Cross-spectrum face recognition, e.g. visible to thermal matching, remains a challenging task due to the large variation originated from different domains. This paper proposed a subspace projection hashing (SPH) to enable the cross-spectrum face recognition task. The intrinsic idea behind SPH is to project the features from different domains onto a common subspace, where matching the faces from different domains can be accomplished. Notably, we proposed a new loss function that can (i) preserve both inter-domain and intra-domain similarity; (ii) regularize a scaled-up pairwise distance between hashed codes, to optimize projection matrix. Three datasets, Wiki, EURECOM VIS-TH paired face and TDFace are adopted to evaluate the proposed SPH. The experimental results indicate that the proposed SPH outperforms the original linear subspace ranking hashing (LSRH) in the benchmark dataset (Wiki) and demonstrates a reasonably good performance for visible-thermal, visible-near-infrared face recognition, therefore suggests the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed SPH.

A reliable detection of the R-peaks in an electrocardiogram (ECG) time series is a fundamental step for further rhythmic, heart rate variability (HRV) analysis, biometric recognition techniques and additional ECG waveform based analysis. In this paper, a novel real-time and low-complexity R-peak detection algorithm is presented for single lead ECG signals. The detection algorithm is divided in two stages. In the first pre-processing stage, the QRS complex is enhanced by taking the double derivative, squaring and moving window integration. In the second, the detection of the R-peak is achieved based on a finite state machine approach. The detection threshold is dynamically adapted and follows an exponential decay after each detection, making it suitable for R-peak detection under fast heart rate and R-wave amplitude changes with no additional search back. The proposed algorithm was evaluated in a private single lead ECG database acquired using a FieldWiz wearable device. The database comprises five recordings from four different subjects, recorded during dynamic conditions, running, trail running and gym sessions. The raw ECG signals were annotated for the R-peak and benchmarked against common QRS detectors and proposed method. The combined acquisition setup and presented approach resulted in R-peak detection Sensivitity (Se) of 99.77% and Positive Predictive Value of (PPV) of 99.18%, comparable to state of the art real time QRS detectors. Due to its low computational complexity, this method can be implemented in embedded wearable systems, suited for cardiovascular tracking devices in dynamic use cases and R-peak detection.

In this paper, we present a novel Siamese graph convolution network (GCN) for face sketch recognition. To build a graph from an image, we utilize a deep learning method to detect the image edges, and then use a superpixel method to segment the edge image. Each segmented superpixel region is taken as a node, and each pair of adjacent regions forms an edge of the graph. Graphs from both a face sketch and a face photo are input into the Siamese GCN for recognition. A deep graph matching method is used to share messages between cross-modal graphs in this model. Experiments show that the GCN can obtain high performance on several face photo-sketch datasets, including seen and unseen face photo-sketch datasets. It is also shown that the model performance based on the graph structure representation of the data using the Siamese GCN is more stable than a Siamese CNN model.

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.

Cross-domain few-shot classification task (CD-FSC) combines few-shot classification with the requirement to generalize across domains represented by datasets. This setup faces challenges originating from the limited labeled data in each class and, additionally, from the domain shift between training and test sets. In this paper, we introduce a novel training approach for existing FSC models. It leverages on the explanation scores, obtained from existing explanation methods when applied to the predictions of FSC models, computed for intermediate feature maps of the models. Firstly, we tailor the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) method to explain the prediction outcomes of FSC models. Secondly, we develop a model-agnostic explanation-guided training strategy that dynamically finds and emphasizes the features which are important for the predictions. Our contribution does not target a novel explanation method but lies in a novel application of explanations for the training phase. We show that explanation-guided training effectively improves the model generalization. We observe improved accuracy for three different FSC models: RelationNet, cross attention network, and a graph neural network-based formulation, on five few-shot learning datasets: miniImagenet, CUB, Cars, Places, and Plantae.

