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Irfan Essa
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    VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation
    Lijun Yu
    Xiuye Gu
    Rachel Hornung
    Hassan Akbari
    Ming-Chang Chiu
    Josh Dillon
    Agrim Gupta
    Meera Hahn
    Anja Hauth
    David Hendon
    Alonso Martinez
    Grant Schindler
    Huisheng Wang
    Jimmy Yan
    Xuan Yang
    Lu Jiang
    arxiv Preprint (2023) (to appear)
    Preview abstract We present VideoPoet, a language model capable of synthesizing high-quality video, with matching audio, from a large variety of conditioning signals. VideoPoet employs a decoder-only transformer architecture that processes multimodal inputs -- including images, videos, text, and audio. The training protocol follows that of Large Language Models (LLMs), consisting of two stages: pretraining and task-specific adaptation. During pretraining, VideoPoet incorporates a mixture of multimodal generative objectives within an autoregressive Transformer framework. The pretrained LLM serves as a foundation that can be adapted for a range of video generation tasks. We present empirical results demonstrating the model's state-of-the-art capabilities in zero-shot video generation, specifically highlighting VideoPoet's ability to generate high-fidelity motions. Project page: http://sites.research.google/videopoet/ View details
    Preview abstract This paper studies non-autoregressive transformers for the image synthesis task from the lens of discrete diffusion models. We find that generative methods based on non-autoregressive transformers suffer from decoding compounding error due to the parallel sampling of visual tokens. To alleviate it, we introduce discrete predictor-corrector diffusion models (DPC). Predictor-corrector samplers are a recently introduced class of samplers for diffusion models which improve upon ancestral samplers by correcting the sampling distribution of intermediate diffusion states using MCMC methods. In DPC, the Langevin corrector, which does not have a direct counterpart in discrete space, is replaced with a discrete MCMC transition defined by a learned corrector kernel. The corrector kernel is trained to make the correction steps achieve asymptotic convergence, in distribution, to the real marginal of the intermediate diffusion states. Our experiments show that equipped with DPC, discrete diffusion models can achieve comparable quality to continuous diffusion models, while having orders of magnitude faster sampling times. DPC improves upon existing discrete latent space models for class-conditional image generation on ImageNet, and outperforms recent diffusion models and GANs, according to visual evaluation user studies. View details
    Preview abstract This paper introduces a Masked Generative Video Transformer, named MAGVIT, for multi-task video generation. We train a single MAGVIT model and apply it to multiple video generation tasks at inference time. To this end, two new designs are proposed: an improved 3D tokenizer model to quantize a video into spatial-temporal visual tokens, and a novel technique to embed conditions inside the mask to facilitate multi-task training. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the compelling quality, efficiency, and flexibility of the proposed model. First, MAGVIT radically improves the previous best fidelity on two video generation tasks. In terms of efficiency, MAGVIT offers leading video generation speed at inference time, which is estimated to be one or two orders-of-magnitudes faster than other models. As for flexibility, we verified that a single trained MAGVIT is able to generically perform 8+ tasks at several video benchmarks from drastically different visual domains. We will open source our framework and models. View details
    Preview abstract Recent conditional image generation methods produce images of remarkable diversity, fidelity and realism. However, the majority of these methods allow conditioning only on labels or text prompts, which limits their level of control over the generation result. In this paper, we introduce MaskSketch, a masked image generation method that allows spatial conditioning of the generation result, using a guiding sketch as an extra conditioning signal during sampling. MaskSketch utilizes a pre-trained masked image generator, requires no model training or paired supervision, and works with input sketches of different levels of abstraction. We propose a novel parallel sampling scheme that leverages the structural information encoded in the intermediate self-attention maps of a masked generative transformer, such as scene layout and object shape. Our results show that MaskSketch achieves high image realism and fidelity to the guiding structure. Evaluated on standard benchmark datasets, MaskSketch outperforms state-of-the-art methods for sketch-to-image translation, as well as generic image-to-image translation approaches. View details
