This paper addresses the problem of discovering the objects present in a collection of images without any supervision. We build on the optimization approach of Vo et al. (CVPR'19) with several key novelties: (1) We propose a novel saliency-based region proposal algorithm that achieves significantly higher overlap with ground-truth objects than other competitive methods. This procedure leverages off-the-shelf CNN features trained on classification tasks without any bounding box information, but is otherwise unsupervised. (2) We exploit the inherent hierarchical structure of proposals as an effective regularizer for the approach to object discovery of Vo et al., boosting its performance to significantly improve over the state of the art on several standard benchmarks. (3) We adopt a two-stage strategy to select promising proposals using small random sets of images before using the whole image collection to discover the objects it depicts, allowing us to tackle, for the first time (to the best of our knowledge), the discovery of multiple objects in each one of the pictures making up datasets with up to 20,000 images, an over five-fold increase compared to existing methods, and a first step toward true large-scale unsupervised image interpretation.
Unsupervised object discovery aims to localize objects in images, while removing the dependence on annotations required by most deep learning-based methods. To address this problem, we propose a fully unsupervised, bottom-up approach, for multiple objects discovery. The proposed approach is a two-stage framework. First, instances of object parts are segmented by using the intra-image similarity between self-supervised local features. The second step merges and filters the object parts to form complete object instances. The latter is performed by two CNN models that capture semantic information…
ENS(巴黎高等师范学院);CNRS(法国国家科学研究中心);PSL University(巴黎文理研究大学);INRIA(法国国家信息与自动化研究所);POSTECH(浦项科技大学);University of Oxford(牛津大学);New York University(纽约大学)
Learning with complete or partial supervision is powerful but relies on ever-growing human annotation efforts. As a way to mitigate this serious problem, as well as to serve specific applications, unsupervised learning has emerged as an important field of research. In computer vision, unsupervised learning comes in various guises. We focus here on the unsupervised discovery and matching of object categories among images in a collection, following the work of Cho et al. 2015. We show that the original approach can be reformulated and solved as a proper optimization problem. Experiments on sever…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University(北京大学王选计算机研究所)
Unsupervised object discovery (UOD) has recently shown encouraging progress with the adoption of pre-trained Transformer features. However, current methods based on Transformers mainly focus on designing the localization head (e.g., seed selection-expansion and normalized cut) and overlook the importance of improving Transformer features. In this work, we handle UOD task from the perspective of feature enhancement and propose FOReground guidance and MUlti-LAyer feature fusion for unsupervised object discovery, dubbed FORMULA. Firstly, we present a foreground guidance strategy with an off-the-s…
Robotics at Google(谷歌机器人部门);Google Research(谷歌研究院)
In this paper we address the problem of automatically discovering atomic actions in unsupervised manner from instructional videos. Instructional videos contain complex activities and are a rich source of information for intelligent agents, such as, autonomous robots or virtual assistants, which can, for example, automatically `read' the steps from an instructional video and execute them. However, videos are rarely annotated with atomic activities, their boundaries or duration. We present an unsupervised approach to learn atomic actions of structured human tasks from a variety of instructional …
We address the problem of discovering part segmentations of articulated objects without supervision. In contrast to keypoints, part segmentations provide information about part localizations on the level of individual pixels. Capturing both locations and semantics, they are an attractive target for supervised learning approaches. However, large annotation costs limit the scalability of supervised algorithms to other object categories than humans. Unsupervised approaches potentially allow to use much more data at a lower cost. Most existing unsupervised approaches focus on learning abstract rep…
Inria(法国国家信息与自动化研究所);École Normale Supérieure(巴黎高等师范学院);PSL Research University(巴黎文理研究大学)
This paper addresses unsupervised discovery and localization of dominant objects from a noisy image collection with multiple object classes. The setting of this problem is fully unsupervised, without even image-level annotations or any assumption of a single dominant class. This is far more general than typical colocalization, cosegmentation, or weakly-supervised localization tasks. We tackle the discovery and localization problem using a part-based region matching approach: We use off-the-shelf region proposals to form a set of candidate bounding boxes for objects and object parts. These regi…
