In recent years the amounts of personal photos captured increased significantly, giving rise to new challenges in multi-image understanding and high-level image understanding. Event recognition in personal photo albums presents one challenging scenario where life events are recognized from a disordered collection of images, including both relevant and irrelevant images. Event recognition in images also presents the challenge of high-level image understanding, as opposed to low-level image object classification. In absence of methods to analyze multiple inputs, previous methods adopted temporal mechanisms, including various forms of recurrent neural networks. However, their effective temporal window is local. In addition, they are not a natural choice given the disordered characteristic of photo albums. We address this gap with a tailor-made solution, combining the power of CNNs for image representation and transformers for album representation to perform global reasoning on image collection, offering a practical and efficient solution for photo albums event recognition. Our solution reaches state-of-the-art results on 3 prominent benchmarks, achieving above 90\% mAP on all datasets. We further explore the related image-importance task in event recognition, demonstrating how the learned attentions correlate with the human-annotated importance for this subjective task, thus opening the door for new applications.
Recognizing the identities of people in everyday photos is still a very challenging problem for machine vision, due to non-frontal faces, changes in clothing, location, lighting and similar. Recent studies have shown that rich relational information between people in the same photo can help in recognizing their identities. In this work, we propose to model the relational information between people as a sequence prediction task. At the core of our work is a novel recurrent network architecture, in which relational information between instances' labels and appearance are modeled jointly. In addi…
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
We explore the task of recognizing peoples' identities in photo albums in an unconstrained setting. To facilitate this, we introduce the new People In Photo Albums (PIPA) dataset, consisting of over 60000 instances of 2000 individuals collected from public Flickr photo albums. With only about half of the person images containing a frontal face, the recognition task is very challenging due to the large variations in pose, clothing, camera viewpoint, image resolution and illumination. We propose the Pose Invariant PErson Recognition (PIPER) method, which accumulates the cues of poselet-level per…
We address the problem of end-to-end visual storytelling. Given a photo album, our model first selects the most representative (summary) photos, and then composes a natural language story for the album. For this task, we make use of the Visual Storytelling dataset and a model composed of three hierarchically-attentive Recurrent Neural Nets (RNNs) to: encode the album photos, select representative (summary) photos, and compose the story. Automatic and human evaluations show our model achieves better performance on selection, generation, and retrieval than baselines.
Shandong University（山东大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
In this paper, we propose a novel model with a hierarchical photo-scene encoder and a reconstructor for the task of album storytelling. The photo-scene encoder contains two sub-encoders, namely the photo and scene encoders, which are stacked together and behave hierarchically to fully exploit the structure information of the photos within an album. Specifically, the photo encoder generates semantic representation for each photo while exploiting temporal relationships among them. The scene encoder, relying on the obtained photo representations, is responsible for detecting the scene changes and…
National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）；St. Petersburg Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics（斯捷克洛夫数学研究所圣彼得堡分部）
In this paper a new formulation of event recognition task is examined: it is required to predict event categories in a gallery of images, for which albums (groups of photos corresponding to a single event) are unknown. We propose the novel two-stage approach. At first, features are extracted in each photo using the pre-trained convolutional neural network. These features are classified individually. The scores of the classifier are used to group sequential photos into several clusters. Finally, the features of photos in each group are aggregated into a single descriptor using neural attention …
University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）；Adobe Research（Adobe 研究院）
Automatic organization of personal photos is a problem with many real world ap- plications, and can be divided into two main tasks: recognizing the event type of the photo collection, and selecting interesting images from the collection. In this paper, we attempt to simultaneously solve both tasks: album-wise event recognition and image- wise importance prediction. We collected an album dataset with both event type labels and image importance labels, refined from an existing CUFED dataset. We propose a hybrid system consisting of three parts: A siamese network-based event-specific image import…
Samsung-PDMI Joint AI Center, St. Petersburg Department of Steklov Institute of Mathematics（三星-PDMI联合人工智能中心，斯捷克洛夫数学研究所圣彼得堡分部）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型高等经济学院）
