20200714.md

ArXiv cs.CV --Tue, 14 Jul 2020

1.Loss Function Search for Face Recognition ⬇️

In face recognition, designing margin-based (e.g., angular, additive, additive angular margins) softmax loss functions plays an important role in learning discriminative features. However, these hand-crafted heuristic methods are sub-optimal because they require much effort to explore the large design space. Recently, an AutoML for loss function search method AM-LFS has been derived, which leverages reinforcement learning to search loss functions during the training process. But its search space is complex and unstable that hindering its superiority. In this paper, we first analyze that the key to enhance the feature discrimination is actually \textbf{how to reduce the softmax probability}. We then design a unified formulation for the current margin-based softmax losses. Accordingly, we define a novel search space and develop a reward-guided search method to automatically obtain the best candidate. Experimental results on a variety of face recognition benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method over the state-of-the-art alternatives.

2.Uncertain-DeepSSM: From Images to Probabilistic Shape Models ⬇️

Statistical shape modeling (SSM) has recently taken advantage of advances in deep learning to alleviate the need for a time-consuming and expert-driven workflow of anatomy segmentation, shape registration, and the optimization of population-level shape representations. DeepSSM is an end-to-end deep learning approach that extracts statistical shape representation directly from unsegmented images with little manual overhead. It performs comparably with state-of-the-art shape modeling methods for estimating morphologies that are viable for subsequent downstream tasks. Nonetheless, DeepSSM produces an overconfident estimate of shape that cannot be blindly assumed to be accurate. Hence, conveying what DeepSSM does not know, via quantifying granular estimates of uncertainty, is critical for its direct clinical application as an on-demand diagnostic tool to determine how trustworthy the model output is. Here, we propose Uncertain-DeepSSM as a unified model that quantifies both, data-dependent aleatoric uncertainty by adapting the network to predict intrinsic input variance, and model-dependent epistemic uncertainty via a Monte Carlo dropout sampling to approximate a variational distribution over the network parameters. Experiments show an accuracy improvement over DeepSSM while maintaining the same benefits of being end-to-end with little pre-processing.

3.Towards practical lipreading with distilled and efficient models ⬇️

Lipreading has witnessed a lot of progress due to the resurgence of neural networks. Recent work has placed emphasis on aspects such as improving performance by finding the optimal architecture or improving generalization. However, there is still a significant gap between the current methodologies and the requirements for an effective deployment of lipreading in practical scenarios. In this work, we propose a series of innovations that significantly bridge that gap: first, we raise the state-of-the-art performance by a wide margin on LRW and LRW-1000 to 88.6% and 46.6%, respectively, through careful optimization. Secondly, we propose a series of architectural changes, including a novel depthwise-separable TCN head, that slashes the computational cost to a fraction of the (already quite efficient) original model. Thirdly, we show that knowledge distillation is a very effective tool for recovering performance of the lightweight models. This results in a range of models with different accuracy-efficiency trade-offs. However, our most promising lightweight models are on par with the current state-of-the-art while showing a reduction of 8 and 4x in terms of computational cost and number of parameters, respectively, which we hope will enable the deployment of lipreading models in practical applications.

4.Accelerating Translational Image Registration for HDR Images on GPU ⬇️

High Dynamic Range (HDR) images are generated using multiple exposures of a scene. When a hand-held camera is used to capture a static scene, these images need to be aligned by globally shifting each image in both dimensions. For a fast and robust alignment, the shift amount is commonly calculated using Median Threshold Bitmaps (MTB) and creating an image pyramid. In this study, we optimize these computations using a parallel processing approach utilizing GPU. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed implementation achieves a speed-up of up to 6.24 times over the baseline multi-threaded CPU implementation on the alignment of one image pair. The source code is available at this https URL

5.Automatic Pass Annotation from Soccer VideoStreams Based on Object Detection and LSTM ⬇️