Multi-scale feature representation is a common strategy to handle the scale variation in pedestrian detection. Existing methods simply utilize the convolutional pyramidal features for multi-scale representation. However, they rarely pay attention to the differences among different feature scales and extract multi-scale features from a single feature map, which may make the detectors sensitive to scale-variance in multi-scale pedestrian detection. In this paper, we introduce a bidirectional feature enhancement module (BFEM) to augment the semantic information of low-level features and the localization information of high-level features. In addition, we propose a prior-based receptive field block (PRFB) for multi-scale pedestrian feature extraction, where the receptive field is closer to the aspect ratio of the pedestrian target. Consequently, it is less affected by the surrounding background when extracting features. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperform the state-of-the-art methods on the CityPersons and Caltech datasets.

Form understanding is a challenging problem which aims to recognize semantic entities from the input document and their hierarchical relations. Previous approaches face a significant difficulty dealing with the complexity of the task, thus treat these objectives separately. To this end, we present a novel deep neural network to jointly perform both Entity Labeling and link prediction in an end-to-end fashion. Our model extends the Multi-stage Attentional U-Net architecture with the Part-Intensity Fields and Part-Association Fields for link prediction, enriching the spatial information flow with the additional supervision from Entity Linking. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the model on the \textit{Form Understanding in Noisy Scanned Documents} \textit{(FUNSD)} dataset, where our method substantially outperforms the original model and state-of-the-art baselines in both Entity Labeling and Entity Linking task.

A technique for compressing deep neural models achieving competitive performance to state-of-the-art methods is proposed. The approach utilizes the mutual information between the feature maps and the output of the model in order to prune the redundant layers of the network. Extensive numerical experiments on both CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet data sets demonstrate that the proposed method can be effective in compressing deep models, both in terms of the numbers of parameters and operations. For instance, by applying the proposed approach to DenseNet model with 0.77 million parameters and 293 million operations for classification of CIFAR-10 data set, a reduction of 62.66% and 41.00% in the number of parameters and the number of operations are respectively achieved, while increasing the test error only by less than 1%.

Recognition of isolated handwritten digits is a well studied research problem and several models show high recognition accuracy on different standard datasets. But the same is not true while we consider recognition of handwritten digit strings although it has many real-life applications like bank cheque processing, postal code recognition, and numeric field understanding from filled-in form images. The problem becomes more difficult when digits in the string are not neatly written which is commonly seen in freestyle handwriting. The performance of any such model primarily suffers due to the presence of touching digits in the string. To handle these issues, in the present work, we first use a deep autoencoder based segmentation technique for isolating the digits from a handwritten digit string, and then we pass the isolated digits to a Residual Network (ResNet) based recognition model to obtain the machine-encoded digit string. The proposed model has been evaluated on the Computer Vision Lab (CVL) Handwritten Digit Strings (HDS) database, used in HDSRC 2013 competition on handwritten digit string recognition, and a competent result with respect to state-of-the-art techniques has been achieved.

Modern Convolutional Neural Networks~(CNNs) have been improving the accuracy of person re-identification (re-id) using a large number of training samples. Such a re-id system suffers from a lack of training samples for deployment to practical security applications. To address this problem, we focus on the approach that transfers CNN features pre-trained on a large-scale person re-id dataset to a small-scale dataset. Most of the ordinal CNN feature transfer methods use the features of fully connected layers that entangle locally pooled features of different spatial locations on an image. Unfortunately, due to the difference of view angles and the bias of walking directions of the persons, each camera view in a dataset has a unique spatial property in the person image, which reduces the generality of the local pooling for different cameras/datasets. To account for the camera- and dataset-specific spatial bias, we propose a method to learn camera and dataset-specific position weight maps for discriminative local pooling of convolutional features. Our experiments on four public datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed feature transfer with a small number of training samples in the target datasets.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder, which causes social deficits in social lives. Early ASD screening for children is an important method to reduce the impact of ASD on people’s whole lives. Traditional screening methods rely on protocol experiments and subjective evaluations from clinicians and domain experts and thereby cost a lot. To standardize the process of ASD screening, we 1 collaborate with a group of ASD experts, and design a ”Responsive Social Smile” protocol and an experiment environment. Also, we propose a machine learningbased assessment framework for early ASD screening. By integrating technologies of speech recognition and computer vision, the framework can quantitatively analyze the behaviors of children under well-designed protocols. By collecting 196 test samples from 41 children in the clinical treatments, our proposed method obtains 85.20% accuracy for the score prediction of individual protocol, and 80.49% unweighted accuracy for the final ASD prediction. This result indicates that our model reaches the average level of domain experts in ASD diagnosis.

