TGCRBNW: A Dataset for Runner Bib Number Detection (and Recognition) in the Wild

Pablo Hernández-Carrascosa, Adrian Penate-Sanchez, Javier Lorenzo, David Freire Obregón, Modesto Castrillon

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Auto-TLDR; Racing Bib Number Detection and Recognition in the Wild Using Faster R-CNN

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Racing bib number (RBN) detection and recognition is a specific problem related to text recognition in natural scenes. In this paper, we present a novel dataset created after registering participants in a real ultrarunning competition which comprises a wide range of acquisition conditions in five different recording points, including nightlight and daylight. The dataset contains more than 3k samples of over 400 different individuals. The aim is at providing an in the wild benchmark for both RBN detection and recognition problems. To illustrate the present difficulties, the dataset is evaluated for RBN detection using different Faster R-CNN specific detection models, filtering its output with heuristics based on body detection to improve the overall detection performance. Initial results are promising, but there is still a significant room for improvement. And detection is just the first step to accomplish in the wild RBN recognition.

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Auto-TLDR; AS-RPN: Anchor Selection-based Region Proposal Network for Scene Text Detection

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Iterative Bounding Box Annotation for Object Detection

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-Automatic Bounding Box Annotation for Object Detection in Digital Images

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Manual annotation of bounding boxes for object detection in digital images is tedious, and time and resource consuming. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic method for efficient bounding box annotation. The method trains the object detector iteratively on small batches of labeled images and learns to propose bounding boxes for the next batch, after which the human annotator only needs to correct possible errors. We propose an experimental setup for simulating the human actions and use it for comparing different iteration strategies, such as the order in which the data is presented to the annotator. We experiment on our method with three datasets and show that it can reduce the human annotation effort significantly, saving up to 75% of total manual annotation work.

Early Wildfire Smoke Detection in Videos

Taanya Gupta, Hengyue Liu, Bir Bhanu

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-supervised Spatio-Temporal Video Object Segmentation for Automatic Detection of Smoke in Videos during Forest Fire

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Detecting Objects with High Object Region Percentage

Fen Fang, Qianli Xu, Liyuan Li, Ying Gu, Joo-Hwee Lim

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Auto-TLDR; Faster R-CNN for High-ORP Object Detection

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Object shape is a subtle but important factor for object detection. It has been observed that the object-region-percentage (ORP) can be utilized to improve detection accuracy for elongated objects, which have much lower ORPs than other types of objects. In this paper, we propose an approach to improve the detection performance for objects whose ORPs are relatively higher.To address the problem of high-ORP object detection, we propose a method consisting of three steps. First, we adjust the ground truth bounding boxes of high-ORP objects to an optimal range. Second, we train an object detector, Faster R-CNN, based on adjusted bounding boxes to achieve high recall. Finally, we train a DCNN to learn the adjustment ratios towards four directions and adjust detected bounding boxes of objects to get better localization for higher precision. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on 12 high-ORP objects in COCO and 8 objects in a proprietary gearbox dataset. The experimental results show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on these objects while costing less resources in training and inference stages.

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Auto-TLDR; Text Detection for Document Images Using Synthetic and Real Data

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Vision-Based Layout Detection from Scientific Literature Using Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks

Huichen Yang, William Hsu

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Auto-TLDR; Transfer Learning for Scientific Literature Layout Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks

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Construction Worker Hardhat-Wearing Detection Based on an Improved BiFPN

Chenyang Zhang, Zhiqiang Tian, Jingyi Song, Yaoyue Zheng, Bo Xu

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Auto-TLDR; A One-Stage Object Detection Method for Hardhat-Wearing in Construction Site

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A Fast and Accurate Object Detector for Handwritten Digit String Recognition

Jun Guo, Wenjing Wei, Yifeng Ma, Cong Peng

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Auto-TLDR; ChipNet: An anchor-free object detector for handwritten digit string recognition

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Which Airline Is This? Airline Logo Detection in Real-World Weather Conditions

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Auto-TLDR; Airlines logo detection on airplane tails using data augmentation

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CDeC-Net: Composite Deformable Cascade Network for Table Detection in Document Images

Madhav Agarwal, Ajoy Mondal, C. V. Jawahar

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Auto-TLDR; CDeC-Net: An End-to-End Trainable Deep Network for Detecting Tables in Document Images

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Text Recognition - Real World Data and Where to Find Them

Klára Janoušková, Lluis Gomez, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Jiri Matas

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Weakly Annotated Images for Text Extraction

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We present a method for exploiting weakly annotated images to improve text extraction pipelines. The approach uses an arbitrary end-to-end text recognition system to obtain text region proposals and their, possibly erroneous, transcriptions. The proposed method includes matching of imprecise transcription to weak annotations and edit distance guided neighbourhood search. It produces nearly error-free, localised instances of scene text, which we treat as "pseudo ground truth" (PGT). We apply the method to two weakly-annotated datasets. Training with the extracted PGT consistently improves the accuracy of a state of the art recognition model, by 3.7 % on average, across different benchmark datasets (image domains) and 24.5 % on one of the weakly annotated datasets.

Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images

Jinwang Wang, Wen Yang, Haowen Guo, Ruixiang Zhang, Gui-Song Xia

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Auto-TLDR; Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images Using Multiple Center Points Based Learning Network

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Object detection in Earth Vision has achieved great progress in recent years. However, tiny object detection in aerial images remains a very challenging problem since the tiny objects contain a small number of pixels and are easily confused with the background. To advance tiny object detection research in aerial images, we present a new dataset for Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images (AI-TOD). Specifically, AI-TOD comes with 700,621 object instances for eight categories across 28,036 aerial images. Compared to existing object detection datasets in aerial images, the mean size of objects in AI-TOD is about 12.8 pixels, which is much smaller than others. To build a benchmark for tiny object detection in aerial images, we evaluate the state-of-the-art object detectors on our AI-TOD dataset. Experimental results show that direct application of these approaches on AI-TOD produces suboptimal object detection results, thus new specialized detectors for tiny object detection need to be designed. Therefore, we propose a multiple center points based learning network (M-CenterNet) to improve the localization performance of tiny object detection, and experimental results show the significant performance gain over the competitors.

Object Features and Face Detection Performance: Analyses with 3D-Rendered Synthetic Data

Jian Han, Sezer Karaoglu, Hoang-An Le, Theo Gevers

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Auto-TLDR; Synthetic Data for Face Detection Using 3DU Face Dataset

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This paper is to provide an overview of how object features from images influence face detection performance, and how to select synthetic faces to address specific features. To this end, we investigate the effects of occlusion, scale, viewpoint, background, and noise by using a novel synthetic image generator based on 3DU Face Dataset. To examine the effects of different features, we selected three detectors (Faster RCNN, HR, SSH) as representative of various face detection methodologies. Comparing different configurations of synthetic data on face detection systems, it showed that our synthetic dataset could complement face detectors to become more robust against features in the real world. Our analysis also demonstrated that a variety of data augmentation is necessary to address nuanced differences in performance.

FeatureNMS: Non-Maximum Suppression by Learning Feature Embeddings

Niels Ole Salscheider

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Auto-TLDR; FeatureNMS: Non-Maximum Suppression for Multiple Object Detection

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Most state of the art object detectors output multiple detections per object. The duplicates are removed in a post-processing step called Non-Maximum Suppression. Classical Non-Maximum Suppression has shortcomings in scenes that contain objects with high overlap: The idea of this heuristic is that a high bounding box overlap corresponds to a high probability of having a duplicate. We propose FeatureNMS to solve this problem. FeatureNMS recognizes duplicates not only based on the intersection over union between bounding boxes, but also based on the difference of feature vectors. These feature vectors can encode more information like visual appearance. Our approach outperforms classical NMS and derived approaches and achieves state of the art performance.

Tracking Fast Moving Objects by Segmentation Network

Ales Zita, Filip Sroubek

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Auto-TLDR; Fast Moving Objects Tracking by Segmentation Using Deep Learning

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Tracking Fast Moving Objects (FMO), which appear as blurred streaks in video sequences, is a difficult task for standard trackers, as the object position does not overlap in consecutive video frames and texture information of the objects is blurred. Up-to-date approaches tuned for this task are based on background subtraction with a static background and slow deblurring algorithms. In this article, we present a tracking-by-segmentation approach implemented using modern deep learning methods that perform near real-time tracking on real-world video sequences. We have developed a physically plausible FMO sequence generator to be a robust foundation for our training pipeline and demonstrate straightforward network adaptation for different FMO scenarios with varying foreground.

A Modified Single-Shot Multibox Detector for Beyond Real-Time Object Detection

Georgios Orfanidis, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Stefanos Vrochidis, Anastasios Tefas, Ioannis Kompatsiaris

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Auto-TLDR; Single Shot Detector in Resource-Restricted Systems with Lighter SSD Variations

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This works focuses on examining the performance of the Single Shot Detector (SSD) model in resource restricted systems where maintaining the power of the full model comprises a significant prerequisite. The proposed SSD variations examine the behavior of lighter versions of SSD while propose measures to limit the unavoidable performance shortage. The outcomes of the conducted research demonstrate a remarkable trade-off between performance losses, speed improvement and the required resource reservation. Thus, the experimental results evidence the efficiency of the presented SSD alterations towards accomplishing higher frame rates and retaining the performance of the original model.

Ground-truthing Large Human Behavior Monitoring Datasets

Tehreem Qasim, Robert Fisher, Naeem Bhatti

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Auto-TLDR; Semi-automated Groundtruthing for Large Video Datasets

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We present a groundtruthing approach which is applicable to large video datasets collected for studying people’s behavior, and which are recorded at a low frame per second (fps) rate. Groundtruthing a large dataset manually is a time consuming task and is prone to errors. The proposed approach is semi-automated (using a combination of deepnet and traditional image analysis) to minimize human labeler’s interaction with the video frames. The framework employs mask-rcnn as a people counter followed by human assisted semi-automated tests to correct the wrong labels. Subsequently, a bounding box extraction algorithm is used which is fully automated for frames with a single person and semi-automated for frames with two or more people. We also propose a methodology for anomaly detection i.e., collapse on table or floor. Behavior recognition is performed by using a fine-tuned alexnet convolutional neural network. The people detection and behavior analysis components of the framework are primarily designed to help reduce human labor in ground-truthing so that minimal human involvement is required. They are not meant to be employed as fully automated state-of-the-art systems. The proposed approach is validated on a new dataset presented in this paper, containing human activity in an indoor office environment and recorded at 1 fps as well as an indoor video sequence recorded at 15 fps. Experimental results show a significant reduction in human labor involved in the process of ground-truthing i.e., the number of potential clicks for office dataset was reduced by 99.2% and for the additional test video by 99.7%.