Soccer analytics is attracting increasing interest in academia and industry, thanks to the availability of data that describe all the spatio-temporal events that occur in each match. These events (e.g., passes, shots, fouls) are collected by human operators manually, constituting a considerable cost for data providers in terms of time and economic resources. In this paper, we describe PassNet, a method to recognize the most frequent events in soccer, i.e., passes, from video streams. Our model combines a set of artificial neural networks that perform feature extraction from video streams, object detection to identify the positions of the ball and the players, and classification of frame sequences as passes or not passes. We test PassNet on different scenarios, depending on the similarity of conditions to the match used for training. Our results show good classification results and significant improvement in the accuracy of pass detection with respect to baseline classifiers, even when the match's video conditions of the test and training sets are considerably different. PassNet is the first step towards an automated event annotation system that may break the time and the costs for event annotation, enabling data collections for minor and non-professional divisions, youth leagues and, in general, competitions whose matches are not currently annotated by data providers.

6.Implicit Euler ODE Networks for Single-Image Dehazing ⬇️

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been applied for image dehazing tasks, where the residual network (ResNet) is often adopted as the basic component to avoid the vanishing gradient problem. Recently, many works indicate that the ResNet can be considered as the explicit Euler forward approximation of an ordinary differential equation (ODE). In this paper, we extend the explicit forward approximation to the implicit backward counterpart, which can be realized via a recursive neural network, named IM-block. Given that, we propose an efficient end-to-end multi-level implicit network (MI-Net) for the single image dehazing problem. Moreover, multi-level fusing (MLF) mechanism and residual channel attention block (RCA-block) are adopted to boost performance of our network. Experiments on several dehazing benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

7.Multitask Non-Autoregressive Model for Human Motion Prediction ⬇️

Human motion prediction, which aims at predicting future human skeletons given the past ones, is a typical sequence-to-sequence problem. Therefore, extensive efforts have been continued on exploring different RNN-based encoder-decoder architectures. However, by generating target poses conditioned on the previously generated ones, these models are prone to bringing issues such as error accumulation problem. In this paper, we argue that such issue is mainly caused by adopting autoregressive manner. Hence, a novel Non-auToregressive Model (NAT) is proposed with a complete non-autoregressive decoding scheme, as well as a context encoder and a positional encoding module. More specifically, the context encoder embeds the given poses from temporal and spatial perspectives. The frame decoder is responsible for predicting each future pose independently. The positional encoding module injects positional signal into the model to indicate temporal order. Moreover, a multitask training paradigm is presented for both low-level human skeleton prediction and high-level human action recognition, resulting in the convincing improvement for the prediction task. Our approach is evaluated on Human3.6M and CMU-Mocap benchmarks and outperforms state-of-the-art autoregressive methods.

8.Fashion-IQ 2020 Challenge 2nd Place Team's Solution ⬇️

This paper is dedicated to team VAA's approach submitted to the Fashion-IQ challenge in CVPR 2020. Given a pair of the image and the text, we present a novel multimodal composition method, RTIC, that can effectively combine the text and the image modalities into a semantic space. We extract the image and the text features that are encoded by the CNNs and the sequential models (e.g., LSTM or GRU), respectively. To emphasize the meaning of the residual of the feature between the target and candidate, the RTIC is composed of N-blocks with channel-wise attention modules. Then, we add the encoded residual to the feature of the candidate image to obtain a synthesized feature. We also explored an ensemble strategy with variants of models and achieved a significant boost in performance comparing to the best single model. Finally, our approach achieved 2nd place in the Fashion-IQ 2020 Challenge with a test score of 48.02 on the leaderboard.

