We propose to leverage concept-level representations for complex event recognition in photographs given limited training examples. We introduce a novel framework to discover event concept attributes from the web and use that to extract semantic features from images and classify them into social event categories with few training examples. Discovered concepts include a variety of objects, scenes, actions and event sub-types, leading to a discriminative and compact representation for event images. Web images are obtained for each discovered event concept and we use (pretrained) CNN features to train concept classifiers. Extensive experiments on challenging event datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several baselines using deep CNN features directly in classifying images into events with limited training examples. We also demonstrate that our method achieves the best overall accuracy on a dataset with unseen event categories using a single training example.
@cite_30: In this paper we present the first large-scale scene attribute database. First, we perform crowd-sourced human studies to find a taxonomy of 102 discriminative attributes. Next, we build the “SUN attribute database” on top of the diverse SUN categorical database. Our attribute database spans more than 700 categories and 14,000 images and has potential for use in high-level scene understanding and fine-grained scene recognition. We use our dataset to train attribute classifiers and evaluate how well these relatively simple classifiers can recognize a variety of attributes related to materials, surface properties, lighting, functions and affordances, and spatial envelope properties.
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@cite_37: The rapid development of social video sharing platforms has created a huge demand for automatic video classification and annotation techniques, in particular for videos containing social activities of a group of people (e.g. YouTube video of a wedding reception). Recently, attribute learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for transferring learning to sparsely labelled classes in object or single-object short action classification. In contrast to existing work, this paper for the first time, tackles the problem of attribute learning for understanding group social activities with sparse labels. This problem is more challenging because of the complex multi-object nature of social activities, and the unstructured nature of the activity context. To solve this problem, we (1) contribute an unstructured social activity attribute (USAA) dataset with both visual and audio attributes, (2) introduce the concept of semi-latent attribute space and (3) propose a novel model for learning the latent attributes which alleviate the dependence of existing models on exact and exhaustive manual specification of the attribute-space. We show that our framework is able to exploit latent attributes to outperform contemporary approaches for addressing a variety of realistic multi-media sparse data learning tasks including: multi-task learning, N-shot transfer learning, learning with label noise and importantly zero-shot learning.
@cite_61: We introduce a new descriptor for images which allows the construction of efficient and compact classifiers with good accuracy on object category recognition. The descriptor is the output of a large number of weakly trained object category classifiers on the image. The trained categories are selected from an ontology of visual concepts, but the intention is not to encode an explicit decomposition of the scene. Rather, we accept that existing object category classifiers often encode not the category per se but ancillary image characteristics; and that these ancillary characteristics can combine to represent visual classes unrelated to the constituent categories' semantic meanings. The advantage of this descriptor is that it allows object-category queries to be made against image databases using efficient classifiers (efficient at test time) such as linear support vector machines, and allows these queries to be for novel categories. Even when the representation is reduced to 200 bytes per image, classification accuracy on object category recognition is comparable with the state of the art (36 versus 42 ), but at orders of magnitude lower computational cost.
@cite_4: We study the problem of object classification when training and test classes are disjoint, i.e. no training examples of the target classes are available. This setup has hardly been studied in computer vision research, but it is the rule rather than the exception, because the world contains tens of thousands of different object classes and for only a very few of them image, collections have been formed and annotated with suitable class labels. In this paper, we tackle the problem by introducing attribute-based classification. It performs object detection based on a human-specified high-level description of the target objects instead of training images. The description consists of arbitrary semantic attributes, like shape, color or even geographic information. Because such properties transcend the specific learning task at hand, they can be pre-learned, e.g. from image datasets unrelated to the current task. Afterwards, new classes can be detected based on their attribute representation, without the need for a new training phase. In order to evaluate our method and to facilitate research in this area, we have assembled a new large-scale dataset, “Animals with Attributes”, of over 30,000 animal images that match the 50 classes in Osherson's classic table of how strongly humans associate 85 semantic attributes with animal classes. Our experiments show that by using an attribute layer it is indeed possible to build a learning object detection system that does not require any training images of the target classes.
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@cite_27: In this paper, we present a novel image representation that renders it possible to access natural scenes by local semantic description. Our work is motivated by the continuing effort in content-based image retrieval to extract and to model the semantic content of images. The basic idea of the semantic modeling is to classify local image regions into semantic concept classes such as water, rocks, or foliage. Images are represented through the frequency of occurrence of these local concepts. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the image representation is well suited for modeling the semantic content of heterogenous scene categories, and thus for categorization and retrieval. The image representation also allows us to rank natural scenes according to their semantic similarity relative to certain scene categories. Based on human ranking data, we learn a perceptually plausible distance measure that leads to a high correlation between the human and the automatically obtained typicality ranking. This result is especially valuable for content-based image retrieval where the goal is to present retrieval results in descending semantic similarity from the query.
@cite_2: In this paper we explore the idea of using high-level semantic concepts, also called attributes, to represent human actions from videos and argue that attributes enable the construction of more descriptive models for human action recognition. We propose a unified framework wherein manually specified attributes are: i) selected in a discriminative fashion so as to account for intra-class variability; ii) coherently integrated with data-driven attributes to make the attribute set more descriptive. Data-driven attributes are automatically inferred from the training data using an information theoretic approach. Our framework is built upon a latent SVM formulation where latent variables capture the degree of importance of each attribute for each action class. We also demonstrate that our attribute-based action representation can be effectively used to design a recognition procedure for classifying novel action classes for which no training samples are available. We test our approach on several publicly available datasets and obtain promising results that quantitatively demonstrate our theoretical claims.
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@cite_34: 
Attributes have been used to describe objects (both fixed @cite_4 @cite_47 @cite_54 @cite_28 and relative @cite_24 ), faces @cite_37 , scenes @cite_30 and actions @cite_2 @cite_34 . These attribute detectors are then run on new images for high level recognition @cite_27 @cite_39 . Researchers have explored creating a set (or bank) of detectors pretrained on objects such as Object Banks @cite_35 , an ontology of abstract concepts such as Classemes @cite_61 or scene attributes @cite_30 @cite_22 .