This paper presents a self-supervised framework for training interest point detectors and descriptors suitable for a large number of multiple-view geometry problems in computer vision. As opposed to patch-based neural networks, our fully-convolutional model operates on full-sized images and jointly computes pixel-level interest point locations and associated descriptors in one forward pass. We introduce Homographic Adaptation, a multi-scale, multihomography approach for boosting interest point detection repeatability and performing cross-domain adaptation (e.g., synthetic-to-real). Our model, when trained on the MS-COCO generic image dataset using Homographic Adaptation, is able to repeatedly detect a much richer set of interest points than the initial pre-adapted deep model and any other traditional corner detector. The final system gives rise to state-of-the-art homography estimation results on HPatches when compared to LIFT, SIFT and ORB.

Humans can orient themselves in their 3D environments using simple 2D maps. Differently, algorithms for visual localization mostly rely on complex 3D point clouds that are expensive to build, store, and maintain over time. We bridge this gap by introducing OrienterNet, the first deep neural network that can localize an image with sub-meter accuracy using the same 2D semantic maps that humans use. Orienter-Net estimates the location and orientation of a query image by matching a neural Bird's-Eye View with open and globally available maps from OpenStreetMap, enabling anyone to localize anywhere such maps are available. OrienterNet is supervised only by camera poses but learns to perform semantic matching with a wide range of map elements in an end-to-end manner. To enable this, we introduce a large crowd-sourced dataset of images captured across 12 cities from the diverse viewpoints of cars, bikes, and pedestrians. OrienterNet generalizes to new datasets and pushes the state of the art in both robotics and AR scenarios. The code and trained model will be released publicly.

This paper proposes a conceptually simple but surprisingly powerful method which combines the effectiveness of a discriminative object detector with the explicit correspondence offered by a nearest-neighbor approach. The method is based on training a separate linear SVM classifier for every exemplar in the training set. Each of these ExemplarSVMs is thus defined by a single positive instance and millions of negatives. While each detector is quite specific to its exemplar, we empirically observe that an ensemble of such Exemplar-SVMs offers surprisingly good generalization. Our performance on the PASCAL VOC detection task is on par with the much more complex latent part-based model of Felzenszwalb et al., at only a modest computational cost increase. But the central benefit of our approach is that it creates an explicit association between each detection and a single training exemplar. Because most detections show good alignment to their associated exemplar, it is possible to transfer any available exemplar meta-data (segmentation, geometric structure, 3D model, etc.) directly onto the detections, which can then be used as part of overall scene understanding.

Abstract. The presence of bias in existing object recognition datasets is now well-known in the computer vision community. While it remains in question whether creating an unbiased dataset is possible given limited resources, in this work we propose a discriminative framework that directly exploits dataset bias during training. In particular, our model learns two sets of weights: (1) bias vectors associated with each individual dataset, and (2) visual world weights that are common to all datasets, which are learned by undoing the associated bias from each dataset. The visual world weights are expected to be our best possible approximation to the object model trained on an unbiased dataset, and thus tend to have good generalization ability. We demonstrate the e↵ectiveness of our model by applying the learned weights to a novel, unseen dataset, and report superior results for both classification and detection tasks compared to a classical SVM that does not account for the presence of bias. Overall, we find that it is beneficial to explicitly account for bias when combining multiple datasets.

Sliding window scanning is the dominant paradigm in object recognition research today. But while much success has been reported in detecting several rectangular-shaped object classes (i.e. faces, cars, pedestrians), results have been much less impressive for more general types of objects. Several researchers have advocated the use of image segmentation as a way to get a better spatial support for objects. In this paper, our aim is to address this issue by studying the following two questions: 1) how important is good spatial support for recognition? 2) can segmentation provide better spatial support for objects? To answer the first, we compare recognition performance using ground-truth segmentation vs. bounding boxes. To answer the second, we use the multiple segmentation approach to evaluate how close can real segments approach the ground-truth for real objects, and at what cost. Our results demonstrate the importance of finding the right spatial support for objects, and the feasibility of doing so without excessive computational burden.