    Preview abstract Presentation slides commonly use visual patterns for structural navigation, such as titles, dividers, and build slides. However, screen readers do not capture such intention, making it time-consuming and less accessible for blind and visually impaired (BVI) users to linearly consume slides with repeated content. We present Slide Gestalt, an automatic approach that identifies the hierarchical structure in a slide deck. Slide Gestalt computes the visual and textual correspondences between slides to generate hierarchical groupings. Readers can navigate the slide deck from the higher-level section overview to the lower-level description of a slide group or individual elements interactively with our UI. We derived side consumption and authoring practices from interviews with BVI readers and sighted creators and an analysis of 100 decks. We performed our pipeline with 50 real-world slide decks and a large dataset. Feedback from eight BVI participants showed that Slide Gestalt helped navigate a slide deck by anchoring content more efficiently, compared to using accessible slides. View details
    Preview abstract In this work, we introduce Semantic Pyramid AutoEncoder (SPAE) for enabling frozen LLMs to perform both understanding and generation tasks involving non-linguistic modalities such as images or videos. SPAE converts between raw pixels and interpretable lexical tokens (or words) extracted from the LLM's vocabulary. The resulting tokens capture both the semantic meaning and the fine-grained details needed for visual reconstruction, effectively translating the visual content into a language comprehensible to the LLM, and empowering it to perform a wide array of multimodal tasks. Our approach is validated through in-context learning experiments with frozen PaLM 2 and GPT 3.5 on a diverse set of image understanding and generation tasks. Our method marks the first successful attempt to enable a frozen LLM to generate image content while surpassing state-of-the-art performance in image understanding tasks, under the same setting, by over 25%. View details
    Preview abstract Transferring knowledge from an image synthesis model trained on a large dataset is a promising direction for learning generative image models from various domains efficiently. While previous works have studied GAN models, we present a recipe for learning vision transformers by generative knowledge transfer. We base our framework on state-of-the-art generative vision transformers that represent an image as a sequence of visual tokens to the autoregressive or non-autoregressive transformers. To adapt to a new domain, we employ prompt tuning, which prepends learnable tokens called prompt to the image token sequence, and introduce a new prompt design for our task. We study on a variety of visual domains, including visual task adaptation benchmark, with varying amount of training images, and show effectiveness of knowledge transfer and a significantly better image generation quality over existing works. View details
    Sharing Decoders: Network Fission for Multi-task Pixel Prediction
    Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, IEEE/CVF (2022), pp. 3771-3780
    Preview abstract We examine the benefits of splitting encoder-decoders for multitask learning and showcase results on three tasks (semantics, surface normals, and depth) while adding very few FLOPS per task. Current hard parameter sharing methods for multi-task pixel-wise labeling use one shared encoder with separate decoders for each task. We generalize this notion and term the splitting of encoder-decoder architectures at different points as fission. Our ablation studies on fission show that sharing most of the decoder layers in multi-task encoder-decoder networks results in improvement while adding far fewer parameters per task. Our proposed method trains faster, uses less memory, results in better accuracy, and uses significantly fewer floating point operations (FLOPS) than conventional multi-task methods, with additional tasks only requiring 0.017% more FLOPS than the single-task network. View details
    Synthesis-Assisted Video Prototyping From a Document
    Brian R. Colonna
    Christian Frueh
    UIST 2022: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (2022)
    Preview abstract Video productions commonly start with a script, especially for talking head videos that feature a speaker narrating to the camera. When the source materials come from a written document -- such as a web tutorial, it takes iterations to refine content from a text article to a spoken dialogue, while considering visual compositions in each scene. We propose Doc2Video, a video prototyping approach that converts a document to interactive scripting with a preview of synthetic talking head videos. Our pipeline decomposes a source document into a series of scenes, each automatically creating a synthesized video of a virtual instructor. Designed for a specific domain -- programming cookbooks, we apply visual elements from the source document, such as a keyword, a code snippet or a screenshot, in suitable layouts. Users edit narration sentences, break or combine sections, and modify visuals to prototype a video in our Editing UI. We evaluated our pipeline with public programming cookbooks. Feedback from professional creators shows that our method provided a reasonable starting point to engage them in interactive scripting for a narrated instructional video. View details
