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Human or Machine? It Is Not What You Write, but How You Write It

Luis Leiva, Moises Diaz, M.A. Ferrer, Réjean Plamondon

Auto-TLDR; Behavioral Biometrics via Handwritten Symbols for Identification and Verification

Abstract Slides Poster

Online fraud often involves identity theft. Since most security measures are weak or can be spoofed, we investigate a more nuanced and less explored avenue: behavioral biometrics via handwriting movements. This kind of data can be used to verify if a legitimate user is operating a device or a computer application, so it is important to distinguish between human and machine-generated movements reliably. For this purpose, we study handwritten symbols (isolated characters, digits, gestures, and signatures) produced by humans and machines, and compare and contrast several deep learning models. We find that if symbols are presented as static images, they can fool state-of-the-art classifiers (near 75% accuracy in the best case) but can be distinguished with remarkable accuracy if they are presented as temporal sequences (95% accuracy in the average case). We conclude that an accurate detection of fake movements has more to do with how users write, rather than what they write. Our work has implications for computerized systems that need to authenticate or verify legitimate human users, and provides an additional layer of security to keep attackers at bay.

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Cross-People Mobile-Phone Based Airwriting Character Recognition

Yunzhe Li, Hui Zheng, He Zhu, Haojun Ai, Xiaowei Dong

Auto-TLDR; Cross-People Airwriting Recognition via Motion Sensor Signal via Deep Neural Network

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Airwriting using mobile phones has many applications in human-computer interaction. However, the recognition of airwriting character needs a lot of training data from user, which brings great difficulties to the pratical application. The model learnt from a specific person often cannot yield satisfied results when used on another person. The data gap between people is mainly caused by the following factors: personal writing styles, mobile phone sensors, and ways to hold mobile phones. To address the cross-people problem, we propose a deep neural network(DNN) that combines convolutional neural network(CNN) and bilateral long short-term memory(BLSTM). In each layer of the network, we also add an AdaBN layer which is able to increase the generalization ability of the DNN. Different from the original AdaBN method, we explore the feasibility for semi-supervised learning. We implement it to our design and conduct comprehensive experiments. The evaluation results show that our system can achieve an accuracy of 99% for recognition and an improvement of 10% on average for transfer learning between various factors such as people, devices and postures. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to implement cross-people airwriting recognition via motion sensor signal, which is a fundamental step towards ubiquitous sensing.

Deep Transfer Learning for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection

Nicole Cilia, Claudio De Stefano, Francesco Fontanella, Claudio Marrocco, Mario Molinara, Alessandra Scotto Di Freca

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Detection of Handwriting Alterations for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis using Dynamic Features

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Early detection of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is essential in order to initiate therapies that can reduce the effects of such a disease, improving both life quality and life expectancy of patients. Among all the activities carried out in our daily life, handwriting seems one of the first to be influenced by the arise of neurodegenerative diseases. For this reason, the analysis of handwriting and the study of its alterations has become of great interest in this research field in order to make a diagnosis as early as possible. In recent years, many studies have tried to use classification algorithms applied to handwritings to implement decision support systems for AD diagnosis. A key issue for the use of these techniques is the detection of effective features, that allow the system to distinguish the natural handwriting alterations due to age, from those caused by neurodegenerative disorders. In this context, many interesting results have been published in the literature in which the features have been typically selected by hand, generally considering the dynamics of the handwriting process in order to detect motor disorders closely related to AD. Features directly derived from handwriting generation models can be also very helpful for AD diagnosis. It should be remarked, however, that the above features do not consider changes in the shape of handwritten traces, which may occur as a consequence of neurodegenerative diseases, as well as the correlation among shape alterations and changes in the dynamics of the handwriting process. Moving from these considerations, the aim of this study is to verify if the combined use of both shape and dynamic features allows a decision support system to improve performance for AD diagnosis. To this purpose, starting from a database of on-line handwriting samples, we generated for each of them a synthetic off-line colour image, where the colour of each elementary trait encodes, in the three RGB channels, the dynamic information associated to that trait. Finally, we exploited the capability of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to automatically extract features from raw images. The experimental comparison of the results obtained by using standard features and features extracted according the above procedure, confirmed the effectiveness of our approach.

Learning Metric Features for Writer-Independent Signature Verification Using Dual Triplet Loss

Qian Wan, Qin Zou

Auto-TLDR; A dual triplet loss based method for offline writer-independent signature verification

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Handwritten signature has long been a widely accepted biometric and applied in many verification scenarios. However, automatic signature verification remains an open research problem, which is mainly due to three reasons. 1) Skilled forgeries generated by persons who imitate the original writting pattern are very difficult to be distinguished from genuine signatures. It is especially so in the case of offline signatures, where only the signature image is captured as a feature for verification. 2) Most state-of-the-art models are writer-dependent, requiring a specific model to be trained whenever a new user is registered in verification, which is quite inconvenient. 3) Writer-independent models often have unsatisfactory performance. To this end, we propose a novel metric learning based method for offline writer-independent signature verification. Specifically, a dual triplet loss is used to train the model, where two different triplets are constructed for random and skilled forgeries, respectively. Experiments on three alphabet datasets — GPDS Synthetic, MCYT and CEDAR — show that the proposed method achieves competitive or superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods. Experiments are also conducted on a new offline Chinese signature dataset — CSIG-WHU, and the results show that the proposed method has a high feasibility on character-based signatures.

