Parichehr Behjati Ardakani, Pau Rodriguez, Carles Fernandez, Armin Mehri, Xavier Roca, Seiichi Ozawa, et al. (2022). Frequency-based Enhancement Network for Efficient Super-Resolution. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 10, 57383–57397.
Abstract: Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have provided outstanding performance in single image super-resolution (SISR). Despite their remarkable performance, the lack of high-frequency information in the recovered images remains a core problem. Moreover, as the networks increase in depth and width, deep CNN-based SR methods are faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. A promising and under-explored solution is to adapt the amount of compute based on the different frequency bands of the input. To this end, we present a novel Frequency-based Enhancement Block (FEB) which explicitly enhances the information of high frequencies while forwarding low-frequencies to the output. In particular, this block efficiently decomposes features into low- and high-frequency and assigns more computation to high-frequency ones. Thus, it can help the network generate more discriminative representations by explicitly recovering finer details. Our FEB design is simple and generic and can be used as a direct replacement of commonly used SR blocks with no need to change network architectures. We experimentally show that when replacing SR blocks with FEB we consistently improve the reconstruction error, while reducing the number of parameters in the model. Moreover, we propose a lightweight SR model — Frequency-based Enhancement Network (FENet) — based on FEB that matches the performance of larger models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal performs favorably against the state-of-the-art SR algorithms in terms of visual quality, memory footprint, and inference time. The code is available at https://github.com/pbehjatii/FENet
Keywords: Deep learning; Frequency-based methods; Lightweight architectures; Single image super-resolution
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Giacomo Magnifico, Beata Megyesi, Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Jialuo Chen, & Alicia Fornes. (2022). Lost in Transcription of Graphic Signs in Ciphers. In International Conference on Historical Cryptology (HistoCrypt 2022) (pp. 153–158).
Abstract: Hand-written Text Recognition techniques with the aim to automatically identify and transcribe hand-written text have been applied to historical sources including ciphers. In this paper, we compare the performance of two machine learning architectures, an unsupervised method based on clustering and a deep learning method with few-shot learning. Both models are tested on seen and unseen data from historical ciphers with different symbol sets consisting of various types of graphic signs. We compare the models and highlight their differences in performance, with their advantages and shortcomings.
Keywords: transcription of ciphers; hand-written text recognition of symbols; graphic signs
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Pau Riba, Lutz Goldmann, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Diede Rusticus, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2022). Table detection in business document images by message passing networks. PR - Pattern Recognition, 127, 108641.
Abstract: Tabular structures in business documents offer a complementary dimension to the raw textual data. For instance, there is information about the relationships among pieces of information. Nowadays, digital mailroom applications have become a key service for workflow automation. Therefore, the detection and interpretation of tables is crucial. With the recent advances in information extraction, table detection and recognition has gained interest in document image analysis, in particular, with the absence of rule lines and unknown information about rows and columns. However, business documents usually contain sensitive contents limiting the amount of public benchmarking datasets. In this paper, we propose a graph-based approach for detecting tables in document images which do not require the raw content of the document. Hence, the sensitive content can be previously removed and, instead of using the raw image or textual content, we propose a purely structural approach to keep sensitive data anonymous. Our framework uses graph neural networks (GNNs) to describe the local repetitive structures that constitute a table. In particular, our main application domain are business documents. We have carefully validated our approach in two invoice datasets and a modern document benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that tables can be detected by purely structural approaches.
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Hugo Jair Escalante, Heysem Kaya, Albert Ali Salah, Sergio Escalera, Yagmur Gucluturk, Umut Guçlu, et al. (2022). Modeling, Recognizing, and Explaining Apparent Personality from Videos. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 13(2), 894–911.
