Italy

The ability to detect, localize and classify objects that are anomalies is a challenging task in the computer vision community. In this paper, we tackle these tasks developing a framework to automatically inspect the railway during the night. Specifically, it is able to predict the presence, the image coordinates and the class of obstacles. To deal with the lowlight environment, the framework is based on thermal images and consists of three different modules that address the problem of detecting anomalies, predicting their image coordinates and classifying them. Moreover, due to the absolute lack of publiclyreleased datasets collected in the railway context for anomaly detection, we introduce a new multi-modal dataset, acquired from a rail drone, used to evaluate the proposed framework. 
Experimental results confirm the accuracy of the framework and its suitability, in terms of computational load, performance, and inference time, to be implemented on a self-powered inspection system.

ICPR 2020

Anomaly Detection, Localization and Classification for Railway Inspection

railways

anomaly detection

deep learning

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. 


technical paper

Hand gesture recognition plays a significant role in human-computer interaction for understanding various human gestures and their intent. However, most prior works can only recognize gestures of limited labeled classes and fail to adapt to new categories. The task of Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) for hand gesture recognition aims to address the above issue by leveraging semantic representations and detecting both seen and unseen class samples. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end prototype-based GZSL framework for hand gesture recognition which consists of two branches. The first branch is a prototype-based detector that learns gesture representations and determines whether an input sample belongs to a seen or unseen category. The second branch is a zero-shot label predictor which takes the features of unseen classes as input and outputs predictions through a learned mapping mechanism between the feature and the semantic space. We further establish a hand gesture dataset that specifically targets this GZSL task, and comprehensive experiments on this dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on recognizing both seen and unseen gestures.

A Prototype-Based Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Framework for Hand Gesture Recognition

Facial cosmetics have the ability to substantially alter the facial appearance, which can negatively affect the decisions of a face recognition. In addition, it was recently shown that the application of makeup can be abused to launch so-called makeup presentation attacks. In such attacks, the attacker might apply heavy makeup in order to achieve the facial appearance of a target subject for the purpose of impersonation. 
In this work, we assess the vulnerability of a COTS face recognition system to makeup presentation attacks employing the publicly available Makeup Induced Face Spoofing (MIFS) database. It is shown that makeup presentation attacks might seriously impact the security of the face recognition system. Further, we propose an attack detection scheme which distinguishes makeup presentation attacks from genuine authentication attempts by analysing differences in deep face representations obtained from potential makeup presentation attacks and corresponding target face images. The proposed detection system employs a machine learning-based classifier, which is trained with synthetically generated makeup presentation attacks utilizing a generative adversarial network for facial makeup transfer in conjunction with image warping. Experimental evaluations conducted using the MIFS database reveal a detection equal error rate of 0.7% for the task of separating genuine authentication attempts from makeup presentation attacks.

Detection of Makeup Presentation Attacks based on Deep Face Representations

In this paper we study the poorly investigated problem of learning Random Forests for distance-based Random Forest clustering. We studied both classic schemes as well as alternative approaches, novel in this context. In particular, we investigated the suitability of Gaussian Density Forests, Random Forests specifically designed for density estimation. Further, we introduce a novel variant of Random Forest, based on an effective non parametric by-pass estimator of the Renyi entropy, which can be useful when the parametric assumption is too strict. An empirical evaluation involving different datasets and different RF-clustering strategies confirms that the learning step is crucial for RF-clustering. We also present a set of practical guidelines useful to determine the most suitable variant of RF-clustering according to the problem under examination.

On Learning Random Forests for Random Forest Clustering

In this paper we address unsupervised machine learning for two use cases in satellite communication, which are scheduling problems: (i) Ka-band frequency plan optimization and (ii) dynamic configuration of an active antenna array satellite. We apply approaches based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework to both of them. We compare against baselines of currently deployed solutions, and show that they can be significantly outperformed by the EM-based approach. In addition, the approaches can be applied incrementally, thus supporting fast adaptation to small changes in the input configuration.

