Black-box machine translation systems have proven incredibly useful for a variety of applications yet by design are hard to adapt, tune to a specific domain, or build on top of. In this work, we introduce a method to improve such systems via automatic pre-processing (APP) using sentence simplification. We first propose a method to automatically generate a large in-domain paraphrase corpus through back-translation with a black-box MT system, which is used to train a paraphrase model that “simplifies” the original sentence to be more conducive for translation. The model is used to preprocess source sentences of multiple low-resource language pairs. We show that this preprocessing leads to better translation performance as compared to non-preprocessed source sentences. We further perform side-by-side human evaluation to verify that translations of the simplified sentences are better than the original ones. Finally, we provide some guidance on recommended language pairs for generating the simplification model corpora by investigating the relationship between ease of translation of a language pair (as measured by BLEU) and quality of the resulting simplification model from back-translations of this language pair (as measured by SARI), and tie this into the downstream task of low-resource translation.

In this paper, we present a novel image classification system that is built around a core of trainable filter ensembles that we call Volterra kernel classifiers. Our system treats images as a collection of possibly overlapping patches and is composed of three components: (1) A scheme for a single patch classification that seeks a smooth, possibly nonlinear, functional mapping of the patches into a range space, where patches of the same class are close to one another, while patches from different classes are far apart-in the L_2 sense. This mapping is accomplished using trainable convolution filters (or Volterra kernels) where the convolution kernel can be of any shape or order. (2) Given a corpus of Volterra classifiers with various kernel orders and shapes for each patch, a boosting scheme for automatically selecting the best weighted combination of the classifiers to achieve higher per-patch classification rate. (3) A scheme for aggregating the classification information obtained for each patch via voting for the parent image classification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique using face recognition as an application area and provide extensive experiments on the Yale, CMU PIE, Extended Yale B, Multi-PIE, and MERL Dome benchmark face data sets. We call the Volterra kernel classifiers applied to face recognition Volterrafaces. We show that our technique, which falls into the broad class of embedding-based face image discrimination methods, consistently outperforms various state-of-the-art methods in the same category.

We present two theses in this paper: First, performance of most existing face recognition algorithms improves if instead of the whole image, smaller patches are individually classified followed by label aggregation using voting. Second, weighted plurality1voting outperforms other popular voting methods if the weights are set such that they maximize the victory margin for the winner with respect to each of the losers. Moreover, this can be done while taking higher order relationships among patches into account using kernels. We call this scheme Kernel Plurality. We verify our proposals with detailed experimental results and show that our framework with Kernel Plurality improves the performance of various face recognition algorithms beyond what has been previously reported in the literature. Furthermore, on five different benchmark datasets - Yale A, CMU PIE, MERL Dome, Extended Yale B and Multi-PIE, we show that Kernel Plurality in conjunction with recent face recognition algorithms can provide state-of-the-art results in terms of face recognition rates.

Modeling illumination effects and pose variations of a face is of fundamental importance in the field of facial image analysis. Most of the conventional techniques that simultaneously address both of these problems work with the Lambertian assumption and thus fall short of accurately capturing the complex intensity variation that the facial images exhibit or recovering their 3D shape in the presence of specularities and cast shadows. In this paper, we present a novel Tensor-Spline-based framework for facial image analysis. We show that, using this framework, the facial apparent BRDF field can be accurately estimated while seamlessly accounting for cast shadows and specularities. Further, using local neighborhood information, the same framework can be exploited to recover the 3D shape of the face (to handle pose variation). We quantitatively validate the accuracy of the Tensor Spline model using a more general model based on the mixture of single-lobed spherical functions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique by presenting extensive experimental results for face relighting, 3D shape recovery, and face recognition using the Extended Yale B and CMU PIE benchmark data sets.

In this paper, we present a novel framework to address the confounding effects of illumination variation in face recognition. By augmenting the gallery set with realistically relit images, we enhance recognition performance in a classifier-independent way. We describe a novel method for single-image relighting, Morphable Reflectance Fields (MoRF), which does not require manual intervention and provides relighting superior to that of existing automatic methods. We test our framework through face recognition experiments using various state-of-the-art classifiers and popular benchmark datasets: CMU PIE, Multi-PIE, and MERL Dome. We demonstrate that our MoRF relighting and gallery augmentation framework achieves improvements in terms of both rank-1 recognition rates and ROC curves. We also compare our model with other automatic relighting methods to confirm its advantage. Finally, we show that the recognition rates achieved using our framework exceed those of state-of-the-art recognizers on the aforementioned databases.

In this paper we address the problem of relighting faces in presence of cast shadows and specularities. We present a solution to this problem by capturing the spatially varying Apparent Bidirectional Reflectance Functions (ABRDF) fields of human faces using Spline Modulated Spherical Harmonics and representing them using a few salient spherical functions called Eigenbubbles. Through extensive experiments on the Extended Yale B and the CMU PIE benchmark datasets we demonstrate that the proposed method clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in synthesized image quality. Furthermore, we show that our framework allows for ABDRF field compression and can also be used to enhance performance of face recognition algorithms.

In this paper we present a novel face classification system where we represent face images as a spatial arrangement of image patches, and seek a smooth nonlinear functional mapping for the corresponding patches such that in the range space, patches of the same face are close to one another, while patches from different faces are far apart, in L2sense. We accomplish this using Volterra kernels, which can generate successively better approximations to any smooth nonlinear functional. During learning, for each set of corresponding patches we recover a Volterra kernel by minimizing a goodness functional defined over the range space of the sought functional. We show that for our definition of the goodness functional, which minimizes the ratio between intraclass distances and interclass distances, the problem of generating Volterra approximations, to any order, can be posed as a generalized eigenvalue problem. During testing, each patch from the test image that is classified independently, casts a vote towards image classification and the class with the maximum votes is chosen as the winner. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in recognizing faces by extensive experiments on Yale, CMU PIE and Extended Yale B benchmark face datasets and show that our technique consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art in learning based face discrimination.

In an 2D echocardiogram exam, an ultrasound probe samples the heart with 2D slices. Changing the orientation and position on the probe changes the slice viewpoint, altering the cardiac anatomy being imaged. The determination of the probe viewpoint forms an essential step in automatic cardiac echo image analysis. In this paper we present a system for automatic view classification that exploits cues from both cardiac structure and motion in echocardiogram videos. In our framework, each image from the echocardiogram video is represented by a set of novel salient features. We locate these features at scale invariant points in the edge-filtered motion magnitude images and encode them using local spatial, textural and kinetic information. Training in our system involves learning a hierarchical feature dictionary and parameters of a pyramid matching kernel based support vector machine. While testing, each image, classified independently, casts a votes towards parent video classification and the viewpoint with maximum votes wins. Through experiments on a large database of echocardiograms obtained from both diseased and control subjects, we show that our technique consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the popular four-view classification test. We also present results for eight-view classification to demonstrate the scalability of our framework.

Human faces are neither exactly Lambertian nor entirely convex and hence most models in literature which make the Lambertian assumption, fall short when dealing with specularities and cast shadows. In this paper, we present a novel anti-symmetric tensor spline (a spline for tensor-valued functions) based method for the estimation of the Apparent BRDF (ABRDF) field for human faces that seamlessly accounts for specularities and cast shadows. Furthermore, unlike other methods, it does not require any 3D information to build the model and can work with as few as 9 images. In order to validate the accuracy of our anti-symmetric tensor spline model, we present a novel approximation of the ABRDF using a continuous mixture of single-lobed spherical functions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our anti-symmetric tensor-spline model in comparison to other popular models in the literature, by presenting extensive results for face relighting and face recognition using the Extended Yale B database.