Recursive Recognition of Offline Handwritten Mathematical Expressions

Marco Cotogni, Claudio Cusano, Antonino Nocera

Auto-TLDR; Online Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition with Recurrent Neural Network

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In this paper we propose a method for Offline Handwritten Mathematical Expression recognition. The method is a fast and accurate thanks to its architecture, which include both a Convolutional Neural Network and a Recurrent Neural Network. The CNN extracts features from the image to recognize and its output is provided to the RNN which produces the mathematical expression encoded in the LaTeX language. To process both sequential and non-sequential mathematical expressions we also included a deconvolutional module which, in a recursive way, segments the image for additional analysis trough a recursive process. The results obtained show a very high accuracy obtained on a large handwritten data set of 9100 samples of handwritten expressions.

Trajectory-User Link with Attention Recurrent Networks

Tao Sun, Yongjun Xu, Fei Wang, Lin Wu, 塘文钱, Zezhi Shao

Auto-TLDR; TULAR: Trajectory-User Link with Attention Recurrent Neural Networks

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The prevalent adoptions of GPS-enabled devices have witnessed an explosion of various location-based services which produces a huge amount of trajectories monitoring the individuals' movements. In this paper, we tackle Trajectory-User Link (TUL) problem, which identifies humans' movement patterns and links trajectories to the users who generated them. Existing solutions on TUL problem employ recurrent neural networks and variational autoencoder methods, which face the bottlenecks in the case of excessively long trajectories and fragmentary users' movements. However, these are common characteristics of trajectory data in reality, leading to performance degradation of the existing models. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end attention recurrent neural learning framework, called TULAR (Trajectory-User Link with Attention Recurrent Networks), which focus on selected parts of the source trajectories when linking. TULAR introduce the Trajectory Semantic Vector (TSV) via unsupervised location representation learning and recurrent neural networks, by which to reckon the weight of parts of source trajectory. Further, we employ three attention scores for the weight measurements. Experiments are conducted on two real world datasets and compared with several existing methods, and the results show that TULAR yields a new state-of-the-art performance. Source code is public available at GitHub: https://github.com/taos123/TULAR.

IPN Hand: A Video Dataset and Benchmark for Real-Time Continuous Hand Gesture Recognition

Gibran Benitez-Garcia, Jesus Olivares-Mercado, Gabriel Sanchez-Perez, Keiji Yanai

Auto-TLDR; IPN Hand: A Benchmark Dataset for Continuous Hand Gesture Recognition

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Continuous hand gesture recognition (HGR) is an essential part of human-computer interaction with a wide range of applications in the automotive sector, consumer electronics, home automation, and others. In recent years, accurate and efficient deep learning models have been proposed for HGR. However, in the research community, the current publicly available datasets lack real-world elements needed to build responsive and efficient HGR systems. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark dataset named IPN Hand with sufficient size, variation, and real-world elements able to train and evaluate deep neural networks. This dataset contains more than 4 000 gesture samples and 800 000 RGB frames from 50 distinct subjects. We design 13 different static and dynamic gestures focused on interaction with touchless screens. We especially consider the scenario when continuous gestures are performed without transition states, and when subjects perform natural movements with their hands as non-gesture actions. Gestures were collected from about 30 diverse scenes, with real-world variation in background and illumination. With our dataset, the performance of three 3D-CNN models is evaluated on the tasks of isolated and continuous real-time HGR. Furthermore, we analyze the possibility of increasing the recognition accuracy by adding multiple modalities derived from RGB frames, i.e., optical flow and semantic segmentation, while keeping the real-time performance of the 3D-CNN model. Our empirical study also provides a comparison with the publicly available nvGesture (NVIDIA) dataset. The experimental results show that the state-of-the-art ResNext-101 model decreases about 30% accuracy when using our real-world dataset, demonstrating that the IPN Hand dataset can be used as a benchmark, and may help the community to step forward in the continuous HGR.

Online Trajectory Recovery from Offline Handwritten Japanese Kanji Characters of Multiple Strokes

Hung Tuan Nguyen, Tsubasa Nakamura, Cuong Tuan Nguyen, Masaki Nakagawa

Auto-TLDR; Recovering Dynamic Online Trajectories from Offline Japanese Kanji Character Images for Handwritten Character Recognition

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We propose a deep neural network-based method to recover dynamic online trajectories from offline handwritten Japanese kanji character images. It is a challenging task since Japanese kanji characters consist of multiple strokes. Our proposed model has three main components: Convolutional Neural Network-based encoder, Long Short-Term Memory Network-based decoder with an attention layer, and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). The encoder focuses on feature extraction while the decoder refers to the extracted features and generates time-sequences of GMM parameters. The attention layer is the key component for trajectory recovery. The GMM provides robustness to style variations so that the proposed model does not overfit to training samples. In the experiments, the proposed method is evaluated by both visual verification and handwritten character recognition. This is the first attempt to use online recovered trajectories to help improve the performance of offline handwriting recognition. Although the visual verification reveals some problems, the recognition experiments demonstrate the effect of trajectory recovery in improving the accuracy of offline handwritten character recognition when online recognition of the recovered trajectories are combined.

Generalized Iris Presentation Attack Detection Algorithm under Cross-Database Settings

Mehak Gupta, Vishal Singh, Akshay Agarwal, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh

Auto-TLDR; MVNet: A Deep Learning-based PAD Network for Iris Recognition against Presentation Attacks

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

The deployment of biometrics features based person identification has increased significantly from border access to mobile unlock to electronic transactions. Iris recognition is considered as one of the most accurate biometric modality for person identification. However, the vulnerability of this recognition towards presentation attacks, especially towards the 3D contact lenses, can limit its potential deployments. The textured lenses are so effective in hiding the real texture of iris that it can fool not only the automatic recognition algorithms but also the human examiners. While in literature, several presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms are presented; however, the significant limitation is the generalizability against an unseen database, unseen sensor, and different imaging environment. Inspired by the success of the hybrid algorithm or fusion of multiple detection networks, we have proposed a deep learning-based PAD network that utilizes multiple feature representation layers. The computational complexity is an essential factor in training the deep neural networks; therefore, to limit the computational complexity while learning multiple feature representation layers, a base model is kept the same. The network is trained end-to-end using a softmax classifier. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed network termed as MVNet using multiple databases such as IIITD-WVU MUIPA, IIITD-WVU UnMIPA database under cross-database training-testing settings. The experiments are performed extensively to assess the generalizability of the proposed algorithm.

