Italy


Most of existing superpixel methods are designed to segment standard planar images as pre-processing for computer vision pipelines. Nevertheless, the 
increasing number of applications based on wide angle capture devices, mainly generating 360o spherical images, have enforced the need for dedicated superpixel approaches. In this paper, we introduce a new superpixel method for spherical images called SphSPS (for Spherical Shortest Path-based Superpixels). Our approach respects the spherical geometry and generalizes the notion of shortest path between a pixel and a superpixel center on the 3D spherical acquisition space. To relevantly evaluate this last aspect in the spherical space, we also generalize a planar global regularity metric. Finally, the proposed SphSPS method obtains significantly better performances than both planar and spherical recent superpixel approaches on the reference 360o spherical panorama segmentation dataset.

ICPR 2020

Generalized Shortest Path-based Superpixels for Accurate Segmentation of Spherical Images

regularity

spherical images

superpixels

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

AAAI 2024

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

poster

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. 


Spherical cameras and the latest image processing techniques open up new horizons. In particular, methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) now give excellent results for optical flow estimation on perspective images. However, these approaches are highly dependent on their architectures and training datasets. This paper proposes to benefit from years of improvement in perspective images optical flow estimation and to apply it to omnidirectional ones without training on new datasets. Our network, OmniFlowNet, is built on a CNN specialized in perspective images. Its convolution operation is adapted to be consistent with the equirectangular projection. Tested on spherical datasets created with Blender and several equirectangular videos realized from real indoor and outdoor scenes, OmniFlowNet shows better performance than its original network without extra training.

OmniFlowNet: a Perspective Neural Network Adaptation forOptical Flow Estimation in Omnidirectional Images

Multi-Task learning (MTL) provides state-of-the-art results
in many applications of computer vision and natural
language processing. In contrast to single-task learning
(STL), MTL allows for leveraging knowledge between related
tasks improving prediction results on all tasks. However,
there is a limited number of comparative studies applied to
MTL architectures for regression and time series problems
taking recent advances of MTL into account. An intriguing,
non-linear time-series problem are day ahead forecasts of
the expected power generation for renewable power plants.
Therefore, the main contribution of this article is a
comparative study of the following recent and relevant MTL
architectures: Hard-parameter sharing, cross-stitch
network, and sluice network (SN). They are compared to a
multi-layer peceptron (MLP) model of similar size in an STL
setting. As a additional contribution, we provide a simple,
yet practical approach to model task specific information
through an embedding layer in an MLP, referred to as task
embedding. Further, we contribute a new MTL architecture
named emerging relation network (ERN), which can be
considered as an extension of the SN. 
For a solar power dataset, the task embedding achieves the
best mean improvement with 8.2%. For two wind and one
additional solar dataset, the ERN is the best MTL
architecture with improvements up to 11.3%.

Emerging Relation Network and Task Embedding for Multi-Task Regression Problems

Different techniques have emerged in the deep learning scenario, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, Deep Belief Networks, and Long Short-Term Memory Networks, to cite a few. In lockstep, regularization methods, which aim to prevent overfitting by penalizing the weight connections, or turning off some units, have been widely studied either. In this paper, we present a novel approach called MaxDropout, a regularizer for deep neural network models that works in a supervised fashion by removing (shutting off) the prominent neurons (i.e., most active) in each hidden layer. The model forces fewer activated units to learn more representative information, thus providing sparsity. Regarding the experiments, we show that it is possible to improve existing neural networks and provide better results in neural networks when Dropout is replaced by MaxDropout. The proposed method was evaluated in image classification, achieving comparable results to existing regularizers, such as Cutout and RandomErasing, also improving the accuracy of neural networks that uses Dropout by replacing the existing layer by MaxDropout.

MaxDropout: Deep Neural Network Regularization Based on Maximum Output Values

Few-shot learning is a challenging problem that has attracted more and more attention recently since abundant training samples are difficult to obtain in practical applications. Meta-learning has been proposed to address this issue, which focuses on quickly adapting a predictor as a base-learner to new tasks, given limited labeled samples. However, a critical challenge for meta-learning is the representation deficiency since it is hard to discover common information from a small number of training samples or even one, as is the representation of key features from such little information. As a result, a meta-learner cannot be trained well in a high-dimensional parameter space to generalize to new tasks. Existing methods mostly resort to extracting less expressive features so as to avoid the representation deficiency. Aiming at learning better representations, we propose a metalearning approach with complemented representations network (MCRNet) for few-shot image classification. In particular, we embed a latent space, where latent codes are reconstructed with extra representation information to complement the representation deficiency. Furthermore, the latent space is established with variational inference, collaborating well with different baselearners, and can be extended to other models. Finally, our endto-end framework achieves the state-of the-art performance in image classification on three standard few-shot learning datasets.

