Italy

Conventional network pruning methods on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) reduce the number of input or output channels of convolution layers. With these approaches, the channels in the plain network can be pruned without any restrictions. However, in the case of the ResNet based networks which have shortcuts (skip connections), the channel slimming of existing pruning methods is limited to the inside of each residual block. Since the number of Flops and parameters are also highly related to the number of channels in the shortcuts, more investigation on pruning channels in shortcuts is required. 

In this paper, we propose a novel pruning method, Slimming Shortcut Pruning (SSPruning), for pruning channels in shortcuts on ResNet based networks. 
First, we separate the long shortcut into individual regions that can be pruned independently without considering its long connections. 
Then, by applying our Importance Learning Gate (ILG) which learns the importance of channels globally regardless of channel type and location (i.e., in the shortcut or inside of the block), we can finally achieve an optimally pruned model. Through various experiments, we have confirmed that our method yields outstanding results when we prune the shortcuts and inside of the block together.

ICPR 2020

Slimming ResNet by Slimming Shortcut

network pruning

computer vision

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. 


poster

Active learning reduces the labeling cost by actively querying labels for the most valuable data points. Typical active learning methods select the most informative examples one-at-a-time, their batch variants exist which select a set of most informative points instead of one point at a time. These points are selected in such a way that when added to the training data along with their labels, they provide maximum benefit to the underlying model. In this paper, we present a learning framework that actively selects optimal set of examples (in a batch) within a given budget, based on given utility and cost functions. The framework is generic enough to incorporate any utility and any cost function defined on a set of examples. Furthermore, we propose a novel utility function based on the Facility Location problem that considers three important characteristics of utility i.e., diversity, density and point utility. We also propose a novel cost function, by formulating the cost computation problem as an optimization problem, the solution to which turns out to be the minimum spanning tree. Thus, our framework provides the optimal batch of points within the given budget based on the cost and utility functions. We evaluate our method on several data sets and show its superior performance over baseline methods.

Budgeted Batch Mode Active Learning with Generalized Cost and Utility Functions

The recently proposed action spotting task consists of finding the exact timestamp in which an event occurs. This task fits particularly well for soccer videos, where events correspond to salient actions strictly defined by soccer rules (a goal occurs
when the ball crosses the goal line). In this paper, we devise a lightweight and modular network for action spotting, which can simultaneously predict the event label and its temporal offset using the same underlying features. We enrich our model with two training strategies: the first one for data balancing and uniform sampling, the second for masking ambiguous frames and keeping the most discriminative visual cues. When tested on the SoccerNet dataset and using standard features, our full proposal exceeds the current state of the art by 3 Average-mAP points. Additionally, it reaches a gain of more than 10 Average-mAP points on the test set when fine-tuned in combination with a strong 2D backbone.

RMS-net: Regression and Masking for Soccer Event Spotting


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.

HANet: Hybrid Attention-aware Network for Crowd Counting

The development of so-called soft-biometrics aims at providing information related to the physical and behavioural characteristics of a person. This paper focuses on body weight estimation based on the observation from a top-view \mbox{RGB-D} camera. In fact, the capability to estimate the weight of a person can be of help in many different applications, from health-related scenarios, to business intelligence and retail analytics. To deal with this issue, a TVWE (Top-View Weight Estimation) framework is proposed with the aim of predicting the weight. The approach relies on the adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that have been trained on depth data. Each network has also been modified in their top section to replace classification with prediction inference. The performance of five state-of-art DNNs have been compared, namely VGG16, ResNet, Inception, DenseNet and Efficient-Net. In addition, a convolutional auto-encoder has also been included for completeness. Considering the limited literature in this domain, the TVWE framework has been evaluated on a new publicly available dataset: ``VRAI Weight estimation Dataset'', which also collects, for each subject, labels related to weight, gender, and height. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed methods are suitable for this task, bringing different and significant insights for the application of the solution in different domains.

Weight Estimation from an RGB-D camera in top-view configuration

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has emerged as an effective paradigm for reducing the huge manual annotation cost for Person Re-Identification (Re-ID). Many of the recent UDA methods for Re-ID are clustering-based and select all the pseudo-label samples in each iteration for the model training. However, there are many wrong labeled samples that will mislead the model optimization under this circumstance. To solve this problem, we propose a Progressive Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (PUDA) framework for image-based Person Re-ID to reduce the negative effect of wrong pseudo-label samples on the model training process. Specifically, we first pretrain a CNN model on a labeled source dataset, then finetune the model on unlabeled target dataset with the following three steps iteratively: 1) estimating pseudo-labels for all the images in the target dataset with the model trained in the last iteration; 2) extending the training set by adding pseudo-label samples with higher label confidence; 3) updating the CNN model with the expanded training set in a supervised manner. During the iteration process, the number of pseudo-label samples added increased progressively. In particular, a Moderate Initial Selections (MIS) strategy for pseudo-label sampling is also proposed to reduce the negative impacts of random noise features in the early iterations and mislabeled samples in the late iterations on the model. The proposed framework with MIS strategy is validated on the Duke-to-Market, Market-to-Duke unsupervised domain adaptation tasks and achieves improvements of 4.2 points (absolute, i.e., 80.0% vs. 75.8%) and 1.7 points (absolute, i.e., 70.7% vs. 69.0%) in mAP correspondingly.