Abstract: Explainability and interpretability are two critical aspects of decision support systems. Despite their importance, it is only recently that researchers are starting to explore these aspects. This paper provides an introduction to explainability and interpretability in the context of apparent personality recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in this direction. We describe a challenge we organized on explainability in first impressions analysis from video. We analyze in detail the newly introduced data set, evaluation protocol, proposed solutions and summarize the results of the challenge. We investigate the issue of bias in detail. Finally, derived from our study, we outline research opportunities that we foresee will be relevant in this area in the near future.
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Mohamed Ali Souibgui, & Y.Kessentini. (2022). DE-GAN: A Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Document Enhancement. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 44(3), 1180–1191.
Abstract: Documents often exhibit various forms of degradation, which make it hard to be read and substantially deteriorate the performance of an OCR system. In this paper, we propose an effective end-to-end framework named Document Enhancement Generative Adversarial Networks (DE-GAN) that uses the conditional GANs (cGANs) to restore severely degraded document images. To the best of our knowledge, this practice has not been studied within the context of generative adversarial deep networks. We demonstrate that, in different tasks (document clean up, binarization, deblurring and watermark removal), DE-GAN can produce an enhanced version of the degraded document with a high quality. In addition, our approach provides consistent improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods over the widely used DIBCO 2013, DIBCO 2017 and H-DIBCO 2018 datasets, proving its ability to restore a degraded document image to its ideal condition. The obtained results on a wide variety of degradation reveal the flexibility of the proposed model to be exploited in other document enhancement problems.
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Saad Minhas, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Shoaib Ehsan, & Klaus McDonald Maier. (2022). Effects of Non-Driving Related Tasks during Self-Driving mode. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 23(2), 1391–1399.
Abstract: Perception reaction time and mental workload have proven to be crucial in manual driving. Moreover, in highly automated cars, where most of the research is focusing on Level 4 Autonomous driving, take-over performance is also a key factor when taking road safety into account. This study aims to investigate how the immersion in non-driving related tasks affects the take-over performance of drivers in given scenarios. The paper also highlights the use of virtual simulators to gather efficient data that can be crucial in easing the transition between manual and autonomous driving scenarios. The use of Computer Aided Simulations is of absolute importance in this day and age since the automotive industry is rapidly moving towards Autonomous technology. An experiment comprising of 40 subjects was performed to examine the reaction times of driver and the influence of other variables in the success of take-over performance in highly automated driving under different circumstances within a highway virtual environment. The results reflect the relationship between reaction times under different scenarios that the drivers might face under the circumstances stated above as well as the importance of variables such as velocity in the success on regaining car control after automated driving. The implications of the results acquired are important for understanding the criteria needed for designing Human Machine Interfaces specifically aimed towards automated driving conditions. Understanding the need to keep drivers in the loop during automation, whilst allowing drivers to safely engage in other non-driving related tasks is an important research area which can be aided by the proposed study.
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Jun Wan, Chi Lin, Longyin Wen, Yunan Li, Qiguang Miao, Sergio Escalera, et al. (2022). ChaLearn Looking at People: IsoGD and ConGD Large-scale RGB-D Gesture Recognition. TCIBERN - IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 52(5), 3422–3433.
Abstract: The ChaLearn large-scale gesture recognition challenge has been run twice in two workshops in conjunction with the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2016 and International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2017, attracting more than 200 teams round the world. This challenge has two tracks, focusing on isolated and continuous gesture recognition, respectively. This paper describes the creation of both benchmark datasets and analyzes the advances in large-scale gesture recognition based on these two datasets. We discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale ground-truth annotations of gesture recognition, and provide a detailed analysis of the current state-of-the-art methods for large-scale isolated and continuous gesture recognition based on RGB-D video sequences. In addition to recognition rate and mean jaccard index (MJI) as evaluation metrics used in our previous challenges, we also introduce the corrected segmentation rate (CSR) metric to evaluate the performance of temporal segmentation for continuous gesture recognition. Furthermore, we propose a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) baseline method, determining the video division points based on the skeleton points extracted by convolutional pose machine (CPM). Experiments demonstrate that the proposed Bi-LSTM outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with an absolute improvement of 8.1% (from 0.8917 to 0.9639) of CSR.
