Italy

Machine learning approaches have achieved remarkable advances over the last decades, especially in supervised learning tasks such as classification. Meanwhile, multimedia data and applications experienced an explosive growth, becoming ubiquitous in diverse domains. Due to the huge increase in multimedia data collections and the lack of labeled data in several scenarios, creating methods capable of exploit the unlabeled data and operate under weakly supervision is a crucial task. In this work, we propose a rank-based model to exploit contextual information encoded in the unlabeled data in order to perform weakly supervised classification. We employ different rank-based correlation measures to identify strong similarities relationships and expand the labeled set in an unsupervised way. Subsequently, the extended labeled set is used by a classifier to achieve better accuracy results. The proposed weakly supervised approach was evaluated on multimedia classification tasks, considering several combinations of rank correlation measures and classifiers. An experimental evaluation was conducted on 4 public image datasets and different features. Very positive gains were achieved in comparison with various semi-supervised and supervised classifiers taken as baselines when considering the same amount of labeled data.

ICPR 2020

Weakly Supervised Learning through Rank-Based Contextual Measures

indexing and retrieval

multimedia analysis

weakly supervised learning

semi-supervised learning

classification

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-23 is the Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The theme of this conference is to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities are tailored to the theme of bridges and all are selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers. 
AAAI is providing you with a conference planner, which you can use to help organize your itinerary of activities. This includes talks to attend in person, talks to attend remotely, breaks with colleagues and your site seeing activities. To access this conference planner, please go to [https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io](https://aaai-2023.takemobi.io).

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AAAI 2023

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines.

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. 


We train a detection, classification and score analysis DNN to improve fencing referee decisions and provide trainers statistical analysis. The model classifies ‘Lunges’, ‘Counter-Attack’, and ‘Preparation to attack’ and introduces additional classes to reduce false positives. A scoring function evaluates, in real-time, who is awarded points.

Real-Time Fencing Move Classification and Detection at Touch Time during a Fencing Match

As an essential high-level task of the video-understanding topic, automatically describing a video with natural language has recently gained attention as a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Previous models for video captioning have several limitations, such as the existence of gaps in current semantic representations and the inexpressibility of the generated captions. To deal with these limitations, in this paper, we present a new architecture that we call Attentive Visual Semantic Specialized Network (AVSSN), which is an encoder-decoder model based on our Adaptive Attention Gate and Specialized LSTM layers. This architecture can selectively decide when to use visual or semantic information in the text generation process. The adaptive gate makes the decoder automatically select the relevant information for providing a better temporal state representation than the existing decoders. Besides, the model is capable of learning to improve the expressiveness of generated captions attending to their length, using a sentence-length-related loss function. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the Microsoft Video Description (MSVD) and the Microsoft Research Video-to-Text (MSR-VTT) datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with several popular evaluation metrics: BLEU-4, METEOR, CIDEr, and ROUGE-L.

Attentive Visual Semantic


Recent research on super-resolution (SR) has witnessed major developments with the advancements of deep convolutional neural networks. There is a need for information extraction from scenic text images or even document images on
device, most of which are low-resolution (LR) images. Therefore, SR becomes an essential pre-processing step as Bicubic Upsampling, which is conventionally present in smartphones, performs poorly on LR images. To give the user more control over his privacy, and to reduce the carbon footprint by reducing the
overhead of cloud computing and hours of GPU usage, executing SR models on the edge is a necessity in the recent times. There are various challenges in running and optimizing a model on resource-constrained platforms like smartphones. In this paper, we present a novel deep neural network that reconstructs sharper character edges and thus boosts OCR confidence. The proposed architecture not only achieves significant improvement in PSNR over bicubic upsampling on various benchmark datasets but also runs with an average inference time of 11.7 ms per image. We have outperformed state-of-the-art on the Text330 dataset. We also achieve an OCR accuracy of 75.89% on the ICDAR 2015 TextSR dataset, where ground truth has an accuracy of 78.10%.

On-Device Text Image Super Resolution

Recent advances in automated image analysis have
lead to an increased number of proposed datasets in remote
sensing applications. This permits the successful employment
of data hungry state-of-the-art deep neural networks. However,
the Earth is not covered equally by semantically meaningful
classes. Thus, many land cover datasets suffer from a severe
class imbalance. We show that by taking appropriate measures,
the performance in the minority classes can be improved by
up to 30 percent without affecting the performance in the
majority classes strongly. Additionally, we investigate the use
of an attribute encoding scheme to represent the inherent class
hierarchies commonly observed in land cover analysis.

