Abstract: Our recent work suggests that, thanks to nowadays powerful CNNs, image-based 2D pose estimation is a promising cue for determining pedestrian intentions such as crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, stopping before entering the road, and starting to walk or bending towards the road. This statement is based on the results obtained on non-naturalistic sequences (Daimler dataset), i.e. in sequences choreographed specifically for performing the study. Fortunately, a new publicly available dataset (JAAD) has appeared recently to allow developing methods for detecting pedestrian intentions in naturalistic driving conditions; more specifically, for addressing the relevant question is the pedestrian going to cross? Accordingly, in this paper we use JAAD to assess the usefulness of 2D pose estimation for answering such a question. We combine CNN-based pedestrian detection, tracking and pose estimation to predict the crossing action from monocular images. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-ofthe-art results.

Abstract: We present the design and beta tests of a new machine learning challenge called AutoCV (for Automated Computer Vision), which is the first event in a series of challenges we are planning on the theme of Automated Deep Learning. We target applications for which Deep Learning methods have had great success in the past few years, with the aim of pushing the state of the art in fully automated methods to design the architecture of neural networks and train them without any human intervention. The tasks are restricted to multi-label image classification problems, from domains including medical, areal, people, object, and handwriting imaging. Thus the type of images will vary a lot in scales, textures, and structure. Raw data are provided (no features extracted), but all datasets are formatted in a uniform tensor manner (although images may have fixed or variable sizes within a dataset). The participants's code will be blind tested on a challenge platform in a controlled manner, with restrictions on training and test time and memory limitations. The challenge is part of the official selection of IJCNN 2019.

Abstract: The ICDAR 2019 Challenge on “Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction” (SROIE) covers important aspects related to the automated analysis of scanned receipts. The SROIE tasks play a key role in many document analysis systems and hold significant commercial potential. Although a lot of work has been published over the years on administrative document analysis, the community has advanced relatively slowly, as most datasets have been kept private. One of the key contributions of SROIE to the document analysis community is to offer a first, standardized dataset of 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations, as well as an evaluation procedure for such tasks. The Challenge is structured around three tasks, namely Scanned Receipt Text Localization (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). The competition opened on 10th February, 2019 and closed on 5th May, 2019. We received 29, 24 and 18 valid submissions received for the three competition tasks, respectively. This report presents the competition datasets, define the tasks and the evaluation protocols, offer detailed submission statistics, as well as an analysis of the submitted performance. While the tasks of text localization and recognition seem to be relatively easy to tackle, it is interesting to observe the variety of ideas and approaches proposed for the information extraction task. According to the submissions' performance we believe there is still margin for improving information extraction performance, although the current dataset would have to grow substantially in following editions. Given the success of the SROIE competition evidenced by the wide interest generated and the healthy number of submissions from academic, research institutes and industry over different countries, we consider that the SROIE competition can evolve into a useful resource for the community, drawing further attention and promoting research and development efforts in this field.

Abstract: In incremental learning, replaying stored samples from previous tasks together with current task samples is one of the most efficient approaches to address catastrophic forgetting. However, unlike incremental classification, image replay has not been successfully applied to incremental object detection (IOD). In this paper, we identify the overlooked problem of foreground shift as the main reason for this. Foreground shift only occurs when replaying images of previous tasks and refers to the fact that their background might contain foreground objects of the current task. To overcome this problem, a novel and efficient Augmented Box Replay (ABR) method is developed that only stores and replays foreground objects and thereby circumvents the foreground shift problem. In addition, we propose an innovative Attentive RoI Distillation loss that uses spatial attention from region-of-interest (RoI) features to constrain current model to focus on the most important information from old model. ABR significantly reduces forgetting of previous classes while maintaining high plasticity in current classes. Moreover, it considerably reduces the storage requirements when compared to standard image replay. Comprehensive experiments on Pascal-VOC and COCO datasets support the state-of-the-art performance of our model.

Abstract: Finding a way to estimate quickly and robustly the pose of an image is essential in augmented reality. Here we will discuss the approach we chose in order to get closer to real time by using SIFT points [4]. We propose a method based on filtering both SIFT points and images on which to focus on. Hence we will focus on relevant data.

Abstract: Due to the increasing demand for game-streaming services, efficient compression of computer-generated video is more critical than ever, especially when the available bandwidth is low. This paper proposes a super-resolution framework that improves the coding efficiency of computer-generated gaming videos at low bitrates. Most state-of-the-art super-resolution networks generalize over a variety of RGB inputs and use a unified network architecture for frames of different levels of degradation, leading to high complexity and redundancy. Since games usually consist of a limited number of fixed scenarios, we specialize one model for each scenario and assign appropriate network capacities for different QPs to perform super-resolution under the guidance of reconstructed high-quality luma components. Experimental results show that our framework achieves a superior quality-complexity trade-off compared to the ESRnet baseline, saving at most 93.59% parameters while maintaining comparable performance. The compression efficiency compared to HEVC is also improved by more than 17% BD-rate gain.

Abstract: Human drivers produce a vast amount of data which could, in principle, be used to improve autonomous driving systems. Unfortunately, seemingly straightforward approaches for creating end-to-end driving models that map sensor data directly into driving actions are problematic in terms of interpretability, and typically have significant difficulty dealing with spurious correlations. Alternatively, we propose to use this kind of action-based driving data for learning representations. Our experiments show that an affordance-based driving model pre-trained with this approach can leverage a relatively small amount of weakly annotated imagery and outperform pure end-to-end driving models, while being more interpretable. Further, we demonstrate how this strategy outperforms previous methods based on learning inverse dynamics models as well as other methods based on heavy human supervision (ImageNet).

Abstract: Image-to-image translation has recently achieved remarkable results. But despite current success, it suffers from inferior performance when translations between classes require large shape changes. We attribute this to the high-resolution bottlenecks which are used by current state-of-the-art image-to-image methods. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel deep hierarchical Image-to-Image Translation method, called DeepI2I. We learn a model by leveraging hierarchical features: (a) structural information contained in the shallow layers and (b) semantic information extracted from the deep layers. To enable the training of deep I2I models on small datasets, we propose a novel transfer learning method, that transfers knowledge from pre-trained GANs. Specifically, we leverage the discriminator of a pre-trained GANs (i.e. BigGAN or StyleGAN) to initialize both the encoder and the discriminator and the pre-trained generator to initialize the generator of our model. Applying knowledge transfer leads to an alignment problem between the encoder and generator. We introduce an adaptor network to address this. On many-class image-to-image translation on three datasets (Animal faces, Birds, and Foods) we decrease mFID by at least 35% when compared to the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that transfer learning significantly improves the performance of I2I systems, especially for small datasets. Finally, we are the first to perform I2I translations for domains with over 100 classes.