Italy

Visual navigation models based on deep learning can learn effective policies when trained on large amounts of visual observations through reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, collecting the required experience in the real world requires the deployment of a robotic platform, which is expensive and time-consuming. To deal with this limitation, several simulation platforms have been proposed in order to train visual navigation policies on virtual environments efficiently. Despite the advantages they offer, simulators present a limited realism in terms of appearance and physical dynamics, leading to navigation policies that do not generalize in the real world. In this paper, we propose a tool based on the Habitat simulator which exploits real world images of the environment, together with sensor and actuator
noise models, to produce more realistic navigation episodes. We perform a range of experiments to assess the ability of such policies to generalize using virtual and real-world images, as well as observations transformed with unsupervised domain
adaptation approaches. We also assess the impact of sensor and actuation noise on the navigation performance and investigate whether it allows to learn more robust navigation policies. We show that our tool can effectively help to train and evaluate
navigation policies on real-world observations without running navigation episodes in the real world.

ICPR 2020

On Embodied Visual Navigation in Real Environment Through Habitat

embodied visual navigation

vision for robotics

deep reinforcement 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

we focus on protecting the facial privacy for people under the surveillance scenarios, by changing some visual appearances of the faces while keeping them recognizable by the current face recognition systems. This is a challenging problem because we need to retain the most important structures of the captured facial images, while modify the salient facial regions to protect personal privacy. To that end, we develop an encoder-decoder network architecture which can disentangle the facial feature representation and synthesis new faces to protect the individual privacy.

Learning Disentangled Representations for Identity Preserving Surveillance Face Camouflage


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.

Respecting Domain Relations: Hypothesis Invariance for
Domain Generalization


Traditional approaches for the recognition or
identification of the writer of a handwritten text image
used to relay on heuristic knowledge about the shape and
other features of the strokes of previously segmented
characters. However, recent works have done significantly
advances on the state of the art thanks to the use of
various types of deep neural networks. In most of all of
these works, text images are decomposed into patches, which
are processed by the networks without any previous
character or word segmentation. In this paper, we study how
the way images are decomposed into patches impact
recognition accuracy, using three publicly available
datasets. The study also includes a simpler architecture
where no patches are used at all - a single deep neural
network inputs a whole text image and directly provides a
writer recognition hypothesis. Results show that bigger
patches generally lead to improved accuracy, achieving in
one of the datasets a significant improvement over the best
results reported so far.

Writer Identification Using Deep Neural Networks: Impact of Patch Size and Number of Patches

The success of deep learning at computer vision tasks has led to an ever-increasing number of applications on edge devices. Often with the use of edge AI hardware accelerators like the Intel Movidius Vision Processing Unit (VPU). Performing computer vision tasks on edge devices is challenging. Many Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are too complex to run on edge devices with limited computing power. This has created large interest in designing efficient CNNs and one promising way of doing this is through Neural Architecture Search (NAS). NAS aims to automate the design of neural networks. NAS can also optimize multiple different objectives together, like accuracy and efficiency, which is difficult for humans. In this paper, we use a differentiable NAS method to find efficient CNNs for VPU that achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy on ImageNet. Our NAS designed model outperforms MobileNetV2, having almost 1\% higher top-1 accuracy while being 13\% faster on MyriadX VPU. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a VPU specific CNN has been designed using a NAS algorithm. Our results also reiterate the fact that efficient networks must be designed for each specific hardware. We show that efficient networks targeted at different devices do not perform as well on the VPU

VPU Specific CNNs through Neural Architecture Search

We present a method to automatically learn to segment dynamic objects using SLAM outliers. It requires only one monocular sequence per dynamic object for training and consists in localizing dynamic objects using SLAM outliers,
creating their masks, and using these masks to train a semantic segmentation network. We integrate the trained network in ORB-SLAM 2 and LDSO. 

At runtime we remove features on dynamic objects, making the SLAM unaffected by them. We also propose a new stereo dataset and new metrics to evaluate SLAM robustness. Our dataset includes consensus inversions, i.e., situations where the SLAM uses more features on dynamic objects that on the static background. Consensus inversions are challenging for SLAM as they may cause major SLAM failures. 

