Italy

The design of an automatic visual inspection system is usually performed in two stages. While the first stage consists of selecting the most suitable hardware setup for highlighting most effectively the defects on the surface to be inspected, the second stage concerns the development of algorithmic solutions to exploit the potentials offered by the collected data. In this paper, first, we present a novel illumination setup embedding four illumination configurations to resemble diffused, dark-field, and front lighting techniques. Second, we analyze the contributions brought by deploying the proposed setup in the training phase only, mimicking the scenario in which an already developed visual inspection system cannot be modified on the customer site. Along with an exhaustive set of experiments, in this paper, we demonstrate the suitability of the proposed setup for effective illumination of complex-objects, defined as manufactured items with variable surface characteristics that cannot be determined a priori. Eventually, we provide insights into the importance of multiple light configurations availability during training and their natural boosting effect which, without the need to modify the system design in the evaluation phase, lead to improvements in the overall system performance.

ICPR 2020

Complex-Object Visual Inspection: Empirical Studies on A Multiple Lighting Solution

illumination and reflectance modeling

vision for robotics

applications of computer vision

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


poster

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are now widely deployed in a variety of computer vision (CV) systems. These systems typically include an image signal processor (ISP), even though the ISP is traditionally designed to produce images that look appealing to humans. In CV systems, it is not clear what the role of the ISP is, or if it is even required at all for accurate prediction. In this work, we investigate the efficacy of the ISP in CNN classification tasks and outline the system-level trade-offs between prediction accuracy and computational cost. To do so, we build software models of a configurable ISP and an imaging sensor to train CNNs on ImageNet with a range of different ISP settings and functionality. Results on ImageNet show that an ISP improves accuracy by 4.6%-12.2% on MobileNets. Results from ResNets demonstrate these trends also generalize to deeper networks. An ablation study of the various processing stages in a typical ISP reveals that the tone mapper is the most significant stage when operating on high dynamic range (HDR) images, by providing 5.8% average accuracy improvement alone. We also show that the ISP increases the generalization of CNNs across two different image sensors by a significant 17.5%. Overall, the ISP benefits system efficiency because the memory and computational costs of the ISP is minimal compared to the cost of using a larger CNN to achieve the same accuracy.

ISP4ML: The Role of Image Signal Processing in Efficient Deep Learning Vision Systems


This paper studies the problem of Person Re-Identification (ReID)
for large-scale applications. Recent research efforts have been devoted
to building complicated part models, which introduce considerably
high computational cost and memory consumption, inhibiting its practicability
in large-scale applications. This paper aims to develop a novel learning
strategy to find efficient feature embeddings while maintaining the
balance of accuracy and model complexity. More specifically, we find
by enhancing the classical triplet loss together with cross-entropy
loss, our method can explore the hard examples and build a discriminant
feature embedding yet compact enough for large-scale applications.
Our method is carried out progressively using Bayesian optimization,
and we call it the Progressive Learning Algorithm (PLA). Extensive
experiments on three large-scale datasets show that our PLA is comparable
or better than the state-of-the-arts. Especially, on the challenging
Market-1501 dataset, we achieve Rank-1=94.7%/mAP=89.4% while saving
at least 30\% parameters than strong part models.

Automatic Student Network Search for Knowledge Distillation


Multi-pedestrian tracking in aerial imagery has several applications such as large-scale event monitoring, disaster management, search-and-rescue missions, and as input into predictive crowd dynamic models. Due to the challenges such as the large number and the tiny size of the pedestrians (e.g., 4×4 pixels) with their similar appearances as well as different scales and atmospheric conditions of the images with their extremely low frame rates (e.g., 2 fps), current state-of-the-art algorithms including the deep learning-based ones are unable to perform well. In this paper, we propose AerialMPTNet, a novel approach for multi-pedestrian tracking in geo-referenced aerial imagery by fusing appearance features from a Siamese Neural Network, movement predictions from a Long Short-Term Memory, and pedestrian interconnections from a GraphCNN. In addition, to address the lack of diverse aerial pedestrian tracking datasets, we introduce the Aerial Multi-Pedestrian Tracking (AerialMPT) dataset consisting of 307 frames and 44,740 pedestrians annotated. We believe that AerialMPT is the largest and most diverse dataset to this date and will be released publicly. We evaluate AerialMPTNet on AerialMPT and KIT AIS, and benchmark with several state-of-the-art tracking methods. Results indicate that AerialMPTNet significantly outperforms other methods on accuracy and time-efficiency.

AerialMPTNet: Multi-Pedestrian Tracking in Aerial Imagery Using Temporal and Graphical Features

We present a new lightweight CNN-based algorithm for multi-frame optical flow estimation.
Our solution introduces a double recurrence over spatial scale and time through repeated use of a generic "STaR" (SpatioTemporal Recurrent) cell. It includes (i) a temporal recurrence based on conveying learned features rather than optical flow estimates; (ii) an occlusion detection process which is coupled with optical flow estimation and therefore uses a very limited number of extra parameters. The resulting STaRFlow algorithm gives state-of-the-art performances on MPI Sintel and Kitti2015 and involves significantly less parameters than all other methods with comparable results.

