Abstract: We propose a framework for automated classification of Advertisement Images, using not just Visual features but also Textual cues extracted from embedded text. Our approach takes inspiration from the assumption that Ad images contain meaningful textual content, that can provide discriminative semantic interpretetion, and can thus aid in classifcation tasks. To this end, we develop a framework using off-the-shelf components, and demonstrate the effectiveness of Textual cues in semantic Classfication tasks.

Abstract: The ICDAR Robust Reading Competition (RRC), initiated in 2003 and reestablished in 2011, has become the defacto evaluation standard for the international community. Concurrent with its second incarnation in 2011, a continuous
effort started to develop an online framework to facilitate the hosting and management of competitions. This short paper briefly outlines the Robust Reading Competition Annotation and Evaluation Platform, the backbone of the
Robust Reading Competition, comprising a collection of tools and processes that aim to simplify the management and annotation of data, and to provide online and offline performance evaluation and analysis services.

Abstract: Word-spotting methods based on the Bag-ofVisual-Words framework have demonstrated a good retrieval performance even when used in a completely unsupervised manner. Although unsupervised approaches are suitable for
large document collections due to the cost of acquiring labeled data, these methods also present some drawbacks. For instance, having to train a suitable “codebook” for a certain dataset has a high computational cost. Therefore, in
this paper we present a database agnostic codebook which is trained from synthetic data. The aim of the proposed approach is to generate a codebook where the only information required is the type of script used in the document. The use of synthetic data also allows to easily incorporate semantic
information in the codebook generation. So, the proposed method is able to determine which set of codewords have a semantic representation of the descriptor feature space. Experimental results show that the resulting codebook attains a state-of-the-art performance while having a more compact representation.

Abstract: Deep networks trained on demonstrations of human driving have learned to follow roads and avoid obstacles. However, driving policies trained via imitation learning cannot be controlled at test time. A vehicle trained end-to-end to imitate an expert cannot be guided to take a specific turn at an upcoming intersection. This limits the utility of such systems. We propose to condition imitation learning on high-level command input. At test time, the learned driving policy functions as a chauffeur that handles sensorimotor coordination but continues to respond to navigational commands. We evaluate different architectures for conditional imitation learning in vision-based driving. We conduct experiments in realistic three-dimensional simulations of urban driving and on a 1/5 scale robotic truck that is trained to drive in a residential area. Both systems drive based on visual input yet remain responsive to high-level navigational commands. The supplementary video can be viewed at this https URL

Abstract: Skin lesion segmentation (SLS) in dermoscopic images is a crucial task for automated diagnosis of melanoma. In this paper, we present a robust deep learning SLS model, so-called SLSDeep, which is represented as an encoder-decoder network. The encoder network is constructed by dilated residual layers, in turn, a pyramid pooling network followed by three convolution layers is used for the decoder. Unlike the traditional methods employing a cross-entropy loss, we investigated a loss function by combining both Negative Log Likelihood (NLL) and End Point Error (EPE) to accurately segment the melanoma regions with sharp boundaries. The robustness of the proposed model was evaluated on two public databases: ISBI 2016 and 2017 for skin lesion analysis towards melanoma detection challenge. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of segmentation accuracy. Moreover, it is capable to segment more than 100 images of size 384x384 per second on a recent GPU.

Abstract: In this paper, we strive to answer two questions: What is the current state of 3D hand pose estimation from depth images? And, what are the next challenges that need to be tackled? Following the successful Hands In the Million Challenge (HIM2017), we investigate the top 10 state-of-the-art methods on three tasks: single frame 3D pose estimation, 3D hand tracking, and hand pose estimation during object interaction. We analyze the performance of different CNN structures with regard to hand shape, joint visibility, view point and articulation distributions. Our findings include: (1) isolated 3D hand pose estimation achieves low mean errors (10 mm) in the view point range of [70, 120] degrees, but it is far from being solved for extreme view points; (2) 3D volumetric representations outperform 2D CNNs, better capturing the spatial structure of the depth data; (3) Discriminative methods still generalize poorly to unseen hand shapes; (4) While joint occlusions pose a challenge for most methods, explicit modeling of structure constraints can significantly narrow the gap between errors on visible and occluded joints.