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In this paper, we conduct an extensive study on the use of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for omnidirectional image quality assessment (IQA). To cope with the lack of available IQA databases, transfer learning from seven pre-trained CNN models is investigated over retraining on standard 2D databases. In addition, we explore the influence of various image representations and training strategies on the model’s performance. A comparison of the use of projected versus radial content, and multichannel CNN versus patch-wise training is also covered. The experimental results on two publicly available databases are used to draw conclusions about which strategy best fits the visual quality prediction and at which computational cost. The analysis shows that retraining CNN models on 2D IQA databases improves the prediction accuracy. The latter and the required computational time are found to be significantly affected by the training strategy. Cross-database evaluations demonstrate that the nature and variety of the content impact the generalization ability of the models. Finally, we show that conclusions coming from other image processing communities may not hold for IQA. The provided discussion shall provide insights and recommendations when using pre-trained CNNs for omnidirectional IQA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blur is one of the most common distortions that degrade natural images. This stimulates the blossom of sharpness assessment metrics. Existing sharpness metrics possess good performance for evaluating simulated blur, but are limited for the more common realistic blur that are introduced during image capture and processing in real life. To this end, we propose an effective Realistic Blur Assessment method (RBA) based on discrepancy learning. First, motivated by the fact that the distortion-free reference images are usually unavailable in practice, but the Human Visual System (HVS) can still accurately perceive image sharpness by quantifying the perceptual discrepancy between the distorted image and the hallucinated reference image in mind, we propose to train a discrepancy generation model to automatically generate the discrepancy map from the distorted image analogous to the HVS. This is achieved by using a deep neural network with rich training images. With the discrepancy map, two sharpness-aware features, i.e. sparse representation based entropy of primitive and content-guided variation of power, are then extracted to severally quantify spatial visual information amount and spectral power. Finally, the two features are integrated to produce the overall sharpness score. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image representation based on sparse coding generalizes the bag of words model. Although it reduces the reconstruction error for local features to achieve the state-of-the-art image classification performance, the large computational cost hinders the application of sparse coding-based image features. In this paper, we propose approximating a sparse code using the output of a simple neural network. The resulting parameter learning model for the neural network automatically incorporates non-negative and shift-invariant constraints, leading to an efficient normalized non-negative sparse coding (N3SC) sparse encoder. Without the use of the traditional iterative process to solve the sparse coding objective, the sparse encoder directly “converts” each local feature into a sparse code. We also introduce a method for training the encoder based on the auto-encoder method. In addition, we formally propose the corresponding sparse coding scheme called N3SC, which enforces both the non-negative constraint and the shift-invariant constraint in addition to the traditional sparse coding criteria. As demonstrated by several experiments, the obtained N3SC encoder requires only 3%–10% of the processing time for image feature extraction compared with the standard sparse coding scheme. At the same time, the features extracted using the exact solutions of the N3SC coding scheme and the N3SC encoder offer superior image classification accuracy compared to the accuracy of many existing sparse coding-based representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based visual comfort assessment (VCA) for stereoscopic images. To assess the overall degree of visual discomfort in stereoscopic viewing, we devise a binocular fusion deep network (BFN) learning binocular characteristics between stereoscopic images. The proposed BFN learns the latent binocular feature representations for the visual comfort score prediction. In the BFN, the binocular feature is encoded by fusing the spatial features extracted from left and right views. Finally, the visual comfort score is predicted by projecting the binocular feature onto the subjective score space. In addition, we devise a disparity regularization network (DRN) for improving the prediction results. The proposed DRN takes the binocular feature from the BFN and estimates disparity maps from the feature in order to embed disparity relations between left and right views into the deep network. The proposed deep network with BFN and DRN is end-to-end trained in a unified framework in which the DRN acts as disparity regularization. We evaluated the prediction performance of the proposed deep network for VCA by the comparison of existing objective VCA metrics. Further, we demonstrated that the proposed BFN showed various factors causing visual discomfort by using network visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main challenges of visual object tracking arise from the arbitrary appearance of the objects that need to be tracked. Most existing algorithms try to solve this problem by training a new model to regenerate or classify each tracked object. As a result, the model needs to be initialized and retrained for each new object. In this paper, we propose to track different objects in an object-independent approach with a novel two-flow convolutional neural network (YCNN). The YCNN takes two inputs (one is an object image patch, the other is a larger searching image patch), then outputs a response map which predicts how likely and where the object would appear in the search patch. Unlike the object-specific approaches, the YCNN is actually trained to measure the similarity between the two image patches. Thus, this model will not be limited to any specific object. Furthermore, the network is end-to-end trained to extract both shallow and deep dedicated convolutional features for visual tracking. And once properly trained, the YCNN can be used to track all kinds of objects without further training and updating. As a result, our algorithm is able to run at a very high speed of 45 frames-per-second. