Abstract

With a view to provide a user-friendly interface for designing, training and developing deep learning frameworks, we have developed Expresso, a GUI tool written in Python. Expresso is built atop Caffe, the open-source, prize-winning framework popularly used to develop Convolutional Neural Networks. Expresso provides a convenient wizard-like graphical interface which guides the user through various common scenarios--data import, construction and training of deep networks, performing various experiments, analyzing and visualizing the results of these experiments. The multi-threaded nature of Expresso enables concurrent execution and notification of events related to the aforementioned scenarios. The GUI sub-components and inter-component interfaces in Expresso have been designed with extensibility in mind. We believe Expresso's flexibility and ease of use will come in handy to researchers, newcomers and seasoned alike, in their explorations related to deep learning.

Abstract

Freehand line sketches are an interesting and unique form of visual representation. Typically, such sketches are studied and utilized as an end product of the sketching process. However, we have found it instructive to study the sketches as sequentially accumulated composition of drawing strokes added over time. Studying sketches in this manner has enabled us to create novel sparse yet discriminative sketch-based representations for object categories which we term category-epitomes. Our procedure for obtaining these epitomes concurrently provides a natural measure for quantifying the sparseness underlying the original sketch, which we term epitome-score. We construct and analyze category-epitomes and epitome-scores for freehand sketches belonging to various object categories. Our analysis provides a novel viewpoint for studying the semantic nature of object categories.

Abstract

here has been a profound interest of late in the digitization and reconstruction of historical monuments. Rendering massive monument models requires a cluster of work stations because of the computational in feasibility of rendering over a single machine. Moreover, interactive rendering of these massive models in an immersive environment is only possible over a cluster of machines. In this paper, we present a design of distributed rendering system to efficiently handle models with massive textures. A server holds the skeleton of the whole model and divides the screen space balancing the rendering load among multiple clients. Each client loads only the require geometry and textures to render its sub-scene. We present a virtual texturing method for handling massive textures over the distributed rendering system. These textures are combined into a texture atlas which is split into equally sized tiles. A virtual texture is built over this atlas with each pixel representing a tile in the atlas. An efficient caching module loads only the required tiles into the memory, that are identified using the virtual texture.A fragment shader uses the virtual texture as a mapping to the physical texture in memory to generate the fragments. We demonstrate the performance of our system over a 350M triangles and 500 gigapixel textured model of Vittala temple.

Abstract

Automatic annotation of an audio or a music piece with multiple labels helps in understanding the composition of a music. Such meta-level information can be very useful in applications such as music transcription, retrieval, organization and personalization. In this work, we formulate the problem of annotation as multi-label classification which is considerably different from that of a popular single (binary or multi-class) label classification. We employ both the nearest neighbour and max-margin (SVM) formulations for the automatic annotation. We consider K-NN and SVM that are adapted for multi-label classification using one-vs-rest strategy and a direct multi-label classification formulation using ML-KNN and M3L. In the case of music, often the signatures of the labels (e.g. instruments and vocal signatures) are fused in the features. We therefore propose a simple feature augmentation technique based on non …

Abstract

The mismatch between the training data and the test data distributions is a challenging issue while designing many practical computer vision systems. In this paper, we propose a domain adaptation technique to tackle this issue. We are interested in a domain adaptation scenario where source domain has large amount of labeled examples and the target domain has large amount of unlabeled examples. We align the source domain subspace with the target domain subspace in order to reduce the mismatch between the two distributions. We model the subspace using Locality Preserving Projections (LPP). Unlike previous subspace alignment approaches, we introduce a strategy to effectively utilize the training labels in order to learn discriminative subspaces. We validate our domain adaptation approach by testing it on two different domains, i.e. handwritten and printed digit images. We compare our approach with …

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a classifier based retrieval scheme for efficiently and accurately retrieving relevant documents. We use SVM classifiers for word retrieval, and argue that the classifier based solutions can be superior to the OCR based solutions in many practical situations. We overcome the practical limitations of the classifier based solution in terms of limited vocabulary support, and availability of training data. In order to overcome these limitations, we design a one-shot learning scheme for dynamically synthesizing classifiers. Given a set of SVM classifiers, we appropriately join them to create novel classifiers. This extends the classifier based retrieval paradigm to an unlimited number of classes (words) present in a language. We validate our method on multiple datasets, and compare it with popular alternatives like OCR and word spotting. Even on a language like English, where OCRs have been fairly …

Abstract

The dynamic time warping (DTW) distance is a popular similarity measure for comparing time series data. It has been successfully applied in many fields like speech recognition, data mining and information retrieval to automatically cope with time deformations and variations in the length of the time dependent data. There have been attempts in the past to define kernels on DTW distance. These kernels try to approximate the DTW distance. However, these have quadratic complexity and these are computationally expensive for large time series. In this paper, we introduce FastDTW kernel, which is a linear approximation of the DTW kernel and can be used with linear SVM.

Abstract

Human pose as a query modality is an alternative and rich experience for image and video retrieval. We present a novel approach for the task of human pose retrieval, and make the following contributions: first, we introduce `deep poselets' for pose-sensitive detection of various body parts, that are built on convolutional neural network (CNN) features. These deep poselets significantly outperform previous instantiations of Berkeley poselets [2]. Second, using these detector responses, we construct a pose representation that is suitable for pose search, and show that pose retrieval performance exceeds previous methods by a factor of two. The compared methods include Bag of visual words [24], Berkeley poselets [2] and Human pose estimation algorithms [28]. All the methods are quantitatively evaluated on a large dataset of images built from a number of standard benchmarks together with frames from Hollywood …

Abstract

Traditional visual servoing is able to navigate a robotic system between two views of the same object. However, it is not designed to servo between views of different objects. In this paper, we consider a novel problem of servoing any instance (exemplar) of an object category to a desired pose (view) and propose a strategy to accomplish the task. We use features that semantically encode the locations of object parts and define the servoing error as the difference between positions of corresponding parts in the image space. Our controller is based on the linear combination of 3D models, such that the resulting model interpolates between the given and desired instances. We conducted our experiments on five different object categories in simulation framework and show that our approach achieves the desired pose with smooth trajectory. Furthermore, we show the performance gain achieved by using a linear …

Abstract

In this work, we propose an online handwriting solution, where the data is captured with the help of depth sensors. Users may write in the air and our method recognizes it in real time using the proposed feature representation. Our method uses an efficient fingertip tracking approach and reduces the necessity of pen-up/pen-down switching. We validate our method on two depth sensors, Kinect and Leap Motion Controller. On a dataset collected from 20 users, we achieve a recognition accuracy of 97.59% for character recognition. We also demonstrate how this system can be extended for lexicon recognition with reliable performance. We have also prepared a dataset containing 1,560 characters and 400 words with the intention of providing common benchmark for handwritten character recognition using depth sensors and related research.