STaRFlow: A SpatioTemporal Recurrent Cell for Lightweight Multi-Frame Optical Flow Estimation

Topic modeling is widely studied for the dimension reduction and analysis of documents. However, it is formulated as a difficult optimization problem. Current approximate solutions also suffer from inaccurate model- or data-assumptions. To deal with the above problems, we propose a polynomial-time deep topic model with no model and data assumptions. Specifically, we first apply multilayer bootstrap network (MBN), which is an unsupervised deep model, to reduce the dimension of documents, and then use the low-dimensional data representations or their clustering results as the target of supervised Lasso for topic word discovery. To our knowledge, this is the first time that MBN and Lasso are applied to unsupervised topic modeling. Experimental comparison results with five representative topic models on the 20-newsgroups and TDT2 corpora illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Deep Topic Modeling by Multilayer Bootstrap Network and Lasso

We present a deep transformation model for probabilistic regression. Deep learning is known for outstandingly accurate predictions on complex data but in regression tasks it is predominantly used to just predict a single number. This
ignores the non-deterministic character of most tasks. Especially
if crucial decisions are based on the predictions, like in medical
applications, it is essential to quantify the prediction uncertainty.
The presented deep learning transformation model estimates the
whole conditional probability distribution, which is the most
thorough way to capture uncertainty about the outcome. We
combine ideas from a statistical transformation model (most
likely transformation) with recent transformation models from
deep learning (normalizing flows) to predict complex outcome
distributions. The core of the method is a parameterized transformation
function which can be trained with the usual maximum
likelihood framework using gradient descent. The method can
be combined with existing deep learning architectures. For small
machine learning benchmark datasets, we report state of the art
performance for most dataset and partly even outperform it. Our
method works for complex input data, which we demonstrate by
employing a CNN architecture on image data.

Deep transformation models for tackling complex probabilistic regression problems

We propose a novel lightweight network for stereo estimation. Our network consists of a fully-convolutional densely connected neural network (FC-DCNN) that computes matching costs between rectified image pairs. Our FC-DCNN method learns expressive features and performs some simple but effective post-processing steps. The densely connected layer structure connects the output of each layer to the input of each subsequent layer. This network structure and the fact that we do not use any fully-connected layers or 3D convolutions leads to a very lightweight network. The output of this network is used in order to calculate matching costs and create a cost-volume. Instead of using time and memory-inefficient cost-aggregation methods such as semi-global matching or conditional random fields in order to improve the result, we rely on filtering techniques, namely median filter and guided filter. By computing a left-right consistency check we get rid of inconsistent values. Afterwards we use a watershed foreground-background segmentation on the disparity image with removed inconsistencies. This mask is then used to refine the final prediction. We show that our method works well for both challenging indoor and outdoor scenes by evaluating it on the Middlebury, KITTI and ETH3D benchmarks respectively. Our full framework is available at https://github.com/thedodo/FC-DCNN

FC-DCNN: A densely connected neural network for stereo estimation

In this work, we perform a wide variety of experiments with different deep learning architectures on datasets of limited size.
According to our study, we show that model complexity is a critical factor when only a few samples per class are available.
Differently from the literature, we show that in some configurations, the state of the art can be improved using low complexity models.
For instance, in problems with scarce training samples and without data augmentation, low-complexity convolutional neural networks perform comparably well or better than state-of-the-art architectures.
Moreover, we show that even standard data augmentation can boost recognition performance by large margins.
This result suggests the development of more complex data generation/augmentation pipelines for cases when data is limited.
Finally, we show that dropout, a widely used regularization technique, maintains its role as a good regularizer even when data is scarce.
Our findings are empirically validated on the sub-sampled versions of popular CIFAR-10, Fashion-MNIST and, SVHN benchmarks.

A Close Look at Deep Learning with Small Data

As a promising step, the performance of data analysis and feature learning are able to be improved if certain pattern matching mechanism is available. One of the feasible solutions can refer to the importance estimation of instances, and consequently, kernel mean matching (KMM) has become an important method for knowledge discovery and novelty detection in kernel machines. Furthermore, the existing KMM methods have focused on concrete learning frameworks. In this work, a novel approach to adaptive matching of kernel means is proposed, and selected data with high importance are adopted to achieve calculation efficiency with optimization. In addition, scalable learning can be conducted in proposed method as a generalized solution to matching of appended data. The experimental results on a wide variety of real-world data sets demonstrate the proposed method is able to give outstanding performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods, while calculation efficiency can be preserved.

Adaptive Matching of Kernel Means

Affinity measure in object tracking outputs a similarity or distance score for given detections. As an affinity measure is typically imperfect, it generally has an uncertain region in which regarding two groups of detections as the same object or different objects based on the score can be wrong. How to reduce the uncertain region is a major challenge for most similarity-based tracking methods. Early mistakes often result in distribution drifts for tracked objects and this is another major issue for object tracking. In this paper, we propose a new offline tracking method called agglomerative hierarchical clustering with ensemble of tracking experts (AHC_ETE), to tackle the uncertain region and early mistake issues. We conduct tracking from certain to uncertain to reduce early mistakes. Meanwhile, we ensemble multiple tracking experts to reduce the uncertain region as the final uncertain region is the intersection of those of all tracking experts. Experiments on the MOT15 and MOT16 datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/cyoukaikai/ahc_ete.

Complex-Object Visual Inspection: Empirical Studies on A Multiple Lighting Solution

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ISP4ML: The Role of Image Signal Processing in Efficient Deep Learning Vision Systems

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