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

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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.

Cut and Compare: End-To-End Offline Signature Verification Network

Xi Lu, Lin-Lin Huang, Fei Yin

Auto-TLDR; An End-to-End Cut-and-Compare Network for Offline Signature Verification

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Offline signature verification, to determine whether a handwritten signature image is genuine or forged for a claimed identity, is needed in many applications. How to extract salient features and how to calculate similarity scores are the major issues. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end cut-and-compare network for offline signature verification. Based on the Spatial Transformer Network (STN), discriminative regions are segmented from a pair of input signature images and are compared attentively with help of Attentive Recurrent Comparator (ARC). An adaptive distance fusion module is proposed to fuse the distances of these regions. To address the intrapersonal variability problem, we design a smoothed double-margin loss to train the network. The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance on CEDAR, GPDS Synthetic, BHSig-H and BHSig-B datasets of different languages. Furthermore, our network shows strong generalization ability on cross-language test.

Total Whitening for Online Signature Verification Based on Deep Representation

Xiaomeng Wu, Akisato Kimura, Kunio Kashino, Seiichi Uchida

Auto-TLDR; Total Whitening for Online Signature Verification

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In deep metric learning targeted at time series, the correlation between feature activations may be easily enlarged through highly nonlinear neural networks, leading to suboptimal embedding effectiveness. An effective solution to this problem is whitening. For example, in online signature verification, whitening can be derived for three individual Gaussian distributions, namely the distributions of local features at all temporal positions 1) for all signatures of all subjects, 2) for all signatures of each particular subject, and 3) for each particular signature of each particular subject. This study proposes a unified method called total whitening that integrates these individual Gaussians. Total whitening rectifies the layout of multiple individual Gaussians to resemble a standard normal distribution, improving the balance between intraclass invariance and interclass discriminative power. Experimental results demonstrate that total whitening achieves state-of-the-art accuracy when tested on online signature verification benchmarks.

GazeMAE: General Representations of Eye Movements Using a Micro-Macro Autoencoder

Louise Gillian C. Bautista, Prospero Naval

Auto-TLDR; Fast and Slow Eye Movement Representations for Sentiment-agnostic Eye Tracking

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Eye movements are intricate and dynamic events that contain a wealth of information about the subject and the stimuli. We propose an abstract representation of eye movements that preserve the important nuances in gaze behavior while being stimuli-agnostic. We consider eye movements as raw position and velocity signals and train a deep temporal convolutional autoencoder to learn micro-scale and macro-scale representations corresponding to the fast and slow features of eye movements. These joint representations are evaluated by fitting a linear classifier on various tasks and outperform other works in biometrics and stimuli classification. Further experiments highlight the validity and generalizability of this method, bringing eye tracking research closer to real-world applications.

How Unique Is a Face: An Investigative Study

Michal Balazia, S L Happy, Francois Bremond, Antitza Dantcheva

Auto-TLDR; Uniqueness of Face Recognition: Exploring the Impact of Factors such as image resolution, feature representation, database size, age and gender

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Face recognition has been widely accepted as a means of identification in applications ranging from border control to security in the banking sector. Surprisingly, while widely accepted, we still lack the understanding of the uniqueness or distinctiveness of face as a biometric characteristic. In this work, we study the impact of factors such as image resolution, feature representation, database size, age and gender on uniqueness denoted by the Kullback-Leibler divergence between genuine and impostor distributions. Towards understanding the impact, we present experimental results on the datasets AT&T, LFW, IMDb-Face, as well as ND-TWINS, with the feature extraction algorithms VGGFace, VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, MobileNet and DenseNet121, that reveal the quantitative impact of the named factors. While these are early results, our findings indicate the need for a better understanding of the concept of biometric uniqueness and its implication on face recognition.

Video Face Manipulation Detection through Ensemble of CNNs

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

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

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

Relevance Detection in Cataract Surgery Videos by Spatio-Temporal Action Localization

Negin Ghamsarian, Mario Taschwer, Doris Putzgruber, Stephanie. Sarny, Klaus Schoeffmann

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

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In cataract surgery, the operation is performed with the help of a microscope. Since the microscope enables watching real-time surgery by up to two people only, a major part of surgical training is conducted using the recorded videos. To optimize the training procedure with the video content, the surgeons require an automatic relevance detection approach. In addition to relevance-based retrieval, these results can be further used for skill assessment and irregularity detection in cataract surgery videos. In this paper, a three-module framework is proposed to detect and classify the relevant phase segments in cataract videos. Taking advantage of an idle frame recognition network, the video is divided into idle and action segments. To boost the performance in relevance detection Mask R-CNN is utilized to detect the cornea in each frame where the relevant surgical actions are conducted. The spatio-temporal localized segments containing higher-resolution information about the pupil texture and actions, and complementary temporal information from the same phase are fed into the relevance detection module. This module consists of four parallel recurrent CNNs being responsible to detect four relevant phases that have been defined with medical experts. The results will then be integrated to classify the action phases as irrelevant or one of four relevant phases. Experimental results reveal that the proposed approach outperforms static CNNs and different configurations of feature-based and end-to-end recurrent networks.

