Italy

Scene text recognition (STR) is still a hot research topic
in computer vision field due to its various applications.
Existing works mainly focus on learning a general model
with a huge number of synthetic text images to recognize
unconstrained scene texts, and have achieved substantial
progress. However, these methods are not quite applicable
in many real-world scenarios where 1) high recognition
accuracy is required, while 2) labeled samples are lacked.
To tackle this challenging problem, this paper proposes a
few-shot adversarial sequence domain adaptation (FASDA)
approach to build sequence adaptation between the synthetic
source domain (with many synthetic labeled samples) and a
specific target domain (with only some or a few real
labeled samples). This is done by simultaneously learning
each character’s feature representation with an attention
mech- anism and establishing the corresponding
character-level latent subspace with adversarial learning.
Our approach can maximize the character-level confusion
between the source domain and the target domain, thus
achieves the sequence-level adaptation with even a small
number of labeled samples in the target domain. Extensive
experiments on various datasets show that our method
significantly outperforms the finetuning scheme, and
obtains comparable performance to the state-of-the-art STR
methods.

ICPR 2020 MAIN CONFERENCE

Text Recognition in Real Scenarios with a Few Labeled Samples

adversarial learning

scene text recognition

domain adaptation

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

With the rise of the so-called Adversarial Attacks, there
is an increased concern on model security. In this paper we
present two different contributions: novel measures of
robustness (based on adversarial attacks) and a novel
adversarial attack. The key idea behind these metrics is to
obtain a measure that could compare different
architectures, with independence of how the input is
preprocessed (robustness against different input sizes and
value ranges). To do so, a novel adversarial attack is
presented, performing a delayed elastic-net adversarial
attack (constraints are only used whenever a successful
adversarial attack is obtained). Experimental results show
that our approach obtains state-of-the-art adversarial
samples, in terms of minimal perturbation distance.
Finally, a benchmark of ImageNet pretrained models is used
to conduct experiments aiming to shed some light about
which model should be selected whenever security is a role
factor.

A Delayed Elastic-Net Approach for Performing Adversarial Attacks

Along with the performance improvements of neural network models, developing methods that enable the explanation of their behavior is a significant research topic. 
For convolutional neural networks, the explainability is usually achieved with attribution (heatmap) that visualizes pixel-level importance or contribution of input to its corresponding result. 
This attribution should reflect the relation (dependency) between inputs and outputs, which has been studied with a variety of methods, e.g., derivative of an output with respect to an input pixel value, a weighted sum of gradients, amount of output changes to input perturbations, and so on. 
In this paper, we present a new method that improves the measure of attribution and incorporates it into the integrated gradients method. To be precise, rather than using the conventional chain-rule, we propose a method called guided non-linearity that propagates gradients more effectively through non-linear units (e.g., ReLU and max-pool) so that only positive gradients backpropagate through non-linear units. 
Our method is inspired by the mechanism of action potential generation in postsynaptic neurons, where the firing of action potentials depends on the sum of excitatory (EPSP) and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials (IPSP). 
We believe that paths consisting of EPSP-giving-neurons faithfully reflect the contribution of inputs to the output, and we make gradients flow only along those paths (i.e., paths of positive chain reactions). Experiments with 5 deep neural networks have shown that the proposed method outperforms others in terms of the deletion metrics, and yields fine-grained and more human-interpretable attribution.

Improving Explainability of Integrated Gradients with Guided Non-Linearity

Traditionally, a Neural Network classification training loss function follows the same principle: minimizing the distance between samples that belong to the same class, while maximizing the distance to the other classes. There are no restrictions on the spatial placement of deep features (last layer input). This paper addresses this issue when dealing with Neural Networks, providing a set of loss functions that are able to train a classifier by forcing the deep features to be projected over a predefined orthogonal basis. Experimental results shows that these `data placement' functions can overcome the training accuracy provided by the classic cross-entropy loss function.