    Preview abstract Non-autoregressive generative transformers recently demonstrated impressive image generation performance, and orders of magnitude faster sampling than their autoregressive counterparts. However, optimal parallel sampling from the true joint distribution of visual tokens remains an open challenge. In this paper we introduce Token-Critic, an auxiliary model to guide the sampling of a non-autoregressive generative transformer. Given a masked-and-reconstructed real image, the Token-Critic model is trained to distinguish which visual tokens belong to the original image and which were sampled by the generative transformer. During non-autoregressive iterative sampling, Token-Critic is used to select which tokens to accept and which to reject and resample. Coupled with Token-Critic, a state-of-the-art generative transformer significantly improves its performance, and outperforms recent diffusion models and GANs in terms of the trade-off between generated image quality and diversity, in the challenging class-conditional ImageNet generation. View details
    How to Train Navigation Agents (on a Sample and Compute) Budget
    Erik Wijmans
    Dhruv Batra
    International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2022
    Preview abstract PointGoal Navigation has seen significant recent interest and progress, spurred on by the Habitat platform and associated challenge [1]. In this paper, we study PointGoal Navigation under both a sample budget (75 million frames) and a compute budget (1 GPU for 1 day). We conduct an extensive set of experiments, cumulatively totaling over 50,000 GPU-hours, that let us identify and discuss a number of ostensibly minor but significant design choices – the advantage estimation procedure (a key component in training), visual encoder architecture, and a seemingly minor hyper-parameter change. Overall, these design choices to lead considerable and consistent improvements over the base-lines present in Savva et al. [1]. Under a sample budget, performance for RGB-D agents improves 8 SPL on Gibson (14% relative improvement) and 20 SPL on Matterport3D (38% relative improvement). Under a compute budget, performance for RGB-D agents improves by 19 SPL on Gibson (32% relative improvement) and 35 SPL on Matterport3D (220% relative improvement). We hope our findings and recommendations will make serve to make the community’s experiments more efficient. View details
    VER: Scaling On-Policy RL Leads to the Emergence of Navigation in Embodied Rearrangement
    Erik Wijmans
    Dhruv Batra
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.
    Preview abstract We present Variable Experience Rollout (VER), a technique for efficiently scaling batched on-policy reinforcement learning in heterogenous environments (where different environments take vastly different times to generate rollouts) to many GPUs residing on, potentially, many machines. VER combines the strengths of and blurs the line between synchronous and asynchronous on-policy RL methods (SyncOnRL and AsyncOnRL, respectively). Specifically, it learns from on-policy experience (like SyncOnRL) and has no synchronization points (like AsyncOnRL) enabling high throughput. We find that VER leads to significant and consistent speed-ups across a broad range of embodied navigation and mobile manipulation tasks in photorealistic 3D simulation environments. Specifically, for PointGoal navigation and ObjectGoal navigation in Habitat 1.0, VER is 60-100% faster (1.6-2x speedup) than DD-PPO, the current state of art for distributed SyncOnRL, with similar sample efficiency. For mobile manipulation tasks (open fridge/cabinet, pick/place objects) in Habitat 2.0 VER is 150% faster (2.5x speedup) on 1 GPU and 170% faster (2.7x speedup) on 8 GPUs than DD-PPO. Compared to SampleFactory (the current state-of-the-art AsyncOnRL), VER matches its speed on 1 GPU, and is 70% faster (1.7x speedup) on 8 GPUs with better sample efficiency. We leverage these speed-ups to train chained skills for GeometricGoal rearrangement tasks in the Home Assistant Benchmark (HAB). We find a surprising emergence of navigation in skills that do not ostensible require any navigation. Specifically, the Pick skill involves a robot picking an object from a table. During training the robot was always spawned close to the table and never needed to navigate. However, we find that if base movement is part of the action space, the robot learns to navigate then pick an object in new environments with 50% success, demonstrating surprisingly high out-of-distribution generalization. View details
