Italy

In this work we compare the performance of a location-specific and a location-agnostic machine learning metamodel for crop nitrogen response rate prediction. We conduct a case study for grass-only pasture in several locations in New Zealand. We generate a large dataset of APSIM simulation outputs and train machine learning models based on that data. Initially, we examine how the models perform at the location where the location-specific model was trained. We then perform the Mann–Whitney U test to see if the difference in the predictions of the two models (i.e. location-specific and location-agnostic) is significant. We expand this procedure to other locations to investigate the generalization capability of the models. We find that there is no statistically significant difference in the predictions of the two models. This is both interesting and useful because the location-agnostic model generalizes better than the location-specific model which means that it can be applied to virgin sites with similar confidence to experienced sites.

ICPR 2020

Location-specific vs location-agnostic machine learning metamodels for predicting pasture nitrogen response rate

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. 


technical paper

Noisy image processing is a fundamental task of computer vision. The first
example is the detection of faint edges in noisy images, a challenging
problem studied in the last decades. A recent study introduced a fast method
to detect faint edges in the highest accuracy among all the existing
approaches. Their complexity is nearly linear in the image's pixels and
their runtime is seconds for a noisy image. Their approach utilizes a
multi-scale binary partitioning of the image. By utilizing the multi-scale
U-net architecture, we show in this paper that their method can be
dramatically improved in both aspects of run time and accuracy. By training
the network on a dataset of binary images, we developed an approach for
faint edge detection that works in linear complexity. Our runtime of a
noisy image is milliseconds on a GPU. Even though our method is orders of
magnitude faster, we still achieve higher accuracy of detection under many
challenging scenarios. In addition, we show that our approach to performing
multi-scale preprocessing of noisy images using U-net improves the ability
to perform other vision tasks under the presence of noise. We prove it on
the problems of noisy objects classification and classical image denoising.
We show that multi-scale denoising can be carried out by a novel edge
preservation loss. As our experiments show, we achieve high-quality results
in the three aspects of faint edge detection, noisy image classification, and
natural image denoising.

Multi-scale Processing of Noisy Images using Edge Preservation Losses

This work addresses the pose estimation task on low-resolution images captured using thermal sensors which can operate in a no-light environment. Low-resolution thermal sensors have been widely adopted in various applications for cost control and privacy protection purposes. In this paper, targeting the challenging scenario of ultra-low resolution thermal imaging (32 x 32 pixels), we aim to estimate human poses for the purpose of monitoring health conditions and indoor events. To overcome the challenges in ultra-low resolution thermal imaging such as blurred boundaries and data scarcity, we propose a new Image to Image (I2I) translation architecture which can translate the original blurred thermal image into a visible light image with sharper boundaries. Then the generated visible light image can
be fed into the off-the-shelf pose estimator which was well-trained in the visible domain. Experimental results suggest that the proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the I2I based pose estimation task for our thermal image dataset. Furthermore, we also demonstrated the merits of the proposed method on the publicly available FLIR dataset by measuring the quality of translated images.

Boundary guided image translation for pose estimation from ultra-low resolution thermal sensor


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.

New York University, New York University Abu Dhabi




This paper describes the analysis of defocus information when a finger touching a virtual keyboard by using DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) coefficient without detecting 3D position (especially exact depth value) of thr finger. We use 2 cameras and a half mirror to get the images of the finger with same optical axis. The focal length of the two cameras are slightly different. We can know the finger touching the virtual keyboard when the finger is in the middle of the two focal length from the defocus information, because the position of the virtual keyboard is in the middle of the two focal position where the defocus information of the two cameras are same. Previous work of a virtual keyboard is realized by detecting the feature point of the finger at first. After that the finger position and the depth are checked if they are same to the position and the depth of the keyboard. A problem of the previous virtual keyboard is 3D point of the finger (feature point or edge, small region) should be detected. This is very time consuming. We overcome this problem by comparing the defocus information of the finger in the key area of virtual keyboard on the 2 images captured by the two cameras. In this paper we describe the optical system of the virtual keyboard and the resolution of the depth of the finger. Experimental result make it clear that middle range of the DCT coefficients is effective for detecting the finger. In our system, the finger touch is detected by comparing the DCT coefficients of the 2 images. The minimum distance of the detectable finger is depended on the diameter and the focal length of the lens, the resolution of the image sensor. We formulate this theoretical minimum distance and verify it by experiment. Besides finger, our system can also be generalized to detect other object touching the keyboard or not.

