Italy

Action recognition in still images is a challenging task because of the complexity of human motions and the variance of background in the same action category. And some actions typically occur in fine-grained categories, with little visual differences between these categories. So extracting discriminative features or modeling various semantic parts is essential for image-based action recognition. Many methods apply expensive manual annotations to learn discriminative parts information for action recognition, which may severely hinder potential applications in real life. In recent years, bilinear pooling method has shown its effectiveness for image classification due to its learning distinctive features automatically. Inspired by this model, in this paper, an improved bilinear pooling method is proposed for image-based action recognition. The previous bilinear pooling approaches contain lots of noisy background or harmful feature information, which limit their application for action recognition. In our method, 
the attention mechanism is introduced into hierarchical bilinear pooling framework with mask aggregation. The proposed model can generate the distinctive and RoI-aware feature information by combining multiple attention mask maps from the channel and spatial-wise attention features. Specifically, our method makes the network to pay more attention to discriminative region of the vital objects in an image. We verify our model on the two challenging datasets: 1) Stanford 40 action dataset and 2) our action dataset that includes 60 categories. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which is superior to the traditional and state-of-the-art methods.

ICPR 2020

An Improved Bilinear Pooling Method for Image- Based Action Recognition

action recognition; attention mechanism; mask aggregation

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 2022

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. 


We revisit the long-standing problem of learning
from a small sample, to which end we propose a novel method called
GLICO (Generative Latent Implicit Conditional Optimization).
GLICO learns a mapping from the training examples to a latent
space, and a generator that generates images from vectors in
the latent space. Unlike most recent works, which rely on access to
large amounts of unlabeled data, GLICO does not require access
to any additional data other than the small set of labeled points.
In fact, GLICO learns to synthesize completely new samples for
every class using as little as 5 or 10 examples per class, with as few
as 10 such classes without imposing any prior. GLICO is then used
to augment the small training set while training a classifier on
the small sample. To this end, our proposed method samples the
learned latent space using spherical interpolation and generates
new examples using the trained generator. Empirical results
show that the new sampled set is diverse enough, leading to
improvement in image classification in comparison with the state
of the art, when trained on small samples obtained from CIFAR10, CIFAR-100, and CUB-200.

Generative Latent Implicit Conditional Optimization when Learning from Small Sample


Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable results on image super-resolution (SR), but the efficiency problem of deep SR networks is rarely studied. We experimentally find that many sequentially stacked convolutional blocks in nowadays SR networks are far from being fully optimized, which largely damages their overall efficiency. It indicates that comparable or even better results could be achieved with less but sufficiently optimized blocks. In this paper, we try to construct a more efficient SR model via the proposed recursive aggregation network (RAN). It recursively aggregates convolutional blocks in different orders and avoids too many sequentially stacked blocks. In this way, multiple shortcuts are introduced in RAN, and help gradients easier flow to all inner layers, even for very deep SR networks. As a result, all blocks in RAN can be better optimized, thus RAN can achieve better performance with a smaller model size than existing methods

Efficient Super-Resolution by Recursive Aggregation

Work in the construction site is considered to be one of the occupations with the highest safety risk factor. Therefore, safety plays an important role in construction site. One of the most fundamental safety rules in construction site is to wear a hardhat. To strengthen the safety of the construction site, most of the current methods use multi-stage method for hardhat-wearing detection. These methods have limitations in terms of adaptability and generalizability. In this paper, we propose a one-stage object detection method based on convolutional neural network. We present a multi-scale strategy that selects the high-resolution feature maps of DarkNet-53 to effectively identify small-scale hardhats. In addition, we propose an improved weighted bi-directional feature pyramid network (BiFPN), which could fuse more semantic features from more scales. The proposed method can not only detect hardhat-wearing, but also identify the color of the hardhat. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a mAP of 87.04%, which outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on a public dataset.

Construction worker hardhat-wearing detection based on an improved BiFPN

The adaptation of deep convolutional neural network has made revolutionary advances in human body posture estimation. Various applications utilizing deep neural network for pose estimation have drawn considerable attention in recent years. However, prediction and localization of keypoints in single-person and multi-person images is still a challenging problem. Towards this, we propose a bottom-up approach to pose estimation and motion recognition. We present StrongPose system that deals with object-part associations using part-based modeling. The convolution network in our model detects strong keypoint heat maps and predicts their comparative displacements, allowing keypoints to be grouped into human instances. Further, it utilizes the keypoints to generate body heat maps that can determine the position of the human body in the image. The StrongPose system is based on fully convolutional engineering and makes proficient inferences while maintaining runtime regardless of the number of individuals in the image. We train and test the StrongPose on the COCO dataset. Evaluation results show that our framework achieves average precision of 0.708 using ResNet-101 and 0.725 using ResNet-152. Our results considerably outperform prior bottom-up frameworks.

