Wednesday, November 16, 2011

don't throw away old code: github-it!

My thesis experiments on Exemplar-SVMs (my PhD thesis link: Note, 33MB) would have taken approximately 20 CPU years to finish.  But not on a fat CMU cluster!  Here is some simple code which helped make things possible in ~1month of 200+ cores of crunching.  That scale of computation is not quite Google-scale computing, but it was a unforgettable experience as a CMU PhD student.  I've recently had to go back to the SSH / GNU Screen method of starting scripts at MIT, since we do not have torque/pbs there, but I definitely use these scripts.  Fork it, use it, change it, hack it, improve it, break it, learn from it, etc.

https://github.com/quantombone/warp_scripts

I used these scripts to drive the experiments in my Exemplar-SVM framework (also on Github).


The basic take home message is "do not throw away old code" which you found useful at some time.  C'mon ex-phd students, I know you wrote a lot of code, you graduated and now you feel embarrassed to share your code.  Who cares if you never had a chance to clean it up, if the world never gets to see it then it will die a silent death from lack of use.  Just put it on Github, and let others take a look.  Git is the world's best source control/versioning system. Its distributed nature makes it perfect for large-scale collaboration.  Now with github sharing is super easy! Sharing is caring.  Let's make the world a better place for hackerdom, one repository at a time.  I've met some great hackers at MIT, such as the great cvondrick, who is still teaching me how to branch like a champ.

Mathematicians share proofs.  Hackers share code.  Embrace technology, embrace Github.  If you ever want to hack with me, it is probably as important for you to know the basics of git as it is for you to be a master of linear algebra.

Additional Reading:
Distributed Version Control: The Future of History, an article about Git by some Kitware software engineers


Tuesday, November 08, 2011

scene recognition with part-based models at ICCV 2011


Today, I wanted to point everyone's attention to a super-cool paper from day 1 of this year's ICCV 2011 Conference.  Megha Pandey is the lead on this, and Lana Lazebnik (of spatial pyramid fame) is the seasoned vision community member supervising this research.  The idea is really simple (and simplicity is a plus!): train a latent deformable part-based model for scenes.  Some of the scene models look really cool, and I encourage everybody interested in scene recognition to take a look.  

A Part-based Scene Model


One of the reasons why I like this paper is because just like our SIGGRAPH ASIA 2011 paper on cross-domain image matching, they are using HOG features to represent scenes and applying these models in a sliding-window fashion.  This is much different than the traditional image-to-feature-vector mapping used in systems based on the GIST descriptor.  These types of approaches allow the detection of a scene inside another image!  Framing issues are elegantly handled by allowing the model to slide.


Abstract: Weakly supervised discovery of common visual structure in highly variable, cluttered images is a key problem in recognition. We address this problem using deformable part-based models (DPM’s) with latent SVM training. These models have been introduced for fully supervised training of object detectors, but we demonstrate that they are also capable of more open-ended learning of latent structure for such tasks as scene recognition and weakly supervised object localization. For scene recognition, DPM’s can capture recurring visual elements and salient objects; in combination with standard global image features, they obtain state-of-the-art results on the MIT 67-category indoor scene dataset. For weakly supervised object localization, optimization over latent DPM parameters can discover the spatial extent of objects in cluttered training images without ground-truth bounding boxes. The resulting method outperforms a recent state-of-the-art weakly supervised object localization approach on the PASCAL-07 dataset.



Weakly Supervised Object Localization (see paper for details)


Saturday, November 05, 2011

the fun begins at ICCV 2011

All the cool vision kids are going, so why aren't you?
http://www.iccv2011.org/

This will be my first ICCV ever! and my first trip to Spain!  Seriously though, if you need to find me over the next week, come to Barcelona. There are lots of great papers out this year and I'll be sure the write about the few which I find interesting (and haven't already blogged about).  If you want to learn more about the craziness behind ExemplarSVMs, or just to say 'Hi' don't hesitate to find me walking around the conference.  I'll be there during all the workshop days too.

If anybody has a favourite ICCV2001 paper they want me to look and perhaps write something about (hardcore object recognition please -- I don't care about illumination models), please send me your requests (in the comments below).