Jie Shen

Jie Shen, Ping Li, Huan Xu

Low-rank representation~(LRR) has been a significant method for segmenting data that are generated from a union of subspaces. It is, however, known that solving the LRR program is challenging in terms of time complexity and memory footprint, in that the size of the nuclear norm regularized matrix is $n$-by-$n$ (where $n$ is the number of samples). In this paper, we thereby develop a fast online implementation of LRR that reduces the memory cost from $O(n^2)$ to $O(pd)$, with $p$ being the ambient dimension and $d$ being some estimated rank~($d < p \ll n$). The crux for this end is a non-convex reformulation of the LRR program, which pursues the basis dictionary that generates the (uncorrupted) observations. We build the theoretical guarantee that the sequence of the solutions produced by our algorithm converges to a stationary point of the empirical and the expected loss function asymptotically. Extensive experiments on synthetic and realistic datasets further substantiate that our algorithm is fast, robust and memory efficient.

Jing Wang, Jie Shen, Ping Li

Object proposals are an ensemble of bounding boxes with high potential to contain objects. In order to determine a small set of proposals with a high recall, a common scheme is extracting multiple features followed by a ranking algorithm which however, incurs two major challenges: {\bf 1)} The ranking model often imposes pairwise constraints between each proposal, rendering the problem away from an efficient training/testing phase; {\bf 2)} Linear kernels are utilized due to the computational and memory bottleneck of training a kernelized model. In this paper, we remedy these two issues by suggesting a {\em kernelized partial ranking model}. In particular, we demonstrate that {\bf i)} our partial ranking model reduces the number of constraints from $O(n^2)$ to $O(nk)$ where $n$ is the number of all potential proposals for an image but we are only interested in top-$k$ of them that has the largest overlap with the ground truth; {\bf ii)} we permit non-linear kernels in our model which is often superior to the linear classifier in terms of accuracy. For the sake of mitigating the computational and memory issues, we introduce a consistent weighted sampling~(CWS) paradigm that approximates the non-linear kernel as well as facilitates an efficient learning. In fact, as we will show, training a linear CWS model amounts to learning a kernelized model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that equipped with the non-linear kernel and the partial ranking algorithm, recall at top-$k$ proposals can be substantially improved.

Weipeng Zhang, Jie Shen, Guangcan Liu et al.

As a fundamental technique that concerns several vision tasks such as image parsing, action recognition and clothing retrieval, human pose estimation (HPE) has been extensively investigated in recent years. To achieve accurate and reliable estimation of the human pose, it is well-recognized that the clothing attributes are useful and should be utilized properly. Most previous approaches, however, require to manually annotate the clothing attributes and are therefore very costly. In this paper, we shall propose and explore a \emph{latent} clothing attribute approach for HPE. Unlike previous approaches, our approach models the clothing attributes as latent variables and thus requires no explicit labeling for the clothing attributes. The inference of the latent variables are accomplished by utilizing the framework of latent structured support vector machines (LSSVM). We employ the strategy of \emph{alternating direction} to train the LSSVM model: In each iteration, one kind of variables (e.g., human pose or clothing attribute) are fixed and the others are optimized. Our extensive experiments on two real-world benchmarks show the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed approach.