Time Series Data Augmentation for Neural Networks by Time Warping with a Discriminative Teacher

Brian Kenji Iwana, Seiichi Uchida

Auto-TLDR; Guided Warping for Time Series Data Augmentation

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Neural networks have become a powerful tool in pattern recognition and part of their success is due to generalization from using large datasets. However, unlike other domains, time series classification datasets are often small. In order to address this problem, we propose a novel time series data augmentation called guided warping. While many data augmentation methods are based on random transformations, guided warping exploits the element alignment properties of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and shapeDTW, a high-level DTW method based on shape descriptors, to deterministically warp sample patterns. In this way, the time series are mixed by warping the features of a sample pattern to match the time steps of a reference pattern. Furthermore, we introduce a discriminative teacher in order to serve as a directed reference for the guided warping. We evaluate the method on all 85 datasets in the 2015 UCR Time Series Archive with a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) and a recurrent neural network (RNN). The code with an easy to use implementation can be found at https://github.com/uchidalab/time_series_augmentation.

3D Attention Mechanism for Fine-Grained Classification of Table Tennis Strokes Using a Twin Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks

Pierre-Etienne Martin, Jenny Benois-Pineau, Renaud Péteri, Julien Morlier

Auto-TLDR; Attentional Blocks for Action Recognition in Table Tennis Strokes

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The paper addresses the problem of recognition of actions in video with low inter-class variability such as Table Tennis strokes. Two stream, "twin" convolutional neural networks are used with 3D convolutions both on RGB data and optical flow. Actions are recognized by classification of temporal windows. We introduce 3D attention modules and examine their impact on classification efficiency. In the context of the study of sportsmen performances, a corpus of the particular actions of table tennis strokes is considered. The use of attention blocks in the network speeds up the training step and improves the classification scores up to 5% with our twin model. We visualize the impact on the obtained features and notice correlation between attention and player movements and position. Score comparison of state-of-the-art action classification method and proposed approach with attentional blocks is performed on the corpus. Proposed model with attention blocks outperforms previous model without them and our baseline.

Handwritten Signature and Text Based User Verification Using Smartwatch

Raghavendra Ramachandra, Sushma Venkatesh, Raja Kiran, Christoph Busch

Auto-TLDR; A novel technique for user verification using a smartwatch based on writing pattern or signing pattern

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Wrist-wearable devices such as smartwatch have gained popularity as they provide quick access to the various information and easy access to multiple applications. Among various applications of the smartwatch, user verification based on the handwriting has been recently investigated. In this paper, we present a novel technique for user verification using a smartwatch based on writing pattern or signing pattern. The proposed technique leverages accelerometer data captured from the smartwatch that are further represented using 2D Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) and deep features extracted using the pre-trained ResNet50. The comparison is performed using the ensemble of the classifier. Extensive experiments are carried out on the newly captured dataset using two different smartwatches with three different writing scenarios (or activities). The article provides key insights and analysis of the results in such a verification scenario.

From Human Pose to On-Body Devices for Human-Activity Recognition

Fernando Moya Rueda, Gernot Fink

Auto-TLDR; Transfer Learning from Human Pose Estimation for Human Activity Recognition using Inertial Measurements from On-Body Devices

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Human Activity Recognition (HAR), using inertial measurements from on-body devices, has not seen a great advantage from deep architectures. This is mainly due to the lack of annotated data, diversity of on-body device configurations, the class-unbalance problem, and non-standard human activity definitions. Approaches for improving the performance of such architectures, e.g., transfer learning, are therefore difficult to apply. This paper introduces a method for transfer learning from human-pose estimations as a source for improving HAR using inertial measurements obtained from on-body devices. We propose to fine-tune deep architectures, trained using sequences of human poses from a large dataset and their derivatives, for solving HAR on inertial measurements from on-body devices. Derivatives of human poses will be considered as a sort of synthetic data for HAR. We deploy two different temporal-convolutional architectures as classifiers. An evaluation of the method is carried out on three benchmark datasets improving the classification performance.

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

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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.

Sketch-SNet: Deeper Subdivision of Temporal Cues for Sketch Recognition

Yizhou Tan, Lan Yang, Honggang Zhang

Auto-TLDR; Sketch Recognition using Invariable Structural Feature and Drawing Habits Feature

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Sketch recognition is a central task in sketchrelated researches. Different from the natural image, the sparse pixel distribution of sketch destroys the visual texture which encourages researchers to explore the temporal information of sketch. With the release of million-scale datasets, we explore the invariable structure of sketch and specific order of strokes in sketch. Prior works based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) trend to output different features with changed stroke orders. In particular, we adopt a novel method by employing a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to extract invariable structural feature under any orders of strokes. Compared to traditional comprehension of sketch, we further split the temporal information of sketch into two types of feature (invariable structural feature (ISF) and drawing habits feature (DHF)) which aim to reduce the confusion in temporal information. We propose a two-branch GCN-RNN network to extract two types of feature respectively, termed Sketch-SNet. The GCN branch is encouraged to extract the ISF through receiving various shuffled strokes of an input sketch. The RNN branch takes the original input to extract DHF by learning the pattern of strokes’ order. Meanwhile, we introduce semantic information to generate soft-labels owing to the high abstractness of sketch. Extensive experiments on the Quick-Draw dataset demonstrate that our further subdivision of temporal information improves the performance of sketch recognition which surpasses state-of-the-art by a large margin.