Uncertainty Guided Recognition of Tiny Craters on the Moon

Thorsten Wilhelm, Christian Wöhler

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Auto-TLDR; Accurately Detecting Tiny Craters in Remote Sensed Images Using Deep Neural Networks

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Accurately detecting craters in remotely sensed images is an important task when analysing the properties of planetary bodies. Commonly, only large craters in the range of several kilometres are detected. In this work we provide the first example of automatically detecting tiny craters in the range of several meters with the help of a deep neural network by using only a small set of annotated craters. Additionally, we propose a novel way to group overlapping detections and replace the commonly used non-maximum suppression with a probabilistic treatment. As a result, we receive valuable uncertainty estimates of the detections and the aggregated detections are shown to be vastly superior.

Feature Embedding Based Text Instance Grouping for Largely Spaced and Occluded Text Detection

Pan Gao, Qi Wan, Renwu Gao, Linlin Shen

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Auto-TLDR; Text Instance Embedding Based Feature Embeddings for Multiple Text Instance Grouping

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A text instance can be easily detected as multiple ones due to the large space between texts/characters, curved shape and partial occlusion. In this paper, a feature embedding based text instance grouping algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. To learn the feature space, a TIEM (Text Instance Embedding Module) is trained to minimize the within instance scatter and maximize the between instance scatter. Similarity between different text instances are measured in the feature space and merged if they meet certain conditions. Experimental results show that our approach can effectively connect text regions that belong to the same text instance. Competitive performance of our approach has been achieved on CTW1500, Total-Text, IC15 and a subset consists of texts selected from the three datasets, with large spacing and occlusions.

Utilising Visual Attention Cues for Vehicle Detection and Tracking

Feiyan Hu, Venkatesh Gurram Munirathnam, Noel E O'Connor, Alan Smeaton, Suzanne Little

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Auto-TLDR; Visual Attention for Object Detection and Tracking in Driver-Assistance Systems

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Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been attracting attention from many researchers. Vision based sensors are the closest way to emulate human driver visual behavior while driving. In this paper, we explore possible ways to use visual attention (saliency) for object detection and tracking. We investigate: 1) How a visual attention map such as a subjectness attention or saliency map and an objectness attention map can facilitate region proposal generation in a 2-stage object detector; 2) How a visual attention map can be used for tracking multiple objects. We propose a neural network that can simultaneously detect objects as and generate objectness and subjectness maps to save computational power. We further exploit the visual attention map during tracking using a sequential Monte Carlo probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter. The experiments are conducted on KITTI and DETRAC datasets. The use of visual attention and hierarchical features has shown a considerable improvement of≈8% in object detection which effectively increased tracking performance by≈4% on KITTI dataset.

Multi-View Object Detection Using Epipolar Constraints within Cluttered X-Ray Security Imagery

Brian Kostadinov Shalon Isaac-Medina, Chris G. Willcocks, Toby Breckon

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Epipolar Constraints for Multi-View Object Detection in X-ray Security Images

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End-To-End Deep Learning Methods for Automated Damage Detection in Extreme Events at Various Scales

Yongsheng Bai, Alper Yilmaz, Halil Sezen

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Auto-TLDR; Robust Mask R-CNN for Crack Detection in Extreme Events

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Robust Mask R-CNN (Mask Regional Convolutional Neural Network) methods are proposed and tested for automatic detection of cracks on structures or their components that may be damaged during extreme events, such as earth-quakes. We curated a new dataset with 2,021 labeled images for training and validation and aimed to find end-to-end deep neural networks for crack detection in the field. With data augmentation and parameters fine-tuning, Path Aggregation Network (PANet) with spatial attention mechanisms and High-resolution Network (HRNet) are introduced into Mask R-CNNs. The tests on three public datasets with low- or high-resolution images demonstrate that the proposed methods can achieve a big improvement over alternative networks, so the proposed method may be sufficient for crack detection for a variety of scales in real applications.

Object Detection Model Based on Scene-Level Region Proposal Self-Attention

Yu Quan, Zhixin Li, Canlong Zhang, Huifang Ma

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Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Semantic Informations for Object Detection

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The improvement of object detection performance is mostly focused on the extraction of local information near the region of interest in the image, which results in detection performance in this area being unable to achieve the desired effect. First, a depth-wise separable convolution network(D_SCNet-127 R-CNN) is built on the backbone network. Considering the importance of scene and semantic informations for visual recognition, the feature map is sent into the branch of the semantic segmentation module, region proposal network module, and the region proposal self-attention module to build the network of scene-level and region proposal self-attention module. Second, a deep reinforcement learning was utilized to achieve accurate positioning of border regression, and the calculation speed of the whole model was improved through implementing a light-weight head network. This model can effectively solve the limitation of feature extraction in traditional object detection and obtain more comprehensive detailed features. The experimental verification on MSCOCO17, VOC12, and Cityscapes datasets shows that the proposed method has good validity and scalability.

