Svebor Karaman

Xuewen Yang, Svebor Karaman, Joel Tetreault et al.

The task of news article image captioning aims to generate descriptive and informative captions for news article images. Unlike conventional image captions that simply describe the content of the image in general terms, news image captions follow journalistic guidelines and rely heavily on named entities to describe the image content, often drawing context from the whole article they are associated with. In this work, we propose a new approach to this task, motivated by caption guidelines that journalists follow. Our approach, Journalistic Guidelines Aware News Image Captioning (JoGANIC), leverages the structure of captions to improve the generation quality and guide our representation design. Experimental results, including detailed ablation studies, on two large-scale publicly available datasets show that JoGANIC substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods both on caption generation and named entity related metrics.

Alireza Zareian, Svebor Karaman, Shih-Fu Chang

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to extract entities, predicates and their semantic structure from images, enabling deep understanding of visual content, with many applications such as visual reasoning and image retrieval. Nevertheless, existing SGG methods require millions of manually annotated bounding boxes for training, and are computationally inefficient, as they exhaustively process all pairs of object proposals to detect predicates. In this paper, we address those two limitations by first proposing a generalized formulation of SGG, namely Visual Semantic Parsing, which disentangles entity and predicate recognition, and enables sub-quadratic performance. Then we propose the Visual Semantic Parsing Network, VSPNet, based on a dynamic, attention-based, bipartite message passing framework that jointly infers graph nodes and edges through an iterative process. Additionally, we propose the first graph-based weakly supervised learning framework, based on a novel graph alignment algorithm, which enables training without bounding box annotations. Through extensive experiments, we show that VSPNet outperforms weakly supervised baselines significantly and approaches fully supervised performance, while being several times faster. We publicly release the source code of our method.

Alireza Zareian, Svebor Karaman, Shih-Fu Chang

Scene graphs are powerful representations that parse images into their abstract semantic elements, i.e., objects and their interactions, which facilitates visual comprehension and explainable reasoning. On the other hand, commonsense knowledge graphs are rich repositories that encode how the world is structured, and how general concepts interact. In this paper, we present a unified formulation of these two constructs, where a scene graph is seen as an image-conditioned instantiation of a commonsense knowledge graph. Based on this new perspective, we re-formulate scene graph generation as the inference of a bridge between the scene and commonsense graphs, where each entity or predicate instance in the scene graph has to be linked to its corresponding entity or predicate class in the commonsense graph. To this end, we propose a novel graph-based neural network that iteratively propagates information between the two graphs, as well as within each of them, while gradually refining their bridge in each iteration. Our Graph Bridging Network, GB-Net, successively infers edges and nodes, allowing to simultaneously exploit and refine the rich, heterogeneous structure of the interconnected scene and commonsense graphs. Through extensive experimentation, we showcase the superior accuracy of GB-Net compared to the most recent methods, resulting in a new state of the art. We publicly release the source code of our method.

Shiyuan Huang, Xudong Lin, Svebor Karaman et al.

Two-stream networks have achieved great success in video recognition. A two-stream network combines a spatial stream of RGB frames and a temporal stream of Optical Flow to make predictions. However, the temporal redundancy of RGB frames as well as the high-cost of optical flow computation creates challenges for both the performance and efficiency. Recent works instead use modern compressed video modalities as an alternative to the RGB spatial stream and improve the inference speed by orders of magnitudes. Previous works create one stream for each modality which are combined with an additional temporal stream through late fusion. This is redundant since some modalities like motion vectors already contain temporal information. Based on this observation, we propose a compressed domain two-stream network IP TSN for compressed video recognition, where the two streams are represented by the two types of frames (I and P frames) in compressed videos, without needing a separate temporal stream. With this goal, we propose to fully exploit the motion information of P-stream through generalized distillation from optical flow, which largely improves the efficiency and accuracy. Our P-stream runs 60 times faster than using optical flow while achieving higher accuracy. Our full IP TSN, evaluated over public action recognition benchmarks (UCF101, HMDB51 and a subset of Kinetics), outperforms other compressed domain methods by large margins while improving the total inference speed by 20%.