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Daniela Rato, Miguel Oliveira, Vitor Santos, Manuel Gomes, & Angel Sappa. (2022). A sensor-to-pattern calibration framework for multi-modal industrial collaborative cells. JMANUFSYST - Journal of Manufacturing Systems, 64, 497–507.
Abstract: Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is necessary. To ensure this, collaborative cells are equipped with a large set of sensors of multiple modalities, covering the entire work volume. However, the fusion of information from all these sensors requires an accurate extrinsic calibration. The calibration of such complex systems is challenging, due to the number of sensors and modalities, and also due to the small overlapping fields of view between the sensors, which are positioned to capture different viewpoints of the cell. This paper proposes a sensor to pattern methodology that can calibrate a complex system such as a collaborative cell in a single optimization procedure. Our methodology can tackle RGB and Depth cameras, as well as LiDARs. Results show that our methodology is able to accurately calibrate a collaborative cell containing three RGB cameras, a depth camera and three 3D LiDARs.
Keywords: Calibration; Collaborative cell; Multi-modal; Multi-sensor
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Xavier Soria, Gonzalo Pomboza-Junez, & Angel Sappa. (2022). LDC: Lightweight Dense CNN for Edge Detection. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 10, 68281–68290.
Abstract: This paper presents a Lightweight Dense Convolutional (LDC) neural network for edge detection. The proposed model is an adaptation of two state-of-the-art approaches, but it requires less than 4% of parameters in comparison with these approaches. The proposed architecture generates thin edge maps and reaches the highest score (i.e., ODS) when compared with lightweight models (models with less than 1 million parameters), and reaches a similar performance when compare with heavy architectures (models with about 35 million parameters). Both quantitative and qualitative results and comparisons with state-of-the-art models, using different edge detection datasets, are provided. The proposed LDC does not use pre-trained weights and requires straightforward hyper-parameter settings. The source code is released at https://github.com/xavysp/LDC
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Marc Masana, Xialei Liu, Bartlomiej Twardowski, Mikel Menta, Andrew Bagdanov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2022). Class-incremental learning: survey and performance evaluation. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, .
Abstract: For future learning systems incremental learning is desirable, because it allows for: efficient resource usage by eliminating the need to retrain from scratch at the arrival of new data; reduced memory usage by preventing or limiting the amount of data required to be stored -- also important when privacy limitations are imposed; and learning that more closely resembles human learning. The main challenge for incremental learning is catastrophic forgetting, which refers to the precipitous drop in performance on previously learned tasks after learning a new one. Incremental learning of deep neural networks has seen explosive growth in recent years. Initial work focused on task incremental learning, where a task-ID is provided at inference time. Recently we have seen a shift towards class-incremental learning where the learner must classify at inference time between all classes seen in previous tasks without recourse to a task-ID. In this paper, we provide a complete survey of existing methods for incremental learning, and in particular we perform an extensive experimental evaluation on twelve class-incremental methods. We consider several new experimental scenarios, including a comparison of class-incremental methods on multiple large-scale datasets, investigation into small and large domain shifts, and comparison on various network architectures.
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Ana Garcia Rodriguez, Yael Tudela, Henry Cordova, S. Carballal, I. Ordas, L. Moreira, et al. (2022). First in Vivo Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Colorectal Polyps using White Light Endoscopy. END - Endoscopy, 54.
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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Marçal Rusiñol, Alicia Fornes, & Mauricio Villegas. (2022). Pay Attention to What You Read: Non-recurrent Handwritten Text-Line Recognition. PR - Pattern Recognition, 129, 108766.
