Carola Figueroa Flores, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Joost Van de Weijer, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2019). Saliency for fine-grained object recognition in domains with scarce training data. PR - Pattern Recognition, 94, 62–73.
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of saliency to improve the classification accuracy of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the case when scarce training data is available. Our approach consists in adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture which is used to modulate the standard bottom-up visual features from the original image input, acting as an attentional mechanism that guides the feature extraction process. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enable the effective training of a fine-grained recognition model with limited training samples and to improve the performance on the task, thereby alleviating the need to annotate a large dataset. The vast majority of saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline. Our proposed pipeline allows to evaluate saliency methods for the high-level task of object recognition. We perform extensive experiments on various fine-grained datasets (Flowers, Birds, Cars, and Dogs) under different conditions and show that saliency can considerably improve the network’s performance, especially for the case of scarce training data. Furthermore, our experiments show that saliency methods that obtain improved saliency maps (as measured by traditional saliency benchmarks) also translate to saliency methods that yield improved performance gains when applied in an object recognition pipeline.
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Carola Figueroa Flores. (2021). Visual Saliency for Object Recognition, and Object Recognition for Visual Saliency (Joost Van de Weijer, & Bogdan Raducanu, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: For humans, the recognition of objects is an almost instantaneous, precise and
extremely adaptable process. Furthermore, we have the innate capability to learn
new object classes from only few examples. The human brain lowers the complexity
of the incoming data by filtering out part of the information and only processing
those things that capture our attention. This, mixed with our biological predisposition to respond to certain shapes or colors, allows us to recognize in a simple
glance the most important or salient regions from an image. This mechanism can
be observed by analyzing on which parts of images subjects place attention; where
they fix their eyes when an image is shown to them. The most accurate way to
record this behavior is to track eye movements while displaying images.
Computational saliency estimation aims to identify to what extent regions or
objects stand out with respect to their surroundings to human observers. Saliency
maps can be used in a wide range of applications including object detection, image
and video compression, and visual tracking. The majority of research in the field has
focused on automatically estimating saliency maps given an input image. Instead, in
this thesis, we set out to incorporate saliency maps in an object recognition pipeline:
we want to investigate whether saliency maps can improve object recognition
results.
In this thesis, we identify several problems related to visual saliency estimation.
First, to what extent the estimation of saliency can be exploited to improve the
training of an object recognition model when scarce training data is available. To
solve this problem, we design an image classification network that incorporates
saliency information as input. This network processes the saliency map through a
dedicated network branch and uses the resulting characteristics to modulate the
standard bottom-up visual characteristics of the original image input. We will refer to this technique as saliency-modulated image classification (SMIC). In extensive
experiments on standard benchmark datasets for fine-grained object recognition,
we show that our proposed architecture can significantly improve performance,
especially on dataset with scarce training data.
Next, we address the main drawback of the above pipeline: SMIC requires an
explicit saliency algorithm that must be trained on a saliency dataset. To solve this,
we implement a hallucination mechanism that allows us to incorporate the saliency
estimation branch in an end-to-end trained neural network architecture that only
needs the RGB image as an input. A side-effect of this architecture is the estimation
of saliency maps. In experiments, we show that this architecture can obtain similar
results on object recognition as SMIC but without the requirement of ground truth
saliency maps to train the system.
Finally, we evaluated the accuracy of the saliency maps that occur as a sideeffect of object recognition. For this purpose, we use a set of benchmark datasets
for saliency evaluation based on eye-tracking experiments. Surprisingly, the estimated saliency maps are very similar to the maps that are computed from human
eye-tracking experiments. Our results show that these saliency maps can obtain
competitive results on benchmark saliency maps. On one synthetic saliency dataset
this method even obtains the state-of-the-art without the need of ever having seen
an actual saliency image for training.
Keywords: computer vision; visual saliency; fine-grained object recognition; convolutional neural networks; images classification
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Alicia Fornes, V.C.Kieu, M. Visani, N.Journet, & Anjan Dutta. (2014). The ICDAR/GREC 2013 Music Scores Competition: Staff Removal. In B.Lamiroy, & J.-M. Ogier (Eds.), Graphics Recognition. Current Trends and Challenges (Vol. 8746, pp. 207–220). LNCS. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Abstract: The first competition on music scores that was organized at ICDAR and GREC in 2011 awoke the interest of researchers, who participated in both staff removal and writer identification tasks. In this second edition, we focus on the staff removal task and simulate a real case scenario concerning old and degraded music scores. For this purpose, we have generated a new set of semi-synthetic images using two degradation models that we previously introduced: local noise and 3D distortions. In this extended paper we provide an extended description of the dataset, degradation models, evaluation metrics, the participant’s methods and the obtained results that could not be presented at ICDAR and GREC proceedings due to page limitations.
