Italy

Feature pyramids are widely used to improve scale invariance for object detection. Most methods just map the objects to feature maps with relevant square receptive fields, but rarely pay attention to the aspect ratio variation, which is also an important property of object instances. It will lead to a poor match between rectangular objects and assigned features with square receptive fields, thus preventing from accurate recognition and location. Besides, the information propagation among feature layers is sparse, namely, each feature in the pyramid may mainly or only contain single-level information, which is not representative enough for classification and localization sub-tasks. In this paper, Bidirectional Matrix Feature Pyramid Network (BMFPN) is proposed to address these issues. It consists of three modules: Diagonal Layer Generation Module (DLGM), Top-down Module (TDM) and Bottom-up Module (BUM). First, multi-level features extracted by backbone are fed into DLGM to produce the base features. Then these base features are utilized to construct the final feature pyramid through TDM and BUM in series. The receptive fields of the designed feature layers in BMFPN have various scales and aspect ratios. Objects can be correctly assigned to appropriate and representative feature maps with relevant receptive fields depending on its scale and aspect ratio properties. Moreover, TDM and BUM form bidirectional and reticular information flow, which effectively fuses multi-level information in top-down and bottom-up manner respectively. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed architecture, an end-toend anchor-free detector is designed and trained by integrating BMFPN into FCOS. And the center-ness branch in FCOS is modified with our Gaussian center-ness branch (GCB), which brings another slight improvement. Without bells and whistles, our method gains +3.3%, +2.4% and +2.6% AP on MS COCO dataset from baselines with ResNet-50, ResNet-101 and ResNeXt-101 backbones, respectively.

ICPR 2020

Bidirectional Matrix Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection

aspect ratio

scale

feature pyramid

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

We present a novel Siamese graph convolution network (GCN) for face sketch recognition. To build a graph from an image, we utilize a deep learning method to detect the image edges, and then use a superpixel method to segment the edge image. Each segmented superpixel region is taken as a node, and each pair of adjacent regions forms an edge of the graph. Graphs from both a face sketch and a face photo are input into the Siamese GCN for recognition. A deep graph matching method is used to share messages between cross-modal graphs in this model. Experiments show that the GCN can obtain high performance on several face photo-sketch datasets, including seen and unseen face photo-sketch datasets. It is also shown that the model performance based on the graph structure representation of the data using the Siamese GCN is more stable than a Siamese CNN model.

Siamese Graph Convolution Network for Face Sketch Recognition

As the basis of advanced visual tasks such as vehicle tracking and traffic flow analysis, vehicle detection needs to accurately predict the position and category of vehicle objects. In the past decade, deep learning methods have made great progress. However, we also notice that some existing cases are not studied thoroughly. First, false positive on the background regions is a critical problem. Second, most of the previous approaches only optimize a single vehicle detection model, ignoring the relationship between different visual perception tasks. For these two findings, we introduce a foreground segmentation branch for the first time, which can predict the pixel level of vehicles in advance. Furthermore, two attention modules are designed to guide the work of the detection branch. The proposed method can be easily grafted into the one-stage and two-stage detection framework. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model on large scale variance highway (LSVH) dataset, and achieve the state-of-the-art detection accuracy.

Forground-Guided Vehicle Perception Framework

Isolation Forests are a very successful approach for solving outlier
detection tasks based on Random Forests that require feature vectors as
input. There are many situations where vectorial data is not readily
available, for instance when dealing with input sequences or strings. In
these situations, one can extract higher level characteristics from
the input, which is typically hard and often loses valuable
information. An alternative is to define a proximity between the
input objects, which can be more intuitive.
We propose the Proximity Isolation Forests that extend the Isolation
Forests to non-vectorial data.

Proximity Isolation Forests


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.

On-manifold Adversarial Data Augmentation Improves Uncertainty Calibration

Recent unsupervised domain adaptation methods based on deep architectures have shown remarkable performance not only in traditional classification tasks but also in more complex problems involving structured predictions (e.g. semantic segmentation, depth estimation). Following this trend, in this paper we present a novel deep adaptation framework for estimating keypoints under domain shift, i.e. when the training (source) and the test (target) images significantly differ in term sof visual appearance. Our method seamlessly combines three different components: feature alignment, adversarial training and self-supervision.Specifically, our deep architecture leverages from domain-specific distribution alignment layers to perform target adaptation at the feature level.Furthermore, a novel loss is proposed which combines an adversarial term for ensuring aligned predictions in the output space and a geometric consistency term which guarantees coherent predictions between a target sample and its perturbed version. Our extensive experimental evaluation conducted on three publicly available benchmarks shows that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods in the 2D keypoint prediction task.

