Abstract: Offline signature verification is one of the most challenging tasks in biometrics and document forensics. Unlike other verification problems, it needs to model minute but critical details between genuine and forged signatures, because a skilled falsification might often resembles the real signature with small deformation. This verification task is even harder in writer independent scenarios which is undeniably fiscal for realistic cases. In this paper, we model an offline writer independent signature verification task with a convolutional Siamese network. Siamese networks are twin networks with shared weights, which can be trained to learn a feature space where similar observations are placed in proximity. This is achieved by exposing the network to a pair of similar and dissimilar observations and minimizing the Euclidean distance between similar pairs while simultaneously maximizing it between dissimilar pairs. Experiments conducted on cross-domain datasets emphasize the capability of our network to model forgery in different languages (scripts) and handwriting styles. Moreover, our designed Siamese network, named SigNet, exceeds the state-of-the-art results on most of the benchmark signature datasets, which paves the way for further research in this direction.

Abstract: In this work we introduce a cross modal image retrieval system that allows both text and sketch as input modalities for the query. A cross-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model the sketch and text input modalities as well as the the image output modality, learning a common embedding between text and images and between sketches and images. In addition, an attention model is used to selectively focus the attention on the different objects of the image, allowing for retrieval with multiple objects in the query. Experiments show that the proposed method performs the best in both single and multiple object image retrieval in standard datasets.

Abstract: We present WiCV 2018 – Women in Computer Vision Workshop to increase the visibility and inclusion of women researchers in computer vision field, organized in conjunction with CVPR 2018. Computer vision and machine learning have made incredible progress over the past years, yet the number of female researchers is still low both in academia and industry. WiCV is organized to raise visibility of female researchers, to increase the collaboration,
and to provide mentorship and give opportunities to femaleidentifying junior researchers in the field. In its fourth year, we are proud to present the changes and improvements over the past years, summary of statistics for presenters and attendees, followed by expectations from future generations.

Abstract: The adaptation capability to a wide range of domains is crucial for scene text spotting models when deployed to real-world conditions. However, existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches usually incorporate scene text detection and recognition simply by pretraining on natural scene text datasets, which do not directly exploit the intermediate feature representations between multiple domains. Here, we investigate the problem of domain-adaptive scene text spotting, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly adapt to target domains rather than being specialized for a specific domain or scenario. Further, we investigate a transformer baseline called Swin-TESTR to focus on solving scene-text spotting for both regular and arbitrary-shaped scene text along with an exhaustive evaluation. The results clearly demonstrate the potential of intermediate representations to achieve significant performance on text spotting benchmarks across multiple domains (e.g. language, synth-to-real, and documents). both in terms of accuracy and efficiency.