Italy

In this work, we introduce a new architectural component to Neural Network (NN), i.e., trainable and spectrally initializable matrix transformations on feature maps. While previous literature has already demonstrated the possibility of adding static spectral transformations as feature processors, our focus is on more general trainable transforms. We study the transforms in various architectural configurations on four datasets of different nature: from medical (ColorectalHist, HAM10000) and natural(Flowers) images to historical documents (CB55). With rigorous experiments that control for the number of parameters and randomness, we show that networks utilizing the introduced matrix transformations outperform vanilla neural networks. The observed accuracy increases appreciably across all datasets. In addition, we show that the benefit of spectral initialization leads to significantly faster convergence, as opposed to randomly initialized matrix transformations. The transformations are implemented as auto-differentiable PyTorch modules that can be incorporated into any neural network architecture. The entire code base is open-source.

ICPR 2020

Trainable Spectrally Initializable MatrixTransformations in Convolutional Neural Networks

spectral-initialisation

architecture

neural-networks

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

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. 


This paper relies on the Mean Decision Rule (MDR) method for solving large-scale binary SVM problems. It consists in taking small random samples of the full dataset and separate training for each of them with consecutive averaging the respective individual decision rules to obtain a final one. This paper proposes two new approaches to improve it. The first proposed approach is a new sampling technique that exploits SVM and MDR properties to fast form so-called smart samples by selecting only the objects, that are candidates to be the support ones. The proposed technique essentially increases MDR convergence and allows to reach the highest quality in less time. In the case of kernel-based MDR (KMDR) the proposed sampling technique allows additionally to reduce the number of support objects in the final decision rule and, as a result, to decrease the recognition time. The second proposed approach is a new data strategy to accelerate random access to large datasets stored in the traditional libsvm format. The proposed strategy allows to quickly extract random subsets of objects from a file and load them into RAM and is also suitable for any sampling-based methods, including stochastic gradient methods. Joint use of the proposed approaches with (K)MDR allows to obtain the best (or near the best) decision of large-scale binary SVM problems faster, compared to the existing SVM solvers.

Mean Decision Rules Method with Smart Sampling for Fast Large-Scale Binary SVM Classification

The minimization of the loss function is of paramount importance in deep neural networks. Many popular optimization algorithms have been shown to correspond to some evolution equation of gradient flow type. Inspired by the numerical schemes used for general evolution equations, we introduce a second-order stochastic Runge Kutta method and show that it yields a consistent procedure for the minimization of the loss function. In addition, it can be coupled, in an adaptive framework, with the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to adjust automatically the learning rate of the SGD. The resulting adaptive SGD, called SGD-G2, shows good results in terms of convergence speed when tested on standard data-sets.

Stochastic Runge-Kutta methods and adaptive SGD-G2 stochastic gradient descent

We present a public dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking (IPT) consisting of sequences of depth data recorded using an Orbbec Astra depth sensor. The dataset features sequences in ten different locations with a high amount of background variation and is designed to be applicable to a wide range of tasks. Its labeling is versatile, allowing for tracking in either 3d space or image coordinates. Next to frame-by-frame 3d and inferred bounding box labeling we provide supplementary annotation of camera poses and room layouts, split in multiple semantically distinct categories. Intended use-cases are applications where both a high level understanding of scene understanding and privacy are central points of consideration, such as active and assisted living (AAL), security and industrial safety. Compared to similar public datasets IPT distinguishes itself with its sequential data format, 3d instance labeling and room layout annotation. We present baseline object detection results in image coordinates using a YOLOv3 network architecture and implement a background model suitable for online tracking applications to increase detection accuracy. Additionally we propose a novel volumetric non-maximum suppression (V-NMS) approach, taking advantage of known room geometry. Last we provide baseline person tracking results utilizing Multiple Object Tracking Challenge (MOTChallenge) evaluation metrics of the CVPR19 benchmark.

IPT: A Dataset for Identity Preserved Tracking in Closed Domains


We propose a GAN-based image compression method working at extremely low bitrates below 0.1bpp. Most existing learned image compression methods suffer from blur at extremely low bitrates. Although GAN can help to reconstruct sharp images, there are two drawbacks. First, GAN makes training unstable. Second, the reconstructions often contain unpleasing noise or artifacts. To address both of the drawbacks, our method adopts two-stage training and network interpolation. The two-stage training is effective to stabilize the training. Moreover, the network interpolation utilizes the models in both stages and reduces undesirable noise and artifacts, while maintaining important edges. Hence, we can control the trade-off between perceptual quality and fidelity without re-training models. The experimental results show that our model can reconstruct high-quality images. Furthermore, our user study confirms that our reconstructions are preferable to the state-of-the-art GAN-based image compression model.

Fidelity-Controllable Extreme Image Compression with Generative Adversarial Networks

3D human pose estimation (HPE) is crucial in many fields, such as human behavior analysis, augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) applications, and self-driving industry. Videos that contain multiple potentially occluded people captured from freely moving monocular cameras are very common in real-world scenarios, while 3D HPE for such scenarios is quite challenging, partially because there is a lack of such data with accurate 3D ground truth labels in existing datasets. In this paper, we propose a temporal regression network with a gated convolution module to transform 2D joints to 3D and recover the missing occluded joints in the meantime. A simple yet effective localization approach is further conducted to transform the normalized pose to the global trajectory. To verify the effectiveness of our approach, we also collect a new moving camera multi-human (MMHuman) dataset that includes multiple people with heavy occlusion captured by moving cameras. The 3D ground truth joints are provided by accurate motion capture (MoCap) system. From the experiments on static-camera based Human3.6M data and our own collected moving-camera based data, we show that our proposed method outperforms most state-of-the-art 2D-to-3D pose estimation methods, especially for the scenarios with heavy occlusions.

