Deep Learning for Material recognition: most recent advances and open challenges
Alain Tremeau, Sixiang Xu, Damien Muselet
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Paper presented as Invited paper at the International Conference on Big Data, Machine Learning and Applications (BIGDML), Silchar, India, December 2019
Recognizing material from color images is still a challenging problem today. While deep neural networks provide very good results on object recognition and has been the topic of a huge amount of papers in the last decade, their adaptation to material images still requires some works to reach equivalent accuracies. Nevertheless, recent studies achieve very good results in material recognition with deep learning and we propose, in this paper, to review most of them by focusing on three aspects: material image datasets, influence of the context and ad hoc descriptors for material appearance. Every aspect is introduced by a systematic manner and results from representative works are cited. We also present our own studies in this area and point out some open challenges for future works.
Material attributes have been shown to provide a discriminative intermediate representation for recognizing materials, especially for the challenging task of recognition from local material appearance (i.e., regardless of object and scene context). In the past, however, material attributes have been recognized separately preceding category recognition. In contrast, neuroscience studies on material perception and computer vision research on object and place recognition have shown that attributes are produced as a by-product during the category recognition process. Does the same hold true for ma…
Material recognition for real-world outdoor surfaces has become increasingly important for computer vision to support its operation "in the wild." Computational surface modeling that underlies material recognition has transitioned from reflectance modeling using in-lab controlled radiometric measurements to image-based representations based on internet-mined images of materials captured in the scene. We propose to take a middle-ground approach for material recognition that takes advantage of both rich radiometric cues and flexible image capture. We realize this by developing a framework for di…
We introduce a novel method for using reflectance to identify materials. Reflectance offers a unique signature of the material but is challenging to measure and use for recognizing materials due to its high-dimensionality. In this work, one-shot reflectance is captured using a unique optical camera measuring {\it reflectance disks} where the pixel coordinates correspond to surface viewing angles. The reflectance has class-specific stucture and angular gradients computed in this reflectance space reveal the material class. These reflectance disks encode discriminative information for efficient …
Recognition of materials has proven to be a challenging problem due to the wide variation in appearance within and between categories. Global image context, such as where the material is or what object it makes up, can be crucial to recognizing the material. Existing methods, however, operate on an implicit fusion of materials and context by using large receptive fields as input (i.e., large image patches). Many recent material recognition methods treat materials as yet another set of labels like objects. Materials are, however, fundamentally different from objects as they have no inherent sha…
Recognizing materials in real-world images is a challenging task. Real-world materials have rich surface texture, geometry, lighting conditions, and clutter, which combine to make the problem particularly difficult. In this paper, we introduce a new, large-scale, open dataset of materials in the wild, the Materials in Context Database (MINC), and combine this dataset with deep learning to achieve material recognition and segmentation of images in the wild. MINC is an order of magnitude larger than previous material databases, while being more diverse and well-sampled across its 23 categories. …
Human action recognition has been an important topic in computer vision due to its many applications such as video surveillance, human machine interaction and video retrieval. One core problem behind these applications is automatically recognizing low-level actions and high-level activities of interest. The former is usually the basis for the latter. This survey gives an overview of the most recent advances in human action recognition during the past several years, following a well-formed taxonomy proposed by a previous survey. From this state-of-the-art survey, researchers can view a panorama…
Rutgers University–New Brunswick（罗格斯大学新布朗斯维克分校）；Amazon AI, Amazon Web Services Inc（亚马逊人工智能，亚马逊网络服务公司）；Kyoto University（京都大学）
Computational surface modeling that underlies material recognition has transitioned from reflectance modeling using in-lab controlled radiometric measurements to image-based representations based on internet-mined single-view images captured in the scene. We take a middle-ground approach for material recognition that takes advantage of both rich radiometric cues and flexible image capture. A key concept is differential angular imaging, where small angular variations in image capture enables angular-gradient features for an enhanced appearance representation that improves recognition. We build …
Convolutional networks have been widely applied for computer vision system. Encouraged by these results, a U-Net convolutional network was applied to recognition of vessels and materials in chemistry lab using the recent Vector-LabPics dataset, which contains 2187 images of materials within mostly transparent vessels in a chemistry lab and other general settings, labeled with 13 classes. By optimizing hyperparameters including learning rates and learning rate decays, 87% accuracy in vessel recognition was achieved. In the case of relatively small training and test sets (relatively rare materia…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）
