Fast Pose Estimation with Parameter Sensitive Hashing

Example-based methods are effective for parameter estimation problems when the underlying system is simple or the dimensionality of the input is low. For complex and high-dimensional problems such as pose estimation, the number of required examples and the computational complexity rapidly becme prohibitively high. We introduce a new algorithm that learns a set of hashing functions that efficiently index examples relevant to a particular estimation task. Our algorithm extends a recently developed method for locality-sensitive hashing, which finds approximate neighbors in time sublinear in the number of examples. This method depends critically on the choice of hash functions; we show how to find the set of hash functions that are optimally relevant to a particular estimation problem. Experiments demonstrate that the resulting algorithm, which we call Parameter-Sensitive Hashing, can rapidly and accurately estimate the articulated pose of human figures from a large database of example images.

Interaction and Intelligent Behavior

We introduce basic behaviors as primitives for control and learning in situated, embodied agents interacting in complex domains. We propose methods for selecting, formally specifying, algorithmically implementing, empirically evaluating, and combining behaviors from a basic set. We also introduce a general methodology for automatically constructing higher--level behaviors by learning to select from this set. Based on a formulation of reinforcement learning using conditions, behaviors, and shaped reinforcement, out approach makes behavior selection learnable in noisy, uncertain environments with stochastic dynamics. All described ideas are validated with groups of up to 20 mobile robots performing safe--wandering, following, aggregation, dispersion, homing, flocking, foraging, and learning to forage.

Alignment by Maximization of Mutual Information

A new information-theoretic approach is presented for finding the pose of an object in an image. The technique does not require information about the surface properties of the object, besides its shape, and is robust with respect to variations of illumination. In our derivation, few assumptions are made about the nature of the imaging process. As a result the algorithms are quite general and can foreseeably be used in a wide variety of imaging situations. Experiments are presented that demonstrate the approach registering magnetic resonance (MR) images with computed tomography (CT) images, aligning a complex 3D object model to real scenes including clutter and occlusion, tracking a human head in a video sequence and aligning a view-based 2D object model to real images. The method is based on a formulation of the mutual information between the model and the image called EMMA. As applied here the technique is intensity-based, rather than feature-based. It works well in domains where edge or gradient-magnitude based methods have difficulty, yet it is more robust than traditional correlation. Additionally, it has an efficient implementation that is based on stochastic approximation. Finally, we will describe a number of additional real-world applications that can be solved efficiently and reliably using EMMA. EMMA can be used in machine learning to find maximally informative projections of high-dimensional data. EMMA can also be used to detect and correct corruption in magnetic resonance images (MRI).