Abstract

This paper proposes a method to modify traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) into interpretable CNNs, in order to clarify knowledge representations in high conv-layers of CNNs. In an interpretable CNN, each filter in a high conv-layer represents a specific object part. Our interpretable CNNs use the same training data as ordinary CNNs without a need for additional annotations of object parts or textures for supervision. The interpretable CNN automatically assigns each filter in a high conv-layer with an object part during the learning process. We can apply our method to different types of CNNs with various structures. The explicit knowledge representation in an interpretable CNN can help people understand logic inside a CNN, i.e. what patterns are memorized by the CNN for prediction. Experiments have shown that filters in an interpretable CNN are more semantically meaningful than those in traditional CNNs. 1 .

Existing methods on video-based action recognition are generally view-dependent, i.e., performing recognition from the same views seen in the training data. We present a novel multiview spatio-temporal AND-OR graph (MST-AOG) representation for cross-view action recognition, i.e., the recognition is performed on the video from an unknown and unseen view. As a compositional model, MST-AOG compactly represents the hierarchical combinatorial structures of cross-view actions by explicitly modeling the geometry, appearance and motion variations. This paper proposes effective methods to learn the structure and parameters of MST-AOG. The inference based on MST-AOG enables action recognition from novel views. The training of MST-AOG takes advantage of the 3D human skeleton data obtained from Kinect cameras to avoid annotating enormous multi-view video frames, which is error-prone and time-consuming, but the recognition does not need 3D information and is based on 2D video input. A new Multiview Action3D dataset has been created and will be released. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that this new action representation significantly improves the accuracy and robustness for cross-view action recognition on 2D videos.

Human action recognition is an important yet challenging task. Human actions usually involve human-object interactions, highly articulated motions, high intra-class variations, and complicated temporal structures. The recently developed commodity depth sensors open up new possibilities of dealing with this problem by providing 3D depth data of the scene. This information not only facilitates a rather powerful human motion capturing technique, but also makes it possible to efficiently model human-object interactions and intra-class variations. In this paper, we propose to characterize the human actions with a novel actionlet ensemble model, which represents the interaction of a subset of human joints. The proposed model is robust to noise, invariant to translational and temporal misalignment, and capable of characterizing both the human motion and the human-object interactions. We evaluate the proposed approach on three challenging action recognition datasets captured by Kinect devices, a multiview action recognition dataset captured with Kinect device, and a dataset captured by a motion capture system. The experimental evaluations show that the proposed approach achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

We study the problem of action recognition from depth sequences captured by depth cameras, where noise and occlusion are common problems because they are captured with a single commodity camera. In order to deal with these issues, we extract semi-local features called random occupancy pattern (ROP) features, which employ a novel sampling scheme that effectively explores an extremely large sampling space. We also utilize a sparse coding approach to robustly encode these features. The proposed approach does not require careful parameter tuning. Its training is very fast due to the use of the high-dimensional integral image, and it is robust to the occlusions. Our technique is evaluated on two datasets captured by commodity depth cameras: an action dataset and a hand gesture dataset. Our classification results are superior to those obtained by the state of the art approaches on both datasets.

No abstract

This article proposes a general theory and methodology, called the minimax entropy principle, for building statistical models for images (or signals) in a variety of applications. This principle consists of two parts. The first is the maximum entropy principle for feature binding (or fusion): for a given set of observed feature statistics, a distribution can be built to bind these feature statistics together by maximizing the entropy over all distributions that reproduce them. The second part is the minimum entropy principle for feature selection: among all plausible sets of feature statistics, we choose the set whose maximum entropy distribution has the minimum entropy. Computational and inferential issues in both parts are addressed; in particular, a feature pursuit procedure is proposed for approximately selecting the optimal set of features. The minimax entropy principle is then corrected by considering the sample variation in the observed feature statistics, and an information criterion for feature pursuit is derived. The minimax entropy principle is applied to texture modeling, where a novel Markov random field (MRF) model, called FRAME (filter, random field, and minimax entropy), is derived, and encouraging results are obtained in experiments on a variety of texture images. The relationship between our theory and the mechanisms of neural computation is also discussed.

Single image rain removal is a typical inverse problem in computer vision. The deep learning technique has been verified to be effective for this task and achieved state-of-theart performance. However, previous deep learning methods need to pre-collect a large set of image pairs with/without synthesized rain for training, which tends to make the neural network be biased toward learning the specific patterns of the synthesized rain, while be less able to generalize to real test samples whose rain types differ from those in the training data. To this issue, this paper firstly proposes a semi-supervised learning paradigm toward this task. Different from traditional deep learning methods which only use supervised image pairs with/without synthesized rain, we further put real rainy images, without need of their clean ones, into the network training process. This is realized by elaborately formulating the residual between an input rainy image and its expected network output (clear image without rain) as a specific parametrized rain streaks distribution. The network is therefore trained to adapt real unsupervised diverse rain types through transferring from the supervised synthesized rain, and thus both the short-of-training-sample and bias-to-supervised-sample issues can be evidently alleviated. Experiments on synthetic and real data verify the superiority of our model compared to the state-of-the-arts.