No Arabic abstract
We aim to improve segmentation through the use of machine learning tools during region agglomeration. We propose an active learning approach for performing hierarchical agglomerative segmentation from superpixels. Our method combines multiple features at all scales of the agglomerative process, works for data with an arbitrary number of dimensions, and scales to very large datasets. We advocate the use of variation of information to measure segmentation accuracy, particularly in 3D electron microscopy (EM) images of neural tissue, and using this metric demonstrate an improvement over competing algorithms in EM and natural images.
Object recognition has seen significant progress in the image domain, with focus primarily on 2D perception. We propose to leverage existing large-scale datasets of 3D models to understand the underlying 3D structure of objects seen in an image by constructing a CAD-based representation of the objects and their poses. We present Mask2CAD, which jointly detects objects in real-world images and for each detected object, optimizes for the most similar CAD model and its pose. We construct a joint embedding space between the detected regions of an image corresponding to an object and 3D CAD models, enabling retrieval of CAD models for an input RGB image. This produces a clean, lightweight representation of the objects in an image; this CAD-based representation ensures a valid, efficient shape representation for applications such as content creation or interactive scenarios, and makes a step towards understanding the transformation of real-world imagery to a synthetic domain. Experiments on real-world images from Pix3D demonstrate the advantage of our approach in comparison to state of the art. To facilitate future research, we additionally propose a new image-to-3D baseline on ScanNet which features larger shape diversity, real-world occlusions, and challenging image views.
Interest point descriptors have fueled progress on almost every problem in computer vision. Recent advances in deep neural networks have enabled task-specific learned descriptors that outperform hand-crafted descriptors on many problems. We demonstrate that commonly used metric learning approaches do not optimally leverage the feature hierarchies learned in a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), especially when applied to the task of geometric feature matching. While a metric loss applied to the deepest layer of a CNN, is often expected to yield ideal features irrespective of the task, in fact the growing receptive field as well as striding effects cause shallower features to be better at high precision matching tasks. We leverage this insight together with explicit supervision at multiple levels of the feature hierarchy for better regularization, to learn more effective descriptors in the context of geometric matching tasks. Further, we propose to use activation maps at different layers of a CNN, as an effective and principled replacement for the multi-resolution image pyramids often used for matching tasks. We propose concrete CNN architectures employing these ideas, and evaluate them on multiple datasets for 2D and 3D geometric matching as well as optical flow, demonstrating state-of-the-art results and generalization across datasets.
Radar sensors are an important part of driver assistance systems and intelligent vehicles due to their robustness against all kinds of adverse conditions, e.g., fog, snow, rain, or even direct sunlight. This robustness is achieved by a substantially larger wavelength compared to light-based sensors such as cameras or lidars. As a side effect, many surfaces act like mirrors at this wavelength, resulting in unwanted ghost detections. In this article, we present a novel approach to detect these ghost objects by applying data-driven machine learning algorithms. For this purpose, we use a large-scale automotive data set with annotated ghost objects. We show that we can use a state-of-the-art automotive radar classifier in order to detect ghost objects alongside real objects. Furthermore, we are able to reduce the amount of false positive detections caused by ghost images in some settings.
We propose a hierarchical graph neural network (GNN) model that learns how to cluster a set of images into an unknown number of identities using a training set of images annotated with labels belonging to a disjoint set of identities. Our hierarchical GNN uses a novel approach to merge connected components predicted at each level of the hierarchy to form a new graph at the next level. Unlike fully unsupervised hierarchical clustering, the choice of grouping and complexity criteria stems naturally from supervision in the training set. The resulting method, Hi-LANDER, achieves an average of 54% improvement in F-score and 8% increase in Normalized Mutual Information (NMI) relative to current GNN-based clustering algorithms. Additionally, state-of-the-art GNN-based methods rely on separate models to predict linkage probabilities and node densities as intermediate steps of the clustering process. In contrast, our unified framework achieves a seven-fold decrease in computational cost. We release our training and inference code at https://github.com/dmlc/dgl/tree/master/examples/pytorch/hilander.
LiDAR point clouds contain measurements of complicated natural scenes and can be used to update digital elevation models, glacial monitoring, detecting faults and measuring uplift detecting, forest inventory, detect shoreline and beach volume changes, landslide risk analysis, habitat mapping, and urban development, among others. A very important application is the classification of the 3D cloud into elementary classes. For example, it can be used to differentiate between vegetation, man-made structures, and water. Our goal is to present a preliminary comparison study for the classification of 3D point cloud LiDAR data that includes several types of feature engineering. In particular, we demonstrate that providing context by augmenting each point in the LiDAR point cloud with information about its neighboring points can improve the performance of downstream learning algorithms. We also experiment with several dimension reduction strategies, ranging from Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to neural network-based auto-encoders, and demonstrate how they affect classification performance in LiDAR point clouds. For instance, we observe that combining feature engineering with a dimension reduction a method such as PCA, there is an improvement in the accuracy of the classification with respect to doing a straightforward classification with the raw data.