Abstract: Historical ciphered manuscripts are a type of document where graphical symbols are used to encrypt their content instead of regular text. Nowadays, expert transcriptions can be found in libraries alongside the corresponding manuscript images. However, those transcriptions are not aligned, so these are barely usable for training deep learning-based recognition methods. To solve this issue, we propose a method to align each symbol in the transcript of an image with its visual representation by using an attention-based Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) model. The core idea is that, by learning to recognise symbols sequence within a cipher line image, the model also identifies their position implicitly through an attention mechanism. Thus, the resulting symbol segmentation can be later used for training algorithms. The experimental evaluation shows that this method is promising, especially taking into account the small size of the cipher dataset.

Abstract: This work addresses the problem of Question Answering (QA) on handwritten document collections. Unlike typical QA and Visual Question Answering (VQA) formulations where the answer is a short text, we aim to locate a document snippet where the answer lies. The proposed approach works without recognizing the text in the documents. We argue that the recognition-free approach is suitable for handwritten documents and historical collections where robust text recognition is often difficult. At the same time, for human users, document image snippets containing answers act as a valid alternative to textual answers. The proposed approach uses an off-the-shelf deep embedding network which can project both textual words and word images into a common sub-space. This embedding bridges the textual and visual domains and helps us retrieve document snippets that potentially answer a question. We evaluate results of the proposed approach on two new datasets: (i) HW-SQuAD: a synthetic, handwritten document image counterpart of SQuAD1.0 dataset and (ii) BenthamQA: a smaller set of QA pairs defined on documents from the popular Bentham manuscripts collection. We also present a thorough analysis of the proposed recognition-free approach compared to a recognition-based approach which uses text recognized from the images using an OCR. Datasets presented in this work are available to download at docvqa.org.

Abstract: In this report we present results of the ICDAR 2021 edition of the Document Visual Question Challenges. This edition complements the previous tasks on Single Document VQA and Document Collection VQA with a newly introduced on Infographics VQA. Infographics VQA is based on a new dataset of more than 5, 000 infographics images and 30, 000 question-answer pairs. The winner methods have scored 0.6120 ANLS in Infographics VQA task, 0.7743 ANLSL in Document Collection VQA task and 0.8705 ANLS in Single Document VQA. We present a summary of the datasets used for each task, description of each of the submitted methods and the results and analysis of their performance. A summary of the progress made on Single Document VQA since the first edition of the DocVQA 2020 challenge is also presented.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new approach to under-stand actions in egocentric videos that exploits the semantics of object interactions at both frame and temporal levels. At the frame level, we use a region-based approach that takes as input a primary region roughly corresponding to the user hands and a set of secondary regions potentially corresponding to the interacting objects and calculates the action score through a CNN formulation. This information is then fed to a Hierarchical LongShort-Term Memory Network (HLSTM) that captures temporal dependencies between actions within and across shots. Ablation studies thoroughly validate the proposed approach, showing in particular that both levels of the HLSTM architecture contribute to performance improvement. Furthermore, quantitative comparisons show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of action recognition on standard benchmarks,without relying on motion information

