Abstract: Automatic document content processing is affected by artifacts caused by the shape
of the paper, non-uniform and diverse color of lighting conditions. Fully-supervised
methods on real data are impossible due to the large amount of data needed. Hence, the
current state of the art deep learning models are trained on fully or partially synthetic images. However, document shadow or shading removal results still suffer because: (a) prior methods rely on uniformity of local color statistics, which limit their application on real-scenarios with complex document shapes and textures and; (b) synthetic or hybrid datasets with non-realistic, simulated lighting conditions are used to train the models. In this paper we tackle these problems with our two main contributions. First, a physically constrained learning-based method that directly estimates document reflectance based on intrinsic image formation which generalizes to challenging illumination conditions. Second, a new dataset that clearly improves previous synthetic ones, by adding a large range of realistic shading and diverse multi-illuminant conditions, uniquely customized to deal with documents in-the-wild. The proposed architecture works in two steps. First, a white balancing module neutralizes the color of the illumination on the input image. Based on the proposed multi-illuminant dataset we achieve a good white-balancing in really difficult conditions. Second, the shading separation module accurately disentangles the shading and paper material in a self-supervised manner where only the synthetic texture is used as a weak training signal (obviating the need for very costly ground truth with disentangled versions of shading and reflectance). The proposed approach leads to significant generalization of document reflectance estimation in real scenes with challenging illumination. We extensively evaluate on the real benchmark datasets available for intrinsic image decomposition and document shadow removal tasks. Our reflectance estimation scheme, when used as a pre-processing step of an OCR pipeline, shows a 21% improvement of character error rate (CER), thus, proving the practical applicability. The data and code will be available at: https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/DocIIW.

Abstract: Domain adaptation (DA) aims to transfer the knowledge learned from a source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Some recent works tackle source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) where only a source pre-trained model is available for adaptation to the target domain. However, those methods do not consider keeping source performance which is of high practical value in real world applications. In this paper, we propose a new domain adaptation paradigm called Generalized Source-free Domain Adaptation (G-SFDA), where the learned model needs to perform well on both the target and source domains, with only access to current unlabeled target data during adaptation. First, we propose local structure clustering (LSC), aiming to cluster the target features with its semantically similar neighbors, which successfully adapts the model to the target domain in the absence of source data. Second, we propose sparse domain attention (SDA), it produces a binary domain specific attention to activate different feature channels for different domains, meanwhile the domain attention will be utilized to regularize the gradient during adaptation to keep source information. In the experiments, for target performance our method is on par with or better than existing DA and SFDA methods, specifically it achieves state-of-the-art performance (85.4%) on VisDA, and our method works well for all domains after adapting to single or multiple target domains.

Abstract: The main objective of the EMPATHIC project has been the design and development of a virtual coach to engage the healthy-senior user and to enhance well-being through awareness of personal status. The EMPATHIC approach addresses this objective through multimodal interactions supported by the GROW coaching model. The paper summarizes the main components of the EMPATHIC Virtual Coach (EMPATHIC-VC) and introduces a demonstration of the coaching sessions in selected scenarios.

Abstract: The threat of 3D mask to face recognition systems is increasing serious, and has been widely concerned by researchers. To facilitate the study of the algorithms, a large-scale High-Fidelity Mask dataset, namely CASIA-SURF HiFiMask (briefly HiFiMask) has been collected. Specifically, it consists of total amount of 54,600 videos which are recorded from 75 subjects with 225 realistic masks under 7 new kinds of sensors. Based on this dataset and Protocol 3 which evaluates both the discrimination and generalization ability of the algorithm under the open set scenarios, we organized a 3D High-Fidelity Mask Face Presentation Attack Detection Challenge to boost the research of 3D mask based attack detection. It attracted more than 200 teams for the development phase with a total of 18 teams qualifying for the final round. All the results were verified and re-ran by the organizing team, and the results were used for the final ranking. This paper presents an overview of the challenge, including the introduction of the dataset used, the definition of the protocol, the calculation of the evaluation criteria, and the summary and publication of the competition results. Finally, we focus on introducing and analyzing the top ranked algorithms, the conclusion summary, and the research ideas for mask attack detection provided by this competition.

Abstract: Personality computing has become an emerging topic in computer vision, due to the wide range of applications it can be used for. However, most works on the topic have focused on analyzing the individual, even when applied to interaction scenarios, and for short periods of time. To address these limitations, we present the Dyadformer, a novel multi-modal multi-subject Transformer architecture to model individual and interpersonal features in dyadic interactions using variable time windows, thus allowing the capture of long-term interdependencies. Our proposed cross-subject layer allows the network to explicitly model interactions among subjects through attentional operations. This proof-of-concept approach shows how multi-modality and joint modeling of both interactants for longer periods of time helps to predict individual attributes. With Dyadformer, we improve state-of-the-art self-reported personality inference results on individual subjects on the UDIVA v0.5 dataset.

Abstract: This paper presents a complete pipeline to perform deep learning-based instance segmentation of different types of grains (e.g., corn, sunflower, soybeans, lentils, chickpeas, mote, and beans). The proposed approach consists of using synthesized image datasets for the training process, which are easily generated according to the category of the instance to be segmented. The synthesized imaging process allows generating a large set of well-annotated grain samples with high variability—as large and high as the user requires. Instance segmentation is performed through a popular deep learning based approach, the Mask R-CNN architecture, but any learning-based instance segmentation approach can be considered. Results obtained by the proposed pipeline show that the strategy of using synthesized image datasets for training instance segmentation helps to avoid the time-consuming image annotation stage, as well as to achieve higher intersection over union and average precision performances. Results obtained with different varieties of grains are shown, as well as comparisons with manually annotated images, showing both the simplicity of the process and the improvements in the performance.

Abstract: A signed distance function (SDF) as the 3D shape description is one of the most effective approaches to represent 3D geometry for rendering and reconstruction. Our work is inspired by the state-of-the-art method DeepSDF [17] that learns and analyzes the 3D shape as the iso-surface of its shell and this method has shown promising results especially in the 3D shape reconstruction and compression domain. In this paper, we consider the degeneration problem of reconstruction coming from the capacity decrease of the DeepSDF model, which approximates the SDF with a neural network and a single latent code. We propose Local Geometry Code Learning (LGCL), a model that improves the original DeepSDF results by learning from a local shape geometry of the full 3D shape. We add an extra graph neural network to split the single transmittable latent code into a set of local latent codes distributed on the 3D shape. Mentioned latent codes are used to approximate the SDF in their local regions, which will alleviate the complexity of the approximation compared to the original DeepSDF. Furthermore, we introduce a new geometric loss function to facilitate the training of these local latent codes. Note that other local shape adjusting methods use the 3D voxel representation, which in turn is a problem highly difficult to solve or even is insolvable. In contrast, our architecture is based on graph processing implicitly and performs the learning regression process directly in the latent code space, thus make the proposed architecture more flexible and also simple for realization. Our experiments on 3D shape reconstruction demonstrate that our LGCL method can keep more details with a significantly smaller size of the SDF decoder and outperforms considerably the original DeepSDF method under the most important quantitative metrics.