Italy

Mutual information (MI) is an information-theoretic measure of dependency between two random variables. Several methods to estimate MI, from samples of two random variables with unknown underlying probability distributions have been
proposed in the literature. Recent methods realize parametric probability distributions or critic as a neural network to approximate unknown density ratios. The approximated density ratios are used to estimate different variational lower bounds of MI. While these methods provide reliable estimation when the true MI is low, they produce high variance estimates in cases of high MI. We argue that the high variance characteristic is due to the uncontrolled complexity of the critic&#39;s hypothesis space. In support of this argument, we use the data-driven Rademacher complexity of the hypothesis space associated with the critic&#39;s architecture to analyse generalization error bound of variational lower bound estimates of MI. In the proposed work, we show that it is possible to negate the high variance characteristics of these estimators by constraining the critic&#39;s hypothesis space to Reproducing Hilbert Kernel Space (RKHS), which corresponds to a kernel learned using Automated Spectral Kernel Learning (ASKL). By analysing the aforementioned generalization error bounds, we augment the overall optimisation objective with effective regularisation term. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of this regularization in enforcing proper bias variance tradeoff on four variational lower bounds, namely NWJ, MINE, JS and SMILE.

ICPR 2020

Reducing the Variance of Variational Estimates of Mutual Information by Limiting the Critic&#39;s Hypothesis Space to RKHS

rkhs

reproducing kernel hilbert space

generalization error

rademacher complexity

mutual information

unsupervised 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. 


Mutual information (MI) is an information-theoretic measure of dependency between two random variables. Several methods to estimate MI, from samples of two random variables with unknown underlying probability distributions have been
proposed in the literature. Recent methods realize parametric probability distributions or critic as a neural network to approximate unknown density ratios. The approximated density ratios are used to estimate different variational lower bounds of MI. While these methods provide reliable estimation when the true MI is low, they produce high variance estimates in cases of high MI. We argue that the high variance characteristic is due to the uncontrolled complexity of the critic's hypothesis space. In support of this argument, we use the data-driven Rademacher complexity of the hypothesis space associated with the critic's architecture to analyse generalization error bound of variational lower bound estimates of MI. In the proposed work, we show that it is possible to negate the high variance characteristics of these estimators by constraining the critic's hypothesis space to Reproducing Hilbert Kernel Space (RKHS), which corresponds to a kernel learned using Automated Spectral Kernel Learning (ASKL). By analysing the aforementioned generalization error bounds, we augment the overall optimisation objective with effective regularisation term. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of this regularization in enforcing proper bias variance tradeoff on four variational lower bounds, namely NWJ, MINE, JS and SMILE.

Reducing the Variance of Variational Estimates of Mutual Information by Limiting the Critic's Hypothesis Space to RKHS

poster

The ability to handle large scale variations is crucial for many real world visual tasks. A straightforward approach for handling scale in a deep network is to process an image at several scales simultaneously in a set of scale channels. Scale invariance can then, in principle, be achieved by using weight sharing between the scale channels together with max or average pooling over the outputs from the scale channels. The ability of such scale channel networks to generalise to scales not present in the training set over significant scale ranges has, however, not previously been explored. We, therefore, present a theoretical analysis of invariance and covariance properties of scale channel networks and perform an experimental evaluation of the ability of different types of scale channel networks to generalise to previously unseen scales. We identify limitations of previous approaches and propose a new type of foveated scale channel architecture, where the scale channels process increasingly larger parts of the image with decreasing resolution. Our proposed FovMax and FovAvg networks perform almost identically over a scale range of 8, also when training on single scale training data, and do also give improvements in the small sample regime.

Exploring the ability of CNNs to generalise to previously unseen scales over wide scale ranges

Regression via classification (RvC) is a common method used for regression problems in deep learning, where the target variable belongs to a set of continuous values. By discretizing the target into a set of non-overlapping classes, it has been shown that training a classifier can improve neural network accuracy compared to using a standard regression approach. However, it is not clear how the set of discrete classes should be chosen and how it affects the overall solution. In this work, we propose that using several discrete data representations simultaneously can improve neural network learning compared to a single representation. Our approach is end-to-end differentiable and can be added as a simple extension to conventional learning methods, such as deep neural networks. We test our method on three challenging tasks and show that our method reduces the prediction error compared to a baseline RvC approach while maintaining a similar model complexity.

Deep Ordinal Regression with Label Diversity

We train a detection, classification and score analysis DNN to improve fencing referee decisions and provide trainers statistical analysis. The model classifies ‘Lunges’, ‘Counter-Attack’, and ‘Preparation to attack’ and introduces additional classes to reduce false positives. A scoring function evaluates, in real-time, who is awarded points.

Real-Time Fencing Move Classification and Detection at Touch Time during a Fencing Match

This work considers the problem of domain shift in person re-identification. Being trained on one dataset, a re-identification model usually performs much worse on unseen data. Partially this gap is caused by the relatively small scale of person re-identification datasets (compared to face recognition ones, for instance), but it is also related to training objectives. We propose to use the metric learning objective, and some additional training practices to build well-generalizing, yet, computationally efficient models.