Watch Your Strokes: Improving Handwritten Text Recognition with Deformable Convolutions

Iulian Cojocaru, Silvia Cascianelli, Lorenzo Baraldi, Massimiliano Corsini, Rita Cucchiara

Auto-TLDR; Deformable Convolutional Neural Networks for Handwritten Text Recognition

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Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in free-layout pages is a valuable yet challenging task which aims to automatically understand handwritten texts. State-of-the-art approaches in this field usually encode input images with Convolutional Neural Networks, whose kernels are typically defined on a fixed grid and focus on all input pixels independently. However, this is in contrast with the sparse nature of handwritten pages, in which only pixels representing the ink of the writing are useful for the recognition task. Furthermore, the standard convolution operator is not explicitly designed to take into account the great variability in shape, scale, and orientation of handwritten characters. To overcome these limitations, we investigate the use of deformable convolutions for handwriting recognition. This type of convolution deform the convolution kernel according to the content of the neighborhood, and can therefore be more adaptable to geometric variations and other deformations of the text. Experiments conducted on the IAM and RIMES datasets demonstrate that the use of deformable convolutions is a promising direction for the design of novel architectures for handwritten text recognition.

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

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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.

Temporal Binary Representation for Event-Based Action Recognition

Simone Undri Innocenti, Federico Becattini, Federico Pernici, Alberto Del Bimbo

Auto-TLDR; Temporal Binary Representation for Gesture Recognition

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In this paper we present an event aggregation strategy to convert the output of an event camera into frames processable by traditional Computer Vision algorithms. The proposed method first generates sequences of intermediate binary representations, which are then losslessly transformed into a compact format by simply applying a binary-to-decimal conversion. This strategy allows us to encode temporal information directly into pixel values, which are then interpreted by deep learning models. We apply our strategy, called Temporal Binary Representation, to the task of Gesture Recognition, obtaining state of the art results on the popular DVS128 Gesture Dataset. To underline the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to existing ones, we also collect an extension of the dataset under more challenging conditions on which to perform experiments.

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

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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.

Multimodal Side-Tuning for Document Classification

Stefano Zingaro, Giuseppe Lisanti, Maurizio Gabbrielli

Auto-TLDR; Side-tuning for Multimodal Document Classification

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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.

A Close Look at Deep Learning with Small Data

Lorenzo Brigato, Luca Iocchi

Auto-TLDR; Low-Complex Neural Networks for Small Data Conditions

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In this work, we perform a wide variety of experiments with different Deep Learning architectures in small data conditions. We show that model complexity is a critical factor when only a few samples per class are available. Differently from the literature, we improve the state of the art using low complexity models. We show that standard convolutional neural networks with relatively few parameters are effective in this scenario. In many of our experiments, low complexity models outperform state-of-the-art architectures. Moreover, we propose a novel network that uses an unsupervised loss to regularize its training. Such architecture either improves the results either performs comparably well to low capacity networks. Surprisingly, experiments show that the dynamic data augmentation pipeline is not beneficial in this particular domain. Statically augmenting the dataset might be a promising research direction while dropout maintains its role as a good regularizer.

MixNet for Generalized Face Presentation Attack Detection

Nilay Sanghvi, Sushant Singh, Akshay Agarwal, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh

Auto-TLDR; MixNet: A Deep Learning-based Network for Detection of Presentation Attacks in Cross-Database and Unseen Setting

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The non-intrusive nature and high accuracy of face recognition algorithms have led to their successful deployment across multiple applications ranging from border access to mobile unlocking and digital payments. However, their vulnerability against sophisticated and cost-effective presentation attack mediums raises essential questions regarding its reliability. Several presentation attack detection algorithms are presented; however, they are still far behind from reality. The major problem with the existing work is the generalizability against multiple attacks both in the seen and unseen setting. The algorithms which are useful for one kind of attack (such as print) fail miserably for another type of attack (such as silicone masks). In this research, we have proposed a deep learning-based network called MixNet to detect presentation attacks in cross-database and unseen attack settings. The proposed algorithm utilizes state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures and learns the feature mapping for each attack category. Experiments are performed using multiple challenging face presentation attack databases such as Silicone Mask Attack Database (SMAD) and Spoof In the Wild with Multiple Attack (SiW-M). Extensive experiments and comparison with the existing state of the art algorithms show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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

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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.

Wireless Localisation in WiFi Using Novel Deep Architectures

Peizheng Li, Han Cui, Aftab Khan, Usman Raza, Robert Piechocki, Angela Doufexi, Tim Farnham

Auto-TLDR; Deep Neural Network for Indoor Localisation of WiFi Devices in Indoor Environments

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This paper studies the indoor localisation of WiFi devices based on a commodity chipset and standard channel sounding. First, we present a novel shallow neural network (SNN) in which features are extracted from the channel state information (CSI) corresponding to WiFi subcarriers received on different antennas and used to train the model. The single layer architecture of this localisation neural network makes it lightweight and easy-to-deploy on devices with stringent constraints on computational resources. We further investigate for localisation the use of deep learning models and design novel architectures for convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-short term memory (LSTM). We extensively evaluate these localisation algorithms for continuous tracking in indoor environments. Experimental results prove that even an SNN model, after a careful handcrafted feature extraction, can achieve accurate localisation. Meanwhile, using a well-organised architecture, the neural network models can be trained directly with raw data from the CSI and localisation features can be automatically extracted to achieve accurate position estimates. We also found that the performance of neural network-based methods are directly affected by the number of anchor access points (APs) regardless of their structure. With three APs, all neural network models proposed in this paper can obtain localisation accuracy of around 0.5 metres. In addition the proposed deep NN architecture reduces the data pre-processing time by 6.5 hours compared with a shallow NN using the data collected in our testbed. In the deployment phase, the inference time is also significantly reduced to 0.1 ms per sample. We also demonstrate the generalisation capability of the proposed method by evaluating models using different target movement characteristics to the ones in which they were trained.