Inria(法国国家信息与自动化研究所);École Normale Supérieure(巴黎高等师范学院);PSL Research University(巴黎文理研究大学)
This paper addresses the problem of automatically localizing dominant objects as spatio-temporal tubes in a noisy collection of videos with minimal or even no supervision. We formulate the problem as a combination of two complementary processes: discovery and tracking. The first one establishes correspondences between prominent regions across videos, and the second one associates successive similar object regions within the same video. Interestingly, our algorithm also discovers the implicit topology of frames associated with instances of the same object class across different videos, a role n…
Stanford University(斯坦福大学);Cornell University(康奈尔大学);Brain of Things Inc.(Brain of Things公司)
Human communication typically has an underlying structure. This is reflected in the fact that in many user generated videos, a starting point, ending, and certain objective steps between these two can be identified. In this paper, we propose a method for parsing a video into such semantic steps in an unsupervised way. The proposed method is capable of providing a semantic "storyline" of the video composed of its objective steps. We accomplish this using both visual and language cues in a joint generative model. The proposed method can also provide a textual description for each of the identifi…
INRIA(法国国家信息与自动化研究所);ENS(巴黎高等师范学院);CNRS(法国国家科学研究中心);PSL University(巴黎文理研究大学);New York University(纽约大学)
Existing approaches to unsupervised object discovery (UOD) do not scale up to large datasets without approximations that compromise their performance. We propose a novel formulation of UOD as a ranking problem, amenable to the arsenal of distributed methods available for eigenvalue problems and link analysis. Through the use of self-supervised features, we also demonstrate the first effective fully unsupervised pipeline for UOD. Extensive experiments on COCO and OpenImages show that, in the single-object discovery setting where a single prominent object is sought in each image, the proposed LO…
Deep learning models have been shown to learn spurious correlations from data that sometimes lead to systematic failures for certain subpopulations. Prior work has typically diagnosed this by crowdsourcing annotations for various protected attributes and measuring performance, which is both expensive to acquire and difficult to scale. In this work, we propose UDIS, an unsupervised algorithm for surfacing and analyzing such failure modes. UDIS identifies subpopulations via hierarchical clustering of dataset embeddings and surfaces systematic failure modes by visualizing low performing clusters …
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院自动化研究所);University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学);Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, HKISI_CAS(中国科学院香港创新研究院人工智能与机器人中心)
Object discovery is a core task in computer vision. While fast progresses have been made in supervised object detection, its unsupervised counterpart remains largely unexplored. With the growth of data volume, the expensive cost of annotations is the major limitation hindering further study. Therefore, discovering objects without annotations has great significance. However, this task seems impractical on still-image or point cloud alone due to the lack of discriminative information. Previous studies underlook the crucial temporal information and constraints naturally behind multi-modal inputs.…
In this study, we explore the use of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) in visual place classification for robotic mapping and localization. An open question is how to partition the robot's workspace into places to maximize the performance (e.g., accuracy, precision, recall) of potential DCNN classifiers. This is a chicken and egg problem: If we had a well-trained DCNN classifier, it is rather easy to partition the robot's workspace into places, but the training of a DCNN classifier requires a set of pre-defined place classes. In this study, we address this problem and present several …
Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy(罗马尼亚科学院数学研究所)
Unsupervised learning from visual data is one of the most difficult challenges in computer vision, being a fundamental task for understanding how visual recognition works. From a practical point of view, learning from unsupervised visual input has an immense practical value, as very large quantities of unlabeled videos can be collected at low cost. In this paper, we address the task of unsupervised learning to detect and segment foreground objects in single images. We achieve our goal by training a student pathway, consisting of a deep neural network. It learns to predict from a single input i…