Complementing Representation Deficiency in Few-shot Image Classification: A Meta-Learning Approach

Updating the tracker model with adverse bounding box predictions adds an unavoidable bias term to the learning. This bias term, which we refer to as model decay, offsets the learning and causes tracking drift. While its adverse affect
might not be visible in short-term tracking, accumulation of this bias over a long-term can eventually lead to a permanent loss of the target. In this paper, we look at the problem of model bias from a mathematical perspective. Further, we briefly examine the effect of various sources of tracking error on model decay, using a correlation filter (ECO) and a Siamese (SINT) tracker. Based on observations and
insights, we propose simple additions that help to reduce model decay in long-term tracking. The proposed tracker is evaluated on four long-term and one short term tracking benchmarks, demonstrating superior accuracy and robustness, even in 30 minute long videos.

Model Decay in Long-Term Tracking

Few-shot learning is often motivated by the ability of humans to learn new tasks from few examples. However, standard few-shot classification benchmarks assume that the representation is learned on a limited amount of base class data, ignoring the amount of prior knowledge that a human may have accumulated before learning new tasks. At the same time, even if a powerful representation is available, it may happen in some domain that base class data are limited or non-existent.
This motivates us to study a problem where the representation is obtained from a classifier pre-trained on a large-scale dataset of a different domain, assuming no access to its training process, while the base class data are limited to few examples per class and their role is to adapt the representation to the domain at hand rather than learn from scratch. We adapt the representation in two stages, namely on the few base class data if available and on the even fewer data of new tasks.
In doing so, we obtain from the pre-trained classifier a spatial attention map that allows focusing on objects and suppressing background clutter. This is important in the new problem, because when base class data are few, the network cannot learn where to focus implicitly. We also show that a pre-trained network may be easily adapted to novel classes, without meta-learning.

Few-Shot Few-Shot Learning and the role of Spatial Attention


Forensic analysis is used to detect image forgeries e.g. the copy move forgery
and the object removal forgery, respectively.
Counter forensic techniques (aka anti-forensic methods to fool the forensic analyst by concealing
traces of manipulation) have become popular in the game of cat and mouse between the analyst and the attacker.
Classical anti-forensic techniques targeting on SIFT keypoints have been established with particular
emphasis on keypoint removal in the context of copy move forgery detection.
In this paper we propose a forensic approach countering SIFT keypoint removal by changing to a different type
of keypoints in forensic analysis, clearly demonstrating benefits over traditional SIFT keypoint oriented techniques.


Countering Anti-forensics of SIFT-based Copy-Move Detection

Clustering artworks is difficult for several reasons. On the one hand, recognizing meaningful patterns in accordance with domain knowledge and visual perception is extremely difficult. On the other hand, applying traditional clustering and feature reduction techniques to the highly dimensional pixel space can be ineffective. To address these issues, we propose to use a deep convolutional embedding model for digitized painting clustering, in which the task of mapping the raw input data to an abstract, latent space is jointly optimized with the task of finding a set of cluster centroids in this latent feature space. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The model is also capable of outperforming other state-of-the-art deep clustering approaches to the same problem. The proposed method can be useful for several art-related tasks, in particular visual link retrieval and historical knowledge discovery in painting datasets.

Deep Convolutional Embedding for Digitized Painting Clustering

Learning how to adapt to complex and dynamic environments is one of the most important factors that contribute to our intelligence. Endowing artificial agents with this ability is not a simple task, particularly in competitive scenarios. In this paper, we present a broad study on how popular reinforcement learning algorithms can be adapted and implemented to learn and to play a real-world implementation of a competitive multiplayer card game. We propose specific training and validation routines for the learning agents, in order to evaluate how the agents learn to be competitive and explain how they adapt to each others' playing style. Finally, we pinpoint how the behavior of each agent derives from their learning style and create a baseline for future research on this scenario.

Learning from Learners: Adapting Reinforcement Learning Agents to be Competitive in a Card Game

Deep neural networks (DNNs) with many layers of feature representations yield state-of-the-art results on several difficult learning tasks. However, optimizing very deep DNNs without shortcut connections known as PlainNets, is a notoriously hard problem. Considering the growing interest in this area, this paper investigates holistically two scenarios that plague the training of very deep PlainNets: (1) the relatively popular challenge of ‘vanishing and exploding units’ activations’, and (2) the less investigated ‘singularity’ problem, which is studied in details in this paper. In contrast to earlier works that study only the saturation and explosion of units’ activations in isolation, this paper harmonizes the inconspicuous coexistence of the aforementioned problems for very deep PlainNets. Particularly, we argue that the aforementioned problems would have to be tackled simultaneously for the successful training of very deep PlainNets. Finally, different techniques that can be employed for tackling the optimization problem are discussed, and a specific combination of simple techniques that allows the successful training of PlainNets having up to 100 layers is demonstrated.

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OmniFlowNet: a Perspective Neural Network Adaptation forOptical Flow Estimation in Omnidirectional Images

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