Italy

In Astronomy, a huge amount of image data is generated daily by photometric surveys, which scan the sky to collect data from stars, galaxies and other celestial objects. In this paper, we propose a technique to leverage unlabeled astronomical images to pre-train deep convolutional neural networks, in order to learn a domain-specific feature extractor which improves the results of machine learning techniques in setups with small amounts of labeled data available. We show that our technique produces results which are in many cases better than using ImageNet pre-training.

ICPR 2020

Self-supervised Learning for Astronomical Image Classification

astronomical image processing

self-supervised learning

transfer learning

ECAI2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI, including:




**An extensive programme of workshops, tutorials, and invited speakers**

**The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference (PAIS)**

**The Frontiers in AI track sessions**

**The Lab To Market event**

**The Women in AI time**

**The EU Challenges forum**

… and many more!

ECAI 2020

ECAI 2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI.

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. 


In recent years, surveillance cameras are widely deployed in public places, and the general crime rate has been reduced signiﬁcantly due to these ubiquitous devices. Usually, these cameras provide cues and evidence after crimes are conducted, while they are rarely used to prevent or stop criminal activities in time. It is both time and labor consuming to manually monitor a large amount of video data from surveillance cameras. Therefore, automatically recognizing violent behaviors from video signals becomes essential. This paper summarizes several existing video datasets for violence detection and proposes the RWF-2000 database with 2,000 videos captured by surveillance cameras in real-world scenes. Also, we present a new method that utilizes both the merits of 3D-CNNs and optical ﬂow, namely Flow Gated Network. The proposed approach obtains an accuracy of 87.25% on the test set of our proposed database. The database and source codes are currently open to access.

RWF-2000: An Open Large Scale Video Database for Violence Detection


We propose a novel , compact network RCN to recognize Chinese characters. The experiments show great superiority on few-shot tasks and scene character dataset.

Radical Counter Network for robust Chinese character recognition


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.

Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Power Line Outage Identification

Recently, many Near infrared-visible (NIR-VIS) heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) methods have been proposed in the community. But it remains a challenging problem because of the sensing gap along with large pose variations. In this paper, we propose an Exemplar Guided Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination (EGCH) to reduce the domain discrepancy through disentangled representation learning. For each modality, EGCH contains a spectral encoder as well as a structure encoder to disentangle spectral and structure representation, respectively. It also contains a traditional generator that reconstructs the input from the above two representations, and a structure generator that predicts the facial parsing map from the structure representation. Besides, mutual information minimization and maximization are conducted to boost disentanglement and make representations adequately expressed. Then the translation is built on structure representations between two modalities. Provided with the transformed NIR structure representation and original VIS spectral representation, EGCH is capable to produce high-fidelity VIS images that preserve the topology structure of the input NIR while transfer the spectral information of an arbitrary VIS exemplar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves more promising results both qualitatively and quantitatively than the state-of-the-art NIR-VIS methods.

Exemplar Guided Cross-Spectral Face Hallucination via Mutual Information Disentanglement

Efficient Game-Theoretic Hypergraph Matching

Face anti-spoofing is becoming increasingly indispensable for face recognition systems, which are vulnerable to various spoofing attacks performed using fake photos and videos. In this paper, a novel ``LDN-TOP representation followed by ProCRC classification" pipeline for face anti-spoofing is proposed. We use local directional number pattern (LDN) with the derivative-Gaussian mask to capture detailed appearance information resisting illumination variations and noises, which can influence the texture pattern distribution. To further capture motion information, we extend LDN to a spatial-temporal variant named local directional number pattern from three orthogonal planes (LDN-TOP). The multi-scale LDN-TOP capturing complete information is extracted from color images to generate the feature vector with powerful representation capacity. Finally, the feature vector is fed into the probabilistic collaborative representation based classifier (ProCRC) for face anti-spoofing. Our method is evaluated on three challenging public datasets, namely CASIA FASD, Replay-Attack database, and UVAD database using sequence-based evaluation protocol. The experimental results show that our method can achieve promising performance with 0.37% EER on CASIA and 5.73% HTER on UVAD. The performance on Replay-Attack database is also competitive.


