Recovering Intrinsic Images / Efficient Object Detection

n this talk I will present recent work on two different topics from low- and high-level computer vision: Intrinsic Image Recovery and Efficient object detection. By intrinsic image decomposition we refer to the challenging task of decoupling material properties from lighting properties given a single image. We propose a probabilistic model that incorporates previous attempts exploiting edge information and combine it with a novel prior on material reflectances in the image. This results in a random field model with global, latent variables and pixel-accurate output reflectance values. I will present experiments on a recently proposed ground-truth database.

The proposed model is found to outperform previous models that have been proposed. Then I will also discuss some possible future developments in this field. In the second part of the talk I will present an efficient object detection scheme that breaks the computational complexity of commonly used detection algorithms, eg sliding windows. We pose the detection problem naturally as a structured prediction problem for which we decompose the inference procedure into an adaptive best-first search.

This results in test-time inference that scales sub-linearly in the size of the search space and detection requires usually less than 100 classifier evaluations. This paves the way for using strong (but costly) classifiers such as non-linear SVMs. The algorithmic properties are demonstrated using the VOC'07 dataset. This work is part of the Visipedia project, in collaboration with Steve Branson, Catherine Wah, Florian Schroff, Boris Babenko, Peter Welinder and Pietro Perona.