No Arabic abstract
Although the human visual system is surprisingly robust to extreme distortion when recognizing objects, most evaluations of computer object detection methods focus only on robustness to natural form deformations such as peoples pose changes. To determine whether algorithms truly mirror the flexibility of human vision, they must be compared against human vision at its limits. For example, in Cubist abstract art, painted objects are distorted by object fragmentation and part-reorganization, to the point that human vision often fails to recognize them. In this paper, we evaluate existing object detection methods on these abstract renditions of objects, comparing human annotators to four state-of-the-art object detectors on a corpus of Picasso paintings. Our results demonstrate that while human perception significantly outperforms current methods, human perception and part-based models exhibit a similarly graceful degradation in object detection performance as the objects become increasingly abstract and fragmented, corroborating the theory of part-based object representation in the brain.
Monocular object detection and tracking have improved drastically in recent years, but rely on a key assumption: that objects are visible to the camera. Many offline tracking approaches reason about occluded objects post-hoc, by linking together tracklets after the object re-appears, making use of reidentification (ReID). However, online tracking in embodied robotic agents (such as a self-driving vehicle) fundamentally requires object permanence, which is the ability to reason about occluded objects before they re-appear. In this work, we re-purpose tracking benchmarks and propose new metrics for the task of detecting invisible objects, focusing on the illustrative case of people. We demonstrate that current detection and tracking systems perform dramatically worse on this task. We introduce two key innovations to recover much of this performance drop. We treat occluded object detection in temporal sequences as a short-term forecasting challenge, bringing to bear tools from dynamic sequence prediction. Second, we build dynamic models that explicitly reason in 3D, making use of observations produced by state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation networks. To our knowledge, ours is the first work to demonstrate the effectiveness of monocular depth estimation for the task of tracking and detecting occluded objects. Our approach strongly improves by 11.4% over the baseline in ablations and by 5.0% over the state-of-the-art in F1 score.
Visual design is associated with the use of some basic design elements and principles. Those are applied by the designers in the various disciplines for aesthetic purposes, relying on an intuitive and subjective process. Thus, numerical analysis of design visuals and disclosure of the aesthetic value embedded in them are considered as hard. However, it has become possible with emerging artificial intelligence technologies. This research aims at a neural network model, which recognizes and classifies the design principles over different domains. The domains include artwork produced since the late 20th century; professional photos; and facade pictures of contemporary buildings. The data collection and curation processes, including the production of computationally-based synthetic dataset, is genuine. The proposed model learns from the knowledge of myriads of original designs, by capturing the underlying shared patterns. It is expected to consolidate design processes by providing an aesthetic evaluation of the visual compositions with objectivity.
Modern methods for counting people in crowded scenes rely on deep networks to estimate people densities in individual images. As such, only very few take advantage of temporal consistency in video sequences, and those that do only impose weak smoothness constraints across consecutive frames. In this paper, we advocate estimating people flows across image locations between consecutive images and inferring the people densities from these flows instead of directly regressing them. This enables us to impose much stronger constraints encoding the conservation of the number of people. As a result, it significantly boosts performance without requiring a more complex architecture. Furthermore, it allows us to exploit the correlation between people flow and optical flow to further improve the results. We also show that leveraging people conservation constraints in both a spatial and temporal manner makes it possible to train a deep crowd counting model in an active learning setting with much fewer annotations. This significantly reduces the annotation cost while still leading to similar performance to the full supervision case.
We present a method for predicting dense depth in scenarios where both a monocular camera and people in the scene are freely moving. Existing methods for recovering depth for dynamic, non-rigid objects from monocular video impose strong assumptions on the objects motion and may only recover sparse depth. In this paper, we take a data-driven approach and learn human depth priors from a new source of data: thousands of Internet videos of people imitating mannequins, i.e., freezing in diverse, natural poses, while a hand-held camera tours the scene. Because people are stationary, training data can be generated using multi-view stereo reconstruction. At inference time, our method uses motion parallax cues from the static areas of the scenes to guide the depth prediction. We demonstrate our method on real-world sequences of complex human actions captured by a moving hand-held camera, show improvement over state-of-the-art monocular depth prediction methods, and show various 3D effects produced using our predicted depth.
By analyzing the motion of people and other objects in a scene, we demonstrate how to infer depth, occlusion, lighting, and shadow information from video taken from a single camera viewpoint. This information is then used to composite new objects into the same scene with a high degree of automation and realism. In particular, when a user places a new object (2D cut-out) in the image, it is automatically rescaled, relit, occluded properly, and casts realistic shadows in the correct direction relative to the sun, and which conform properly to scene geometry. We demonstrate results (best viewed in supplementary video) on a range of scenes and compare to alternative methods for depth estimation and shadow compositing.