Abstract: The advent of recurrent neural networks for handwriting recognition marked an important milestone reaching impressive recognition accuracies despite the great variability that we observe across different writing styles. Sequential architectures are a perfect fit to model text lines, not only because of the inherent temporal aspect of text, but also to learn probability distributions over sequences of characters and words. However, using such recurrent paradigms comes at a cost at training stage, since their sequential pipelines prevent parallelization. In this work, we introduce a non-recurrent approach to recognize handwritten text by the use of transformer models. We propose a novel method that bypasses any recurrence. By using multi-head self-attention layers both at the visual and textual stages, we are able to tackle character recognition as well as to learn language-related dependencies of the character sequences to be decoded. Our model is unconstrained to any predefined vocabulary, being able to recognize out-of-vocabulary words, i.e. words that do not appear in the training vocabulary. We significantly advance over prior art and demonstrate that satisfactory recognition accuracies are yielded even in few-shot learning scenarios.
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Diego Velazquez, Pau Rodriguez, Josep M. Gonfaus, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2022). A Closer Look at Embedding Propagation for Manifold Smoothing. JMLR - Journal of Machine Learning Research, 23(252), 1–27.
Abstract: Supervised training of neural networks requires a large amount of manually annotated data and the resulting networks tend to be sensitive to out-of-distribution (OOD) data.
Self- and semi-supervised training schemes reduce the amount of annotated data required during the training process. However, OOD generalization remains a major challenge for most methods. Strategies that promote smoother decision boundaries play an important role in out-of-distribution generalization. For example, embedding propagation (EP) for manifold smoothing has recently shown to considerably improve the OOD performance for few-shot classification. EP achieves smoother class manifolds by building a graph from sample embeddings and propagating information through the nodes in an unsupervised manner. In this work, we extend the original EP paper providing additional evidence and experiments showing that it attains smoother class embedding manifolds and improves results in settings beyond few-shot classification. Concretely, we show that EP improves the robustness of neural networks against multiple adversarial attacks as well as semi- and
self-supervised learning performance.
Keywords: Regularization; emi-supervised learning; self-supervised learning; adversarial robustness; few-shot classification
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S.K. Jemni, Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Yousri Kessentini, & Alicia Fornes. (2022). Enhance to Read Better: A Multi-Task Adversarial Network for Handwritten Document Image Enhancement. PR - Pattern Recognition, 123, 108370.
Abstract: Handwritten document images can be highly affected by degradation for different reasons: Paper ageing, daily-life scenarios (wrinkles, dust, etc.), bad scanning process and so on. These artifacts raise many readability issues for current Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) algorithms and severely devalue their efficiency. In this paper, we propose an end to end architecture based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to recover the degraded documents into a and form. Unlike the most well-known document binarization methods, which try to improve the visual quality of the degraded document, the proposed architecture integrates a handwritten text recognizer that promotes the generated document image to be more readable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use the text information while binarizing handwritten documents. Extensive experiments conducted on degraded Arabic and Latin handwritten documents demonstrate the usefulness of integrating the recognizer within the GAN architecture, which improves both the visual quality and the readability of the degraded document images. Moreover, we outperform the state of the art in H-DIBCO challenges, after fine tuning our pre-trained model with synthetically degraded Latin handwritten images, on this task.
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Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Ali Furkan Biten, Sounak Dey, Alicia Fornes, Yousri Kessentini, Lluis Gomez, et al. (2022). One-shot Compositional Data Generation for Low Resource Handwritten Text Recognition. In Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision.
Abstract: Low resource Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a hard problem due to the scarce annotated data and the very limited linguistic information (dictionaries and language models). This appears, for example, in the case of historical ciphered manuscripts, which are usually written with invented alphabets to hide the content. Thus, in this paper we address this problem through a data generation technique based on Bayesian Program Learning (BPL). Contrary to traditional generation approaches, which require a huge amount of annotated images, our method is able to generate human-like handwriting using only one sample of each symbol from the desired alphabet. After generating symbols, we create synthetic lines to train state-of-the-art HTR architectures in a segmentation free fashion. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving competitive results compared to the usage of real annotated data.
Keywords: Document Analysis
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