The problem of uncovering different dynamicalregimes is of pivotal importance in time series analysis. Switchingdynamical systems provide a solution for modeling physical phe-nomena whose time series data exhibit different dynamical modes.In this work we propose a novel variational RNN model forswitching dynamics allowing for both non-Markovian and non-linear dynamical behavior between and within dynamic modes.Attention mechanisms are provided to inform the switchingdistribution. We evaluate our model on synthetic and empiricaldatasets of diverse nature and successfully uncover differentdynamical regimes and predict the switching dynamics.

In this paper we consider a graph clustering problem with a given number of clusters and approximate desired sizes of the clusters. One possible motivation for such task could be the problem of databases or servers allocation within several given large computational clusters, where we want related objects to share the same cluster in order to minimize latency and transaction costs. This task differs from the original community detection problem, though we adopt some ideas from Glauber Dynamics and Label Propagation Algorithm. At the same time we consider no additional information about node labels, so the task has nature of unsupervised learning. We propose an algorithm for the problem, show that it works well for a large set of parameters of Stochastic Block Model (SBM) and theoretically show its running time complexity for achieving almost exact recovery is of $O(n\cdot\deg_{av} \cdot \omega )$ for the mean-field SBM with $\omega$ tending to infinity arbitrary slow. Other significant advantage of the proposed approach is its local nature, which means it can be efficiently distributed with no scheduling or synchronization.

Attributed graphs are structures that are useful to represent objects through the information of their local parts and their relations. Each characteristic in the local parts is represented by different attributes on the nodes. In this context, the comparison between structured objects is performed through a distance between attributed graphs. If we want to correctly tune the distance and the node correspondence between graphs, we have to add some weights on the node attributes to gauge the importance of each local characteristic. In this paper, we present a method to learn the weights on each node attribute. It is based on building an embedded space and imposing the weights we want to learn to be the constants of the hyperplane deduced by a linear regression applied on a cloud of points. These points represent the node-to-node mappings.

The class imbalance problem is characterized by the unequal distribution of different class samples, usually resulting in a learning bias toward the majority class. In the past decades, kinds of techniques have been proposed to alleviate this problem. Among those approaches, one promising method, interpolation- based oversampling, proposes to generate synthetic minority samples based on selected reference data, which can effectively solve the skewed distribution of data samples. However, there are several unsolved issues in interpolation-based oversampling. Existing methods often suffer from noisy synthetic samples due to improper data clusterings and unsatisfactory reference selection. In this paper, we propose the position-aware safe boundary interpolation oversampling algorithm (PABIO) to address such issues. We firstly introduce a combined clustering algorithm for minority samples to overcome the shortage of clustering using only distance-based or density-based. Then a position- aware interpolation-based oversampling algorithm is proposed for different minority clusters. Especially, we develop a novel method to leverage the majority class information to learn a safe boundary for generating synthetic points. The proposed PABIO is evaluated on multiple imbalanced data sets classified by two base classifiers: support vector machine (SVM) and C4.5 decision tree classifier. Experimental results show that our proposed PABIO outperforms other baselines among benchmark data sets.

Image2latex usually means converts mathematical formulas in images into latex markup. It is a very challenging job due to the complex two-dimensional structure, variant scales of input, and very long representation sequence. Many researchers use encoder-decoder based model to solve this task and achieved good results. However, these methods don't make full use of the structure and position information of the formula. %In this paper, we improve the encoder by employing Global Context block and Transformer. To solve this problem, we propose a global context-based network with transformer that can (1) learn a more powerful and robust intermediate representation via aggregating global features and (2) encode position information explicitly and (3) learn latent dependencies between symbols by using self-attention mechanism. The experimental results on the dataset IM2LATEX-100K demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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.

