Italy


Asynchronization issue caused by different types of modalities is one of the major problems in audio visual speech recognition (AVSR) research. However, most AVSR systems merely rely on up sampling of video or down sampling of audio to align audio and visual features, assuming that the feature sequences are aligned frame-by-frame. These pre-processing steps oversimplify the asynchrony relation between acoustic signal and lip motion, lacking flexibility and impairing the performance of the system. Although there are systems modeling the asynchrony between the modalities, sometimes they fail to align speech and video precisely over some even all noisy conditions. In this paper, we propose a mutual feature alignment method for AVSR which can make full use of cross modility information to address the asynchronization issue by introducing Mutual Iterative Attention (MIA) mechanism. Our method can automatically learn an alignment in a mutual way by performing mutual attention iteratively between the audio and visual features, relying on the modified encoder structure of Transformer. Experimental results show that our proposed method obtains absolute improvements up to 20.42% over the audio modality alone depending upon the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) level. Better recognition performance can also be achieved comparing with the traditional feature concatenation method under both clean and noisy conditions. It is expectable that our proposed mutual feature alignment method can be easily generalized to other multimodal tasks with semantically correlated information.

ICPR 2020

Mutual Alignment between Audiovisual Features for End-to-End Audiovisual Speech Recognition

mutual iterative attention

audio visual speech recognition

multimodal alignment

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AAMAS 2021

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ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 



In recent years optical flow is often estimated to reuse features so as to accelerate video semantic segmentation. With the addition of optical flow network, however, the extra cost may incur and accuracy may thus be degraded because of repeated warping operation. In this paper, we propose a boundary-aware distillation network (BDNet) that replaces the optical flow network with block motion vectors encoded in compressed video, resulting in negligible computational complexity. In order to make salient features, an auxiliary boundary-aware stream is added to the main stream to jointly estimate silhouette and segmentation of objects. To further correct warped features, a well-trained teacher network is employed to transfer knowledge to the main stream. Both boundary-aware stream and the teacher network are neglected during the inference stage, so that video segmentation network enables to get faster without increasing any computational burden. By splitting the task into three components, our BDNet shows almost 10% time saving as well as 1.6% accuracy improvement over baseline on the Cityscapes dataset.

A Boundary-aware Distillation Network for Compressed Video Semantic Segmentation


Near-duplicate video retrieval (NDVR) is an important and challenging problem due to the increasing amount of videos uploaded to the Internet. In this paper, we propose an attention-based deep metric learning method for NDVR. Our method is based on well-established principles: We leverage two-stream networks to combine RGB and optical flow features, and incorporate an attention module to effectively deal with distractor frames commonly observed in near duplicate videos. We further aggregate the features corresponding to multiple video segments to enhance the discriminative power. The whole system is trained using a deep metric learning objective with a Siamese architecture. Our experiments show that the attention module helps eliminate redundant and noisy frames, while focusing on visually relevant frames for solving NVDR. We evaluate our approach on recent large-scale NDVR datasets, CC_WEB_VIDEO, VCDB, FIVR and SVD. To demonstrate the generalization ability of our approach, we report results in both within- and cross-dataset settings, and show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Attention-Based Deep Metric Learning for Near-Duplicate Video Retrieval

In this work, we address the problem of multi-domain image-to-image translation with particular attention paid to computational cost. In particular, current state of the art models require a large and deep model in order to handle the visual diversity of multiple domains. In a context of limited computational resources, increasing the network size may not be possible. Therefore, we propose to increase the network capacity by using an adaptive graph structure. At inference time, the network estimates its own graph by selecting specific sub-networks. Sub-network selection is implemented using Gumbel-Softmax in order to allow end-to-end training. This approach leads to an adjustable increase in number of parameters while preserving an almost constant computational cost. Our evaluation on two publicly available datasets of facial and painting images shows that our adaptive strategy generates better images with fewer artifacts than literature methods.

Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation withAdaptive Inference Graph

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is an active research area of the visual domain.
One of its fundamental sub-tasks is semi-supervised / one-shot learning: given only the segmentation mask for the first frame, the task is to provide pixel-accurate masks for the object over the rest of the sequence.
Despite much progress in the last years, we noticed that many of the existing approaches lose objects in longer sequences, especially when the object is small or briefly occluded.
In this work, we build upon a sequence-to-sequence approach that employs an encoder-decoder architecture together with a memory module for exploiting the sequential data.
We further improve this approach by proposing a model that manipulates multi-scale Spatio-temporal information using memory-equipped skip connections.
Furthermore, we incorporate an auxiliary task based on distance classification which greatly enhances the quality of edges in segmentation masks.
We compare our approach to the state of the art and show considerable improvement in the contour accuracy metric and the overall segmentation accuracy.

