Italy

Decision trees excel at interpretability of their prediction results. 
To achieve required prediction accuracies, however, often large ensembles of decision trees -- random forests -- are considered, reducing interpretability due to large size. 
Additionally, their size slows down inference on modern hardware and restricts their applicability in low-memory embedded devices.
We introduce *Decision Snippet Features*, which are obtained from small subtrees that appear frequently in trained random forests.
We subsequently show that linear models on top of these features achieve comparable and sometimes even better predictive performance than the original random forest, while reducing the model size by up to two orders of magnitude.

ICPR 2020

Decision Snippet Features

frequent subtree mining

decision tree

random forest

representation learning

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 recent years, various types of sensors observe the real world. Especially, weather sensors are densely installed all over the world to observe current weather situations at various places. However, weather signals such as the temperature or humidity obtained by weather sensors are intuitively difficult for humans to understand. On the other hand, images captured by typical RGB cameras can tell weather situations at the captured places in a more comprehensible way for humans; however, cameras are only installed at limited places and are not necessarily open to public due to privacy issues. In order to solve this problem, the goal of our work is to generate images which can tell weather situations at arbitrary time and locations. This can be realized by using a conditional generative adversarial network architecture that takes an image and a condition to transform the image accordingly to the condition. Training such image generator requires a large number of image and condition pairs as the training data. Although weather signals can be easily collected from weather sensors, collecting their spatially and temporally synchronized outdoor images is not easy. Thus, we propose a semi-supervised method for training the image generator. A relatively small number of pairs of an outdoor image and weather signals is collected, each from different web services, by considering their semantic consistency. The collected pairs are used to train a predictor for predicting weather signals from a given outdoor image. Then, the image generator is trained by using a large number of pairs of an outdoor image and pseudo weather signals predicted by the predictor as the training data.

Semi-Supervised Outdoor Image Generation Conditioned on Weather Signals

Person re-identification (re-id) is an important task in video surveillance. It is challenging due to the appearance of the person varying a wide range across non-overlapping camera views. In recent years, attention-based models are introduced to learn discriminative representation. In this paper, we consider the attention selection in a natural way as like human moving attention on different parts of the visual field for person re-id. In concrete, we propose a Recurrent Deep Attention Network (RDAN) with an attention selection mechanism based on reinforcement learning. The proposed RDAN aims to progressively observe the identity-sensitive regions to build up the representation of individuals. Extensive experiments on three person reid benchmarks Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, and CUHK03- NP demonstrate the proposed method can achieve competitive performance.

Recurrent Deep Attention Network for Person Re-Identification


The generative adversarial network (GAN) exhibits great superiority in the face attribute synthesis task. However, existing methods have very limited effects on the expansion of new attributes. To overcome the limitations of a single network in new attribute synthesis, a continuous learning method for face attribute synthesis is proposed in this work. First, the feature vector of the input image is extracted and attribute direction regression is performed in the feature space to obtain the axes of different attributes. The feature vector is then linearly guided along the axis so that images with target attributes can be synthesized by the decoder. Finally, to make the network capable of continuous learning, the orthogonal direction modification module is used to extend the newly-added attributes. Experimental results show that the proposed method can endow a single network with the ability to learn attributes continuously, and, as compared to those produced by the current state-of-the-art methods, the synthetic attributes have higher accuracy.

Continuous learning of face attribute synthesis


The rate of publishing scientific articles is increasing day by day which has created difficulty for the researchers to learn about the recent advancements in a faster way. Also, relying on the abstract of these published articles is not a good idea as they cover only broad ideas of the article. The summarization of scientific documents (SDS) addresses this challenge. In this paper, we propose a system for SDS having two components: identifying the relevant sentences in the article using citation context; generation of the summary by posing SDS as a binary optimization problem. For the purpose of optimization, a meta-heuristic evolutionary algorithm is utilized. In order to improve the quality of summary, various aspects measuring the relevance of sentences are simultaneously optimized using the concept of multi-objective optimization. Inspired by the popularity of graph-based algorithms like LexRank which is popularly used in solving summarization problems of different real-life applications, its impact is studied in fusion with our optimization framework. An ablation study is also performed to identify the most contributing aspects for the summary generation. We investigated the performance of our proposed framework on two datasets related to the computational linguistic domain, CL-SciSumm 2016 and CL-SciSumm 2017, in terms of ROUGE measures. The results obtained illustrate that our framework effectively improves other existing methods. Further, results are validated using the statistical paired t-test.

Scientific Document Summarization using Citation Context and Multi-objective Optimization

As reported by Hong Kong Government in 2017, there are more than 1.5 million residents suffering from hearing impairment in Hong Kong. Most of them rely on Hong Kong Sign Language for daily communication while there are only 63 registered sign language interpreters in Hong Kong. To address this specific social issue and also facilitate the effective communication between the hearing impaired and other people, this paper introduces a word-level Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) dataset which currently includes 45 isolated words and at least 30 sign videos per word performed by different signers(more than 1500 videos in total now and still enlarging). Based on this dataset, this paper systemically compares the performances of various deep learning approaches, including (1) 2D histogram of oriented gradients(HOG) feature/pose estimation/feature extraction with long-short term memory(LSTM) layer; (2) 3D Residual Neural Network(ResNet) (3) (2+1)D Residual Neural Network, in HKSL recognition. Meanwhile, to further improve the accuracy of sign language recognition, this paper proposes a novel method called (3+2+1)D ResNet Model with Frame Selection which adopts blurriness detection with Laplacian kernel to construct highquality video clips and also combines both (2+1)D and 3D ResNet for recognizing the sign language. At the end, the experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other deep learning approaches and attains an impressive accuracy of 94.6% in our dataset.