The DeepScoresV2 Dataset and Benchmark for Music Object Detection

Lukas Tuggener, Yvan Putra Satyawan, Alexander Pacha, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Thilo Stadelmann

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Auto-TLDR; DeepScoresV2: an extended version of the DeepScores dataset for optical music recognition

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In this paper, we present DeepScoresV2, an extended version of the DeepScores dataset for optical music recognition (OMR). We improve upon the original DeepScores dataset by providing much more detailed annotations, namely (a) annotations for 135 classes including fundamental symbols of non-fixed size and shape, increasing the number of annotated symbols by 23%; (b) oriented bounding boxes; (c) higher-level rhythm and pitch information (onset beat for all symbols and line position for noteheads); and (d) a compatibility mode for easy use in conjunction with the MUSCIMA++ dataset for OMR on handwritten documents. These additions open up the potential for future advancement in OMR research. Additionally, we release two state-of-the-art baselines for DeepScoresV2 based on Faster R-CNN and the Deep Watershed Detector. An analysis of the baselines shows that regular orthogonal bounding boxes are unsuitable for objects which are long, small, and potentially rotated, such as ties and beams, which demonstrates the need for detection algorithms that naturally incorporate object angles. Dataset, code and pre-trained models, as well as user instructions, are publicly available at https://tuggeluk.github.io/dsv2_preview/

Thermal Image Enhancement Using Generative Adversarial Network for Pedestrian Detection

Mohamed Amine Marnissi, Hajer Fradi, Anis Sahbani, Najoua Essoukri Ben Amara

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Auto-TLDR; Improving Visual Quality of Infrared Images for Pedestrian Detection Using Generative Adversarial Network

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Infrared imaging has recently played an important role in a wide range of applications including surveillance, robotics and night vision. However, infrared cameras often suffer from some limitations, essentially about low-contrast and blurred details. These problems contribute to the loss of observation of target objects in infrared images, which could limit the feasibility of different infrared imaging applications. In this paper, we mainly focus on the problem of pedestrian detection on thermal images. Particularly, we emphasis the need for enhancing the visual quality of images beforehand performing the detection step. % to ensure effective results. To address that, we propose a novel thermal enhancement architecture based on Generative Adversarial Network, and composed of two modules contrast enhancement and denoising modules with a post-processing step for edge restoration in order to improve the overall quality. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is assessed by means of visual quality metrics and better results are obtained compared to the original thermal images and to the obtained results by other existing enhancement methods. These results have been conduced on a subset of KAIST dataset. Using the same dataset, the impact of the proposed enhancement architecture has been demonstrated on the detection results by obtaining better performance with a significant margin using YOLOv3 detector.

SyNet: An Ensemble Network for Object Detection in UAV Images

Berat Mert Albaba, Sedat Ozer

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Auto-TLDR; SyNet: Combining Multi-Stage and Single-Stage Object Detection for Aerial Images

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Recent advances in camera equipped drone applications and their widespread use increased the demand on vision based object detection algorithms for aerial images. Object detection process is inherently a challenging task as a generic computer vision problem, however, since the use of object detection algorithms on UAVs (or on drones) is relatively a new area, it remains as a more challenging problem to detect objects in aerial images. There are several reasons for that including: (i) the lack of large drone datasets including large object variance, (ii) the large orientation and scale variance in drone images when compared to the ground images, and (iii) the difference in texture and shape features between the ground and the aerial images. Deep learning based object detection algorithms can be classified under two main categories: (a) single-stage detectors and (b) multi-stage detectors. Both single-stage and multi-stage solutions have their advantages and disadvantages over each other. However, a technique to combine the good sides of each of those solutions could yield even a stronger solution than each of those solutions individually. In this paper, we propose an ensemble network, SyNet, that combines a multi-stage method with a single-stage one with the motivation of decreasing the high false negative rate of multi-stage detectors and increasing the quality of the single-stage detector proposals. As building blocks, CenterNet and Cascade R-CNN with pretrained feature extractors are utilized along with an ensembling strategy. We report the state of the art results obtained by our proposed solution on two different datasets: namely MS-COCO and visDrone with \%52.1 $mAP_{IoU = 0.75}$ is obtained on MS-COCO $val2017$ dataset and \%26.2 $mAP_{IoU = 0.75}$ is obtained on VisDrone $test-set$. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mertalbaba/SyNet}{https://github.com/mer talbaba/SyNet

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

Mygel Andrei Martija, Prospero Naval

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

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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.

