ICPR2020 Paper Browser

Paper download is intended for registered attendees only, and is subjected to the IEEE Copyright Policy. Any other use is strongly forbidden.

Force Banner for the Recognition of Spatial Relations

Robin Deléarde, Camille Kurtz, Laurent Wendling, Philippe Dejean

Auto-TLDR; Spatial Relation Recognition using Force Banners

Abstract Slides

Studying the spatial organization of objects in images is fundamental to increase both the understanding of the sensed scene and the accuracy of the perceived similarity between images. This often leads to the problem of spatial relation recognition: given two objects depicted in an image, what is their spatial relation? In this article, we consider this as a classification problem. Instead of considering directly the original image space (or imaging features) to predict the spatial relation, we propose a novel intermediate representation (called Force Banner) modeling rich spatial information between pairs of objects composing a scene. Such a representation captures the relative position between objects using a panel of forces (attraction and repulsion), that take into account the structural shapes of the objects and their distance in a directional fashion. Force Banners are used to feed a classical 2D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the recognition of spatial relations, benefiting from pre-trained models and fine-tuning. Experimental results obtained on a dataset of images with various shapes highlight the interest of this approach, and in particular its benefit to describe spatial information.

Similar papers

Classification of Spatially Enriched Pixel Time Series with Convolutional Neural Networks

Mohamed Chelali, Camille Kurtz, Anne Puissant, Nicole Vincent

Auto-TLDR; Spatio-Temporal Features Extraction from Satellite Image Time Series Using Random Walk

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Satellite Image Time Series (SITS), MRI sequences, and more generally image time series, constitute 2D+t data providing spatial and temporal information about an observed scene. Given a pattern recognition task such as image classification, considering jointly such rich information is crucial during the decision process. Nevertheless, due to the complex representation of the data-cube, spatio-temporal features extraction from 2D+t data remains difficult to handle. We present in this article an approach to learn such features from this data, and then to proceed to their classification. Our strategy consists in enriching pixel time series with spatial information. It is based on Random Walk to build a novel segment-based representation of the data, passing from a 2D+t dimension to a 2D one, without loosing too much spatial information. Such new representation is then involved in an end-to-end learning process with a classical 2D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in order to learn spatio-temporal features for the classification of image time series. Our approach is evaluated on a remote sensing application for the mapping of agricultural crops. Thanks to a visual attention mechanism, the proposed $2D$ spatio-temporal representation makes also easier the interpretation of a SITS to understand spatio-temporal phenomenons related to soil management practices.

Enhancing Deep Semantic Segmentation of RGB-D Data with Entangled Forests

Matteo Terreran, Elia Bonetto, Stefano Ghidoni

Auto-TLDR; FuseNet: A Lighter Deep Learning Model for Semantic Segmentation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Semantic segmentation is a problem which is getting more and more attention in the computer vision community. Nowadays, deep learning methods represent the state of the art to solve this problem, and the trend is to use deeper networks to get higher performance. The drawback with such models is a higher computational cost, which makes it difficult to integrate them on mobile robot platforms. In this work we want to explore how to obtain lighter deep learning models without compromising performance. To do so we will consider the features used in the Entangled Random Forest algorithm and we will study the best strategies to integrate these within FuseNet deep network. Such new features allow us to shrink the network size without loosing performance, obtaining hence a lighter model which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the semantic segmentation task and represents an interesting alternative for mobile robotics applications, where computational power and energy are limited.

A Systematic Investigation on Deep Architectures for Automatic Skin Lesions Classification

Pierluigi Carcagni, Marco Leo, Andrea Cuna, Giuseppe Celeste, Cosimo Distante

Auto-TLDR; RegNet: Deep Investigation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Classification of Skin Lesions

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Computer vision-based techniques are more and more employed in healthcare and medical fields nowadays in order, principally, to be as a support to the experienced medical staff to help them to make a quick and correct diagnosis. One of the hot topics in this arena concerns the automatic classification of skin lesions. Several promising works exist about it, mainly leveraging Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), but proposed pipeline mainly rely on complex data preprocessing and there is no systematic investigation about how available deep models can actually reach the accuracy needed for real applications. In order to overcome these drawbacks, in this work, an end-to-end pipeline is introduced and some of the most recent Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures are included in it and compared on the largest common benchmark dataset recently introduced. To this aim, for the first time in this application context, a new network design paradigm, namely RegNet, has been exploited to get the best models among a population of configurations. The paper introduces a threefold level of contribution and novelty with respect the previous literature: the deep investigation of several CNN architectures driving to a consistent improvement of the lesions recognition accuracy, the exploitation of a new network design paradigm able to study the behavior of populations of models and a deep discussion about pro and cons of each analyzed method paving the path towards new research lines.

Trainable Spectrally Initializable Matrix Transformations in Convolutional Neural Networks

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

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

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

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.

A CNN-RNN Framework for Image Annotation from Visual Cues and Social Network Metadata

Tobia Tesan, Pasquale Coscia, Lamberto Ballan

Auto-TLDR; Context-Based Image Annotation with Multiple Semantic Embeddings and Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Images represent a commonly used form of visual communication among people. Nevertheless, image classification may be a challenging task when dealing with unclear or non-common images needing more context to be correctly annotated. Metadata accompanying images on social-media represent an ideal source of additional information for retrieving proper neighborhoods easing image annotation task. To this end, we blend visual features extracted from neighbors and their metadata to jointly leverage context and visual cues. Our models use multiple semantic embeddings to achieve the dual objective of being robust to vocabulary changes between train and test sets and decoupling the architecture from the low-level metadata representation. Convolutional and recurrent neural networks (CNNs-RNNs) are jointly adopted to infer similarity among neighbors and query images. We perform comprehensive experiments on the NUS-WIDE dataset showing that our models outperform state-of-the-art architectures based on images and metadata, and decrease both sensory and semantic gaps to better annotate images.

Supporting Skin Lesion Diagnosis with Content-Based Image Retrieval

Stefano Allegretti, Federico Bolelli, Federico Pollastri, Sabrina Longhitano, Giovanni Pellacani, Costantino Grana

Auto-TLDR; Skin Images Retrieval Using Convolutional Neural Networks for Skin Lesion Classification and Segmentation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Given the relevance of skin cancer, many attempts have been dedicated to the creation of automated devices that could assist both expert and beginner dermatologists towards fast and early diagnosis of skin lesions. In recent years, tasks such as skin lesion classification and segmentation have been extensively addressed with deep learning algorithms, which in some cases reach a diagnostic accuracy comparable to that of expert physicians. However, the general lack of interpretability and reliability severely hinders the ability of those approaches to actually support dermatologists in the diagnosis process. In this paper a novel skin images retrieval system is presented, which exploits features extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks to gather similar images from a publicly available dataset, in order to assist the diagnosis process of both expert and novice practitioners. In the proposed framework, Resnet-50 is initially trained for the classification of dermoscopic images; then, the feature extraction part is isolated, and an embedding network is build on top of it. The embedding learns an alternative representation, which allows to check image similarity by means of a distance measure. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method is able to select meaningful images, which can effectively boost the classification accuracy of human dermatologists.

