On the one hand, deep neural networks are effective in learning large datasets. On the other, they are inefficient with their data usage. They often require copious amount of labeled-data to train their scads of parameters. Training larger and deeper networks is hard without appropriate regularization, particularly while using a small dataset. Laterally, collecting well-annotated data is expensive, time-consuming and often infeasible. A popular way to regularize these networks is to simply train the network with more data from an alternate representative dataset. This can lead to adverse effects if the statistics of the representative dataset are dissimilar to our target.This predicament is due to the problem of domain shift. Data from a shifted domain might not produce bespoke features when a feature extractor from the representative domain is used. Several techniques of domain adaptation have been proposed in the past to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a new technique (d-SNE) of domain adaptation that cleverly uses stochastic neighborhood embedding techniques and a novel modified-Hausdorff distance. The proposed technique is learnable end-to-end and is therefore, ideally suited to train neural networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that d-SNE outperforms the current states-of-the-art and is robust to the variances in different datasets, even in the one-shot and semi-supervised learning settings. d-SNE also demonstrates the ability to generalize to multiple domains concurrently.

Often the filters learned by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) from different image datasets appear similar. This similarity of filters is often exploited for the purposes of transfer learning. This is also being used as an initialization technique for different tasks in the same dataset or for the same task in similar datasets. Off-the-shelf CNN features have capitalized on this idea to promote their networks as best transferable and most general and are used in a cavalier manner in day-to-day computer vision tasks. While the filters learned by these CNNs are related to the atomic structures of the images from which they are learnt, all datasets learn similar looking low-level filters. With the understanding that a dataset that contains many such atomic structures learn general filters and are therefore useful to initialize other networks with, we propose a way to analyse and quantify generality. We applied this metric on several popular character recognition, natural image and a medical image dataset, and arrive at some interesting conclusions. On further experimentation we also discovered that particular classes in a dataset themselves are more general than others.

Multiple-instance learning (MIL) is a unique learning problem in which training data labels are available only for collections of objects (called bags) instead of individual objects (called instances). A plethora of approaches have been developed to solve this problem in the past years. Popular methods include the diverse density, MILIS and DD-SVM. While having been widely used, these methods, particularly those in computer vision have attempted fairly sophisticated solutions to solve certain unique and particular configurations of the MIL space. In this paper, we analyze the MIL feature space using modified versions of traditional non-parametric techniques like the Parzen window and k-nearest-neighbour, and develop a learning approach employing distances to k-nearest neighbours of a point in the feature space. We show that these methods work as well, if not better than most recently published methods on benchmark datasets. We compare and contrast our analysis with the well-established diverse-density approach and its variants in recent literature, using benchmark datasets including the Musk, Andrews' and Corel datasets, along with a diabetic retinopathy pathology diagnosis dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that, while enjoying an intuitive interpretation and supporting fast learning, these method have the potential of delivering improved performance even for complex data arising from real-world applications.

Video deinterlacing is a key technique in digital video processing, particularly with the widespread usage of LCD and plasma TVs. This paper proposes a novel spatio-temporal video deinterlacing technique that adaptively chooses between results from segment adaptive gradient angle interpolation (SAGA), vertical temporal filter (VTF) and temporal line averaging (LA). The proposed method performs better than several popular benchmarking methods in terms of both visual quality and PSNR and requires minimal computational overhead. The algorithm performs better than existing approaches on fine moving edges and semi-static regions of videos, which are recognized as particularly challenging deinterlacing cases.