9.Nested Learning For Multi-Granular Tasks ⬇️

Standard deep neural networks (DNNs) are commonly trained in an end-to-end fashion for specific tasks such as object recognition, face identification, or character recognition, among many examples. This specificity often leads to overconfident models that generalize poorly to samples that are not from the original training distribution. Moreover, such standard DNNs do not allow to leverage information from heterogeneously annotated training data, where for example, labels may be provided with different levels of granularity. Furthermore, DNNs do not produce results with simultaneous different levels of confidence for different levels of detail, they are most commonly an all or nothing approach. To address these challenges, we introduce the concept of nested learning: how to obtain a hierarchical representation of the input such that a coarse label can be extracted first, and sequentially refine this representation, if the sample permits, to obtain successively refined predictions, all of them with the corresponding confidence. We explicitly enforce this behavior by creating a sequence of nested information bottlenecks. Looking at the problem of nested learning from an information theory perspective, we design a network topology with two important properties. First, a sequence of low dimensional (nested) feature embeddings are enforced. Then we show how the explicit combination of nested outputs can improve both the robustness and the accuracy of finer predictions. Experimental results on Cifar-10, Cifar-100, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, Dbpedia, and Plantvillage demonstrate that nested learning outperforms the same network trained in the standard end-to-end fashion.

10.DeepHAZMAT: Hazardous Materials Sign Detection and Segmentation with Restricted Computational Resources ⬇️

One of the most challenging and non-trivial tasks in robotics-based rescue operations is Hazardous Materials or HAZMATs sign detection within the operation field, in order to prevent other unexpected disasters. Each Hazmat sign has a specific meaning that the rescue robot should detect and interpret it to take a safe action, accordingly. Accurate Hazmat detection and real-time processing are the two most important factors in such robotics applications. Furthermore, we also have to cope with some secondary challengers such as image distortion problems and restricted CPU and computational resources which are embedded in a rescue robot. In this paper, we propose a CNN-Based pipeline called DeepHAZMAT for detecting and segmenting Hazmats in four steps; 1) optimising the number of input images that are fed into the CNN network, 2) using the YOLOv3-tiny structure to collect the required visual information from the hazardous areas, 3) Hazmat sign segmentation and separation from the background using GrabCut technique, and 4) post-processing the result with morphological operators and convex hall algorithm. In spite of the utilisation of a very limited memory and CPU resources, the experimental results show the proposed method has successfully maintained a better performance in terms of detection-speed and detection-accuracy, compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

11.Term Revealing: Furthering Quantization at Run Time on Quantized DNNs ⬇️

We present a novel technique, called Term Revealing (TR), for furthering quantization at run time for improved performance of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) already quantized with conventional quantization methods. TR operates on power-of-two terms in binary expressions of values. In computing a dot-product computation, TR dynamically selects a fixed number of largest terms to use from the values of the two vectors in the dot product. By exploiting normal-like weight and data distributions typically present in DNNs, TR has a minimal impact on DNN model performance (i.e., accuracy or perplexity). We use TR to facilitate tightly synchronized processor arrays, such as systolic arrays, for efficient parallel processing. We show an FPGA implementation that can use a small number of control bits to switch between conventional quantization and TR-enabled quantization with a negligible delay. To enhance TR efficiency further, we propose HESE encoding (Hybrid Encoding for Signed Expressions) of values, as opposed to classic binary encoding with nonnegative power-of-two terms. We evaluate TR with HESE encoded values on an MLP for MNIST, multiple CNNs for ImageNet, and an LSTM for Wikitext-2, and show significant reductions in inference computations (between 3-10x) compared to conventional quantization for the same level of model performance.

12.Learning and Exploiting Interclass Visual Correlations for Medical Image Classification ⬇️

Deep neural network-based medical image classifications often use "hard" labels for training, where the probability of the correct category is 1 and those of others are 0. However, these hard targets can drive the networks over-confident about their predictions and prone to overfit the training data, affecting model generalization and adaption. Studies have shown that label smoothing and softening can improve classification performance. Nevertheless, existing approaches are either non-data-driven or limited in applicability. In this paper, we present the Class-Correlation Learning Network (CCL-Net) to learn interclass visual correlations from given training data, and produce soft labels to help with classification tasks. Instead of letting the network directly learn the desired correlations, we propose to learn them implicitly via distance metric learning of class-specific embeddings with a lightweight plugin CCL block. An intuitive loss based on a geometrical explanation of correlation is designed for bolstering learning of the interclass correlations. We further present end-to-end training of the proposed CCL block as a plugin head together with the classification backbone while generating soft labels on the fly. Our experimental results on the International Skin Imaging Collaboration 2018 dataset demonstrate effective learning of the interclass correlations from training data, as well as consistent improvements in performance upon several widely used modern network structures with the CCL block.

