Larry S. Davis

Perceiving meaningful activities in a long video sequence is a challenging problem due to ambiguous definition of 'meaningfulness' as well as clutters in the scene. We approach this problem by learning a generative model for regular motion patterns (termed as regularity) using multiple sources with very limited supervision. Specifically, we propose two methods that are built upon the autoencoders for their ability to work with little to no supervision. We first leverage the conventional handcrafted spatio-temporal local features and learn a fully connected autoencoder on them. Second, we build a fully convolutional feed-forward autoencoder to learn both the local features and the classifiers as an end-to-end learning framework. Our model can capture the regularities from multiple datasets. We evaluate our methods in both qualitative and quantitative ways - showing the learned regularity of videos in various aspects and demonstrating competitive performance on anomaly detection datasets as an application.

An analysis of different techniques for recognizing and detecting objects under extreme scale variation is presented. Scale specific and scale invariant design of detectors are compared by training them with different configurations of input data. By evaluating the performance of different network architectures for classifying small objects on ImageNet, we show that CNNs are not robust to changes in scale. Based on this analysis, we propose to train and test detectors on the same scales of an image-pyramid. Since small and large objects are difficult to recognize at smaller and larger scales respectively, we present a novel training scheme called Scale Normalization for Image Pyramids (SNIP) which selectively back-propagates the gradients of object instances of different sizes as a function of the image scale. On the COCO dataset, our single model performance is 45.7% and an ensemble of 3 networks obtains an mAP of 48.3%. We use off-the-shelf ImageNet-1000 pre-trained models and only train with bounding box supervision. Our submission won the Best Student Entry in the COCO 2017 challenge. Code will be made available at http://bit.ly/2yXVg4c.