We describe a system that builds a high dynamic-range and wide-angle image of the night sky by combining a large set of input images. The method makes use of pixel-rank information in the individual input images to improve a "consensus" pixel rank in the combined image. Because it only makes use of ranks and the complexity of the algorithm is linear in the number of images, the method is useful for large sets of uncalibrated images that might have undergone unknown non-linear tone mapping transformations for visualization or aesthetic reasons. We apply the method to images of the night sky (of unknown provenance) discovered on the Web. The method permits discovery of astronomical objects or features that are not visible in any of the input images taken individually. More importantly, however, it permits scientific exploitation of a huge source of astronomical images that would not be available to astronomical research without our automatic system.
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Crowd-sourcing is an increasingly popular tool for image analysis in animal ecology. Computer vision methods that can utilize crowd-sourced annotations can help scale up analysis further. In this work we study the potential to do so on the challenging task of fine-grained counting. As opposed to the standard crowd counting task, fine-grained counting also involves classifying attributes of individuals in dense crowds. We introduce a new dataset from animal ecology to enable this study that contains 1.7M crowd-sourced annotations of 8 fine-grained classes. It is the largest available dataset fo…
CSS: Overcoming Pose and Scene Challenges in Crowd-Sourced 3D Gaussian Splatting
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；China Unicom Smart City Research Institute（中国联通智慧城市研究院）
This article compares two multimodal resources that consist of diagrams which describe topics in elementary school natural sciences. Both resources contain the same diagrams and represent their structure using graphs, but differ in terms of their annotation schema and how the annotations have been created - depending on the resource in question - either by crowd-sourced workers or trained experts. This article reports on two experiments that evaluate how effectively crowd-sourced and expert-annotated graphs can represent the multimodal structure of diagrams for representation learning using va…
The Out the Window (OTW) dataset is a crowdsourced activity dataset containing 5,668 instances of 17 activities from the NIST Activities in Extended Video (ActEV) challenge. These videos are crowdsourced from workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk using a novel scenario acting strategy, which collects multiple instances of natural activities per scenario. Turkers are instructed to lean their mobile device against an upper story window overlooking an outdoor space, walk outside to perform a scenario involving people, vehicles and objects, and finally upload the video to us for annotation. Perfor…
New York University（纽约大学）；Wikimedia Foundation（维基媒体基金会）；University of Turin（都灵大学）
Rendering Wikipedia content through mobile and augmented reality mediums can enable new forms of interaction in urban-focused user communities facilitating learning, communication and knowledge exchange. With this objective in mind, in this work we develop a mobile application that allows for the recognition of notable sites featured on Wikipedia. The application is powered by a deep neural network that has been trained on crowd-sourced imagery describing sites of interest, such as buildings, statues, museums or other physical entities that are present and visually accessible in an urban envir…
Crowd sourcing has become a widely adopted scheme to collect ground truth labels. However, it is a well-known problem that these labels can be very noisy. In this paper, we demonstrate how to learn a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) from noisy labels, using facial expression recognition as an example. More specifically, we have 10 taggers to label each input image, and compare four different approaches to utilizing the multiple labels: majority voting, multi-label learning, probabilistic label drawing, and cross-entropy loss. We show that the traditional majority voting scheme does not…
In this work we tackle the challenging problem of anime character recognition. Anime, referring to animation produced within Japan and work derived or inspired from it. For this purpose we present DAF:re (DanbooruAnimeFaces:revamped), a large-scale, crowd-sourced, long-tailed dataset with almost 500 K images spread across more than 3000 classes. Additionally, we conduct experiments on DAF:re and similar datasets using a variety of classification models, including CNN based ResNets and self-attention based Vision Transformer (ViT). Our results give new insights into the generalization and trans…
Road networks are among the most essential components of a country's infrastructure. By facilitating the movement and exchange of goods, people, and ideas, they support economic and cultural activity both within and across borders. Up-to-date mapping of the the geographical distribution of roads and their quality is essential in high-impact applications ranging from land use planning to wilderness conservation. Mapping presents a particularly pressing challenge in developing countries, where documentation is poor and disproportionate amounts of road construction are expected to occur in the co…