13.On uncertainty estimation in active learning for image segmentation ⬇️

Uncertainty estimation is important for interpreting the trustworthiness of machine learning models in many applications. This is especially critical in the data-driven active learning setting where the goal is to achieve a certain accuracy with minimum labeling effort. In such settings, the model learns to select the most informative unlabeled samples for annotation based on its estimated uncertainty. The highly uncertain predictions are assumed to be more informative for improving model performance. In this paper, we explore uncertainty calibration within an active learning framework for medical image segmentation, an area where labels often are scarce. Various uncertainty estimation methods and acquisition strategies (regions and full images) are investigated. We observe that selecting regions to annotate instead of full images leads to more well-calibrated models. Additionally, we experimentally show that annotating regions can cut 50% of pixels that need to be labeled by humans compared to annotating full images.

14.Disentanglement of Color and Shape Representations for Continual Learning ⬇️

We hypothesize that disentangled feature representations suffer less from catastrophic forgetting. As a case study we perform explicit disentanglement of color and shape, by adjusting the network architecture. We tested classification accuracy and forgetting in a task-incremental setting with Oxford-102 Flowers dataset. We combine our method with Elastic Weight Consolidation, Learning without Forgetting, Synaptic Intelligence and Memory Aware Synapses, and show that feature disentanglement positively impacts continual learning performance.

15.Multiple Sound Sources Localization from Coarse to Fine ⬇️

How to visually localize multiple sound sources in unconstrained videos is a formidable problem, especially when lack of the pairwise sound-object annotations. To solve this problem, we develop a two-stage audiovisual learning framework that disentangles audio and visual representations of different categories from complex scenes, then performs cross-modal feature alignment in a coarse-to-fine manner. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on public dataset of localization, as well as considerable performance on multi-source sound localization in complex scenes. We then employ the localization results for sound separation and obtain comparable performance to existing methods. These outcomes demonstrate our model's ability in effectively aligning sounds with specific visual sources.

16.End-to-End Multi-Object Tracking with Global Response Map ⬇️

Most existing Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) approaches follow the Tracking-by-Detection paradigm and the data association framework where objects are firstly detected and then associated. Although deep-learning based method can noticeably improve the object detection performance and also provide good appearance features for cross-frame association, the framework is not completely end-to-end, and therefore the computation is huge while the performance is limited. To address the problem, we present a completely end-to-end approach that takes image-sequence/video as input and outputs directly the located and tracked objects of learned types. Specifically, with our introduced multi-object representation strategy, a global response map can be accurately generated over frames, from which the trajectory of each tracked object can be easily picked up, just like how a detector inputs an image and outputs the bounding boxes of each detected object. The proposed model is fast and accurate. Experimental results based on the MOT16 and MOT17 benchmarks show that our proposed on-line tracker achieved state-of-the-art performance on several tracking metrics.

17.Active Crowd Counting with Limited Supervision ⬇️

To learn a reliable people counter from crowd images, head center annotations are normally required. Annotating head centers is however a laborious and tedious process in dense crowds. In this paper, we present an active learning framework which enables accurate crowd counting with limited supervision: given a small labeling budget, instead of randomly selecting images to annotate, we first introduce an active labeling strategy to annotate the most informative images in the dataset and learn the counting model upon them. The process is repeated such that in every cycle we select the samples that are diverse in crowd density and dissimilar to previous selections. In the last cycle when the labeling budget is met, the large amount of unlabeled data are also utilized: a distribution classifier is introduced to align the labeled data with unlabeled data; furthermore, we propose to mix up the distribution labels and latent representations of data in the network to particularly improve the distribution alignment in-between training samples. We follow the popular density estimation pipeline for crowd counting. Extensive experiments are conducted on standard benchmarks i.e. ShanghaiTech, UCF CC 50, MAll, TRANCOS, and DCC. By annotating limited number of images (e.g. 10% of the dataset), our method reaches levels of performance not far from the state of the art which utilize full annotations of the dataset.