We propose a new fast fully unsupervised method to discover semantic patterns. Our algorithm is able to hierarchically find visual categories and produce a segmentation mask where previous methods fail. Through the modeling of what is a visual pattern in an image, we introduce the notion of "semantic levels" and devise a conceptual framework along with measures and a dedicated benchmark dataset for future comparisons. Our algorithm is composed by two phases. A filtering phase, which selects semantical hotsposts by means of an accumulator space, then a clustering phase which propagates the sema…
In this study, we address the problem of supervised change detection for robotic map learning applications, in which the aim is to train a place-specific change classifier (e.g., support vector machine (SVM)) to predict changes from a robot's view image. An open question is the manner in which to partition a robot's workspace into places (e.g., SVMs) to maximize the overall performance of change classifiers. This is a chicken-or-egg problem: if we have a well-trained change classifier, partitioning the robot's workspace into places is rather easy. However, training a change classifier requires…
Instance segmentation is an active topic in computer vision that is usually solved by using supervised learning approaches over very large datasets composed of object level masks. Obtaining such a dataset for any new domain can be very expensive and time-consuming. In addition, models trained on certain annotated categories do not generalize well to unseen objects. The goal of this paper is to propose a method that can perform unsupervised discovery of long-tail categories in instance segmentation, through learning instance embeddings of masked regions. Leveraging rich relationship and hierarc…
What defines a visual style? Fashion styles emerge organically from how people assemble outfits of clothing, making them difficult to pin down with a computational model. Low-level visual similarity can be too specific to detect stylistically similar images, while manually crafted style categories can be too abstract to capture subtle style differences. We propose an unsupervised approach to learn a style-coherent representation. Our method leverages probabilistic polylingual topic models based on visual attributes to discover a set of latent style factors. Given a collection of unlabeled fash…
Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence(起点人工智能研究院);National University of Defense Technology(国防科技大学);Australian National University(澳大利亚国立大学);Sun Yat-sen University(中山大学);University of Canberra(堪培拉大学);Data61, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization(联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61)
3D shape generation is a challenging problem due to the high-dimensional output space and complex part configurations of real-world objects. As a result, existing algorithms experience difficulties in accurate generative modeling of 3D shapes. Here, we propose a novel factorized generative model for 3D shape generation that sequentially transitions from coarse to fine scale shape generation. To this end, we introduce an unsupervised primitive discovery algorithm based on a higher-order conditional random field model. Using the primitive parts for shapes as attributes, a parameterized 3D repres…
We present a method to learn the 3D surface of objects directly from a collection of images. Previous work achieved this capability by exploiting additional manual annotation, such as object pose, 3D surface templates, temporal continuity of videos, manually selected landmarks, and foreground/background masks. In contrast, our method does not make use of any such annotation. Rather, it builds a generative model, a convolutional neural network, which, given a noise vector sample, outputs the 3D surface and texture of an object and a background image. These 3 components combined with an addition…
University of Groningen(格罗宁根大学);University of Barcelona(巴塞罗那大学)
The routine of a person is defined by the occurrence of activities throughout different days, and can directly affect the person's health. In this work, we address the recognition of routine related days. To do so, we rely on egocentric images, which are recorded by a wearable camera and allow to monitor the life of the user from a first-person view perspective. We propose an unsupervised model that identifies routine related days, following an outlier detection approach. We test the proposed framework over a total of 72 days in the form of photo-streams covering around 2 weeks of the life of …
Inria Rennes VRG, FEE, CTU in Prague(法国国家信息与自动化研究所雷恩分所VRG、费尔科学院(FEE)、捷克技术大学布拉格分校(CTU in Prague));Inria(法国国家信息与自动化研究所);CTU in Prague(捷克技术大学布拉格分校)
Severe background clutter is challenging in many computer vision tasks, including large-scale image retrieval. Global descriptors, that are popular due to their memory and search efficiency, are especially prone to corruption by such a clutter. Eliminating the impact of the clutter on the image descriptor increases the chance of retrieving relevant images and prevents topic drift due to actually retrieving the clutter in the case of query expansion. In this work, we propose a novel salient region detection method. It captures, in an unsupervised manner, patterns that are both discriminative an…
Queen Mary University of London(伦敦玛丽女王大学);Vision Semantics Limited(Vision Semantics有限公司)
