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Arbitrary text appearance poses a great challenge in scene text recognition tasks. Existing works mostly handle with the problem in consideration of the shape distortion, including perspective distortions, line curvature or other style variations. Rectification (i.e., spatial transformers) as the preprocessing stage is one popular approach and extensively studied. However, chromatic difficulties in complex scenes have not been paid much attention on. In this work, we introduce a new learnable geometric-unrelated rectification, Structure-Preserving Inner Offset Network (SPIN), which allows the color manipulation of source data within the network. This differentiable module can be inserted before any recognition architecture to ease the downstream tasks, giving neural networks the ability to actively transform input intensity rather than only the spatial rectification. It can also serve as a complementary module to known spatial transformations and work in both independent and collaborative ways with them. Extensive experiments show the proposed transformation outperforms existing rectification networks and has comparable performance among the state-of-the-arts.

AAAI 2021

SPIN: Structure-Preserving Inner Offset Network for Scene Text Recognition

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. 


ICPR 2020

technical paper

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. 

Bayesian Optimization (BO) has shown significant success in tackling expensive low-dimensional black-box optimization problems. Many optimization problems of interest are high-dimensional, and scaling BO to such settings remains an important challenge. In this paper, we consider generalized additive models in which low-dimensional functions with overlapping subsets of variables are composed to model a high-dimensional target function. Our goal is to lower the computational resources required and facilitate faster model learning by reducing the model complexity while retaining the sample-efficiency of existing methods. Specifically, we constrain the underlying dependency graphs to tree structures in order to facilitate both the structure learning and optimization of the acquisition function. For the former, we propose a hybrid graph learning algorithm based on Gibbs sampling and mutation. In addition, we propose a novel zooming-based algorithm that permits generalized additive models to be employed more efficiently in the case of continuous domains. We demonstrate and discuss the efficacy of our approach via a range of experiments on synthetic functions and real-world datasets.

High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization via Tree-Structured Additive Models

Digital watermark is a commonly used technique to protect the copyright of medias. Simultaneously, to increase the robustness of watermark, attacking technique, such as watermark removal, also gets the attention from the community. Previous watermark removal methods require to gain the watermark location from users or train a multi-task network to recover the background indiscriminately. However, when jointly learning, the network performs better on watermark detection than recovering the texture. Inspired by this observation and to erase the visible watermarks blindly, we propose a novel two-stage framework with a stacked attention-guided ResUNets to simulate the process of detection, removal and refinement.  In the first stage, we design a multi-task network called SplitNet. It learns the basis features for three sub-tasks altogether while the task-specific features separately use multiple channel attentions. Then, with the predicted mask and coarser restored image, we design RefineNet to smooth the watermarked region with a mask-guided spatial attention. Besides network structure, the proposed algorithm also combines multiple perceptual losses for better quality both visually and numerically.  We extensively evaluate our algorithm over four different datasets under various settings and the experiments show that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Split then Refine: Stacked Attention-Guided ResUNets for Blind Single Image Visible Watermark Removal

Dialogue systems in open domain have achieved great success due to the easily obtained single-turn corpus and the development of deep learning, but the multi-turn scenario is still a challenge because of the frequent coreference and information omission. In this paper, we investigate the incomplete utterance restoration which has brought general improvement over multi-turn dialogue systems in recent studies. Meanwhile, inspired by the autoregression for text generation and the sequence labeling for text editing, we propose a novel semi autoregressive generator (SARG) with the high efficiency and flexibility. Moreover, experiments on Restoration-200k show that our proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models in terms of quality and inference speed.

SARG: A Novel Semi Autoregressive Generator for Multi-Turn Incomplete Utterance Restoration

Filter pruning is a commonly used method for compressing Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets), due to its friendly hardware supporting and flexibility. However, existing methods mostly need a cumbersome procedure, which brings many extra hyper-parameters and training epochs. This is because only using sparsity and pruning stages cannot obtain a satisfying performance. Besides, many works do not consider the difference of pruning ratio across different layers. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel dynamic and progressive filter pruning (DPFPS) scheme that directly learns a structured sparsity network from Scratch. In particular, DPFPS imposes a new structured sparsity-inducing regularization specifically upon the expected pruning parameters in a dynamic sparsity manner. The dynamic sparsity scheme determines sparsity allocation ratios of different layers and a Taylor series based channel sensitivity criteria is presented to identify the expected pruning parameters. Moreover, we increase the structured sparsity-inducing penalty in a progressive manner. This helps the model to be sparse gradually instead of forcing the model to be sparse at the beginning. Our method solves the pruning ratio based optimization problem by an iterative soft-thresholding algorithm (ISTA) with dynamic sparsity. At the end of the training, we only need to remove the redundant parameters without other stages, such as fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method is competitive with 11 state-of-the-art methods on both small-scale and large-scale datasets (i.e., CIFAR and ImageNet). Specifically, on ImageNet, we achieve a 44.97% pruning ratio of FLOPs by compressing ResNet-101, even with an increase of 0.12% Top-5 accuracy. Our pruned models and codes are released at https://github.com/taoxvzi/DPFPS.