EAGLE: Large-Scale Vehicle Detection Dataset in Real-World Scenarios Using Aerial Imagery

Seyed Majid Azimi, Reza Bahmanyar, Corentin Henry, Kurz Franz

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Auto-TLDR; EAGLE: A Large-Scale Dataset for Multi-class Vehicle Detection with Object Orientation Information in Airborne Imagery

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Multi-class vehicle detection from airborne imagery with orientation estimation is an important task in the near and remote vision domains with applications in traffic monitoring and disaster management. In the last decade, we have witnessed significant progress in object detection in ground imagery, but it is still in its infancy in airborne imagery, mostly due to the scarcity of diverse and large-scale datasets. Despite being a useful tool for different applications, current airborne datasets only partially reflect the challenges of real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce EAGLE (oriEnted object detection using Aerial imaGery in real-worLd scEnarios), a large-scale dataset for multi-class vehicle detection with object orientation information in aerial imagery. It features high-resolution aerial images composed of different real-world situations with a wide variety of camera sensor, resolution, flight altitude, weather, illumination, haze, shadow, time, city, country, occlusion, and camera angle. The annotation was done by airborne imagery experts with small- and large-vehicle classes. EAGLE contains 215,986 instances annotated with oriented bounding boxes defined by four points and orientation, making it by far the largest dataset to date in this task. It also supports researches on the haze and shadow removal as well as super-resolution and in-painting applications. We define three tasks: detection by (1) horizontal bounding boxes, (2) rotated bounding boxes, and (3) oriented bounding boxes. We carried out several experiments to evaluate several state-of-the-art methods in object detection on our dataset to form a baseline. Experiments show that the EAGLE dataset accurately reflects real-world situations and correspondingly challenging applications. The dataset will be made publicly available.

Stratified Multi-Task Learning for Robust Spotting of Scene Texts

Kinjal Dasgupta, Sudip Das, Ujjwal Bhattacharya

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Auto-TLDR; Feature Representation Block for Multi-task Learning of Scene Text

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Gaining control over the dynamics of multi-task learning should help to unlock the potential of the deep network to a great extent. In the existing multi-task learning (MTL) approaches of deep network, all the parameters of its feature encoding part are subjected to adjustments corresponding to each of the underlying sub-tasks. On the other hand, different functional areas of human brain are responsible for distinct functions such as the Broca's area of the cerebrum is responsible for speech formation whereas its Wernicke's area is related to the language development etc. Inspired by this fact, in the present study, we propose to introduce a block (termed as Feature Representation Block) of connection weights spanned over a few successive layers of a deep multi-task learning architecture and stratify the same into distinct subsets for their adjustments exclusively corresponding to different sub-tasks. Additionally, we have introduced a novel regularization component for controlled training of this Feature Representation Block. The purpose of the development of this learning framework is efficient end-to-end recognition of scene texts. Simulation results of the proposed strategy on various benchmark scene text datasets such as ICDAR 2015, ICDAR 2017 MLT, COCO-Text and MSRA-TD500 have improved respective SOTA performance.

An Accurate Threshold Insensitive Kernel Detector for Arbitrary Shaped Text

Xijun Qian, Yifan Liu, Yu-Bin Yang

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Auto-TLDR; TIKD: threshold insensitive kernel detector for arbitrary shaped text

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Recently, segmentation-based methods are popular in scene text detection due to the segmentation results can easily represent scene text of arbitrary shapes. However, previous works segment text instances the same as normal objects. It is obvious that the edge of the text instance differs from normal objects. In this paper, we propose a threshold insensitive kernel detector for arbitrary shaped text called TIKD, which includes a simple but stable base model and a new loss weight called Decay Loss Weight (DLW). By suppressing outlier pixels in a gradual way, the DLW can lead the network to detect more accurate text instances. Our method shows great power in accuracy and stability. It is worth mentioning that we achieve the precision, recall, f-measure of 88.7%, 83.7%, 86.1% respectively on the Total-Text dataset, with a fast speed of 16.3 frames per second. What’s more, even if we set the threshold in an extreme situation range from 0.1 to 0.9, our method can always achieve a stable f-measure over 79.9% on the Total-Text dataset.

IPT: A Dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking in Closed Domains

Thomas Heitzinger, Martin Kampel

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Auto-TLDR; Identity Preserved Tracking Using Depth Data for Privacy and Privacy

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We present a public dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking (IPT) consisting of sequences of depth data recorded using an Orbbec Astra depth sensor. The dataset features sequences in ten different locations with a high amount of background variation and is designed to be applicable to a wide range of tasks. Its labeling is versatile, allowing for tracking in either 3d space or image coordinates. Next to frame-by-frame 3d and inferred bounding box labeling we provide supplementary annotation of camera poses and room layouts, split in multiple semantically distinct categories. Intended use-cases are applications where both a high level understanding of scene understanding and privacy are central points of consideration, such as active and assisted living (AAL), security and industrial safety. Compared to similar public datasets IPT distinguishes itself with its sequential data format, 3d instance labeling and room layout annotation. We present baseline object detection results in image coordinates using a YOLOv3 network architecture and implement a background model suitable for online tracking applications to increase detection accuracy. Additionally we propose a novel volumetric non-maximum suppression (V-NMS) approach, taking advantage of known room geometry. Last we provide baseline person tracking results utilizing Multiple Object Tracking Challenge (MOTChallenge) evaluation metrics of the CVPR19 benchmark.

