Sagnik Das, Hassan Ahmed Sial, Ke Ma, Ramon Baldrich, Maria Vanrell, & Dimitris Samaras. (2020). Intrinsic Decomposition of Document Images In-the-Wild. In 31st British Machine Vision Conference.
Abstract: Automatic document content processing is affected by artifacts caused by the shape
of the paper, non-uniform and diverse color of lighting conditions. Fully-supervised
methods on real data are impossible due to the large amount of data needed. Hence, the
current state of the art deep learning models are trained on fully or partially synthetic images. However, document shadow or shading removal results still suffer because: (a) prior methods rely on uniformity of local color statistics, which limit their application on real-scenarios with complex document shapes and textures and; (b) synthetic or hybrid datasets with non-realistic, simulated lighting conditions are used to train the models. In this paper we tackle these problems with our two main contributions. First, a physically constrained learning-based method that directly estimates document reflectance based on intrinsic image formation which generalizes to challenging illumination conditions. Second, a new dataset that clearly improves previous synthetic ones, by adding a large range of realistic shading and diverse multi-illuminant conditions, uniquely customized to deal with documents in-the-wild. The proposed architecture works in two steps. First, a white balancing module neutralizes the color of the illumination on the input image. Based on the proposed multi-illuminant dataset we achieve a good white-balancing in really difficult conditions. Second, the shading separation module accurately disentangles the shading and paper material in a self-supervised manner where only the synthetic texture is used as a weak training signal (obviating the need for very costly ground truth with disentangled versions of shading and reflectance). The proposed approach leads to significant generalization of document reflectance estimation in real scenes with challenging illumination. We extensively evaluate on the real benchmark datasets available for intrinsic image decomposition and document shadow removal tasks. Our reflectance estimation scheme, when used as a pre-processing step of an OCR pipeline, shows a 21% improvement of character error rate (CER), thus, proving the practical applicability. The data and code will be available at: https://github.com/cvlab-stonybrook/DocIIW.
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Sounak Dey, Pau Riba, Anjan Dutta, Josep Llados, & Yi-Zhe Song. (2019). Doodle to Search: Practical Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 2179–2188).
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct retrieval of photos from unseen categories. We importantly advance prior arts by proposing a novel ZS-SBIR scenario that represents a firm step forward in its practical application. The new setting uniquely recognizes two important yet often neglected challenges of practical ZS-SBIR, (i) the large domain gap between amateur sketch and photo, and (ii) the necessity for moving towards large-scale retrieval. We first contribute to the community a novel ZS-SBIR dataset, QuickDraw-Extended, that consists of 330,000 sketches and 204,000 photos spanning across 110 categories. Highly abstract amateur human sketches are purposefully sourced to maximize the domain gap, instead of ones included in existing datasets that can often be semi-photorealistic. We then formulate a ZS-SBIR framework to jointly model sketches and photos into a common embedding space. A novel strategy to mine the mutual information among domains is specifically engineered to alleviate the domain gap. External semantic knowledge is further embedded to aid semantic transfer. We show that, rather surprisingly, retrieval performance significantly outperforms that of state-of-the-art on existing datasets that can already be achieved using a reduced version of our model. We further demonstrate the superior performance of our full model by comparing with a number of alternatives on the newly proposed dataset. The new dataset, plus all training and testing code of our model, will be publicly released to facilitate future research.
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Xinhang Song, Haitao Zeng, Sixian Zhang, Luis Herranz, & Shuqiang Jiang. (2020). Generalized Zero-shot Learning with Multi-source Semantic Embeddings for Scene Recognition. In 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia.
Abstract: Recognizing visual categories from semantic descriptions is a promising way to extend the capability of a visual classifier beyond the concepts represented in the training data (i.e. seen categories). This problem is addressed by (generalized) zero-shot learning methods (GZSL), which leverage semantic descriptions that connect them to seen categories (e.g. label embedding, attributes). Conventional GZSL are designed mostly for object recognition. In this paper we focus on zero-shot scene recognition, a more challenging setting with hundreds of categories where their differences can be subtle and often localized in certain objects or regions. Conventional GZSL representations are not rich enough to capture these local discriminative differences. Addressing these limitations, we propose a feature generation framework with two novel components: 1) multiple sources of semantic information (i.e. attributes, word embeddings and descriptions), 2) region descriptions that can enhance scene discrimination. To generate synthetic visual features we propose a two-step generative approach, where local descriptions are sampled and used as conditions to generate visual features. The generated features are then aggregated and used together with real features to train a joint classifier. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we introduce a new dataset for zero-shot scene recognition with multi-semantic annotations. Experimental results on the proposed dataset and SUN Attribute dataset illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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Kai Wang, Luis Herranz, Anjan Dutta, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2020). Bookworm continual learning: beyond zero-shot learning and continual learning. In Workshop TASK-CV 2020.
Abstract: We propose bookworm continual learning(BCL), a flexible setting where unseen classes can be inferred via a semantic model, and the visual model can be updated continually. Thus BCL generalizes both continual learning (CL) and zero-shot learning (ZSL). We also propose the bidirectional imagination (BImag) framework to address BCL where features of both past and future classes are generated. We observe that conditioning the feature generator on attributes can actually harm the continual learning ability, and propose two variants (joint class-attribute conditioning and asymmetric generation) to alleviate this problem.
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Debora Gil, & Guillermo Torres. (2020). A multi-shape loss function with adaptive class balancing for the segmentation of lung structures. In 34th International Congress and Exhibition on Computer Assisted Radiology & Surgery.
