Italy


Traditional approaches for the recognition or
identification of the writer of a handwritten text image
used to relay on heuristic knowledge about the shape and
other features of the strokes of previously segmented
characters. However, recent works have done significantly
advances on the state of the art thanks to the use of
various types of deep neural networks. In most of all of
these works, text images are decomposed into patches, which
are processed by the networks without any previous
character or word segmentation. In this paper, we study how
the way images are decomposed into patches impact
recognition accuracy, using three publicly available
datasets. The study also includes a simpler architecture
where no patches are used at all - a single deep neural
network inputs a whole text image and directly provides a
writer recognition hypothesis. Results show that bigger
patches generally lead to improved accuracy, achieving in
one of the datasets a significant improvement over the best
results reported so far.

ICPR 2020

Writer Identification Using Deep Neural Networks: Impact of Patch Size and Number of Patches

handwritten text image

writer identification

deep neural networks

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

The success of deep learning at computer vision tasks has led to an ever-increasing number of applications on edge devices. Often with the use of edge AI hardware accelerators like the Intel Movidius Vision Processing Unit (VPU). Performing computer vision tasks on edge devices is challenging. Many Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are too complex to run on edge devices with limited computing power. This has created large interest in designing efficient CNNs and one promising way of doing this is through Neural Architecture Search (NAS). NAS aims to automate the design of neural networks. NAS can also optimize multiple different objectives together, like accuracy and efficiency, which is difficult for humans. In this paper, we use a differentiable NAS method to find efficient CNNs for VPU that achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy on ImageNet. Our NAS designed model outperforms MobileNetV2, having almost 1\% higher top-1 accuracy while being 13\% faster on MyriadX VPU. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a VPU specific CNN has been designed using a NAS algorithm. Our results also reiterate the fact that efficient networks must be designed for each specific hardware. We show that efficient networks targeted at different devices do not perform as well on the VPU

VPU Specific CNNs through Neural Architecture Search

We present a method to automatically learn to segment dynamic objects using SLAM outliers. It requires only one monocular sequence per dynamic object for training and consists in localizing dynamic objects using SLAM outliers,
creating their masks, and using these masks to train a semantic segmentation network. We integrate the trained network in ORB-SLAM 2 and LDSO. 

At runtime we remove features on dynamic objects, making the SLAM unaffected by them. We also propose a new stereo dataset and new metrics to evaluate SLAM robustness. Our dataset includes consensus inversions, i.e., situations where the SLAM uses more features on dynamic objects that on the static background. Consensus inversions are challenging for SLAM as they may cause major SLAM failures. 

Our approach performs better than the State-of-the-Art on the TUM RGB-D dataset in monocular mode and on our dataset in both monocular and stereo modes.

Learning to Segment Dynamic Objects using SLAM Outliers

BatchNorm (BN) stabilizes network optimization by normalizing the activations during training and exploits mini-batch sample statistics. BN unfortunately suffers from performance degradation when the statistical estimates become unstable for small batch-size based tasks. This paper we propose WeightAlign: normalizing activations without using sample statistics. Instead of sample statistics, we re-parameterize the weights within a filter to arrive at correctly normalized activations.

WeightAlign: Normallizing Activations by Weight Alignment


We present a novel approach to adjust global image properties such as colour, saturation, and luminance using human-interpretable image enhancement curves, inspired by the Photoshop curves tool. Our method, dubbed neural CURve Layers (CURL), is designed as a multi-colour space neural retouching block trained jointly in three different colour spaces (HSV, CIELab, RGB) guided by a novel multi-colour
space loss. The curves are fully differentiable and are trained end-to-end for different computer vision problems including photo enhancement (RGB-to-RGB) and as part of the image signal processing pipeline for image formation (RAW-to-RGB). To demonstrate the effectiveness of CURL we combine this global image transformation block with a pixel-level (local) image multi-scale encoder-decoder backbone network. In an extensive experimental evaluation we show that CURL produces state of-the-art image quality versus recently proposed deep learning
approaches in both objective and perceptual metrics, setting new state-of-the-art performance on multiple public datasets. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/sjmoran/CURL.