Building Computationally Efficient and Well-Generalizing Person Re-Identification Models with Metric Learning

We present a novel approach of 2D to 3D transfer learning for semantic segmentation based on mapping pre-trained 2D convolutional neural network weights into planar 3D kernels. Results were evaluated using a public dataset for multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation utilizing solely MRI Flair sequence without brain extraction. Complete source code is available under an open-source license.

Planar 3D Transfer Learning for End to End Unimodal MRI Unbalanced Data Segmentation

We propose a novel foreground-focused domain adaptation (FFDA) framework
which mines the loss of the domain discriminators to concentrate on the backpropagation of foreground loss.

Foreground-focused domain adaptation for object detection

As one of the primary tasks in data mining, outlier detection serves a significant role in data quality enhancement for the scientific model prediction and revealing the abnormal hidden patterns from large scale trajectory datasets. In this paper, we introduce a versatile framework for detecting local trajectory outliers using spatial and temporal features of moving objects. Our local outlier detection consists of three phases. First, we divide the raw trajectory into trajectory segments by using a time-based partition strategy and extracting trajectory features from spatial attributes for each trajectory segment. Second, we create template trajectory segments based on a clustering schema. Finally, we compute the abnormal score, which measures the dissimilarity among the query and template trajectory segments, and thus determine the outlying trajectory segments according to the overall distribution of the abnormal score. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct two case studies on the real-life solar active region and Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) trajectory datasets. Our results show that our local outlier detection method can successfully detect the reporting errors and anomalous phenomenon in both of our case studies.

A Framework for Local Outlier Detection from Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Datasets

Multi-class vehicle detection from airborne imagery with orientation estimation is an important task in the remote vision domains with applications in traffic monitoring and disaster management. In the last decade, we have witnessed significant progress in object detection in ground imagery, but it is still in its infancy in airborne imagery, mostly due to the scarcity of diverse and large-scale datasets. To address this issue, we introduce EAGLE (oriEnted vehicle detection using Aerial imaGery in real-worLd scEnarios), a large-scale dataset for multi-class vehicle detection with object orientation information in aerial imagery. It features high-resolution aerial images composed of different real-world situations with a wide variety of camera sensor, resolution, flight altitude, weather, illumination, haze, shadow, time, city, country, occlusion, and camera angle. The annotation was done by airborne imagery experts with small- and large-vehicle classes. EAGLE contains 215,986 instances annotated with oriented bounding boxes defined by four points and orientation, making it by far the largest dataset to date in this task. Experiments show that the EAGLE dataset accurately reflects real-world situations and correspondingly challenging applications.

EAGLE: Large-scale Vehicle Detection Dataset in Real-World Scenarios using Aerial Imagery

In cataract surgery, the operation is performed with the help of a microscope. Since the microscope enables watching real-time surgery by up to two people only, a major part of surgical training is conducted using the recorded videos. To optimize the training procedure with the video content, the surgeons require an automatic relevance detection approach. In addition to relevance-based retrieval, these results can be further used for skill assessment and irregularity detection in cataract surgery videos. In this paper, a three-module framework is proposed to detect and classify the relevant phase segments in cataract videos. Taking advantage of an idle frame recognition network, the video is divided into idle and action segments. To boost the performance in relevance detection, the cornea where the relevant surgical actions are conducted is detected in all frames using Mask R-CNN. The spatiotemporally localized segments containing higher-resolution information about the pupil texture and actions, and complementary temporal information from the same phase are fed into the relevance detection module. This module consists of four parallel recurrent CNNs being responsible to detect four relevant phases that have been defined with medical experts. The results will then be integrated to classify the action phases as irrelevant or one of four relevant phases. Experimental results reveal that the proposed approach outperforms static CNNs and different configurations of feature-based and end-to-end recurrent networks.

Relevance Detection in Cataract Surgery Videos by Spatio-Temporal Action Localization

Pairwise comparison data arise in many domains with subjective assessment experiments, for example in image and video quality assessment. In these experiments observers are asked to express a preference between two conditions. However, many pairwise comparison protocols require a large number of comparisons to infer accurate scores, which may be unfeasible when each comparison is time-consuming (e.g. videos) or expensive (e.g. medical imaging). This motivates the use of an active sampling algorithm that chooses only the most informative pairs for comparison. In this paper we propose ASAP, an active sampling algorithm based on approximate message passing and expected information gain maximization. Unlike most existing methods, which rely on partial updates of the posterior distribution, we are able to perform full updates and therefore much improve the accuracy of the inferred scores. We demonstrate, with real and synthetic data, that ASAP offers the highest accuracy of inferred scores compared to the existing methods.

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Reducing the Variance of Variational Estimates of Mutual Information by Limiting the Critic's Hypothesis Space to RKHS