Structured Learning and Prediction in Computer Vision introduces the reader to the most popular classes of structured models in computer vision.

An overview of recent work in the field of structured prediction, the building of predictive machine learning models for interrelated and dependent outputs. The goal of structured prediction is to build machine learning models that predict relational information that itself has structure, such as being composed of multiple interrelated parts. These models, which reflect prior knowledge, task-specific relations, and constraints, are used in fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and computational biology. They can carry out such tasks as predicting a natural language sentence, or segmenting an image into meaningful components. These models are expressive and powerful, but exact computation is often intractable. A broad research effort in recent years has aimed at designing structured prediction models and approximate inference and learning procedures that are computationally efficient. This volume offers an overview of this recent research in order to make the work accessible to a broader research community. The chapters, by leading researchers in the field, cover a range of topics, including research trends, the linear programming relaxation approach, innovations in probabilistic modeling, recent theoretical progress, and resource-aware learning. Contributors Jonas Behr, Yutian Chen, Fernando De La Torre, Justin Domke, Peter V. Gehler, Andrew E. Gelfand, Sébastien Giguère, Amir Globerson, Fred A. Hamprecht, Minh Hoai, Tommi Jaakkola, Jeremy Jancsary, Joseph Keshet, Marius Kloft, Vladimir Kolmogorov, Christoph H. Lampert, François Laviolette, Xinghua Lou, Mario Marchand, André F. T. Martins, Ofer Meshi, Sebastian Nowozin, George Papandreou, Daniel Průša, Gunnar Rätsch, Amélie Rolland, Bogdan Savchynskyy, Stefan Schmidt, Thomas Schoenemann, Gabriele Schweikert, Ben Taskar, Sinisa Todorovic, Max Welling, David Weiss, Thomáš Werner, Alan Yuille, Stanislav Živný

Few developments have influenced the field of computer vision in the last decade more than the introduction of statistical machine learning techniques. Particularly kernel-based classifiers, such as the support vector machine, have become indispensable tools, providing a unified framework for solving a wide range of image-related prediction tasks, including face recognition, object detection and action classification. By emphasizing the geometric intuition that all kernel methods rely on, Kernel Methods in Computer Vision provides an introduction to kernel-based machine learning techniques accessible to a wide audience including students, researchers and practitioners alike, without sacrificing mathematical correctness. It covers not only support vector machines but also less known techniques for kernel-based regression, outlier detection, clustering and dimensionality reduction. Additionally, it offers an outlook on recent developments in kernel methods that have not yet made it into the regular textbooks: structured prediction, dependency estimation and learning of the kernel function. Each topic is illustrated with examples of successful application in the computer vision literature, making Kernel Methods in Computer Vision a useful guide not only for those wanting to understand the working principles of kernel methods, but also for anyone wanting to apply them to real-life problems.

Probabilistic Graphical Models for Computer Vision introduces probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) for computer vision problems and teaches how to develop the PGM model from training data. This book discusses PGMs and their significance in the context of solving computer vision problems, giving the basic concepts, definitions and properties. It also provides a comprehensive introduction to well-established theories for different types of PGMs, including both directed and undirected PGMs, such as Bayesian Networks, Markov Networks and their variants.

The seven-volume set comprising LNCS volumes 8689-8695 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV 2014, held in Zurich, Switzerland, in September 2014. The 363 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 1444 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on tracking and activity recognition; recognition; learning and inference; structure from motion and feature matching; computational photography and low-level vision; vision; segmentation and saliency; context and 3D scenes; motion and 3D scene analysis; and poster sessions.

The goal of this book is to address the use of several important machine learning techniques into computer vision applications. An innovative combination of computer vision and machine learning techniques has the promise of advancing the field of computer vision, which contributes to better understanding of complex real-world applications. The effective usage of machine learning technology in real-world computer vision problems requires understanding the domain of application, abstraction of a learning problem from a given computer vision task, and the selection of appropriate representations for the learnable (input) and learned (internal) entities of the system. In this book, we address all these important aspects from a new perspective: that the key element in the current computer revolution is the use of machine learning to capture the variations in visual appearance, rather than having the designer of the model accomplish this. As a bonus, models learned from large datasets are likely to be more robust and more realistic than the brittle all-design models.

A major part of natural language processing now depends on the use of text data to build linguistic analyzers. We consider statistical, computational approaches to modeling linguistic structure. We seek to unify across many approaches and many kinds of linguistic structures. Assuming a basic understanding of natural language processing and/or machine learning, we seek to bridge the gap between the two fields. Approaches to decoding (i.e., carrying out linguistic structure prediction) and supervised and unsupervised learning of models that predict discrete structures as outputs are the focus. We also survey natural language processing problems to which these methods are being applied, and we address related topics in probabilistic inference, optimization, and experimental methodology. Table of Contents: Representations and Linguistic Data / Decoding: Making Predictions / Learning Structure from Annotated Data / Learning Structure from Incomplete Data / Beyond Decoding: Inference