Italy

Noisy data, crawled from the web or supplied by volunteers such as Mechanical Turkers or citizen scientists, is considered an alternative to professionally labeled data. There has been research focused on mitigating the effects of label noise. It is typically modeled as inaccuracy, where the correct label is replaced by an incorrect label from the same set. We consider an additional dimension of label noise: imprecision. For example, a non-breeding snow bunting is labeled as a bird. This label is correct, but not as precise as the task requires.
Standard softmax classifiers cannot learn from such a weak label because they consider all classes mutually exclusive, which non-breeding snow bunting and bird are not. We propose CHILLAX (Class Hierarchies for Imprecise Label Learning and Annotation eXtrapolation), a method based on hierarchical classification, to fully utilize labels of any precision.
Experiments on noisy variants of NABirds and ILSVRC2012 show that our method outperforms strong baselines by as much as 16.4 percentage points, and the current state of the art by up to 3.9 percentage points.

ICPR 2020

Making Every Label Count: Handling Semantic Imprecision By Integrating Domain Knowledge

imprecise data

hierarchical classification

domain knowledge

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




We consider the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for image classification. To learn target-domain-aware features from the unlabeled data, we create a self-supervised pretext task by augmenting the unlabeled data with a certain type of transformation (specifically, image rotation) and ask the learner to predict the properties of the transformation. However, the obtained feature representation may contain a large amount of irrelevant information with respect to the main task. To provide further guidance, we force the feature representation of the augmented data to be consistent with that of the original data. Intuitively, the consistency introduces additional constraints to representation learning, therefore, the learned representation is more likely to focus on the right information about the main task. Our experimental results validate the proposed method and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on classical domain adaptation benchmarks.

Self-Supervised Domain Adaptation with Consistency Training


Background subtraction is a fundamental pre-processing task in computer vision. This task becomes challenging in real scenarios due to variations in the background for both static and moving camera sequences. Several deep learning methods for background subtraction have been proposed in the literature with competitive performances. However, these models show performance degradation when tested on unseen videos; and they require huge amount of data to avoid overfitting. Recently, graph-based algorithms have been successful approaching unsupervised and semi-supervised learning problems. Furthermore, the theory of graph signal processing and semi-supervised learning have been combined leading to new insights in the field of machine learning. In this paper, concepts of recovery of graph signals are introduced in the problem of background subtraction. We propose a new algorithm called Graph BackGround Subtraction (GraphBGS), which is composed of: instance segmentation, background initialization, graph construction, graph sampling, and a semi-supervised algorithm inspired from the theory of recovery of graph signals. Our algorithm has the advantage of requiring less labeled data than deep learning methods while having competitive results on both: static and moving camera videos. GraphBGS outperforms unsupervised and supervised methods in several challenging conditions on the publicly available Change Detection (CDNet2014), and UCSD background subtraction databases.

GraphBGS: Background Subtraction via Recovery of Graph Signals

Instead of detecting pedestrians from their appearances in 2-D spatial images, which is time-consuming. This paper detects pedestrians along with their motion-directions in a temporal way. By projecting a driving video to a 2-D temporal image called Motion Profile (MP), we can robustly distinguish pedestrian in motion against smooth background motion. To ensure non-redundant data processing of deep network on a compact motion profile further, a novel temporal-shift memory (TSM) model is developed to perform deep learning of sequential input in linear processing time. In experiments containing pedestrian motion from various sensors such as video and LiDAR, we achieve the detecting rate of pedestrians at 90% in near and mid-range on the road. With the super-fast speed and good accuracy, this method is promising for intelligent vehicles.

Semantic Segmentation for Pedestrian Detection from Motion in Temporal Domain

This paper investigates the dependence of existing state-of-the-art person re-identification models on the presence and visibility of human faces. We apply a face detection and blurring algorithm to create anonymized versions of several popular person re-identification datasets including Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID, CUHK03, Viper, and Airport. Using a cross-section of existing state-of-the-art models that range in accuracy and computational efficiency, we evaluate the effect of this anonymization on re-identification performance using standard metrics. Perhaps surprisingly, the effect on mAP is very small, and accuracy is recovered by simply training on the anonymized versions of the data rather than the original data. These findings are consistent across multiple models and datasets. These results indicate that datasets can be safely anonymized by blurring faces without significantly impacting the performance of person re-identification systems, and may allow for the release of new richer re-identification datasets where previously there were privacy or data protection concerns.

How important are faces for person re-identification?


