The Dead Sea Scrolls are of great historical significance. Lamentably, in the decades since their discovery, many fragments have deteriorated. Fortunately, low-resolution grayscale infrared images of the Palestinian Archaeological Museum plates holding the scrolls in their discovered state are extant, along with recent high-quality multispectral images by the Israel Antiquities Authority. However, the necessary task of identifying each fragment in the new images on the old plates is tedious and time consuming to perform manually, and is often problematic when fragments have been moved from the original plate. We describe an automated system that segments the new and old images of fragments from the background on which they were imaged, finds their matches on the old plates and aligns and superimposes them. To this end, we developed a deep-learning based segmentation method and a cascade approach for template matching, based on scale, shape analysis and dense matching. We have tested the proposed method on five plates, comprising about 120 fragments. We present both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the results and perform an ablation study to evaluate the importance of each component of our system.

We present a general approach to video understanding, inspired by semantic transfer techniques that have been successfully used for 2D image analysis. Our method considers a video to be a 1D sequence of clips, each one associated with its own semantics. The nature of these semantics - natural language captions or other labels - depends on the task at hand. A test video is processed by forming correspondences between its clips and the clips of reference videos with known semantics, following which, reference semantics can be transferred to the test video. We describe two matching methods, both designed to ensure that (a) reference clips appear similar to test clips and (b), taken together, the semantics of the selected reference clips is consistent and maintains temporal coherence. We use our method for video captioning on the LSMDC'16 benchmark, video summarization on the SumMe and TV-Sum benchmarks, Temporal Action Detection on the Thumos2014 benchmark, and sound prediction on the Greatest Hits benchmark. Our method not only surpasses the state of the art, in four out of five benchmarks, but importantly, it is the only single method we know of that was successfully applied to such a diverse range of tasks.

We present a novel means of describing local image appearances using binary strings. Binary descriptors have drawn increasing interest in recent years due to their speed and low memory footprint. A known shortcoming of these representations is their inferior performance compared to larger, histogram based descriptors such as the SIFT. Our goal is to close this performance gap while maintaining the benefits attributed to binary representations. To this end we propose the Learned Arrangements of Three Patch Codes descriptors, or LATCH. Our key observation is that existing binary descriptors are at an increased risk from noise and local appearance variations. This, as they compare the values of pixel pairs: changes to either of the pixels can easily lead to changes in descriptor values and compromise their performance. In order to provide more robustness, we instead propose a novel means of comparing pixel patches. This ostensibly small change, requires a substantial redesign of the descriptors themselves and how they are produced. Our resulting LATCH representation is rigorously compared to state-of-the-art binary descriptors and shown to provide far better performance for similar computation and space requirements.

We present a novel method for classifying emotions from static facial images. Our approach leverages on the recent success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) on face recognition problems. Unlike the settings often assumed there, far less labeled data is typically available for training emotion classification systems. Our method is therefore designed with the goal of simplifying the problem domain by removing confounding factors from the input images, with an emphasis on image illumination variations. This, in an effort to reduce the amount of data required to effectively train deep CNN models. To this end, we propose novel transformations of image intensities to 3D spaces, designed to be invariant to monotonic photometric transformations. These are applied to CASIA Webface images which are then used to train an ensemble of multiple architecture CNNs on multiple representations. Each model is then fine-tuned with limited emotion labeled training data to obtain final classification models. Our method was tested on the Emotion Recognition in the Wild Challenge (EmotiW 2015), Static Facial Expression Recognition sub-challenge (SFEW) and shown to provide a substantial, 15.36% improvement over baseline results (40% gain in performance).