Exploring Severe Occlusion: Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation with Gated Convolution

Most approaches to deep neural network compression via pruning either directly evaluate a filter's importance using its weights or optimize an alternative objective function with sparsity constraints.
While these methods offer a useful way to approximate contributions from similar filters, they often either ignore the dependency between layers or solve a more difficult optimization objective than standard cross-entropy.
Our method, Mutual Information-based Neuron Trimming (MINT), approaches deep compression via pruning by enforcing sparsity based on the strength of the dependency between filters of adjacent layers, across every pair of layers in the network.
The dependency is calculated using conditional geometric mutual information which evaluates the amount of similar information exchanged between filters using a graph-based criterion.
When pruning a network, we ensure that retained filters contribute the majority of the information towards succeeding layers which ensures high performance.
Our novel approach is highly competitive with existing state-of-the-art compression-via-pruning methods on standard benchmarks for this task: MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ILSVRC2012, across a variety of network architectures despite using only a single retraining pass.
Also, we discuss our observations of a common denominator between our pruning methodology's response to adversarial attacks and calibration statistics when compared to the original network.

MINT: Deep Network Compression via Mutual Information-based Neuron Trimming

Collecting sufficient well-labeled training data is a challenging task in many clinical applications. Besides the tremendous efforts required for data collection, clinical assessments are also impacted by raters’ variabilities, which may be significant even among experienced clinicians. The high demands of reproducible and scalable data-driven approaches in these areas necessitates relevant research on learning with limited data. In this work, we propose a spatio-temporal adversarial autoencoder (ST-AAE) for clinical assessment of hand tremor frequency and severity. The ST-AAE integrates spatial and temporal information simultaneously into the original AAE, taking optical flows as inputs. Using only optical flows, irrelevant background or static objects from RGB frames are largely eliminated, so that the AAE is directed to effectively learn key feature representations of the latent space from tremor movements. The ST-AAE was evaluated with both volunteer and clinical data. The volunteer results showed that the ST-AAE improved model performance significantly by 15% increase on accuracy. Leave-one-out (on subjects) cross validation was used to evaluate the accuracy for all the 3068 video segments from 28 volunteers. The weighted average of the AUCs of ROCs is 0.97. The results demonstrated that the ST-AAE model, trained with a small number of subjects, can be generalized well to different subjects. In addition, the model trained only by volunteer data was also evaluated with 32 clinical videos from 9 essential tremor patients, the model predictions correlate well with the clinical ratings: correlation coefficient r = 0.91 and 0.98 for in-person ratings and video watching ratings, respectively.

Estimation of Clinical Tremor using Spatio-Temporal Adversarial AutoEncoder


Inclement weather, haze, and fog severely decrease the performance of outdoor imaging systems. Due to a large range of the depth-of-field, most image dehazing or enhancement methods suffer from color distortions and halo artifacts when applied to real-world hazy outdoor scenes, especially those with the sky. To effectively recover details in both distant and nearby regions as well as to preserve color fidelity of the sky, in this study, we propose a novel image defogging and enhancement approach based on a replaceable plug-in segmentation module and region-adaptive processing. First, regions of the grayish sky, pure white objects, and other parts are separated. Second, a luminance-inverted multi-scale Retinex with color restoration (MSRCR) and region-ratio-based adaptive Gamma correction are applied to non-grayish and non-white areas. Finally, the enhanced regions are stitched seamlessly by using a mean-filtered region mask. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach not only outperforms several state-of-the-art defogging methods in terms of both visibility and color fidelity, but also provides enhanced outputs with fewer artifacts and halos, particularly in sky regions.

Fast Region-Adaptive Defogging and Enhancement for Outdoor Images Containing Sky

Grounding free-form textual queries necessitates an understanding of these textual phrases and its relation to the visual cues to reliably reason about the described locations. Spatial attention networks are known to learn this relationship and focus its gaze on salient objects in the image. Thus, we propose to utilize spatial attention networks for image-level visual-textual fusion preserving local (word) and global (phrase) information to refine region proposals with an in-network Region Proposal Network (RPN) and detect single or multiple regions for a phrase query. We focus only on the phrase query - ground truth pair (referring expression) for a model independent of the constraints of the datasets i.e. additional attributes, context etc. For such referring expression dataset ReferIt game, our Multiregion Attention assisted Grounding network (MAGNet) achieves over 12% improvement over the state-of-the-art. Without the context from image captions and attribute information in Flickr30k Entities, we still achieve competitive results compared to the stateof-the-art.

MAGNet: Multi-Region Attention-Assisted Grounding of Natural Language Queries at Phrase Level


Images acquired with standard digital cameras have
Bayer patterns and suffer from lens blur. A demosaicking step
is implemented in every digital camera, yet blur often remains
unattended due to computational cost and instability of deblurring
algorithms. Linear methods, which are computationally less
demanding, produce ringing artifacts in deblurred images. Complex
non-linear deblurring methods avoid artifacts, however, their
complexity implies offline application after camera demosaicking,
which leads to sub-optimal performance. In this work, we propose
a joint demosaicking deblurring and deringing network with a
light-weight architecture inspired by the alternating direction
method of multipliers. The proposed network has a transparent
and clear interpretation compared to other black-box data-driven
approaches. We experimentally validate its superiority over state-of-
the-art demosaicking methods with offline deblurring.

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Mean Decision Rules Method with Smart Sampling for Fast Large-Scale Binary SVM Classification

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