JW Xiao, CB Zhang, J. Feng, Xialei Liu, Joost Van de Weijer, & MM Cheng. (2023). Endpoints Weight Fusion for Class Incremental Semantic Segmentation. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 7204–7213).
Abstract: Class incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) focuses on alleviating catastrophic forgetting to improve discrimination. Previous work mainly exploit regularization (e.g., knowledge distillation) to maintain previous knowledge in the current model. However, distillation alone often yields limited gain to the model since only the representations of old and new models are restricted to be consistent. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to obtain a model with strong memory of old knowledge, named Endpoints Weight Fusion (EWF). In our method, the model containing old knowledge is fused with the model retaining new knowledge in a dynamic fusion manner, strengthening the memory of old classes in ever-changing distributions. In addition, we analyze the relation between our fusion strategy and a popular moving average technique EMA, which reveals why our method is more suitable for class-incremental learning. To facilitate parameter fusion with closer distance in the parameter space, we use distillation to enhance the optimization process. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on two widely used datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.
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Patricia Suarez, Dario Carpio, & Angel Sappa. (2023). A Deep Learning Based Approach for Synthesizing Realistic Depth Maps. In 22nd International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (Vol. 14234, 369–380). LNCS.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel cycle generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) architecture for synthesizing high-quality depth maps from a given monocular image. The proposed architecture uses multiple loss functions, including cycle consistency, contrastive, identity, and least square losses, to enable the generation of realistic and high-fidelity depth maps. The proposed approach addresses this challenge by synthesizing depth maps from RGB images without requiring paired training data. Comparisons with several state-of-the-art approaches are provided showing the proposed approach overcome other approaches both in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality.
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Francesc Net, Marc Folia, Pep Casals, & Lluis Gomez. (2023). Transductive Learning for Near-Duplicate Image Detection in Scanned Photo Collections. In 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 14191, pp. 3–17). LNCS.
Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of near-duplicate image detection techniques in a real-world use case scenario, where a document management company is commissioned to manually annotate a collection of scanned photographs. Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate photographs can reduce the time spent on manual annotation by archivists. This real use case differs from laboratory settings as the deployment dataset is available in advance, allowing the use of transductive learning. We propose a transductive learning approach that leverages state-of-the-art deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Our approach involves pre-training a deep neural network on a large dataset and then fine-tuning the network on the unlabeled target collection with self-supervised learning. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline methods in the task of near-duplicate image detection in the UKBench and an in-house private dataset.
Keywords: Image deduplication; Near-duplicate images detection; Transductive Learning; Photographic Archives; Deep Learning
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Khanh Nguyen, Ali Furkan Biten, Andres Mafla, Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2023). Show, Interpret and Tell: Entity-Aware Contextualised Image Captioning in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 37, pp. 1940–1948).
Abstract: Humans exploit prior knowledge to describe images, and are able to adapt their explanation to specific contextual information given, even to the extent of inventing plausible explanations when contextual information and images do not match. In this work, we propose the novel task of captioning Wikipedia images by integrating contextual knowledge. Specifically, we produce models that jointly reason over Wikipedia articles, Wikimedia images and their associated descriptions to produce contextualized captions. The same Wikimedia image can be used to illustrate different articles, and the produced caption needs to be adapted to the specific context allowing us to explore the limits of the model to adjust captions to different contextual information. Dealing with out-of-dictionary words and Named Entities is a challenging task in this domain. To address this, we propose a pre-training objective, Masked Named Entity Modeling (MNEM), and show that this pretext task results to significantly improved models. Furthermore, we verify that a model pre-trained in Wikipedia generalizes well to News Captioning datasets. We further define two different test splits according to the difficulty of the captioning task. We offer insights on the role and the importance of each modality and highlight the limitations of our model.
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Bonifaz Stuhr, Jurgen Brauer, Bernhard Schick, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2023). Masked Discriminators for Content-Consistent Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation.