    Preview abstract Vision Transformer (ViT) is emerging as the state-of-the-art architecture for image recognition. While recent studies suggest that ViTs are more robust than their convolutional counterparts, our experiments find that ViTs trained on ImageNet are overly reliant on local textures and fail to make adequate use of shape information. ViTs thus have difficulties generalizing to out-of-distribution, real-world data. To address this deficiency, we present a simple and effective architecture modification to ViT's input layer by adding discrete tokens produced by a vector-quantized encoder. Different from the standard continuous pixel tokens, discrete tokens are invariant under small perturbations and contain less information individually, which promote ViTs to learn global information that is invariant. Experimental results demonstrate that adding discrete representation on four architecture variants strengthens ViT robustness by up to 12% across seven ImageNet robustness benchmarks while maintaining the performance on ImageNet. View details
    BLT: Bi-directional Layout Transformer for Controllable Layout Generation
    Xiang Kong
    Lu Jiang
    Huiwen Chang
    Han Zhang
    Haifeng Gong
    ECCV (2022)
    Preview abstract Creating visual layouts is a critical step in graphic design. Automatic generation of such layouts is essential for scalable and diverse visual designs. To advance conditional layout generation, we introduce BLT, a bidirectional layout transformer. BLT differs from previous work on transformers in adopting non-autoregressive transformers. In training, BLT learns to predict the masked attributes by attending to surrounding attributes in two directions. During inference, BLT first generates a draft layout from the input and then iteratively refines it into a high-quality layout by masking out low-confident attributes. The masks generated in both training and inference are controlled by a new hierarchical sampling policy. We verify the proposed model on six benchmarks of diverse design tasks. Experimental results demonstrate two benefits compared to the state-of-the-art layout transformer models. First, our model empowers layout transformers to fulfill controllable layout generation. Second, it achieves up to 10x speedup in generating a layout at inference time than the layout transformer baseline. View details
    Preview abstract Non-linear video editing requires composing footage utilizing visual framing and temporal effects, which can be a time-consuming process. Often, editors borrow effects from existing creation and develop personal editing styles. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach that extracts editing styles in a source video and applies the edits to matched footage for video creation. Our Computer Vision based techniques detects framing, content type, playback speed, and lighting of each input video segment. By applying a combination of these features, we demonstrate an effective method that transfers the visual and temporal styles from professionally edited videos to unseen raw footage. Our experiments with real-world input videos received positive feedback from survey participants. View details
    Preview abstract In this paper we address the problem of automatically discovering atomic actions from instructional videos. Instructional videos contain complex activities and are a rich source of information for intelligent agents, such as, autonomous robots or virtual assistants, which can, for example, automatically ‘read’ the steps from an instructional video and execute them. However, videos are rarely annotated with atomic activities, their boundaries or duration. We present an unsupervised approach to learn atomic actions of structured human tasks from a variety of instructional videos. We propose a sequential stochastic autoregressive model for temporal segmentation of videos, which learns to represent and discover the sequential relationship between different atomic actions of the task, and provides automatic and unsupervised self-labeling. View details
    Automatic Instructional Video Creation from a Markdown-Formatted Tutorial
    Nathan Frey
    UIST 2021: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (2021)
    Preview abstract We introduce HowToCut, an automatic approach that converts a Markdown-formatted tutorial into an interactive video that presents the visual instructions with a synthesized voiceover for narration. HowToCut extracts instructional content from a multimedia document that describes a step-by-step procedure. Our method selects and converts text instructions to a voiceover. It makes automatic editing decisions to align the narration with edited visual assets, including step images, videos, and text overlays. We derive our video editing strategies from an analysis of 125 web tutorials and apply Computer Vision techniques to the assets. To enable viewers to interactively navigate the tutorial, HowToCut's conversational UI presents instructions in multiple formats upon user commands. We evaluated our automatically-generated video tutorials through user studies (N=20) and validated the video quality via an online survey (N=93). The evaluation shows that our method was able to effectively create informative and useful instructional videos from a web tutorial document for both reviewing and following. View details