Our approach performs better than the State-of-the-Art on the TUM RGB-D dataset in monocular mode and on our dataset in both monocular and stereo modes.

Learning to Segment Dynamic Objects using SLAM Outliers

BatchNorm (BN) stabilizes network optimization by normalizing the activations during training and exploits mini-batch sample statistics. BN unfortunately suffers from performance degradation when the statistical estimates become unstable for small batch-size based tasks. This paper we propose WeightAlign: normalizing activations without using sample statistics. Instead of sample statistics, we re-parameterize the weights within a filter to arrive at correctly normalized activations.

WeightAlign: Normallizing Activations by Weight Alignment


We present a novel approach to adjust global image properties such as colour, saturation, and luminance using human-interpretable image enhancement curves, inspired by the Photoshop curves tool. Our method, dubbed neural CURve Layers (CURL), is designed as a multi-colour space neural retouching block trained jointly in three different colour spaces (HSV, CIELab, RGB) guided by a novel multi-colour
space loss. The curves are fully differentiable and are trained end-to-end for different computer vision problems including photo enhancement (RGB-to-RGB) and as part of the image signal processing pipeline for image formation (RAW-to-RGB). To demonstrate the effectiveness of CURL we combine this global image transformation block with a pixel-level (local) image multi-scale encoder-decoder backbone network. In an extensive experimental evaluation we show that CURL produces state of-the-art image quality versus recently proposed deep learning
approaches in both objective and perceptual metrics, setting new state-of-the-art performance on multiple public datasets. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/sjmoran/CURL.

CURL: Neural Curve Layers for Global Image Enhancement


Fake news often involves semantic manipulations across modalities such as image, text, location etc and requires the development of multimodal semantic forensics for its detection. Recent research has centered the problem around images, calling it image repurposing -- where a digitally unmanipulated image is semantically misrepresented by means of its accompanying multimodal metadata such as captions, location, etc. The image and metadata together comprise a multimedia package. The problem setup requires algorithms to perform multimodal semantic forensics to authenticate a query multimedia package using a reference dataset of potentially related packages as evidences. Existing methods are limited to using a single evidence (retrieved package), which ignores potential performance improvement from the use of multiple evidences. In this work, we introduce a novel graph neural network based model for multimodal semantic forensics, which effectively utilizes multiple retrieved packages as evidences and is scalable with the number of evidences. We compare the scalability and performance of our model against existing methods. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms with an error reduction of up to 25%.

MEG: Multi-Evidence GNN for Multimodal Semantic Forensics

Video captioning automatically and accurately generates a textual description for a video. The typical methods following the encoder-decoder architecture directly utilize hidden states to predict words. Nevertheless, these methods do not amend the inaccurate hidden states before feeding those states into word prediction. This leads to a cascade of errors in generating word by word. In this paper, the context visual information-based deliberation network is proposed, abbreviated as CVI-DelNet. Its key idea is to introduce a deliberator into the encoder-decoder framework. The encoder-decoder first generates a raw hidden state sequence. Unlike the existing methods, the raw hidden state is no longer directly used for word prediction but is fed into the deliberator to generate the refined hidden state. The words are then predicted according to the refined hidden states and the contextual visual features. The results on two datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Context Visual Information-based Deliberation Network for Video Captioning

Image classification is a fundamental task in computer vision. A variety of deep learning models based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture have proven to be an efficient solution. Numerous improvements have been proposed over the years, where broader, deeper, and denser networks have been constructed. However, the atomic operation for these models has remained a linear unit (single neuron). In this work, we pursue an alternative dimension by hypothesizing the atomic operation to be performed by a quadratic unit. We construct convolutional layers using quadratic neurons for feature extraction and subsequently use dense layers for classification. We perform analysis to quantify the implication of replacing linear neurons with quadratic units. Results show a keen improvement in classification accuracy with quadratic neurons over linear neurons.

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On Embodied Visual Navigation in Real Environment Through Habitat

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