The Effect of Spectrogram Reconstruction on Automatic Music Transcription: An Alternative Approach to Improve Transcription Accuracy

Kin Wai Cheuk, Yin-Jyun Luo, Emmanouil Benetos, Herremans Dorien

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Auto-TLDR; Exploring the effect of spectrogram reconstruction loss on automatic music transcription

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Most of the state-of-the-art automatic music transcription (AMT) models break down the main transcription task into sub-tasks such as onset prediction and offset prediction and train them with onset and offset labels. These predictions are then concatenated together and used as the input to train another model with the pitch labels to obtain the final transcription. We attempt to use only the pitch labels (together with spectrogram reconstruction loss) and explore how far this model can go without introducing supervised sub-tasks. In this paper, we do not aim at achieving state-of-the-art transcription accuracy, instead, we explore the effect that spectrogram reconstruction has on our AMT model. Our proposed model consists of two U-nets: the first U-net transcribes the spectrogram into a posteriorgram, and a second U-net transforms the posteriorgram back into a spectrogram. A reconstruction loss is applied between the original spectrogram and the reconstructed spectrogram to constrain the second U-net to focus only on reconstruction. We train our model on different datasets including MAPS, MAESTRO, and MusicNet. Our experiments show that adding the reconstruction loss can generally improve the note-level transcription accuracy when compared to the same model without the reconstruction part. Moreover, it can also boost the frame-level precision to be higher than the state-of-the-art models. The feature maps learned by our u-net contain gridlike structures (not present in the baseline model) which implies that with the present of reconstruction loss, the model is probably trying to count along both the time and frequency axis, resulting in a higher note-level transcription accuracy.

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Auto-TLDR; A CNN-based approach to classify ballroom dances given audio recordings

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Auto-TLDR; Environmental Sound Classification with Short-Time Fourier Transform Spectrograms

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Auto-TLDR; Sound Event Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Visual Representations on MIVIA Audio Events

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Auto-TLDR; DenseNet: A Dense Convolutional Network Architecture for Speech Recognition in Indian Languages

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Auto-TLDR; AttendAffectNet: A Self-Attention Based Network for Emotion Prediction from Movies

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Auto-TLDR; Text-Independent Speaker Identification with Scattering Wavelet Network and Convolutional Neural Networks

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Auto-TLDR; AuSiL: Audio Similarity Learning for Near-duplicate Video Retrieval

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Auto-TLDR; Echo State Networks for Onset Detection in Music Analysis

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Auto-TLDR; Compressed Sensing for Digit Recognition in Audio Reconstruction

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Auto-TLDR; Automated Music Mood Detection using Music Information Retrieval

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Auto-TLDR; Parallel Interactive Network for Spoken Language Understanding

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Auto-TLDR; Evaluation of generative models in the symbolic music domain using the circle of fifths

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Auto-TLDR; Experimental Design of the Non-wheeze Class for Wheeze Classification

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Auto-TLDR; Object-Prior: Learning the 1-to-1 correspondence between visual and audio signals by audio- visual sound source methods

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Auto-TLDR; APVG: Audio-driven Performance Video Generation Using Structured Temporal UNet

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End-To-End Triplet Loss Based Emotion Embedding System for Speech Emotion Recognition

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Auto-TLDR; End-to-End Neural Embedding System for Speech Emotion Recognition

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Auto-TLDR; Adversarially Training for Robust Neural Networks against Adversarial Attacks

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Auto-TLDR; One-shot Learning in the Bioacoustics Domain using Siamese Neural Networks

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Auto-TLDR; relevance-based retrieval in cataract surgery videos

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Auto-TLDR; A semantic and temporal synchronous landmark learning method for talking face generation

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Toward Text-Independent Cross-Lingual Speaker Recognition Using English-Mandarin-Taiwanese Dataset

Yi-Chieh Wu, Wen-Hung Liao

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Auto-TLDR; Cross-lingual Speech for Biometric Recognition

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Segmenting Messy Text: Detecting Boundaries in Text Derived from Historical Newspaper Images

Carol Anderson, Phil Crone

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Auto-TLDR; Text Segmentation of Marriage Announcements Using Deep Learning-based Models

