Weak-supervision for Objects Detection and Image/Video Set Summarization

The growing scale of image and video datasets in vision makes labeling and annotation of such datasets, for training of recognition models, difficult and time consuming. Further, richer models often require richer labelings of the data, that are typically even more difficult to obtain. In this talk I will focus on two models that make use of different forms of supervision for two different vision tasks.  

In the first part of this talk I will focus on object detection. The appearance of an object changes profoundly with pose, camera view and interactions of the object with other objects in the scene. This makes it challenging to learn detectors based on an object-level labels (e.g., “car”). We postulate that having a richer set of labelings (at different levels of granularity) for an object, including finer-grained sub-categories, consistent in appearance and view, and higher-order composites – contextual groupings of objects consistent in their spatial layout and appearance, can significantly alleviate these problems. However, obtaining such a rich set of annotations, including annotation of an exponentially growing set of object groupings, is infeasible. To this end, we propose a weakly-supervised framework for object detection where we discover subcategories and the composites automatically with only traditional object-level category labels as input.

In the second part of the talk I will focus on the framework for large scale image set and video summarization. Starting from the intuition that the characteristics of the two media types are different but complementary, we develop a fast and easily-parallelizable approach for creating not only video summaries but also novel structural summaries of events in the form of the storyline graphs. The storyline graphs can illustrate various events or activities associated with the topic in the form of a branching directed network. The video summarization is achieved by diversity ranking on the similarity graphs between images and video frame, thereby treating consumer image as essentially a form of weak-supervision. The reconstruction of storyline graphs on the other hand is formulated as inference of the sparse time-varying directed graphs from a set of photo streams with assistance of consumer videos.

Time permitting I will also talk about a few other recent project highlights.