[4eyes] Computer vision talk: "Perceptual Annotation: Measuring Human Vision to Improve Computer Vision"

[Victor Fragoso]

Speaker: Dr. Walter Scheirer
Website: http://www.wjscheirer.com/
When: Tuesday, December 9, 2014 | 11:00am 
Location: Harold Frank Hall, Room 4164 (ECE conf. room)
Title: Perceptual Annotation: Measuring Human Vision to Improve Computer Vision

Abstract: 
For many problems in computer vision, human learners are considerably better than machines. Humans possess highly accurate internal recognition and learning mechanisms that are not yet understood, and they frequently have access to more extensive training data through a lifetime of unbiased experience with the visual world. In this talk, I will propose the use of visual psychophysics to directly leverage the abilities of human subjects to build better machine learning systems. First, I will describe an advanced online psychometric testing platform to make new kinds of annotation data available for learning. Second, I will develop a technique for harnessing these new kinds of information - "perceptual annotations" - for support vector machines. A key intuition for this approach is that while it may remain infeasible to dramatically increase the amount of data and high-quality labels available for the training of a given system, measuring the exemplar-by-exemplar difficulty and pattern of errors of human annotators can provide important information for regularizing the solution of the system at hand. A case study for the problem of unconstrained face detection highlights this observation: the approach yields state-of-the-art results on the challenging FDDB data set.

Bio:
Walter J. Scheirer, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, with affiliations in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Dept. of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Center for Brain Science. He is also an Assistant Professor Adjoint at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. Previously, he was the director of research & development at Securics, Inc., an early stage company producing innovative computer vision-based solutions. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado and his M.S. and B.A. degrees from Lehigh University. Dr. Scheirer has extensive experience in the areas of computer vision and human biometrics, with an emphasis on advanced learning techniques. His overarching research interest is the fundamental problem of recognition, including the representations and algorithms supporting solutions to it.