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Text segmentation, the task of dividing a document into sections, is often a prerequisite for performing additional natural language processing tasks. Existing text segmentation methods have typically been developed and tested using clean, narrative-style text with segments containing distinct topics. Here we consider a challenging text segmentation task: dividing newspaper marriage announcement lists into units of one couple each. In many cases the information is not structured into sentences, and adjacent segments are not topically distinct from each other. In addition, the text of the announcements, which is derived from images of historical newspapers via optical character recognition, contains many typographical errors. Because of these properties, these announcements are not amenable to segmentation with existing techniques. We present a novel deep learning-based model for segmenting such text and show that it significantly outperforms an existing state-of-the-art method on our task.

Deep Composer: A Hash-Based Duplicative Neural Network for Generating Multi-Instrument Songs

Jacob Galajda, Brandon Royal, Kien Hua

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Composer for Intelligence Duplication

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Music is one of the most appreciated forms of art, and generating songs has become a popular subject in the artificial intelligence community. There are various networks that can produce pleasant sounding music, but no model has been able to produce music that duplicates the style of a specific artist or artists. In this paper, we extend a previous single-instrument model: the Deep Composer -a model we believe to be capable of achieving this. Deep Composer originates from the Deep Segment Hash Learning (DSHL) single instrument model and is designed to learn how a specific artist would place individual segments of music together rather than create music similar to a specific genre. To the best of our knowledge, no other network has been designed to achieve this. For these reasons, we introduce a new field of study, Intelligence Duplication (ID). AI research generally focuses on developing techniques to mimic universal intelligence. Intelligence Duplication (ID) research focuses on techniques to artificially duplicate or clone a specific mind such as Mozart. Additionally, we present a new retrieval algorithm, Segment Barrier Retrieval (SBR), to improve retrieval accuracy within the hash-space as opposed to a more traditionally used feature-space. SBR prevents retrieval branches from entering areas of low-density within the hash-space, a phenomena we identify and label as segment sparsity. To test our Deep Composer and the effectiveness of SBR, we evaluate various models with different SBR threshold values and conduct qualitative surveys for each model. The survey results indicate that our Deep Composer model is capable of learning music generation from multiple composers. Our extended Deep Composer model provides a more suitable platform for Intelligence Duplication. Future work can apply this platform to duplicate great composers such as Mozart or allow them to collaborate in the virtual space.

Single-Modal Incremental Terrain Clustering from Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Feature Learning

Reina Ishikawa, Ryo Hachiuma, Akiyoshi Kurobe, Hideo Saito

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-modal Variational Autoencoder for Terrain Type Clustering

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The key to an accurate understanding of terrain is to extract the informative features from the multi-modal data obtained from different devices. Sensors, such as RGB cameras, depth sensors, vibration sensors, and microphones, are used as the multi-modal data. Many studies have explored ways to use them, especially in the robotics field. Some papers have successfully introduced single-modal or multi-modal methods. However, in practice, robots can be faced with extreme conditions; microphones do not work well in the crowded scenes, and an RGB camera cannot capture terrains well in the dark. In this paper, we present a novel framework using the multi-modal variational autoencoder and the Gaussian mixture model clustering algorithm on image data and audio data for terrain type clustering. Our method enables the terrain type clustering even if one of the modalities (either image or audio) is missing at the test-time. We evaluated the clustering accuracy with a conventional multi-modal terrain type clustering method and we conducted ablation studies to show the effectiveness of our approach.

Spatial Bias in Vision-Based Voice Activity Detection

Kalin Stefanov, Mohammad Adiban, Giampiero Salvi

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Auto-TLDR; Spatial Bias in Vision-based Voice Activity Detection in Multiparty Human-Human Interactions

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We present models for automatic vision-based voice activity detection (VAD) in multiparty human-human interactions that are aimed at complementing the acoustic VAD methods. We provide evidence that this type of vision-based VAD models are susceptible to spatial bias in the datasets. The physical settings of the interaction, usually constant throughout data acquisition, determines the distribution of head poses of the participants. Our results show that when the head pose distributions are significantly different in the training and test sets, the performance of the models drops significantly. This suggests that previously reported results on datasets with a fixed physical configuration may overestimate the generalization capabilities of this type of models. We also propose a number of possible remedies to the spatial bias, including data augmentation, input masking and dynamic features, and provide an in-depth analysis of the visual cues used by our models.