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in computer vision by supervisedly learning strong visual feature representations. However, training CNNs relies heavily on the availability of exhaustive training data annotations, limiting significantly their deployment and scalability in many application scenarios. In this work, we introduce a generic unsupervised deep learning approach to training deep models without the need for any manual label supervision. Specifically, we progressively discover sample anchored/centred neighbourhoods to reason and learn the u…
Part models of object categories are essential for challenging recognition tasks, where differences in categories are subtle and only reflected in appearances of small parts of the object. We present an approach that is able to learn part models in a completely unsupervised manner, without part annotations and even without given bounding boxes during learning. The key idea is to find constellations of neural activation patterns computed using convolutional neural networks. In our experiments, we outperform existing approaches for fine-grained recognition on the CUB200-2011, NA birds, Oxford PE…
As recent generative models can generate photo-realistic images, people seek to understand the mechanism behind the generation process. Interpretable generation process is beneficial to various image editing applications. In this work, we propose a framework to discover interpretable directions in the latent space given arbitrary pre-trained generative adversarial networks. We propose to learn the transformation from prior one-hot vectors representing different attributes to the latent space used by pre-trained models. Furthermore, we apply a centroid loss function to improve consistency and s…
Enhancing Object Discovery for Unsupervised Instance Segmentation and Object Detection
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wenzhou University(计算机科学与人工智能学院,温州大学);Oujiang Laboratory (Zhejiang Lab for Regenerative Medicine, Vision and Brain Health), Eye Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University(瓯江实验室(浙江省再生医学、视觉与脑健康实验室),温州医科大学眼医院)
We study the problem of unsupervised physical object discovery. While existing frameworks aim to decompose scenes into 2D segments based off each object's appearance, we explore how physics, especially object interactions, facilitates disentangling of 3D geometry and position of objects from video, in an unsupervised manner. Drawing inspiration from developmental psychology, our Physical Object Discovery Network (POD-Net) uses both multi-scale pixel cues and physical motion cues to accurately segment observable and partially occluded objects of varying sizes, and infer properties of those obje…
We present an unsupervised framework for simultaneous appearance-based object discovery, detection, tracking and reconstruction using RGBD cameras and a robot manipulator. The system performs dense 3D simultaneous localization and mapping concurrently with unsupervised object discovery. Putative objects that are spatially and visually coherent are manipulated by the robot to gain additional motion-cues. The robot uses appearance alone, followed by structure and motion cues, to jointly discover, verify, learn and improve models of objects. Induced motion segmentation reinforces learned models w…
Unsupervised bias discovery in medical image segmentation
Research Institute for Signals, Systems and Computational Intelligence, sinc(i)(信号、系统与计算智能研究所sinc(i));CONICET(国家科学技术研究委员会);Universidad Nacional del Litoral(国立滨海大学)
Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy(罗马尼亚科学院数学研究所);University "Politehnica" of Bucharest(布加勒斯特理工大学)
Unsupervised learning poses one of the most difficult challenges in computer vision today. The task has an immense practical value with many applications in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, as large quantities of unlabeled videos can be collected at relatively low cost. In this paper, we address the unsupervised learning problem in the context of detecting the main foreground objects in single images. We train a student deep network to predict the output of a teacher pathway that performs unsupervised object discovery in videos or large image collections. Our approach is diff…
University of Nottingham(诺丁汉大学);Samsung AI Center Cambridge(三星剑桥人工智能中心);Hartpury University(哈特伯瑞大学);Queen Mary University of London(伦敦玛丽女王大学)
This paper proposes a novel paradigm for the unsupervised learning of object landmark detectors. Contrary to existing methods that build on auxiliary tasks such as image generation or equivariance, we propose a self-training approach where, departing from generic keypoints, a landmark detector and descriptor is trained to improve itself, tuning the keypoints into distinctive landmarks. To this end, we propose an iterative algorithm that alternates between producing new pseudo-labels through feature clustering and learning distinctive features for each pseudo-class through contrastive learning.…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院自动化研究所);School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences(中国科学院大学人工智能学院)