18.IntegralAction: Pose-driven Feature Integration for Robust Human Action Recognition in Videos ⬇️

Most current action recognition methods heavily rely on appearance information by taking an RGB sequence of entire image regions as input. While being effective in exploiting contextual information around humans, e.g., human appearance and scene category, they are easily fooled by out-of-context action videos where the contexts do not exactly match with target actions. In contrast, pose-based methods, which takes a sequence of human skeletons only as input, suffer from inaccurate pose estimation or ambiguity of human pose per se. Integrating these two approaches has turned out to be non-trivial; training a model with both appearance and pose ends up with a strong bias towards appearance and does not generalize well to unseen videos. To address this problem, we propose to learn pose-driven feature integration that dynamically combines appearance and pose streams by observing pose features on the fly. The main idea is to let the pose stream decide how much and which appearance information is used in integration based on whether the given pose information is reliable or not. We show that the proposed IntegralAction achieves highly robust performance across in-context and out-of-context action video datasets.

19.Domain aware medical image classifier interpretation by counterfactual impact analysis ⬇️

The success of machine learning methods for computer vision tasks has driven a surge in computer assisted prediction for medicine and biology. Based on a data-driven relationship between input image and pathological classification, these predictors deliver unprecedented accuracy. Yet, the numerous approaches trying to explain the causality of this learned relationship have fallen short: time constraints, coarse, diffuse and at times misleading results, caused by the employment of heuristic techniques like Gaussian noise and blurring, have hindered their clinical adoption.
In this work, we discuss and overcome these obstacles by introducing a neural-network based attribution method, applicable to any trained predictor. Our solution identifies salient regions of an input image in a single forward-pass by measuring the effect of local image-perturbations on a predictor's score. We replace heuristic techniques with a strong neighborhood conditioned inpainting approach, avoiding anatomically implausible, hence adversarial artifacts. We evaluate on public mammography data and compare against existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we exemplify the approach's generalizability by demonstrating results on chest X-rays. Our solution shows, both quantitatively and qualitatively, a significant reduction of localization ambiguity and clearer conveying results, without sacrificing time efficiency.

20.Part-aware Prototype Network for Few-shot Semantic Segmentation ⬇️

Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to learn to segment new object classes with only a few annotated examples, which has a wide range of real-world applications. Most existing methods either focus on the restrictive setting of one-way few-shot segmentation or suffer from incomplete coverage of object regions. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot semantic segmentation framework based on the prototype representation. Our key idea is to decompose the holistic class representation into a set of part-aware prototypes, capable of capturing diverse and fine-grained object features. In addition, we propose to leverage unlabeled data to enrich our part-aware prototypes, resulting in better modeling of intra-class variations of semantic objects. We develop a novel graph neural network model to generate and enhance the proposed part-aware prototypes based on labeled and unlabeled images. Extensive experimental evaluations on two benchmarks show that our method outperforms the prior art with a sizable margin.

21.Seeing Eye-to-Eye? A Comparison of Object Recognition Performance in Humans and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks under Image Manipulation ⬇️

For a considerable time, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have reached human benchmark performance in object recognition. On that account, computational neuroscience and the field of machine learning have started to attribute numerous similarities and differences to artificial and biological vision. This study aims towards a behavioral comparison of visual core object recognition between humans and feedforward neural networks in a classification learning paradigm on an ImageNet data set. For this purpose, human participants (n = 65) competed in an online experiment against different feedforward DCNNs. The designed approach based on a typical learning process of seven different monkey categories included a training and validation phase with natural examples, as well as a testing phase with novel shape and color manipulations. Analyses of accuracy revealed that humans not only outperform DCNNs on all conditions, but also display significantly greater robustness towards shape and most notably color alterations. Furthermore, a precise examination of behavioral patterns highlights these findings by revealing independent classification errors between the groups. The obtained results endorse an implementation of recurrent circuits similar to the primate ventral stream in artificial vision models as a way to achieve adequate object generalization abilities across unexperienced manipulations.