Image Defocus Analysis for Finger Detection on A Virtual Keyboard



Differential models for the simulation of the muscle mechanics are based on iteratively updating a mesh grid and deducing its new state through a finite element model. Models usually assume that the mesh grid is almost regular, and this makes a degradation of the simulation accuracy in long simulation sequences, since the mesh tends to be less regular when the number of iterations increases. We present a model that has the aim of reducing this accuracy degradation. It is based on recomputing the mesh grid returned by the model in each iteration through the concept of graph matching. The new model is currently in use to analyse the dynamics of the human heart when some pressure is applied to it. The final goal of the project (which is not shown in this paper) is to deduce the optimal position and strength pressure applied to the heart that increases the chance of reviving it with the minimum tissue damage. Experimental validation shows that our model returns a higher accuracy of the muscle position through some iterations than classical differential models with an insignificant increase of runtime. Thus, it is worth recomputing the mesh grid since the simulation accuracy drastically increases at the expense of a low runtime increase.

Incorporating a graph-matching algorithm into a muscle mechanics model





We present SIMCO, a completely agnostic multi-class object counting approach.
SIMCO starts by detecting foreground objects through a novel Mask RCNN-based architecture trained beforehand (just once) on a brand-new synthetic 2D shape dataset, InShape; the idea is to highlight every object resembling a primitive 2D shape (circle, square, rectangle, etc.). Each object detected is described by a low-dimensional embedding, obtained from a novel similarity-based head branch; this latter implements a triplet loss, encouraging similar objects (same 2D shape + color and scale) to map close. Subsequently, SIMCO uses this embedding for clustering, so that different 'classes' of similar objects can emerge and be counted, making SIMCO the very first multi-class unsupervised counter. The only required assumption is that repeated objects are present in the image. Experiments show that SIMCO provides state-of-the-art scores on counting benchmarks and that it can also help in many challenging image understanding tasks.

SIMCO: SIMilarity-based object COunting




Attributed graphs are structures that are useful to represent objects through the information of their local parts and their relations. Each characteristic in the local parts is represented by different attributes on the nodes. In this context, the comparison between structured objects is performed through a distance between attributed graphs. If we want to correctly tune the distance and the node correspondence between graphs, we have to add some weights on the node attributes to gauge the importance of each local characteristic. In this paper, we present a method to learn the weights on each node attribute. It is based on building an embedded space and imposing the weights we want to learn to be the constants of the hyperplane deduced by a linear regression applied on a cloud of points. These points represent the node-to-node mappings.

Learning Graph Matching Substitution Weights based on a Linear Regression

CNN Based Predictor of Face Image Quality

Automatic crack detection is a critical task that has the potential to drastically reduce labor-intensive building and road inspections currently being done manually. Recent studies in this field have significantly improved the detection accuracy. However, the methods often heavily rely on costly annotation processes. In addition, to handle a wide variety of target domains, new batches of annotations are usually required for each new environment. This makes the data annotation cost a significant bottleneck when deploying crack detection systems in real life. To resolve this issue, we formulate the crack detection problem as a weakly-supervised problem and propose a two-branched framework. By combining predictions of a supervised model trained on low quality annotations with predictions based on pixel brightness, our framework is less affected by the annotation quality. Experimental results show that the proposed framework retains high detection accuracy even when provided with low quality annotations.

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Location-specific vs location-agnostic machine learning metamodels for predicting pasture nitrogen response rate

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Multi-scale Processing of Noisy Images using Edge Preservation Losses

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