objective through observations. Our formulation takes into account that the distribution of the reward in the action space is sparse and training a reinforcement learning algorithm from scratch can be difficult. We present an approach that combines self-supervised learning and reinforcement learning to effectively transfer negative samples into positive ones and change the reward distribution. We demonstrate the benefits of our painting agent to reproduce reference images with brush strokes. The training phase takes about one hour and the runtime algorithm takes about 30 seconds on a GTX1080 GPU reproducing a 1000 800 image with 20,000 strokes.

Recognizing a hotel from an image of a hotel room is important for human trafficking investigations. Images directly link victims to places and can help verify where victims have been trafficked, and where their traffickers might move them or others in the future. Recognizing the hotel from images is challenging because of low image quality, uncommon camera perspectives, large occlusions (often the victim), and the similarity of objects (e.g., furniture, art, bedding) across different hotel rooms. To support efforts towards this hotel recognition task, we have curated a dataset of over 1 million annotated hotel room images from 50,000 hotels. These images include professionally captured photographs from travel websites and crowd-sourced images from a mobile application, which are more similar to the types of images analyzed in real-world investigations. We present a baseline approach based on a standard network architecture and a collection of data-augmentation approaches tuned to this problem domain.