Low-rank matrix factorization is an essential problem in many areas including computer vision, with applications in e.g. affine structure-from-motion, photometric stereo, and non-rigid structure from motion. However, very little attention has been drawn to minimal cases for this problem or to using the minimal configuration of observations to find the solution. Minimal problems are useful when either outliers are present or the observation matrix is sparse. In this paper, we first give some theoretical insights on how to generate all the minimal problems of a given size using Laman graph theory. We then propose a new parametrization and a building-block scheme to solve these minimal problems by extending the solution from a small sized minimal problem. We test our solvers on synthetic data as well as real data with outliers or a large portion of missing data and show that our method can handle the cases when other iterative methods, based on convex relaxation, fail.

In this paper we investigate the problem of segmenting images using the information in text annotations. In contrast to the general image understanding problem, this type of annotation guided segmentation is less ill-posed in the sense that for the output there is higher consensus among human annotations. In the paper we present a system based on a combined visual and semantic pipeline. In the visual pipeline, a list of tentative figure-ground segmentations is first proposed. Each such segmentation is classified into a set of visual categories. In the natural language processing pipeline, the text is parsed and chunked into objects. Each chunk is then compared with the visual categories and the relative distance is computed using the word-net structure. The final choice of segments and their correspondence to the chunked objects are then obtained using combinatorial optimization. The output is compared to manually annotated ground-truth images. The results are promising and there are several interesting avenues for continued research.

Inthispaper,wedescribeanovelsystemthatidentifiesrelationsbetweentheobjectsextractedfromanimage. We started from the idea that in addition to the geometric and visual properties of the image objects, we could exploit lexical and semantic information from the text accompanying the image. As experimental set up, we gathered a corpus of images from Wikipedia as well as their associated articles. We extracted two types of objects: human beings and horses and we considered three relations that could hold between them: Ride, Lead, or None. We used geometric features as a baseline to identify the relations between the entities and we describe the improvements brought by the addition of bag-of-wordf eatures and predicate–arguments tructures we derived from the text. The best semantic model resulted in a relative error reduction of more than 18% over the baseline.

Measurements with unknown time delays are common in different applications such as microphone array, radio antenna array calibration, where the sources (e.g. sounds) are transmitted in unknown time instants. In this paper, we present a method for estimating unknown time delays from Time-Difference-of-Arrival (TDOA) measurements. We propose a novel rank constraint on a matrix depending on the measurements and the unknown time delays. The time delays are recovered by solving a truncated nuclear norm minimization problem using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). We show in synthetic experiments that the proposed method recovers the time delays with good accuracy for noisy and missing data.

Applications of the simulation of adult aging effects are widespread nowadays, whereas the difficulties in certain aspects restrict its development. In this paper, a method is proposed for simulating adult facial aging effects by means of super-resolution. Accounting for the nature of multimodalities in the face image set, multilinear algebra is introduced to represent and process the whole image set in tensor space. To ameliorate the aging simulation results generated by merely the super-resolution method, we further adopt active appearance models to reduce the blurring effects of the results through adding normalization of the faces and postprocessing to the algorithm. To evaluate our aging simulation method, the aged faces obtained are compared with the ground-truth face images of the same individuals and also assessed by several volunteers mainly from two perspectives: the aged faces' perceived age and their preservation effects of the original identities of subjects in the test images. Additionally, objective experiments based on an automatic age estimator and a face recognition method using eigenfaces are also conducted as another way of the evaluation.

Is the real problem in finding the relative orientation of two viewpoints the correspondence problem? We argue that this is only one difficulty. Even with known correspondences, popular methods like the eight point algorithm and minimal solvers may break down due to planar scenes or small relative motions. In this paper, we derive a simple, brute-force algorithm which is both robust to outliers and has no such algorithmic degeneracies. Several cost functions are explored including maximizing the consensus set and robust norms like truncated least-squares. Our method is based on parameter search in a four-dimensional space using a new epipolar parametrization. In principle, we do an exhaustive search of parameter space, but the computations are very simple and easily parallelizable, resulting in an efficient method. Further speed-ups can be obtained by restricting the domain of possible motions to, for example, planar motions or small rotations. Experimental results are given for a variety of scenarios including scenes with a large portion of outliers. Further, we apply our algorithm to 3D motion segmentation where we outperform state-of-the-art on the well-known Hopkins-155 benchmark database.

The facial change caused by aging progression might significantly degrade the performance of a face recognition system. One major way to deal with this problem is to predict the aging process. The work presented in this paper proposed a framework to simulate the face aging process by means of super-resolution. Considered the nature of multi- modalities in face image set, multi-linear algebra is introduced into the super-resolution method to represent and process the whole image set in tensor space. The simulating results represented in the paper are compared with the ground truth face image of the same people.