Nighttime Pedestrian Detection Based on Feature Attention and Transformation

Gang Li, Shanshan Zhang, Jian Yang

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Auto-TLDR; FAM and FTM: Enhanced Feature Attention Module and Feature Transformation Module for nighttime pedestrian detection

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Pedestrian detection at nighttime is an important yet challenging task, which is fundamental for many practical applications, e.g. autonomous driving, video surveillance. To address this problem, in this work we start with some analysis, from which we find that the nighttime features have much more noise than that of daytime, resulting in low discrimination ability. Besides, we also observe some pedestrian examples are under adverse illumination conditions, and they can hardly provide sufficient information for accurate detection. Based on these findings, we propose the Feature Attention Module (FAM) and Feature Transformation Module (FTM) to enhance nighttime features. In FAM, guided by progressive segmentation supervision, hierarchical feature attention is produced to enhance multi-level features. On the other hand, FTM is introduced to enforce features from adverse illumination to approach that from better illumination. Based on feature attention and transformation (FAT) mechanism, a two-stage detector called FATNet is constructed for nighttime pedestrian detection. We conduct extensive experiments on nighttime datasets of EuroCity Persons (Night) and NightOwls to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. On both two datasets, our method achieves significant improvements to the baseline and also outperforms state-of-the-art detectors.

RLST: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Scene Text Detection Refinement

Xuan Peng, Zheng Huang, Kai Chen, Jie Guo, Weidong Qiu

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Auto-TLDR; Saccadic Eye Movements and Peripheral Vision for Scene Text Detection using Reinforcement Learning

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Within the research of scene text detection, some previous work has already achieved significant accuracy and efficiency. However, most of the work was generally done without considering about the implicit relationship between detection and eye movements. In this paper, we propose a new method for scene text detection especially for its refinement based on reinforcement learning. The idea of this method is inspired by Saccadic Eye Movements and Peripheral Vision. A saccade makes it possible for humans to orient the gaze to the location where a visual object has appeared. Peripheral vision gathers visual information of surroundings which provides supplement to foveal vision during gazing. We propose a simple pipeline, imitating the way human eyes do a saccade and collect peripheral information, to locate scene text roughly and to refine multi-scale vision field iteratively using reinforcement learning. For both training and evaluation, we use ICDAR2015 Challenge 4 dataset as a base and design several criteria to measure the feasibility of our work.

MagnifierNet: Learning Efficient Small-Scale Pedestrian Detector towards Multiple Dense Regions

Qi Cheng, Mingqin Chen, Yingjie Wu, Fei Chen, Shiping Lin

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Auto-TLDR; MagnifierNet: A Simple but Effective Small-Scale Pedestrian Detection Towards Multiple Dense Regions

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Despite the success of pedestrian detection, there is still a significant gap in the performance of the detection of pedestrians at different scales. Detecting small-scale pedestrians is extremely challenging due to the low resolution of their convolution features which is essential for downstream classifiers. To address this issue, we observed pedestrian datasets and found that pedestrians often gather together in crowded public places. Then we propose MagnifierNet, a simple but effective small-scale pedestrian detector towards multiple dense regions. MagnifierNet uses our proposed sweep-line based grouping algorithm to find dense regions based on the number of pedestrians in the grouped region. And we adopt a new definition of small-scale pedestrians through grid search and KL-divergence. Besides, our grouping method can also be used as a new strategy for pedestrian data augmentation. The ablation study demonstrates that MagnifierNet improves the representation of small-scale pedestrians. We validate the effectiveness of MagnifierNet on CityPersons and KITTI datasets. Experimental results show that MagnifierNet achieves the best small-scale pedestrian detection performance on CityPersons benchmark without any external data, and also achieves competitive performance for detecting small-scale pedestrians on KITTI dataset without bells and whistles.

A Few-Shot Learning Approach for Historical Ciphered Manuscript Recognition

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

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

Yolo+FPN: 2D and 3D Fused Object Detection with an RGB-D Camera

Ya Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Yolo+FPN: Combining 2D and 3D Object Detection for Real-Time Object Detection

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In this paper we propose a new deep neural network system, called Yolo+FPN, which fuses both 2D and 3D object detection algorithms to achieve better real-time object detection results and faster inference speed, to be used on real robots. Finding an optimized fusion strategy to efficiently combine 3D object detection with 2D detection information is useful and challenging for both indoor and outdoor robots. In order to satisfy real-time requirements, a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency is needed. We not only have improved training and test accuracies and lower mean losses on the KITTI object detection benchmark, but also achieve better average precision on 3D detection of all classes in three levels of difficulty. Also, we implemented Yolo+FPN system using an RGB-D camera, and compared the speed of 2D and 3D object detection using different GPUs. For the real implementation of both indoor and outdoor scenes, we focus on person detection, which is the most challenging and important among the three classes.

One-Stage Multi-Task Detector for 3D Cardiac MR Imaging

Weizeng Lu, Xi Jia, Wei Chen, Nicolò Savioli, Antonio De Marvao, Linlin Shen, Declan O'Regan, Jinming Duan

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-task Learning for Real-Time, simultaneous landmark location and bounding box detection in 3D space

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Fast and accurate landmark location and bounding box detection are important steps in 3D medical imaging. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework, for real-time, simultaneous landmark location and bounding box detection in 3D space. Our method extends the famous single-shot multibox detector (SSD) from single-task learning to multi-task learning and from 2D to 3D. Furthermore, we propose a post-processing approach to refine the network landmark output, by averaging the candidate landmarks. Owing to these settings, the proposed framework is fast and accurate. For 3D cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images with size 224 × 224 × 64, our framework runs about 128 volumes per second (VPS) on GPU and achieves 6.75mm average point-to-point distance error for landmark location, which outperforms both state-of-the-art and baseline methods. We also show that segmenting the 3D image cropped with the bounding box results in both improved performance and efficiency.

