Italy


We present an unsupervised deep learning method for text line segmentation that is inspired by the relative variance between text lines and spaces among text lines. Handwritten text line segmentation is important for the efficiency of further processing. A common method is to train a deep learning network for embedding the document image into an image of blob lines that are tracing the text lines. Previous methods learned such embedding in a supervised manner, requiring the annotation of many document images. This paper presents an unsupervised embedding of document image patches without a need for annotations. The number of foreground pixels over the text lines is relatively different from the number of foreground pixels over the spaces among text lines. Generating similar and different pairs relying on this principle definitely leads to outliers. However, as the results show, the outliers do not harm the convergence and the network learns to discriminate the text lines from the spaces between text lines. Remarkably, with a challenging Arabic handwritten text line segmentation dataset, VML-AHTE, we achieved superior performance over the supervised methods. Additionally, the proposed method was evaluated on the ICDAR 2017 and ICFHR 2010 handwritten text line segmentation datasets.

ICPR 2020

Unsupervised deep learning for text line segmentation

text line extraction

text line detection

unsupervised deep learning

text line segmentation

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

Transit of wasteful materials within the European
Union is highly regulated through a system of permits. Waste
processing costs vary greatly depending on the waste category of
a permit. Therefore, companies may have a financial incentive to
allege transporting waste with erroneous categorisation.
Our goal is to assist inspectors in selecting potentially manipulated
permits for further investigation, making their task
more effective and efficient. Due to data limitations, a supervised
learning approach based on historical cases is not possible.
Standard unsupervised approaches, such as outlier detection
and data quality-assurance techniques, are not suited since we
are interested in targeting non-random modifications in both
category and category-correlated features.
For this purpose we (1) introduce the concept of crosslier:
an anomalous instance of a category which lies across other
categories; (2) propose eXPose: a novel approach to crosslier
detection based on supervised category modelling; and (3) present
the crosslier diagram: a visualisation tool specifically designed for
domain experts to easily assess crossliers. We compare eXPose
against traditional outlier detection methods in various benchmark
datasets with synthetic crossliers and show the superior
performance of our method in targeting these instances.

The eXPose Approach to Crosslier Detection

Human Pose Estimation is a fundamental task for many applications in the Computer Vision community and it has been widely investigated in the 2D domain, i.e. intensity images.
Therefore, most of the available methods for this task are mainly based on 2D Convolutional Neural Networks and huge manually-annotated RGB datasets, achieving stunning results.
In this paper, we propose RefiNet, a multi-stage framework that regresses an extremely-precise 3D human pose estimation from a given 2D pose and a depth map.
The framework consists of three different modules, each one specialized in a particular refinement and data representation, i.e. depth patches, 3D skeleton and point clouds.
Moreover, we present a new dataset, called Baracca, acquired with RGB, depth and thermal cameras and specifically created for the automotive context.
Experimental results confirm the quality of the refinement procedure that largely improves the human pose estimations of off-the-shelf 2D methods.

RefiNet: 3D Human Pose Refinement with Depth Maps

In a society with increasing age, the understanding of human falls it is of paramount importance. This paper presents a Decision Support System whose pipeline is designed to extract and compute physical domain’s features achieving the state of the art accuracy on the Le2i and UR fall detection datasets. The paper uses the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement and its sigma-lognormal model together with classic physical features to achieve 98% and 99% of accuracy in automatic fall detection on respectively Le2i and URFD datasets. The effort made in the design of this work is toward recognition of falls by using physical models whose laws are clear and understandable.

Fall Detection by Human Pose Estimation and Kinematic Theory

The availability of large-scale annotated datasets has enabled Fully-Convolutional Neural Networks to reach outstanding performance on road extraction in aerial images. However, high-quality pixel-level annotation is expensive to produce and even manually labeled data often contains topological errors. Trading off quality for quantity, many datasets rely on already available yet noisy labels, for example from OpenStreetMap.
In this paper, we explore the training of custom U-Nets built with ResNet and DenseNet backbones using noise-aware losses that are robust towards label omission and registration noise. We perform an extensive evaluation of standard and noise-aware losses, including a novel Bootstrapped DICE-Coefficient loss, on two challenging road segmentation benchmarks. Our losses yield a consistent improvement in overall extraction quality and exhibit a strong capacity to cope with severe label noise. Our method generalizes well to two other fine-grained topology delineation tasks: surface crack detection for quality inspection and cell membrane extraction in electron microscopy imagery.

Aerial Road Segmentation in the Presence of Topological Label Noise


Document images dewarping is still a challenge especially when documents are captured with one camera in an uncontrolled environment. In this paper we propose a generic approach based on vanishing points (VP) to reconstruct the 3D shape of document pages. Unlike previous methods we do not need to segment the text included in the documents. Therefore, our approach is less sensitive to pre-processing and segmentation errors. The computation of the VPs is robust and relies on the a-contrario framework, which has only one parameter whose setting is based on probabilistic reasoning instead of experimental tuning. Thus, our method can be applied to any kind of document including text and non-text blocks and extended to other kind of images. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to a variety of distortions.