Fall Detection by Human Pose Estimation and Kinematic Theory

Vincenzo Dentamaro, Donato Impedovo, Giuseppe Pirlo

Auto-TLDR; A Decision Support System for Automatic Fall Detection on Le2i and URFD Datasets

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In a society with increasing age, the understanding of human falls it is of paramount importance. This paper presents a Decision Support System whose pipeline is designed to extract and compute physical domain’s features achieving the state of the art accuracy on the Le2i and UR fall detection datasets. The paper uses the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement and its sigma-lognormal model together with classic physical features to achieve 98% and 99% of accuracy in automatic fall detection on respectively Le2i and URFD datasets. The effort made in the design of this work is toward recognition of falls by using physical models whose laws are clear and understandable.

Learning to Take Directions One Step at a Time

Qiyang Hu, Adrian Wälchli, Tiziano Portenier, Matthias Zwicker, Paolo Favaro

Auto-TLDR; Generating a Sequence of Motion Strokes from a Single Image

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We present a method to generate a video sequence given a single image. Because items in an image can be animated in arbitrarily many different ways, we introduce as control signal a sequence of motion strokes. Such control signal can be automatically transferred from other videos, e.g., via bounding box tracking. Each motion stroke provides the direction to the moving object in the input image and we aim to train a network to generate an animation following a sequence of such directions. To address this task we design a novel recurrent architecture, which can be trained easily and effectively thanks to an explicit separation of past, future and current states. As we demonstrate in the experiments, our proposed architecture is capable of generating an arbitrary number of frames from a single image and a sequence of motion strokes. Key components of our architecture are an autoencoding constraint to ensure consistency with the past and a generative adversarial scheme to ensure that images look realistic and are temporally smooth. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the MNIST, KTH, Human3.6M, Push and Weizmann datasets.

Leveraging Synthetic Subject Invariant EEG Signals for Zero Calibration BCI

Nik Khadijah Nik Aznan, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei, Stephen Bonner, Jason Connolly, Toby Breckon

Auto-TLDR; SIS-GAN: Subject Invariant SSVEP Generative Adversarial Network for Brain-Computer Interface

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Recently, substantial progress has been made in the area of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) using modern machine learning techniques to decode and interpret brain signals. While Electroencephalography (EEG) has provided a non-invasive method of interfacing with a human brain, the acquired data is often heavily subject and session dependent. This makes seamless incorporation of such data into real-world applications intractable as the subject and session data variance can lead to long and tedious calibration requirements and cross-subject generalisation issues. Focusing on a Steady State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) classification systems, we propose a novel means of generating highly-realistic synthetic EEG data invariant to any subject, session or other environmental conditions. Our approach, entitled the Subject Invariant SSVEP Generative Adversarial Network (SIS-GAN), produces synthetic EEG data from multiple SSVEP classes using a single network. Additionally, by taking advantage of a fixed-weight pre-trained subject classification network, we ensure that our generative model remains agnostic to subject-specific features and thus produces subject-invariant data that can be applied to new previously unseen subjects. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of our synthetic data, leading to superior performance, with improvements of up to 16% in zero-calibration classification tasks when trained using our subject-invariant synthetic EEG signals.

Are Spoofs from Latent Fingerprints a Real Threat for the Best State-Of-Art Liveness Detectors?

Roberto Casula, Giulia Orrù, Daniele Angioni, Xiaoyi Feng, Gian Luca Marcialis, Fabio Roli

Auto-TLDR; ScreenSpoof: Attacks using latent fingerprints against state-of-art fingerprint liveness detectors and verification systems

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We investigated the threat level of realistic attacks using latent fingerprints against sensors equipped with state-of-art liveness detectors and fingerprint verification systems which integrate such liveness algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, only a previous investigation was done with spoofs from latent prints. In this paper, we focus on using snapshot pictures of latent fingerprints. These pictures provide molds, that allows, after some digital processing, to fabricate high-quality spoofs. Taking a snapshot picture is much simpler than developing fingerprints left on a surface by magnetic powders and lifting the trace by a tape. What we are interested here is to evaluate preliminary at which extent attacks of the kind can be considered a real threat for state-of-art fingerprint liveness detectors and verification systems. To this aim, we collected a novel data set of live and spoof images fabricated with snapshot pictures of latent fingerprints. This data set provide a set of attacks at the most favourable conditions. We refer to this method and the related data set as "ScreenSpoof". Then, we tested with it the performances of the best liveness detection algorithms, namely, the three winners of the LivDet competition. Reported results point out that the ScreenSpoof method is a threat of the same level, in terms of detection and verification errors, than that of attacks using spoofs fabricated with the full consensus of the victim. We think that this is a notable result, never reported in previous work.

Attention-Driven Body Pose Encoding for Human Activity Recognition

Bappaditya Debnath, Swagat Kumar, Marry O'Brien, Ardhendu Behera

Auto-TLDR; Attention-based Body Pose Encoding for Human Activity Recognition

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This article proposes a novel attention-based body pose encoding for human activity recognition. Most of the existing human activity recognition approaches based on 3D pose data often enrich the input data using additional handcrafted representations such as velocity, super normal vectors, pairwise relations, and so on. The enriched data complements the 3D body joint position data and improves the model performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that learns enhanced feature representations from a given sequence of 3D body joints. To achieve this, the approach exploits two body pose streams: 1) a spatial stream which encodes the spatial relationship between various body joints at each time point to learn spatial structure involving the spatial distribution of different body joints 2) a temporal stream that learns the temporal variation of individual body joints over the entire sequence duration to present a temporally enhanced representation. Afterwards, these two pose streams are fused with a multi-head attention mechanism. We also capture the contextual information from the RGB video stream using a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model combined with a multi-head attention and a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. Finally, the RGB video stream is combined with the fused body pose stream to give a novel end-to-end deep model for effective human activity recognition. The proposed model is evaluated on three datasets including the challenging NTU-RGBD dataset and achieves state-of-the-art results.