    Preview abstract In this paper we address the problem of automatically discovering atomic actions in unsupervised manner from instructional videos, which are rarely annotated with atomic actions. We present an unsupervised approach to learn atomic actions of structured human tasks from a variety of instructional videos based on a sequential stochastic autoregressive model for temporal segmentation of videos. This learns to represent and discover the sequential relationship between different atomic actions of the task, and which provides automatic and unsupervised self-labeling. View details
    Semantic MapNet: Building Allocentric Semantic Maps and Representations from Egocentric Views
    Vincent Cartillier
    Zhile Ren
    Neha Jain
    Stefan Lee
    Dhruv Batra
    in Proceedings of AAAI 2021, AAAI
    Preview abstract We study the task of semantic mapping – specifically, an embodied agent (a robot or an egocentric AI assistant) is given a tour of a new environment and asked to build an allocentric top-down semantic map (‘what is where?’) from egocentric observations of an RGB-D camera with known pose (via localization sensors). Towards this goal, we present Semantic MapNet (SMNet), which consists of: (1) an Egocentric Visual Encoder that encodes each egocentric RGB-D frame, (2) a Feature Projector that projects egocentric features to appropriate locations on a floor-plan, (3) a Spatial Memory Tensor of size floor-plan length × width × feature-dims that learns to accumulate projected egocentric features, and (4) a Map Decoder that uses the memory tensor to produce semantic top-down maps. SMNet combines the strengths of (known) projective camera geometry and neural representation learning. On the task of semantic mapping in the Matterport3D dataset, SMNet significantly outperforms competitive baselines by 4.01 − 16.81% (absolute) on mean-IoU and 3.81 − 19.69% (absolute) on Boundary-F1 metrics. Moreover, we show how to use the neural episodic memories and spatio-semantic allocentric representations built by SMNet for subsequent tasks in the same space – navigating to objects seen during the tour (‘Find chair’) or answering questions about the space (‘How many chairs did you see in the house?’). Project page:https://vincentcartillier.github.io/smnet.html. Also available as arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.01191 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.01191) View details
    Automatic Generation of Two-Level Hierarchical Tutorials from Instructional Makeup Videos
    Anh Truong
    Maneesh Agrawala
    CHI 2021: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2021)
    Preview abstract We present a multi-modal approach for automatically generating hierarchical tutorials from instructional makeup videos. Our approach is inspired by prior research in cognitive psychology, which suggests that people mentally segment procedural tasks into event hierarchies, where coarse-grained events focus on objects while fine-grained events focus on actions. In the instructional makeup domain, we find that objects correspond to facial parts while fine-grained steps correspond to actions on those facial parts. Given an input instructional makeup video, we apply a set of heuristics that combine computer vision techniques with transcript text analysis to automatically identify the fine-level action steps and group these steps by facial part to form the coarse-level events. We provide a voice-enabled, mixed-media UI to visualize the resulting hierarchy and allow users to efficiently navigate the tutorial (e.g., skip ahead, return to previous steps) at their own pace. Users can navigate the hierarchy at both the facial-part and action-step levels using click-based interactions and voice commands. We demonstrate the effectiveness of segmentation algorithms and the resulting mixed-media UI on a variety of input makeup videos. A user study shows that users prefer following instructional makeup videos in our mixed-media format to the standard video UI and that they find our format much easier to navigate. View details
    Interactive Visual Description of a Web Page for Smart Speakers
    Conversational User Interfaces Workshop, the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2020)
    Preview abstract Smart speakers are becoming ubiquitous for accessing lightweight information using speech. While these devices are powerful for question answering and service operations using voice commands, it is challenging to navigate content of rich formats–including web pages–that are consumed by mainstream computing devices. We conducted a comparative study with 12 participants that suggests and motivates the use of a narrative voice output of a web page as being easier to follow and comprehend than a conventional screen reader. We are developing a tool that automatically narrates web documents based on their visual structures with interactive prompts. We discuss the design challenges for a conversational agent to intelligently select content for a more personalized experience, where we hope to contribute to the CUI workshop and form a discussion for future research. View details
    DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames
    Erik Wijmans
    Abhishek Kadian
    Ari Morcos
    Stefan Lee
    Devi Parikh
    Manolis Savva
    Dhruv Batra
    ICLR (2020)
