Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. Real-time RGB-D camera relocalization 

    December 23, 2013 | Ben Glocker, Shahram Izadi, Jamie Shotton, and Antonio Criminisi

    We introduce an efficient camera relocalization approach which can be easily integrated into real-time 3D reconstruction methods, such as KinectFusion. Our approach makes use of compact encoding of whole image frames which enables both online harvesting of keyframes in tracking mode, and fast retrieval of…

  2. Decision Jungles: Compact and Rich Models for Classification 

    December 5, 2013

    Randomized decision trees and forests have a rich history in machine learning and have seen considerable success in application, perhaps particularly so for computer vision. However, they face a fundamental limitation: given enough data, the number of nodes in decision trees will grow exponentially with…

  3. Finding Actors and Actions in Movies 

    December 1, 2013

    We address the problem of learning a joint model of actors and actions in movies using weak supervision provided by scripts. Specifically, we extract actor/action pairs from the script and use them as constraints in a discriminative clustering framework. The corresponding optimization problem is formulated…

  4. Efficient Human Pose Estimation from Single Depth Images 

    December 1, 2013

    We describe two new approaches to human pose estimation. Both can quickly and accurately predict the 3D positions of body joints from a single depth image without using any temporal information. The key to both approaches is the use of a large, realistic, and highly…

  5. Behaviorist Agent Architecture 

    November 16, 2013 | Paulo Salem and Ana C. V. de Melo

    In this article we propose an agent architecture based on Behavior Analysis, a behaviorist psychology theory. The main characteristic of this theory is the description of complex behavior exclusively in terms of stimulation and behavioral responses. That is to say, in terms of observable and…

  6. Neighbourhood approximation using randomized forests [Best Paper Award] 

    October 1, 2013 | Ender Konukoglu, Ben Glocker, D. Zikic, and Antonio Criminisi

    Leveraging available annotated data is an essential component of many modern methods for medical image analysis. In particular, approaches making use of the “neighbourhood” structure between images for this purpose have shown significant potential. Such techniques achieve high accuracy in analysing an image by propagating…

  7. WESD–Weighted Spectral Distance for Measuring Shape Dissimilarity 

    September 1, 2013 | Ender Konukoglu, Ben Glocker, Antonio Criminisi, and K. M. Pohl

    This paper presents a new distance for measuring shape dissimilarity between objects. Recent publications introduced the use of eigenvalues of the Laplace operator as compact shape descriptors. Here, we revisit the eigenvalues to define a proper distance, called Weighted Spectral Distance (WESD), for quantifying shape…

  8. The any-combiner for multi-agent target classification 

    July 8, 2013 | Nathan Parrish and Ashley J. Llorens

    The any-combiner is a classifier combination approach for target classification problems in which the target class can be naturally decomposed into multiple subclasses. This kind of classification problem can often occur in sensor-based system applications, such as biometric user verification, biosurveillance or underwater mine detection,…