The Application of Capsule Neural Network Based CNN for Speech Emotion Recognition

Xincheng Wen, Kunhong Liu

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Auto-TLDR; CapCNN: A Capsule Neural Network for Speech Emotion Recognition

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Moreover, the abstraction of audio features makes it impossible to fully use the inherent relationship among audio features. This paper proposes a model that combines a convolutional neural network(CNN) and a capsule neural network (CapsNet), named as CapCNN. The advantage of CapCNN lies in that it provides a solution to solve time sensitivity and focus on the overall characteristics. In this study, it is found that CapCNN can well handle the speech emotion recognition task. Compared with other state-of-art methods, our algorithm shows high performances on the CASIA and EMODB datasets. The detailed analysis confirms that our method provides balanced results on the various classes.

S2I-Bird: Sound-To-Image Generation of Bird Species Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Joo Yong Shim, Joongheon Kim, Jong-Kook Kim

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Auto-TLDR; Generating bird images from sound using conditional generative adversarial networks

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Generating images from sound is a challenging task. This paper proposes a novel deep learning model that generates bird images from their corresponding sound information. Our proposed model includes a sound encoder in order to extract suitable feature representations from audio recordings, and then it generates bird images that corresponds to its calls using conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) with auxiliary classifiers. We demonstrate that our model produces better image generation results which outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in a similar context.

Mutual Alignment between Audiovisual Features for End-To-End Audiovisual Speech Recognition

Hong Liu, Yawei Wang, Bing Yang

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Auto-TLDR; Mutual Iterative Attention for Audio Visual Speech Recognition

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Asynchronization issue caused by different types of modalities is one of the major problems in audio visual speech recognition (AVSR) research. However, most AVSR systems merely rely on up sampling of video or down sampling of audio to align audio and visual features, assuming that the feature sequences are aligned frame-by-frame. These pre-processing steps oversimplify the asynchrony relation between acoustic signal and lip motion, lacking flexibility and impairing the performance of the system. Although there are systems modeling the asynchrony between the modalities, sometimes they fail to align speech and video precisely in some even all noise conditions. In this paper, we propose a mutual feature alignment method for AVSR which can make full use of cross modility information to address the asynchronization issue by introducing Mutual Iterative Attention (MIA) mechanism. Our method can automatically learn an alignment in a mutual way by performing mutual attention iteratively between the audio and visual features, relying on the modified encoder structure of Transformer. Experimental results show that our proposed method obtains absolute improvements up to 20.42% over the audio modality alone depending upon the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) level. Better recognition performance can also be achieved comparing with the traditional feature concatenation method under both clean and noisy conditions. It is expectable that our proposed mutual feature alignment method can be easily generalized to other multimodal tasks with semantically correlated information.

Unsupervised Co-Segmentation for Athlete Movements and Live Commentaries Using Crossmodal Temporal Proximity

Yasunori Ohishi, Yuki Tanaka, Kunio Kashino

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Auto-TLDR; A guided attention scheme for audio-visual co-segmentation

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Audio-visual co-segmentation is a task to extract segments and regions corresponding to specific events on unlabelled audio and video signals. It is particularly important to accomplish it in an unsupervised way, since it is generally very difficult to manually label all the objects and events appearing in audio-visual signals for supervised learning. Here, we propose to take advantage of temporal proximity of corresponding audio and video entities included in the signals. For this purpose, we newly employ a guided attention scheme to this task to efficiently detect and utilize temporal cooccurrences of audio and video information. The experiments using a real TV broadcasting of Sumo wrestling, a sport event, with live commentaries show that our model can automatically extract specific athlete movements and its spoken descriptions in an unsupervised manner.