An Integrated Approach of Deep Learning and Symbolic Analysis for Digital PDF Table Extraction

Mengshi Zhang, Daniel Perelman, Vu Le, Sumit Gulwani

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Auto-TLDR; Deep Learning and Symbolic Reasoning for Unstructured PDF Table Extraction

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Deep learning has shown great success at interpreting unstructured data such as object recognition in images. Symbolic/logical-reasoning techniques have shown great success in interpreting structured data such as table extraction in webpages, custom text files, spreadsheets. The tables in PDF documents are often generated from such structured sources (text-based Word/Latex documents, spreadsheets, webpages) but end up being unstructured. We thus explore novel combinations of deep learning and symbolic reasoning techniques to build an effective solution for PDF table extraction. We evaluate effectiveness without granting partial credit for matching part of a table (which may cause silent errors in downstream data processing). Our method achieves a 0.725 F1 score (vs. 0.339 for the state-of-the-art) on detecting correct table bounds---a much stricter metric than the common one of detecting characters within tables---in a well known public benchmark (ICDAR 2013) and a 0.404 F1 score (vs. 0.144 for the state-of-the-art) on our private benchmark with more widely varied table structures.

Correlation-Based ConvNet for Small Object Detection in Videos

Brais Bosquet, Manuel Mucientes, Victor Brea

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Auto-TLDR; STDnet-ST: An End-to-End Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Neural Network for Small Object Detection in Video

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The detection of small objects is of particular interest in many real applications. In this paper, we propose STDnet-ST, a novel approach to small object detection in video using spatial information operating alongside temporal video information. STDnet-ST is an end-to-end spatio-temporal convolutional neural network that detects small objects over time and correlates pairs of the top-ranked regions with the highest likelihood of containing small objects. This architecture links the small objects across the time as tubelets, being able to dismiss unprofitable object links in order to provide high-quality tubelets. STDnet-ST achieves state-of-the-art results for small objects on the publicly available USC-GRAD-STDdb and UAVDT video datasets.

The HisClima Database: Historical Weather Logs for Automatic Transcription and Information Extraction

Verónica Romero, Joan Andreu Sánchez

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Auto-TLDR; Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition and Information Extraction from Historical Weather Logs

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Knowing the weather and atmospheric conditions from the past can help weather researchers to generate models like the ones used to predict how weather conditions are likely to change as global temperatures continue to rise. Many historical weather records are available from the past registered on a systemic basis. Historical weather logs were registered in ships, when they were on the high seas, recording daily weather conditions such as: wind speed, temperature, coordinates, etc. These historical documents represent an important source of knowledge with valuable information to extract climatic information of several centuries ago. Such information is usually collected by experts that devote a lot of time. This paper presents a new database, compiled from a ship log mainly composed by handwritten tables that contain mainly numerical information, to support research in automatic handwriting recognition and information extraction. In addition, a study is presented about the capability of state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems and information extraction techniques, when applied to the presented database. Baseline results are reported for reference in future studies.

Deep Real-Time Hand Detection Using CFPN on Embedded Systems

Pirdiansyah Hendri, Jun-Wei Hsieh, Ping Yang Chen

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Auto-TLDR; Concatenated Feature Pyramid Network for Small Hand Detection on Embedded Devices

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Real-time HI (Human Interface) systems need accurate and efficient hand detection models to meet the limited resources in budget, dimension, memory, computing, and electric power. In recent years, object detection became a less challenging task with the latest deep CNN-based state-of-the-art models, i.e., RCNN, SSD, and YOLO; however, these models cannot provide the desired efficiency and accuracy for HI systems on embedded devices due to their complex time-consuming architecture. In addition, the detection of small hands (<30x30 pixels) is still a challenging task for all the above existing methods. Thus, we propose a shallow model named Concatenated Feature Pyramid Network (CFPN) to provide above mentioned performance for small hand detection. The superiority of CFPN is confirmed on a HandFlow dataset with mAP:0.5 of 95.6 and FPS of 33 on Nvidia TX2. The COCO dataset is also used to compare with other state-of-the-art method and shows the highest efficiency and accuracy with the proposed CFPN model. Thus we conclude that the proposed model is useful for real-life small hand detection on embedded devices.

Image-Based Table Cell Detection: A New Dataset and an Improved Detection Method

Dafeng Wei, Hongtao Lu, Yi Zhou, Kai Chen

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Auto-TLDR; TableCell: A Semi-supervised Dataset for Table-wise Detection and Recognition

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The topic of table detection and recognition has been spotlighted in recent years, however, the latest works only aim at the coarse scene in table-wise detection. In this paper, we present TableCell, a new image-based dataset which contains 5262 samples with 170K high precision cell-wised annotations based on a novel semi-supervised method.. Several classical deep learning detection models are evaluated to build a strong baseline using the proposed dataset. Furthermore, we come up with an efficient table projection method to facilitate capturing long-range global feature, which consists of row projection and column projection. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method improves the accuracy of table detection. Our dataset and code will be made available at https://github.com/weidafeng/TableCell upon publication.

