Wanli Ouyang

Unsupervised Salience Learning for Person Re-identification

Human eyes can recognize person identities based on some small salient regions. However, such valuable salient information is often hidden when computing similarities of images with existing approaches. Moreover, many existing approaches learn discriminative features and handle drastic viewpoint change in a supervised way and require labeling new training data for a different pair of camera views. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective for person re-identification based on unsupervised salience learning. Distinctive features are extracted without requiring identity labels in the training procedure. First, we apply adjacency constrained patch matching to build dense correspondence between image pairs, which shows effectiveness in handling misalignment caused by large viewpoint and pose variations. Second, we learn human salience in an unsupervised manner. To improve the performance of person re-identification, human salience is incorporated in patch matching to find reliable and discriminative matched patches. The effectiveness of our approach is validated on the widely used VIPeR dataset and ETHZ dataset.

Joint Deep Learning for Pedestrian Detection

Feature extraction, deformation handling, occlusion handling, and classification are four important components in pedestrian detection. Existing methods learn or design these components either individually or sequentially. The interaction among these components is not yet well explored. This paper proposes that they should be jointly learned in order to maximize their strengths through cooperation. We formulate these four components into a joint deep learning framework and propose a new deep network architecture. By establishing automatic, mutual interaction among components, the deep model achieves a 9% reduction in the average miss rate compared with the current best-performing pedestrian detection approaches on the largest Caltech benchmark dataset.

Visual Tracking with Fully Convolutional Networks

We propose a new approach for general object tracking with fully convolutional neural network. Instead of treating convolutional neural network (CNN) as a black-box feature extractor, we conduct in-depth study on the properties of CNN features offline pre-trained on massive image data and classification task on ImageNet. The discoveries motivate the design of our tracking system. It is found that convolutional layers in different levels characterize the target from different perspectives. A top layer encodes more semantic features and serves as a category detector, while a lower layer carries more discriminative information and can better separate the target from distracters with similar appearance. Both layers are jointly used with a switch mechanism during tracking. It is also found that for a tracking target, only a subset of neurons are relevant. A feature map selection method is developed to remove noisy and irrelevant feature maps, which can reduce computation redundancy and improve tracking accuracy. Extensive evaluation on the widely used tracking benchmark [36] shows that the proposed tacker outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly.

Person Re-identification by Salience Matching

Human salience is distinctive and reliable information in matching pedestrians across disjoint camera views. In this paper, we exploit the pair wise salience distribution relationship between pedestrian images, and solve the person re-identification problem by proposing a salience matching strategy. To handle the misalignment problem in pedestrian images, patch matching is adopted and patch salience is estimated. Matching patches with inconsistent salience brings penalty. Images of the same person are recognized by minimizing the salience matching cost. Furthermore, our salience matching is tightly integrated with patch matching in a unified structural Rank SVM learning framework. The effectiveness of our approach is validated on the VIPeR dataset and the CUHK Campus dataset. It outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both datasets.

Learning Mid-level Filters for Person Re-identification

In this paper, we propose a novel approach of learning mid-level filters from automatically discovered patch clusters for person re-identification. It is well motivated by our study on what are good filters for person re-identification. Our mid-level filters are discriminatively learned for identifying specific visual patterns and distinguishing persons, and have good cross-view invariance. First, local patches are qualitatively measured and classified with their discriminative power. Discriminative and representative patches are collected for filter learning. Second, patch clusters with coherent appearance are obtained by pruning hierarchical clustering trees, and a simple but effective cross-view training strategy is proposed to learn filters that are view-invariant and discriminative. Third, filter responses are integrated with patch matching scores in RankSVM training. The effectiveness of our approach is validated on the VIPeR dataset and the CUHK01 dataset. The learned mid-level features are complementary to existing handcrafted low-level features, and improve the best Rank-1 matching rate on the VIPeR dataset by 14%.