Can Data Placement Be Effective for Neural Networks Classification Tasks? Introducing the Orthogonal Loss

Finger vein recognition deals with the identification of subjects based on their venous pattern within the fingers. There is a lot of prior work using hand crafted features, but only little work using CNN based recognition systems. This article proposes a new approach using CNNs that utilizes the triplet loss function together with hard triplet online selection for finger vein recognition. The CNNs are used for three different use cases: (1) the classical recognition use case, where every finger of a subject is considered as a separate class, (2) an evaluation of the similarity of left and right hand fingers from the same subject and (3) an evaluation of the similarity of different fingers of the same subject. The results show that the proposed nets achieve superior results compared to prior work on finger vein recognition using the triplet loss function. Furtherly, we show that different fingers of the same subject, especially symmetric fingers (same finger type but from different hand), show enough similarities to perform recognition. The last statement contradicts the current understanding in the literature for finger vein biometry, in which it is assumed that different fingers of the same subject are unique identities.

Finger Vein Recognition and Intra-Subject Similarity Evaluation of Finger Veins using the CNN Triplet Loss

Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) and its variants are popular few-shot classification methods. They train an initializer across a variety of sampled learning tasks (also known as episodes) such that the initialized model can adapt quickly to new ones. In this paper, we propose an approach called MetaMix, which generates virtual feature-target pairs within each episode to regularize the backbone models.
MetaMix can be integrated with any of the MAML-based algorithms and learn the decision boundaries generalizing better to new tasks. Experiments on the mini-ImageNet, CUB, and FC100 datasets show that MetaMix improves the performance of MAML-based algorithms and achieves state-of-the-art result when integrated with Meta-Transfer Learning.

MetaMix: Improved Meta-Learning with Interpolation-based Consistency Regularization


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.

Creating Classifier Ensembles through Meta-Heuristic Algorithms for Aerial Scene Classification

Metallic surface defect detection is of great significance in quality control for production. However, this task is very challenging due to the noise disturbance, large appearance variation, and the ambiguous definition of the defect individual. Traditional image processing methods are unable to detect the damaged region effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new defect detection method, Attention Cascade R- CNN with Mix-NMS (ACRM), to classify and locate defects robustly. Three submodules are developed to achieve this goal: 1) a lightweight attention block is introduced, which can improve the ability in capture global and local feature both in the spatial and channel dimension; 2) we firstly apply the cascade R-CNN to our task, which exploits multiple detectors to sequentially refine the detection result robustly; 3) we introduce a new method named Mix Non-Maximum Suppression (Mix- NMS), which can significantly improve its ability in filtering the redundant detection result in our task. Extensive experiments on a real industrial dataset show that ACRM achieves state-of-the- art results compared to the existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of our detection method.

ACRM: Attention Cascade R-CNN with Mix-NMS for Metallic Surface Defect Detection

In this paper, we propose a new image classifier based on the incorporation of the nearest neighbor algorithm and the activation space of convolutional neural network. The classifier has been successfully implemented on some state-of- the-art models and further improve their performance. The main
technique tool we use is convex hull based classification and its acceleration. We find several phenomena which we believe are of both theoretical and application interest: 1) in several cases, the new classifier outperforms original CNN by reaching higher accuracy; 2) the classifier can work more efficiently by combining with sampling strategy; 3) centroid of each convex hull shows surprising ability in classification. Most of the work have strong geometric meanings, which helps us have a new understanding about convolutional layers.

Nearest Neighbor Classification Based onActivation Space of Convolutional Neural Network


With the advent of data living on vertices of graphs, there is much interest in processing the so-called graph signals for partitioning tasks. As active contours have had much impact in the image processing community, their formulation on graphs is of importance to the field of graph signal processing. This paper proposes an adaptation on graphs of a model that combines the Geodesic Active Contour and the Active Contour Without Edges models. In addition, specific terms depending on graphs are introduced in the formulation. This adaptation is solved using a level set formulation with a gradient descent that can be expressed as a morphological front evolution process. Experimental results on different kinds of graphs signals show the benefit of the approach.

Graph signal active contours


In this paper, we address the problem of video summarization, which aims at selecting a subset of video frames as a summary to represent the original video contents compactly and completely. We propose a simple but effective supervised approach with a dual attention capsule network towards this end. Unlike existing LSTM based methods, it pays attention to short- and long-term dependencies among video frames through an elaborate dual self-attention architecture, which can handle longer-term dependencies and admit parallel computing. To reconcile the outputs of dual self-attention, we rely on a two-stream capsule network to learn the underlying frame selection criteria. Experiments on real-world datasets show the advantages of the proposed approach compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Text Recognition in Real Scenarios with a Few Labeled Samples

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A Delayed Elastic-Net Approach for Performing Adversarial Attacks

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