Italy


Recently, substantial progress has been made in the area of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) using modern machine learning techniques to decode and interpret brain signals. While Electroencephalography (EEG) has provided a non-invasive method of interfacing with a human brain, the acquired data is often heavily subject and session dependent. This makes seamless incorporation of such data into real-world applications intractable as the subject and session data variance can lead to long and tedious calibration requirements and cross-subject generalisation issues. Focusing on a Steady State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) classification systems, we propose a novel means of generating highly-realistic synthetic EEG data invariant to any subject, session or other environmental conditions. Our approach, entitled the Subject Invariant SSVEP Generative Adversarial Network (SIS-GAN), produces synthetic EEG data from multiple SSVEP classes using a single network. Additionally, by taking advantage of a fixed-weight pre-trained subject classification network, we ensure that our generative model remains agnostic to subject-specific features and thus produces subject-invariant data that can be applied to new previously unseen subjects. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of our synthetic data, leading to superior performance, with improvements of up to 16% in zero-calibration classification tasks when trained using our subject-invariant synthetic EEG signals.

ICPR 2020

Leveraging Synthetic Subject Invariant EEG Signals for Zero Calibration BCI

brain-computer interface

generative adversarial network

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. 


technical paper

In this paper we present an event aggregation strategy to convert the output of an event camera into frames processable by traditional Computer Vision algorithms. The proposed method first generates sequences of intermediate binary representations, which are then losslessly transformed into a compact format by simply applying a binary-to-decimal conversion. This strategy allows us to encode temporal information directly into pixel values, which are then interpreted by deep learning models. We apply our strategy, called Temporal Binary Representation, to the task of Gesture Recognition, obtaining state of the art results on the popular DVS128 Gesture Dataset. To underline the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to existing ones, we also collect an extension of the dataset under more challenging conditions on which to perform experiments.

Temporal Binary Representation for Event-Based Action Recognition

We develop and evaluate models for automatic vision-based voice activity detection (VAD) in multiparty human-human interactions that are aimed at complementing acoustic VAD methods. We provide evidence that this type of vision-based VAD models are susceptible to spatial bias in the dataset used for their development; the physical settings of the interaction, usually constant throughout data acquisition, determines the distribution of head poses of the participants. Our results show that when the head pose distributions are significantly different in the train and test sets, the performance of the vision-based VAD models drops significantly. This suggests that previously reported results on datasets with a fixed physical configuration may overestimate the generalization capabilities of this type of models. We also propose a number of possible remedies to the spatial bias, including data augmentation, input masking and dynamic features, and provide an in-depth analysis of the visual cues used by the developed vision-based VAD models.

Spatial Bias in Vision-Based Voice Activity Detection


Image inpainting aims at synthesizing the missing content of damaged and corrupted images to produce visually realistic restorations; typical applications are in image restoration, automatic scene editing, super-resolution, and dynamic object removal. In this paper, we propose Semantic and Edge Conditioned Inpainting Generative Adversarial Network (SECI-GAN), an architecture that jointly exploits the high-level cues extracted by semantic segmentation and the fine-grained details captured by edge extraction to condition the image inpainting process. SECI-GAN is designed with a particular focus on recovering big regions belonging to the same object (e.g. cars or pedestrians) in the context of dynamic object removal from complex street views. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SECI-GAN, we evaluate our results on the Cityscapes dataset, showing that SECI-GAN is better than competing state-of-the-art models at recovering the structure and the content of the missing parts while producing consistent predictions.

SECI-GAN: Semantic and Edge Completion for dynamic objects removal


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.

ARCADe: A Rapid Continual Anomaly Detector

The challenge in few-shot learning is that available data is not enough to capture the underlying distribution. To mitigate this, two emerging directions are (a) using local image representations, essentially multiplying the amount of data by a constant factor, and (b) using more unlabeled data, for instance by transductive inference, jointly on a number of queries. In this work, we bring these two ideas together, introducing local propagation. We treat local image features as independent examples, we build a graph on them and we use it to propagate both the features themselves and the labels, known and unknown. Interestingly, since there is a number of features per image, even a single query gives rise to transductive inference. As a result, we provide a universally safe choice for few-shot inference under both non-transductive and transductive settings, improving accuracy over corresponding methods. This is in contrast to existing solutions, where one needs to choose the method depending on the quantity of available data.

