The Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Model (DPGMM) is often used to cluster data when the number of clusters is unknown. One main DPGMM inference paradigm relies on sampling. Here we consider a known state-of-art sampler (proposed by Chang and Fisher III (2013) and improved by Dinari et al. (2019)), analyze its failure modes, and show how to improve it, often drastically. Concretely, in that sampler, whenever a new cluster is formed it is augmented with two subclusters whose labels are initialized at random. Upon their evolution, the subclusters serve to propose a split of the parent cluster. We show that the random initialization is often problematic and hurts the otherwise-effective sampler. Specifically, we demonstrate that this initialization tends to lead to poor split proposals and/or too many iterations before a desired split is accepted. This slows convergence and can damage the clustering. As a remedy, we propose two drop-in-replacement options for the subcluster-initialization subroutine. The first is an intuitive heuristic while the second is based on deep learning. We show that the proposed approach yields better splits, which in turn translate to substantial improvements in performance, results, and stability. Our code is publicly available.

Background models are widely used in computer vision. While successful Static-camera Background (SCB) models exist, Moving-camera Background (MCB) models are limited. Seemingly, there is a straightforward solution: 1) align the video frames; 2) learn an SCB model; 3) warp either original or previously-unseen frames toward the model. This approach, however, has drawbacks, especially when the accumulative camera motion is large and/or the video is long. Here we propose a purely-2D unsupervised modular method that systematically eliminates those issues. First, to estimate warps in the original video, we solve a joint-alignment problem while leveraging a certifiably-correct initialization. Next, we learn both multiple partially-overlapping local subspaces and how to predict alignments. Lastly, in test time, we warp a previously-unseen frame, based on the prediction, and project it on a subset of those subspaces to obtain a background/foreground separation. We show the method handles even large scenes with a relatively-free camera motion (provided the camera-to-scene distance does not change much) and that it not only yields State-of-the-Art results on the original video but also generalizes gracefully to previously-unseen videos of the same scene. Our code is available at https://github.com/BGU-CS-VIL/JA-POLS.