A new algorithm is proposed for removing large objects from digital images. The challenge is to fill in the hole that is left behind in a visually plausible way. In the past, this problem has been addressed by two classes of algorithms: 1) "texture synthesis" algorithms for generating large image regions from sample textures and 2) "inpainting" techniques for filling in small image gaps. The former has been demonstrated for "textures"--repeating two-dimensional patterns with some stochasticity; the latter focus on linear "structures" which can be thought of as one-dimensional patterns, such as lines and object contours. This paper presents a novel and efficient algorithm that combines the advantages of these two approaches. We first note that exemplar-based texture synthesis contains the essential process required to replicate both texture and structure; the success of structure propagation, however, is highly dependent on the order in which the filling proceeds. We propose a best-first algorithm in which the confidence in the synthesized pixel values is propagated in a manner similar to the propagation of information in inpainting. The actual color values are computed using exemplar-based synthesis. In this paper, the simultaneous propagation of texture and structure information is achieved by a single, efficient algorithm. Computational efficiency is achieved by a block-based sampling process. A number of examples on real and synthetic images demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in removing large occluding objects, as well as thin scratches. Robustness with respect to the shape of the manually selected target region is also demonstrated. Our results compare favorably to those obtained by existing techniques.

Semantic segmentation is a key problem for many computer vision tasks. While approaches based on convolutional neural networks constantly break new records on different benchmarks, generalizing well to diverse testing environments remains a major challenge. In numerous real world applications, there is indeed a large gap between data distributions in train and test domains, which results in severe performance loss at run-time. In this work, we address the task of unsupervised domain adaptation in semantic segmentation with losses based on the entropy of the pixel-wise predictions. To this end, we propose two novel, complementary methods using (i) an entropy loss and (ii) an adversarial loss respectively. We demonstrate state-of-theart performance in semantic segmentation on two challenging "synthetic-2-real" set-ups 1 and show that the approach can also be used for detection.

Abstract. Color-based trackers recently proposed in [3,4,5] have been proved robust and versatile for a modest computational cost. They are especially appealing for tracking tasks where the spatial structure of the tracked objects exhibits such a dramatic variability that trackers based on a space-dependent appearance reference would break down very fast. Trackers in [3,4,5] rely on the deterministic search of a window whose color content matches a reference histogram color model. Relying on the same principle of color histogram distance, but within a probabilistic framework, we introduce a new Monte Carlo tracking technique. The use of a particle filter allows us to better handle color clutter in the background, as well as complete occlusion of the tracked entities over a few frames. This probabilistic approach is very flexible and can be extended in a number of useful ways. In particular, we introduce the following ingredients: multi-part color modeling to capture a rough spatial layout ignored by global histograms, incorporation of a background color model when relevant, and extension to multiple objects.

A new algorithm is proposed for removing large objects from digital images. The challenge is to fill in the hole that is left behind in a visually plausible way.In the past, this problem has been addressed by two classes of algorithms: (i) "texture synthesis" algorithms for generating large image regions from sample textures, and (ii) "inpainting" techniques for filling in small image gaps. The former work well for "textures" -repeating twodimensional patterns with some stochasticity; the latter focus on linear "structures" which can be thought of as onedimensional patterns, such as lines and object contours.This paper presents a novel and efficient algorithm that combines the advantages of these two approaches. We first note that exemplar-based texture synthesis contains the essential process required to replicate both texture and structure; the success of structure propagation, however, is highly dependent on the order in which the filling proceeds. We propose a best-first algorithm in which the confidence in the synthesized pixel values is propagated in a manner similar to the propagation of information in inpainting. The actual colour values are computed using exemplar-based synthesis. Computational efficiency is achieved by a blockbased sampling process.A number of examples on real and synthetic images demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in removing large occluding objects as well as thin scratches. Robustness with respect to the shape of the manually selected target region is also demonstrated. Our results compare favorably to those obtained by existing techniques.

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The problem of interactive foreground/background segmentation in still images is of great practical importance in image editing. The state of the art in interactive segmentation is probably represented by the graph cut algorithm of Boykov and Jolly (ICCV 2001). Its underlying model uses both colour and contrast information, together with a strong prior for region coherence. Estimation is performed by solving a graph cut problem for which very efficient algorithms have recently been developed. However the model depends on parameters which must be set by hand and the aim of this work is for those constants to be learned from image data. First, a generative, probabilistic formulation of the model is set out in terms of a "Gaussian Mixture Markov Random Field" (GMMRF). Secondly, a pseudolikelihood algorithm is derived which jointly learns the colour mixture and coherence parameters for foreground and background respectively. Error rates for GMMRF segmentation are calculated throughout using a new image database, available on the web, with ground truth provided by a human segmenter. The graph cut algorithm, using the learned parameters, generates good object-segmentations with little interaction. However, pseudolikelihood learning proves to be frail, which limits the complexity of usable models, and hence also the achievable error rate.

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We address recognition and localization of human actions in realistic scenarios. In contrast to the previous work studying human actions in controlled settings, here we train and test algorithms on real movies with substantial variation of actions in terms of subject appearance, motion, surrounding scenes, viewing angles and spatio-temporal extents. We introduce a new annotated human action dataset and use it to evaluate several existing methods. We in particular focus on boosted space-time window classifiers and introduce "keyframe priming" that combines discriminative models of human motion and shape within an action. Keyframe priming is shown to significantly improve the performance of action detection. We present detection results for the action class "drinking" evaluated on two episodes of the movie "Coffee and Cigarettes".