Italy

Accurate localization is a foundational capacity, required for autonomous vehicles to accomplish other tasks such as navigation or path planning. It is a common practice for vehicles to use GPS to acquire location information. However, the application of GPS can result in severe challenges when vehicles run within the inner city where different kinds of structures may shadow the GPS signal and lead to inaccurate location results. To address the localization challenges of urban settings, we propose a novel feature voting technique for visual localization. Different from the conventional front-view-based method, our approach employs views from three directions (front, left, and right) and thus significantly improves the robustness of location prediction. In our work, we craft the proposed feature voting method into three state-of-the-art visual localization networks and modify their architectures properly so that they can be applied for vehicular operation. Extensive field test results indicate that our approach can predict location robustly even in challenging inner-city settings. Our research sheds light on using the visual localization approach to help autonomous vehicles to find accurate location information in a city maze, within a desirable time constraint.

ICPR 2020

Visual Localization for Autonomous Driving: Mapping the Accurate Location in the City Maze

autonomous vehicles

feature voting

visual localization

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


In this paper we introduce a novel end-to-end blind inpainting algorithm for masonry wall images, performing the automatic detection and virtual completion of occluded or damaged wall regions.

A GAN based Blind Inpainting Method for Masonry Wall Images

Visual pose regression models estimate the camera pose from a query image with a single forward pass. Current models learn pose encoding from an image using deep convolutional networks which are trained per scene. The resulting encoding is typically passed to a multi-layer perceptron in order to regress the pose. In this work, we propose that scene-specific pose encoders are not required for pose regression and that encodings trained for visual similarity can be used instead. In
order to test our hypothesis, we take a shallow architecture of several fully connected layers and train it with pre-computed encodings from a generic image retrieval model. We find that these encodings are not only sufficient to regress the camera pose, but that, when provided to a branching fully connected architecture, a trained model can achieve competitive results and even surpass current state-of-the-art pose regressors in some cases. Moreover, we show that for outdoor localization, the proposed architecture is the only pose regressor, to date, consistently localizing in under 2 meters and 5 degrees.

Do We Really Need Scene-specific Pose Encoders?


Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is studied to obtain crucial information about the condition of a patient’s heart. Machine learning based automated medical diagnostic systems that may help to evaluate the condition of the heart from this signal are required to be trained using large volumes of labelled training samples and the same may increase the chance of compromising with the patients’ privacy. To solve this issue, generation of synthetic electrocardiogram signals by learning only from the general distributions of the available real training samples have been attempted in the literature. However, these studies did not pay necessary attention to the specific vital details of these signals, such as the P wave, the QRS complex, and the T wave. This shortcoming often results in the generation of unrealistic synthetic signals, such as a signal which does not contain one or more of the above components. In the present study, a novel deep generative architecture, termed as CardioGAN, based on generative adversarial network and powered by the effective attention mechanism has been designed which is capable of learning the intricate inter-dependencies among the various parts of real samples leading to the generation
of more realistic electrocardiogram signals. Also, it helps in reducing the risk of breaching the privacy of patients. Extensive experimentation performed by us establishes that the proposed method achieves a better performance in generating synthetic electrocardiogram signals in comparison to the existing methods.


CardioGAN: An Attention-based Generative Adversarial Network for Generation of Electrocardiograms

Moving object detection in a video plays an important role in many vision applications. Recently, moving object detection using appearance modeling based on a convolutional neural network has been actively developed. However, the CNN- based methods usually require the user’s supervision of the first frame so that it becomes highly dependent on the training dataset. In contrast, the method of finding a foreground, which models a background occupying a large proportion in an image, can detect a moving object efficiently in an unsupervised manner. However, existing methods based on background modeling in a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera suffer many false positives or loss of moving objects due to the estimation error of camera motion. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we propose a moving object detection method for a PTZ camera through two background models. In an unsupervised way, our method builds the two background models that have different roles: 1) a coarse background model for detecting large changes, and 2) a fine background model for detecting small changes. In more detail, the coarse background model builds a block-based Gaussian model, and the fine model builds a sample consensus model. Both models are adaptively updated according to the estimated camera motion in the video recorded by a PTZ camera. Then, each foreground result from two background models is incorporated to fill the moving object region. Through experiments, the proposed method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods and operates in real-time without parallel processing. In addition, we showed the effectiveness of the proposed model through improved results of moving object detection through combination with the latest supervised method.