Rank-Based Ordinal Classification

Joan Serrat, Idoia Ruiz

Auto-TLDR; Ordinal Classification with Order

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Differently from the regular classification task, in ordinal classification there is an order in the classes. As a consequence not all classification errors matter the same: a predicted class close to the groundtruth one is better than predicting a farther away class. To account for this, most previous works employ loss functions based on the absolute difference between the predicted and groundtruth class {\em labels}. We argue that there are many cases in ordinal classification where label values are arbitrary (for instance 1\ldots $C$, being $C$ the number of classes) and thus such loss functions may not be the best choice. We instead propose a network architecture that produces not a single class prediction but an ordered vector, or ranking, of all the possible classes from most to less likely. This is tanks to a loss function that compares groundtruth and predicted rankings of these class labels, not the labels themselves. Another advantage of this new formulation is that we can enforce consistency in the predictions, namely, predicted rankings come from some unimodal vector of scores with mode at the groundtruth class. We compare with the state of the art ordinal classification methods, showing that ours attains equal or better performance, as measured by common ordinal classification metrics, on three benchmark datasets. Furthermore, it is also suitable for a new task on image aesthetics assessment, \textit{i.e.}, most voted score prediction. Finally, we also apply it to building damage assessment from satellite images, providing an analysis of its performance depending on the degree of imbalance of the dataset.

Using Scene Graphs for Detecting Visual Relationships

Anurag Tripathi, Siddharth Srivastava, Brejesh Lall, Santanu Chaudhury

Auto-TLDR; Relationship Detection using Context Aligned Scene Graph Embeddings

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we solve the problem of detecting relationships between pairs of objects in an image. We develop spatially aware word embeddings using scene graphs and use joint feature representations containing visual, spatial and semantic embeddings from the input images to train a deep network on the task of relationship detection. Further, we propose to utilize context aligned scene graph embeddings from the train set, without requiring explicit availability of scene graphs at test time. We show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for predicate detection and provides competing results on relationship detection. We also show the generalization ability of the proposed method by performing predictions under zero shot settings. Further, we also provide an exhaustive empirical evaluation on each component of the proposed network.

Comparison of Deep Learning and Hand Crafted Features for Mining Simulation Data

Theodoros Georgiou, Sebastian Schmitt, Thomas Baeck, Nan Pu, Wei Chen, Michael Lew

Auto-TLDR; Automated Data Analysis of Flow Fields in Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a very important tool for many industrial applications, such as aerodynamic optimization of engineering designs like cars shapes, airplanes parts etc. The output of such simulations, in particular the calculated flow fields, are usually very complex and hard to interpret for realistic three-dimensional real-world applications, especially if time-dependent simulations are investigated. Automated data analysis methods are warranted but a non-trivial obstacle is given by the very large dimensionality of the data. A flow field typically consists of six measurement values for each point of the computational grid in 3D space and time (velocity vector values, turbulent kinetic energy, pressure and viscosity). In this paper we address the task of extracting meaningful results in an automated manner from such high dimensional data sets. We propose deep learning methods which are capable of processing such data and which can be trained to solve relevant tasks on simulation data, i.e. predicting drag and lift forces applied on an airfoil. We also propose an adaptation of the classical hand crafted features known from computer vision to address the same problem and compare a large variety of descriptors and detectors. Finally, we compile a large dataset of 2D simulations of the flow field around airfoils which contains 16000 flow fields with which we tested and compared approaches. Our results show that the deep learning-based methods, as well as hand crafted feature based approaches, are well-capable to accurately describe the content of the CFD simulation output on the proposed dataset.

SynDHN: Multi-Object Fish Tracker Trained on Synthetic Underwater Videos

Mygel Andrei Martija, Prospero Naval

Auto-TLDR; Underwater Multi-Object Tracking in the Wild with Deep Hungarian Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we seek to extend multi-object tracking research on a relatively less explored domain, that of, underwater multi-object tracking in the wild. Multi-object fish tracking is an important task because it can provide fish monitoring systems with richer information (e.g. multiple views of the same fish) as compared to detections and it can be an invaluable input to fish behavior analysis. However, there is a lack of an annotated benchmark dataset with enough samples for this task. To circumvent the need for manual ground truth tracking annotation, we craft a synthetic dataset. Using this synthetic dataset, we train an integrated detector and tracker called SynDHN. SynDHN uses the Deep Hungarian Network (DHN), which is a differentiable approximation of the Hungarian assignment algorithm. We repurpose DHN to become the tracking component of our algorithm by performing the task of affinity estimation between detector predictions. We consider both spatial and appearance features for affinity estimation. Our results show that despite being trained on a synthetic dataset, SynDHN generalizes well to real underwater video tracking and performs better against our baseline algorithms.

Rotation Invariant Aerial Image Retrieval with Group Convolutional Metric Learning

Hyunseung Chung, Woo-Jeoung Nam, Seong-Whan Lee

Auto-TLDR; Robust Remote Sensing Image Retrieval Using Group Convolution with Attention Mechanism and Metric Learning

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Remote sensing image retrieval (RSIR) is the process of ranking database images depending on the degree of similarity compared to the query image. As the complexity of RSIR increases due to the diversity in shooting range, angle, and location of remote sensors, there is an increasing demand for methods to address these issues and improve retrieval performance. In this work, we introduce a novel method for retrieving aerial images by merging group convolution with attention mechanism and metric learning, resulting in robustness to rotational variations. For refinement and emphasis on important features, we applied channel attention in each group convolution stage. By utilizing the characteristics of group convolution and channel-wise attention, it is possible to acknowledge the equality among rotated but identically located images. The training procedure has two main steps: (i) training the network with Aerial Image Dataset (AID) for classification, (ii) fine-tuning the network with triplet-loss for retrieval with Google Earth South Korea and NWPU-RESISC45 datasets. Results show that the proposed method performance exceeds other state-of-the-art retrieval methods in both rotated and original environments. Furthermore, we utilize class activation maps (CAM) to visualize the distinct difference of main features between our method and baseline, resulting in better adaptability in rotated environments.