Abstract: A common goal of unpaired image-to-image translation is to preserve content consistency between source images and translated images while mimicking the style of the target domain. Due to biases between the datasets of both domains, many methods suffer from inconsistencies caused by the translation process. Most approaches introduced to mitigate these inconsistencies do not constrain the discriminator, leading to an even more ill-posed training setup. Moreover, none of these approaches is designed for larger crop sizes. In this work, we show that masking the inputs of a global discriminator for both domains with a content-based mask is sufficient to reduce content inconsistencies significantly. However, this strategy leads to artifacts that can be traced back to the masking process. To reduce these artifacts, we introduce a local discriminator that operates on pairs of small crops selected with a similarity sampling strategy. Furthermore, we apply this sampling strategy to sample global input crops from the source and target dataset. In addition, we propose feature-attentive denormalization to selectively incorporate content-based statistics into the generator stream. In our experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in photorealistic sim-to-real translation and weather translation and also performs well in day-to-night translation. Additionally, we propose the cKVD metric, which builds on the sKVD metric and enables the examination of translation quality at the class or category level.
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Luca Ginanni Corradini, Simone Balocco, Luciano Maresca, Silvio Vitale, & Matteo Stefanini. (2023). Anatomical Modifications After Stent Implantation: A Comparative Analysis Between CGuard, Wallstent, and Roadsaver Carotid Stents. Journal of Endovascular Therapy, 30(1), 18–24.
Abstract: Abstract
Purpose:
Carotid revascularization can be associated with modifications of the vascular geometry, which may lead to complications. The changes on the vessel angulation before and after a carotid WallStent (WS) implantation are compared against 2 new dual-layer devices, CGuard (CG) and RoadSaver (RS).
Materials and Methods:
The study prospectively recruited 217 consecutive patients (112 GC, 73 WS, and 32 RS, respectively). Angiography projections were explored and the one having a higher arterial angle was selected as a basal view. After stent implantation, a stent control angiography was performed selecting the projection having the maximal angle. The same procedure is followed in all the 3 stent types to guarantee comparable conditions. The angulation changes on the stented segments were quantified from both angiographies. The statistical analysis quantitatively compared the pre-and post-angles for the 3 stent types. The results are qualitatively illustrated using boxplots. Finally, the relation between pre- and post-angles measurements is analyzed using linear regression.
Results:
For CG, no statistical difference in the axial vessel geometry between the basal and postprocedural angles was found. For WS and RS, statistical difference was found between pre- and post-angles. The regression analysis shows that CG induces lower changes from the original curvature with respect to WS and RS.
Conclusion:
Based on our results, CG determines minor changes over the basal morphology than WS and RS stents. Hence, CG respects better the native vessel anatomy than the other stents.
Level of Evidence: Level 4, Case Series.
Keywords: Ginanni Corradini L, Balocco S, Maresca L, Vitale S, Stefanini M.
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Maciej Wielgosz, Antonio Lopez, & Muhamad Naveed Riaz. (2023). CARLA-BSP: a simulated dataset with pedestrians.
Abstract: We present a sample dataset featuring pedestrians generated using the ARCANE framework, a new framework for generating datasets in CARLA (0.9.13). We provide use cases for pedestrian detection, autoencoding, pose estimation, and pose lifting. We also showcase baseline results.
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Akhil Gurram, & Antonio Lopez. (2023). On the Metrics for Evaluating Monocular Depth Estimation.
Abstract: Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is performed to produce 3D information that can be used in downstream tasks such as those related to on-board perception for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) or driver assistance. Therefore, a relevant arising question is whether the standard metrics for MDE assessment are a good indicator of the accuracy of future MDE-based driving-related perception tasks. We address this question in this paper. In particular, we take the task of 3D object detection on point clouds as a proxy of on-board perception. We train and test state-of-the-art 3D object detectors using 3D point clouds coming from MDE models. We confront the ranking of object detection results with the ranking given by the depth estimation metrics of the MDE models. We conclude that, indeed, MDE evaluation metrics give rise to a ranking of methods that reflects relatively well the 3D object detection results we may expect. Among the different metrics, the absolute relative (abs-rel) error seems to be the best for that purpose.
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David Pujol Perich, Albert Clapes, & Sergio Escalera. (2023). SADA: Semantic adversarial unsupervised domain adaptation for Temporal Action Localization.
