Christian Walder

Research Scientist

Alumni

Empirical Inference

Publications

10 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2010

Markerless tracking of Dynamic 3D Scans of Faces

Walder, C., Breidt, M., Bülthoff, H., Schölkopf, B., Curio, C.

In Dynamic Faces: Insights from Experiments and Computation, pages: 255-276, (Editors: Curio, C., Bülthoff, H. H. and Giese, M. A.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, December 2010 (inbook)

Web [BibTex]

2010

Walder, C., Breidt, M., Bülthoff, H., Schölkopf, B., Curio, C. Markerless tracking of Dynamic 3D Scans of Faces In Dynamic Faces: Insights from Experiments and Computation, pages: 255-276, (Editors: Curio, C., Bülthoff, H. H. and Giese, M. A.), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, December 2010 (inbook)

Web [BibTex]

2009

Markerless 3D Face Tracking (DAGM 2009)

Walder, C., Breidt, M., Bülthoff, H., Schölkopf, B., Curio, C.

In Pattern Recognition, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 5748 , pages: 41-50, (Editors: J Denzler and G Notni and H Süsse), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 31st Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition (DAGM), September 2009 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a novel algorithm for the markerless tracking of deforming surfaces such as faces. We acquire a sequence of 3D scans along with color images at 40Hz. The data is then represented by implicit surface and color functions, using a novel partition-of-unity type method of efficiently combining local regressors using nearest neighbor searches. Both these functions act on the 4D space of 3D plus time, and use temporal information to handle the noise in individual scans. After interactive registration of a template mesh to the first frame, it is then automatically deformed to track the scanned surface, using the variation of both shape and color as features in a dynamic energy minimization problem. Our prototype system yields high-quality animated 3D models in correspondence, at a rate of approximately twenty seconds per timestep. Tracking results for faces and other objects are presented.

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

2009

Walder, C., Breidt, M., Bülthoff, H., Schölkopf, B., Curio, C. Markerless 3D Face Tracking (DAGM 2009) In Pattern Recognition, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 5748 , pages: 41-50, (Editors: J Denzler and G Notni and H Süsse), Springer, Berlin, Germany, 31st Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition (DAGM), September 2009 (inproceedings)

PDF Web DOI [BibTex]

Diffeomorphic Dimensionality Reduction

Walder, C., Schölkopf, B.

In Advances in neural information processing systems 21, pages: 1713-1720, (Editors: D Koller and D Schuurmans and Y Bengio and L Bottou), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), June 2009 (inproceedings)

Abstract

This paper introduces a new approach to constructing meaningful lower dimensional representations of sets of data points. We argue that constraining the mapping between the high and low dimensional spaces to be a diffeomorphism is a natural way of ensuring that pairwise distances are approximately preserved. Accordingly we develop an algorithm which diffeomorphically maps the data near to a lower dimensional subspace and then projects onto that subspace. The problem of solving for the mapping is transformed into one of solving for an Eulerian flow field which we compute using ideas from kernel methods. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on various real world data sets.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Walder, C., Schölkopf, B. Diffeomorphic Dimensionality Reduction In Advances in neural information processing systems 21, pages: 1713-1720, (Editors: D Koller and D Schuurmans and Y Bengio and L Bottou), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, 22nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), June 2009 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

2008

Learning with Transformation Invariant Kernels

Walder, C., Chapelle, O.

In Advances in neural information processing systems 20, pages: 1561-1568, (Editors: Platt, J. C., D. Koller, Y. Singer, S. Roweis), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-First Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), September 2008 (inproceedings)

Abstract

This paper considers kernels invariant to translation, rotation and dilation. We show that no non-trivial positive definite (p.d.) kernels exist which are radial and dilation invariant, only conditionally positive definite (c.p.d.) ones. Accordingly, we discuss the c.p.d. case and provide some novel analysis, including an elementary derivation of a c.p.d. representer theorem. On the practical side, we give a support vector machine (s.v.m.) algorithm for arbitrary c.p.d. kernels. For the thinplate kernel this leads to a classifier with only one parameter (the amount of regularisation), which we demonstrate to be as effective as an s.v.m. with the Gaussian kernel, even though the Gaussian involves a second parameter (the length scale).

PDF Web [BibTex]

2008

Walder, C., Chapelle, O. Learning with Transformation Invariant Kernels In Advances in neural information processing systems 20, pages: 1561-1568, (Editors: Platt, J. C., D. Koller, Y. Singer, S. Roweis), Curran, Red Hook, NY, USA, Twenty-First Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), September 2008 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Sparse Multiscale Gaussian Process Regression

Walder, C., Kim, K., Schölkopf, B.

In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 1112-1119, (Editors: WW Cohen and A McCallum and S Roweis), ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, ICML, July 2008 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Most existing sparse Gaussian process (g.p.) models seek computational advantages by basing their computations on a set of m basis functions that are the covariance function of the g.p. with one of its two inputs fixed. We generalise this for the case of Gaussian covariance function, by basing our computations on m Gaussian basis functions with arbitrary diagonal covariance matrices (or length scales). For a fixed number of basis functions and any given criteria, this additional flexibility permits approximations no worse and typically better than was previously possible. We perform gradient based optimisation of the marginal likelihood, which costs O(m2n) time where n is the number of data points, and compare the method to various other sparse g.p. methods. Although we focus on g.p. regression, the central idea is applicable to all kernel based algorithms, and we also provide some results for the support vector machine (s.v.m.) and kernel ridge regression (k.r.r.). Our approach outperforms the other methods, particularly for the case of very few basis functions, i.e. a very high sparsity ratio.