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

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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.

What and How? Jointly Forecasting Human Action and Pose

Yanjun Zhu, Yanxia Zhang, Qiong Liu, Andreas Girgensohn

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

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

Detecting Manipulated Facial Videos: A Time Series Solution

Zhang Zhewei, Ma Can, Gao Meilin, Ding Bowen

Auto-TLDR; Face-Alignment Based Bi-LSTM for Fake Video Detection

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We propose a new method to expose fake videos based on a time series solution. The method is based on bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) backbone architecture with two different types of features: {Face-Alignment} and {Dense-Face-Alignment}, in which both of them are physiological signals that can be distinguished between fake and original videos. We choose 68 landmark points as the feature of {Face-Alignment} and Pose Adaptive Feature (PAF) for {Dense-Face-Alignment}. Based on these two facial features, we designed two deep networks. In addition, we optimize our network by adding an attention mechanism that improves detection precision. Our method is tested over benchmarks of Face Forensics/Face Forensics++ dataset and show a promising performance on inference speed while maintaining accuracy with state-of art solutions that deal against DeepFake.

Nearest Neighbor Classification Based on Activation Space of Convolutional Neural Network

Xinbo Ju, Shuo Shao, Huan Long, Weizhe Wang

Auto-TLDR; Convolutional Neural Network with Convex Hull Based Classifier

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In this paper, we propose a new image classifier based on the incorporation of the nearest neighbor algorithm and the activation space of convolutional neural network. The classifier has been successfully used on some state-of-the-art models and further improve their performance. Main technique tools we used are convex hull based classification and its acceleration. We find that 1) in several cases, the classifier can reach higher accuracy than original CNN; 2) by sampling, the classifier can work more efficiently; 3) centroid of each convex hull shows surprising ability in classification. Most of the work has strong geometry meanings, which helps us have a new understanding about convolutional layers.

Which are the factors affecting the performance of audio surveillance systems?

Antonio Greco, Antonio Roberto, Alessia Saggese, Mario Vento

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

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Sound event recognition systems are rapidly becoming part of our life, since they can be profitably used in several vertical markets, ranging from audio security applications to scene classification and multi-modal analysis in social robotics. In the last years, a not negligible part of the scientific community started to apply Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to image-based representations of the audio stream, due to their successful adoption in almost all the computer vision tasks. In this paper, we carry out a detailed benchmark of various widely used CNN architectures and visual representations on a popular dataset, namely the MIVIA Audio Events database. Our analysis is aimed at understanding how these factors affect the sound event recognition performance with a particular focus on the false positive rate, very relevant in audio surveillance solutions. In fact, although most of the proposed solutions achieve a high recognition rate, the capability of distinguishing the events-of-interest from the background is often not yet sufficient for real systems, and prevent its usage in real applications. Our comprehensive experimental analysis investigates this aspect and allows to identify useful design guidelines for increasing the specificity of sound event recognition systems.

CQNN: Convolutional Quadratic Neural Networks

Pranav Mantini, Shishir Shah

Auto-TLDR; Quadratic Neural Network for Image Classification

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Image classification is a fundamental task in computer vision. A variety of deep learning models based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture have proven to be an efficient solution. Numerous improvements have been proposed over the years, where broader, deeper, and denser networks have been constructed. However, the atomic operation for these models has remained a linear unit (single neuron). In this work, we pursue an alternative dimension by hypothesizing the atomic operation to be performed by a quadratic unit. We construct convolutional layers using quadratic neurons for feature extraction and subsequently use dense layers for classification. We perform analysis to quantify the implication of replacing linear neurons with quadratic units. Results show a keen improvement in classification accuracy with quadratic neurons over linear neurons.

Enhancing Semantic Segmentation of Aerial Images with Inhibitory Neurons

Ihsan Ullah, Sean Reilly, Michael Madden

Auto-TLDR; Lateral Inhibition in Deep Neural Networks for Object Recognition and Semantic Segmentation

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In a Convolutional Neural Network, each neuron in the output feature map takes input from the neurons in its receptive field. This receptive field concept plays a vital role in today's deep neural networks. However, inspired by neuro-biological research, it has been proposed to add inhibitory neurons outside the receptive field, which may enhance the performance of neural network models. In this paper, we begin with deep network architectures such as VGG and ResNet, and propose an approach to add lateral inhibition in each output neuron to reduce its impact on its neighbours, both in fine-tuning pre-trained models and training from scratch. Our experiments show that notable improvements upon prior baseline deep models can be achieved. A key feature of our approach is that it is easy to add to baseline models; it can be adopted in any model containing convolution layers, and we demonstrate its value in applications including object recognition and semantic segmentation of aerial images, where we show state-of-the-art result on the Aeroscape dataset. On semantic segmentation tasks, our enhancement shows 17.43% higher mIoU than a single baseline model on a single source (the Aeroscape dataset), 13.43% higher performance than an ensemble model on the same single source, and 7.03% higher than an ensemble model on multiple sources (segmentation datasets). Our experiments illustrate the potential impact of using inhibitory neurons in deep learning models, and they also show better results than the baseline models that have standard convolutional layer.

