Labeling, discovering, and detecting objects in images

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Russell, Bryan Christopher, 1979-
Other Authors: William T. Freeman.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2008
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/43057
_version_ 1826202583001202688
author Russell, Bryan Christopher, 1979-
author2 William T. Freeman.
author_facet William T. Freeman.
Russell, Bryan Christopher, 1979-
author_sort Russell, Bryan Christopher, 1979-
collection MIT
description Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.
first_indexed 2024-09-23T12:09:56Z
format Thesis
id mit-1721.1/43057
institution Massachusetts Institute of Technology
language eng
last_indexed 2024-09-23T12:09:56Z
publishDate 2008
publisher Massachusetts Institute of Technology
record_format dspace
spelling mit-1721.1/430572019-04-12T09:25:38Z Labeling, discovering, and detecting objects in images Russell, Bryan Christopher, 1979- William T. Freeman. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-138). Recognizing the many objects that comprise our visual world is a difficult task. Confounding factors, such as intra-class object variation, clutter, pose, lighting, dealing with never-before seen objects, scale, and lack of visual experience often fool existing recognition systems. In this thesis, we explore three issues that address a few of these factors: the importance of labeled image databases for recognition, the ability to discover object categories from simply looking at many images, and the use of large labeled image databases to efficiently detect objects embedded in scenes. For each of the issues above, we will need to cope with large collections of images. We begin by introducing LabelMe, a large labeled image database collected from users via a web annotation tool. The users of the annotation tool provided information about the identity, location, and extent of objects in images. Through this effort, we have collected about 160,000 images and 200,000 object labels to date. We show that the database spans more object categories and scenes and offers a wider range of appearance variation than most other labeled databases for object recognition. We also provide four useful extensions of the database: (i) resolving synonym ambiguities that arise in the object labels, (ii) recovering object-part relationships, (iii) extracting a depth ordering of the labeled objects in an image, and (iv) providing a semi-automatic process for the fast labeling of images. We then seek to learn models of objects in the extreme case when no supervision is provided. We draw inspiration from the success of unsupervised topic discovery in text. We apply the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model of Blei et al. to unlabeled images to automatically discover object categories. To achieve this, we employ the visual words representation of images, which is analogous to the words in text. (cont) We show that our unsupervised model achieves comparable classification performance to a model trained with supervision on an unseen image set depicting several object classes. We also successfully localize the discovered object classes in images. While the image representation used for the object discovery process is simple to compute and can distinguish between different object categories, it does not capture explicit spatial information about regions in different parts of the image. We describe a procedure for combining image segmentation with the object discovery process to by Bryan Christopher Russell. Ph.D. 2008-11-07T18:57:14Z 2008-11-07T18:57:14Z 2008 2008 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/43057 243866111 eng M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 138 p. application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Russell, Bryan Christopher, 1979-
Labeling, discovering, and detecting objects in images
title Labeling, discovering, and detecting objects in images
title_full Labeling, discovering, and detecting objects in images
title_fullStr Labeling, discovering, and detecting objects in images
title_full_unstemmed Labeling, discovering, and detecting objects in images
title_short Labeling, discovering, and detecting objects in images
title_sort labeling discovering and detecting objects in images
topic Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/43057
work_keys_str_mv AT russellbryanchristopher1979 labelingdiscoveringanddetectingobjectsinimages