Keywords: Competition; Graphics recognition; Music scores; Writer identification; Staff removal
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David Fernandez, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2011). Handwritten Word Spotting in Old Manuscript Images Using a Pseudo-Structural Descriptor Organized in a Hash Structure. In Jordi Vitria, Joao Miguel Raposo, & Mario Hernandez (Eds.), 5th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (Vol. 6669, pp. 628–635).
Abstract: There are lots of historical handwritten documents with information that can be used for several studies and projects. The Document Image Analysis and Recognition community is interested in preserving these documents and extracting all the valuable information from them. Handwritten word-spotting is the pattern classification task which consists in detecting handwriting word images. In this work, we have used a query-by-example formalism: we have matched an input image with one or multiple images from handwritten documents to determine the distance that might indicate a correspondence. We have developed an approach based in characteristic Loci Features stored in a hash structure. Document images of the marriage licences of the Cathedral of Barcelona are used as the benchmarking database.
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David Fernandez, Josep Llados, Alicia Fornes, & R.Manmatha. (2012). On Influence of Line Segmentation in Efficient Word Segmentation in Old Manuscripts. In 13th International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (pp. 763–768).
Abstract: he objective of this work is to show the importance of a good line segmentation to obtain better results in the segmentation of words of historical documents. We have used the approach developed by Manmatha and Rothfeder [1] to segment words in old handwritten documents. In their work the lines of the documents are extracted using projections. In this work, we have developed an approach to segment lines more efficiently. The new line segmentation algorithm tackles with skewed, touching and noisy lines, so it is significantly improves word segmentation. Experiments using Spanish documents from the Marriages Database of the Barcelona Cathedral show that this approach reduces the error rate by more than 20%
Keywords: document image processing;handwritten character recognition;history;image segmentation;Spanish document;historical document;line segmentation;old handwritten document;old manuscript;word segmentation;Bifurcation;Dynamic programming;Handwriting recognition;Image segmentation;Measurement;Noise;Skeleton;Segmentation;document analysis;document and text processing;handwriting analysis;heuristics;path-finding
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David Fernandez, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2014). A graph-based approach for segmenting touching lines in historical handwritten documents. IJDAR - International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition, 17(3), 293–312.
Abstract: Text line segmentation in handwritten documents is an important task in the recognition of historical documents. Handwritten document images contain text lines with multiple orientations, touching and overlapping characters between consecutive text lines and different document structures, making line segmentation a difficult task. In this paper, we present a new approach for handwritten text line segmentation solving the problems of touching components, curvilinear text lines and horizontally overlapping components. The proposed algorithm formulates line segmentation as finding the central path in the area between two consecutive lines. This is solved as a graph traversal problem. A graph is constructed using the skeleton of the image. Then, a path-finding algorithm is used to find the optimum path between text lines. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on a comprehensive dataset consisting of five databases: ICDAR2009, ICDAR2013, UMD, the George Washington and the Barcelona Marriages Database. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art considering the different types and difficulties of the benchmarking data.
Keywords: Text line segmentation; Handwritten documents; Document image processing; Historical document analysis
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, Joan Mas, Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora, & Anna Cabre. (2014). A Bimodal Crowdsourcing Platform for Demographic Historical Manuscripts. In Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage Conference (pp. 103–108).
Abstract: In this paper we present a crowdsourcing web-based application for extracting information from demographic handwritten document images. The proposed application integrates two points of view: the semantic information for demographic research, and the ground-truthing for document analysis research. Concretely, the application has the contents view, where the information is recorded into forms, and the labeling view, with the word labels for evaluating document analysis techniques. The crowdsourcing architecture allows to accelerate the information extraction (many users can work simultaneously), validate the information, and easily provide feedback to the users. We finally show how the proposed application can be extended to other kind of demographic historical manuscripts.
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Francesco Fabbri, Xianghang Liu, Jack R. McKenzie, Bartlomiej Twardowski, & Tri Kurniawan Wijaya. (2023). FedFNN: Faster Training Convergence Through Update Predictions in Federated Recommender Systems.
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a key approach for distributed machine learning, enhancing online personalization while ensuring user data privacy. Instead of sending private data to a central server as in traditional approaches, FL decentralizes computations: devices train locally and share updates with a global server. A primary challenge in this setting is achieving fast and accurate model training – vital for recommendation systems where delays can compromise user engagement. This paper introduces FedFNN, an algorithm that accelerates decentralized model training. In FL, only a subset of users are involved in each training epoch. FedFNN employs supervised learning to predict weight updates from unsampled users, using updates from the sampled set. Our evaluations, using real and synthetic data, show: 1. FedFNN achieves training speeds 5x faster than leading methods, maintaining or improving accuracy; 2. the algorithm's performance is consistent regardless of client cluster variations; 3. FedFNN outperforms other methods in scenarios with limited client availability, converging more quickly.
