Serge J. Belongie

Shape matching and object recognition using shape contexts

This paper presents my work on computing shape models that are computationally fast and invariant basic transformations like translation, scaling and rotation. In this paper, I propose shape detection using a feature called shape context. Shape context describes all boundary points of a shape with respect to any single boundary point. Thus it is descriptive of the shape of the object. Object recognition can be achieved by matching this feature with a priori knowledge of the shape context of the boundary points of the object. Experimental results are promising on handwritten digits, trademark images.

Behavior recognition via sparse spatio-temporal features

A common trend in object recognition is to detect and leverage the use of sparse, informative feature points. The use of such features makes the problem more manageable while providing increased robustness to noise and pose variation. In this work we develop an extension of these ideas to the spatio-temporal case. For this purpose, we show that the direct 3D counterparts to commonly used 2D interest point detectors are inadequate, and we propose an alternative. Anchoring off of these interest points, we devise a recognition algorithm based on spatio-temporally windowed data. We present recognition results on a variety of datasets including both human and rodent behavior.

Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context

We present a new dataset with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in object recognition by placing the question of object recognition in the context of the broader question of scene understanding. This is achieved by gathering images of complex everyday scenes containing common objects in their natural context. Objects are labeled using per-instance segmentations to aid in precise object localization. Our dataset contains photos of 91 objects types that would be easily recognizable by a 4 year old. With a total of 2.5 million labeled instances in 328k images, the creation of our dataset drew upon extensive crowd worker involvement via novel user interfaces for category detection, instance spotting and instance segmentation. We present a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset in comparison to PASCAL, ImageNet, and SUN. Finally, we provide baseline performance analysis for bounding box and segmentation detection results using a Deformable Parts Model.

Visual tracking with online Multiple Instance Learning

In this paper, we address the problem of learning an adaptive appearance model for object tracking. In particular, a class of tracking techniques called “tracking by detection” have been shown to give promising results at real-time speeds. These methods train a discriminative classifier in an online manner to separate the object from the background. This classifier bootstraps itself by using the current tracker state to extract positive and negative examples from the current frame. Slight inaccuracies in the tracker can therefore lead to incorrectly labeled training examples, which degrades the classifier and can cause further drift. In this paper we show that using Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) instead of traditional supervised learning avoids these problems, and can therefore lead to a more robust tracker with fewer parameter tweaks. We present a novel online MIL algorithm for object tracking that achieves superior results with real-time performance.

Robust Object Tracking with Online Multiple Instance Learning

In this paper, we address the problem of tracking an object in a video given its location in the first frame and no other information. Recently, a class of tracking techniques called “tracking by detection” has been shown to give promising results at real-time speeds. These methods train a discriminative classifier in an online manner to separate the object from the background. This classifier bootstraps itself by using the current tracker state to extract positive and negative examples from the current frame. Slight inaccuracies in the tracker can therefore lead to incorrectly labeled training examples, which degrade the classifier and can cause drift. In this paper, we show that using Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) instead of traditional supervised learning avoids these problems and can therefore lead to a more robust tracker with fewer parameter tweaks. We propose a novel online MIL algorithm for object tracking that achieves superior results with real-time performance. We present thorough experimental results (both qualitative and quantitative) on a number of challenging video clips.

Contour and Texture Analysis for Image Segmentation

This paper provides an algorithm for partitioning grayscale images into disjoint regions of coherent brightness and texture. Natural images contain both textured and untextured regions, so the cues of contour and texture differences are exploited simultaneously. Contours are treated in the intervening contour framework, while texture is analyzed using textons. Each of these cues has a domain of applicability, so to facilitate cue combination we introduce a gating operator based on the texturedness of the neighborhood at a pixel. Having obtained a local measure of how likely two nearby pixels are to belong to the same region, we use the spectral graph theoretic framework of normalized cuts to find partitions of the image into regions of coherent texture and brightness. Experimental results on a wide range of images are shown.

Spectral grouping using the Nystrom method

Spectral graph theoretic methods have recently shown great promise for the problem of image segmentation. However, due to the computational demands of these approaches, applications to large problems such as spatiotemporal data and high resolution imagery have been slow to appear. The contribution of this paper is a method that substantially reduces the computational requirements of grouping algorithms based on spectral partitioning making it feasible to apply them to very large grouping problems. Our approach is based on a technique for the numerical solution of eigenfunction problems known as the Nystrom method. This method allows one to extrapolate the complete grouping solution using only a small number of samples. In doing so, we leverage the fact that there are far fewer coherent groups in a scene than pixels.

Fast Feature Pyramids for Object Detection

Multi-resolution image features may be approximated via extrapolation from nearby scales, rather than being computed explicitly. This fundamental insight allows us to design object detection algorithms that are as accurate, and considerably faster, than the state-of-the-art. The computational bottleneck of many modern detectors is the computation of features at every scale of a finely-sampled image pyramid. Our key insight is that one may compute finely sampled feature pyramids at a fraction of the cost, without sacrificing performance: for a broad family of features we find that features computed at octave-spaced scale intervals are sufficient to approximate features on a finely-sampled pyramid. Extrapolation is inexpensive as compared to direct feature computation. As a result, our approximation yields considerable speedups with negligible loss in detection accuracy. We modify three diverse visual recognition systems to use fast feature pyramids and show results on both pedestrian detection (measured on the Caltech, INRIA, TUD-Brussels and ETH data sets) and general object detection (measured on the PASCAL VOC). The approach is general and is widely applicable to vision algorithms requiring fine-grained multi-scale analysis. Our approximation is valid for images with broad spectra (most natural images) and fails for images with narrow band-pass spectra (e.g., periodic textures).

Integral Channel Features

We study the performance of ‘integral channel features’ for image classification tasks, focusing in particular on pedestrian detection. The general idea behind integral channel features is that multiple registered image channels are computed using linear and non-linear transformations of the input image, and then features such as local sums, histograms, and Haar features and their various generalizations are efficiently computed using integral images. Such features have been used in recent literature for a variety of tasks – indeed, variations appear to have been invented independently multiple times. Although integral channel features have proven effective, little effort has been devoted to analyzing or optimizing the features themselves. In this work we present a unified view of the relevant work in this area and perform a detailed experimental evaluation. We demonstrate that when designed properly, integral channel features not only outperform other features including histogram of oriented gradient (HOG), they also (1) naturally integrate heterogeneous sources of information, (2) have few parameters and are insensitive to exact parameter settings, (3) allow for more accurate spatial localization during detection, and (4) result in fast detectors when coupled with cascade classifiers.

The Fastest Pedestrian Detector in the West

We demonstrate a multiscale pedestrian detector operating in near real time ( 6 fps on 640x480 images) with state-of-the-art detection performance. The computational bottleneck of many modern detectors is the construction of an image pyramid, typically sampled at 8-16 scales per octave, and associated feature computations at each scale. We propose a technique to avoid constructing such a finely sampled image pyramid without sacrificing performance: our key insight is that for a broad family of features, including gradient histograms, the feature responses computed at a single scale can be used to approximate feature responses at nearby scales. The approximation is accurate within an entire scale octave. This allows us to decouple the sampling of the image pyramid from the sampling of detection scales. Overall, our approximation yields a speedup of 10-100 times over competing methods with only a minor loss in detection accuracy of about 1-2% on the Caltech Pedestrian dataset across a wide range of evaluation settings. The results are confirmed on three additional datasets (INRIA, ETH, and TUD-Brussels) where our method always scores within a few percent of the state-of-the-art while being 1-2 orders of magnitude faster. The approach is general and should be widely applicable.