Shape Consistent 2D Keypoint Estimation Under Domain Shift

In this paper, we propose a novel deep network, learning to transfer multi-scale partial gait representations using capsules to obtain more discriminative gait features. Our network first obtains multi-scale partial representations using a state-of-the-art deep partial feature extractor. It then recurrently learns the correlations and co-occurrences of the patterns among the partial features in forward and backward directions using Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Units (BGRU). Finally, a capsule network is adopted to learn deeper part-whole relationships and assigns more weights to the more relevant features while ignoring the spurious dimensions. That way, we obtain final features that are more robust to both viewing and appearance changes. The performance of our method has been extensively tested on two gait recognition datasets, CASIA-B and OU-MVLP, using four challenging test protocols. The results of our method have been compared to the state-of-the-art gait recognition solutions, showing the superiority of our model, notably when facing challenging viewing and carrying conditions.

Gait Recognition using Multi-Scale Partial Representation Transformation with Capsules

In recent years, many attempts have been dedicated to the creation of automated devices that could assist both expert and beginner dermatologists towards fast and early diagnosis of skin lesions. Tasks such as skin lesion classification and segmentation have been extensively addressed with deep learning algorithms, which in some cases reach a diagnostic accuracy comparable to that of expert physicians. However, the general lack of interpretability and reliability severely hinders the ability of those approaches to actually support dermatologists in the diagnosis process.

In this paper a novel skin image retrieval system is presented, which exploits features extracted by Convolutional Neural Networks to gather similar images from a publicly available dataset, in order to assist the diagnosis process of both expert and novice practitioners.
In the proposed framework, ResNet-50 is initially trained for the classification of dermoscopic images; then, the feature extraction part is isolated, and an embedding network is built on top of it. The embedding learns an alternative representation, which allows to check image similarity by means of a distance measure.

Experimental results reveal that the proposed method is able to select meaningful images, which can effectively boost the classification accuracy of human dermatologists.

Supporting Skin Lesion Diagnosis with Content-Based Image Retrieval

This work investigates questions related to learning features in convolutional neural networks (CNN). Empirical findings across multiple architectures such as VGG, ResNet, Inception and MobileNet indicate that weights near the center of a filter are larger than weights on the outside. Current regularization schemes violate this principle. Thus, we introduce Locality-promoting Regularization, which yields accuracy gains across multiple architectures and datasets. We also show theoretically that the empirical finding could be explained by maximizing feature cohesion under the assumption of spatial locality.

LOCO-Reg: Locolaty promoting regularization

Differently from the regular classification task, in ordinal classification there is an order in the classes. As a consequence, not all classification errors matter the same: a predicted class close to the ground truth one is better than predicting a farther away class. To account for this, most previous works employ loss functions based on the absolute difference between the predicted and ground truth class labels. We argue that there are many cases in ordinal classification where label values are arbitrary (for instance 1...C being C the number of classes) and thus such loss functions may not be the best choice. We instead propose a network architecture that produces not a single class prediction but an ordered vector, or ranking, of all the possible classes from most to least likely. This is thanks to a loss function that compares ground truth and predicted rankings of these class labels, not the labels themselves. Another advantage of this new formulation is that we can enforce consistency in the predictions, namely, predicted rankings come from some unimodal vector of scores with mode at the ground truth class. We compare with the state of the art ordinal classification methods, showing that ours attains equal or better performance, as measured by common ordinal classification metrics, on three benchmark datasets. Furthermore, it is also suitable for a new task on image aesthetics assessment, i.e. most voted score prediction. Finally, we also apply it to building damage assessment from satellite images, providing an analysis of its performance depending on the degree of imbalance of the dataset.

Rank-Based Ordinal Classification

We address the problem of detecting anomalies with respect to structured patterns. To this end, we conceive a novel anomaly detection method called PIF, that combines
the advantages of adaptive isolation methods with the flexibility of preference embedding. Specifically, we propose to embed the data in a high dimensional space where an efficient tree-based method, PI-FOREST , is employed to compute an anomaly score. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that
PIF favorably compares with state-of-the-art anomaly detection techniques, and confirm that PI-FOREST is better at measuring arbitrary distances and isolate points in the preference space.

Downloads

Next from ICPR 2020

Siamese Graph Convolution Network for Face Sketch Recognition

Similar lecture

ScarfNet: Multi-scale Features with Deeply Fused and Redistributed Semantics for Enhanced Object Detection