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Batch Normalization (BN) is a well-known technique used in training deep neural networks. The main idea behind batch normalization is to normalize the features of the layers (i:e:, transforming them to have a mean equal to zero and a variance
equal to one). Such a procedure encourages the optimization landscape of the loss function to be smoother, and improves the learning of the networks for both speed and performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the performance of the network can be improved, if the distributions of the features of the output in the same layer are similar. As normalizing based on mean and variance does not necessarily make the features to have the same distribution, we propose a new normalization scheme: Batch Normalization with Skewness Reduction (BNSR). Comparing with other normalization approaches, BNSR transforms not just only the mean and variance, but also the skewness of the data. By tackling this property of a distribution, we are able to make the output distributions of the layers to be further similar. The nonlinearity of BNSR may further improve the expressiveness of the underlying network. Comparisons with other normalization schemes are tested on the CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can outperform other state-of-the-arts that are not equipped with BNSR.

ICPR 2020

Improving Batch Normalization with Skewness Reduction for Deep Neural Networks

batch normalization

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

Object shape is a subtle but important factor for object detection. It has been observed that the object-region-percentage (ORP) can be utilized to improve detection accuracy for elongated objects, which have much lower ORPs than other
types of objects. In this paper, we propose an approach to improve the detection performance for objects with high ORPs. Our method consists of three steps. First, we adjust the ground truth bounding boxes of high-ORP objects to an optimal range. Second, we train an object detector, Faster R-CNN, based on adjusted bounding boxes to achieve high recall. Finally, we train a DCNN to learn the adjustment ratios towards four directions and adjust detected bounding boxes of objects to get better localization for higher precision. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on
12 high-ORP objects in COCO and 8 objects in a proprietary gearbox dataset. The experimental results show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art Performance on these objects while costing less resources in training and inference stages.

Detecting objects with high object region percentage

Learning interpretable and interpolatable latent representations has been an emerging research direction, allowing researchers to understand and utilize the derived latent space for further applications such as visual synthesis or recognition.
While most existing approaches derive an interpolatable latent space and induces smooth transition in image appearance, it is still not clear how to observe desirable representations which would contain semantic information of interest. In this paper,
we aim to learn meaningful representations and simultaneously perform semantic-oriented and visually-smooth interpolation. To this end, we propose an angular triplet-neighbor loss (ATNL) that enables learning a latent representation whose distribution matches the semantic information of interest. With the latent space guided by ATNL, we further utilize spherical semantic interpolation for generating semantic warping of images, allowing synthesis of desirable visual data. Experiments on MNIST and CMU Multi-PIE datasets qualitatively and quantitatively verify the effectiveness of our method.

Semantics-Guided Representation Learning with Applications to Visual Synthesis

Explaining decisions of black-box classifiers is paramount in sensitive domains such as medical imaging since clinicians confidence is necessary for adoption. 
Various explanation approaches have been proposed, among which perturbation based approaches are very promising. Within this class of methods, we leverage a learning framework to produce our visual explanations method. From a given classifier, we train two generators to produce from an input image the so called similar and adversarial images. The similar image shall be classified as the input image whereas the adversarial shall not. Visual explanation is built as the difference between these two generated images. Using metrics from the literature, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed approach is model-agnostic and has a low computation burden at prediction time. Thus, it is adapted for real-time systems. Finally, we show that random geometric augmentations applied to the original image play a regularization role that improves several previously proposed explanation methods. We validate our approach on a large chest X-ray database.

Combining Similarity and Adversarial Learning to Generate Visual Explanation: Application to Medical Image Classification


This paper proposes a new lightweight network, LiNet, that enhancing technical efficiency in lightweight super resolution and operating approximately like very large and costly networks in terms of number of network parameters and operations. The proposed architecture allows the network to learn more abstract properties by avoiding low-level information via multiple links. LiNet introduces a Compact Dense Module, which contains set of inner and outer blocks, to efficiently extract meaningful information, to better leverage multi-level representations before upsampling stage, and to allow an efficient information and gradient flow within the network. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed LiNet achieves favorable performance against lightweight state-of-the-art methods.

LiNet: A Lightweight Network for Image Super Resolution

Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a widely used generative model for learning latent representations. Burda et al. in their seminal paper showed that learning capacity of VAE is limited by over-pruning. It is a phenomenon where a significant number of latent variables fail to capture any information about the input data and the corresponding hidden units become inactive. This adversely affects learning diverse and interpretable latent representations. As variational graph autoencoder (VGAE) extends VAE for graph-structured data, it inherits the over-pruning problem. In this paper, we adopt a model based approach and propose epitomic VGAE (EVGAE),a generative variational framework for graph datasets which successfully mitigates the over-pruning problem and also boosts the generative ability of VGAE. We consider EVGAE to consist of multiple sparse VGAE models, called epitomes, that are groups of latent variables sharing the latent space. This approach aids in increasing active units as epitomes compete to learn better representation of the graph data. We verify our claims via experiments on three benchmark datasets. Our experiments show that EVGAE has a better generative ability than VGAE. Moreover, EVGAE outperforms VGAE on link prediction task in citation networks.