RMS-Net: Regression and Masking for Soccer Event Spotting

Matteo Tomei, Lorenzo Baraldi, Simone Calderara, Simone Bronzin, Rita Cucchiara

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Auto-TLDR; An Action Spotting Network for Soccer Videos

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The recently proposed action spotting task consists in finding the exact timestamp in which an event occurs. This task fits particularly well for soccer videos, where events correspond to salient actions strictly defined by soccer rules (a goal occurs when the ball crosses the goal line). In this paper, we devise a lightweight and modular network for action spotting, which can simultaneously predict the event label and its temporal offset using the same underlying features. We enrich our model with two training strategies: the first one for data balancing and uniform sampling, the second for masking ambiguous frames and keeping the most discriminative visual cues. When tested on the SoccerNet dataset and using standard features, our full proposal exceeds the current state of the art by 3 Average-mAP points. Additionally, it reaches a gain of more than 10 Average-mAP points on the test set when fine-tuned in combination with a strong 2D backbone.

What and How? Jointly Forecasting Human Action and Pose

Yanjun Zhu, Yanxia Zhang, Qiong Liu, Andreas Girgensohn

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Auto-TLDR; Forecasting Human Actions and Motion Trajectories with Joint Action Classification and Pose Regression

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Forecasting human actions and motion trajectories addresses the problem of predicting what a person is going to do next and how they will perform it. This is crucial in a wide range of applications such as assisted living and future co-robotic settings. We propose to simultaneously learn actions and action-related human motion dynamics, while existing works perform them independently. In this paper, we present a method to jointly forecast categories of human action and the pose of skeletal joints in the hope that the two tasks can help each other. As a result, our system can predict not only the future actions but also the motion trajectories that will result. To achieve this, we define a task of joint action classification and pose regression. We employ a sequence to sequence encoder-decoder model combined with multi-task learning to forecast future actions and poses progressively before the action happens. Experimental results on two public datasets, IkeaDB and OAD, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Revisiting Sequence-To-Sequence Video Object Segmentation with Multi-Task Loss and Skip-Memory

Fatemeh Azimi, Benjamin Bischke, Sebastian Palacio, Federico Raue, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel

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Auto-TLDR; Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Video Object Segmentation

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Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is an active research area of the visual domain. One of its fundamental sub-tasks is semi-supervised / one-shot learning: given only the segmentation mask for the first frame, the task is to provide pixel-accurate masks for the object over the rest of the sequence. Despite much progress in the last years, we noticed that many of the existing approaches lose objects in longer sequences, especially when the object is small or briefly occluded. In this work, we build upon a sequence-to-sequence approach that employs an encoder-decoder architecture together with a memory module for exploiting the sequential data. We further improve this approach by proposing a model that manipulates multi-scale spatio-temporal information using memory-equipped skip connections. Furthermore, we incorporate an auxiliary task based on distance classification which greatly enhances the quality of edges in segmentation masks. We compare our approach to the state of the art and show considerable improvement in the contour accuracy metric and the overall segmentation accuracy.

Video Representation Fusion Network For Multi-Label Movie Genre Classification

Tianyu Bi, Dmitri Jarnikov, Johan Lukkien

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Auto-TLDR; A Video Representation Fusion Network for Movie Genre Classification

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In this paper, we introduce a Video Representation Fusion Network (VRFN) for movie genre classification. Different from the previous works, which use frame-level features for movie genre classification, our approach uses video classification architecture to create video-level features from a group of frames and fuse these features temporally to learn long-term spatiotemporal information for the movie genre classification task. We use a pre-trained I3D model to generate intermediate video representations and connect it with a C3D-LSTM model for feature fusion and movie genre classification. LMTD-9 dataset which contains 4007 trailers multi-labeled with 9 movie genres is used for training and evaluation of the model. The experimental results demonstrate that learning long-term temporal dependencies by fusing video representations improves the performance in movie genre classification. Our best model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 3.4% improvement in AUPRC (macro).