Probability Guided Maxout

Claudio Ferrari, Stefano Berretti, Alberto Del Bimbo

Auto-TLDR; Probability Guided Maxout for CNN Training

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we propose an original CNN training strategy that brings together ideas from both dropout-like regularization methods and solutions that learn discriminative features. We propose a dropping criterion that, differently from dropout and its variants, is deterministic rather than random. It grounds on the empirical evidence that feature descriptors with larger $L2$-norm and highly-active nodes are strongly correlated to confident class predictions. Thus, our criterion guides towards dropping a percentage of the most active nodes of the descriptors, proportionally to the estimated class probability. We simultaneously train a per-sample scaling factor to balance the expected output across training and inference. This further allows us to keep high the descriptor's L2-norm, which we show enforces confident predictions. The combination of these two strategies resulted in our ``Probability Guided Maxout'' solution that acts as a training regularizer. We prove the above behaviors by reporting extensive image classification results on the CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and Caltech256 datasets.

Effective Deployment of CNNs for 3DoF Pose Estimation and Grasping in Industrial Settings

Daniele De Gregorio, Riccardo Zanella, Gianluca Palli, Luigi Di Stefano

Auto-TLDR; Automated Deep Learning for Robotic Grasping Applications

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper we investigate how to effectively deploy deep learning in practical industrial settings, such as robotic grasping applications. When a deep-learning based solution is proposed, usually lacks of any simple method to generate the training data. In the industrial field, where automation is the main goal, not bridging this gap is one of the main reasons why deep learning is not as widespread as it is in the academic world. For this reason, in this work we developed a system composed by a 3-DoF Pose Estimator based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and an effective procedure to gather massive amounts of training images in the field with minimal human intervention. By automating the labeling stage, we also obtain very robust systems suitable for production-level usage. An open source implementation of our solution is provided, alongside with the dataset used for the experimental evaluation.

Categorizing the Feature Space for Two-Class Imbalance Learning

Rosa Sicilia, Ermanno Cordelli, Paolo Soda

Auto-TLDR; Efficient Ensemble of Classifiers for Minority Class Inference

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Class imbalance limits the performance of most learning algorithms, resulting in a low recognition rate for samples belonging to the minority class. Although there are different strategies to address this problem, methods that generate ensemble of classifiers have proven to be effective in several applications. This paper presents a new strategy to construct the training set of each classifier in the ensemble by exploiting information in the feature space that can give rise to unreliable classifications, which are determined by a novel algorithm here introduced. The performance of our proposal is compared against multiple standard ensemble approaches on 25 publicly available datasets, showing promising results.

One Step Clustering Based on A-Contrario Framework for Detection of Alterations in Historical Violins

Alireza Rezaei, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Emanuel Aldea, Piercarlo Dondi, Marco Malagodi

Auto-TLDR; A-Contrario Clustering for the Detection of Altered Violins using UVIFL Images

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Preventive conservation is an important practice in Cultural Heritage. The constant monitoring of the state of conservation of an artwork helps us reduce the risk of damage and number of interventions necessary. In this work, we propose a probabilistic approach for the detection of alterations on the surface of historical violins based on an a-contrario framework. Our method is a one step NFA clustering solution which considers grey-level and spatial density information in one background model. The proposed method is robust to noise and avoids parameter tuning and any assumption about the quantity of the worn out areas. We have used as input UV induced fluorescence (UVIFL) images for considering details not perceivable with visible light. Tests were conducted on image sequences included in the ``Violins UVIFL imagery'' dataset. Results illustrate the ability of the algorithm to distinguish the worn area from the surrounding regions. Comparisons with the state of the art clustering methods shows improved overall precision and recall.

The Color Out of Space: Learning Self-Supervised Representations for Earth Observation Imagery

Stefano Vincenzi, Angelo Porrello, Pietro Buzzega, Marco Cipriano, Pietro Fronte, Roberto Cuccu, Carla Ippoliti, Annamaria Conte, Simone Calderara

Auto-TLDR; Satellite Image Representation Learning for Remote Sensing

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The recent growth in the number of satellite images fosters the development of effective deep-learning techniques for Remote Sensing (RS). However, their full potential is untapped due to the lack of large annotated datasets. Such a problem is usually countered by fine-tuning a feature extractor that is previously trained on the ImageNet dataset. Unfortunately, the domain of natural images differs from the RS one, which hinders the final performance. In this work, we propose to learn meaningful representations from satellite imagery, leveraging its high-dimensionality spectral bands to reconstruct the visible colors. We conduct experiments on land cover classification (BigEarthNet) and West Nile Virus detection, showing that colorization is a solid pretext task for training a feature extractor. Furthermore, we qualitatively observe that guesses based on natural images and colorization rely on different parts of the input. This paves the way to an ensemble model that eventually outperforms both the above-mentioned techniques.

A Systematic Investigation on End-To-End Deep Recognition of Grocery Products in the Wild

Marco Leo, Pierluigi Carcagni, Cosimo Distante

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Recognition of Products on grocery shelf images using Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Automatic recognition of products on grocery shelf images is a new and attractive topic in computer vision and machine learning since, it can be exploited in different application areas. This paper introduces a complete end-to-end pipeline (without preliminary radiometric and spatial transformations usually involved while dealing with the considered issue) and it provides a systematic investigation of recent machine learning models based on convolutional neural networks for addressing the product recognition task by exploiting the proposed pipeline on a recent challenging grocery product dataset. The investigated models were never been used in this context: they derive from the successful and more generic object recognition task and have been properly tuned to address this specific issue. Besides, also ensembles of nets built by most advanced theoretical fundaments have been taken into account. Gathered classification results were very encouraging since the recognition accuracy has been improved up to 15\% with respect to the leading approaches in the state of art on the same dataset. A discussion about the pros and cons of the investigated solutions are discussed by paving the path towards new research lines.

SIMCO: SIMilarity-Based Object COunting

Marco Godi, Christian Joppi, Andrea Giachetti, Marco Cristani

Auto-TLDR; SIMCO: An Unsupervised Multi-class Object Counting Approach on InShape

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We present SIMCO, a completely agnostic multi-class object counting approach. SIMCO starts by detecting foreground objects through a novel Mask RCNN-based architecture trained beforehand (just once) on a brand-new synthetic 2D shape dataset, InShape; the idea is to highlight every object resembling a primitive 2D shape (circle, square, rectangle, etc.). Each object detected is described by a low-dimensional embedding, obtained from a novel similarity-based head branch; this latter implements a triplet loss, encouraging similar objects (same 2D shape + color and scale) to map close. Subsequently, SIMCO uses this embedding for clustering, so that different 'classes' of similar objects can emerge and be counted, making SIMCO the very first multi-class unsupervised counter. The only required assumption is that repeated objects are present in the image. Experiments show that SIMCO provides state-of-the-art scores on counting benchmarks and that it can also help in many challenging image understanding tasks.