Revisiting Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation with Multi-Task Loss and Skip-Memory


We propose a fusion algorithm for haze removal that combines color information from an RGB image and edge information extracted from its corresponding NIR image using Haar wavelets. The proposed algorithm is based on the key observation that NIR edge features are more prominent in the hazy regions of the image than the RGB edge features in those same regions. To combine the color and edge information, we introduce a haze-weight map which proportionately distributes the color and edge information during the fusion process. Because NIR images are, intrinsically, nearly haze-free, our work makes no assumptions like existing works that rely on a scattering model and essentially designing a depth-independent method. This helps in minimizing artifacts and gives a more realistic sense to the restored haze-free image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm is both qualitatively and quantitatively better on several key metrics when compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Near-Infrared Depth-Independent Image Dehazing using Haar Wavelets


Ultrasound images are often contaminated by speckle noise during the acquisition process, which influences the performance of subsequent applications. The paper introduces a nonconvex low-rank matrix approximation model for ultrasound images restoration, which integrates the weighted nuclear norm minimization (WNNM) and data fidelity term. WNNM can adaptively assign weights on different singular values to preserve more details in restored images. The fidelity term about ultrasound images do not be utilized in existing low-rank ultrasound denoising methods. This optimization question can effectively solved by alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The experimental results on simulated images and real medical
ultrasound images demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed method compared with other four state-of-the-art methods.

Ultrasound Image Restoration Using Weighted Nuclear Norm Minimization

Determining the links between large amounts of video data with no prior knowledge of the camera positions is a hard task to automate. From a collection of videos acquired from static cameras simultaneously, we propose a method for finding groups of videos with overlapping fields of view. Each video is first processed individually: at regular time steps, objects are detected and are assigned a category and an appearance descriptor. Next, the video is split into cells at different resolutions and we assign to each cell its story: it consists of the list of objects detected in the cell over time. Once the stories are established for each video, the links between cells of different videos are determined by comparing their stories: two cells are linked if they show simultaneous detections of objects of the same category with similar appearances. Pairs of videos with overlapping fields of view are identified using these links between cells. A link graph is finally returned, in which each node represents a video, and the edges indicate pairs of overlapping videos.
The approach is evaluated on a set of 63 real videos from both public datasets and live surveillance videos and shows promising results.

Story comparison for estimating field of view overlap in a video collection

We propose an innovative method for combining sparse optical ﬂow tracking and descriptor matching algorithms.
The proposed approach solves the following problems that are inherent to keypoint-based and optical ﬂow based tracking algorithms: spatial jitter, extreme scale transformation, extreme perspective transformation, degradation in the number of tracking points, and drifting of tracking points. Our algorithm provides smooth object-position tracking under six degrees of freedom transformations with a small computational cost for providing a high-quality real-time AR experience on mobile platforms. We experimentally demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art tracking algorithms while offering faster computational time. A mobile augmented reality (AR) application, which is developed using our approach, delivers planar object tracking with 30 FPS on modern mobile phones for a camera resolution of 1280 720. Finally, we compare the performance of our AR application with that of the Vuforia-based AR application on the same planar objects database. The test results show that our AR application delivers better AR experience than Vuforia in terms of a smooth transition of object-pose between video frames.

Mobile Augmented Reality: Fast, Precise, and Smooth Planar Object Tracking


Encoded (or ciphered) manuscripts are a special type of historical documents that contain encrypted text. The automatic recognition of this kind of documents is challenging because: 1) the cipher alphabet changes from one document to another, 2) there is a lack of annotated corpus for training and 3) touching symbols make the symbol segmentation difficult and complex. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a novel method for handwritten ciphers recognition based on few-shot object detection. Our method first detects all symbols of a given alphabet in a line image, and then a decoding step maps the symbol similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. By training on synthetic data, we show that the proposed architecture is able to recognize handwritten ciphers with unseen alphabets. In addition, if few labeled pages with the same alphabet are used for fine tuning, our method surpasses existing unsupervised and supervised HTR methods for ciphers recognition.

A Few-shot Learning Approach for Historical Ciphered Manuscript Recognition

Typically, real-world requirements to deploy face recognition models in unconstrained surveillance scenarios demand to identify low-resolution faces with extremely low computational cost. In the last years, several methods based on complex deep learning models have been proposed with promising recognition results but at a high computational cost. Inspired by the compactness and computation efficiency of lightweight deep face networks and their high accuracy on general face recognition tasks, in this work we propose to benchmark two recently introduced lightweight face models on low-resolution surveillance imagery to enable efficient system deployment. In this way, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation on the two typical settings: LR-to-HR and LR-to-LR matching. In addition, we investigate the effect of using trained models with down-sampled synthetic data from high-resolution images, as well as the combination of different models, for face recognition on real low-resolution images. Experimental results show that the used lightweight face models achieve state-of-the-art results on low-resolution benchmarks with low memory footprint and computational complexity. Moreover, we observed that combining models trained with different degradations improves the recognition accuracy on low-resolution surveillance imagery, which is feasible due to their low computational cost.

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A Boundary-aware Distillation Network for Compressed Video Semantic Segmentation

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