Generic Document Image Dewarping by Probabilistic Discretization of Vanishing Points

Deep learning has recently improved the performance of Speaker Identification (SI) systems. Promising results have been obtained with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This success is mostly driven by the advent of large datasets. However in the context of decentralized commercial applications, collection of large amount of training data is not always possible. In addition, robustness of a SI system is adversely effected by short utterances. 
Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel text-independent speaker identification system able to identify speakers by learning from only few training short utterances examples. To achieve this, we combine a two-layer wavelet scattering network coupled with a CNN. The proposed architecture takes variable length speech segments. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, Timit and Librispeech datasets are used in the experiments. Our experiments shows that our hybrid architecture provides satisfactory results under the constraints of short and limited number of utterances. These experiments also show that our hybrid architecture are competitive with the state of the art.

Hybrid Network For End-To-End Text-Independent Speaker Identification

Recently, research endeavors have shown the potentiality of Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks (CycleGAN) in style transfer. In Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks, the consistency loss is introduced to measure the difference between the original images and the reconstructed in both directions, forward and backward. In this work, the combination of Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks with Fast and Adaptive Bidimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition (FABEMD) is proposed to perform style transfer on images. In the proposed approach the cycle-consistency loss is modified to include the differences between the extracted Intrinsic Mode Functions (BIMFs) images. Instead of an estimation of pixel-to-pixel difference between the produced and input images, the FABEMD is applied and the extracted BIMFs are involved in the computation of the total cycle loss. This method enriches the computation of the total loss in a content-to-content and style-to-style comparison by connecting the spatial information to the frequency components. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method is efficient and produces qualitative results comparable to state-of-the-art methods.

Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks and Fast Adaptive Bi-dimensional Empirical Mode Decomposition for Style Transfer


Scene text recognition is a challenging task due to the diversity in text appearance and complexity of natural scenes. Thanks to the development of deep learning and the large volume of training data, scene text recognition has made impressive progress in recent years. However, recent research on adversarial examples has shown that deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial input with often imperceptible changes. As one of the most practical tasks in computer vision, scene text recognition is also facing huge security risks. To our best knowledge, there has been no work on adversarial attacks against scene text recognition. To investigate its effects on scene text recognition, we make the first attempt to attack the state-of-the-art scene text recognizers, i.e., attention-based recognizers. To that end, we first adjust the objective function designed for non-sequential tasks, such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and image retrieval, to the sequential form. We then propose a novel and effective objective function to further reduce the amount of perturbation while achieving a higher attack success rate. Comprehensive experiments on several standard benchmarks clearly demonstrate effective adversarial effects on scene text recognition by the proposed attacks. It is noteworthy that while this is harmful to a recognition system, it is highly advantageous for a text-based CAPTCHA system.

Cost-Effective Adversarial Attacks against Scene Text Recognition

We address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) which aims at adapting models trained on a labeled domain to a completely unlabeled domain. One way to achieve this goal is to learn a domain-invariant representation. However, this approach is subject to two challenges: samples from two domains are insufficient to guarantee domain-invariance at most part of the latent space, and neighboring samples from the target domain may not belong to the same class on the low-dimensional manifold. To mitigate these shortcomings, we propose two strategies. First, we incorporate a domain mixup strategy in domain adversarial learning model by linearly interpolating between the source and target domain samples. This allows the latent space to be continuous and yields an improvement of the domain matching. Second, the domain discriminator is regularized via judging the relative difference between both domains for the input mixup features, which speeds up the domain matching. Experiment results show that our proposed model achieves superior performance on different tasks under various domain shifts and data complexity.

Adversarially Constrained Interpolation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

We propose two modified neural networks based on dual path multi-scale fusion networks (SFANet) and SegNet for accurate and efficient crowd counting. Inspired by SFANet, the first model, which is named M-SFANet, is attached with atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and context-aware module (CAN). The encoder of M-SFANet is enhanced with ASPP containing parallel atrous convolutional layers with different sampling rates and hence able to extract multi-scale features of the target object and incorporate larger context. To further deal with scale variation throughout an input image, we leverage the CAN module which adaptively encodes the scales of the contextual information. The combination yields an effective model for counting in both dense and sparse crowd scenes. Based on the SFANet decoder structure, M-SFANet's decoder has dual paths, for density map and attention map generation. The second model is called M-SegNet, which is produced by replacing the bilinear upsampling in SFANet with max unpooling that is used in SegNet. This change provides a faster model while providing competitive counting performance. Designed for high-speed surveillance applications, M-SegNet has no additional multi-scale-aware module in order to not increase the complexity. Both models are encoder-decoder based architectures and are end-to-end trainable. We conduct extensive experiments on five crowd counting datasets and one vehicle counting dataset to show that these modifications yield algorithms that could improve state-of-the-art crowd counting methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/Pongpisit-Thanasutives/Variations-of-SFANet-for-Crowd-Counting.

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Unsupervised deep learning for text line segmentation

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The eXPose Approach to Crosslier Detection

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