We introduce a new light-field dataset of materials, and take advantage of the recent success of deep learning to perform material recognition on the 4D light-field. Our dataset contains 12 material categories, each with 100 images taken with a Lytro Illum, from which we extract about 30,000 patches in total. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first mid-size dataset for light-field images. Our main goal is to investigate whether the additional information in a light-field (such as multiple sub-aperture views and view-dependent reflectance effects) can aid material recognition. Since rec…
This paper addresses the problem of simultaneous 3D reconstruction and material recognition and segmentation. Enabling robots to recognise different materials (concrete, metal etc.) in a scene is important for many tasks, e.g. robotic interventions in nuclear decommissioning. Previous work on 3D semantic reconstruction has predominantly focused on recognition of everyday domestic objects (tables, chairs etc.), whereas previous work on material recognition has largely been confined to single 2D images without any 3D reconstruction. Meanwhile, most 3D semantic reconstruction methods rely on comp…
University of Wollongong（伍伦贡大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
This paper takes a problem-oriented perspective and presents a comprehensive review of transfer learning methods, both shallow and deep, for cross-dataset visual recognition. Specifically, it categorises the cross-dataset recognition into seventeen problems based on a set of carefully chosen data and label attributes. Such a problem-oriented taxonomy has allowed us to examine how different transfer learning approaches tackle each problem and how well each problem has been researched to date. The comprehensive problem-oriented review of the advances in transfer learning with respect to the prob…
We propose a method for integration of features extracted using deep representations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) each of which is learned using a different image dataset of objects and materials for material recognition. Given a set of representations of multiple pre-trained CNNs, we first compute activations of features using the representations on the images to select a set of samples which are best represented by the features. Then, we measure the uncertainty of the features by computing the entropy of class distributions for each sample set. Finally, we compute the contribution…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Our goal is to recognize material categories using images and geometry information. In many applications, such as construction management, coarse geometry information is available. We investigate how 3D geometry (surface normals, camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameters) can be used with 2D features (texture and color) to improve material classification. We introduce a new dataset, GeoMat, which is the first to provide both image and geometry data in the form of: (i) training and testing patches that were extracted at different scales and perspectives from real world examples of each material…
Shanghai University（上海大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
Face recognition is one of the most popular and long-standing topics in computer vision. With the recent development of deep learning techniques and large-scale datasets, deep face recognition has made remarkable progress and been widely used in many real-world applications. Given a natural image or video frame as input, an end-to-end deep face recognition system outputs the face feature for recognition. To achieve this, a typical end-to-end system is built with three key elements: face detection, face alignment, and face representation. The face detection locates faces in the image or frame. …
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
The recognition of materials and objects inside transparent containers using computer vision has a wide range of applications, ranging from industrial bottles filling to the automation of chemistry laboratory. One of the main challenges in such recognition is the ability to distinguish between image features resulting from the vessels surface and image features resulting from the material inside the vessel. Reflections and the functional parts of a vessels surface can create strong edges that can be mistakenly identified as corresponding to the vessel contents, and cause recognition errors. Th…
We introduce Deep Thermal Imaging, a new approach for close-range automatic recognition of materials to enhance the understanding of people and ubiquitous technologies of their proximal environment. Our approach uses a low-cost mobile thermal camera integrated into a smartphone to capture thermal textures. A deep neural network classifies these textures into material types. This approach works effectively without the need for ambient light sources or direct contact with materials. Furthermore, the use of a deep learning network removes the need to handcraft the set of features for different ma…
Spectral imaging has recently gained traction for face recognition in biometric systems. We investigate the merits of spectral imaging for face recognition and the current challenges that hamper the widespread deployment of spectral sensors for face recognition. The reliability of conventional face recognition systems operating in the visible range is compromised by illumination changes, pose variations and spoof attacks. Recent works have reaped the benefits of spectral imaging to counter these limitations in surveillance activities (defence, airport security checks, etc.). However, the imple…
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Visual recognition is currently one of the most important and active research areas in computer vision, pattern recognition, and even the general field of artificial intelligence. It has great fundamental importance and strong industrial needs. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have largely boosted their performances on many concrete tasks, with the help of large amounts of training data and new powerful computation resources. Though recognition accuracy is usually the first concern for new progresses, efficiency is actually rather important and sometimes critical for both academic research and indu…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Massachusetts, Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
