Description
1 Short answer questions [25 points]
1. When performing interest point detection with the Laplacian of Gaussian, how would the results differ
if we were to (a) take any positions that are local maxima in scale-space, or (b) take any positions whose
filter response exceeds a threshold? Specifically, what is the impact on repeatability or distinctiveness
of the resulting interest points?
2. What is an “inlier” when using RANSAC to solve for the epipolar lines for stereo with uncalibrated
views, and how do we compute those inliers?
3. Name and briefly explain two possible failure modes for dense stereo matching, where points are
matched using local appearance and correlation search within a window.
4. What exactly does the value recorded in a single dimension of a SIFT keypoint descriptor signify?
5. If using SIFT with the Generalized Hough Transform to perform recognition of an object instance,
what is the dimensionality of the Hough parameter space? Explain your answer.
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2 Programming problem [75 points]
For this problem, you will implement a video search method to retrieve relevant frames from a video based
on the features in a query region selected from some frame. We are providing image data and some starter
code for this assignment.
Provided data
You can access pre–computed SIFT features here:
https://filebox.ece.vt.edu/~F13ECE5554/resources/PS4_material/PS4SIFT.zip.
The associated images are stored here:
https://filebox.ece.vt.edu/~F13ECE5554/resources/PS4_material/PS4Frames.zip.
Please note that the data takes about 6GB. Each .mat file in the provided SIFT data corresponds to a single image, and contains the following variables, where n is the number of detected SIFT features in that image:
descriptors nx128 double // the SIFT vectors as rows
imname 1×57 char // name of the image file that goes with this data
numfeats 1×1 double // number of detected features
orients nx1 double // the orientations of the patches
positions nx2 double // the positions of the patch centers
scales nx1 double // the scales of the patches
Provided code
The following are the provided code files. You are not required to use any of these functions, but you will
probably find them helpful. You can access the code from here:
Matlab: https://filebox.ece.vt.edu/~F15ECE5554ECE4984/resources/PS4_material/PS4CodeMatlab.
zip
• loadDataExample.m: Run this first and make sure you understand the data format. It is a script that
shows a loop of data files, and how to access each descriptor. It also shows how to use some of the
other functions below.
• displaySIFTPatches.m: given SIFT descriptor info, it draws the patches on top of an image
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• getPatchFromSIFTParameters.m: given SIFT descriptor info, it extracts the image patch itself and
returns as a single image
• selectRegion.m: given an image and list of feature positions, it allows a user to draw a polygon
showing a region of interest, and then returns the indices within the list of positions that fell within
the polygon.
• dist2.m: a fast implementation of computing pairwise distances between two matrices for which each
row is a data point
• kmeansML.m: a faster k-means implementation that takes the data points as columns.
Python: https://filebox.ece.vt.edu/~F15ECE5554ECE4984/resources/PS4_material/PS4CodePython.
zip
• loadDataExample.py (ipynb): Run this first and make sure you understand the data format. It is
a script that shows a loop of data files, and how to access each descriptor. It also shows how to use
some of the other functions below. You can also run the ipyhon notebook version code.
• displaySIFTPatches.py: given SIFT descriptor info, it draws the patches on top of an image
• getPatchFromSIFTParameters.py: given SIFT descriptor info, it extracts the image patch itself and
returns as a single image
• selectRegion.py: given an image and list of feature positions, it allows a user to draw a polygon
showing a region of interest, and then returns the indices within the list of positions that fell within
the polygon.
• dist2.py: a fast implementation of computing pairwise distances between two matrices for which each
row is a data point
What to implement and discuss in the writeup
Write one script for each of the following (along with any helper functions you find useful), and in your pdf
writeup report on the results, explain, and show images where appropriate.
