Italy

There is an increasing demand on utilizing camera equipped drones and their applications in many domains varying from agriculture to entertainment and from sports events to surveillance. In such drone applications, an essential and a common task is tracking an object of interest visually. Drone (or UAV) images have different properties when compared to the ground taken (natural) images and those differences introduce additional complexities to the existing object trackers to be directly applied on drone applications. Some important differences among those complexities include (i) smaller object sizes to be tracked and (ii) different orientations and viewing angles yielding different texture and features to be observed. Therefore, new algorithms trained on drone images are needed for the drone-based applications. In this paper, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based single object tracker that tracks an object of interest in drone images by estimating a series of actions to find the location of the object in the next frame. This is the first work introducing a single object tracker using a deep RL-based technique for drone images. Our proposed solution introduces a novel reward function that aims to reduce the total number of actions taken to estimate the object&#39;s location in the next frame and also introduces a different backbone network to be used on low resolution images. Additionally, we introduce a set of new actions into the action library to better deal with the above-mentioned complexities. We compare our proposed solutions to a state of the art tracking algorithm from the recent literature and demonstrate up to 3.87\% improvement in precision and 3.6\% improvement in IoU values on the VisDrone2019 data set. We also provide additional results on OTB-100 data set and show up to 3.15\% improvement in precision on the OTB-100 data set when compared to the same previous state of the art algorithm. Lastly, we analyze the ability to handle some of the challenges faced during tracking, including but not limited to occlusion, deformation, and scale variation for our proposed solutions.

ICPR 2020

Visual Object Tracking in Drone Images with Deep Reinforcement Learning

uav videos

aerial images

object tracking

visual object tracking

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. 


There is an increasing demand on utilizing camera equipped drones and their applications in many domains varying from agriculture to entertainment and from sports events to surveillance. In such drone applications, an essential and a common task is tracking an object of interest visually. Drone (or UAV) images have different properties when compared to the ground taken (natural) images and those differences introduce additional complexities to the existing object trackers to be directly applied on drone applications. Some important differences among those complexities include (i) smaller object sizes to be tracked and (ii) different orientations and viewing angles yielding different texture and features to be observed. Therefore, new algorithms trained on drone images are needed for the drone-based applications. In this paper, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based single object tracker that tracks an object of interest in drone images by estimating a series of actions to find the location of the object in the next frame. This is the first work introducing a single object tracker using a deep RL-based technique for drone images. Our proposed solution introduces a novel reward function that aims to reduce the total number of actions taken to estimate the object's location in the next frame and also introduces a different backbone network to be used on low resolution images. Additionally, we introduce a set of new actions into the action library to better deal with the above-mentioned complexities. We compare our proposed solutions to a state of the art tracking algorithm from the recent literature and demonstrate up to 3.87\% improvement in precision and 3.6\% improvement in IoU values on the VisDrone2019 data set. We also provide additional results on OTB-100 data set and show up to 3.15\% improvement in precision on the OTB-100 data set when compared to the same previous state of the art algorithm. Lastly, we analyze the ability to handle some of the challenges faced during tracking, including but not limited to occlusion, deformation, and scale variation for our proposed solutions.

poster

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for matching faces with temporal variations caused due to age progression. The proposed generative adversarial network algorithm is a unified framework that combines facial age estimation and age-separated face verification. The key idea of this approach is to learn the age variations across time by conditioning the input image on the subject’s gender and the target age group to which the face needs to be progressed. The loss function accounts for reducing the age gap between the original image and generated face image as well as preserving the identity. Both visual fidelity and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture on different facial age databases for age-separated face recognition.

Age Gap Reducer-GAN for Recognizing Age-Separated Faces

This paper addresses the task of group activity recognition in multi-person videos. Existing approaches decompose this task into feature learning and relational reasoning. Despite showing progress, these methods only rely on appearance features for people and overlook the available contextual information, which can play an important role in group activity understanding. In this work, we focus on the feature learning aspect and propose a two-stream architecture that not only considers person-level appearance features but also makes use of contextual information present in videos for group activity recognition. In particular, we propose to use two types of contextual information beneficial for two different scenarios: pose context and scene context that provide crucial cues for group activity understanding. We combine appearance and contextual features to encode each person with an enriched representation. Finally, these combined features are used in relational reasoning for predicting group activities. We evaluate our method on two benchmarks, Volleyball and Collective Activity, and show that joint modeling of contextual information with appearance features benefits group activity understanding.

Context Aware Group Activity Recognition


An important task in brain connectivity research is the classification of patients from healthy subjects. In this work, we present a two-step mathematical framework allowing to discriminate between two groups of people with an application to multiple sclerosis. The proposed approach exploits the properties of the connectivity matrices determined using the covariances between signals of a fixed set of brain areas. These positive semi-definite matrices lay on a Riemannian manifold, allowing to use a geodesic distance defined on this space. In order to generate a vector representation useful for classification purposes, but still preserving the network structure, we encoded the data exploiting the network attractors determined by a geodesic clustering of connectivity matrices. Then clustering centroids were used as a dictionary allowing to encode subject’s connectivity matrices as a vector of geodesic distances. A Linear Support Vector Machine was then used to perform classification between subjects. To demonstrate the advantage of using geodesic metrics in this framework, we conducted the same analysis using Euclidean metric. Experimental results validate the fact that employing geodesic metric in this framework leads to a higher classification performance, whereas performance with a Euclidean metric was sub-optimal.