Unsupervised Moving Object Detection through Background Models for PTZ Camera

Multi-scale feature fusion has been an effective way for improving the performance of semantic segmentation. How- ever, current methods generally fail to consider the semantic gaps between the shallow (low-level) and deep (high-level) features and thus the fusion methods may not be optimal. In this paper, to address the issues of the semantic gap between the feature from different layers, we propose a unified framework based on the U-shape encoder-decoder architecture, named Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (EFPN). Specifically, the semantic enhancement module (SEM), edge extraction module (EEM), and context aggregation model (CAM) are incorporated into the decoder network to improve the robustness of the multi- level features aggregation. In addition, a global fusion model (GFM), which in the encoder branch is proposed to capture more semantic information in the deep layers and effectively transmit the high-level semantic features to each layer. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results show that the proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art results on three public datasets, namely PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes, and PASCAL Context. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for other visual tasks that require frequent fusing features and upsampling.

Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network for Semantic Segmentation


This presentation proposes a method that can classify foot strike types using a deep learning model and can extract unknown factors, which enables to evaluate running motions without being influenced by biases of sports experts, using the contribution degree of input values (CDIV). Accelerometers are attached to the runner’s body, and when the runner runs, a fixed camera observes the runner and acquires a video sequence synchronously with the accelerometers. To train a deep learning model for classifying foot strikes, we annotate foot strike acceleration data for RFS (Rearfoot strike) or non-RFS objectively by watching the video. To interpret the unknown factors extracted from the learned model, we calculate two CDIVs: the contributions of the resampling time and the accelerometer value to the output (foot strike type) . 
Experiments on classifying unknown runners’ foot strikes were conducted. As a common result to sport science, it is confirmed that the CDIVs contribute highly at the time of the right foot strike, and the sensor values corresponding to the right and left tibias contribute highly to classifying the foot strikes. Experimental results show the right tibia is important for classifying foot strikes. This is because many of the training data represent difference between the two foot strikes in the right tibia. As a conclusion, our proposed method could extract unknown factors from the classifier and could interpret the factors that contain similar knowledge to the prior knowledge of experts, as well as new findings that are not included in conventional knowledge.

Extracting and Interpreting Unknown Factors with Classifier for Foot Strike Types in Running

This paper addresses unsupervised few-shot object recognition, where all training images are unlabeled, and test images are divided into queries and a few labeled support images per object class of interest. The training and test images do not share object classes. We extend the vanilla GAN with two loss functions, both aimed at self-supervised learning. The ﬁrst is a reconstruction loss that enforces the discriminator to reconstruct the probabilistically sampled latent code which has been used for generating the “fake” image. The second is a triplet loss that enforces the discriminator to output image encodings that are closer for more similar images. Evaluation, comparisons, and detailed ablation studies are done in the context of few-shot classiﬁcation. Our approach signiﬁcantly outperforms the state of the art on the Mini-Imagenet and Tiered-Imagenet datasets.

A Self-supervised GAN for Unsupervised Few-shot Object Recognition


Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is booming in recent years. As we all know, the text recognition results are vulnerable to slight perturbation in input images, thus a method for measuring how reliable the results are is crucial. 
In this paper, We propose a coarse-to-fine method for lexicon-free OCR confidence prediction which can be embedded with any text sequence recognition networks.

Robust Lexicon-Free Confidence Prediction for Text Recognition


There have been attempts to solve the Single Image Super-resolution problem using lightweight networks, considering limited computational resources for real-world applications. In previous works, residual paths in networks are pre-fixed and manually designed by human researchers. The proposed method allows the network to dynamically select residual paths depending on the input image, based on the idea of attention mechanism.

Single Image Super-Resolution with Dynamic Residual Attention

Object detection has been paid rising attention in computer vision field. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) extract high-level semantic features of images, which directly determine the performance of object detection. As a common solution, embedding integration modules into CNNs can enrich extracted features and thereby improve the performance. However, the instability and inconsistency of internal multiple branches exist in these modules. To address this problem, we propose a novel multibranch module called Efficient-Receptive Field Block (E-RFB), in which multiple levels of features are combined for network optimization. Specifically, by downsampling and increasing depth, the E-RFB provides sufficient RF. Second, in order to eliminate the inconsistency across different branches, a novel spatial attention mechanism, namely, Group Spatial Attention Module (GSAM) is proposed. The GSAM gradually narrows a feature map by channel grouping; thus it encodes the information between spatial and channel dimensions into the final attention heat map. Third, the proposed module can be easily joined in various CNNs to enhance feature representation as a plug-and-play component. With SSD-style detectors, our method halves the parameters of the original detection head and achieves high accuracy on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets. Moreover, the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods based on similar framework.


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