Local Propagation for Few-Shot Learning

Event-based cameras are vision devices that transmit only brightness changes with low latency and ultra-low power consumption. Such characteristics make event-based cameras attractive in the field of localization and object tracking in resource-constrained systems. Since the number of generated events in such cameras is huge, the selection and filtering of the incoming events are beneficial from both increasing the accuracy of the features and reducing the computational load. In this paper, we present an algorithm to detect asynchronous corners from a stream of events in real-time on embedded systems. The algorithm is called the Three Layer Filtering-Harris or TLF-Harris algorithm. The algorithm is based on an events' filtering strategy whose purpose is 1) to increase the accuracy by deliberately eliminating some incoming events, i.e., noise, and 2) to improve the real-time performance of the system, i.e., preserving a constant throughput in terms of input events per second, by discarding unnecessary events with a limited accuracy loss.


Dynamic Resource-aware Corner Detection forBio-inspired Vision Sensors

The Softmax prediction function is widely used to train Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) for large-scale face recognition and other applications. The limitation of the softmax activation is that the resulting probability distribution always has a full support. This full support leads to larger intraclass variations. In this paper, we formulate a novel loss function, called Angular Sparsemax for face recognition. The proposed loss function promotes sparseness of the hypotheses prediction function similar to Sparsemax with Fenchel-Young regularisation. By introducing an additive angular margin on the score vector, the discriminatory power of the face embedding is further improved. The proposed loss function is experimentally validated on several databases in terms of recognition accuracy. Its performance compares well with the state of the art Arcface loss.


Anglar Sparsemax for Face Recognition

The contemporary SLAM mapping systems assume a static environment and build a map that is then used for mobile robot navigation disregarding the dynamic changes in this environment. The paper at hand presents a novel solution for the problem of life-long mapping that continually updates a metric map represented as a 2D occupancy grid in large scale indoor environments with movable objects such as people, robots, objects etc. suitable for industrial applications. We formalize each cell’s occupancy as a failure analysis problem and contribute temporal persistence modeling (TPM), an algorithm for probabilistic prediction of the time that a cell in an observed location is expected to be “occupied” or “empty” given sparse prior observations from a task specific mobile robot. Our work is evaluated in Gazebo simulation environment against the nominal occupancy of cells and the estimated obstacles persistence. We also show that robot navigation with life-long mapping demands less re-plans and leads to more efficient navigation in highly dynamic environments.

Towards life-long mapping of dynamic environments using temporal persistence modeling

We propose a new approach to the problem of detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs in image classifications with deep convolutional networks. We leverage so-called boundary samples to enforce low confidence (maximum softmax
probabilities) for inputs far away from the training data. In particular, we propose the boundary optimised samples (named BoS) training algorithm for generating them. At the end of the BoS training, all the boundary samples are in principle located on a specific level hypersurface with respect to the designed loss. Our contributions are i) the BoS training as an efficient alternative to generate boundary samples, ii) a robust algorithm therewith to enforce low confidence for OOD samples, and iii) experiments demonstrating improved OOD detection over the baseline.

Boundary Optimised Samples Training for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Images

Lung ultrasound imaging is reaching growing interest from the scientific community. On one side, thanks to its harmlessness and high descriptive power, this kind of diagnostic imaging has been largely adopted in sensitive applications, like the diagnosis and follow-up of preterm newborns in neonatal intensive care units. On the other side, state-of-the-art image analysis and pattern recognition approaches have recently proven their ability to fully exploit the rich information contained in these data, making them attractive for the research community. In this work, we present a thorough analysis of recent deep learning networks and training strategies carried out on a vast and challenging multicenter dataset comprising 87 patients with different diseases and gestational ages. These approaches are employed to assess the lung respiratory status from ultrasound images and are evaluated against a reference marker. The conducted analysis sheds some light on this problem by showing the critical points that can mislead the training procedure and proposes some adaptations to the specific data and task. The achieved results sensibly outperform those obtained by a previous work, which is based on textural features, and narrow the gap with the visual score predicted by the human experts.

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Leveraging Synthetic Subject Invariant EEG Signals for Zero Calibration BCI