NIPS 2011 Domain Adaptation Workshop: Cool world: domain adaptation of virtual and real worlds....

Domain Adaptation Workshop: Theory and Application at NIPS 2011 Invited Talk: Cool world: domain adaptation of virtual and real worlds for human detection using active learning by Antonio M. L´opez Abstract: Image based human detection is of paramount interest for different applications. The most promising human detectors rely on discriminatively learnt classifiers, i.e., trained with labeled samples. However, labelling is a manual intensive task, especially in cases like human detection where it is necessary to provide at least bounding boxes framing the humans for training. To overcome such problem, in Marin et al. we have proposed the use of a virtual world where the labels of the different objects are obtained automatically. This means that the human models (classifiers) are learnt using the appearance of realistic computer graphics. Later, these models are used for human detection in images of the real world. The results of this technique are surprisingly good. However, these are not always as good as the classical approach of training and testing with data coming from the same camera and the same type of scenario. Accordingly, in Vazquez et al. we cast the problem as one of supervised domain adaptation. In doing so, we assume that a small amount of manually labeled samples from real-world images is required. To collect these labeled samples we use an active learning technique. Thus, ultimately our human model is learnt by the combination of virtual- and real-world labeled samples which, to the best of our knowledge, was not done before. Here, we term such combined space cool world. In this extended abstract we summarize our proposal, and include quantitative results from Vazquez et al. showing its validity.