PDF PDF DOI [BibTex]

Walder, C., Kim, K., Schölkopf, B. Sparse Multiscale Gaussian Process Regression In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 1112-1119, (Editors: WW Cohen and A McCallum and S Roweis), ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, ICML, July 2008 (inproceedings)

PDF PDF DOI [BibTex]

2007

Learning with Transformation Invariant Kernels

Walder, C., Chapelle, O.

(165), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, September 2007 (techreport)

Abstract

Abstract. This paper considers kernels invariant to translation, rotation and dilation. We show that no non-trivial positive definite (p.d.) kernels exist which are radial and dilation invariant, only conditionally positive definite (c.p.d.) ones. Accordingly, we discuss the c.p.d. case and provide some novel analysis, including an elementary derivation of a c.p.d. representer theorem. On the practical side, we give a support vector machine (s.v.m.) algorithm for arbitrary c.p.d. kernels. For the thin-plate kernel this leads to a classifier with only one parameter (the amount of regularisation), which we demonstrate to be as effective as an s.v.m. with the Gaussian kernel, even though the Gaussian involves a second parameter (the length scale).

PDF [BibTex]

2007

Walder, C., Chapelle, O. Learning with Transformation Invariant Kernels (165), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, September 2007 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

Implicit Surfaces with Globally Regularised and Compactly Supported Basis Functions

Walder, C., Schölkopf, B., Chapelle, O.

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19, pages: 273-280, (Editors: B Schölkopf and J Platt and T Hofmann), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 20th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), September 2007 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We consider the problem of constructing a function whose zero set is to represent a surface, given sample points with surface normal vectors. The contributions include a novel means of regularising multi-scale compactly supported basis functions that leads to the desirable properties previously only associated with fully supported bases, and show equivalence to a Gaussian process with modified covariance function. We also provide a regularisation framework for simpler and more direct treatment of surface normals, along with a corresponding generalisation of the representer theorem. We demonstrate the techniques on 3D problems of up to 14 million data points, as well as 4D time series data.

PDF Web [BibTex]

Walder, C., Schölkopf, B., Chapelle, O. Implicit Surfaces with Globally Regularised and Compactly Supported Basis Functions In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19, pages: 273-280, (Editors: B Schölkopf and J Platt and T Hofmann), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 20th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), September 2007 (inproceedings)

PDF Web [BibTex]

Sparse Multiscale Gaussian Process Regression

Walder, C., Kim, K., Schölkopf, B.

(162), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, August 2007 (techreport)

Abstract

Most existing sparse Gaussian process (g.p.) models seek computational advantages by basing their computations on a set of m basis functions that are the covariance function of the g.p. with one of its two inputs fixed. We generalise this for the case of Gaussian covariance function, by basing our computations on m Gaussian basis functions with arbitrary diagonal covariance matrices (or length scales). For a fixed number of basis functions and any given criteria, this additional flexibility permits approximations no worse and typically better than was previously possible. Although we focus on g.p. regression, the central idea is applicable to all kernel based algorithms, such as the support vector machine. We perform gradient based optimisation of the marginal likelihood, which costs O(m2n) time where n is the number of data points, and compare the method to various other sparse g.p. methods. Our approach outperforms the other methods, particularly for the case of very few basis functions, i.e. a very high sparsity ratio.

PDF [BibTex]

Walder, C., Kim, K., Schölkopf, B. Sparse Multiscale Gaussian Process Regression (162), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, August 2007 (techreport)

PDF [BibTex]

2006

Implicit Surface Modelling with a Globally Regularised Basis of Compact Support

Walder, C., Schölkopf, B., Chapelle, O.

Computer Graphics Forum, 25(3):635-644, September 2006 (article)

Abstract

We consider the problem of constructing a globally smooth analytic function that represents a surface implicitly by way of its zero set, given sample points with surface normal vectors. The contributions of the paper include a novel means of regularising multi-scale compactly supported basis functions that leads to the desirable interpolation properties previously only associated with fully supported bases. We also provide a regularisation framework for simpler and more direct treatment of surface normals, along with a corresponding generalisation of the representer theorem lying at the core of kernel-based machine learning methods. We demonstrate the techniques on 3D problems of up to 14 million data points, as well as 4D time series data and four-dimensional interpolation between three-dimensional shapes.

PDF GZIP DOI [BibTex]

2006

Walder, C., Schölkopf, B., Chapelle, O. Implicit Surface Modelling with a Globally Regularised Basis of Compact Support Computer Graphics Forum, 25(3):635-644, September 2006 (article)

PDF GZIP DOI [BibTex]

2005

Implicit Surface Modelling as an Eigenvalue Problem

Walder, C., Chapelle, O., Schölkopf, B.

In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 937-944, (Editors: L De Raedt and S Wrobel), ACM, New York, NY, USA, ICML, 2005 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We discuss the problem of fitting an implicit shape model to a set of points sampled from a co-dimension one manifold of arbitrary topology. The method solves a non-convex optimisation problem in the embedding function that defines the implicit by way of its zero level set. By assuming that the solution is a mixture of radial basis functions of varying widths we attain the globally optimal solution by way of an equivalent eigenvalue problem, without using or constructing as an intermediate step the normal vectors of the manifold at each data point. We demonstrate the system on two and three dimensional data, with examples of missing data interpolation and set operations on the resultant shapes.

PDF [BibTex]

2005

Walder, C., Chapelle, O., Schölkopf, B. Implicit Surface Modelling as an Eigenvalue Problem In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 937-944, (Editors: L De Raedt and S Wrobel), ACM, New York, NY, USA, ICML, 2005 (inproceedings)

PDF [BibTex]