Abstract: Temporal Action Localization (TAL) is a complex task that poses relevant challenges, particularly when attempting to generalize on new -- unseen -- domains in real-world applications. These scenarios, despite realistic, are often neglected in the literature, exposing these solutions to important performance degradation. In this work, we tackle this issue by introducing, for the first time, an approach for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) in sparse TAL, which we refer to as Semantic Adversarial unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SADA). Our contributions are threefold: (1) we pioneer the development of a domain adaptation model that operates on realistic sparse action detection benchmarks; (2) we tackle the limitations of global-distribution alignment techniques by introducing a novel adversarial loss that is sensitive to local class distributions, ensuring finer-grained adaptation; and (3) we present a novel set of benchmarks based on EpicKitchens100 and CharadesEgo, that evaluate multiple domain shifts in a comprehensive manner. Our experiments indicate that SADA improves the adaptation across domains when compared to fully supervised state-of-the-art and alternative UDA methods, attaining a performance boost of up to 6.14% mAP.
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Senmao Li, Joost van de Weijer, Taihang Hu, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Qibin Hou, Yaxing Wang, et al. (2023). StyleDiffusion: Prompt-Embedding Inversion for Text-Based Editing.
Abstract: A significant research effort is focused on exploiting the amazing capacities of pretrained diffusion models for the editing of images. They either finetune the model, or invert the image in the latent space of the pretrained model. However, they suffer from two problems: (1) Unsatisfying results for selected regions, and unexpected changes in nonselected regions. (2) They require careful text prompt editing where the prompt should include all visual objects in the input image. To address this, we propose two improvements: (1) Only optimizing the input of the value linear network in the cross-attention layers, is sufficiently powerful to reconstruct a real image. (2) We propose attention regularization to preserve the object-like attention maps after editing, enabling us to obtain accurate style editing without invoking significant structural changes. We further improve the editing technique which is used for the unconditional branch of classifier-free guidance, as well as the conditional one as used by P2P. Extensive experimental prompt-editing results on a variety of images, demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively that our method has superior editing capabilities than existing and concurrent works.
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Antonio Carta, Andrea Cossu, Vincenzo Lomonaco, Davide Bacciu, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2023). Projected Latent Distillation for Data-Agnostic Consolidation in Distributed Continual Learning.
Abstract: Distributed learning on the edge often comprises self-centered devices (SCD) which learn local tasks independently and are unwilling to contribute to the performance of other SDCs. How do we achieve forward transfer at zero cost for the single SCDs? We formalize this problem as a Distributed Continual Learning scenario, where SCD adapt to local tasks and a CL model consolidates the knowledge from the resulting stream of models without looking at the SCD's private data. Unfortunately, current CL methods are not directly applicable to this scenario. We propose Data-Agnostic Consolidation (DAC), a novel double knowledge distillation method that consolidates the stream of SC models without using the original data. DAC performs distillation in the latent space via a novel Projected Latent Distillation loss. Experimental results show that DAC enables forward transfer between SCDs and reaches state-of-the-art accuracy on Split CIFAR100, CORe50 and Split TinyImageNet, both in reharsal-free and distributed CL scenarios. Somewhat surprisingly, even a single out-of-distribution image is sufficient as the only source of data during consolidation.
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Patricia Suarez, Henry Velesaca, Dario Carpio, & Angel Sappa. (2023). Corn kernel classification from few training samples. Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture, 89–99.
Abstract: This article presents an efficient approach to classify a set of corn kernels in contact, which may contain good, or defective kernels along with impurities. The proposed approach consists of two stages, the first one is a next-generation segmentation network, trained by using a set of synthesized images that is applied to divide the given image into a set of individual instances. An ad-hoc lightweight CNN architecture is then proposed to classify each instance into one of three categories (ie good, defective, and impurities). The segmentation network is trained using a strategy that avoids the time-consuming and human-error-prone task of manual data annotation. Regarding the classification stage, the proposed ad-hoc network is designed with only a few sets of layers to result in a lightweight architecture capable of being used in integrated solutions. Experimental results and comparisons with previous approaches showing both the improvement in accuracy and the reduction in time are provided. Finally, the segmentation and classification approach proposed can be easily adapted for use with other cereal types.