Progressive Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Image-based Person Re-Identification


Segmentation based methods isolate a digit string image into pieces
of single digits using various algorithms and then perform digit
recognition on these pieces However, segmentation algorithms may not
perform well in case of complex and erratic handwriting

Non segmentation based deep learning methods for digit recognition
make use of Recurrent Neural Network, however they are expensive to train

We propose a deep autoencoder based segmentation approach to
recognize digit strings

Handwritten Digit String Recognition using Deep Autoencoder based Segmentation and ResNet based Recognition Approach

Image hiding has received significant attentions due to the need of enhanced multimedia services. Recently, deep learning-based methods have been introduced that are capable of significantly increasing the hidden capacity and supporting full size image hiding. However, these methods suffer from the necessity to balance the errors of the modified cover image and the recovered hidden image. In our paper, we propose a novel joint compressive autoencoder (J-CAE) framework to design an image hiding algorithm that achieves full-size image hidden capacity with small reconstruction errors of the hidden image. More importantly, it addresses the trade-off problem of previous deep learning-based methods by mapping the image representations in the latent spaces of the joint CAE models. Thus, both visual quality of the container image and recovery quality of the hidden image can be simultaneously improved. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms several state-of-the-art deep learning-based image hiding methods in terms of imperceptibility and recovery quality of the hidden images while maintaining fullsize image hidden capacity.

Joint compressive autoencoders for full image-to-image hiding


Connected Components Labeling represents a fundamental step for many Computer Vision and Image Processing pipelines. Since the first appearance of the task in the sixties, many algorithmic solutions to optimize the computational load needed to label an image have been proposed. Among them, block-based scan approaches and decision trees revealed to be some of the most valuable strategies.

However, due to the cost of the manual construction of optimal decision trees and the computational limitations of automatic strategies employed in the past, the application of blocks and decision trees has been restricted to small masks, and thus to 2D algorithms.

With this paper we present a novel heuristic algorithm based on decision tree learning methodology, called Entropy Partitioning Decision Tree (EPDT). It allows to compute near-optimal decision trees for large scan masks. Experimental results demonstrate that algorithms based on the generated decision trees outperform state-of-the-art competitors.

A Heuristic-Based Decision Tree for Connected Components Labeling of 3D Volumes


Text line localization in document images is still considered an open research task. The state-of-the-art methods in this regard are only based on the classical image analysis techniques mostly have unsatisfactory performances especially when the document images i) contain significant degradations and different noise types and scanning defects, and ii) have touching and/or multi-skewed text lines or overlapping words/characters and non-uniform inter-line space. Moreover, localizing text in ancient handwritten Arabic document images is even more complex due to the morphological particularities related to the Arabic script. Thus, in this paper, we propose a hybrid method combining a deep network with classical document image analysis techniques for text line localization in ancient handwritten Arabic document images. The proposed method is firstly based on using the U-Net architecture to extract the main area covering the text core. Then, a modified RLSA combined with topological structural analysis is applied to localize whole text lines (including the ascender and descender components). To analyze the performance of the proposed method, a set of experiments has been conducted on many recent public and private datasets, and a thorough experimental evaluation has been carried out.

Combining Deep and Ad-hoc Solutions to Localize Text Lines in Ancient Arabic Document Images

Focusing on hyperspectral imaging together with deep learning, Sony Europe B.V and University of Padova are proposing together the paper “Semi-supervised Deep Learning Techniques for Spectrum Reconstruction”. We present a family of novel deep learning schemes for hyperspectral data estimation able to work when the hyperspectral information at our disposal is limited. Firstly, we introduce a learning scheme exploiting a physical model based on the backward mapping to the RGB space and total variation regularization that can be trained with a limited amount of HSI images. Then, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning scheme able to work even with just a few pixels labeled with hyperspectral information. The proposed techniques allow to reach impressive performances with very limited supervision with ground truth data.

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Budgeted Batch Mode Active Learning with Generalized Cost and Utility Functions

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