Expectation-Maximization for Scheduling Problems in Satellite Communication

Mixture model (MM) is a probabilistic framework allows us to define dataset containing K different modes. When each of the modes is associated with a Gaussian distribution, we refer to it as Gaussian MM or GMM. Given a data point x, a GMM may assume the existence of a random index k ∈ {1, . . . , K} identifying which Gaussian the particular data is associated with. In a traditional GMM paradigm, it is straightforward to compute in closed-form, the conditional likelihood p(x|k,θ) as well as the responsibility probability p(k|x, θ) describing the distribution weights for each data. Computing the responsibility allows us to retrieve many important statistics of the overall dataset, including the weights of each of the modes/clusters. Modern large datasets are often containing multiple unlabelled modes, such as paintings dataset may con- tain several styles; fashion images containing several unlabelled categories. In its raw representation, the Euclidean distances between the data (e.g., images) do not allow them to form mixtures naturally, nor it’s feasible to compute responsibility distribution analytically, making GMM unable to apply. In this paper, we utilize the generative adversarial network (GAN) framework to achieve a plausible alternative method to compute these probabilities. The key insight is that we compute them at the data’s latent space z instead of x. However, this process of z → x is irreversible under GAN which renders the computation of responsibility p(k|x, θ) infeasible. Our paper proposed a novel method to solve it by using a so-called posterior consistency module (PCM). PCM acts like a GAN, except its generator CPCM does not output the data, but instead it outputs a distribution to approximate p(k|x,θ). The entire network is trained in an “end-to-end” fashion. Trough these techniques, it allows us to model the dataset of very complex structure using GMM and subsequently to discover interesting properties of an unsupervised dataset, including its segments, as well as generating new “out- distribution” data by smooth linear interpolation across any combinations of the modes in a completely unsupervised manner.

GAN-based Gaussian Mixture Model Responsibility Learning


Blind reduction of speckle noise has become a long-standing unsolved problem in several imaging applications, such as medical ultrasound imaging, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, and underwater sonar imaging, etc. The unwanted noise could lead to negative effects on the reliable detection and recognition of objects of interest. From a statistical point of view, speckle noise could be assumed to be multiplicative, significantly different from the common additive Gaussian noise. The purpose of this study is to blindly reduce the speckle noise under non-ideal imaging conditions. The multiplicative relationship between latent sharp image and random noise will be first converted into an additive version through a logarithmic transformation. To promote imaging performance, we introduced the feature pyramid network (FPN) and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP), contributing to a more powerful deep blind DeSPeckling Network (named as DSPNet). In particular, DSPNet is mainly composed of two subnetworks, i.e., Log-NENet (i.e., noise estimation network in logarithmic domain) and Log-DNNet (i.e., denoising network in logarithmic domain). Log-NENet and Log-DNNet are, respectively, proposed to estimate noise level map and reduce random noise in logarithmic domain. The multi-scale mixed loss function is further proposed to improve the robust generalization of DSPNet. The proposed deep blind despeckling network is capable of reducing random noise and preserving salient image details. Both synthetic and realistic experiments have demonstrated the superior performance of our DSPNet in terms of quantitative evaluations and visual image qualities.

DSPNet: Deep Learning-Enabled Blind Reduction of Speckle Noise


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.

Constructing Geographic and Long-term Temporal Graph for Traffic Forecasting


Text visual question answering (TextVQA) targets at answering the question related to texts appearing in the given images, posing more challenges than VQA by requiring a deeper recognition and understanding of various shapes of humanreadable scene texts as well as their meanings in different contexts. To overcome the weakness of exiting works, we propose a novel multi-modal contextual graph neural network (MCG) model for TextVQA. The proposed MCG model can capture the relationships between visual features of scene texts and non-textual objects in the given images as well as utilize richer sources of multi-modal features to improve the model performance. In particular, we encode the scene texts into richer features containing textual, visual and positional features, then model the visual relations between scene texts and non-textual objects through a contextual graph neural network. Our extensive experiments on real-world dataset demonstrate the advantages of the proposed MCG model over baseline approaches.

Multi-Modal Contextual Graph Neural Network for Text Visual Question Answering

Adversarial examples are slightly modified inputs devised to cause erroneous inference of deep learning models. Protection against the intervention of adversarial examples is a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed before the wide adoption of deep-learning based intelligent systems. In this research, we utilize the method known as input recharacterization to effectively eliminate the perturbations found in the adversarial examples. By converting images from the intensity domain into density-based representation using halftoning operation, performance of the classifier can be properly maintained. With adversarial attacks generated using FGSM, I-FGSM, and PGD, the top-5 accuracy of the hybrid model can still achieve 80.97%, 78.77%, 81.56%, respectively. Although the accuracy has been slightly affected, the influence of adversarial examples is significantly discounted. The average improvement over existing input transform defense mechanisms is approximately 10%.

Defense Mechanism Against Adversarial Attacks Using Density-based Representation of Images


In this work, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture, which is named as multi-Laplacian GAN with edge enhancement and abbreviated as MLGE. MLGE reconstructs HR images from 16×16 pixels to 128×128 pixels and does not use any prior face information. Experimental results verify that MLGE effectively reconstructs HR images and outperforms state-of-the-art methods Both quantitatively and qualitatively.


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Anomaly Detection, Localization and Classification for Railway Inspection

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A Prototype-Based Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Framework for Hand Gesture Recognition

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Anomaly Detection, Localization and Classification for Railway Inspection