Research in texture recognition often concentrates on the problem of material recognition in uncluttered conditions, an assumption rarely met by applications. In this work we conduct a first study of material and describable texture at- tributes recognition in clutter, using a new dataset derived from the OpenSurface texture repository. Motivated by the challenge posed by this problem, we propose a new texture descriptor, D-CNN, obtained by Fisher Vector pooling of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) filter bank. D-CNN substantially improves the state-of-the-art in texture, mate- rial and sce…
Universidad de Zaragoza（萨拉戈萨大学）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
Observing and recognizing materials is a fundamental part of our daily life. Under typical viewing conditions, we are capable of effortlessly identifying the objects that surround us and recognizing the materials they are made of. Nevertheless, understanding the underlying perceptual processes that take place to accurately discern the visual properties of an object is a long-standing problem. In this work, we perform a comprehensive and systematic analysis of how the interplay of geometry, illumination, and their spatial frequencies affects human performance on material recognition tasks. We c…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
With the recent renaissance of deep convolution neural networks, encouraging breakthroughs have been achieved on the supervised recognition tasks, where each class has sufficient training data and fully annotated training data. However, to scale the recognition to a large number of classes with few or now training samples for each class remains an unsolved problem. One approach to scaling up the recognition is to develop models capable of recognizing unseen categories without any training instances, or zero-shot recognition/ learning. This article provides a comprehensive review of existing ze…
Material classification in natural settings is a challenge due to complex interplay of geometry, reflectance properties, and illumination. Previous work on material classification relies strongly on hand-engineered features of visual samples. In this work we use a Convolutional Neural Network (convnet) that learns descriptive features for the specific task of material recognition. Specifically, transfer learning from the task of object recognition is exploited to more effectively train good features for material classification. The approach of transfer learning using convnets yields significan…
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Visual recognition of material boundaries in transparent vessels is valuable for numerous applications. Such recognition is essential for estimation of fill-level, volume and phase-boundaries as well as for tracking of such chemical processes as precipitation, crystallization, condensation, evaporation and phase-separation. The problem of material boundary recognition in images is particularly complex for materials with non-flat surfaces, i.e., solids, powders and viscous fluids, in which the material interfaces have unpredictable shapes. This work demonstrates a general method for finding the…
Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）；Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, Narendrapur（罗摩克里希纳教会寄宿学院，纳伦德拉普尔）
In the last year, the outbreak of COVID-19 has deployed computer vision and machine learning algorithms in various fields to enhance human life interactions. COVID-19 is a highly contaminated disease that affects mainly the respiratory organs of the human body. We must wear a mask in this situation as the virus can be contaminated through the air and a non-masked person can be affected. Our proposal deploys a computer vision and deep learning framework to recognize face masks from images or videos. We have implemented a Boundary dependent face cut recognition algorithm that can cut the face fr…
Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) is an extreme form of transfer learning, where no labelled examples of the data to be classified are provided during the training stage. Instead, ZSL uses additional information learned about the domain, and relies upon transfer learning algorithms to infer knowledge about the missing instances. ZSL approaches are an attractive solution for sparse datasets. Here we outline a model to identify the materials with which a work of art was created, by learning the relationship between English descriptions of the subject of a piece and its composite materials. After experime…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
The recent progress in sparse coding and deep learning has made unsupervised feature learning methods a strong competitor to hand-crafted descriptors. In computer vision, success stories of learned features have been predominantly reported for object recognition tasks. In this paper, we investigate if and how feature learning can be used for material recognition. We propose two strategies to incorporate scale information into the learning procedure resulting in a novel multi-scale coding procedure. Our results show that our learned features for material recognition outperform hand-crafted desc…
This paper describes the COCO-Text dataset. In recent years large-scale datasets like SUN and Imagenet drove the advancement of scene understanding and object recognition. The goal of COCO-Text is to advance state-of-the-art in text detection and recognition in natural images. The dataset is based on the MS COCO dataset, which contains images of complex everyday scenes. The images were not collected with text in mind and thus contain a broad variety of text instances. To reflect the diversity of text in natural scenes, we annotate text with (a) location in terms of a bounding box, (b) fine-gra…