Face Anti-spoofing Based on Dynamic Color Texture Analysis Using Local Directional Number Pattern

Attention mechanisms is frequently used to learn the discriminative features for better feature representations. In this paper, we extend the attention mechanism to the task of weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) and propose the dual-attention guided dropblock module (DGDM), which aims at learning the informative and complementary visual patterns for WSOL. This module contains two key components, the channel attention guided dropout (CAGD) and the spatial attention guided dropblock (SAGD). To model channel interdependencies, the CAGD ranks the channel attentions and treats the top-k attentions with the largest magnitudes as the important ones. It also keeps some low-valued elements to increase their value if they become important during training. The SAGD can efficiently remove the most discriminative information by erasing the contiguous regions of feature maps rather than individual pixels. This guides the model to capture the less discriminative parts for classification. Furthermore, it can also distinguish the foreground
objects from the background regions to alleviate the attention misdirection. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art localization performance.

Dual-attention Guided Dropblock Module for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

Activity detection in security videos is a difficult problem due to multiple factors such as large field of view, presence of multiple activities, varying scales and viewpoints, and its untrimmed nature. The existing research in activity detection is mainly focused on datasets, such as UCF-101, JHMDB, THUMOS, and AVA, which partially address these issues. The requirement of processing the security videos in realtime makes this even more challenging. In this work we propose Gabriella, a real-time online system to perform activity detection on untrimmed security videos. The proposed method consists of three stages: tubelet extraction, activity classification, and online tubelet merging. For tubelet extraction, we propose a localization network which takes a video clip as input and spatio-temporally detects potential foreground regions at multiple scales to generate action tubelets. We propose a novel Patch-Dice loss to handle large variations in actor size. Our online processing of videos at a clip level drastically reduces the computation time in detecting activities. The detected tubelets are assigned activity class scores by the classification network and merged together using our proposed Tubelet-Merge Action-Split (TMAS) algorithm to form the final action detections. The TMAS algorithm efficiently connects the tubelets in an online fashion to generate action detections which are robust against varying length activities. We perform our experiments on the VIRAT and MEVA (Multiview Extended Video with Activities) datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of speed (∼100 fps) and performance with state-of-the-art results.

Gabriella: An Online System for Real-Time Activity Detection in Untrimmed Security Videos

Visual Privacy Attribute Classification (VPAC) identifies privacy information leakage via social media images. These images containing privacy attributes such as skin color, face, or gender are classified into multiple privacy attribute categories in VPAC. With limited works in this task, current methods often extract features from images and simply classify the extracted feature into multiple privacy attribute classes. The dependencies between privacy attributes, e.g., skin color and face typically co-exist in the same image, are usually ignored in classification, which causes performance degradation in VPAC. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Privacy Attributes-aware Message Passing Neural Network (PA-MPNN) to address VPAC. Privacy attributes are considered as nodes on a graph and an MPNN is introduced to model the privacy attribute dependencies. To generate representative features for privacy attribute nodes, a class-wise encoder-decoder is proposed to learn a latent space for each attribute. An attention mechanism with multiple correlation matrices is also introduced in MPNN to learn the privacy attributes graph automatically. Experimental results on the Privacy Attribute Dataset demonstrate that our framework achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods for visual privacy attributes classification.

Privacy Attributes-aware Message Passing Neural Network for Visual Privacy Attributes Classification

Mass utilization of body-worn cameras has led to a huge corpus of available egocentric video. Existing video summarization algorithms can accelerate browsing such videos by selecting (visually) interesting shots from them. Nonetheless, since the system user still has to watch the summary videos, browsing large video databases remain a challenge. Hence, in this work, we propose to generate a textual synopsis, consisting of a few sentences describing the most important events in a long egocentric videos. Users can read the short text to gain insight about the video, and more importantly, efficiently search through the content of a large video database using text queries. Since egocentric videos are long and contain many activities and events, using video-to-text algorithms results in thousands of descriptions, many of which are incorrect. Therefore, we propose a multi-task learning scheme to simultaneously generate descriptions for video segments and summarize the resulting descriptions in an end-to-end fashion. We Input a set of video shots and the network generates a text description for each shot. Next, visual-language content matching unit that is trained with a weakly supervised objective, identifies the correct descriptions. Finally, the last component of our network, called purport network, evaluates the descriptions all together to select the ones containing crucial information. Out of thousands of descriptions generated for the video, a few informative sentences are returned to the user. We validate our framework on the challenging UT Egocentric video dataset, where each video is between 3 to 5 hours long, associated with over 3000 textual descriptions on average. The generated textual summaries, including only 5 percent (or less) of the generated descriptions, are compared to groundtruth summaries in text domain using well-established metrics in natural language processing.

Downloads

Next from ICPR 2020

RWF-2000: An Open Large Scale Video Database for Violence Detection

Similar lecture

Multimodal Transfer Learning-based Approaches for Retinal Vascular Segmentation