Multimodal Side-Tuning for Document Classification

Stefano Zingaro, Giuseppe Lisanti, Maurizio Gabbrielli

Auto-TLDR; Side-tuning for Multimodal Document Classification

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we propose to exploit the side-tuning framework for multimodal document classification. Side-tuning is a methodology for network adaptation recently introduced to solve some of the problems related to previous approaches. Thanks to this technique it is actually possible to overcome model rigidity and catastrophic forgetting of transfer learning by fine-tuning. The proposed solution uses off-the-shelf deep learning architectures leveraging the side-tuning framework to combine a base model with a tandem of two side networks. We show that side-tuning can be successfully employed also when different data sources are considered, e.g. text and images in document classification. The experimental results show that this approach pushes further the limit for document classification accuracy with respect to the state of the art.

Detecting Marine Species in Echograms Via Traditional, Hybrid, and Deep Learning Frameworks

Porto Marques Tunai, Alireza Rezvanifar, Melissa Cote, Alexandra Branzan Albu, Kaan Ersahin, Todd Mudge, Stephane Gauthier

Auto-TLDR; End-to-End Deep Learning for Echogram Interpretation of Marine Species in Echograms

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

This paper provides a comprehensive comparative study of traditional, hybrid, and deep learning (DL) methods for detecting marine species in echograms. Acoustic backscatter data obtained from multi-frequency echosounders is visualized as echograms and typically interpreted by marine biologists via manual or semi-automatic methods, which are time-consuming. Challenges related to automatic echogram interpretation are the variable size and acoustic properties of the biological targets (marine life), along with significant inter-class similarities. Our study explores and compares three types of approaches that cover the entire range of machine learning methods. Based on our experimental results, we conclude that an end-to-end DL-based framework, that can be readily scaled to accommodate new species, is overall preferable to other learning approaches for echogram interpretation, even when only a limited number of annotated training samples is available.

Documents Counterfeit Detection through a Deep Learning Approach

Darwin Danilo Saire Pilco, Salvatore Tabbone

Auto-TLDR; End-to-End Learning for Counterfeit Documents Detection using Deep Neural Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The main topic of this work is on the detection of counterfeit documents and especially banknotes. We propose an end-to-end learning model using a deep learning approach based on Adapnet++ which manages feature extraction at multiple scale levels using several residual units. Unlike previous models based on regions of interest (ROI) and high-resolution documents, our network is feed with simple input images (i.e., a single patch) and we do not need high resolution images. Besides, discriminative regions can be visualized at different scales. Our network learns by itself which regions of interest predict the better results. Experimental results show that we are competitive compared with the state-of-the-art and our deep neural network has good ability to generalize and can be applied to other kind of documents like identity or administrative one.

Improving Visual Relation Detection Using Depth Maps

Sahand Sharifzadeh, Sina Moayed Baharlou, Max Berrendorf, Rajat Koner, Volker Tresp

Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Depth Maps for Visual Relation Detection

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

State-of-the-art visual relation detection methods mostly rely on object information extracted from RGB images such as 2D bounding boxes, feature maps, and predicted class probabilities. Depth maps can additionally provide valuable information on object relations, e.g. helping to detect not only spatial relations, such as standing behind, but also non-spatial relations, such as holding. In this work, we study the effect of using different object information with a focus on depth maps. To enable this study, we release a new synthetic dataset of depth maps, VG-Depth, as an extension to Visual Genome (VG). We also note that given the highly imbalanced distribution of relations in VG, typical evaluation metrics for visual relation detection cannot reveal improvements of under-represented relations. To address this problem, we propose using an additional metric, calling it Macro Recall@K, and demonstrate its remarkable performance on VG. Finally, our experiments confirm that by effective utilization of depth maps within a simple, yet competitive framework, the performance of visual relation detection can be improved by a margin of up to 8%.

Map-Based Temporally Consistent Geolocalization through Learning Motion Trajectories

Bing Zha, Alper Yilmaz

Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Motion Trajectories for Geolocalization of Object on Topological Map using Recurrent Neural Network

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we propose a novel trajectory learning method that exploits motion trajectories on topological map using recurrent neural network for temporally consistent geolocalization of object. Inspired by human's ability to both be aware of distance and direction of self-motion in navigation, our trajectory learning method learns a pattern representation of trajectories encoded as a sequence of distances and turning angles to assist self-localization. We pose the learning process as a conditional sequence prediction problem in which each output locates the object on a traversable edge in a map. Considering the prediction sequence ought to be topologically connected in the graph-structured map, we adopt two different hypotheses generation and elimination strategies to eliminate disconnected sequence prediction. We demonstrate our approach on the KITTI stereo visual odometry dataset which is a city-scale environment. The key benefits of our approach to geolocalization are that 1) we take advantage of powerful sequence modeling ability of recurrent neural network and its robustness to noisy input, 2) only require a map in the form of a graph and 3) simply use an affordable sensor that generates motion trajectory. The experiments show that the motion trajectories can be learned by training an recurrent neural network, and temporally consistent geolocation can be predicted with both of the proposed strategies.

Recognizing Bengali Word Images - A Zero-Shot Learning Perspective

Sukalpa Chanda, Daniël Arjen Willem Haitink, Prashant Kumar Prasad, Jochem Baas, Umapada Pal, Lambert Schomaker

Auto-TLDR; Zero-Shot Learning for Word Recognition in Bengali Script

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Zero-Shot Learning(ZSL) techniques could classify a completely unseen class, which it has never seen before during training. Thus, making it more apt for any real-life classification problem, where it is not possible to train a system with annotated data for all possible class types. This work investigates recognition of word images written in Bengali Script in a ZSL framework. The proposed approach performs Zero-Shot word recognition by coupling deep learned features procured from VGG16 architecture along with 13 basic shapes/stroke primitives commonly observed in Bengali script characters. As per the notion of ZSL framework those 13 basic shapes are termed as “Signature Attributes”. The obtained results are promising while evaluation was carried out in a Five-Fold cross-validation setup dealing with samples from 250 word classes.