Art University of Tehran（德黑兰艺术大学）；Ferdowsi University of Mashhad（马什哈德菲尔多西大学）；Islamic Azad University Taft（塔夫伊斯兰阿扎德大学）；Dibrugarh University（迪布鲁格尔大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）
Recent advancements in Artificial intelligence, especially deep learning, has changed many fields irreversibly by introducing state of the art methods for automation. Construction monitoring has not been an exception; as a part of construction monitoring systems, material classification and recognition have drawn the attention of deep learning and machine vision researchers. However, to create production-ready systems, there is still a long path to cover. Real-world problems such as varying illuminations and reaching acceptable accuracies need to be addressed in order to create robust systems.…
Powder AI Research（Powder AI 研究院）；Université Paris-Est, LISSI, UPEC（巴黎东大学 LISSI 实验室 / 巴黎东克雷泰伊大学）
Emotional expressions are the behaviors that communicate our emotional state or attitude to others. They are expressed through verbal and non-verbal communication. Complex human behavior can be understood by studying physical features from multiple modalities; mainly facial, vocal and physical gestures. Recently, spontaneous multi-modal emotion recognition has been extensively studied for human behavior analysis. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based approach for audio-visual emotion recognition. Our approach leverages recent advances in deep learning like knowledge distillation …
Synthetic Data for Face Recognition: Current State and Future Prospects
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD（弗劳恩霍夫计算机图形学研究所IGD）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学电气工程学院）；School of Engineering, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学工程学院）；Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学计算机科学系）
Institute of High Performance Computing, Agency for Science, Technology, and Research（高性能计算研究所，科技研究局）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学人工智能中心）；Pattern Recognition and Intelligent System Laboratory, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学模式识别与智能系统实验室）；Brookhaven National Laboratory（布鲁克海文国家实验室）；InnoPeak Technology Inc.；Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Virology, School of Basic Medical Sciences, Fudan University（复旦大学基础医学院医学分子病毒学重点实验室）
In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach, named Point Adversarial Self Mining (PASM), to improve the recognition accuracy in facial expression recognition. Unlike previous works focusing on designing specific architectures or loss functions to solve this problem, PASM boosts the network capability by simulating human learning processes: providing updated learning materials and guidance from more capable teachers. Specifically, to generate new learning materials, PASM leverages a point adversarial attack method and a trained teacher network to locate the most informative positi…
College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院计算学院）
The automatic recognition of facial expressions has been an active research topic since the early nineties. There have been several advances in the past few years in terms of face detection and tracking, feature extraction mechanisms and the techniques used for expression classification. This paper surveys some of the published work since 2001 till date. The paper presents a time-line view of the advances made in this field, the applications of automatic face expression recognizers, the characteristics of an ideal system, the databases that have been used and the advances made in terms of thei…
Person recognition at a distance entails recognizing the identity of an individual appearing in images or videos collected by long-range imaging systems such as drones or surveillance cameras. Despite recent advances in deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), this remains challenging. Images or videos collected by long-range cameras often suffer from atmospheric turbulence, blur, low-resolution, unconstrained poses, and poor illumination. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of recent advances in person recognition at a distance. In particular, we review recent work in multi-spectral f…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Lebanese American University（黎巴嫩美国大学）
Learning-based image compression was shown to achieve a competitive performance with state-of-the-art transform-based codecs. This motivated the development of new learning-based visual compression standards such as JPEG-AI. Of particular interest to these emerging standards is the development of learning-based image compression systems targeting both humans and machines. This paper is concerned with learning-based compression schemes whose compressed-domain representations can be utilized to perform visual processing and computer vision tasks directly in the compressed domain. Such a characte…
Convolutional neural networks have emerged as the leading method for the classification and segmentation of images. In some cases, it is desirable to focus the attention of the net on a specific region in the image; one such case is the recognition of the contents of transparent vessels, where the vessel region in the image is already known. This work presents a valve filter approach for focusing the attention of the net on a region of interest (ROI). In this approach, the ROI is inserted into the net as a binary map. The net uses a different set of convolution filters for the ROI and backgrou…
Hacettepe University（哈斯特帕大学）；Middle East Technical University（中东技术大学）
With the introduction of large-scale datasets and deep learning models capable of learning complex representations, impressive advances have emerged in face detection and recognition tasks. Despite such advances, existing datasets do not capture the difficulty of face recognition in the wildest scenarios, such as hostile disputes or fights. Furthermore, existing datasets do not represent completely unconstrained cases of low resolution, high blur and large pose/occlusion variances. To this end, we introduce the Wildest Faces dataset, which focuses on such adverse effects through violent scenes…