Video Face Manipulation Detection through Ensemble of CNNs

Nicolo Bonettini, Edoardo Daniele Cannas, Sara Mandelli, Luca Bondi, Paolo Bestagini, Stefano Tubaro

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Auto-TLDR; Face Manipulation Detection in Video Sequences Using Convolutional Neural Networks

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In the last few years, several techniques for facial manipulation in videos have been successfully developed and made available to the masses (i.e., FaceSwap, deepfake, etc.). These methods enable anyone to easily edit faces in video sequences with incredibly realistic results and a very little effort. Despite the usefulness of these tools in many fields, if used maliciously, they can have a significantly bad impact on society (e.g., fake news spreading, cyber bullying through fake revenge porn). The ability of objectively detecting whether a face has been manipulated in a video sequence is then a task of utmost importance. In this paper, we tackle the problem of face manipulation detection in video sequences targeting modern facial manipulation techniques. In particular, we study the ensembling of different trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. In the proposed solution, different models are obtained starting from a base network (i.e., EfficientNetB4) making use of two different concepts: (i) attention layers; (ii) siamese training. We show that combining these networks leads to promising face manipulation detection results on two publicly available datasets with more than 119000 videos.

Audio-Video Detection of the Active Speaker in Meetings

Francisco Madrigal, Frederic Lerasle, Lionel Pibre, Isabelle Ferrané

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Auto-TLDR; Active Speaker Detection with Visual and Contextual Information from Meeting Context

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Meetings are a common activity that provides certain challenges when creating systems that assist them. Such is the case of the Active speaker detection, which can provide useful information for human interaction modeling, or human-robot interaction. Active speaker detection is mostly done using speech, however, certain visual and contextual information can provide additional insights. In this paper we propose an active speaker detection framework that integrates audiovisual features with social information, from the meeting context. Visual cue is processed using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that captures the spatio-temporal relationships. We analyze several CNN architectures with both cues: raw pixels (RGB images) and motion (estimated with optical flow). Contextual reasoning is done with an original methodology, based on the gaze of all participants. We evaluate our proposal with a public \textcolor{black}{benchmark} in state-of-art: AMI corpus. We show how the addition of visual and context information improves the performance of the active speaker detection.

Text Synopsis Generation for Egocentric Videos

Aidean Sharghi, Niels Lobo, Mubarak Shah

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Auto-TLDR; Egocentric Video Summarization Using Multi-task Learning for End-to-End Learning

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Mass utilization of body-worn cameras has led to a huge corpus of available egocentric video. Existing video summarization algorithms can accelerate browsing such videos by selecting (visually) interesting shots from them. Nonetheless, since the system user still has to watch the summary videos, browsing large video databases remain a challenge. Hence, in this work, we propose to generate a textual synopsis, consisting of a few sentences describing the most important events in a long egocentric videos. Users can read the short text to gain insight about the video, and more importantly, efficiently search through the content of a large video database using text queries. Since egocentric videos are long and contain many activities and events, using video-to-text algorithms results in thousands of descriptions, many of which are incorrect. Therefore, we propose a multi-task learning scheme to simultaneously generate descriptions for video segments and summarize the resulting descriptions in an end-to-end fashion. We Input a set of video shots and the network generates a text description for each shot. Next, visual-language content matching unit that is trained with a weakly supervised objective, identifies the correct descriptions. Finally, the last component of our network, called purport network, evaluates the descriptions all together to select the ones containing crucial information. Out of thousands of descriptions generated for the video, a few informative sentences are returned to the user. We validate our framework on the challenging UT Egocentric video dataset, where each video is between 3 to 5 hours long, associated with over 3000 textual descriptions on average. The generated textual summaries, including only 5 percent (or less) of the generated descriptions, are compared to groundtruth summaries in text domain using well-established metrics in natural language processing.

Gabriella: An Online System for Real-Time Activity Detection in Untrimmed Security Videos

Mamshad Nayeem Rizve, Ugur Demir, Praveen Praveen Tirupattur, Aayush Jung Rana, Kevin Duarte, Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave, Yogesh Rawat, Mubarak Shah

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Auto-TLDR; Gabriella: A Real-Time Online System for Activity Detection in Surveillance Videos