CURL: Neural Curve Layers for Global Image Enhancement


Fake news often involves semantic manipulations across modalities such as image, text, location etc and requires the development of multimodal semantic forensics for its detection. Recent research has centered the problem around images, calling it image repurposing -- where a digitally unmanipulated image is semantically misrepresented by means of its accompanying multimodal metadata such as captions, location, etc. The image and metadata together comprise a multimedia package. The problem setup requires algorithms to perform multimodal semantic forensics to authenticate a query multimedia package using a reference dataset of potentially related packages as evidences. Existing methods are limited to using a single evidence (retrieved package), which ignores potential performance improvement from the use of multiple evidences. In this work, we introduce a novel graph neural network based model for multimodal semantic forensics, which effectively utilizes multiple retrieved packages as evidences and is scalable with the number of evidences. We compare the scalability and performance of our model against existing methods. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms with an error reduction of up to 25%.

MEG: Multi-Evidence GNN for Multimodal Semantic Forensics

Video captioning automatically and accurately generates a textual description for a video. The typical methods following the encoder-decoder architecture directly utilize hidden states to predict words. Nevertheless, these methods do not amend the inaccurate hidden states before feeding those states into word prediction. This leads to a cascade of errors in generating word by word. In this paper, the context visual information-based deliberation network is proposed, abbreviated as CVI-DelNet. Its key idea is to introduce a deliberator into the encoder-decoder framework. The encoder-decoder first generates a raw hidden state sequence. Unlike the existing methods, the raw hidden state is no longer directly used for word prediction but is fed into the deliberator to generate the refined hidden state. The words are then predicted according to the refined hidden states and the contextual visual features. The results on two datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Context Visual Information-based Deliberation Network for Video Captioning

Image classification is a fundamental task in computer vision. A variety of deep learning models based on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture have proven to be an efficient solution. Numerous improvements have been proposed over the years, where broader, deeper, and denser networks have been constructed. However, the atomic operation for these models has remained a linear unit (single neuron). In this work, we pursue an alternative dimension by hypothesizing the atomic operation to be performed by a quadratic unit. We construct convolutional layers using quadratic neurons for feature extraction and subsequently use dense layers for classification. We perform analysis to quantify the implication of replacing linear neurons with quadratic units. Results show a keen improvement in classification accuracy with quadratic neurons over linear neurons.

CQNN: Convolutional Quadratic Neural Networks

Due to the recent breakthroughs of deep generative models, the fake faces, also known as deepfake which has been abused to deceive the general public, can be easily produced at scale and in very high fidelity. Many works focus on exploring various network architectures or various artifacts produced by deep generative models. Instead, in this work, we focus on the loss functions which have been shown to play a significant role in the context of face recognition. We perform a thorough study of several recent state-of-the-art losses commonly used in face recognition task for deepfake classification and detection since the current deepfake is highly related to face generation. With extensive experiments on the challenging FaceForensic++ and Celeb-DF datasets, the evaluation results provide a clear overview of the performance comparisons of different loss functions and generalization capability across different deepfake data.

An Experimental Evaluation of Recent Face Recognition Losses for Deepfake Detection

Recent advances in deep learning have made available
large, powerful convolutional neural networks (CNN) with
state-of-the-art performance in several real-world applications.
Unfortunately, these large-sized models have millions of parameters,
thus they are not deployable on resource-limited
platforms (e.g., where RAM is limited). Compression of CNNs
becomes therefore a critical problem to achieve memory-efficient
and possibly computationally faster model representations. In
this paper, we investigate the impact of lossy compression of
CNNs by weight pruning and quantization, and lossless weight
matrix representations based on source coding. We tested several
combinations of these techniques on four benchmark datasets
for classification and regression problems, achieving compression
rates up to 165 times, while preserving or improving the model
performance.

Compression strategies and space-conscious representations for deep neural networks

We introduce two methods of improving real-time object grasping performance from monocular colour images in an end-to-end CNN architecture. The first is the addition of an auxiliary task during model training (multi- task learning). Our multi-task CNN model improves grasping performance from a baseline average of 72.04% to 78.14% on the large Jacquard grasping dataset when performing a supplementary depth reconstruction task. The second is introducing a positional loss function that emphasises loss per pixel for secondary parameters (gripper angle and width) only on points of an object where a successful grasp can take place. This increases performance from a baseline average of 72.04% to 78.92% as well as reducing the number of training epochs required. These methods can be also performed in tandem resulting in a further performance increase to 79.12%, while maintaining sufficient inference speed to afford real-time grasp processing.

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