This paper is focused on the automatic extraction of persons and their attributes (gender, year of born) from album of photos and videos. We propose the two-stage approach, in which, firstly, the convolutional neural network simultaneously predicts age/gender from all photos and additionally extracts facial representations suitable for face identification. We modified the MobileNet, which is preliminarily trained to perform face recognition, in order to additionally recognize age and gender. In the second stage of our approach, extracted faces are grouped using hierarchical agglomerative clust…
CVIT, IIIT Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院 CVIT）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook 人工智能研究院）
Person recognition methods that use multiple body regions have shown significant improvements over traditional face-based recognition. One of the primary challenges in full-body person recognition is the extreme variation in pose and view point. In this work, (i) we present an approach that tackles pose variations utilizing multiple models that are trained on specific poses, and combined using pose-aware weights during testing. (ii) For learning a person representation, we propose a network that jointly optimizes a single loss over multiple body regions. (iii) Finally, we introduce new benchma…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) were introduced by Goodfellow in 2014, and since then have become popular for constructing generative artificial intelligence models. However, the drawbacks of such networks are numerous, like their longer training times, their sensitivity to hyperparameter tuning, several types of loss and optimization functions and other difficulties like mode collapse. Current applications of GANs include generating photo-realistic human faces, animals and objects. However, I wanted to explore the artistic ability of GANs in more detail, by using existing models and le…
PuzzleAvatar: Assembling 3D Avatars from Personal Albums
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Mila, Université de Montréal（米拉-蒙特利尔大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
What does a typical visit to Paris look like? Do people first take photos of the Louvre and then the Eiffel Tower? Can we visually model a temporal event like "Paris Vacation" using current frameworks? In this paper, we explore how we can automatically learn the temporal aspects, or storylines of visual concepts from web data. Previous attempts focus on consecutive image-to-image transitions and are unsuccessful at recovering the long-term underlying story. Our novel Skipping Recurrent Neural Network (S-RNN) model does not attempt to predict each and every data point in the sequence, like clas…
The overwhelming popularity of social media has resulted in bulk amounts of personal photos being uploaded to the internet every day. Since these photos are taken in unconstrained settings, recognizing the identities of people among the photos remains a challenge. Studies have indicated that utilizing evidence other than face appearance improves the performance of person recognition systems. In this work, we aim to take advantage of additional cues obtained from different body regions in a zooming in fashion for person recognition. Hence, we present Zoom-RNN, a novel method based on recurrent …
Is it possible to build a system to determine the location where a photo was taken using just its pixels? In general, the problem seems exceptionally difficult: it is trivial to construct situations where no location can be inferred. Yet images often contain informative cues such as landmarks, weather patterns, vegetation, road markings, and architectural details, which in combination may allow one to determine an approximate location and occasionally an exact location. Websites such as GeoGuessr and View from your Window suggest that humans are relatively good at integrating these cues to geo…
Stories are essential for genealogy research since they can help build emotional connections with people. A lot of family stories are reserved in historical photos and albums. Recent development on image captioning models makes it feasible to "tell stories" for photos automatically. The attention mechanism has been widely adopted in many state-of-the-art encoder-decoder based image captioning models, since it can bridge the gap between the visual part and the language part. Most existing captioning models implicitly trained attention modules with word-likelihood loss. Meanwhile, lots of studie…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；LINE Plus；Google（谷歌）；CISPA Helmholtz Center i.G.（亥姆霍兹CISPA中心）
People nowadays share large parts of their personal lives through social media. Being able to automatically recognise people in personal photos may greatly enhance user convenience by easing photo album organisation. For human identification task, however, traditional focus of computer vision has been face recognition and pedestrian re-identification. Person recognition in social media photos sets new challenges for computer vision, including non-cooperative subjects (e.g. backward viewpoints, unusual poses) and great changes in appearance. To tackle this problem, we build a simple person reco…
The Eye of Sherlock Holmes: Uncovering User Private Attribute Profiling via Vision-Language Model Agentic Framework
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Beijing University of Technology（北京理工大学）；Hengxin Tech（恒心科技）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Squirrel Ai Learning（squirrel AI 学习）