1. Raw descriptor matching [15 pts]: Allow a user to select a region of interest (see provided
selectRegion.m(py)) in one frame, and then match descriptors in that region to descriptors in the
second image based on Euclidean distance in SIFT space. Display the selected region of interest in
the first image (a polygon), and the matched features in the second image, something like the below
example. Use the two images and associated features in the provided file twoFrameData.mat (in the
gzip file) to demonstrate. Note, no visual vocabulary should be used for this one. Name your script
rawDescriptorMatches.m(py)
2. Visualizing the vocabulary [20 pts]: Build a visual vocabulary. Display example image patches
associated with two of the visual words. Choose two words that are distinct to illustrate what the different words are capturing, and display enough patch examples so the word content is evident (e.g., say
25 patches per word displayed). See provided helper function getPatchFromSIFTParameters.m(py).
Explain what you see. Name your script visualizeVocabulary.m(py)
3. Full frame queries [20 pts]: After testing your code for bag-of-words visual search, choose 3 different
frames from the entire video dataset to serve as queries. Display the M=5 most similar frames to each
of these queries (in rank order) based on the normalized scalar product between their bag of words
histograms. Explain the results. Name your script fullFrameQueries.m(py)
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4. Region queries [20 pts]: Select your favorite query regions from within 4 frames (which may be
different than those used above) to demonstrate the retrieved frames when only a portion of the SIFT
descriptors are used to form a bag of words. Try to include example(s) where the same object is
found in the most similar M frames but amidst different objects or backgrounds, and also include a
failure case. Explain the results, including possible reasons for the failure cases. Name your script
regionQueries.m(py)
Tips: overview of framework requirements
The basic framework will require these components:
• Compute nearest raw SIFT descriptors. Use the Euclidean distance between SIFT descriptors to
determine which are nearest among two images’ descriptors. That is, “match” features from one image
to the other, without quantizing to visual words.
• Form a visual vocabulary. Cluster a large, representative random sample of SIFT descriptors from
some portion of the frames using k-means. Let the k centers be the visual words. The value of k
is a free parameter; for this data something like k=1500 should work, but feel free to play with this
parameter [For Matlab, see Matlab’s kmeans function, or provided kmeansML.m code. For Python, see
kmeans function in sklearn, scipy, opencv etc.]. Note: You may run out of memory if you use
all the provided SIFT descriptors to build the vocabulary.
• Map a raw SIFT descriptor to its visual word. The raw descriptor is assigned to the nearest visual
word. [see provided dist2.m(py) code for fast distance computations]
• Map an image’s features into its bag-of-words histogram. The histogram for image Ij is a k-dimensional
vector:
F(Ij ) = [freq1,j , freq2,j , …, freqk,j ]
where each entry freqi,j counts the number of occurrences of the i-th visual word in that image, and
k is the number of total words in the vocabulary. In other words, a single image’s list of n SIFT
descriptors yields a k-dimensional bag of words histogram.
• Compute similarity scores. Compare two bag-of-words histograms using the normalized scalar product:
S(Ii
, Ij ) = F(Ii) · F(Ij )
kF(Ii)kkF(Ij )k
=
1
kF(Ii)kkF(Ij )k
X
k
m=1
freqm,ifreqm,j
where S() is the similarity score. kF(Ii)k is the L2 norm of F(Ii).
• Sort the similarity scores between a query histogram and the histograms associated with the rest of
the images in the video. Pull up the images associated with the M most similar examples.
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• Form a query from a region within a frame. Select a polygonal region interactively with the mouse,
and compute a bag of words histogram from only the SIFT descriptors that fall within that region.
You may weight it with tf-idf. [see provided selectRegion.m(py) code]
3 OPTIONAL: Extra credit (up to 10 points each, max 20 points
total)
1. Stop list and tf-idf. Implement a stop list to ignore very common words, and apply tf-idf weighting
to the bags of words. Discuss and create an experiment to illustrate the impact on your results.
2. Spatial verification. Implement a spatial consistency check to post-process and re-rank the shortlist
produced based on the normalized scalar product scores. Demonstrate a query example where this
improves the results.
This assignment is adapted from PS4 of Kristen Grauman’s CS 376: Computer Vision at UT Austin.
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