Ian Endres

We propose to shift the goal of recognition from naming to describing. Doing so allows us not only to name familiar objects, but also: to report unusual aspects of a familiar object (“spotty dog”, not just “dog”); to say something about unfamiliar objects (“hairy and four-legged”, not just “unknown”); and to learn how to recognize new objects with few or no visual examples. Rather than focusing on identity assignment, we make inferring attributes the core problem of recognition. These attributes can be semantic (“spotty”) or discriminative (“dogs have it but sheep do not”). Learning attributes presents a major new challenge: generalization across object categories, not just across instances within a category. In this paper, we also introduce a novel feature selection method for learning attributes that generalize well across categories. We support our claims by thorough evaluation that provides insights into the limitations of the standard recognition paradigm of naming and demonstrates the new abilities provided by our attribute-based framework.

We propose a category-independent method to produce a bag of regions and rank them, such that top-ranked regions are likely to be good segmentations of different objects. Our key objectives are completeness and diversity: Every object should have at least one good proposed region, and a diverse set should be top-ranked. Our approach is to generate a set of segmentations by performing graph cuts based on a seed region and a learned affinity function. Then, the regions are ranked using structured learning based on various cues. Our experiments on the Berkeley Segmentation Data Set and Pascal VOC 2011 demonstrate our ability to find most objects within a small bag of proposed regions.

We propose an approach to find and describe objects within broad domains. We introduce a new dataset that provides annotation for sharing models of appearance and correlation across categories. We use it to learn part and category detectors. These serve as the visual basis for an integrated model of objects. We describe objects by the spatial arrangement of their attributes and the interactions between them. Using this model, our system can find animals and vehicles that it has not seen and infer attributes, such as function and pose. Our experiments demonstrate that we can more reliably locate and describe both familiar and unfamiliar objects, compared to a baseline that relies purely on basic category detectors.

We propose a method to learn a diverse collection of discriminative parts from object bounding box annotations. Part detectors can be trained and applied individually, which simplifies learning and extension to new features or categories. We apply the parts to object category detection, pooling part detections within bottom-up proposed regions and using a boosted classifier with proposed sigmoid weak learners for scoring. On PASCAL VOC 2010, we evaluate the part detectors' ability to discriminate and localize annotated key points. Our detection system is competitive with the best-existing systems, outperforming other HOG-based detectors on the more deformable categories.