Poster
Pose-Sensitive Embedding by Nonlinear NCA Regression
Graham W Taylor · Rob Fergus · George Williams · Ian Spiro · Christoph Bregler

Tue Dec 7th 12:00 -- 12:00 AM @ None #None
in Poster Session »

This paper tackles the complex problem of visually matching people in similar pose but with different clothes, background, and other appearance changes. We achieve this with a novel method for learning a nonlinear embedding based on several extensions to the Neighborhood Component Analysis (NCA) framework. Our method is convolutional, enabling it to scale to realistically-sized images. By cheaply labeling the head and hands in large video databases through Amazon Mechanical Turk (a crowd-sourcing service), we can use the task of localizing the head and hands as a proxy for determining body pose. We apply our method to challenging real-world data and show that it can generalize beyond hand localization to infer a more general notion of body pose. We evaluate our method quantitatively against other embedding methods. We also demonstrate that real-world performance can be improved through the use of synthetic data.

Author Information

Graham W Taylor (University of Guelph)
Rob Fergus (Facebook AI Research / NYU)

Rob Fergus is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He received a Masters in Electrical Engineering with Prof. Pietro Perona at Caltech, before completing a PhD with Prof. Andrew Zisserman at the University of Oxford in 2005. Before coming to NYU, he spent two years as a post-doc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT, working with Prof. William Freeman. He has received several awards including a CVPR best paper prize, a Sloan Fellowship & NSF Career award and the IEEE Longuet-Higgins prize.

George Williams (New York University)
Ian Spiro (New York University)
Christoph Bregler (New York University)

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