    Preview abstract We present Decentralized Distributed Proximal Policy Optimization (DD-PPO), a method for distributed reinforcement learning in resource-intensive simulated environments. DD-PPO is distributed (uses multiple machines), decentralized (lacks a centralized server), and synchronous (no computation is ever "stale"), making it conceptually simple and easy to implement. In our experiments on training virtual robots to navigate in Habitat-Sim, DD-PPO exhibits near-linear scaling -- achieving a speedup of 107x on 128 GPUs over a serial implementation. We leverage this scaling to train an agent for 2.5 Billion steps of experience (the equivalent of 80 years of human experience) -- over 6 months of GPU-time training in under 3 days of wall-clock time with 64 GPUs. This massive-scale training not only sets the state of art on Habitat Autonomous Navigation Challenge 2019, but essentially "solves" the task -- near-perfect autonomous navigation in an unseen environment without access to a map, directly from an RGB-D camera and a GPS+Compass sensor. Fortuitously, error vs computation exhibits a power-law-like distribution; thus, 90% of peak performance is obtained relatively early (at 100 million steps) and relatively cheaply (under 1 day with 8 GPUs). Finally, we show that the scene understanding and navigation policies learned can be transferred to other navigation tasks -- the analog of "ImageNet pre-training + task-specific fine-tuning" for embodied AI. Our model outperforms ImageNet pre-trained CNNs on these transfer tasks and can serve as a universal resource (all models and code are publicly available). View details
    Automatic Video Creation From a Web Page
    Zheng Sun
    UIST 2020: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (2020)
    Preview abstract Creating marketing videos from scratch can be challenging, especially when designing for multiple platforms with different viewing criteria. We present URL2Video, an automatic approach that converts a web page into a short video given temporal and visual constraints. URL2Video captures quality materials and design styles extracted from a web page, including fonts, colors, and layouts. Using constraint programming, URL2Video's design engine organizes the visual assets into a sequence of shots and renders to a video with user-specified aspect ratio and duration. Creators can review the video composition, modify constraints, and generate video variation through a user interface. We learned the design process from designers and compared our automatically generated results with their creation through interviews and an online survey. The evaluation shows that URL2Video effectively extracted design elements from a web page and supported designers by bootstrapping the video creation process. View details
    Preview abstract Graphic design is essential for visual communication with layouts being fundamental to composing attractive designs. Layout generation differs from pixel-level image synthesis and is unique in terms of the requirement of mutual relations among the desired components. We propose a method for design layout generation that can satisfy user-specified constraints. The proposed neural design network (NDN) consists of three modules. The first module predicts a graph with complete relations from a graph with user-specified relations. The second module generates a layout from the predicted graph. Finally, the third module fine-tunes the predicted layout. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the generated layouts are visually similar to real design layouts. We also construct real designs based on predicted layouts for a better understanding of the visual quality. Finally, we demonstrate a practical application on layout recommendation. View details
    Preview abstract We propose 4 insights that help to significantly improve the performance of deep learning models that predict surface normals and semantic labels from a single RGB image. These insights are: (1) denoise the ”ground truth” surface normals in the training set to ensure consistency with the semantic labels; (2) concurrently train on a mix of real and synthetic data, instead of pretraining on synthetic and finetuning on real; (3) jointly predict normals and semantics using a shared model, but only backpropagate errors on pixels that have valid training labels; (4) slim down the model and use grayscale instead of color inputs. Despite the simplicity of these steps, we demonstrate consistently improved state of the art results on several datasets, using a model that runs at 12 fps on a standard mobile phone. View details
