Abstract: Landmark detection is a fundamental task aiming at identifying specific landmarks that serve as representations of distinct object features within an image. However, the present landmark detection algorithms often adopt complex architectures and are trained in a supervised manner using large datasets to achieve satisfactory performance. When faced with limited data, these algorithms tend to experience a notable decline in accuracy. To address these drawbacks, we propose a novel diffusion-based network (DBN) for unsupervised landmark detection, which leverages the generation ability of the diffusion models to detect the landmark locations. In particular, we introduce a dual-branch encoder (DualE) for extracting visual features and predicting landmarks. Additionally, we lighten the decoder structure for faster inference, referred to as LightD. By this means, we avoid relying on extensive data comparison and the necessity of designing complex architectures as in previous methods. Experiments on CelebA, AFLW, 300W and Deepfashion benchmarks have shown that DBN performs state-of-the-art compared to the existing methods. Furthermore, DBN shows robustness even when faced with limited data cases.

Abstract: Conditional human motion generation is an important topic with many applications in virtual reality, gaming, and robotics. While prior works have focused on generating motion guided by text, music, or scenes, these typically result in isolated motions confined to short durations. Instead, we address the generation of long, continuous sequences guided by a series of varying textual descriptions. In this context, we introduce FlowMDM, the first diffusion-based model that generates seamless Human Motion Compositions (HMC) without any postprocessing or redundant denoising steps. For this, we introduce the Blended Positional Encodings, a technique that leverages both absolute and relative positional encodings in the denoising chain. More specifically, global motion coherence is recovered at the absolute stage, whereas smooth and realistic transitions are built at the relative stage. As a result, we achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of accuracy, realism, and smoothness on the Babel and HumanML3D datasets. FlowMDM excels when trained with only a single description per motion sequence thanks to its Pose-Centric Cross-ATtention, which makes it robust against varying text descriptions at inference time. Finally, to address the limitations of existing HMC metrics, we propose two new metrics: the Peak Jerk and the Area Under the Jerk, to detect abrupt transitions.

Abstract: Historical cryptology studies (original) encrypted manuscripts, often handwritten sources, produced in our history. These historical sources can be found in archives, often hidden without any indexing and therefore hard to locate. Once found they need to be digitized and turned into a machine-readable text format before they can be deciphered with computational methods. The focus of historical cryptology is not primarily the development of sophisticated algorithms for decipherment, but rather the entire process of analysis of the encrypted source from collection and digitization to transcription and decryption. The process also includes the interpretation and contextualization of the message set in its historical context. There are many challenges on the way, such as mistakes made by the scribe, errors made by the transcriber, damaged pages, handwriting styles that are difficult to interpret, historical languages from various time periods, and hidden underlying language of the message. Ciphertexts vary greatly in terms of their code system and symbol sets used with more or less distinguishable symbols. Ciphertexts can be embedded in clearly written text, or shorter or longer sequences of cleartext can be embedded in the ciphertext. The ciphers used mostly in historical times are substitutions (simple, homophonic, or polyphonic), with or without nomenclatures, encoded as digits or symbol sequences, with or without spaces. So the circumstances are different from those in modern cryptography which focuses on methods (algorithms) and their strengths and assumes that the algorithm is applied correctly. For both historical and modern cryptology, attack vectors outside the algorithm are applied like implementation flaws and side-channel attacks. In this chapter, we give an introduction to the field of historical cryptology and present an overview of how researchers today process historical encrypted sources.

Abstract: Improving images captured under low-light conditions has become an important topic in computational color imaging, as it has a wide range of applications. Most current methods are either based on handcrafted features or on end-to-end training of deep neural networks that mostly focus on minimizing some distortion metric —such as PSNR or SSIM— on a set of training images. However, the minimization of distortion metrics does not mean that the results are optimal in terms of perception (i.e. perceptual quality). As an example, the perception-distortion trade-off states that, close to the optimal results, improving distortion results in worsening perception. This means that current low-light image enhancement methods —that focus on distortion minimization— cannot be optimal in the sense of obtaining a good image in terms of perception errors. In this paper, we propose a post-processing approach in which, given the original low-light image and the result of a specific method, we are able to obtain a result that resembles as much as possible that of the original method, but, at the same time, giving an improvement in the perception of the final image. More in detail, our method follows the hypothesis that in order to minimally modify the perception of an input image, any modification should be a combination of a local change in the shading across a scene and a global change in illumination color. We demonstrate the ability of our method quantitatively using perceptual blind image metrics such as BRISQUE, NIQE, or UNIQUE, and through user preference tests.

Abstract: Sign Language Recognition (SLR) has garnered significant attention from researchers in recent years, particularly the intricate domain of Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR), which presents heightened complexity compared to Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR). One of the prominent challenges in CSLR pertains to accurately detecting the boundaries of isolated signs within a continuous video stream. Additionally, the reliance on handcrafted features in existing models poses a challenge to achieving optimal accuracy. To surmount these challenges, we propose a novel approach utilizing a Transformer-based model. Unlike traditional models, our approach focuses on enhancing accuracy while eliminating the need for handcrafted features. The Transformer model is employed for both ISLR and CSLR. The training process involves using isolated sign videos, where hand keypoint features extracted from the input video are enriched using the Transformer model. Subsequently, these enriched features are forwarded to the final classification layer. The trained model, coupled with a post-processing method, is then applied to detect isolated sign boundaries within continuous sign videos. The evaluation of our model is conducted on two distinct datasets, including both continuous signs and their corresponding isolated signs, demonstrates promising results.

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.

Abstract: Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) is a fast growing branch of document understanding. Despite the fact that documents contain sensitive or copyrighted information, none of the current DocVQA methods offers strong privacy guarantees.
In this work, we explore privacy in the domain of DocVQA for the first time. We highlight privacy issues in state of the art multi-modal LLM models used for DocVQA, and explore possible solutions.
Specifically, we focus on the invoice processing use case as a realistic, widely used scenario for document understanding, and propose a large scale DocVQA dataset comprising invoice documents and associated questions and answers. We employ a federated learning scheme, that reflects the real-life distribution of documents in different businesses, and we explore the use case where the ID of the invoice issuer is the sensitive information to be protected.
We demonstrate that non-private models tend to memorise, behaviour that can lead to exposing private information. We then evaluate baseline training schemes employing federated learning and differential privacy in this multi-modal scenario, where the sensitive information might be exposed through any of the two input modalities: vision (document image) or language (OCR tokens).
Finally, we design an attack exploiting the memorisation effect of the model, and demonstrate its effectiveness in probing different DocVQA models.

Abstract: This work proposes a novel approach that integrates super-resolution techniques with off-the-shelf object detection methods to tackle the problem of handling very low-resolution thermal images. The suggested approach begins by enhancing the low-resolution (LR) thermal images through a guided super-resolution strategy, leveraging a high-resolution (HR) visible spectrum image. Subsequently, object detection is performed on the high-resolution thermal image. The experimental results demonstrate tremendous improvements in comparison with both scenarios: when object detection is performed on the LR thermal image alone, as well as when object detection is conducted on the up-sampled LR thermal image. Moreover, the proposed approach proves highly valuable in camouflaged scenarios where objects might remain undetected in visible spectrum images.