StrongPose: Bottom-up and Strong Keypoint Heat Map Based Pose Estimation

Video moment retrieval aims to search the moment most relevant to a given language query. However, most existing methods in this community often require temporal boundary annotations which are expensive and time-consuming to label. Hence weakly supervised methods have been put forward recently by only using coarse video-level label. Despite effectiveness, these methods usually process moment candidates independently, while ignoring a critical issue that the natural temporal dependencies between candidates in different temporal scales. To cope with this issue, we propose a Multi-scale 2D Representation Learning method for weakly supervised video moment retrieval. Specifically, we first construct a two-dimensional map for each temporal scale to capture the temporal dependencies between candidates. Two dimensions in this map indicate the start and end time points of these candidates. Then, we select top-K candidates from each scale-varied map with a learnable convolutional neural network. With a newly designed Moments Evaluation Module, we obtain the alignment scores of the selected candidates. At last, the similarity between captions and language query is served as supervision for further training the candidates' selector. Experiments on two benchmark datasets Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art results.

Multi-scale 2D Representation Learning for weakly-supervised moment retrieval


Face age editing has become a crucial task in film post-production, and is also becoming popular for general purpose photography. Recently, adversarial training has produced some of the most visually impressive results for image manipulation, including the face aging/de-aging task. In spite of considerable progress, current methods often present visual artifacts and can only deal with low-resolution images. In order to achieve aging/de-aging with the high quality and robustness necessary for wider use, these problems need to be addressed. This is the goal of the present work. We present an encoder-decoder architecture for face age editing. The core idea of our network is to encode a face image to age-invariant features, and learn a modulation vector corresponding to a target age. We then combine these two elements to produce a realistic image of the person with the desired target age. Our architecture is greatly simplified with respect to other approaches, and allows for fine-grained age editing on high resolution images in a single unified model. Source codes are available at https://github.com/InterDigitalInc/HRFAE.

High Resolution Face Age Editing


Compared with other medical data, cross views of mammograms provide related and complementary information which is helpful in clinical interpretation. Its domain knowledge modeling plays an essential role in our algorithm designing: Cross-View Relation Networks for Mammogram Mass Detection.

Cross-View Relation Networks for Mammogram Mass Detection


Computer vision-based techniques are more and more employed in healthcare and medical fields nowadays, principally, as a support tool to medical staff in order to help them making quick and correct diagnosis. 
One of the hot topics in this arena concerns the automatic classification of skin lesions. Several promising works have been proposed in the last couple of years, mainly leveraging Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). However, the proposed pipeline mainly rely on complex data pre-processing and there is no systematic investigation about how available deep models can actually reach the accuracy needed for real applications.
In order to overcome these drawbacks, in this work, an end-to-end pipeline is introduced and some of the most recent Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures are included in it and compared on the largest common benchmark dataset recently introduced. To this aim, for the first time in this application context, a new network design paradigm, namely RegNet, has been exploited to get the best models among a population of configurations. 
The paper introduces a threefold level of contribution and novelty with respect to the literature: the deep investigation of several CNN architectures driving to a consistent improvement of the lesions recognition accuracy, the exploitation of a new network design paradigm able to study the behavior of populations of models and a deep discussion about pros and cons of each analyzed method by paving the path towards new research lines.

A Systematic Investigation on Deep Architectures for Automatic Skin Lesions Classification

In this study we analyzed longitudinal fingerprint data of 20 data subjects, acquired over a time span of up to 12 years. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we aimed to delineate mated similarity scores as a function of fingerprint quality and of the time interval between reference and probe images. Our results did not reveal effects on mated similarity scores caused by an increasing time interval across subjects, but rather individual effects on mated similarity scores. The results are in line with the general assumption that the fingerprint as a biometric characteristic and the features extracted from it do not change over the adult life span. However, it contradicts several related studies that reported noticeable template ageing effects. We discuss why different findings regarding ageing of references in fingerprint recognition systems were made.

Fingerprints, forever young?


We propose a novel method to solve the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation in this paper, where the mask annotation is only given at the first frame of the video sequence. A mask-propagation-based model is applied to learn the past and current information for segmentation. Besides, due to the scarcity of training data, image/mask pairs that model object deformation and shape variance are generated for the training phase. In addition, we generate the key flips between two adjacent frames for motion adaptation. The method works in an end-to-end way, without any online fine-tuning on test videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art algorithms on benchmark datasets, covering cases with single object or multiple objects. We also conduct extensive ablation experiments to analyze the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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