Creating Classifier Ensembles through Meta-Heuristic Algorithms for Aerial Scene Classification

Álvaro Roberto Ferreira Jr., Gustavo Gustavo Henrique De Rosa, Joao Paulo Papa, Gustavo Carneiro, Fabio Augusto Faria

Auto-TLDR; Univariate Marginal Distribution Algorithm for Aerial Scene Classification Using Meta-Heuristic Optimization

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Aerial scene classification is a challenging task to be solved in the remote sensing area, whereas deep learning approaches, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), are being widely employed to overcome such a problem. Nevertheless, it is not straightforward to find single CNN models that can solve all aerial scene classification tasks, allowing the nurturing of a better alternative, which is to fuse CNN-based classifiers into an ensemble. However, an appropriate choice of the classifiers that will belong to the ensemble is a critical factor, as it is unfeasible to employ all the possible classifiers in the literature. Therefore, this work proposes a novel framework based on meta-heuristic optimization for creating optimized-ensembles in the context of aerial scene classification. The experimental results were performed across nine meta-heuristic algorithms and three aerial scene literature datasets, being compared in terms of effectiveness (accuracy), efficiency (execution time), and behavioral performance in different scenarios. Finally, one can observe that the Univariate Marginal Distribution Algorithm (UMDA) overcame popular literature meta-heuristic algorithms, such as Genetic Programming and Particle Swarm Optimization considering the adopted criteria in the performed experiments.

Large-Scale Historical Watermark Recognition: Dataset and a New Consistency-Based Approach

Xi Shen, Ilaria Pastrolin, Oumayma Bounou, Spyros Gidaris, Marc Smith, Olivier Poncet, Mathieu Aubry

Auto-TLDR; Historical Watermark Recognition with Fine-Grained Cross-Domain One-Shot Instance Recognition

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Historical watermark recognition is a highly practical, yet unsolved challenge for archivists and historians. With a large number of well-defined classes, cluttered and noisy samples, different types of representations, both subtle differences between classes and high intra-class variation, historical watermarks are also challenging for pattern recognition. In this paper, overcoming the difficulty of data collection, we present a large public dataset with more than 6k new photographs, allowing for the first time to tackle at scale the scenarios of practical interest for scholars: one-shot instance recognition and cross-domain one-shot instance recognition amongst more than 16k fine-grained classes. We demonstrate that this new dataset is large enough to train modern deep learning approaches, and show that standard methods can be improved considerably by using mid-level deep features. More precisely, we design both a matching score and a feature fine-tuning strategy based on filtering local matches using spatial consistency. This consistency-based approach provides important performance boost compared to strong baselines. Our model achieves 55\% as top-1 accuracy on our very challenging 16,753-class one-shot cross-domain recognition task, each class described by a single drawing from the classic Briquet catalog. In addition to watermark classification, we show our approach provides promising results on fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval.

A Grid-Based Representation for Human Action Recognition

Soufiane Lamghari, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Nicolas Saunier

Auto-TLDR; GRAR: Grid-based Representation for Action Recognition in Videos

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Human action recognition (HAR) in videos is a fundamental research topic in computer vision. It consists mainly in understanding actions performed by humans based on a sequence of visual observations. In recent years, HAR have witnessed significant progress, especially with the emergence of deep learning models. However, most of existing approaches for action recognition rely on information that is not always relevant for the task, and are limited in the way they fuse temporal information. In this paper, we propose a novel method for human action recognition that encodes efficiently the most discriminative appearance information of an action with explicit attention on representative pose features, into a new compact grid representation. Our GRAR (Grid-based Representation for Action Recognition) method is tested on several benchmark datasets that demonstrate that our model can accurately recognize human actions, despite intra-class appearance variations and occlusion challenges.

How to Define a Rejection Class Based on Model Learning?

Sarah Laroui, Xavier Descombes, Aurelia Vernay, Florent Villiers, Francois Villalba, Eric Debreuve

Auto-TLDR; An innovative learning strategy for supervised classification that is able, by design, to reject a sample as not belonging to any of the known classes

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In supervised classification, the learning process typically trains a classifier to optimize the accuracy of classifying data into the classes that appear in the learning set, and only them. While this framework fits many use cases, there are situations where the learning process is knowingly performed using a learning set that only represents the data that have been observed so far among a virtually unconstrained variety of possible samples. It is then crucial to define a classifier which has the ability to reject a sample, i.e., to classify it into a rejection class that has not been yet defined. Although obvious solutions can add this ability a posteriori to a classifier that has been learned classically, a better approach seems to directly account for this requirement in the classifier design. In this paper, we propose an innovative learning strategy for supervised classification that is able, by design, to reject a sample as not belonging to any of the known classes. For that, we rely on modeling each class as the combination of a probability density function (PDF) and a threshold that is computed with respect to the other classes. Several alternatives are proposed and compared in this framework. A comparison with straightforward approaches is also provided.

Polarimetric Image Augmentation

Marc Blanchon, Fabrice Meriaudeau, Olivier Morel, Ralph Seulin, Desire Sidibe

Auto-TLDR; Polarimetric Augmentation for Deep Learning in Robotics Applications

Abstract Poster Similar

This paper deals with new augmentation methods for an unconventional imaging modality sensitive to the physics of the observed scene called polarimetry. In nature, polarized light is obtained by reﬂection or scattering. Robotics applications in urban environments are subject to many obstacles that can be specular and therefore provide polarized light. These areas are prone to segmentation errors using standard modalities but could be solved using information carried by the polarized light. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown excellent segmentation results, but require a signiﬁcant amount of data to achieve best performances. The lack of data is usually overcomed by using augmentation methods. However, unlike RGB images, polarization images are not only scalar (intensity) images and standard augmentation techniques cannot be applied straightforwardly. We propose enhancing deep learning models through a regularized augmentation procedure applied to polarimetric data in order to characterize scenes more effectively under challenging conditions. We subsequently observe an average of 18.1% improvement in IoU between not augmented and regularized training procedures on real world data.

A Comparison of Neural Network Approaches for Melanoma Classification

Maria Frasca, Michele Nappi, Michele Risi, Genoveffa Tortora, Alessia Auriemma Citarella

Auto-TLDR; Classification of Melanoma Using Deep Neural Network Methodologies

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer and it is diagnosed mainly visually, starting from initial clinical screening and followed by dermoscopic analysis, biopsy and histopathological examination. A dermatologist’s recognition of melanoma may be subject to errors and may take some time to diagnose it. In this regard, deep learning can be useful in the study and classification of skin cancer. In particular, by classifying images with Deep Neural Network methodologies, it is possible to obtain comparable or even superior results compared to those of dermatologists. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the classification of melanoma by adopting different deep learning techniques applied to a common dataset, composed of images from the ISIC dataset and consisting of different types of skin diseases, including melanoma on which we applied a specific pre-processing phase. In particular, a comparison of the results is performed in order to select the best effective neural network to be applied to the problem of recognition and classification of melanoma. Moreover, we also evaluate the impact of the pre- processing phase on the final classification. Different metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity have been selected to assess the goodness of the adopted neural networks and compare them also with the manual classification of dermatologists.