Scene text detection has been studied extensively. Existing methods detect either words or text lines and use either word-level or line-level annotated data for training. In this work, we propose a dual-task network that can perform word-level and line-level text detection simultaneously and use training data of both levels of annotation to boost the performance. The dual-task network has two detection heads for word-level and line-level text detection, respectively. Then we propose a mutual guidance scheme for the joint training of the two tasks with two modules: line filtering module utilizes the output feature map of the text line detector to filter out the non-text regions for the word detector, and word enhancing module provides prior positions of words for the text line detector depending on the output feature map of the word detector. Experimental results of word-level and linelevel text detection demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dual-task network and mutual guidance scheme, and the results of our method are competitive with state-of-the-art methods.

Mutually Guided Dual-Task Network for Scene Text Detection


For the last decade, single image defogging has been a subject of interest in image processing. In the visible spectrum, fog and haze decrease the visibility of distant objects. Thus, the objective of the visibility restoration is to remove as much as possible the effect of the fog within the image. Infrared sensors are more and more used in automotive and aviation industries but the effect of fog and haze is not restricted to the visible spectrum and also applies in the infrared band. After recalling the effects of fog in the common sub-bands of the infrared spectrum, we tested if the approach used for single image defogging in the visible spectrum might also work for infrared. This led us to propose a new approach of single image defogging for Long-Wavelength Infra-Red (LWIR) or Thermal Infra-Red. Several experiments are presented showing that the proposed algorithm offers interesting results not only for fog and haze but for bad weather conditions in general, during day and night.

Visibility Restoration in Infra-Red Images

We propose a novel foreground-focused domain adaptation (FFDA) framework
which mines the loss of the domain discriminators to concentrate on the backpropagation of foreground loss.

Foreground-focused domain adaptation for object detection


Understanding images by predicting pixel-level semantic classes is a fundamental task in computer vision and is one of the most important techniques for autonomous driving. Recent approaches based on deep convolutional neural networks have dramatically improved the speed and accuracy of semantic segmentation on paved road datasets, however, dirt roads have yet to be systematically studied. Dirt roads do not contain clear boundaries between drivable and non-drivable regions; and thus, this difficulty must be overcome for the realization of fully autonomous vehicles. The key idea of our approach is to apply lightweight non-local blocks to reinforce stage-wise long-range dependencies in encoder-decoder style backbone networks. Experiments on 4,687 images of a dirt road dataset show that our transitional asymmetric non-local neural networks present a higher accuracy with lower computational costs compared to state-of-the-art models.

Transitional Asymmetric Non-local Neural Network for Real-Time Dirt Road Segmentation

This paper presents a novel active learning technique aimed
at the selection of sequences for manual annotation from a
database of unlabelled sequences. Supervised machine
learning algorithms can employ these sequences to build
better models than those based on using random sequences
for training. The main contribution of the proposed method
is the use of sequential pattern information contained in
the database to select representative and diverse sequences
for annotation. These two characteristics ensure the proper
coverage of the instance space of sequences and, at the
same time, avoids over-fitting the trained model. The
approach, called SPIAL (Sequential Pattern Information for
Active Learning), uses sequential pattern mining algorithms
to extract frequently occurring sub-sequences from the
database and evaluates how representative and diverse each
sequence is, based on this information. The output is a
list of sequences for annotation sorted by
representativeness and diversity. The algorithm is modular
and, unlike most current techniques, it is independent from
the sequential machine learning technique that builds the
model as SPIAL does not need to know the set of the
features taken into account by the training algorithm.
Experiments done on well-known benchmarks involving
sequential data show that the models trained using SPIAL
increase their convergence speed while reducing manual
effort by selecting small sets of very informative
sequences for annotation. In addition, the computation cost
using SPIAL is much lower than for the state-of-the-art
algorithms evaluated.

Leveraging Sequential PAttern Information for Active Learning from Sequential Data


Obituaries represent a prominent way of expressing the human universal of grief. According to philosophers, obituaries are a ritualized way of evaluating both individuals who have passed away and the communities that helped to shape them. The basic idea is that you can tell what it takes to count as a good person of a particular type in a particular community by seeing how persons of that type are described and celebrated in their obituaries. Obituaries of those killed in conflict, in particular, are rich repositories of communal values, as they reflect the values and virtues that are admired and respected in individuals who are considered to be heroes in their communities. In this paper, we use natural language processing techniques to map the patterns of values and virtues attributed to Australian military personnel who were killed in action during World War I and World War II. Doing so reveals several clusters of values and virtues that tend to be attributed together. In addition, we use named entity recognition and geotagging to track the movements of these soldiers to various theatres of the wars, including North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific.

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Self-Supervised Domain Adaptation with Consistency Training

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