Xu Zhang, Svebor Karaman, Shih-Fu Chang

To detect GAN generated images, conventional supervised machine learning algorithms require collection of a number of real and fake images from the targeted GAN model. However, the specific model used by the attacker is often unavailable. To address this, we propose a GAN simulator, AutoGAN, which can simulate the artifacts produced by the common pipeline shared by several popular GAN models. Additionally, we identify a unique artifact caused by the up-sampling component included in the common GAN pipeline. We show theoretically such artifacts are manifested as replications of spectra in the frequency domain and thus propose a classifier model based on the spectrum input, rather than the pixel input. By using the simulated images to train a spectrum based classifier, even without seeing the fake images produced by the targeted GAN model during training, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances on detecting fake images generated by popular GAN models such as CycleGAN.

Svebor Karaman, Xudong Lin, Xuefeng Hu et al.

We propose an unsupervised hashing method which aims to produce binary codes that preserve the ranking induced by a real-valued representation. Such compact hash codes enable the complete elimination of real-valued feature storage and allow for significant reduction of the computation complexity and storage cost of large-scale image retrieval applications. Specifically, we learn a neural network-based model, which transforms the input representation into a binary representation. We formalize the training objective of the network in an intuitive and effective way, considering each training sample as a query and aiming to obtain the same retrieval results using the produced hash codes as those obtained with the original features. This training formulation directly optimizes the hashing model for the target usage of the hash codes it produces. We further explore the addition of a decoder trained to obtain an approximated reconstruction of the original features. At test time, we retrieved the most promising database samples with an efficient graph-based search procedure using only our hash codes and perform re-ranking using the reconstructed features, thus without needing to access the original features at all. Experiments conducted on multiple publicly available large-scale datasets show that our method consistently outperforms all compared state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing methods and that the reconstruction procedure can effectively boost the search accuracy with a minimal constant additional cost.

Hassan Akbari, Svebor Karaman, Surabhi Bhargava et al.

We address the problem of phrase grounding by lear ing a multi-level common semantic space shared by the textual and visual modalities. We exploit multiple levels of feature maps of a Deep Convolutional Neural Network, as well as contextualized word and sentence embeddings extracted from a character-based language model. Following dedicated non-linear mappings for visual features at each level, word, and sentence embeddings, we obtain multiple instantiations of our common semantic space in which comparisons between any target text and the visual content is performed with cosine similarity. We guide the model by a multi-level multimodal attention mechanism which outputs attended visual features at each level. The best level is chosen to be compared with text content for maximizing the pertinence scores of image-sentence pairs of the ground truth. Experiments conducted on three publicly available datasets show significant performance gains (20%-60% relative) over the state-of-the-art in phrase localization and set a new performance record on those datasets. We provide a detailed ablation study to show the contribution of each element of our approach and release our code on GitHub.

Xu Zhang, Felix Xinnan Yu, Svebor Karaman et al.

Metric learning aims at learning a distance which is consistent with the semantic meaning of the samples. The problem is generally solved by learning an embedding for each sample such that the embeddings of samples of the same category are compact while the embeddings of samples of different categories are spread-out in the feature space. We study the features extracted from the second last layer of a deep neural network based classifier trained with the cross entropy loss on top of the softmax layer. We show that training classifiers with different temperature values of softmax function leads to features with different levels of compactness. Leveraging these insights, we propose a "heating-up" strategy to train a classifier with increasing temperatures, leading the corresponding embeddings to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a variety of metric learning benchmarks.

Philipp Blandfort, Desmond Patton, William R. Frey et al.

