The process of aligning a pair of shapes is a fundamental operation in computer graphics. Traditional approaches rely heavily on matching corresponding points or features to guide the alignment, a paradigm that falters when significant shape portions are missing. These techniques generally do not incorporate prior knowledge about expected shape characteristics, which can help compensate for any misleading cues left by inaccuracies exhibited in the input shapes. We present an approach based on a deep neural network, leveraging shape datasets to learn a shape-aware prior for source-to-target alignment that is robust to shape incompleteness. In the absence of ground truth alignments for supervision, we train a network on the task of shape alignment using incomplete shapes generated from full shapes for self-supervision. Our network, called ALIGNet , is trained to warp complete source shapes to incomplete targets, as if the target shapes were complete, thus essentially rendering the alignment partial-shape agnostic . We aim for the network to develop specialized expertise over the common characteristics of the shapes in each dataset, thereby achieving a higher-level understanding of the expected shape space to which a local approach would be oblivious. We constrain ALIGNet through an anisotropic total variation identity regularization to promote piecewise smooth deformation fields, facilitating both partial-shape agnosticism and post-deformation applications. We demonstrate that ALIGNet learns to align geometrically distinct shapes and is able to infer plausible mappings even when the target shape is significantly incomplete. We show that our network learns the common expected characteristics of shape collections without over-fitting or memorization, enabling it to produce plausible deformations on unseen data during test time.

Human 3D pose estimation from a single image is a challenging task with numerous applications. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently achieved superior performance on the task of 2D pose estimation from a single image, by training on images with 2D annotations collected by crowd sourcing. This suggests that similar success could be achieved for direct estimation of 3D poses. However, 3D poses are much harder to annotate, and the lack of suitable annotated training images hinders attempts towards end-to-end solutions. To address this issue, we opt to automatically synthesize training images with ground truth pose annotations. Our work is a systematic study along this road. We find that pose space coverage and texture diversity are the key ingredients for the effectiveness of synthetic training data. We present a fully automatic, scalable approach that samples the human pose space for guiding the synthesis procedure and extracts clothing textures from real images. Furthermore, we explore domain adaptation for bridging the gap between our synthetic training images and real testing photos. We demonstrate that CNNs trained with our synthetic images out-perform those trained with real photos on 3D pose estimation tasks.

Convolutional-deconvolution networks can be adopted to perform end-to-end saliency detection. But, they do not work well with objects of multiple scales. To overcome such a limitation, in this work, we propose a recurrent attentional convolutional-deconvolution network (RACDNN). Using spatial transformer and recurrent network units, RACDNN is able to iteratively attend to selected image sub-regions to perform saliency refinement progressively. Besides tackling the scale problem, RACDNN can also learn context-aware features from past iterations to enhance saliency refinement in future iterations. Experiments on several challenging saliency detection datasets validate the effectiveness of RACDNN, and show that RACDNN outperforms state-of-the-art saliency detection methods.

This paper aims to build robust feature descriptors by exploring intensity order information in a patch. To this end, the local intensity order pattern (LIOP) and the overall intensity order pattern (OIOP) are proposed to effectively encode intensity order information of each pixel in different aspects. Specifically, LIOP captures the local ordinal information by using the intensity relationships among all the neighbouring sampling points around a pixel, while OIOP exploits the coarsely quantized overall intensity order of these sampling points. These two kinds of patterns are then separately aggregated into different ordinal bins, leading to two kinds of feature descriptors. Furthermore, as these two kinds of descriptors could encode complementary ordinal information, they are combined together to obtain a discriminative and compact mixed intensity order pattern descriptor. All these descriptors are constructed on the basis of relative relationships of intensities in a rotationally invariant way, making them be inherently invariant to image rotation and any monotonic intensity changes. Experimental results on image matching and object recognition are encouraging, demonstrating the superiorities of our descriptors over the state of the art.

In this paper, we aim to explore the role of prior knowledge for pedestrian detection. The main idea is to integrate human body priors into the design of features. To this end, we propose the symmetric features and cross-channel features so as to capture the specific information of human body. Experimental results demonstrate that our detector achieves state-of-the-art performance. What’s more, the evaluation results on subsets of Caltech-USA show that our detector performs best at medium scale and therefore has great potential to be integrated into real-world applications.

Establishing robust visual correspondences is a fundamental component of many computer vision applications. However, it is very challenging to obtain high quality features while maintaining a low computational cost. This paper aims to tackle this problem by adopting a novel Fast Robust Invariant Feature (FRIF) for both feature detection and description. The basic idea is to employ a fast approximated LoG detector to select scale-invariant keypoints and incorporate local pattern and inter-pattern information to construct distinctive binary descriptors. A comprehensive evaluation on standard dataset shows that FRIF achieves quite a high performance with a computation time comparable to state-of-the-art real-time features.

This paper presents a novel method for feature description based on intensity order. Specifically, a Local Intensity Order Pattern(LIOP) is proposed to encode the local ordinal information of each pixel and the overall ordinal information is used to divide the local patch into subregions which are used for accumulating the LIOPs respectively. Therefore, both local and overall intensity ordinal information of the local patch are captured by the proposed LIOP descriptor so as to make it a highly discriminative descriptor. It is shown that the proposed descriptor is not only invariant to monotonic intensity changes and image rotation but also robust to many other geometric and photometric transformations such as viewpoint change, image blur and JEPG compression. The proposed descriptor has been evaluated on the standard Oxford dataset and four additional image pairs with complex illumination changes. The experimental results show that the proposed descriptor obtains a significant improvement over the existing state-of-the-art descriptors.