Epitomic Variational Graph Autoencoder

The application of deep learning to 3D point clouds is challenging due to its lack of order. Inspired by the point embeddings of PointNet and the edge embeddings of DGCNNs, we propose three improvements to the task of point cloud analysis. First, we introduce a novel feature-attentive neural network layer, a FAT layer, that combines both global point-based features and local edge-based features in order to generate better embeddings. Second, we find that applying the same attention mechanism across two different forms of feature map aggregation, max pooling and average pooling, gives better performance than either alone. Third, we observe that residual feature reuse in this setting propagates information more effectively between the layers, and makes the network easier to train. Our architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the task of point cloud classification, as demonstrated on the ModelNet40 dataset, and an extremely competitive performance on the ShapeNet part segmentation challenge.

FatNet: A Feature-attentive Network for 3D Point Cloud Processing

3D object reconstruction from a single-view image is a long-standing challenging problem. Previous work was difficult to accurately reconstruct 3D shapes with a complex topology which has rich details at the edges and corners. Moreover,
previous works used synthetic data to train their network, but domain adaptation problems occurred when tested on real data. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Multi-branch Information Fusion Network (DmifNet) which can recover a high-fidelity 3D shape of arbitrary topology from a 2D image. Specifically, we design several side branches from the intermediate layers to make the network produce more diverse representations to improve the generalization ability of network. In addition, we utilize DoG (Difference of Gaussians) to extract edge geometry and corners information from input images. Then, we use a separate side branch network to process the extracted data to better capture edge geometry and corners feature information. Finally, we dynamically fuse the information of all branches to gain final predicted probability. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on a large-scale publicly available dataset demonstrate the validity and efficiency of our method. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/leilimaster/DmifNet.


DmifNet: 3D Shape Reconstruction Based on Dynamic Multi-Branch Information Fusion

In this paper, we propose a multi-attribute regression network (MARN) to investigate the problem of face reconstruction, especially in challenging cases when faces undergo large variations including severe poses, extreme expressions, and partial occlusions in unconstrained environments. The traditional 3DMM parametric regression method does not distinguish the
learning of identity, expression, and attitude attributes, resulting in lacking geometric details in the reconstructed face. We propose to learn a face multi-attribute features during 3D face reconstruction from single 2D images. Our MARN enables the network to better extract the feature information of face identity, expression, and pose attributes. We introduce three loss functions
to constrain the above three face attributes respectively. At the same time, we carefully design the geometric contour constraint loss function, using the constraints of sparse 2D face landmarks to improve the reconstructed geometric contour information.The experimental results show that our MARN has achieved
significant improvements in 3D face reconstruction and face alignment on the AFLW2000-3D and AFLW datasets.

Multi-Attribute Regression Network for Face Reconstruction

Automatic recognition of products on grocery shelf images is a new and attractive topic in computer vision and machine learning since, it can be exploited in different application areas. This paper introduces a complete end-to-end pipeline,
without preliminary radiometric and spatial transformations usually involved while dealing with the considered issue, and it provides a systematic investigation of recent machine learning models based on convolutional neural networks for addressing the product recognition task by exploiting the proposed pipeline
on a recent challenging grocery product dataset. The investigated models were never been used in this context: they derive from the successful and more generic object recognition task and have been properly tuned to address this specific issue. Besides, also ensembles of nets built by the most advanced theoretical fundaments have been taken into account. Gathered classification results were very encouraging since the recognition accuracy has been improved up to 15% with respect to the leading approaches in the state of art on the same dataset. A discussion about the pros and cons of the investigated solutions are discussed by paving the path towards new research lines.

A Systematic Investigation on end-to-end DeepRecognition of Grocery Products in the Wild

The integration of rich sensory technologies into critical applications, such as gesture recognition and building energy optimization, has highlighted the importance of intelligent time-series analytics. To accommodate this demand, uni-variate approaches have been extended for multi-variate scenarios, but naive extensions have led to a deterioration in model performances due to their limited ability to capture the information recorded in different variates and complex multi-variate time series patterns’ evolution over time. Furthermore, real-world time series are often contaminated with noisy information. In this paper, we note that a time series often carries robust localized temporal events that could help improve model performance by highlighting the relevant information; however, the lack of sufficient data to train for these events makes it impossible for neural architectures to identify and make use of these temporal events. We, therefore, argue that a companion process helping identify salient events in the input time series and driving the model’s attention to the associated salient sub-sequences can help with learning a high-performing network. Relying on this observation, we propose a novel Saliency-Driven Mutual Cross Attention (SDMA) framework that extracts localized temporal events and generates a saliency series to complement the input time series. We further propose an architecture that accounts for the mutual cross-talk between the input and saliency series branches where input and saliency series attend to each other. Experiments show that the proposed mutually-cross attention framework can offer significant boosts in model performance when compared against non-attentioned, conventionally attentioned, and conventionally cross-attentioned models.

Improving Batch Normalization with Skewness Reduction for Deep Neural Networks

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Detecting objects with high object region percentage

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