Applying (3+2+1)D Residual Neural Network with Frame Selection for Hong Kong Sign Language Recognition

The popularity of wearable cameras has opened up a new dimension for egocentric activity recognition. While some methods introduce attention mechanisms into deep learning networks to capture fine-grained hand-object interactions, they often neglect exploring the spatio-temporal relationships. Generating spatial attention, without adequately exploiting temporal consistency, will result in potentially sub-optimal performance in the video-based task. In this paper, we propose a flow-guided spatial attention tracking (F-SAT) module, which is based on enhancing motion patterns and inter-frame information, to highlight the discriminative features from regions of interest across a video sequence. A new form of input, namely the optical-flow volume, is presented to provide informative cues from moving parts for spatial attention tracking. The proposed F-SAT module is deployed to a two-branch-based deep architecture, which fuses complementary information for egocentric activity recognition. Experimental results on three egocentric activity benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Flow-guided Spatial Attention Tracking for Egocentric Activity Recognition

Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is a challenging problem due to the complex serving scenario and diverse face presentation attack patterns. Using single modal images which are usually captured with RGB cameras is not able to deal with the former because of serious overfitting problems. The existing multi-modal FAS datasets rarely pay attention to the cross domain problems, training FAS system on these data leads to inconsistencies and low generalization capabilities in deployment since imaging principles(structured light, TOF, etc.) and pre-processing methods vary between devices. We explore the subtle fine-grained differences betweeen multi-modal cameras and proposed a cross domain multi-modal FAS dataset GREAT-FASD and several evaluation protocols for academic community. Furthermore, we incorporate the multiplicative attention and center loss to enhance the representative power of CNN via seeking out complementary information as a powerful baseline. In addition, extensive experiments have been conducted on the proposed dataset to analyze the robustness to distinguish spoof faces and bona-fide faces. Experimental results show the effectiveness of proposed method and achieve the state-of-the-art competitive results. Finally, we visualize our future distribution in hidden space and observe that the proposed method is able to lead the network to generate a large margin for face anti-spoofing task.

A Cross Domain Multi-modal Dataset for Robust Face Anti-spoofing


Characterizing the spatial relationship between blood vessel and lymphatic vascular structures, in the mice dura mater tissue, is useful for modeling fluid flows and changes in dynamics in various disease processes. We propose a new deep learning-based approach to fuse a set of multi-channel single-focus microscopy images within each volumetric z-stack into a single fused image that accurately captures as much of
the vascular structures as possible. The red spectral channel captures small blood vessels and the green fluorescence channel images lymphatics structures in the intact dura mater attached to bone. The deep architecture Multi-Channel Fusion U-Net (MCFU-Net) combines multi-slice regression likelihood maps of thin linear structures using max pooling for each channel independently to estimate a slice-based focus selection map. We compare MCFU-Net with a widely used derivative-based multiscale Hessian fusion method [8]. The multi-scale Hessian-based fusion produces dark-halos, non-homogeneous backgrounds and less detailed anatomical structures. Perception based no-reference image quality assessment metrics PIQUE, NIQE, and BRISQUE confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method

Multi-focus Image Fusion for Confocal Microscopy Using U-Net Regression Map

As a typical cross-modal problem, visual question answering (VQA) has received increasing attention from the communities of computer vision and natural language processing. Reading and reasoning about texts in the images is a burgeoning and important topic in VQA, especially for the visually impaired assistance applications. Given a image, it aims to predict an answer to a provided natural language question closely related to its textual contents. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end textual content based VQA model, which grounds question answering both on the visual and textual information. 


Dual Path Multi-modal High-Order Features for Textual Content based Visual Question Answering


Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the western world, with medical imaging playing a key role for early diagnosis. Focusing on breast cancer, one of the emerging imaging methodologies is Dynamic Contrast Enhanced-Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI). The flip side of using DCE-MRI is in its long acquisition times that often causes the patient to move. This results in motion artefacts, namely distortions in the acquired image that can affect DCE-MRI analysis. A possible solution consists in the use of Motion Correction Techniques
(MCTs), i.e. procedures intended to re-align the postcontrast image to the corresponding pre-contrast (reference) one. This task is particularly critic in DCE-MRI, due to brightness variations introduced in post-contrast images by the contrast agent flowing. To face this problem, in this work we introduce a new MCT for breast DCE-MRI leveraging Physiologically Based PharmacoKinetic (PBPK) modelling and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to determine the most suitable physiologically compliant transformation. To this aim, we propose a Neural Registration Network relying on a very task-specific loss function explicitly designed to take into account the contrast agent flowing while enforcing a correct re-alignment. We compared the obtained results against some conventional motion correction techniques, evaluating the performance on a patient-by-patient basis. Results show that the proposed approach results to be the best performing even when compared against other techniques designed to take into account for brightness variations.

Downloads

Next from ICPR 2020

Semi-Supervised Outdoor Image Generation Conditioned on Weather Signals

Similar lecture

Semantics-Guided Representation Learning with Applications to Visual Synthesis