Combining Texture and Shape Cues for Object Recognition with Minimal Supervision

We present a novel approach to object classification and detection which requires minimal supervision and which combines visual texture cues and shape information learned from freely available unlabeled web search results. The explosion of visual data on the web can potentially make visual examples of almost any object easily accessible via web search. Previous unsupervised methods have utilized either large scale sources of texture cues from the web, or shape information from data such as crowdsourced CAD models. We propose a two-stream deep learning framework that combines these cues, with one stream learning visual texture cues from image search data, and the other stream learning rich shape information from 3D CAD models. To perform classification or detection for a novel image, the predictions of the two streams are combined using a late fusion scheme. We present experiments and visualizations for both tasks on the standard benchmark PASCAL VOC 2007 to demonstrate that texture and shape provide complementary information in our model. Our method outperforms previous web image based models, 3D CAD model based approaches, and weakly supervised models.