Capsule networks are designed to present the objects by a set of parts and their relationships, which provide an insight into the procedure of visual perception. Although recent works have shown the success of capsule networks on simple objects like digits, the human faces with homologous structures, which are suitable for capsules to describe, have not been explored. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Parsing Capsule Network (HP-Capsule) for unsupervised face subpart-part discovery. When browsing large-scale face images without labels, the network first encodes the frequently observed p…
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor(密歇根大学安娜堡分校);Google Brain(谷歌大脑)
Deep neural networks can model images with rich latent representations, but they cannot naturally conceptualize structures of object categories in a human-perceptible way. This paper addresses the problem of learning object structures in an image modeling process without supervision. We propose an autoencoding formulation to discover landmarks as explicit structural representations. The encoding module outputs landmark coordinates, whose validity is ensured by constraints that reflect the necessary properties for landmarks. The decoding module takes the landmarks as a part of the learnable inp…
Seoul National University(首尔国立大学);Yonsei University(延世大学)
Despite the success of diffusion models (DMs), we still lack a thorough understanding of their latent space. While image editing with GANs builds upon latent space, DMs rely on editing the conditions such as text prompts. We present an unsupervised method to discover interpretable editing directions for the latent variables $\mathbf{x}_t \in \mathcal{X}$ of DMs. Our method adopts Riemannian geometry between $\mathcal{X}$ and the intermediate feature maps $\mathcal{H}$ of the U-Nets to provide a deep understanding over the geometrical structure of $\mathcal{X}$. The discovered semantic latent d…
Unsupervised Part Discovery via Descriptor-Based Masked Image Restoration with Optimized Constraints
Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney(技术悉尼大学工程与信息学院);Dept. of Comp. Sci. and Eng., Southern University of Science and Technology(南方科技大学计算机科学与工程系)
Hangzhou Dianzi University(杭州电子科技大学);AI Research of JD.com(京东人工智能研究院);Ryerson University(瑞尔森大学)
Gait, i.e., the movement pattern of human limbs during locomotion, is a promising biometric for the identification of persons. Despite significant improvement in gait recognition with deep learning, existing studies still neglect a more practical but challenging scenario -- unsupervised cross-domain gait recognition which aims to learn a model on a labeled dataset then adapts it to an unlabeled dataset. Due to the domain shift and class gap, directly applying a model trained on one source dataset to other target datasets usually obtains very poor results. Therefore, this paper proposes a Trans…
The University of Adelaide(阿德莱德大学);Nanjing University(南京大学)
Reusable model design becomes desirable with the rapid expansion of computer vision and machine learning applications. In this paper, we focus on the reusability of pre-trained deep convolutional models. Specifically, different from treating pre-trained models as feature extractors, we reveal more treasures beneath convolutional layers, i.e., the convolutional activations could act as a detector for the common object in the image co-localization problem. We propose a simple yet effective method, termed Deep Descriptor Transforming (DDT), for evaluating the correlations of descriptors and then …
Future Slot Prediction for Unsupervised Object Discovery in Surgical Video
PCASO Laboratory, Department of Surgery, University of Pennsylvania(匹兹堡大学外科实验室、外科系、匹兹堡大学);Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania(计算机与信息科学系、匹兹堡大学)
EPFL(洛桑联邦理工学院);Technical University of Munich(慕尼黑工业大学);Boğaziçi University(博阿齐奇大学)
Recent research has shown that it is possible to find interpretable directions in the latent spaces of pre-trained Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). These directions enable controllable image generation and support a wide range of semantic editing operations, such as zoom or rotation. The discovery of such directions is often done in a supervised or semi-supervised manner and requires manual annotations which limits their use in practice. In comparison, unsupervised discovery allows finding subtle directions that are difficult to detect a priori. In this work, we propose a contrastive le…
Centre for Autonomous System at KTH Royal Institute of Technology(瑞典皇家理工学院自主系统中心)
In this paper we introduce a system for unsupervised object discovery and segmentation of RGBD-images. The system models the sensor noise directly from data, allowing accurate segmentation without sensor specific hand tuning of measurement noise models making use of the recently introduced Statistical Inlier Estimation (SIE) method. Through a fully probabilistic formulation, the system is able to apply probabilistic inference, enabling reliable segmentation in previously challenging scenarios. In addition, we introduce new methods for filtering out false positives, significantly improving the …
