Abstract: We present the design and beta tests of a new machine learning challenge called AutoCV (for Automated Computer Vision), which is the first event in a series of challenges we are planning on the theme of Automated Deep Learning. We target applications for which Deep Learning methods have had great success in the past few years, with the aim of pushing the state of the art in fully automated methods to design the architecture of neural networks and train them without any human intervention. The tasks are restricted to multi-label image classification problems, from domains including medical, areal, people, object, and handwriting imaging. Thus the type of images will vary a lot in scales, textures, and structure. Raw data are provided (no features extracted), but all datasets are formatted in a uniform tensor manner (although images may have fixed or variable sizes within a dataset). The participants's code will be blind tested on a challenge platform in a controlled manner, with restrictions on training and test time and memory limitations. The challenge is part of the official selection of IJCNN 2019.

Abstract: In this article, a form of the so-called word spotting-method is used on a large set of handwritten documents in order to identify those that contain script of similar execution. The point of departure for the investigation is the mediaeval Swedish manuscript Cod. Holm. D 3. The main scribe of this manuscript has yet not been identified in other documents. The current attempt aims at localising other documents that display a large degree of similarity in the characteristics of the script, these being possible candidates for being executed by the same hand. For this purpose, the method of word spotting has been employed, focusing on individual letters, and therefore the process is referred to as letter spotting in the article. In this process, a set of ‘g’:s, ‘h’:s and ‘k’:s have been selected as templates, and then a search has been made for close matches among the mediaeval Swedish charters. The search resulted in a number of charters that displayed great similarities with the manuscript D 3. The used letter spotting method thus proofed to be a very efficient sorting tool localising similar script samples.

Abstract: Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is to recognize human emotions in a natural verbal interaction scenario with machines, which is considered as a challenging problem due to the ambiguous human emotions. Despite the recent progress in SER, state-of-the-art models struggle to achieve a satisfactory performance. We propose a self-attention based method with combined use of label-adaptive mixup and center loss. By adapting label probabilities in mixup and fitting center loss to the mixup training scheme, our proposed method achieves a superior performance to the state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: Visual content is increasingly being processed by machines for various automated content analysis tasks instead of being consumed by humans. Despite the existence of several compression methods tailored for machine tasks, few consider real-world scenarios with multiple tasks. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by proposing a task-switchable pre-processor that optimizes input images specifically for machine consumption prior to encoding by an off-the-shelf codec designed for human consumption. The proposed task-switchable pre-processor adeptly maintains relevant semantic information based on the specific characteristics of different downstream tasks, while effectively suppressing irrelevant information to reduce bitrate. To enhance the processing of semantic information for diverse tasks, we leverage pre-extracted semantic features to modulate the pixel-to-pixel mapping within the pre-processor. By switching between different modulations, multiple tasks can be seamlessly incorporated into the system. Extensive experiments demonstrate the practicality and simplicity of our approach. It significantly reduces the number of parameters required for handling multiple tasks while still delivering impressive performance. Our method showcases the potential to achieve efficient and effective compression for machine vision tasks, supporting the evolving demands of real-world applications.

Abstract: In this paper we present a segmentation-free system for reading text in natural scenes. A CNN architecture is trained in an end-to-end manner, and is able to directly output readings without any explicit text localization step. In order to validate our proposal, we focus on the specific case of reading utility meters. We present our results in a large dataset of images acquired by different users and devices, so text appears in any location, with different sizes, fonts and lengths, and the images present several distortions such as
dirt, illumination highlights or blur.

Abstract: A key aspect of digital mailroom processes is the extraction of relevant information from administrative documents. More often than not, the extraction process cannot be fully automated, and there is instead an important amount of manual intervention. In this work we study the human process of information extraction from invoice document images. We explore whether the gaze of human annotators during an manual information extraction process could be exploited towards reducing the manual effort and automating the process. To this end, we perform an eye-tracking experiment replicating real-life interfaces for information extraction. Through this pilot study we demonstrate that relevant areas in the document can be identified reliably through automatic fixation classification, and the obtained models generalize well to new subjects. Our findings indicate that it is in principle possible to integrate the human in the document image analysis loop, making use of the scanpath to automate the extraction process or verify extracted information.

Abstract: Approaches that use more than two consecutive video frames in the optical flow estimation have a long research history. However, almost all such methods utilize extra information for a pre-processing flow prediction or for a post-processing flow correction and filtering. In contrast, this paper differs from previously developed techniques. We propose a new algorithm for the likelihood function calculation (alternatively the matching cost volume) that is used in the maximum a posteriori estimation. We exploit the fact that in general, optical flow is locally constant in the sense of time and the likelihood function depends on both the previous and the future frame. Implementation of our idea increases the robustness of optical flow estimation. As a result, our method outperforms 9% over the DCFlow technique, which we use as prototype for our CNN based computation architecture, on the most challenging MPI-Sintel dataset for the non-occluded mask metric. Furthermore, our approach considerably increases the accuracy of the flow estimation for the matching cost processing, consequently outperforming the original DCFlow algorithm results up to 50% in occluded regions and up to 9% in non-occluded regions on the MPI-Sintel dataset. The experimental section shows that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-arts results especially on the MPI-Sintel dataset.

Abstract: The ICDAR 2019 Challenge on “Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction” (SROIE) covers important aspects related to the automated analysis of scanned receipts. The SROIE tasks play a key role in many document analysis systems and hold significant commercial potential. Although a lot of work has been published over the years on administrative document analysis, the community has advanced relatively slowly, as most datasets have been kept private. One of the key contributions of SROIE to the document analysis community is to offer a first, standardized dataset of 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations, as well as an evaluation procedure for such tasks. The Challenge is structured around three tasks, namely Scanned Receipt Text Localization (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). The competition opened on 10th February, 2019 and closed on 5th May, 2019. We received 29, 24 and 18 valid submissions received for the three competition tasks, respectively. This report presents the competition datasets, define the tasks and the evaluation protocols, offer detailed submission statistics, as well as an analysis of the submitted performance. While the tasks of text localization and recognition seem to be relatively easy to tackle, it is interesting to observe the variety of ideas and approaches proposed for the information extraction task. According to the submissions' performance we believe there is still margin for improving information extraction performance, although the current dataset would have to grow substantially in following editions. Given the success of the SROIE competition evidenced by the wide interest generated and the healthy number of submissions from academic, research institutes and industry over different countries, we consider that the SROIE competition can evolve into a useful resource for the community, drawing further attention and promoting research and development efforts in this field.