MetaKernel: Learning Variational Random Features with Limited Labels.

Few-shot learning deals with the fundamental and challenging problem of learning from a few annotated samples, while being able to generalize well on new tasks. The crux of few-shot learning is to extract prior knowledge from related tasks to enable fast adaptation to a new task with a limited amount of data. In this paper, we propose meta-learning kernels with random Fourier features for few-shot learning, we call MetaKernel. Specically, we propose learning variational random features in a data-driven manner to obtain task-specic kernels by leveraging the shared knowledge provided by related tasks in a meta-learning setting. We treat the random feature basis as the latent variable, which is estimated by variational inference. The shared knowledge from related tasks is incorporated into a context inference of the posterior, which we achieve via a long-short term memory module. To establish more expressive kernels, we deploy conditional normalizing ows based on coupling layers to achieve a richer posterior distribution over random Fourier bases. The resultant kernels are more informative and discriminative, which further improves the few-shot learning. We conduct experiments on both few-shot image classication and regression tasks. The results on fourteen datasets demonstrate MetaKernel consistently better performance than state-of-the-art alternatives.

Unsharp Mask Guided Filtering.

The goal of this paper is guided image filtering, which emphasizes the importance of structure transfer during filtering by means of an additional guidance image. Where classical guided filters transfer structures using hand-designed functions, recent guided filters have been considerably advanced through parametric learning of deep networks. The state-of-the-art leverages deep networks to estimate the two core coefficients of the guided filter. In this work, we posit that simultaneously estimating both coefficients is suboptimal, resulting in halo artifacts and structure inconsistencies. Inspired by unsharp masking, a classical technique for edge enhancement that requires only a single coefficient, we propose a new and simplified formulation of the guided filter. Our formulation enjoys a filtering prior from a low-pass filter and enables explicit structure transfer by estimating a single coefficient. Based on our proposed formulation, we introduce a successive guided filtering network, which provides multiple filtering results from a single network, allowing for a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Extensive ablations, comparisons and analysis show the effectiveness and efficiency of our formulation and network, resulting in state-of-the-art results across filtering tasks like upsampling, denoising, and cross-modality filtering. Code is available at https://github.com/shizenglin/Unsharp-Mask-Guided-Filtering.

Video2vec Embeddings Recognize Events When Examples Are Scarce.

This paper aims for event recognition when video examples are scarce or even completely absent. The key in such a challenging setting is a semantic video representation. Rather than building the representation from individual attribute detectors and their annotations, we propose to learn the entire representation from freely available web videos and their descriptions using an embedding between video features and term vectors. In our proposed embedding, which we call Video2vec, the correlations between the words are utilized to learn a more effective representation by optimizing a joint objective balancing descriptiveness and predictability. We show how learning the Video2vec embedding using a multimodal predictability loss, including appearance, motion and audio features, results in a better predictable representation. We also propose an event specific variant of Video2vec to learn a more accurate representation for the words, which are indicative of the event, by introducing a term sensitive descriptiveness loss. Our experiments on three challenging collections of web videos from the NIST TRECVID Multimedia Event Detection and Columbia Consumer Videos datasets demonstrate: i) the advantages of Video2vec over representations using attributes or alternative embeddings, ii) the benefit of fusing video modalities by an embedding over common strategies, iii) the complementarity of term sensitive descriptiveness and multimodal predictability for event recognition. By its ability to improve predictability of present day audio-visual video features, while at the same time maximizing their semantic descriptiveness, Video2vec leads to state-of-the-art accuracy for both few- and zero-example recognition of events in video.

Evaluating color descriptors for object and scene recognition.

Image category recognition is important to access visual information on the level of objects and scene types. So far, intensity-based descriptors have been widely used for feature extraction at salient points. To increase illumination invariance and discriminative power, color descriptors have been proposed. Because many different descriptors exist, a structured overview is required of color invariant descriptors in the context of image category recognition. Therefore, this paper studies the invariance properties and the distinctiveness of color descriptors (software to compute the color descriptors from this paper is available from http://www.colordescriptors.com) in a structured way. The analytical invariance properties of color descriptors are explored, using a taxonomy based on invariance properties with respect to photometric transformations, and tested experimentally using a data set with known illumination conditions. In addition, the distinctiveness of color descriptors is assessed experimentally using two benchmarks, one from the image domain and one from the video domain. From the theoretical and experimental results, it can be derived that invariance to light intensity changes and light color changes affects category recognition. The results further reveal that, for light intensity shifts, the usefulness of invariance is category-specific. Overall, when choosing a single descriptor and no prior knowledge about the data set and object and scene categories is available, the OpponentSIFT is recommended. Furthermore, a combined set of color descriptors outperforms intensity-based SIFT and improves category recognition by 8 percent on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and by 7 percent on the Mediamill Challenge.

The semantic pathfinder: using an authoring metaphor for generic multimedia indexing.

This paper presents the semantic pathfinder architecture for generic indexing of multimedia archives. The semantic pathfinder extracts semantic concepts from video by exploring different paths through three consecutive analysis steps, which we derive from the observation that produced video is the result of an authoring-driven process. We exploit this authoring metaphor for machine-driven understanding. The pathfinder starts with the content analysis step. In this analysis step, we follow a data-driven approach of indexing semantics. The style analysis step is the second analysis step. Here, we tackle the indexing problem by viewing a video from the perspective of production. Finally, in the context analysis step, we view semantics in context. The virtue of the semantic pathfinder is its ability to learn the best path of analysis steps on a per-concept basis. To show the generality of this novel indexing approach, we develop detectors for a lexicon of 32 concepts and we evaluate the semantic pathfinder against the 2004 NIST TRECVID video retrieval benchmark, using a news archive of 64 hours. Top ranking performance in the semantic concept detection task indicates the merit of the semantic pathfinder for generic indexing of multimedia archives.