Italy

As reported by Hong Kong Government in 2017, there are more than 1.5 million residents suffering from hearing impairment in Hong Kong. Most of them rely on Hong Kong Sign Language for daily communication while there are only 63 registered sign language interpreters in Hong Kong. To address this specific social issue and also facilitate the effective communication between the hearing impaired and other people, this paper introduces a word-level Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) dataset which currently includes 45 isolated words and at least 30 sign videos per word performed by different signers(more than 1500 videos in total now and still enlarging). Based on this dataset, this paper systemically compares the performances of various deep learning approaches, including (1) 2D histogram of oriented gradients(HOG) feature/pose estimation/feature extraction with long-short term memory(LSTM) layer; (2) 3D Residual Neural Network(ResNet) (3) (2+1)D Residual Neural Network, in HKSL recognition. Meanwhile, to further improve the accuracy of sign language recognition, this paper proposes a novel method called (3+2+1)D ResNet Model with Frame Selection which adopts blurriness detection with Laplacian kernel to construct highquality video clips and also combines both (2+1)D and 3D ResNet for recognizing the sign language. At the end, the experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other deep learning approaches and attains an impressive accuracy of 94.6% in our dataset.

ICPR 2020

Applying (3+2+1)D Residual Neural Network with Frame Selection for Hong Kong Sign Language Recognition

video recognition

residual neural network

sign language recognition

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

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. 


The popularity of wearable cameras has opened up a new dimension for egocentric activity recognition. While some methods introduce attention mechanisms into deep learning networks to capture fine-grained hand-object interactions, they often neglect exploring the spatio-temporal relationships. Generating spatial attention, without adequately exploiting temporal consistency, will result in potentially sub-optimal performance in the video-based task. In this paper, we propose a flow-guided spatial attention tracking (F-SAT) module, which is based on enhancing motion patterns and inter-frame information, to highlight the discriminative features from regions of interest across a video sequence. A new form of input, namely the optical-flow volume, is presented to provide informative cues from moving parts for spatial attention tracking. The proposed F-SAT module is deployed to a two-branch-based deep architecture, which fuses complementary information for egocentric activity recognition. Experimental results on three egocentric activity benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Flow-guided Spatial Attention Tracking for Egocentric Activity Recognition

Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is a challenging problem due to the complex serving scenario and diverse face presentation attack patterns. Using single modal images which are usually captured with RGB cameras is not able to deal with the former because of serious overfitting problems. The existing multi-modal FAS datasets rarely pay attention to the cross domain problems, training FAS system on these data leads to inconsistencies and low generalization capabilities in deployment since imaging principles(structured light, TOF, etc.) and pre-processing methods vary between devices. We explore the subtle fine-grained differences betweeen multi-modal cameras and proposed a cross domain multi-modal FAS dataset GREAT-FASD and several evaluation protocols for academic community. Furthermore, we incorporate the multiplicative attention and center loss to enhance the representative power of CNN via seeking out complementary information as a powerful baseline. In addition, extensive experiments have been conducted on the proposed dataset to analyze the robustness to distinguish spoof faces and bona-fide faces. Experimental results show the effectiveness of proposed method and achieve the state-of-the-art competitive results. Finally, we visualize our future distribution in hidden space and observe that the proposed method is able to lead the network to generate a large margin for face anti-spoofing task.

A Cross Domain Multi-modal Dataset for Robust Face Anti-spoofing


Characterizing the spatial relationship between blood vessel and lymphatic vascular structures, in the mice dura mater tissue, is useful for modeling fluid flows and changes in dynamics in various disease processes. We propose a new deep learning-based approach to fuse a set of multi-channel single-focus microscopy images within each volumetric z-stack into a single fused image that accurately captures as much of
the vascular structures as possible. The red spectral channel captures small blood vessels and the green fluorescence channel images lymphatics structures in the intact dura mater attached to bone. The deep architecture Multi-Channel Fusion U-Net (MCFU-Net) combines multi-slice regression likelihood maps of thin linear structures using max pooling for each channel independently to estimate a slice-based focus selection map. We compare MCFU-Net with a widely used derivative-based multiscale Hessian fusion method [8]. The multi-scale Hessian-based fusion produces dark-halos, non-homogeneous backgrounds and less detailed anatomical structures. Perception based no-reference image quality assessment metrics PIQUE, NIQE, and BRISQUE confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method

Multi-focus Image Fusion for Confocal Microscopy Using U-Net Regression Map

As a typical cross-modal problem, visual question answering (VQA) has received increasing attention from the communities of computer vision and natural language processing. Reading and reasoning about texts in the images is a burgeoning and important topic in VQA, especially for the visually impaired assistance applications. Given a image, it aims to predict an answer to a provided natural language question closely related to its textual contents. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end textual content based VQA model, which grounds question answering both on the visual and textual information. 