DPFPS: Dynamic and Progressive Filter Pruning for Compressing Convolutional Neural Networks from Scratch

Mutual gaze detection, i.e., predicting whether or not two people are looking at each other, plays an important role in understanding human interactions. In this work, we focus on the task of image-based mutual gaze detection, and propose a simple and effective approach to boost the performance by using an auxiliary 3D gaze estimation task during the training phase. We achieve the performance boost without additional labeling cost by training the 3D gaze estimation branch using pseudo 3D gaze labels deduced from mutual gaze labels. By sharing the head image encoder between the 3D gaze estimation and the mutual gaze detection branches, we achieve better head features than learned by training the mutual gaze detection branch alone. Experimental results on three image datasets show that the proposed approach improves the detection performance significantly without additional annotations. This work also introduces a new image dataset that consists of 33.1K pairs of humans annotated with mutual gaze labels in 29.2K images.

Boosting Image-Based Mutual Gaze Detection Using Pseudo 3D Gaze

Current state-of-the-art image captioning systems usually generated descriptions autoregressively, i.e., every forward step conditions on the given image and previously produced words. The sequential attribution causes a unavoidable decoding latency. Non-autoregressive image captioning, on the other hand, predicts the entire sentence simultaneously and accelerates the inference process significantly. However, it removes the dependence in a caption and commonly suffers from repetition or missing issues. To make a better trade-off between speed and quality, we introduce a partially non-autoregressive model, named PNAIC, which considers a caption as a series of concatenated word groups. The groups are generated parallelly in global while each word in group is predicted from left to right, and thus the captioner can create multiple discontinuous words concurrently at each time step. More importantly, by incorporating curriculum learning-based training tasks of group length prediction and invalid group deletion, our model is capable of generating accurate captions as well as preventing common incoherent errors. Extensive experiments on MS COCO benchmark demonstrate that our proposed method achieves more than 3.5Ã— speedup while maintaining competitive performance.

Partially Non-Autoregressive Image Captioning

Recently end-to-end scene text spotting has become a popular research topic due to its advantages of global optimization and high maintainability in real applications. Most methods attempt to develop various region of interest (RoI) operations to concatenate the detection part and the sequence recognition part into a two-stage text spotting framework. However, in such framework, the recognition part is highly sensitive to the detected results (e.g., the compactness of text contours). To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel Mask AttentioN Guided One-stage text spotting framework named MANGO, in which character sequences can be directly recognized without RoI operation. Concretely, a position-aware mask attention module is developed to generate attention weights on each text instance and its characters. It allows different text instances in an image to be allocated on different feature map channels which are further grouped as a batch of instance features. Finally, a lightweight sequence decoder is applied to generate the character sequences. It is worth noting that MANGO inherently adapts to arbitrary-shaped text spotting and can be trained end-to-end with only coarse position information (e.g., rectangular bounding box) and text annotations. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves competitive and even new state-of-the-art performance on both regular and irregular text spotting benchmarks, i.e., ICDAR 2013, ICDAR 2015, Total-Text, and SCUT-CTW1500.

MANGO: A Mask Attention Guided One-Stage Scene Text Spotter

Humans can abstract prior knowledge from very little data and use it to boost skill learning. In this paper, we propose routine-augmented policy learning (RAPL), which discovers routines composed of primitive actions from a single demonstration and uses discovered routines to augment policy learning. To discover routines from the demonstration, we first abstract routine candidates by identifying grammar over the demonstrated action trajectory. Then, the best routines measured by length and frequency are selected to form a routine library. We propose to learn policy simultaneously at primitive-level and routine-level with discovered routines, leveraging the temporal structure of routines. Our approach enables imitating expert behavior at multiple temporal scales for imitation learning and promotes reinforcement learning exploration. Extensive experiments on Atari games demonstrate that RAPL improves the state-of-the-art imitation learning method SQIL and reinforcement learning method A2C. Further, we show that discovered routines can generalize to unseen levels and difficulties on the CoinRun benchmark.

Augmenting Policy Learning with Routines Discovered from a Single Demonstration

The recent literature on fair Machine Learning manifests that the choice of fairness constraints must be driven by the utilities of the population. However, virtually all previous work makes the unrealistic assumption that the exact underlying utilities of the population (representing private tastes of individuals) are known to the regulator that imposes the fairness constraint. In this paper we initiate the discussion of the \emph{mismatch}, the unavoidable difference between the underlying utilities of the population and the utilities assumed by the regulator. We demonstrate that the mismatch can make the disadvantaged protected group worse off after imposing the fairness constraint and provide tools to design fairness constraints that help the disadvantaged group despite the mismatch.

Protecting the Protected Group: Circumventing Harmful Fairness

RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) recently has attracted increasing research interest and many deep learning methods based on encoder-decoder architectures have emerged. However, most existing RGB-D SOD models conduct feature fusion either in the single encoder or the decoder stage, which hardly guarantees sufficient cross-modal fusion ability. In this paper, we make the first attempt in addressing RGB-D SOD through 3D convolutional neural networks. The proposed model, named RD3D, aims at pre-fusion in the encoder stage and in-depth fusion in the decoder stage to effectively promote the full integration of RGB and depth streams. Specifically, RD3D first conducts pre-fusion across RGB and depth modalities through an inflated 3D encoder, and later provides in-depth feature fusion by designing a 3D decoder equipped with rich back-projection paths (RBPP) for leveraging the extensive aggregation ability of 3D convolutions. With such a progressive fusion strategy involving both the encoder and decoder, effective and thorough interaction between the two modalities can be exploited and boost the detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on six widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that RD3D performs favorably against 14 state-of-the-art RGB-D SOD approaches in terms of four key evaluation metrics. Our code will be made publicly available: https://github.com/PPOLYpubki/RD3D.

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