    Preview abstract We consider the problem of retrieving objects from image data and learning to classify them into meaningful semantic categories with minimal supervision. To that end, we propose a fully differentiable unsupervised deep clustering approach to learn semantic classes in an end-to-end fashion without individual class labeling using only unlabeled object proposals. The key contributions of our work are 1) a kmeans clustering objective where the clusters are learned as parameters of the network and are represented as memory units, and 2) simultaneously building a feature representation, or embedding, while learning to cluster it. This approach shows promising results on two popular computer vision datasets: on CIFAR10 for clustering objects, and on the more complex and challenging Cityscapes dataset for semantically discovering classes which visually correspond to cars, people, and bicycles. Currently, the only supervision provided is segmentation objectness masks, but this method can be extended to use an unsupervised objectness-based object generation mechanism which will make the approach completely unsupervised. View details
    Preview abstract One of the main challenges of social interaction in virtual reality settings is that head-mounted displays occlude a large portion of the face, blocking facial expressions and thereby restricting social engagement cues among users. Hence, auxiliary means of sensing and conveying these expressions are needed. We present an algorithm to automatically infer expressions by analyzing only a partially occluded face while the user is engaged in a virtual reality experience. Specifically, we show that images of the user's eyes captured from an IR gaze-tracking camera within a VR headset are sufficient to infer a select subset of facial expressions without the use of any fixed external camera. Using these inferences, we can generate dynamic avatars in real-time which function as an expressive surrogate for the user. We propose a novel data collection pipeline as well as a novel approach for increasing CNN accuracy via personalization. Our results show a mean accuracy of 74% (F1 of 0.73) among 5 `emotive' expressions and a mean accuracy of 70% (F1 of 0.68) among 10 distinct facial action units, outperforming human raters. View details
    Preview abstract Learning a set of diverse and representative features from a large set of unlabeled data has long been an area of active research. We present a method that separates proposals of potential objects into semantic classes in an unsupervised manner. Our preliminary results show that different object categories emerge and can later be retrieved from test images. We propose a differentiable clustering approach which can be integrated with Deep Neural Networks to learn semantic classes in end-to-fashion without manual class labeling. View details
    Preview abstract The massive growth of sports videos has resulted in a need for automatic generation of sports highlights that are comparable in quality to the hand-edited highlights produced by broadcasters such as ESPN. Unlike previous works that mostly use audio-visual cues derived from the video, we propose an approach that additionally leverages contextual cues derived from the environment that the game is being played in. The contextual cues provide information about the excitement levels in the game, which can be ranked and selected to automatically produce high-quality basketball highlights. We introduce a new dataset of 25 NCAA games along with their play-by-play stats and the ground-truth excitement data for each basket. We explore the informativeness of five different cues derived from the video and from the environment through user studies. Our experiments show that for our study participants, the highlights produced by our system are comparable to the ones produced by ESPN for the same games. View details
    Preview abstract We present a technique that uses images, videos and sensor data taken from first-person point-of-view devices to perform egocentric field-of-view (FOV) localization. We define egocentric FOV localization as capturing the visual information from a person’s field-of-view in a given environment and transferring this information onto a reference corpus of images and videos of the same space, hence determining what a person is attending to. Our method matches images and video taken from the first-person perspective with the reference corpus and refines the results using the first-person’s head orientation information obtained using the device sensors. We demonstrate single and multi-user egocentric FOV localization in different indoor and outdoor environments with applications in augmented reality, event understanding and studying social interactions. View details
    Calibration-Free Rolling Shutter Removal
    Daniel Castro
    International Conference on Computational Photography [Best Paper], IEEE (2012)
    Preview abstract We present a novel algorithm for efficient removal of rolling shutter distortions in uncalibrated streaming videos. Our proposed method is calibration free as it does not need any knowledge of the camera used, nor does it require calibration using specially recorded calibration sequences. Our algorithm can perform rolling shutter removal under varying focal lengths, as in videos from CMOS cameras equipped with an optical zoom. We evaluate our approach across a broad range of cameras and video sequences demonstrating robustness, scaleability, and repeatability. We also conducted a user study, which demonstrates preference for the output of our algorithm over other state-of-the art methods. Our algorithm is computationally efficient, easy to parallelize, and robust to challenging artifacts introduced by various cameras with differing technologies. View details