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Activity detection in surveillance videos is a difficult problem due to multiple factors such as large field of view, presence of multiple activities, varying scales and viewpoints, and its untrimmed nature. The existing research in activity detection is mainly focused on datasets, such as UCF-101, JHMDB, THUMOS, and AVA, which partially address these issues. The requirement of processing the surveillance videos in real-time makes this even more challenging. In this work we propose Gabriella, a real-time online system to perform activity detection on untrimmed surveillance videos. The proposed method consists of three stages: tubelet extraction, activity classification, and online tubelet merging. For tubelet extraction, we propose a localization network which takes a video clip as input and spatio-temporally detects potential foreground regions at multiple scales to generate action tubelets. We propose a novel Patch-Dice loss to handle large variations in actor size. Our online processing of videos at a clip level drastically reduces the computation time in detecting activities. The detected tubelets are assigned activity class scores by the classification network and merged together using our proposed Tubelet-Merge Action-Split (TMAS) algorithm to form the final action detections. The TMAS algorithm efficiently connects the tubelets in an online fashion to generate action detections which are robust against varying length activities. We perform our experiments on the VIRAT and MEVA (Multiview Extended Video with Activities) datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of speed ($\sim$100 fps) and performance with state-of-the-art results. The code and models will be made publicly available.

Trainable Spectrally Initializable Matrix Transformations in Convolutional Neural Networks

Michele Alberti, Angela Botros, Schuetz Narayan, Rolf Ingold, Marcus Liwicki, Mathias Seuret

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Auto-TLDR; Trainable and Spectrally Initializable Matrix Transformations for Neural Networks

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In this work, we introduce a new architectural component to Neural Networks (NN), i.e., trainable and spectrally initializable matrix transformations on feature maps. While previous literature has already demonstrated the possibility of adding static spectral transformations as feature processors, our focus is on more general trainable transforms. We study the transforms in various architectural configurations on four datasets of different nature: from medical (ColorectalHist, HAM10000) and natural (Flowers) images to historical documents (CB55). With rigorous experiments that control for the number of parameters and randomness, we show that networks utilizing the introduced matrix transformations outperform vanilla neural networks. The observed accuracy increases appreciably across all datasets. In addition, we show that the benefit of spectral initialization leads to significantly faster convergence, as opposed to randomly initialized matrix transformations. The transformations are implemented as auto-differentiable PyTorch modules that can be incorporated into any neural network architecture. The entire code base is open-source.

Context Matters: Self-Attention for Sign Language Recognition

Fares Ben Slimane, Mohamed Bouguessa

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Auto-TLDR; Attentional Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

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This paper proposes an attentional network for the task of Continuous Sign Language Recognition. The proposed approach exploits co-independent streams of data to model the sign language modalities. These different channels of information can share a complex temporal structure between each other. For that reason, we apply attention to synchronize and help capture entangled dependencies between the different sign language components. Even though Sign Language is multi-channel, handshapes represent the central entities in sign interpretation. Seeing handshapes in their correct context defines the meaning of a sign. Taking that into account, we utilize the attention mechanism to efficiently aggregate the hand features with their appropriate Spatio-temporal context for better sign recognition. We found that by doing so the model is able to identify the essential Sign Language components that revolve around the dominant hand and the face areas. We test our model on the benchmark dataset RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014, yielding competitive results.

Deep Convolutional Embedding for Digitized Painting Clustering

Giovanna Castellano, Gennaro Vessio

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Auto-TLDR; A Deep Convolutional Embedding Model for Clustering Artworks

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Clustering artworks is difficult because of several reasons. On one hand, recognizing meaningful patterns in accordance with domain knowledge and visual perception is extremely hard. On the other hand, the application of traditional clustering and feature reduction techniques to the highly dimensional pixel space can be ineffective. To address these issues, we propose to use a deep convolutional embedding model for digitized painting clustering, in which the task of mapping the input raw data to an abstract, latent space is jointly optimized with the task of finding a set of cluster centroids in this latent feature space. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The model is also able to outperform other state-of-the-art deep clustering approaches to the same problem. The proposed method may be beneficial to several art-related tasks, particularly visual link retrieval and historical knowledge discovery in painting datasets.