Fine-Tuning Convolutional Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Guide and Benchmark Analysis for Glaucoma Screening

Amed Mvoulana, Rostom Kachouri, Mohamed Akil

Auto-TLDR; Fine-tuning Convolutional Neural Networks for Glaucoma Screening

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

This work aimed at giving a comprehensive and in-detailed guide on the route to fine-tuning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for glaucoma screening. Transfer learning consists in a promising alternative to train CNNs from stratch, to avoid the huge data and resources requirements. After a thorough study of five state-of-the-art CNNs architectures, a complete and well-explained strategy for fine-tuning these networks is proposed, using hyperparameter grid-searching and two-phase training approach. Excellent performance is reached on model evaluation, with a 0.9772 AUROC validation rate, giving arise to reliable glaucoma diagosis-help systems. Also, a benchmark analysis is conducted across all fine-tuned models, studying them according to performance indices such as model complexity and size, AUROC density and inference time. This in-depth analysis allows a rigorous comparison between model characteristics, and is useful for giving practioners important trademarks for prospective applications and deployments.

Convolutional STN for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

Akhil Meethal, Marco Pedersoli, Soufiane Belharbi, Eric Granger

Auto-TLDR; Spatial Localization for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

Abstract Slides Similar

Weakly-supervised object localization is a challenging task in which the object of interest should be localized while learning its appearance. State-of-the-art methods recycle the architecture of a standard CNN by using the activation maps of the last layer for localizing the object. While this approach is simple and works relatively well, object localization relies on different features than classification, thus, a specialized localization mechanism is required during training to improve performance. In this paper, we propose a convolutional, multi-scale spatial localization network that provides accurate localization for the object of interest. Experimental results on CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet datasets show competitive performance of our proposed approach on Weakly supervised localization.

Writer Identification Using Deep Neural Networks: Impact of Patch Size and Number of Patches

Akshay Punjabi, José Ramón Prieto Fontcuberta, Enrique Vidal

Auto-TLDR; Writer Recognition Using Deep Neural Networks for Handwritten Text Images

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Traditional approaches for the recognition or identification of the writer of a handwritten text image used to relay on heuristic knowledge about the shape and other features of the strokes of previously segmented characters. However, recent works have done significantly advances on the state of the art thanks to the use of various types of deep neural networks. In most of all of these works, text images are decomposed into patches, which are processed by the networks without any previous character or word segmentation. In this paper, we study how the way images are decomposed into patches impact recognition accuracy, using three publicly available datasets. The study also includes a simpler architecture where no patches are used at all - a single deep neural network inputs a whole text image and directly provides a writer recognition hypothesis. Results show that bigger patches generally lead to improved accuracy, achieving in one of the datasets a significant improvement over the best results reported so far.

Textual-Content Based Classification of Bundles of Untranscribed of Manuscript Images

José Ramón Prieto Fontcuberta, Enrique Vidal, Vicente Bosch, Carlos Alonso, Carmen Orcero, Lourdes Márquez

Auto-TLDR; Probabilistic Indexing for Text-based Classification of Manuscripts

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Content-based classification of manuscripts is an important task that is generally performed in archives and libraries by experts with a wealth of knowledge on the manuscripts contents. Unfortunately, many manuscript collections are so vast that it is not feasible to rely solely on experts to perform this task. Current approaches for textual-content-based manuscript classification generally require the handwritten images to be first transcribed into text -- but achieving sufficiently accurate transcripts is generally unfeasible for large sets of historical manuscripts. We propose a new approach to automatically perform this classification task which does not rely on any explicit image transcripts. It is based on ``probabilistic indexing'', a relatively novel technology which allows to effectively represent the intrinsic word-level uncertainty generally exhibited by handwritten text images. We assess the performance of this approach on a large collection of complex manuscripts from the Spanish Archivo General de Indias, with promising results.

Multi-Attribute Learning with Highly Imbalanced Data

Lady Viviana Beltran Beltran, Mickaël Coustaty, Nicholas Journet, Juan C. Caicedo, Antoine Doucet

Auto-TLDR; Data Imbalance in Multi-Attribute Deep Learning Models: Adaptation to face each one of the problems derived from imbalance

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Data is one of the most important keys for success when studying a simple or a complex phenomenon. With the use of deep-learning exploding and its democratization, non-computer science experts may struggle to use highly complex deep learning architectures, even when straightforward models offer them suitable performances. In this article, we study the specific and common problem of data imbalance in real databases as most of the bad performance problems are due to the data itself. We review two points: first, when the data contains different levels of imbalance. Classical imbalanced learning strategies cannot be directly applied when using multi-attribute deep learning models, i.e., multi-task and multi-label architectures. Therefore, one of our contributions is our proposed adaptations to face each one of the problems derived from imbalance. Second, we demonstrate that with little to no imbalance, straightforward deep learning models work well. However, for non-experts, these models can be seen as black boxes, where all the effort is put in pre-processing the data. To simplify the problem, we performed the classification task ignoring information that is costly to extract, such as part localization which is widely used in the state of the art of attribute classification. We make use of a widely known attribute database, CUB-200-2011 - CUB as our main use case due to its deeply imbalanced nature, along with two better structured databases: celebA and Awa2. All of them contain multi-attribute annotations. The results of highly fine-grained attribute learning over CUB demonstrate that in the presence of imbalance, by using our proposed strategies is possible to have competitive results against the state of the art, while taking advantage of multi-attribute deep learning models. We also report results for two better-structured databases over which our models over-perform the state of the art.