Saliency detection by multi-context deep learning

Low-level saliency cues or priors do not produce good enough saliency detection results especially when the salient object presents in a low-contrast background with confusing visual appearance. This issue raises a serious problem for conventional approaches. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a multi-context deep learning framework for salient object detection. We employ deep Convolutional Neural Networks to model saliency of objects in images. Global context and local context are both taken into account, and are jointly modeled in a unified multi-context deep learning framework. To provide a better initialization for training the deep neural networks, we investigate different pre-training strategies, and a task-specific pre-training scheme is designed to make the multi-context modeling suited for saliency detection. Furthermore, recently proposed contemporary deep models in the ImageNet Image Classification Challenge are tested, and their effectiveness in saliency detection are investigated. Our approach is extensively evaluated on five public datasets, and experimental results show significant and consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.

A discriminative deep model for pedestrian detection with occlusion handling

Part-based models have demonstrated their merit in object detection. However, there is a key issue to be solved on how to integrate the inaccurate scores of part detectors when there are occlusions or large deformations. To handle the imperfectness of part detectors, this paper presents a probabilistic pedestrian detection framework. In this framework, a deformable part-based model is used to obtain the scores of part detectors and the visibilities of parts are modeled as hidden variables. Unlike previous occlusion handling approaches that assume independence among visibility probabilities of parts or manually define rules for the visibility relationship, a discriminative deep model is used in this paper for learning the visibility relationship among overlapping parts at multiple layers. Experimental results on three public datasets (Caltech, ETH and Daimler) and a new CUHK occlusion dataset1 specially designed for the evaluation of occlusion handling approaches show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

DeepID-Net: Deformable deep convolutional neural networks for object detection

In this paper, we propose deformable deep convolutional neural networks for generic object detection. This new deep learning object detection framework has innovations in multiple aspects. In the proposed new deep architecture, a new deformation constrained pooling (def-pooling) layer models the deformation of object parts with geometric constraint and penalty. A new pre-training strategy is proposed to learn feature representations more suitable for the object detection task and with good generalization capability. By changing the net structures, training strategies, adding and removing some key components in the detection pipeline, a set of models with large diversity are obtained, which significantly improves the effectiveness of model averaging. The proposed approach improves the mean averaged precision obtained by RCNN [14], which was the state-of-the-art, from 31% to 50.3% on the ILSVRC2014 detection test set. It also outperforms the winner of ILSVRC2014, GoogLeNet, by 6.1%. Detailed component-wise analysis is also provided through extensive experimental evaluation, which provide a global view for people to understand the deep learning object detection pipeline.

Multi-source Deep Learning for Human Pose Estimation

Visual appearance score, appearance mixture type and deformation are three important information sources for human pose estimation. This paper proposes to build a multi-source deep model in order to extract non-linear representation from these different aspects of information sources. With the deep model, the global, high-order human body articulation patterns in these information sources are extracted for pose estimation. The task for estimating body locations and the task for human detection are jointly learned using a unified deep model. The proposed approach can be viewed as a post-processing of pose estimation results and can flexibly integrate with existing methods by taking their information sources as input. By extracting the non-linear representation from multiple information sources, the deep model outperforms state-of-the-art by up to 8.6 percent on three public benchmark datasets.

STCT: Sequentially Training Convolutional Networks for Visual Tracking

Due to the limited amount of training samples, finetuning pre-trained deep models online is prone to overfitting. In this paper, we propose a sequential training method for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to effectively transfer pre-trained deep features for online applications. We regard a CNN as an ensemble with each channel of the output feature map as an individual base learner. Each base learner is trained using different loss criterions to reduce correlation and avoid over-training. To achieve the best ensemble online, all the base learners are sequentially sampled into the ensemble via important sampling. To further improve the robustness of each base learner, we propose to train the convolutional layers with random binary masks, which serves as a regularization to enforce each base learner to focus on different input features. The proposed online training method is applied to visual tracking problem by transferring deep features trained on massive annotated visual data and is shown to significantly improve tracking performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging benchmark data set and demonstrate that our tracking algorithm can outperform state-of-the-art methods with a considerable margin.