Towards Tackling Multi-Label Imbalances in Remote Sensing Imagery


Crowd counting in still images is a challenging
problem in practice due to huge crowd-density variations, large
perspective changes, severe occlusion, and variable lighting conditions. The state-of-the-art patch rescaling module (PRM) based
approaches prove to be very effective in improving the crowd
counting performance. However, the PRM module requires an
additional and compromising crowd-density classification process. To address these issues and challenges, the paper proposes
a new multi-resolution fusion based end-to-end crowd counting
network. It employs three deep-layers based columns/branches,
each catering the respective crowd-density scale. These columns
regularly fuse (share) the information with each other. The
network is divided into three phases with each phase containing
one or more columns. Three input priors are introduced to serve
as an efficient and effective alternative to the PRM module,
without requiring any additional classification operations. Along
with the final crowd count regression head, the network also
contains three auxiliary crowd estimation regression heads, which
are strategically placed at each phase end to boost the overall
performance. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark
datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms all
the state-of-the-art models under the RMSE evaluation metric.
The proposed approach also has better generalization capability
with the best results during the cross-dataset experiments.


Multi-Resolution Fusion and Multi-Scale Input Priors Based Crowd Counting

Identifying butterfly species by image patterns is a challenging task in computer vision and pattern recognition community due to many butterfly species having similar shape patterns with complex interior structures and considerable pose variation. In additional, geometrical transformation and illumination variation also make this task more difficult. In this paper, a novel image descriptor, named Gaussian convolution angle (GCA) is proposed for butterfly species classification. The proposed GCA projects the butterfly vein image function and intensity image function along a group of vectors that start from a common contour points and ends at the remaining contour points which results a group of vectors that capture the complex vein patterns and texture patterns of butterfly images. The Gaussian convolution of different scales is conducted to the resulting vector functions to generate a multiscale GCA descriptors. The proposed GCA is not only invariant to geometrical transformation including rotation, scaling and translation, but also invariant to lighting change. The proposed method has been tested on a publicly available butterfly image dataset that has 832 samples of 10 species. It achieves a classification accuracy of 92.03% which is higher than the benchmark methods.

Gaussian Convolution Angles: Invariant Vein and Texture Descriptors for Butterfly Species Identification


Occlusion is one of the most difficult challenges in object tracking to model. This is because unlike other challenges, where data augmentation can be of help, occlusion is hard to simulate as the occluding object can be anything in any shape. In this paper, we propose a simple solution to simulate the effects of occlusion in the latent space. Specifically, we present structured dropout to mimick the change in latent codes under occlusion. We present three forms of dropout (channel dropout, segment dropout and slice dropout) with the various forms of occlusion in mind. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the dropouts are incorporated into two modern Siamese trackers (SiamFC and SiamRPN++). The outputs from multiple dropouts are
combined using an encoder network to obtain the final prediction. Experiments on several tracking benchmarks show the benefits of structured dropouts, while due to their simplicity requiring only small changes to the existing tracker models.

Tackling Occlusion in Siamese Tracking with Structured Dropouts

In this paper, we propose a novel attention based coupled framework for road and pothole segmentation. In many developing countries as well as in rural areas, the drivable areas are neither well-defined, nor well-maintained. Under such circumstances, an Advance Driver Assistant System (ADAS) is needed to assess the drivable area and alert about the potholes ahead to ensure vehicle safety. Moreover, this information can also be used in structured environments for assessment and maintenance of road health. We demonstrate few-shot learning approach for pothole detection to leverage accuracy even with fewer training samples. We report the exhaustive experimental results for road segmentation on KITTI and IDD datasets. We also present pothole segmentation on IDD.

Attention Based Coupled Framework for Road and Pothole Segmentation

We propose a novel capsule network based variational encoder architecture, called Bayesian capsules (B-Caps), to modulate the mean and standard deviation of the sampling distribution in the latent space. We hypothesized that this approach can learn a better representation of features in the latent space than traditional approaches. Our hypothesis was tested by using the learned latent variables for image reconstruction task, where for MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets, different classes were separated successfully in the latent space using our proposed model. Our experimental results have shown improved reconstruction and classification performances for both datasets adding credence to our hypothesis. We also showed that by increasing the latent space dimension, the proposed B-Caps was able to learn a better representation when compared to the traditional variational auto-encoders (VAE). Hence our results indicate the strength of capsule networks in representation learning which has never been examined under the VAE settings before.

Variational Capsule Encoder


In this work, we address the problem of audio-based near-duplicate video retrieval. We propose the Audio Similarity Learning (AuSiL) approach that effectively captures temporal patterns of audio similarity between video pairs. For the robust similarity calculation between two videos, we first extract representative audio-based video descriptors by leveraging transfer learning based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained on a large scale dataset of audio events, and then we calculate the similarity matrix derived from the pairwise similarity of these descriptors. The similarity matrix is subsequently fed to a CNN network that captures the temporal structures existing within its content. We train our network following a triplet generation process and optimizing the triplet loss function. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we have manually annotated two publicly available video datasets based on the audio duplicity between their videos. The proposed approach achieves very competitive results compared to three state-of-the-art methods. Also, unlike the competing methods, it is very robust to the retrieval of audio duplicates generated with speed transformations.

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Next from ICPR 2020

Real-Time Fencing Move Classification and Detection at Touch Time during a Fencing Match

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