Recently, the discovery of interpretable directions in the latent spaces of pre-trained GANs has become a popular topic. While existing works mostly consider directions for semantic image manipulations, we focus on an abstract property: creativity. Can we manipulate an image to be more or less creative? We build our work on the largest AI-based creativity platform, Artbreeder, where users can generate images using pre-trained GAN models. We explore the latent dimensions of images generated on this platform and present a novel framework for manipulating images to make them more creative. Our co…
When looking for a restaurant online, user uploaded photos often give people an immediate and tangible impression about a restaurant. Due to their informativeness, such user contributed photos are leveraged by restaurant review websites to provide their users an intuitive and effective search experience. In this paper, we present a novel approach to inferring restaurant types or styles (ambiance, dish styles, suitability for different occasions) from user uploaded photos on user-review websites. To that end, we first collect a novel restaurant photo dataset associating the user contributed pho…
TU Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；nFrames GmbH（nFrames有限公司）
Lake ice is a strong climate indicator and has been recognised as part of the Essential Climate Variables (ECV) by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). The dynamics of freezing and thawing, and possible shifts of freezing patterns over time, can help in understanding the local and global climate systems. One way to acquire the spatio-temporal information about lake ice formation, independent of clouds, is to analyse webcam images. This paper intends to move towards a universal model for monitoring lake ice with freely available webcam data. We demonstrate good performance, including the…
Robust perception-action models should be learned from training data with diverse visual appearances and realistic behaviors, yet current approaches to deep visuomotor policy learning have been generally limited to in-situ models learned from a single vehicle or a simulation environment. We advocate learning a generic vehicle motion model from large scale crowd-sourced video data, and develop an end-to-end trainable architecture for learning to predict a distribution over future vehicle egomotion from instantaneous monocular camera observations and previous vehicle state. Our model incorporate…
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）；University of Zurich（苏黎世大学）；Wageningen University & Research（瓦赫宁根大学及研究中心）
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer new opportunities for wildlife monitoring, with several advantages over traditional field-based methods. They have readily been used to count birds, marine mammals and large herbivores in different environments, tasks which are routinely performed through manual counting in large collections of images. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic system able to detect large mammals in semi-arid Savanna. It relies on an animal-detection system based on machine learning, trained with crowd-sourced annotations provided by volunteers who manually interpreted sub…
German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)（德国癌症研究中心）；Pallas Ludens GmbH（帕拉斯·卢登斯有限公司）；University Hospital Heidelberg（海德堡大学医院）
With the rapidly increasing interest in machine learning based solutions for automatic image annotation, the availability of reference annotations for algorithm training is one of the major bottlenecks in the field. Crowdsourcing has evolved as a valuable option for low-cost and large-scale data annotation; however, quality control remains a major issue which needs to be addressed. To our knowledge, we are the first to analyze the annotation process to improve crowd-sourced image segmentation. Our method involves training a regressor to estimate the quality of a segmentation from the annotator…
Parking Space Ground Truth Test Automation by Artificial Intelligence Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Mobility Partners Laboratory for Product Development and Data Acquisition Technology（移动合作伙伴产品开发与数据采集技术实验室）；Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；TUM School of Engineering and Design（慕尼黑工业大学工程与设计学院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）
Object counting, whose aim is to estimate the number of objects from a given image, is an important and challenging computation task. Significant efforts have been devoted to addressing this problem and achieved great progress, yet counting the number of ground objects from remote sensing images is barely studied. In this paper, we are interested in counting dense objects from remote sensing images. Compared with object counting in a natural scene, this task is challenging in the following factors: large scale variation, complex cluttered background, and orientation arbitrariness. More importa…
AI-Powered Facial Mask Removal Is Not Suitable For Identification
Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science University of California, Berkeley（赫伯特·韦瑟姆视觉科学学院，加州大学伯克利分校）；School of Information University of California, Berkeley（信息学院，加州大学伯克利分校）