    Weakly Supervised Learning of Object Segmentations from Web-Scale Video
    Glenn Hartmann
    Judy Hoffman
    David Tsai
    Omid Madani
    James Rehg
    ECCV'12 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Computer Vision - Volume Part I, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg (2012), pp. 198-208
    Preview abstract We propose to learn pixel-level segmentations of objects from weakly labeled (tagged) internet videos. Specifically, given a large collection of raw YouTube content, along with potentially noisy tags, our goal is to automatically generate spatiotemporal masks for each object, such as "dog", without employing any pre-trained object detectors. We formulate this problem as learning weakly supervised classifiers for a set of independent spatio-temporal segments. The object seeds obtained using segment-level classifiers are further refined using graphcuts to generate high-precision object masks. Our results, obtained by training on a dataset of 20,000 YouTube videos weakly tagged into 15 classes, demonstrate automatic extraction of pixel-level object masks. Evaluated against a ground-truthed subset of 50,000 frames with pixel-level annotations, we confirm that our proposed methods can learn good object masks just by watching YouTube. View details
    Preview abstract We present a novel algorithm for automatically applying constrainable, L1-optimal camera paths to generate stabilized videos by removing undesired motions. Our goal is to compute camera paths that are composed of constant, linear and parabolic segments mimicking the camera motions employed by professional cinematographers. To this end, our algorithm is based on a linear programming framework to minimize the first, second, and third derivatives of the resulting camera path. Our method allows for video stabilization beyond the conventional filtering of camera paths that only suppresses high frequency jitter. We incorporate additional constraints on the path of the camera directly in our algorithm, allowing for stabilized and retargeted videos. Our approach accomplishes this without the need of user interaction or costly 3D reconstruction of the scene, and works as a post-process for videos from any camera or from an online source. View details
    Preview abstract We introduce a new algorithm for video retargeting that uses discontinuous seam-carving in both space and time for resizing videos. We propose a novel appearance-based temporal coherence formulation that allows for frame-by-frame processing and results in temporally discontinuous seams, as opposed to geometrically smooth and continuous seams. This formulation optimizes the difference in appearance of the resultant retargeted frame to the optimal temporally coherent one, and allows for carving around fast moving salient regions. Additionally, we generalize the idea of appearance-based coherence to the spatial domain by introducing piece-wise spatial seams. Our spatial coherence measure minimizes the change in gradients during retargeting, which preserves spatial detail better than minimization of color difference alone. We also show that retargeting based on per-frame saliency (gradient-based or feature-based) does not always lead to desirable results and propose a novel automatically computed measure of spatio-temporal saliency. As needed, the user can also augment the saliency by interactive region-brushing. Our retargeting algorithm processes the video sequentially, which allows us to deal with streaming videos. We demonstrate results over a wide range of video examples and evaluate the effectiveness of each component of our algorithm. View details
    Preview abstract We present an efficient and scalable technique for spatio-temporal segmentation of long video sequences using a hierarchical graph-based algorithm. We begin by over-segmenting a volumetric video graph into space-time regions grouped by appearance. We then construct a ``region graph" over the obtained segmentation and iteratively repeat this process over multiple levels to create a tree of spatio-temporal segmentations. This hierarchical approach generates high quality segmentations which are temporally coherent with stable region boundaries. Additionally, the resulting segmentation hierarchy allows subsequent applications to choose from varying levels of granularity. We further improve segmentation quality by using dense optical flow when constructing the initial graph. We also propose two novel approaches to improve the scalability of our technique: (a) a parallel out-of-core algorithm that can process volumes much larger than an in-core algorithm, and (b) a clip-based processing algorithm that divides the video into overlapping clips in time, and segments them successively while enforcing consistency. We can segment video shots as long as 40 seconds without compromising quality, and even support a streaming mode for arbitrarily long videos, albeit without the ability to process them hierarchically. View details
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