Gang violence is a severe issue in major cities across the U.S. and recent studies [Patton et al. 2017] have found evidence of social media communications that can be linked to such violence in communities with high rates of exposure to gang activity. In this paper we partnered computer scientists with social work researchers, who have domain expertise in gang violence, to analyze how public tweets with images posted by youth who mention gang associations on Twitter can be leveraged to automatically detect psychosocial factors and conditions that could potentially assist social workers and violence outreach workers in prevention and early intervention programs. To this end, we developed a rigorous methodology for collecting and annotating tweets. We gathered 1,851 tweets and accompanying annotations related to visual concepts and the psychosocial codes: aggression, loss, and substance use. These codes are relevant to social work interventions, as they represent possible pathways to violence on social media. We compare various methods for classifying tweets into these three classes, using only the text of the tweet, only the image of the tweet, or both modalities as input to the classifier. In particular, we analyze the usefulness of mid-level visual concepts and the role of different modalities for this tweet classification task. Our experiments show that individually, text information dominates classification performance of the loss class, while image information dominates the aggression and substance use classes. Our multimodal approach provides a very promising improvement (18% relative in mean average precision) over the best single modality approach. Finally, we also illustrate the complexity of understanding social media data and elaborate on open challenges.

Giuseppe Lisanti, Svebor Karaman, Iacopo Masi

In this paper we introduce a method to overcome one of the main challenges of person re-identification in multi-camera networks, namely cross-view appearance changes. The proposed solution addresses the extreme variability of person appearance in different camera views by exploiting multiple feature representations. For each feature, Kernel Canonical Correlation Analysis (KCCA) with different kernels is exploited to learn several projection spaces in which the appearance correlation between samples of the same person observed from different cameras is maximized. An iterative logistic regression is finally used to select and weigh the contributions of each feature projections and perform the matching between the two views. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed solution obtains comparable performance on VIPeR and PRID 450s datasets and improves on PRID and CUHK01 datasets with respect to the state of the art.

Jie Feng, Svebor Karaman, I-Hong Jhuo et al.

In applications involving matching of image sets, the information from multiple images must be effectively exploited to represent each set. State-of-the-art methods use probabilistic distribution or subspace to model a set and use specific distance measure to compare two sets. These methods are slow to compute and not compact to use in a large scale scenario. Learning-based hashing is often used in large scale image retrieval as they provide a compact representation of each sample and the Hamming distance can be used to efficiently compare two samples. However, most hashing methods encode each image separately and discard knowledge that multiple images in the same set represent the same object or person. We investigate the set hashing problem by combining both set representation and hashing in a single deep neural network. An image set is first passed to a CNN module to extract image features, then these features are aggregated using two types of set feature to capture both set specific and database-wide distribution information. The computed set feature is then fed into a multilayer perceptron to learn a compact binary embedding. Triplet loss is used to train the network by forming set similarity relations using class labels. We extensively evaluate our approach on datasets used for image matching and show highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Giuseppe Lisanti, Svebor Karaman, Daniele Pezzatini et al.

In this paper we present a machine vision system to efficiently monitor, analyze and present visual data acquired with a railway overhead gantry equipped with multiple cameras. This solution aims to improve the safety of daily life railway transportation in a two- fold manner: (1) by providing automatic algorithms that can process large imagery of trains (2) by helping train operators to keep attention on any possible malfunction. The system is designed with the latest cutting edge, high-rate visible and thermal cameras that ob- serve a train passing under an railway overhead gantry. The machine vision system is composed of three principal modules: (1) an automatic wagon identification system, recognizing the wagon ID according to the UIC classification of railway coaches; (2) a temperature monitoring system; (3) a system for the detection, localization and visualization of the pantograph of the train. These three machine vision modules process batch trains sequences and their resulting analysis are presented to an operator using a multitouch user interface. We detail all technical aspects of our multi-camera portal: the hardware requirements, the software developed to deal with the high-frame rate cameras and ensure reliable acquisition, the algorithms proposed to solve each computer vision task, and the multitouch interaction and visualization interface. We evaluate each component of our system on a dataset recorded in an ad-hoc railway test-bed, showing the potential of our proposed portal for train safety assessment.