Contextual Classification Using Self-Supervised Auxiliary Models for Deep Neural Networks

Sebastian Palacio, Philipp Engler, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel

Auto-TLDR; Self-Supervised Autogenous Learning for Deep Neural Networks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Classification problems solved with deep neural networks (DNNs) typically rely on a closed world paradigm, and optimize over a single objective (e.g., minimization of the cross- entropy loss). This setup dismisses all kinds of supporting signals that can be used to reinforce the existence or absence of particular patterns. The increasing need for models that are interpretable by design makes the inclusion of said contextual signals a crucial necessity. To this end, we introduce the notion of Self-Supervised Autogenous Learning (SSAL). A SSAL objective is realized through one or more additional targets that are derived from the original supervised classification task, following architectural principles found in multi-task learning. SSAL branches impose low-level priors into the optimization process (e.g., grouping). The ability of using SSAL branches during inference, allow models to converge faster, focusing on a richer set of class-relevant features. We equip state-of-the-art DNNs with SSAL objectives and report consistent improvements for all of them on CIFAR100 and Imagenet. We show that SSAL models outperform similar state-of-the-art methods focused on contextual loss functions, auxiliary branches and hierarchical priors.

Space-Time Domain Tensor Neural Networks: An Application on Human Pose Classification

Konstantinos Makantasis, Athanasios Voulodimos, Anastasios Doulamis, Nikolaos Doulamis, Nikolaos Bakalos

Auto-TLDR; Tensor-Based Neural Network for Spatiotemporal Pose Classifiaction using Three-Dimensional Skeleton Data

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Recent advances in sensing technologies require the design and development of pattern recognition models capable of processing spatiotemporal data efficiently. In this study, we propose a spatially and temporally aware tensor-based neural network for human pose classifiaction using three-dimensional skeleton data. Our model employs three novel components. First, an input layer capable of constructing highly discriminative spatiotemporal features. Second, a tensor fusion operation that produces compact yet rich representations of the data, and third, a tensor-based neural network that processes data representations in their original tensor form. Our model is end-to-end trainable and characterized by a small number of trainable parameters making it suitable for problems where the annotated data is limited. Experimental evaluation of the proposed model indicates that it can achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Learning Dictionaries of Kinematic Primitives for Action Classification

Alessia Vignolo, Nicoletta Noceti, Alessandra Sciutti, Francesca Odone, Giulio Sandini

Auto-TLDR; Action Understanding using Visual Motion Primitives

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

This paper proposes a method based on visual motion primitives to address the problem of action understanding. The approach builds in an unsupervised way a dictionary of kinematic primitives from a set of sub-movements obtained by segmenting the velocity profile of an action on the basis of local minima derived directly from the optical flow. The dictionary is then used to describe each sub-movement as a linear combination of atoms using sparse coding. The descriptive capability of the proposed motion representation is experimentally validated on the MoCA dataset, a collection of synchronized multi-view videos and motion capture data of cooking activities. The results show that the approach, despite its simplicity, has a good performance in action classification, especially when the motion primitives are combined over time. Also, the method is proved to be tolerant to view point changes, and can thus support cross-view action recognition. Overall, the method may be seen as a backbone of a general approach to action understanding, with potential applications in robotics.

Self-Supervised Learning for Astronomical Image Classification

Ana Martinazzo, Mateus Espadoto, Nina S. T. Hirata

Auto-TLDR; Unlabeled Astronomical Images for Deep Neural Network Pre-training

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

In Astronomy, a huge amount of image data is generated daily by photometric surveys, which scan the sky to collect data from stars, galaxies and other celestial objects. In this paper, we propose a technique to leverage unlabeled astronomical images to pre-train deep convolutional neural networks, in order to learn a domain-specific feature extractor which improves the results of machine learning techniques in setups with small amounts of labeled data available. We show that our technique produces results which are in many cases better than using ImageNet pre-training.

Merged 1D-2D Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Nerve Detection in Ultrasound Images

Mohammad Alkhatib, Adel Hafiane, Pierre Vieyres

Auto-TLDR; A Deep Neural Network for Deep Neural Networks to Detect Median Nerve in Ultrasound-Guided Regional Anesthesia

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Ultrasound-Guided Regional Anesthesia (UGRA) becomes a standard procedure in surgical operations and contributes to pain management. It offers the advantages of the targeted nerve detection and provides the visualization of regions of interest such as anatomical structures. However, nerve detection is one of the most challenging tasks that anesthetists can encounter in the UGRA procedure. A computer-aided system that can detect automatically the nerve region would facilitate the anesthetist's daily routine and allow them to concentrate more on the anesthetic delivery. In this paper, we propose a new method based on merging deep learning models from different data to detect the median nerve. The merged architecture consists of two branches, one being one dimensional (1D) convolutional neural networks (CNN) branch and another 2D CNN branch. The merged architecture aims to learn the high-level features from 1D handcrafted noise-robust features and 2D ultrasound images. The obtained results show the validity and high accuracy of the proposed approach and its robustness.

Joint Supervised and Self-Supervised Learning for 3D Real World Challenges

Antonio Alliegro, Davide Boscaini, Tatiana Tommasi

Auto-TLDR; Self-supervision for 3D Shape Classification and Segmentation in Point Clouds

Abstract Slides Similar

Point cloud processing and 3D shape understanding are very challenging tasks for which deep learning techniques have demonstrated great potentials. Still further progresses are essential to allow artificial intelligent agents to interact with the real world. In many practical conditions the amount of annotated data may be limited and integrating new sources of knowledge becomes crucial to support autonomous learning. Here we consider several scenarios involving synthetic and real world point clouds where supervised learning fails due to data scarcity and large domain gaps. We propose to enrich standard feature representations by leveraging self-supervision through a multi-task model that can solve a 3D puzzle while learning the main task of shape classification or part segmentation. An extensive analysis investigating few-shot, transfer learning and cross-domain settings shows the effectiveness of our approach with state-of-the-art results for 3D shape classification and part segmentation.

GuCNet: A Guided Clustering-Based Network for Improved Classification

Ushasi Chaudhuri, Syomantak Chaudhuri, Subhasis Chaudhuri

Auto-TLDR; Semantic Classification of Challenging Dataset Using Guide Datasets

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

We deal with the problem of semantic classification of challenging and highly-cluttered dataset. We present a novel, and yet a very simple classification technique by leveraging the ease of classifiability of any existing well separable dataset for guidance. Since the guide dataset which may or may not have any semantic relationship with the experimental dataset, forms well separable clusters in the feature set, the proposed network tries to embed class-wise features of the challenging dataset to those distinct clusters of the guide set, making them more separable. Depending on the availability, we propose two types of guide sets: one using texture (image) guides and another using prototype vectors representing cluster centers. Experimental results obtained on the challenging benchmark RSSCN, LSUN, and TU-Berlin datasets establish the efficacy of the proposed method as we outperform the existing state-of-the-art techniques by a considerable margin.

