Italy

In this paper, we propose a new approach to understand actions in egocentric videos that exploits the semantics of object interactions at both frame and temporal levels. At the frame level, we use a region-based approach that takes as input a primary region roughly corresponding to the user hands and a set of secondary regions potentially corresponding to the interacting objects and calculates the action score through a CNN formulation. This information is then fed to a Hierarchical Long Short-Term Memory Network (HLSTM) that captures temporal dependencies between actions within and across shots. Ablation studies thoroughly validate the proposed approach, showing in particular that both levels of the HLSTM architecture contribute to performance improvement. Furthermore, quantitative comparisons show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of action recognition on standard benchmarks, without relying on motion information.

ICPR 2020

Modeling Long-Term Interactions to Enhance Action Recognition

region-based action recognition

egocentric action recognition

egocentric vision

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. 
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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. 


This paper considers three different classifier stacking algorithms: simple stacking, cascades of classifier ensembles and nonlinear version of classifier stacking based on classifier interactions. Classifier interactions can be expressed using classifier prediction pairwise matrix (CPPM). As a meta-learner for the last algorithm Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and two other classifier stacking algorithms (simple classifier stacking and cascades of classifier ensembles) have been applied. This allows applying classical stacking and cascade-based recursive stacking in the Euclidean and the Riemannian geometries. The cascades of random forests (RFs) and extra trees (ETs) are considered as a forest-based alternative to deep neural networks \cite{zhou2017deep}. Our goal is to compare accuracies of the cascades of RFs and CNN-based stacking or deep multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) for different classifications problems. We use gesture phase dataset from UCI repository \cite{frank2010uci} to compare and analyze cascades of RFs and extra trees (ETs) in both geometries and CNN-based version of classifier stacking. This data set was selected because generally motion is considered as a nonlinear process (patterns do no lie in Euclidean vector space) in computer vision applications. Thus we can assess how good are forest-based deep learning and the Riemannian manifolds (R-manifolds) when applied to nonlinear processes. Some more datasets from UCI repository were used to compare the aforementioned algorithms to some other well-known classifiers and their stacking-based versions in both geometries. Experimental results show that classifier stacking algorithms in Riemannian geometry (R-geometry) are less dependent on some properties of individual classifiers (e.g. depth of decision trees in RFs or ETs) in comparison to Euclidean geometry. More independent individual classifiers allow to obtain R-manifolds with better properties for classification. Generally, accuracy of classification using classifier stacking in R-geometry is higher than in Euclidean one.

Comparison of Stacking-based Classifier Ensembles using Euclidean and Riemannian Geometries

Large-scale highway traffic forecasting approaches are critical for intelligent transportation systems. Recently, deep-learning-based traffic forecasting methods have emerged as promising approaches for a wide range of traffic forecasting tasks. These methods are specific to a given traffic network, however, and consequently, they cannot be used for forecasting traffic on an unseen traffic network.
Previous work has identified diffusion convolutional recurrent neural networks, (DCRNN), as a state-of-the-art method for highway traffic forecasting. 
It models the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of a highway network using a graph-based diffusion convolution operation within a recurrent neural network. 
Currently, DCRNN cannot perform transfer learning because it learns location-specific traffic patterns, which cannot be used for unseen regions of a network or new geographic locations. To that end, we develop TL-DCRNN, a new transfer learning approach for DCRNN, where a single model trained on a highway network can be used to forecast traffic on unseen highway networks. Given a traffic network with a large amount of traffic data, our approach consists of partitioning the traffic network into a number of subgraphs and using a new training scheme that utilizes subgraphs to marginalize the location-specific information, thus learning the traffic as a function of network connectivity and temporal patterns alone. The resulting trained model can be used to forecast traffic on unseen networks. We demonstrate that TL-DCRNN can learn from San Francisco regional traffic data and can forecast traffic in the Los Angeles region and vice versa.


Transfer Learning with Graph Neural Networks for Short-Term Highway Traffic Forecasting


Purpose: Liver cancer is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the world. The primary goals of this manuscript are the identification of novel imaging features (texture, functional, and shape), and development of a computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system to accurately detect and grade liver tumors non-invasively. 
Methods: A total of 85 patients with liver tumors were enrolled in the study after consents were obtained. 34 patients had benign tumors, 17 patients had intermediate tumors, and 34 patients had hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) malignant tumors. A multi-phase contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (CE-MRI) was collected to extract the imaging features. The proposed approach consists of three main steps. First, a pre-processing is applied to the CE-MRI scans to delineate the tumor lesions that will be used as a region of interest (ROI) across the four different phases of the CE-MRI. Second, a group of three features are modeled to provide a quantitative discrimination between the tumor lesions, namely: the tumor appearance that is modeled using a set of texture features, (namely; the first-order histogram features, second-order gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) features, and second-order gray-level run-length matrix (GLRLM) features), to capture any discrimination that may appear in the lesion texture; the spherical harmonics (SH) based shape features that have the ability to describe the shape complexity of the liver tumors; and the functional features that are based on the calculation of the wash-in/wash-out slopes to evaluate the intensity changes across different phases. Finally, these features were integrated together to obtain the combined features to be fed to a machine learning classifier towards getting the final diagnostic decision. 
Results: Using the Random Forests classifier with a leave-one-out (LOSO) cross-validation, the developed CAD system achieved an 87.1% accuracy in distinguishing between malignant, intermediate and benign tumors (i.e., First stage classification). LR-1 lesions were classified from LR-2 benign lesions with 91.2% accuracy, while 85.3% accuracy was achieved differentiating between LR-4 and LR-5 malignant tumors (i.e., Second stage classification).