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Ayan Banerjee, Sanket Biswas, Josep Llados, & Umapada Pal. (2023). SwinDocSegmenter: An End-to-End Unified Domain Adaptive Transformer for Document Instance Segmentation. In 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 14187, 307–325). LNCS.
Abstract: Instance-level segmentation of documents consists in assigning a class-aware and instance-aware label to each pixel of the image. It is a key step in document parsing for their understanding. In this paper, we present a unified transformer encoder-decoder architecture for en-to-end instance segmentation of complex layouts in document images. The method adapts a contrastive training with a mixed query selection for anchor initialization in the decoder. Later on, it performs a dot product between the obtained query embeddings and the pixel embedding map (coming from the encoder) for semantic reasoning. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks like PubLayNet, PRIMA, Historical Japanese (HJ), and TableBank demonstrate that our model with SwinL backbone achieves better segmentation performance than the existing state-of-the-art approaches with the average precision of 93.72, 54.39, 84.65 and 98.04 respectively under one billion parameters. The code is made publicly available at: github.com/ayanban011/SwinDocSegmenter .
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Wenwen Yu, Chengquan Zhang, Haoyu Cao, Wei Hua, Bohan Li, Huang Chen, et al. (2023). ICDAR 2023 Competition on Structured Text Extraction from Visually-Rich Document Images. In 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 14188, 536–552). LNCS.
Abstract: Structured text extraction is one of the most valuable and challenging application directions in the field of Document AI. However, the scenarios of past benchmarks are limited, and the corresponding evaluation protocols usually focus on the submodules of the structured text extraction scheme. In order to eliminate these problems, we organized the ICDAR 2023 competition on Structured text extraction from Visually-Rich Document images (SVRD). We set up two tracks for SVRD including Track 1: HUST-CELL and Track 2: Baidu-FEST, where HUST-CELL aims to evaluate the end-to-end performance of Complex Entity Linking and Labeling, and Baidu-FEST focuses on evaluating the performance and generalization of Zero-shot/Few-shot Structured Text extraction from an end-to-end perspective. Compared to the current document benchmarks, our two tracks of competition benchmark enriches the scenarios greatly and contains more than 50 types of visually-rich document images (mainly from the actual enterprise applications). The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 24th March, 2023. There are 35 participants and 91 valid submissions received for Track 1, and 15 participants and 26 valid submissions received for Track 2. In this report we will presents the motivation, competition datasets, task definition, evaluation protocol, and submission summaries. According to the performance of the submissions, we believe there is still a large gap on the expected information extraction performance for complex and zero-shot scenarios. It is hoped that this competition will attract many researchers in the field of CV and NLP, and bring some new thoughts to the field of Document AI.
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Wenwen Yu, Mingyu Liu, Mingrui Chen, Ning Lu, Yinlong We, Yuliang Liu, et al. (2023). ICDAR 2023 Competition on Reading the Seal Title. In 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 14188, 522–535). LNCS.
Abstract: Reading seal title text is a challenging task due to the variable shapes of seals, curved text, background noise, and overlapped text. However, this important element is commonly found in official and financial scenarios, and has not received the attention it deserves in the field of OCR technology. To promote research in this area, we organized ICDAR 2023 competition on reading the seal title (ReST), which included two tasks: seal title text detection (Task 1) and end-to-end seal title recognition (Task 2). We constructed a dataset of 10,000 real seal data, covering the most common classes of seals, and labeled all seal title texts with text polygons and text contents. The competition opened on 30th December, 2022 and closed on 20th March, 2023. The competition attracted 53 participants and received 135 submissions from academia and industry, including 28 participants and 72 submissions for Task 1, and 25 participants and 63 submissions for Task 2, which demonstrated significant interest in this challenging task. In this report, we present an overview of the competition, including the organization, challenges, and results. We describe the dataset and tasks, and summarize the submissions and evaluation results. The results show that significant progress has been made in the field of seal title text reading, and we hope that this competition will inspire further research and development in this important area of OCR technology.
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