Abstract: The immense success of deep learning based methods in computer vision heavily relies on large scale training datasets. These richly annotated datasets help the network learn discriminative visual features. Collecting and annotating such datasets requires a tremendous amount of human effort and annotations are limited to popular set of classes. As an alternative, learning visual features by designing auxiliary tasks which make use of freely available self-supervision has become increasingly popular in the computer vision community.
In this paper, we put forward an idea to take advantage of multi-modal context to provide self-supervision for the training of computer vision algorithms. We show that adequate visual features can be learned efficiently by training a CNN to predict the semantic textual context in which a particular image is more probable to appear as an illustration. More specifically we use popular text embedding techniques to provide the self-supervision for the training of deep CNN.

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.

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: Graph-based methods are known to be successful in many machine learning and pattern classification tasks. These methods consider semi-structured data as graphs where nodes correspond to primitives (parts, interest points, segments,
etc.) and edges characterize the relationships between these primitives. However, these non-vectorial graph data cannot be straightforwardly plugged into off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms without a preliminary step of – explicit/implicit –graph vectorization and embedding. This embedding process
should be resilient to intra-class graph variations while being highly discriminant. In this paper, we propose a novel high-order stochastic graphlet embedding (SGE) that maps graphs into vector spaces. Our main contribution includes a new stochastic search procedure that efficiently parses a given graph and extracts/samples unlimitedly high-order graphlets. We consider
these graphlets, with increasing orders, to model local primitives as well as their increasingly complex interactions. In order to build our graph representation, we measure the distribution of these graphlets into a given graph, using particular hash functions that efficiently assign sampled graphlets into isomorphic sets with a very low probability of collision. When
combined with maximum margin classifiers, these graphlet-based representations have positive impact on the performance of pattern comparison and recognition as corroborated through extensive experiments using standard benchmark databases.

Abstract: This paper explores the possibilities of image style transfer applied to text maintaining the original transcriptions. Results on different text domains (scene text, machine printed text and handwritten text) and cross-modal results demonstrate that this is feasible, and open different research lines. Furthermore, two architectures for selective style transfer, which means
transferring style to only desired image pixels, are proposed. Finally, scene text selective style transfer is evaluated as a data augmentation technique to expand scene text detection datasets, resulting in a boost of text detectors performance. Our implementation of the described models is publicly available.