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Debora Gil, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Raquel Perez. (2020). Topological Radiomics (TOPiomics): Early Detection of Genetic Abnormalities in Cancer Treatment Evolution. In Women in Geometry and Topology.
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Diego Porres. (2021). Discriminator Synthesis: On reusing the other half of Generative Adversarial Networks. In Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, Neurips Workshop.
Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks have long since revolutionized the world of computer vision and, tied to it, the world of art. Arduous efforts have gone into fully utilizing and stabilizing training so that outputs of the Generator network have the highest possible fidelity, but little has gone into using the Discriminator after training is complete. In this work, we propose to use the latter and show a way to use the features it has learned from the training dataset to both alter an image and generate one from scratch. We name this method Discriminator Dreaming, and the full code can be found at this https URL.
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Riccardo Del Chiaro, Bartlomiej Twardowski, Andrew Bagdanov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2020). Recurrent attention to transient tasks for continual image captioning. In 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
Abstract: Research on continual learning has led to a variety of approaches to mitigating catastrophic forgetting in feed-forward classification networks. Until now surprisingly little attention has been focused on continual learning of recurrent models applied to problems like image captioning. In this paper we take a systematic look at continual learning of LSTM-based models for image captioning. We propose an attention-based approach that explicitly accommodates the transient nature of vocabularies in continual image captioning tasks -- i.e. that task vocabularies are not disjoint. We call our method Recurrent Attention to Transient Tasks (RATT), and also show how to adapt continual learning approaches based on weight egularization and knowledge distillation to recurrent continual learning problems. We apply our approaches to incremental image captioning problem on two new continual learning benchmarks we define using the MS-COCO and Flickr30 datasets. Our results demonstrate that RATT is able to sequentially learn five captioning tasks while incurring no forgetting of previously learned ones.
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Yaxing Wang, Lu Yu, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2020). DeepI2I: Enabling Deep Hierarchical Image-to-Image Translation by Transferring from GANs. In 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
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.
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Yaxing Wang, Salman Khan, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Joost Van de Weijer, & Fahad Shahbaz Khan. (2020). Semi-supervised Learning for Few-shot Image-to-Image Translation. In 33rd IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
Abstract: In the last few years, unpaired image-to-image translation has witnessed remarkable progress. Although the latest methods are able to generate realistic images, they crucially rely on a large number of labeled images. Recently, some methods have tackled the challenging setting of few-shot image-to-image translation, reducing the labeled data requirements for the target domain during inference. In this work, we go one step further and reduce the amount of required labeled data also from the source domain during training. To do so, we propose applying semi-supervised learning via a noise-tolerant pseudo-labeling procedure. We also apply a cycle consistency constraint to further exploit the information from unlabeled images, either from the same dataset or external. Additionally, we propose several structural modifications to facilitate the image translation task under these circumstances. Our semi-supervised method for few-shot image translation, called SEMIT, achieves excellent results on four different datasets using as little as 10% of the source labels, and matches the performance of the main fully-supervised competitor using only 20% labeled data. Our code and models are made public at: this https URL.
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Yi Xiao, Felipe Codevilla, Christopher Pal, & Antonio Lopez. (2020). Action-Based Representation Learning for Autonomous Driving. In Conference on Robot Learning.
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).
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Andres Mafla, Sounak Dey, Ali Furkan Biten, Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2021). Multi-modal reasoning graph for scene-text based fine-grained image classification and retrieval. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 4022–4032).
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Andres Mafla, Rafael S. Rezende, Lluis Gomez, Diana Larlus, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2021). StacMR: Scene-Text Aware Cross-Modal Retrieval. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 2219–2229).
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Raul Gomez, Yahui Liu, Marco de Nadai, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Bruno Lepri, & Nicu Sebe. (2020). Retrieval Guided Unsupervised Multi-domain Image to Image Translation. In 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia.
Abstract: Image to image translation aims to learn a mapping that transforms an image from one visual domain to another. Recent works assume that images descriptors can be disentangled into a domain-invariant content representation and a domain-specific style representation. Thus, translation models seek to preserve the content of source images while changing the style to a target visual domain. However, synthesizing new images is extremely challenging especially in multi-domain translations, as the network has to compose content and style to generate reliable and diverse images in multiple domains. In this paper we propose the use of an image retrieval system to assist the image-to-image translation task. First, we train an image-to-image translation model to map images to multiple domains. Then, we train an image retrieval model using real and generated images to find images similar to a query one in content but in a different domain. Finally, we exploit the image retrieval system to fine-tune the image-to-image translation model and generate higher quality images. Our experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed solution and highlight the contribution of the retrieval network, which can benefit from additional unlabeled data and help image-to-image translation models in the presence of scarce data.
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Minesh Mathew, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & C.V. Jawahar. (2021). DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 2200–2209).
Abstract: We present a new dataset for Visual Question Answering (VQA) on document images called DocVQA. The dataset consists of 50,000 questions defined on 12,000+ document images. Detailed analysis of the dataset in comparison with similar datasets for VQA and reading comprehension is presented. We report several baseline results by adopting existing VQA and reading comprehension models. Although the existing models perform reasonably well on certain types of questions, there is large performance gap compared to human performance (94.36% accuracy). The models need to improve specifically on questions where understanding structure of the document is crucial. The dataset, code and leaderboard are available at docvqa. org
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