Visual Oriented Encoder: Integrating Multimodal and Multi-Scale Contexts for Video Captioning

Bang Yang, Yuexian Zou

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Auto-TLDR; Visual Oriented Encoder for Video Captioning

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Video captioning is a challenging task which aims at automatically generating a natural language description of a given video. Recent researches have shown that exploiting the intrinsic multi-modalities of videos significantly promotes captioning performance. However, how to integrate multi-modalities to generate effective semantic representations for video captioning is still an open issue. Some researchers proposed to learn multimodal features in parallel during the encoding stage. The downside of these methods lies in the neglect of the interaction among multi-modalities and their rich contextual information. In this study, inspired by the fact that visual contents are generally more important for comprehending videos, we propose a novel Visual Oriented Encoder (VOE) to integrate multimodal features in an interactive manner. Specifically, VOE is designed as a hierarchical structure, where bottom layers are utilized to extract multi-scale contexts from auxiliary modalities while the top layer is exploited to generate joint representations by considering both visual and contextual information. Following the encoder-decoder framework, we systematically develop a VOE-LSTM model and evaluate it on two mainstream benchmarks: MSVD and MSR-VTT. Experimental results show that the proposed VOE surpasses conventional encoders and our VOE-LSTM model achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

Self-Supervised Learning of Dynamic Representations for Static Images

Siyang Song, Enrique Sanchez, Linlin Shen, Michel Valstar

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Auto-TLDR; Facial Action Unit Intensity Estimation and Affect Estimation from Still Images with Multiple Temporal Scale

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Facial actions are spatio-temporal signals by nature, and therefore their modeling is crucially dependent on the availability of temporal information. In this paper, we focus on inferring such temporal dynamics of facial actions when no explicit temporal information is available, i.e. from still images. We present a novel approach to capture multiple scales of such temporal dynamics, with an application to facial Action Unit (AU) intensity estimation and dimensional affect estimation. In particular, 1) we propose a framework that infers a dynamic representation (DR) from a still image, which captures the bi-directional flow of time within a short time-window centered at the input image; 2) we show that we can train our method without the need of explicitly generating target representations, allowing the network to represent dynamics more broadly; and 3) we propose to apply a multiple temporal scale approach that infers DRs for different window lengths (MDR) from a still image. We empirically validate the value of our approach on the task of frame ranking, and show how our proposed MDR attains state of the art results on BP4D for AU intensity estimation and on SEMAINE for dimensional affect estimation, using only still images at test time.

Confidence Calibration for Deep Renal Biopsy Immunofluorescence Image Classification

Federico Pollastri, Juan Maroñas, Federico Bolelli, Giulia Ligabue, Roberto Paredes, Riccardo Magistroni, Costantino Grana

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Auto-TLDR; A Probabilistic Convolutional Neural Network for Immunofluorescence Classification in Renal Biopsy

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With this work we tackle immunofluorescence classification in renal biopsy, employing state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks. In this setting, the aim of the probabilistic model is to assist an expert practitioner towards identifying the location pattern of antibody deposits within a glomerulus. Since modern neural networks often provide overconfident outputs, we stress the importance of having a reliable prediction, demonstrating that Temperature Scaling, a recently introduced re-calibration technique, can be successfully applied to immunofluorescence classification in renal biopsy. Experimental results demonstrate that the designed model yields good accuracy on the specific task, and that Temperature Scaling is able to provide reliable probabilities, which are highly valuable for such a task given the low inter-rater agreement.

Machine-Learned Regularization and Polygonization of Building Segmentation Masks

Stefano Zorzi, Ksenia Bittner, Friedrich Fraundorfer

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Auto-TLDR; Automatic Regularization and Polygonization of Building Segmentation masks using Generative Adversarial Network

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We propose a machine learning based approach for automatic regularization and polygonization of building segmentation masks. Taking an image as input, we first predict building segmentation maps exploiting generic fully convolutional network (FCN). A generative adversarial network (GAN) is then involved to perform a regularization of building boundaries to make them more realistic, i.e., having more rectilinear outlines which construct right angles if required. This is achieved through the interplay between the discriminator which gives a probability of input image being true and generator that learns from discriminator’s response to create more realistic images. Finally, we train the backbone convolutional neural network (CNN) which is adapted to predict sparse outcomes corresponding to building corners out of regularized building segmentation results. Experiments on three building segmentation datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is not only capable of obtaining accurate results, but also of producing visually pleasing building outlines parameterized as polygons.