The aggressive growth of digital data threatens to exceed the capacity of conventional storage devices. The need for new means to store digital information has brought great interest in novel solutions as it is DNA, whose biological properties allow the storage of information at a high density and preserve it without any information loss for hundreds of years when stored under specific conditions. Despite being a promising solution, DNA storage faces two major obstacles: the large cost of synthesis and the high error rate introduced during sequencing. While most of the works focus on adding redundancy aiming for effective error correction, this work combines noise resistance to minimize the impact of the errors in the decoded data and post-processing to further improve the quality of the decoding.

Predicting protein-protein interactions (PPIs) by learning informative representations from amino acid sequences is a challenging yet important problem in biology. Although various deep learning models in Siamese architecture have been proposed to model PPIs from sequences, these methods are computationally expensive for a large number of PPIs due to the pairwise encoding process. Furthermore, these methods are difficult to interpret because of non-intuitive mappings from protein sequences to their sequence representation. To address these challenges, we present a novel deep framework to model and predict PPIs from sequence alone. Our model incorporates a bidirectional gated recurrent unit to learn sequence representations by leveraging contextualized and sequential information from sequences. We further employ a sparse regularization to model long-range dependencies between amino acids and to select important amino acids (protein motifs), thus enhancing interpretability. Besides, the novel design of the encoding process makes our model computationally efficient and scalable to an increasing number of interactions. Experimental results on up-to-date interaction datasets demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods. Literature-based case studies illustrate the ability of our model to provide biological insights to interpret the predictions.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have led us to achieve significant progress in object detection research. To detect objects of various sizes, object detectors often exploit the hierarchy of the multiscale feature maps called {\it feature pyramids}, which are readily obtained by the CNN architecture. However, the performance of these object detectors is limited because the bottom-level feature maps, which experience fewer convolutional layers, lack the semantic information needed to capture the characteristics of the small objects. To address such problems, various methods have been proposed to increase the depth for the bottom-level features used for object detection. While most approaches are based on the generation of additional features through the top-down pathway with lateral connections, our approach directly fuses multi-scale feature maps using bidirectional long short-term memory (biLSTM) in an effort to leverage the gating functions and parameter-sharing in generating deeply fused semantics. The resulting semantic information is redistributed to the individual pyramidal feature at each scale through the channel-wise attention model. We integrate our semantic combining and attentive redistribution feature network (ScarfNet) with the baseline object detectors, i.e., Faster R-CNN, single-shot multibox detector (SSD), and RetinaNet. Experimental results show that our method offers a significant performance gain over the baseline detectors and outperforms the competing multiscale fusion methods in the PASCAL VOC and COCO detection benchmarks.

In recent years, many researchers have started to construct Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to deal with graph classification task. Those GNNs can fit into a framework named Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs), which consists of two phases: a Message Passing phase used for updating node embeddings and a Readout phase. In Readout phase, node embeddings are aggregated to extract graph feature used for classification. However, the above operation may obscure the affect of the node embedding of each node on graph classification. Therefore, a node voting based graph classification model is proposed in this paper, called Node Voting net (NVnet). Similar to the MPNNs, NVnet also contains the Message Passing phase. The main differences between NVnet and MPNNs are: 1, a decoder for graph reconstruction is added to NVnet to make node embeddings contain as much graph structure information as possible; 2, NVnet replaces the Readout phase with a new phase called Node Voting phase. In the Node Voting phase, an attention layer based on the gate mechanism is constructed to help each node observe the node embeddings of other nodes in the graph, and each node predicts the graph class from its own perspective. The above process is called node voting. After voting, the results of all nodes are aggregated to get the final graph classification result. In addition, considering that aggregation operation may also obscure the difference between node voting results, our solution is to add a regularization term to drive node voting results to reach group consensus. We evaluate the performance of the NVnet on 4 benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that compared with other 10 baselines, NVnet can achieve higher graph classification accuracy on datasets by using appropriate convolutional operator.