Theodore Giannakopoulos

Thamar Solorio, Mahsa Shafaei, Christos Smailis et al.

This white paper presents a summary of the discussions regarding critical considerations to develop an extensive repository of online videos annotated with labels indicating questionable content. The main discussion points include: 1) the type of appropriate labels that will result in a valuable repository for the larger AI community; 2) how to design the collection and annotation process, as well as the distribution of the corpus to maximize its potential impact; and, 3) what actions we can take to reduce risk of trauma to annotators.

Konstantinos Bougiatiotis, Theodore Giannakopoulos

In this paper we examine the ability of low-level multimodal features to extract movie similarity, in the context of a content-based movie recommendation approach. In particular, we demonstrate the extraction of multimodal representation models of movies, based on textual information from subtitles, as well as cues from the audio and visual channels. With regards to the textual domain, we emphasize our research in topic modeling of movies based on their subtitles, in order to extract topics that discriminate between movies. Regarding the visual domain, we focus on the extraction of semantically useful features that model camera movements, colors and faces, while for the audio domain we adopt simple classification aggregates based on pretrained models. The three domains are combined with static metadata (e.g. directors, actors) to prove that the content-based movie similarity procedure can be enhanced with low-level multimodal information. In order to demonstrate the proposed content representation approach, we have built a small dataset of 160 widely known movies. We assert movie similarities, as propagated by the individual modalities and fusion models, in the form of recommendation rankings. Extensive experimentation proves that all three low-level modalities (text, audio and visual) boost the performance of a content-based recommendation system, compared to the typical metadata-based content representation, by more than $50\%$ relative increase. To our knowledge, this is the first approach that utilizes a wide range of features from all involved modalities, in order to enhance the performance of the content similarity estimation, compared to the metadata-based approaches.

Nikolaos Sarafianos, Theodore Giannakopoulos, Christophoros Nikou et al.

Visual attributes, from simple objects (e.g., backpacks, hats) to soft-biometrics (e.g., gender, height, clothing) have proven to be a powerful representational approach for many applications such as image description and human identification. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to combine the advantages of both multi-task and curriculum learning in a visual attribute classification framework. Individual tasks are grouped after performing hierarchical clustering based on their correlation. The clusters of tasks are learned in a curriculum learning setup by transferring knowledge between clusters. The learning process within each cluster is performed in a multi-task classification setup. By leveraging the acquired knowledge, we speed-up the process and improve performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method via ablation studies and a detailed analysis of the covariates, on a variety of publicly available datasets of humans standing with their full-body visible. Extensive experimentation has proven that the proposed approach boosts the performance by 4% to 10%.

Nikolaos Sarafianos, Theodore Giannakopoulos, Christophoros Nikou et al.

Visual attributes, from simple objects (e.g., backpacks, hats) to soft-biometrics (e.g., gender, height, clothing) have proven to be a powerful representational approach for many applications such as image description and human identification. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to combine the advantages of both multi-task and curriculum learning in a visual attribute classification framework. Individual tasks are grouped based on their correlation so that two groups of strongly and weakly correlated tasks are formed. The two groups of tasks are learned in a curriculum learning setup by transferring the acquired knowledge from the strongly to the weakly correlated. The learning process within each group though, is performed in a multi-task classification setup. The proposed method learns better and converges faster than learning all the tasks in a typical multi-task learning paradigm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the publicly available, SoBiR, VIPeR and PETA datasets and report state-of-the-art results across the board.

Konstantinos Bougiatiotis, Theodore Giannakopoulos

In this paper we examine the existence of correlation between movie similarity and low level features from respective movie content. In particular, we demonstrate the extraction of multi-modal representation models of movies based on subtitles, audio and metadata mining. We emphasize our research in topic modeling of movies based on their subtitles. In order to demonstrate the proposed content representation approach, we have built a small dataset of 160 widely known movies. We assert movie similarities, as propagated by the singular modalities and fusion models, in the form of recommendation rankings. We showcase a novel topic model browser for movies that allows for exploration of the different aspects of similarities between movies and an information retrieval system for movie similarity based on multi-modal content.