Labeling image collections is a tedious task, especially when multiple labels have to be chosen for each image. In this paper we introduce a new framework that extends state of the art models in word prediction to incorporate information from unlabeled examples, using manifold regularization. To the best of our knowledge this is the first semi-supervised multi-task model used in vision problems. The new model can be solved using gradient descent and is fast and efficient. We show remarkable improvements for cases with few labeled examples for challenging multi-task learning problems in vision (predicting words for images and attributes for objects).

We describe a manifold learning framewor that naturally accommodates supervised learning, partially supervised learning and unsupervised clustering as particular cases. Our method chooses a function by minimizing loss subject to a manifold regularization penalty. This augmented cost is minimized using a greedy, stagewise, functional minimization procedure, as in Gradientboost. Each stage of boosting is fast and efficient. We demonstrate our approach using both radial basis function approximations and trees. The performance of our method is at the state of the art on many standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks, and we produce results for large scale datasets.

We describe an unsupervised method to segment objects detected in images using a novel variant of an interest point template, which is very efficient to train and evaluate. Once an object has been detected, our method segments an image using a conditional random field (CRF) model. This model integrates image gradients, the location and scale of the object, the presence of object parts, and the tendency of these parts to have characteristic patterns of edges nearby. We enhance our method using multiple unsegmented images of objects to learn the parameters of the CRF, in an iterative conditional maximization framework. We show quantitative results on images of real scenes that demonstrate the accuracy of segmentation.

We describe a novel method for learning templates for recognition and localization of objects drawn from categories. A generative model repre- sents the configuration of multiple object parts with respect to an object coordinate system; these parts in turn generate image features. The com- plexity of the model in the number of features is low, meaning our model is much more efficient to train than comparative methods. Moreover, a variational approximation is introduced that allows learning to be or- ders of magnitude faster than previous approaches while incorporating many more features. This results in both accuracy and localization im- provements. Our model has been carefully tested on standard datasets; we compare with a number of recent template models. In particular, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results for detection and localization.