Pakistan Navy Engineering College, NUST-PNEC（巴基斯坦海军工程学院（NUST-PNEC））
This paper presents a hand-written character recognition comparison and performance evaluation for robust and precise classification of different hand-written characters. The system utilizes advanced multilayer deep neural network by collecting features from raw pixel values. The hidden layers stack deep hierarchies of non-linear features since learning complex features from conventional neural networks is very challenging. Two state of the art deep learning architectures were used which includes Caffe AlexNet and GoogleNet models in NVIDIA DIGITS.The frameworks were trained and tested on two …
Moving cameras provide multiple intensity measurements per pixel, yet often semantic segmentation, material recognition, and object recognition do not utilize this information. With basic alignment over several frames of a moving camera sequence, a distribution of intensities over multiple angles is obtained. It is well known from prior work that luminance histograms and the statistics of natural images provide a strong material recognition cue. We utilize per-pixel {\it angular luminance distributions} as a key feature in discriminating the material of the surface. The angle-space sampling in…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Deep learning has paved the way for strong recognition systems which are often both trained on and applied to natural images. In this paper, we examine the give-and-take relationship between such visual recognition systems and the rich information available in the fine arts. First, we find that visual recognition systems designed for natural images can work surprisingly well on paintings. In particular, we find that interactive segmentation tools can be used to cleanly annotate polygonal segments within paintings, a task which is time consuming to undertake by hand. We also find that FasterRCN…
Recent technological advances have made lightweight, head mounted cameras both practical and affordable and products like Google Glass show first approaches to introduce the idea of egocentric (first-person) video to the mainstream. Interestingly, the computer vision community has only recently started to explore this new domain of egocentric vision, where research can roughly be categorized into three areas: Object recognition, activity detection/recognition, video summarization. In this paper, we try to give a broad overview about the different problems that have been addressed and collect a…
Waseda University（早稻田大学）；Waseda Institute for Advanced Study（早稻田大学高等研究所）；Humanoid Robotics Institute (HRI)（仿人机器人研究所）
In this paper we tackle the problem of visually predicting surface friction for environments with diverse surfaces, and integrating this knowledge into biped robot locomotion planning. The problem is essential for autonomous robot locomotion since diverse surfaces with varying friction abound in the real world, from wood to ceramic tiles, grass or ice, which may cause difficulties or huge energy costs for robot locomotion if not considered. We propose to estimate friction and its uncertainty from visual estimation of material classes using convolutional neural networks, together with probabili…
Advancements in Feature Extraction Recognition of Medical Imaging Systems Through Deep Learning Technique
Marquette University（马凯特大学）；Washington University in St. Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）
MateRobot: Material Recognition in Wearable Robotics for People with Visual Impairments
Institute for Robotics and Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院机器人与人体工程学研究所）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Hangzhou SurImage Technology Company Ltd.（杭州 SurImage 科技有限公司）
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences（国家计算机与新兴科学大学）
Handwritten text recognition is an active research area in the field of deep learning and artificial intelligence to convert handwritten text into machine-understandable. A lot of work has been done for other languages, especially for English, but work for the Urdu language is very minimal due to the cursive nature of Urdu characters. The need for Urdu HCR systems is increasing because of the advancement of technology. In this paper, we propose a ResNet18 model for handwritten text recognition using Urdu Nastaliq Handwritten Dataset (UNHD) which contains 3,12000 words written by 500 candidates…
We explore object detection with two attributes: color and material. The task aims to simultaneously detect objects and infer their color and material. A straight-forward approach is to add attribute heads at the very end of a usual object detection pipeline. However, we observe that the two goals are in conflict: Object detection should be attribute-independent and attributes be largely object-independent. Features computed by a standard detection network entangle the category and attribute features; we disentangle them by the use of a two-stream model where the category and attribute feature…
An Approach for Adaptive Automatic Threat Recognition Within 3D Computed Tomography Images for Baggage Security Screening
Department of Computer Science, Durham University, United Kingdom（英国杜伦大学计算机科学系）；Department of Engineering, Durham University, United Kingdom（英国杜伦大学工程系）
In recent years, researchers have proposed many deep learning (DL) methods for various tasks, and particularly face recognition (FR) made an enormous leap using these techniques. Deep FR systems benefit from the hierarchical architecture of the DL methods to learn discriminative face representation. Therefore, DL techniques significantly improve state-of-the-art performance on FR systems and encourage diverse and efficient real-world applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of various FR systems that leverage the different types of DL techniques, and for the study, we s…