Mutually Guided Dual-Task Network for Scene Text Detection

Mengbiao Zhao, Wei Feng, Fei Yin, Xu-Yao Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu

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Auto-TLDR; A dual-task network for word-level and line-level text detection

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Scene text detection has been studied extensively. Existing methods detect either words or text lines and use either word-level or line-level annotated data for training. In this paper, we propose a dual-task network that can perform word-level and line-level text detection simultaneously and use training data of both levels of annotation to boost the performance. The dual-task network has two detection heads for word-level and line-level text detection, respectively. Then we propose a mutual guidance scheme for the joint training of the two tasks with two modules: line filtering module utilizes the output of the text line detector to filter out the non-text regions for the word detector, and word enhancing module provides prior positions of words for the text line detector depending on the output of the word detector. Experimental results of word-level and line-level text detection demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dual-task network and mutual guidance scheme, and the results of our method are competitive with state-of-the-art methods.

Hierarchical Head Design for Object Detectors

Shivang Agarwal, Frederic Jurie

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Auto-TLDR; Hierarchical Anchor for SSD Detector

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The notion of anchor plays a major role in modern detection algorithms such as the Faster-RCNN or the SSD detector. Anchors relate the features of the last layers of the detector with bounding boxes containing objects in images. Despite their importance, the literature on object detection has not paid real attention to them. The motivation of this paper comes from the observations that (i) each anchor learns to classify and regress candidate objects independently (ii) insufficient examples are available for each anchor in case of small-scale datasets. This paper addresses these questions by proposing a novel hierarchical head for the SSD detector. The new design has the added advantage of no extra weights, as compared to the original design at inference time, while improving detectors performance for small size training sets. Improved performance on PASCAL-VOC and state-of-the-art performance on FlickrLogos-47 validate the method. We also show when the proposed design does not give additional performance gain over the original design.

PolyLaneNet: Lane Estimation Via Deep Polynomial Regression

Talles Torres, Rodrigo Berriel, Thiago Paixão, Claudine Badue, Alberto F. De Souza, Thiago Oliveira-Santos

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Auto-TLDR; Real-Time Lane Detection with Deep Polynomial Regression

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One of the main factors that contributed to the large advances in autonomous driving is the advent of deep learning. For safer self-driving vehicles, one of the problems that has yet to be solved completely is lane detection. Since methods for this task have to work in real time (+30 FPS), they not only have to be effective (i.e., have high accuracy) but they also have to be efficient (i.e., fast). In this work, we present a novel method for lane detection that uses as input an image from a forward-looking camera mounted in the vehicle and outputs polynomials representing each lane marking in the image, via deep polynomial regression. The proposed method is shown to be competitive with existing state-of-the-art methods in the TuSimple dataset, while maintaining its efficiency (115 FPS). Additionally, extensive qualitative results on two additional public datasets are presented, alongside with limitations in the evaluation metrics used by recent works for lane detection. Finally, we provide source code and trained models that allow others to replicate all the results shown in this paper, which is surprisingly rare in state-of-the-art lane detection methods.

SFPN: Semantic Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

Yi Gan, Wei Xu, Jianbo Su

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Auto-TLDR; SFPN: Semantic Feature Pyramid Network to Address Information Dilution Issue in FPN

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Feature Pyramid Network(FPN) employs a top-down path to enhance low level feature by utilizing high level feature.However, further improvement of detector is greatly hindered by the inner defect of FPN. The dilution issue in FPN is analyzed in this paper, and a new architecture named Semantic Feature Pyramid Network(SFPN) is introduced to address the information imbalance problem caused by information dilution. The proposed method consists of two simple and effective components: Semantic Pyramid Module(SPM) and Semantic Feature Fusion Module(SFFM). To compensate for the weaknesses of FPN, the semantic segmentation result is utilized as an extra information source in our architecture.By constructing a semantic pyramid based on the segmentation result and fusing it with FPN, feature maps at each level can obtain the necessary information without suffering from the dilution issue. The proposed architecture could be applied on many detectors, and non-negligible improvement could be achieved. Although this method is designed for object detection, other tasks such as instance segmentation can also largely benefit from it. The proposed method brings Faster R-CNN and Mask R-CNN with ResNet-50 as backbone both 1.8 AP improvements respectively. Furthermore, SFPN improves Cascade R-CNN with backbone ResNet-101 from 42.4 AP to 43.5 AP.

Fusion of Global-Local Features for Image Quality Inspection of Shipping Label

Sungho Suh, Paul Lukowicz, Yong Oh Lee

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Auto-TLDR; Input Image Quality Verification for Automated Shipping Address Recognition and Verification

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The demands of automated shipping address recognition and verification have increased to handle a large number of packages and to save costs associated with misdelivery. A previous study proposed a deep learning system where the shipping address is recognized and verified based on a camera image capturing the shipping address and barcode area. Because the system performance depends on the input image quality, inspection of input image quality is necessary for image preprocessing. In this paper, we propose an input image quality verification method combining global and local features. Object detection and scale-invariant feature transform in different feature spaces are developed to extract global and local features from several independent convolutional neural networks. The conditions of shipping label images are classified by fully connected fusion layers with concatenated global and local features. The experimental results regarding real captured and generated images show that the proposed method achieves better performance than other methods. These results are expected to improve the shipping address recognition and verification system by applying different image preprocessing steps based on the classified conditions.