M. Zeeshan Zia is a former researcher at NEC Laboratories America, Inc.

Posts

Deep Supervision with Intermediate Concepts (IEEE)

Read Deep Supervision with Intermediate Concepts (IEEE). Recent data-driven approaches to scene interpretation predominantly pose inference as an end-to-end black-box mapping, commonly performed by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). However, decades of work on perceptual organization in both human and machine vision suggest that there are often intermediate representations that are intrinsic to an inference task, and which provide essential structure to improve generalization. In this work, we explore an approach for injecting prior domain structure into neural network training by supervising hidden layers of a CNN with intermediate concepts that normally are not observed in practice. We formulate a probabilistic framework which formalizes these notions and predicts improved generalization via this deep supervision method. One advantage of this approach is that we are able to train only from synthetic CAD renderings of cluttered scenes, where concept values can be extracted, but apply the results to real images. Our implementation achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 2D/3D keypoint localization and image classification on real image benchmarks including KITTI, PASCALVOC, PASCAL3D+, IKEA, and CIFAR100. We provide additional evidence that our approach outperforms alternative forms of supervision, such as multi-task networks.

Hierarchical Metric Learning and Matching for 2D and 3D Geometric Correspondences

Interest point descriptors have fueled progress on almost every problem in computer vision. Recent advances in deep neural networks have enabled task-specific learned descriptors that outperform hand-crafted descriptors on many problems. We demonstrate that commonly used metric learning approaches do not optimally leverage the feature hierarchies learned in a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), especially when applied to the task of geometric feature matching. While a metric loss applied to the deepest layer of a CNN, is often expected to yield ideal features irrespective of the task, in fact the growing receptive field as well as striding effects cause shallower features to be better at high precision matching tasks. We leverage this insight together with explicit supervision at multiple levels of the feature hierarchy for better regularization, to learn more effective descriptors in the context of geometric matching tasks. Further, we propose to use activation maps at different layers of a CNN, as an effective and principled replacement for the multi-resolution image pyramids often used for matching tasks. We propose concrete CNN architectures employing these ideas and evaluate them on multiple datasets for 2D and 3D geometric matching as well as optical flow, demonstrating state-of-the-art results and generalization across datasets.