Dual Path Multi-modal High-Order Features for Textual Content based Visual Question Answering


Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the western world, with medical imaging playing a key role for early diagnosis. Focusing on breast cancer, one of the emerging imaging methodologies is Dynamic Contrast Enhanced-Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI). The flip side of using DCE-MRI is in its long acquisition times that often causes the patient to move. This results in motion artefacts, namely distortions in the acquired image that can affect DCE-MRI analysis. A possible solution consists in the use of Motion Correction Techniques
(MCTs), i.e. procedures intended to re-align the postcontrast image to the corresponding pre-contrast (reference) one. This task is particularly critic in DCE-MRI, due to brightness variations introduced in post-contrast images by the contrast agent flowing. To face this problem, in this work we introduce a new MCT for breast DCE-MRI leveraging Physiologically Based PharmacoKinetic (PBPK) modelling and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to determine the most suitable physiologically compliant transformation. To this aim, we propose a Neural Registration Network relying on a very task-specific loss function explicitly designed to take into account the contrast agent flowing while enforcing a correct re-alignment. We compared the obtained results against some conventional motion correction techniques, evaluating the performance on a patient-by-patient basis. Results show that the proposed approach results to be the best performing even when compared against other techniques designed to take into account for brightness variations.

Neural Machine Registration for Motion Correction in Breast DCE-MRI

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, variety, 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.

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

We propose a rank-based metric learning method by leveraging a concept of the Riemannian Potato for better separating non-linear data. By exploring the geometric properties of Riemannian manifolds, the proposed loss function optimizes the measure of dispersion using the distribution of Riemannian distances between a reference sample and neighbors and builds a ranked list according to the similarities. We show the proposed function can learn a hypersphere for each class, preserving the similarity structure inside it on Riemannian manifold. As a result, compared with Euclidean distance-based metric, our method can further jointly reduce the intra-class distances and enlarge the inter-class distances for learned features, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods on three widely used non- linear datasets.

Nonlinear Ranking Loss on Riemannian Potato Embedding


Computer vision with state-of-the-art deep learning models has achieved huge success in the field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) including text detection and recognition tasks recently. However, Key Information Extraction (KIE) from documents as the downstream task of OCR, having a large number of use scenarios in the real-world, remains a challenge because documents not only have textual features extracting from OCR systems but also have semantic visual features that are not fully exploited and play a critical role in KIE. Too little work has been devoted to efficiently make full use of both textual and visual features of the documents. In this paper, we introduce PICK, a framework that is effective and robust in handling complex document layout for KIE by combining graph learning with graph convolution operation, yielding a richer semantic representation containing the textual and visual features and global layout without ambiguity. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets have been conducted to show that our method outperforms baseline methods by significant margins. Our code is available at https://github.com/wenwenyu/PICK-pytorch.

PICK: Processing Key Information Extraction from Documents using Improved Graph Learning-Convolutional Networks

Video saliency detection is an important low-level task that has been used in a large range of high-level applications. In this paper, we proposed a three-stream multi-scale attentive network (TSMSAN) for saliency detection in dynamic scenes. TSMSAN integrates motion vector (MV) representation, static saliency map, and RGB information in multi-scales together into one framework on the basis of Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) and spatial attention mechanism. On the one hand, the respective motion features, spatial features, as well as scene features can provide abundant information for video saliency detection. On the other hand, spatial attention mechanism can combine features with multi-scales to focus on key information in dynamic scenes. In this manner, the proposed TSMSAN can encode the spatiotemporal features of the dynamic scene comprehensively.
We evaluate the proposed approach on two public dynamic saliency datasets. The experimental results demonstrate TSMSAN is able to achieve the state-of-the-art performance as well as excellent generalization ability. Furthermore, the proposed TSMSAN can provide more convincing video saliency information, in line with human perception.

TSMSAN: A Three-Stream Multi-Scale Attentive Network for Video Saliency Detection

Recent machine learning methods use increasingly large deep neural networks to achieve state-of-the-art results in various tasks. Network quantization can effectively reduce computation and memory costs without modifying network
structures, facilitating the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) on cloud and edge devices. However, most of the existing methods usually need time-consuming training or fine-tuning and access to the original training dataset that may be unavailable due to privacy or security concerns. In this paper, we present a novel
method to achieve low-precision quantization with limited data. Firstly, to reduce the complexity of per-channel quantization and degeneration of per-layer quantization, we introduce group quantization that separates the output channels into groups and processes each group independently. Secondly, to better distill
knowledge from the pre-trained FP32 model with limited data, we introduce a two-stage knowledge distillation method that divides the optimization process into blockwise optimization and joint optimization to address the limitation of layer-wise supervision and global supervision. Extensive experiments on ImageNet2012
(ResNet18/50, ShuffleNetV2, and MobileNetV2) demonstrate that the proposed approach can significantly improve the quantization model’s accuracy when only a few training samples are available. We further show that the method also extends to other computer vision architectures and tasks such as object detection.

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