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm can also be proved by the experiments on two popular data sets: OTB-100 and VOT-2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video-based person re-identification (re-id) has attracted a lot of research interest. When facing dramatic growth in new pedestrian videos, existing video-based person re-id methods usually need large quantities of labeled pedestrian videos to train a discriminative model. In practice, labeling large quantities of pedestrian videos is a costly and time-consuming task, which will limit the application of these methods in the real environment. Therefore, it is valuable and necessary to investigate how to learn a discriminative re-id model by using limited labeled training pedestrian videos. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised cross-view projection-based dictionary learning (SCPDL) approach for video-based person re-id. Specifically, SCPDL jointly learns a pair of feature projection matrices and a pair of dictionaries by integrating the information contained in labeled and unlabeled pedestrian videos. With the learned feature projection matrices, the influence of variations within each video to the re-id can be reduced. With the learned dictionary pair, pedestrian videos from two different cameras can be converted into coding coefficients in a common representation space, such that the differences between different cameras can be bridged. In the learning process, the labeled pedestrian videos are used to ensure that the learned dictionaries have favorable discriminability; the large quantities of unlabeled pedestrian videos are used to ensure that SCPDL can better capture the variations between pedestrian videos, such that the learned dictionaries can own stronger representative capability. Experiments on two public pedestrian sequence data sets (iLIDS-VID and PRID 2011) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individuating and locating repetitive patterns in still images is a fundamental task in image processing, typically achieved by means of correlation strategies. In this paper, we provide a solid solution to this task using a differential geometry approach, operating on Lie algebra, and exploiting a mixture of templates. The proposed method asks the user to locate a few instances of the target patterns (seeds) that become visual templates used to explore the image. We propose an iterative algorithm to locate patches similar to the seeds working in three steps: first, clustering the detected patches to generate templates of different classes, then looking for the affine transformations, living on a Lie algebra that best links the templates and the detected patches, and finally detecting new patches with a convolutional strategy. The process ends when no new patches are found. We will show how our method is able to process heterogeneous unstructured images with multiple visual motifs and extremely crowded scenarios with high precision and recall, outperforming all the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generic human detectors perform poorly in application scenes in which conditions are significantly different from those of the benchmark data sets. Based on the assumption that only a limited number of labeled examples are available, we propose a variant semi-supervised boosting approach for improving scene adaptiveness by utilizing unlabeled data. Specifically, we train a max-margin-based model as an initial detector for new example collection, instead of using generic detectors, and then a better model is trained via boosting in which the newly obtained examples influence the training process through their similarities to the labeled examples. Since the widely used human descriptors are usually high dimensional and redundant, we employ a graph-based method to determine the weight representing the importance of each feature, such that the weighted similarity measurement leads to a performance gain. In the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed approach “Variant SemiBoost” is demonstrated and state-of-the-art performance on challenging data sets is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with other applications in computer vision, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have underperformed on pedestrian detection. A breakthrough was made very recently using sophisticated deep CNN (DCNN) models, with a number of handcrafted features or explicit occlusion handling mechanism. In this paper, we show that by reusing the convolutional feature maps of a DCNN model as image features to train an ensemble of boosted decision models, we are able to achieve the best reported accuracy without using specially designed learning algorithms. We empirically identify and disclose important implementation details. We also show that pixel labeling may be simply combined with a detector to boost the detection performance. By adding complementary handcrafted features such as optical flow, the DCNN-based detector can be further improved. We advance the state-of-the-art results by lowering the log-average miss rate from 11.7% to 8.9% on the Caltech data set and from 11.2% to 8.6% on the Inria data set. We also achieve a comparable result to state-of-the-art approaches on the KITTI data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of local features for image representation has become popular in recent years. Local features are often used in the bag-of-visual-words scheme. Although proven effective, this method still has two drawbacks. First, local regions from which local features are extracted are not discriminative enough for visual tasks. Hence, the combination of local features is necessary. Second, the semantic gap between visual features and human perception also hinders the performance. To address these two problems, in this paper, we propose a novel contextual exemplar classifier-based method for image representation and apply it for classification tasks. Each exemplar classifier is trained to separate one training image from the other images of different classes. We partition each image into a number of regions and use the responses of these exemplar classifiers as the image region’s representation. The contextual relationship is then modeled using mixture Dirichlet distributions. A bilayer model is used to predict image classes with L2 constraints. Experimental results on the Natural Scene, Caltech-101/256, Flower-17/102, and SUN-397 data sets show that the proposed method is able to outperform the state-of-the-art local feature-based methods for image classification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]