Aerial Road Segmentation in the Presence of Topological Label Noise

Corentin Henry, Friedrich Fraundorfer, Eleonora Vig

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Auto-TLDR; Improving Road Segmentation with Noise-Aware U-Nets for Fine-Grained Topology delineation

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The availability of large-scale annotated datasets has enabled Fully-Convolutional Neural Networks to reach outstanding performance on road extraction in aerial images. However, high-quality pixel-level annotation is expensive to produce and even manually labeled data often contains topological errors. Trading off quality for quantity, many datasets rely on already available yet noisy labels, for example from OpenStreetMap. In this paper, we explore the training of custom U-Nets built with ResNet and DenseNet backbones using noise-aware losses that are robust towards label omission and registration noise. We perform an extensive evaluation of standard and noise-aware losses, including a novel Bootstrapped DICE-Coefficient loss, on two challenging road segmentation benchmarks. Our losses yield a consistent improvement in overall extraction quality and exhibit a strong capacity to cope with severe label noise. Our method generalizes well to two other fine-grained topology delineation tasks: surface crack detection for quality inspection and cell membrane extraction in electron microscopy imagery.

Motion-Supervised Co-Part Segmentation

Aliaksandr Siarohin, Subhankar Roy, Stéphane Lathuiliere, Sergey Tulyakov, Elisa Ricci, Nicu Sebe

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Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Co-Part Segmentation Using Motion Information from Videos

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Recent co-part segmentation methods mostly operate in a supervised learning setting, which requires a large amount of annotated data for training. To overcome this limitation, we propose a self-supervised deep learning method for co-part segmentation. Differently from previous works, our approach develops the idea that motion information inferred from videos can be leveraged to discover meaningful object parts. To this end, our method relies on pairs of frames sampled from the same video. The network learns to predict part segments together with a representation of the motion between two frames, which permits reconstruction of the target image. Through extensive experimental evaluation on publicly available video sequences we demonstrate that our approach can produce improved segmentation maps with respect to previous self-supervised co-part segmentation approaches.

CAggNet: Crossing Aggregation Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Xu Cao, Yanghao Lin

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Auto-TLDR; Crossing Aggregation Network for Medical Image Segmentation

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In this paper, we present Crossing Aggregation Network (CAggNet), a novel densely connected semantic segmentation method for medical image analysis. The crossing aggregation network absorbs the idea of deep layer aggregation and makes significant innovations in layer connection and semantic information fusion. In this architecture, the traditional skip-connection structure of general U-Net is replaced by aggregations of multi-level down-sampling and up-sampling layers. This enables the network to fuse information interactively flows at different levels of layers in semantic segmentation. It also introduces weighted aggregation module to aggregate multi-scale output information. We have evaluated and compared our CAggNet with several advanced U-Net based methods in two public medical image datasets, including the 2018 Data Science Bowl nuclei detection dataset and the 2015 MICCAI gland segmentation competition dataset. Experimental results indicate that CAggNet improves medical object recognition and achieves a more accurate and efficient segmentation compared to existing improved U-Net and UNet++ structure.

Are Multiple Cross-Correlation Identities Better Than Just Two? Improving the Estimate of Time Differences-Of-Arrivals from Blind Audio Signals

Danilo Greco, Jacopo Cavazza, Alessio Del Bue

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Auto-TLDR; Improving Blind Channel Identification Using Cross-Correlation Identity for Time Differences-of-Arrivals Estimation

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Given an unknown audio source, the estimation of time differences-of-arrivals (TDOAs) can be efficiently and robustly solved using blind channel identification and exploiting the cross-correlation identity (CCI). Prior "blind" works have improved the estimate of TDOAs by means of different algorithmic solutions and optimization strategies, while always sticking to the case N = 2 microphones. But what if we can obtain a direct improvement in performance by just increasing N? In this paper we try to investigate this direction, showing that, despite the arguable simplicity, this is capable of (sharply) improving upon state-of-the-art blind channel identification methods based on CCI, without modifying the computational pipeline. Inspired by our results, we seek to warm up the community and the practitioners by paving the way (with two concrete, yet preliminary, examples) towards joint approaches in which advances in the optimization are combined with an increased number of microphones, in order to achieve further improvements.