Italy

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.

ICPR 2020

Nearest Neighbor Classification Based onActivation Space of Convolutional Neural Network

convex hull

activation space

convolutional neural network

classification

Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is partnering with AFCEA San Diego chapter to host the workshop.

The NAML workshop is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team.

The goals of NAML are:

* To spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications

* To connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements

* To build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community

**Watch this video to hear about the AFCEA purpose.**

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NAML 2021

poster

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. 



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.

Video Summarization with a Dual Attention Capsule Network

Spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCNs) have shown great performance in the context of skeleton-based action recognition. Nevertheless, ST-GCNs use raw skeleton data as vertex features. Such features have low dimensionality and might not be optimal for action discrimination. Moreover, a single layer of temporal convolution is used to model short-term temporal dependencies but can be insufficient for capturing both long-term. In this paper, we extend the Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for skeleton-based action recognition by introducing two novel modules, namely, the Graph Vertex Feature Encoder (GVFE) and the Dilated Hierarchical Temporal Convolutional Network (DH-TCN). On the one hand, the GVFE module learns appropriate vertex features for action recognition by encoding raw skeleton data into a new feature space. On the other hand, the DH-TCN module is capable of capturing both short-term and long-term temporal dependencies using a hierarchical dilated convolutional network. Experiments have been conducted on the challenging NTU RGB-D 60, NTU RGB-D 120 and Kinetics datasets. The obtained results show that our method competes with state-of-the-art approaches while using a smaller number of layers and parameters; thus reducing the required training time and memory.

Vertex Feature Encoding and Hierarchical Temporal Modeling in a Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Action Recognition


The paper presents a new theory of combined moment invariants to Gaussian blur and spatial affine transformation. The blur kernel may be arbitrary oriented, scaled, and elongated. No prior information about the kernel parameters and about the underlying affine transform is required. The main idea, expressed by the Substitution Theorem, is to substitute pure blur invariants into traditional affine moment invariants. Potential applications of the new descriptors are in blur-invariant image recognition and in robust template matching.

Combined Invariants to Gaussian Blur and Affine Transformation

Due to the irregularity and sparsity of 3D point clouds, applying convolutional neural networks directly on them
can be nontrivial. In this work, we propose a simple but effective approach for 3D Point Clouds analysis, named PC-Net. PC-Net directly learns on point sets and is equipped with three new operations: first, we apply a novel scale-aware neighbor search for adaptive neighborhood extracting; second, for each neighboring point, we learn a local spatial feature as a complement to their associated features; finally, at the end we use a distance reweighted pooling to aggregate all the features from local structure. With this module, we design hierarchical neural network for point cloud understanding. For both classification and segmentation tasks, our architecture proves effective in the experiments and our models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance over existing deep learning methods on popular point cloud benchmarks.

PC-Net: A Deep Network for 3D Point Clouds Analysis

Exciting research is being conducted using Google’s street view imagery. Researchers can have access to training data that allows CNN training for topics ranging from assessing neighborhood environments to estimating the age of a building. However, due to the uncontrolled nature of imagery available via Google’s Street View API, data collection can be lengthy and tedious. In an effort to help researchers gather address specific dwelling images efficiently, we developed an innovative and novel way of automatically performing this task. It was accomplished by exploiting Google’s publicly available platform with a combination of 3 separate network types and postprocessing techniques. Our uniquely developed NMS technique helped achieve 99.4%, valid, address specific, dwelling images.

Automatically Gather Address Specific Dwelling Images Using Google Street View

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have enabled significant advancements to the state-of-the-art in computer vision. For classification tasks, CNNs have widely employed probabilistic output and have shown the significance of providing additional confidence for predictions. However, such probabilistic methodologies are not widely applicable for addressing regression problems using CNNs, as regression involves learning unconstrained continuous and, in many cases, multi-variate target variables. We propose a PRObabilistic Parametric rEgression Loss (PROPEL) that facilitates CNNs to learn parameters of probability distributions for addressing probabilistic regression problems. PROPEL is fully differentiable and, hence, can be easily incorporated for end-to-end training of existing CNN regression architectures using existing optimization algorithms. The proposed method is flexible as it enables learning complex unconstrained probabilities while being generalizable to higher dimensional multi-variate regression problems. We utilize a PROPEL-based CNN to address the problem of learning hand and head orientation from uncalibrated color images. Our experimental validation and comparison with existing CNN regression loss functions show that PROPEL improves the accuracy of a CNN by enabling probabilistic regression, while significantly reducing required model parameters by $10 \times$, resulting in improved generalization as compared to the existing state-of-the-art.


PROPEL: Probabilistic Parametric Regression Loss for Convolutional Neural Networks

We design a video analytics system to measure gait over time and detect trend and outliers in the data. The purpose is for health monitoring, the thesis being that trend especially can lead to early detection of declining health and be used to prevent
accidents such as falls in the elderly. We use the OpenPose deep learning tool for recognizing the back and neck angle features of walking people, and measure speed as well. Trend and outlier statistics are calculated upon time series of these features. A challenge in this work is lack of testing data of decaying gait. We first designed experiments to measure consistency of the system on a healthy population, then analytically altered this real data to simulate gait decay. Results on about 4000 gait samples of 50 people over 3 months showed good separation of healthy gait subjects from those with trend or outliers, and furthermore the trend measurement was able to detect subtle decay in gait not easily discerned by the human eye.

Video Analytics Gait Trend Measurement for Fall Prevention and Health Monitoring

This paper addresses the problem of active visual place recognition (VPR) from a novel perspective of long-term autonomy. In our approach, a next-best-view (NBV) planner plans an optimal action-observation-sequence to maximize the expected cost-performance for a visual route classification task. A difficulty arises from the fact that the NBV planner is trained and tested in different domains (times of day, weather conditions, and seasons). Existing NBV methods may be confused and deteriorated by the domain-shifts, and require significant efforts for adapting them to a new domain. We address this issue by a novel deep convolutional neural network (DNN) -based NBV planner that does not require the adaptation step. Our main contributions in this paper are summarized as follows: (1) We present a novel domain-invariant NBV planner that is specifically tailored for DNN-based VPR. (2) We formulate the active VPR as a POMDP problem and present a feasible solution to address the inherent intractability. Specifically, the probability distribution vector (PDV) output by the available DNN is used as a domain invariant observation model without the need to retrain it. (3) We verify efficacy of the proposed approach through challenging cross-season VPR experiments, where it is confirmed that the proposed approach clearly outperforms the previous single-view-based or multi-view-based VPR in terms of VPR accuracy and action-observation-cost.

Deep Next-Best-View Planner for Cross-Season Visual Route Classification

Semantic scene completion is the task of predicting a complete 3D representation of volumetric occupancy with corresponding semantic labels for a scene from a single point of view. In this paper, we present EdgeNet, a new end-to-end neural network architecture that fuses information from depth and RGB, explicitly representing RGB edges in 3D space. Previous works on this task used either depth-only or depth with colour by projecting 2D semantic labels generated by a 2D segmentation network into the 3D volume, requiring a two step training process. Our EdgeNet representation encodes colour information in 3D space using edge detection and flipped truncated signed distance, which improves semantic completion scores especially in hard to detect classes. We achieved state-of-the-art scores on both synthetic and real datasets with a simpler and a more computationally efficient training pipeline than competing approaches.

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