Self-Supervised Joint Encoding of Motion and Appearance for First Person Action Recognition

Mirco Planamente, Andrea Bottino, Barbara Caputo

Auto-TLDR; A Single Stream Architecture for Egocentric Action Recognition from the First-Person Point of View

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Wearable cameras are becoming more and more popular in several applications, increasing the interest of the research community in developing approaches for recognizing actions from the first-person point of view. An open challenge in egocentric action recognition is that videos lack detailed information about the main actor's pose and thus tend to record only parts of the movement when focusing on manipulation tasks. Thus, the amount of information about the action itself is limited, making crucial the understanding of the manipulated objects and their context. Many previous works addressed this issue with two-stream architectures, where one stream is dedicated to modeling the appearance of objects involved in the action, and another to extracting motion features from optical flow. In this paper, we argue that learning features jointly from these two information channels is beneficial to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between the two better. To this end, we propose a single stream architecture able to do so, thanks to the addition of a self-supervised block that uses a pretext motion prediction task to intertwine motion and appearance knowledge. Experiments on several publicly available databases show the power of our approach.

An Investigation of Feature Selection and Transfer Learning for Writer-Independent Offline Handwritten Signature Verification

Victor Souza, Adriano Oliveira, Rafael Menelau Oliveira E Cruz, Robert Sabourin

Auto-TLDR; Overfitting of SigNet using Binary Particle Swarm Optimization

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SigNet is a state of the art model for feature representation used for handwritten signature verification (HSV). This representation is based on a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) and contains 2048 dimensions. When transposed to a dissimilarity space generated by the dichotomy transformation (DT), related to the writer-independent (WI) approach, these features may include redundant information. This paper investigates the presence of overfitting when using Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO) to perform the feature selection in a wrapper mode. We proposed a method based on a global validation strategy with an external archive to control overfitting during the search for the most discriminant representation. Moreover, an investigation is also carried out to evaluate the use of the selected features in a transfer learning context. The analysis is carried out on a writer-independent approach on the CEDAR, MCYT and GPDS-960 datasets. The experimental results showed the presence of overfitting when no validation is used during the optimization process and the improvement when the global validation strategy with an external archive is used. Also, the space generated after feature selection can be used in a transfer learning context.

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

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

Exploring Spatial-Temporal Representations for fNIRS-based Intimacy Detection via an Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network

Chao Li, Qian Zhang, Ziping Zhao

Auto-TLDR; Intimate Relationship Prediction by Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

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The detection of intimacy plays a crucial role in the improvement of intimate relationship, which contributes to promote the family and social harmony. Previous studies have shown that different degrees of intimacy have significant differences in brain imaging. Recently, a few of work has emerged to recognise intimacy automatically by using machine learning technique. Moreover, considering the temporal dynamic characteristics of intimacy relationship on neural mechanism, how to model spatio-temporal dynamics for intimacy prediction effectively is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel method to explore deep spatial-temporal representations for intimacy prediction by Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (ACCRNN). Given the advantages of time-frequency resolution in complex neuronal activities analysis, this paper utilizes functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to analyse and infer to intimate relationship. We collect a fNIRS-based dataset for the analysis of intimate relationship. Forty-two-channel fNIRS signals are recorded from the 44 subjects' prefrontal cortex when they watched a total of 18 photos of lovers, friends and strangers for 30 seconds per photo. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the others in terms of accuracy with the precision of 96.5%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a hybrid deep architecture has been employed for fNIRS-based intimacy prediction.

Uncertainty-Aware Data Augmentation for Food Recognition

Eduardo Aguilar, Bhalaji Nagarajan, Rupali Khatun, Marc Bolaños, Petia Radeva

Auto-TLDR; Data Augmentation for Food Recognition Using Epistemic Uncertainty

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Food recognition has recently attracted attention of many researchers. However, high food ambiguity, inter-class variability and intra-class similarity define a real challenge for the Deep learning and Computer Vision algorithms. In order to improve their performance, it is necessary to better understand what the model learns and, from this, to determine the type of data that should be additionally included for being the most beneficial to the training procedure. In this paper, we propose a new data augmentation strategy that estimates and uses the epistemic uncertainty to guide the model training. The method follows an active learning framework, where the new synthetic images are generated from the hard to classify real ones present in the training data based on the epistemic uncertainty. Hence, it allows the food recognition algorithm to focus on difficult images in order to learn their discriminatives features. On the other hand, avoiding data generation from images that do not contribute to the recognition makes it faster and more efficient. We show that the proposed method allows to improve food recognition and provides a better trade-off between micro- and macro-recall measures.

SDMA: Saliency Driven Mutual Cross Attention for Multi-Variate Time Series

Yash Garg, K. Selcuk Candan

Auto-TLDR; Salient-Driven Mutual Cross Attention for Intelligent Time Series Analytics

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Integration of rich sensory technologies into critical applications, such as gesture recognition and building energy optimization, has highlighted the importance of intelligent time series analytics. To accommodate this demand, uni-variate approaches have been extended for multi-variate scenarios, but naive extensions have lead to deterioration in model performances due to their limited ability to capture the information recorded in different variates and complex multi-variate time series patterns’ evolution over time. Furthermore, real-world time series are often contaminated with noisy information. In this paper, we note that a time series often carry robust localized temporal events that could help improve model performance by highlighting the relevant information; however, the lack of sufficient data to train for these events make it impossible for neural architectures to identify and make use of these temporal events. We, therefore, argue that a companion process helping identify salient events in the input time series and driving model’s attention to the associated salient sub-sequences can help with learning a high-performing network. Relying on this observation, we propose a novel Saliency-Driven Mutual Cross Attention (SDMA) framework that extracts localized temporal events and generate a saliency series to complement the input time series. We further propose an architecture which accounts for the mutual cross-talk between the input and saliency series branches where input and saliency series attend each other. Experiments show that the proposed mutually-cross attention framework can offer significant boosts in model performance when compared against non-attentioned, conventionally attentioned, and conventionally cross-attentioned models.