Abstract: This book contains the proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) which was organized and sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), endorsed by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), and in cooperation with the ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), the European Association for Computer Graphics (EUROGRAPHICS), the EUROGRAPHICS Portuguese Chapter, the VRVis Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization Forschungs-GmbH, the French Association for Computer Graphics (AFIG), and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). The proceedings here published demonstrate new and innovative solutions and highlight technical problems in each field that are challenging and worthy of being disseminated to the interested research audiences. VISIGRAPP 2021 was organized to promote a discussion forum about the conference’s research topics between researchers, developers, manufacturers and end-users, and to establish guidelines in the development of more advanced solutions. This year VISIGRAPP was, exceptionally, held as a web-based event, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, from 8 – 10 February. We received a high number of paper submissions for this edition of VISIGRAPP, 371 in total, with contributions from 52 countries. This attests to the success and global dimension of VISIGRAPP. To evaluate each submission, we used a hierarchical process of double-blind evaluation where each paper was reviewed by two to six experts from the International Program Committee (IPC). The IPC selected for oral presentation and for publication as full papers 12 papers from GRAPP, 8 from HUCAPP, 11 papers from IVAPP, and 56 papers from VISAPP, which led to a result for the full-paper acceptance ratio of 24% and a high-quality program. Apart from the above full papers, the conference program also features 118 short papers and 67 poster presentations. We hope that these conference proceedings, which are submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index, SCOPUS, DBLP, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, EI and Microsoft Academic, will help the Computer Vision, Imaging, Visualization, Computer Graphics and Human-Computer Interaction communities to find interesting research work. Moreover, we are proud to inform that the program also includes three plenary keynote lectures, given by internationally distinguished researchers, namely Federico Tombari (Google and Technical University of Munich, Germany), Dieter Schmalstieg (Graz University of Technology, Austria) and Nathalie Henry Riche (Microsoft Research, United States), thus contributing to increase the overall quality of the conference and to provide a deeper understanding of the conference’s interest fields. Furthermore, a short list of the presented papers will be selected to be extended into a forthcoming book of VISIGRAPP Selected Papers to be published by Springer during 2021 in the CCIS series. Moreover, a short list of presented papers will be selected for publication of extended and revised versions in a special issue of the Springer Nature Computer Science journal. All papers presented at this conference will be available at the SCITEPRESS Digital Library. Three awards are delivered at the closing session, to recognize the best conference paper, the best student paper and the best poster for each of the four conferences. There is also an award for best industrial paper to be delivered at the closing session for VISAPP. We would like to express our thanks, first of all, to the authors of the technical papers, whose work and dedication made it possible to put together a program that we believe to be very exciting and of high technical quality. Next, we would like to thank the Area Chairs, all the members of the program committee and auxiliary reviewers, who helped us with their expertise and time. We would also like to thank the invited speakers for their invaluable contribution and for sharing their vision in their talks. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the professional support of the INSTICC team for all organizational processes, especially given the need to introduce online streaming, forum management, direct messaging facilitation and other web-based activities in order to make it possible for VISIGRAPP 2021 authors to present their work and share ideas with colleagues in spite of the logistic difficulties caused by the current pandemic situation. We wish you all an exciting conference. We hope to meet you again for the next edition of VISIGRAPP, details of which are available at http://www. visigrapp.org.

Abstract: Deep learning methods show great promise in a range of settings including the biomedical field. Explainability of these models is important in these fields for building end-user trust and to facilitate their confident deployment. Although several Machine Learning Interpretability tools have been proposed so far, there is currently no recognized evaluation standard to transfer the explainability results into a quantitative score. Several measures have been proposed as proxies for quantitative assessment of explainability methods. However, the robustness of the list of significant features provided by the explainability methods has not been addressed. In this work, we propose a new proxy for assessing the robustness of the list of significant features provided by two explainability methods. Our validation is defined at functionality-grounded level based on the ranked correlation statistical index and demonstrates its successful application in the framework of brain aging estimation. We assessed our proxy to estimate brain age using neuroscience data. Our results indicate small variability and high robustness in the considered explainability methods using this new proxy.

Abstract: Eating habits are learned throughout the early stages of our lives. However, it is not easy to be aware of how our food-related routine affects our healthy living. In this work, we address the unsupervised discovery of nutritional habits from egocentric photo-streams. We build a food-related behavioral pattern discovery model, which discloses nutritional routines from the activities performed throughout the days. To do so, we rely on Dynamic-Time-Warping for the evaluation of similarity among the collected days. Within this framework, we present a simple, but robust and fast novel classification pipeline that outperforms the state-of-the-art on food-related image classification with a weighted accuracy and F-score of 70% and 63%, respectively. Later, we identify days composed of nutritional activities that do not describe the habits of the person as anomalies in the daily life of the user with the Isolation Forest method. Furthermore, we show an application for the identification of food-related scenes when the camera wearer eats in isolation. Results have shown the good performance of the proposed model and its relevance to visualize the nutritional habits of individuals.

Abstract: Garments are highly detailed and dynamic objects made up of particles that interact with each other and with other objects, making the task of 2D to 3D garment reconstruction extremely challenging. Therefore, having a lightweight 3D representation capable of modelling fine details is of great importance. This work presents a deep learning framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to reconstruct 3D garment models from a single RGB image. It has the peculiarity of using UV maps to represent 3D data, a lightweight representation capable of dealing with high-resolution details and wrinkles. With this model and kind of 3D representation, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the CLOTH3D++ dataset, generating good quality and realistic garment reconstructions regardless of the garment topology and shape, human pose, occlusions and lightning.