Encoding Brain Networks Through Geodesic Clustering of Functional
Connectivity for Multiple Sclerosis Classification

This paper presents a two-stage, vision-based pipeline for the real-time detection of driver drowsiness using Facial Action Units (FAUs). FAUs capture movements in groups of muscles in the face like widening of the eyes or dropping of the jaw. The first stage of the pipeline employs a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained to detect FAUs. The output of this network’s penultimate layer serves as an image embedding that captures features relevant to FAU detection. These embeddings are then used to predict drowsiness using an Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) classifier. A separate XGBoost model is trained for each user of the system so that behavior specific to each user can be modeled into the drowsiness classifier. We show that user-specific classifiers require very little data and short training time to yield high prediction accuracies in real-time.

Real-Time Driver Drowsiness Detection Using Facial Action Units

With recent advances in RGB-D sensing technologies as well as improvements in machine learning and fusion techniques, RGB-D facial recognition has become an active area of research. A novel attention aware method is proposed to fuse two image modalities, RGB and depth, for enhanced RGB-D facial recognition. The proposed method first extracts features from both modalities using a convolutional feature extractor. These features are then fused using a two layer attention mechanism. The first layer focuses on the fused feature maps generated by the feature extractor, exploiting the relationship between feature maps using LSTM recurrent learning. The second layer focuses on the spatial features of those maps using convolution. The training database is preprocessed and augmented through a set of geometric transformations, and the learning process is further aided using transfer learning from a pure 2D RGB image training process. Comparative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches, including both traditional and deep neural network-based methods, on the challenging CurtinFaces and IIIT-D RGB-D benchmark databases, achieving classification accuracies over 98.2% and 99.3% respectively. The proposed attention mechanism is also compared with other attention mechanisms, demonstrating more accurate results.

Two-Level Attention-based Fusion Learning for RGB-D Face Recognition

Real-time HI (Human Interface) systems need accurate and efficient hand detection models to meet the limited resources in budget, dimension, memory, computing, and electric power. In recent years, object detection became a less challenging task with the latest deep CNN-based state-of-the-art models, i.e., RCNN, SSD, and YOLO; however, these models cannot provide the desired efficiency and accuracy for HI systems on embedded devices due to their complex time-consuming architecture. In addition, the detection of small hands (<30x30 pixels) is still a challenging task for all the above existing methods. Thus, we propose a shallow model named Concatenated Feature Pyramid Network (CFPN) to provide above mentioned performance for small hand detection. The superiority of CFPN is confirmed on a HandFlow dataset with mAP:0.5 of 95.6 and FPS of 33 on Nvidia TX2. The COCO dataset is also used to compare with other state-of-the-art method and shows the highest efficiency and accuracy with the proposed CFPN model. Thus we conclude that the proposed model is useful for real-life small hand detection on embedded devices.

Deep Real-time Hand Detection Using CFPN on Embedded Systems

We present a method to reconstruct depth videos of non-rigidly deformable objects directly from a video sequence. The estimation of depth is performed locally on spatio-temporal patches of the video, and then the full depth video of the entire shape is recovered by combining them together. We artificially generate a database of small deforming rectangular meshes rendered with different material properties and light conditions, along with their corresponding depth videos and use such data to train a convolutional neural network based on the 3D U-Net architecture

Learning non-rigid surface reconstruction from spatio-temporal image patches


Knowing the weather and atmospheric conditions from the past can
help weather researcher to generate models like the ones used to
predict how weather conditions are likely to change as global
temperatures continue to rise. Many historical weather records are
available from the past registered on systemic basis. Historical
weather logs were created by ships, when they were on the high seas,
recording daily weather conditions such as: wind, speed,
temperature, coordinates, etc. These historical documents represent
an important source of knowledge with valuable information to
extract climatological information of several centuries ago. This paper
presents a study about the capability of state-of-the-art
handwritten text recognition system in a dataset compiled from a
ship log mainly composed by handwritten tables that contain mainly
numbers.


The HisClima database: historical weather logs for automatic transcription and information

With the development of DNNs, the training of deep models usually consumes massive data and computational resources. Therefore, the well-trained neural networks are often seen as valuable intellectual properties. Backdoor-based watermarking schemes have been proposed for copyright protection, and we want to check how robust are backdoor-based watermarking techniques. We propose a generic framework WILD for watermark removal, and the results show that backdoor-based watermarks can be easily removed.

Backdoor-Based Watermarks in Neural Networks with Limited Data

Weakly-supervised object localization is a challenging task in which the object of interest should be localized while learning its appearance. State-of-the-art methods recycle the architecture of a standard CNN by using the activation maps of the last layer for localizing the object. While this approach is simple and works relatively well, object localization relies on different features than classification, thus, a specialized localization mechanism is required during training to improve performance. In this paper, we propose a convolutional, multi-scale spatial localization network that provides accurate localization for the object of interest. Experimental results on CUB-200-2011 and ImageNet datasets show that our proposed approach provides competitive performance for weakly supervised localization.

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Visual Object Tracking in Drone Images with Deep Reinforcement Learning

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