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, & Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora. (2020). Browsing of the Social Network of the Past: Information Extraction from Population Manuscript Images. In Handwritten Historical Document Analysis, Recognition, and Retrieval – State of the Art and Future Trends. World Scientific.
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Marçal Rusiñol. (2016). La Visió per Computador com a Eina per a la Interpretació Automàtica de Fonts Documentals. Lligall, Revista Catalana d'Arxivística, 20–46.
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, Gemma Sanchez, & Horst Bunke. (2012). Writer Identification in Old Handwritten Music Scores. In Copnstantin Papaodysseus (Ed.), Pattern Recognition and Signal Processing in Archaeometry: Mathematical and Computational Solutions for Archaeology (pp. 27–63). IGI-Global.
Abstract: The aim of writer identification is determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. Even though an important amount of compositions contains handwritten text in the music scores, the aim of our work is to use only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the system proposed are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed and normalized for obtaining a single binarized music line, without the staff lines. Afterwards, 100 features are extracted for every music line, which are subsequently used in a k-NN classifier that compares every feature vector with prototypes stored in a database. By applying feature selection and extraction methods on the original feature set, the performance is increased. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving a recognition rate of about 95%.
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Onur Ferhat, Arcadi Llanza, & Fernando Vilariño. (2015). A Feature-Based Gaze Estimation Algorithm for Natural Light Scenarios. In Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, Proceedings of 7th Iberian Conference , ibPRIA 2015 (Vol. 9117, pp. 569–576). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: We present an eye tracking system that works with regular webcams. We base our work on open source CVC Eye Tracker [7] and we propose a number of improvements and a novel gaze estimation method. The new method uses features extracted from iris segmentation and it does not fall into the traditional categorization of appearance–based/model–based methods. Our experiments show that our approach reduces the gaze estimation errors by 34 % in the horizontal direction and by 12 % in the vertical direction compared to the baseline system.
Keywords: Eye tracking; Gaze estimation; Natural light; Webcam
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Onur Ferhat, Arcadi Llanza, & Fernando Vilariño. (2015). Gaze interaction for multi-display systems using natural light eye-tracker. In 2nd International Workshop on Solutions for Automatic Gaze Data Analysis.
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Hao Fang, Ajian Liu, Jun Wan, Sergio Escalera, Hugo Jair Escalante, & Zhen Lei. (2023). Surveillance Face Presentation Attack Detection Challenge. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (pp. 6360–6370).
Abstract: Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems from various physical attacks. However, most of the studies lacked consideration of long-distance scenarios. Specifically, compared with FAS in traditional scenes such as phone unlocking, face payment, and self-service security inspection, FAS in long-distance such as station squares, parks, and self-service supermarkets are equally important, but it has not been sufficiently explored yet. In order to fill this gap in the FAS community, we collect a large-scale Surveillance High-Fidelity Mask (SuHiFiMask). SuHiFiMask contains 10,195 videos from 101 subjects of different age groups, which are collected by 7 mainstream surveillance cameras. Based on this dataset and protocol-3 for evaluating the robustness of the algorithm under quality changes, we organized a face presentation attack detection challenge in surveillance scenarios. It attracted 180 teams for the development phase with a total of 37 teams qualifying for the final round. The organization team re-verified and re-ran the submitted code and used the results as the final ranking. In this paper, we present an overview of the challenge, including an introduction to the dataset used, the definition of the protocol, the evaluation metrics, and the announcement of the competition results. Finally, we present the top-ranked algorithms and the research ideas provided by the competition for attack detection in long-range surveillance scenarios.
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Hao Fang, Ajian Liu, Jun Wan, Sergio Escalera, Chenxu Zhao, Xu Zhang, et al. (2024). Surveillance Face Anti-spoofing. TIFS - IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 19, 1535–1546.
Abstract: Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems from various physical attacks. However, recent research generally focuses on short-distance applications (i.e., phone unlocking) while lacking consideration of long-distance scenes (i.e., surveillance security checks). In order to promote relevant research and fill this gap in the community, we collect a large-scale Surveillance High-Fidelity Mask (SuHiFiMask) dataset captured under 40 surveillance scenes, which has 101 subjects from different age groups with 232 3D attacks (high-fidelity masks), 200 2D attacks (posters, portraits, and screens), and 2 adversarial attacks. In this scene, low image resolution and noise interference are new challenges faced in surveillance FAS. Together with the SuHiFiMask dataset, we propose a Contrastive Quality-Invariance Learning (CQIL) network to alleviate the performance degradation caused by image quality from three aspects: (1) An Image Quality Variable module (IQV) is introduced to recover image information associated with discrimination by combining the super-resolution network. (2) Using generated sample pairs to simulate quality variance distributions to help contrastive learning strategies obtain robust feature representation under quality variation. (3) A Separate Quality Network (SQN) is designed to learn discriminative features independent of image quality. Finally, a large number of experiments verify the quality of the SuHiFiMask dataset and the superiority of the proposed CQIL.
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