Consistent Supervised-Unsupervised Alignment for Generalized Category Discovery
National Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, National Engineering Research Center for Visual Information and Applications, Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University(国家人类-机器混合增强智能重点实验室、视觉信息与应用国家工程研究中心、人工智能与机器人研究院、西安交通大学);School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen(计算机科学与技术学院、哈尔滨工业大学深圳校区);School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University(软件工程学院、西安交通大学);Kuaishou Technology(快手科技);Faculty of Microelectronics, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology(微电子学院、深圳先进技术大学)
ETH Zurich(苏黎世联邦理工学院);Beijing Institute of Technology(北京理工大学);Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence(起源人工智能研究院)
This paper addresses the task of unsupervised video multi-object segmentation. Current approaches follow a two-stage paradigm: 1) detect object proposals using pre-trained Mask R-CNN, and 2) conduct generic feature matching for temporal association using re-identification techniques. However, the generic features, widely used in both stages, are not reliable for characterizing unseen objects, leading to poor generalization. To address this, we introduce a novel approach for more accurate and efficient spatio-temporal segmentation. In particular, to address \textbf{instance discrimination}, we …
Shanghai Jiao Tong University(上海交通大学);Shanghai AI Laboratory(上海人工智能实验室)
Learning from a large corpus of data, pre-trained models have achieved impressive progress nowadays. As popular generative pre-training, diffusion models capture both low-level visual knowledge and high-level semantic relations. In this paper, we propose to exploit such knowledgeable diffusion models for mainstream discriminative tasks, i.e., unsupervised object discovery: saliency segmentation and object localization. However, the challenges exist as there is one structural difference between generative and discriminative models, which limits the direct use. Besides, the lack of explicitly la…
We study the problem of inferring an object-centric scene representation from a single image, aiming to derive a representation that explains the image formation process, captures the scene's 3D nature, and is learned without supervision. Most existing methods on scene decomposition lack one or more of these characteristics, due to the fundamental challenge in integrating the complex 3D-to-2D image formation process into powerful inference schemes like deep networks. In this paper, we propose unsupervised discovery of Object Radiance Fields (uORF), integrating recent progresses in neural 3D sc…
3D models of manufactured objects are important for populating virtual worlds and for synthetic data generation for vision and robotics. To be most useful, such objects should be articulated: their parts should move when interacted with. While articulated object datasets exist, creating them is labor-intensive. Learning-based prediction of part motions can help, but all existing methods require annotated training data. In this paper, we present an unsupervised approach for discovering articulated motions in a part-segmented 3D shape collection. Our approach is based on a concept we call catego…
Unsupervised object discovery in images involves uncovering recurring patterns that define objects and discriminates them against the background. This is more challenging than image clustering as the size and the location of the objects are not known: this adds additional degrees of freedom and increases the problem complexity. In this work, we propose StampNet, a novel autoencoding neural network that localizes shapes (objects) over a simple background in images and categorizes them simultaneously. StampNet consists of a discrete latent space that is used to categorize objects and to determin…
Toxoplasma gondii is a parasitic protozoan that causes dis- seminated toxoplasmosis, a disease that afflicts roughly a third of the worlds population. Its virulence is predicated on its motility and ability to enter and exit nucleated cells; therefore, studies elucidating its mechanism of motility and in particular, its motility patterns in the context of its lytic cycle, are critical to the eventual development of therapeutic strate- gies. Here, we present an end-to-end computational pipeline for identifying T. gondii motility phenotypes in a completely unsupervised, data-driven way. We track…
We propose FineGAN, a novel unsupervised GAN framework, which disentangles the background, object shape, and object appearance to hierarchically generate images of fine-grained object categories. To disentangle the factors without supervision, our key idea is to use information theory to associate each factor to a latent code, and to condition the relationships between the codes in a specific way to induce the desired hierarchy. Through extensive experiments, we show that FineGAN achieves the desired disentanglement to generate realistic and diverse images belonging to fine-grained classes of …