A Novel Computer-Aided Diagnostic System for Early Assessment of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

This work makes a contribution to the problem of incremental class learning, the principle of which is to sequentially introduce batches of samples annotated with new classes during the learning phase. The main objective is to reduce the drop in classification performance on old classes, a phenomenon commonly called catastrophic forgetting. We propose a new method which exploits the availability of a large quantity of non-annotated images in addition to the annotated batches. These images are used to regularize the classifier and give the feature space a more stable structure. We demonstrate on two image data sets, MNIST and STL-10, that our approach is able to improve the global performance of classifiers learned using an incremental learning protocol, even with annotated batches of small size.

Semi-Supervised Class Incremental Learning


Current approaches for semantic image inpainting rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) that learn under full supervision, i.e., using a training set comprising pairs of (i) corrupted images with holes and (ii) corresponding uncorrupted images. However, for several real-world applications, obtaining large sets of uncorrupted images is challenging or infeasible. Current methods also rely on adversarial training involving min-max optimization that is prone to instability during learning. We propose a novel self-supervised image-inpainting DNN framework that can learn in both completely unsupervised and semi-supervised modes. Moreover, our DNN learning formulation bypasses adversarial training and, thereby, lends itself to more stable training. Results on the publicly available CelebA dataset show that our method, even when learning unsupervisedly, outperforms the state of the art that learns with full supervision.

Learning Image Inpainting from Incomplete Images using Self-Supervision

Ghost targets are targets that appear at wrong locations in radar data and are caused by the presence of multiple indirect reflections between the target and the sensor. In this work, we introduce the first point based deep learning approach for ghost target detection in 3D radar point clouds. This is done by extending the PointNet network architecture by modifying its input to include radar point features beyond location and introducing skip connections. We compare different input modalities and analyze the effects of the changes we introduced. We also propose an approach for automatic labelling of ghost targets 3D radar data using lidar as reference. The algorithm is trained and tested on real data in various driving scenarios and the tests show promising results in classifying real and ghost radar targets.

Ghost Target Detection in 3D Radar Data using Point Cloud based Deep Neural Network


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.

Improving Model Accuracy for Imbalanced Image Classification Tasks by Adding a Final Batch Normalization Layer: An Empirical Study


Recently, substantial progress has been made in the area of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) using modern machine learning techniques to decode and interpret brain signals. While Electroencephalography (EEG) has provided a non-invasive method of interfacing with a human brain, the acquired data is often heavily subject and session dependent. This makes seamless incorporation of such data into real-world applications intractable as the subject and session data variance can lead to long and tedious calibration requirements and cross-subject generalisation issues. Focusing on a Steady State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) classification systems, we propose a novel means of generating highly-realistic synthetic EEG data invariant to any subject, session or other environmental conditions. Our approach, entitled the Subject Invariant SSVEP Generative Adversarial Network (SIS-GAN), produces synthetic EEG data from multiple SSVEP classes using a single network. Additionally, by taking advantage of a fixed-weight pre-trained subject classification network, we ensure that our generative model remains agnostic to subject-specific features and thus produces subject-invariant data that can be applied to new previously unseen subjects. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of our synthetic data, leading to superior performance, with improvements of up to 16% in zero-calibration classification tasks when trained using our subject-invariant synthetic EEG signals.

Leveraging Synthetic Subject Invariant EEG Signals for Zero Calibration BCI

In this paper we present an event aggregation strategy to convert the output of an event camera into frames processable by traditional Computer Vision algorithms. The proposed method first generates sequences of intermediate binary representations, which are then losslessly transformed into a compact format by simply applying a binary-to-decimal conversion. This strategy allows us to encode temporal information directly into pixel values, which are then interpreted by deep learning models. We apply our strategy, called Temporal Binary Representation, to the task of Gesture Recognition, obtaining state of the art results on the popular DVS128 Gesture Dataset. To underline the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to existing ones, we also collect an extension of the dataset under more challenging conditions on which to perform experiments.

Temporal Binary Representation for Event-Based Action Recognition

We develop and evaluate models for automatic vision-based voice activity detection (VAD) in multiparty human-human interactions that are aimed at complementing acoustic VAD methods. We provide evidence that this type of vision-based VAD models are susceptible to spatial bias in the dataset used for their development; the physical settings of the interaction, usually constant throughout data acquisition, determines the distribution of head poses of the participants. Our results show that when the head pose distributions are significantly different in the train and test sets, the performance of the vision-based VAD models drops significantly. This suggests that previously reported results on datasets with a fixed physical configuration may overestimate the generalization capabilities of this type of models. We also propose a number of possible remedies to the spatial bias, including data augmentation, input masking and dynamic features, and provide an in-depth analysis of the visual cues used by the developed vision-based VAD models.

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Comparison of Stacking-based Classifier Ensembles using Euclidean and Riemannian Geometries

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