Large-Scale Cross-Modality Search via Collective Matrix Factorization Hashing

Zero-Shot Learning With Transferred Samples

By transferring knowledge from the abundant labeled samples of known source classes, zero-shot learning (ZSL) makes it possible to train recognition models for novel target classes that have no labeled samples. Conventional ZSL approaches usually adopt a two-step recognition strategy, in which the test sample is projected into an intermediary space in the first step, and then the recognition is carried out by considering the similarity between the sample and target classes in the intermediary space. Due to this redundant intermediate transformation, information loss is unavoidable, thus degrading the performance of overall system. Rather than adopting this two-step strategy, in this paper, we propose a novel one-step recognition framework that is able to perform recognition in the original feature space by using directly trained classifiers. To address the lack of labeled samples for training supervised classifiers for the target classes, we propose to transfer samples from source classes with pseudo labels assigned, in which the transferred samples are selected based on their transferability and diversity. Moreover, to account for the unreliability of pseudo labels of transferred samples, we modify the standard support vector machine formulation such that the unreliable positive samples can be recognized and suppressed in the training phase. The entire framework is fairly general with the possibility of further extensions to several common ZSL settings. Extensive experiments on four benchmark data sets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework, compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, in various settings.

Revealing Event Saliency in Unconstrained Video Collection

Recent progresses in multimedia event detection have enabled us to find videos about a predefined event from a large-scale video collection. Research towards more intrinsic unsupervised video understanding is an interesting but understudied field. Specifically, given a collection of videos sharing a common event of interest, the goal is to discover the salient fragments, i.e., the curt video fragments that can concisely portray the underlying event of interest, from each video. To explore this novel direction, this paper proposes an unsupervised event saliency revealing framework. It first extracts features from multiple modalities to represent each shot in the given video collection. Then, these shots are clustered to build the cluster-level event saliency revealing framework, which explores useful information cues (i.e., the intra-cluster prior, inter-cluster discriminability, and inter-cluster smoothness) by a concise optimization model. Compared with the existing methods, our approach could highlight the intrinsic stimulus of the unseen event within a video in an unsupervised fashion. Thus, it could potentially benefit to a wide range of multimedia tasks like video browsing, understanding, and search. To quantitatively verify the proposed method, we systematically compare the method to a number of baseline methods on the TRECVID benchmarks. Experimental results have demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency.

Learning to Hash With Optimized Anchor Embedding for Scalable Retrieval

Sparse representation and image hashing are powerful tools for data representation and image retrieval respectively. The combinations of these two tools for scalable image retrieval, i.e., sparse hashing (SH) methods, have been proposed in recent years and the preliminary results are promising. The core of those methods is a scheme that can efficiently embed the (high-dimensional) image features into a low-dimensional Hamming space, while preserving the similarity between features. Existing SH methods mostly focus on finding better sparse representations of images in the hash space. We argue that the anchor set utilized in sparse representation is also crucial, which was unfortunately underestimated by the prior art. To this end, we propose a novel SH method that optimizes the integration of the anchors, such that the features can be better embedded and binarized, termed as Sparse Hashing with Optimized Anchor Embedding. The central idea is to push the anchors far from the axis while preserving their relative positions so as to generate similar hashcodes for neighboring features. We formulate this idea as an orthogonality constrained maximization problem and an efficient and novel optimization framework is systematically exploited. Extensive experiments on five benchmark image data sets demonstrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art related methods.