SiamMT: Real-Time Arbitrary Multi-Object Tracking

Lorenzo Vaquero, Manuel Mucientes, Victor Brea

Auto-TLDR; SiamMT: A Deep-Learning-based Arbitrary Multi-Object Tracking System for Video

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Visual object tracking is of great interest in many applications, as it preserves the identity of an object throughout a video. However, while real applications demand systems capable of real-time-tracking multiple objects, multi-object tracking solutions usually follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm, thus they depend on running a costly detector in each frame, and they do not allow the tracking of arbitrary objects, i.e., they require training for specific classes. In response to this need, this work presents the architecture of SiamMT, a system capable of efficiently applying individual visual tracking techniques to multiple objects in real-time. This makes it the first deep-learning-based arbitrary multi-object tracker. To achieve this, we propose the global frame features extraction by using a fully-convolutional neural network, followed by the cropping and resizing of the different object search areas. The final similarity operation between these search areas and the target exemplars is carried out with an optimized pairwise cross-correlation. These novelties allow the system to track multiple targets in a scalable manner, achieving 25 fps with 60 simultaneous objects for VGA videos and 40 objects for HD720 videos, all with a tracking quality similar to SiamFC.

Neuron-Based Network Pruning Based on Majority Voting

Ali Alqahtani, Xianghua Xie, Ehab Essa, Mark W. Jones

Auto-TLDR; Large-Scale Neural Network Pruning using Majority Voting

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The achievement of neural networks in a variety of applications is accompanied by a dramatic increase in computational costs and memory requirements. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to simultaneously identify the critical neurons and prune the model during training without involving any pre-training or fine-tuning procedures. Unlike existing methods, which accomplish this task in a greedy fashion, we propose a majority voting technique to compare the activation values among neurons and assign a voting score to quantitatively evaluate their importance.This mechanism helps to effectively reduce model complexity by eliminating the less influential neurons and aims to determine a subset of the whole model that can represent the reference model with much fewer parameters within the training process. Experimental results show that majority voting efficiently compresses the network with no drop in model accuracy, pruning more than 79\% of the original model parameters on CIFAR10 and more than 91\% of the original parameters on MNIST. Moreover, we show that with our proposed method, sparse models can be further pruned into even smaller models by removing more than 60\% of the parameters, whilst preserving the reference model accuracy.

PICK: Processing Key Information Extraction from Documents Using Improved Graph Learning-Convolutional Networks

Wenwen Yu, Ning Lu, Xianbiao Qi, Ping Gong, Rong Xiao

Auto-TLDR; PICK: A Graph Learning Framework for Key Information Extraction from Documents

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Computer vision with state-of-the-art deep learning models have achieved huge success in the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) including text detection and recognition tasks recently. However, Key Information Extraction (KIE) from documents as the downstream task of OCR, having a large number of use scenarios in real-world, remains a challenge because documents not only have textual features extracting from OCR systems but also have semantic visual features that are not fully exploited and play a critical role in KIE. Too little work has been devoted to efficiently make full use of both textual and visual features of the documents. In this paper, we introduce PICK, a framework that is effective and robust in handling complex documents layout for KIE by combining graph learning with graph convolution operation, yielding a richer semantic representation containing the textual and visual features and global layout without ambiguity. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets have been conducted to show that our method outperforms baselines methods by significant margins.

Aggregating Object Features Based on Attention Weights for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval

Hongli Lin, Yongqi Song, Zixuan Zeng, Weisheng Wang

Auto-TLDR; DSAW: Unsupervised Dual-selection for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval

Abstract Similar

Object localization and local feature representation are key issues in fine-grained image retrieval. However, the existing unsupervised methods still need to be improved in these two aspects. For conquering these issues in a unified framework, a novel unsupervised scheme, named DSAW for short, is presented in this paper. Firstly, we proposed a dual-selection (DS) method, which achieves more accurate object localization by using adaptive threshold method to perform feature selection on local and global activation map in turn. Secondly, a novel and faster self-attention weights (AW) method is developed to weight local features by measuring their importance in the global context. Finally, we also evaluated the performance of the proposed method on five fine-grained image datasets and the results showed that our DSAW outperformed the existing best method.

A Few-Shot Learning Approach for Historical Ciphered Manuscript Recognition

Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Alicia Fornés, Yousri Kessentini, Crina Tudor

Auto-TLDR; Handwritten Ciphers Recognition Using Few-Shot Object Detection

Abstract Slides Similar

Encoded (or ciphered) manuscripts are a special type of historical documents that contain encrypted text. The automatic recognition of this kind of documents is challenging because: 1) the cipher alphabet changes from one document to another, 2) there is a lack of annotated corpus for training and 3) touching symbols make the symbol segmentation difficult and complex. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a novel method for handwritten ciphers recognition based on few-shot object detection. Our method first detects all symbols of a given alphabet in a line image, and then a decoding step maps the symbol similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. By training on synthetic data, we show that the proposed architecture is able to recognize handwritten ciphers with unseen alphabets. In addition, if few labeled pages with the same alphabet are used for fine tuning, our method surpasses existing unsupervised and supervised HTR methods for ciphers recognition.

A Novel Region of Interest Extraction Layer for Instance Segmentation

Leonardo Rossi, Akbar Karimi, Andrea Prati

Auto-TLDR; Generic RoI Extractor for Two-Stage Neural Network for Instance Segmentation

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Given the wide diffusion of deep neural network architectures for computer vision tasks, several new applications are nowadays more and more feasible. Among them, a particular attention has been recently given to instance segmentation, by exploiting the results achievable by two-stage networks (such as Mask R-CNN or Faster R-CNN), derived from R-CNN. In these complex architectures, a crucial role is played by the Region of Interest (RoI) extraction layer, devoted to extract a coherent subset of features from a single Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) layer attached on top of a backbone. This paper is motivated by the need to overcome to the limitations of existing RoI extractors which select only one (the best) layer from FPN. Our intuition is that all the layers of FPN retain useful information. Therefore, the proposed layer (called Generic RoI Extractor - GRoIE) introduces non-local building blocks and attention mechanisms to boost the performance. A comprehensive ablation study at component level is conducted to find the best set of algorithms and parameters for the GRoIE layer. Moreover, GRoIE can be integrated seamlessly with every two-stage architecture for both object detection and instance segmentation tasks. Therefore, the improvements brought by the use of GRoIE in different state-of-the-art architectures are also evaluated. The proposed layer leads up to gain a 1.1% AP on bounding box detection and 1.7% AP on instance segmentation. The code is publicly available on GitHub repository at https://github.com/IMPLabUniPr/mmdetection-groie