22.Knowledge Graph Driven Approach to Represent Video Streams for Spatiotemporal Event Pattern Matching in Complex Event Processing ⬇️

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an event processing paradigm to perform real-time analytics over streaming data and match high-level event patterns. Presently, CEP is limited to process structured data stream. Video streams are complicated due to their unstructured data model and limit CEP systems to perform matching over them. This work introduces a graph-based structure for continuous evolving video streams, which enables the CEP system to query complex video event patterns. We propose the Video Event Knowledge Graph (VEKG), a graph driven representation of video data. VEKG models video objects as nodes and their relationship interaction as edges over time and space. It creates a semantic knowledge representation of video data derived from the detection of high-level semantic concepts from the video using an ensemble of deep learning models. A CEP-based state optimization - VEKG-Time Aggregated Graph (VEKG-TAG) is proposed over VEKG representation for faster event detection. VEKG-TAG is a spatiotemporal graph aggregation method that provides a summarized view of the VEKG graph over a given time length. We defined a set of nine event pattern rules for two domains (Activity Recognition and Traffic Management), which act as a query and applied over VEKG graphs to discover complex event patterns. To show the efficacy of our approach, we performed extensive experiments over 801 video clips across 10 datasets. The proposed VEKG approach was compared with other state-of-the-art methods and was able to detect complex event patterns over videos with F-Score ranging from 0.44 to 0.90. In the given experiments, the optimized VEKG-TAG was able to reduce 99% and 93% of VEKG nodes and edges, respectively, with 5.19X faster search time, achieving sub-second median latency of 4-20 milliseconds.

23.Fusing Motion Patterns and Key Visual Information for Semantic Event Recognition in Basketball Videos ⬇️

Many semantic events in team sport activities e.g. basketball often involve both group activities and the outcome (score or not). Motion patterns can be an effective means to identify different activities. Global and local motions have their respective emphasis on different activities, which are difficult to capture from the optical flow due to the mixture of global and local motions. Hence it calls for a more effective way to separate the global and local motions. When it comes to the specific case for basketball game analysis, the successful score for each round can be reliably detected by the appearance variation around the basket. Based on the observations, we propose a scheme to fuse global and local motion patterns (MPs) and key visual information (KVI) for semantic event recognition in basketball videos. Firstly, an algorithm is proposed to estimate the global motions from the mixed motions based on the intrinsic property of camera adjustments. And the local motions could be obtained from the mixed and global motions. Secondly, a two-stream 3D CNN framework is utilized for group activity recognition over the separated global and local motion patterns. Thirdly, the basket is detected and its appearance features are extracted through a CNN structure. The features are utilized to predict the success or failure. Finally, the group activity recognition and success/failure prediction results are integrated using the kronecker product for event recognition. Experiments on NCAA dataset demonstrate that the proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance.

24.Dual-Teacher: Integrating Intra-domain and Inter-domain Teachers for Annotation-efficient Cardiac Segmentation ⬇️

Medical image annotations are prohibitively time-consuming and expensive to obtain. To alleviate annotation scarcity, many approaches have been developed to efficiently utilize extra information, e.g.,semi-supervised learning further exploring plentiful unlabeled data, domain adaptation including multi-modality learning and unsupervised domain adaptation resorting to the prior knowledge from additional modality. In this paper, we aim to investigate the feasibility of simultaneously leveraging abundant unlabeled data and well-established cross-modality data for annotation-efficient medical image segmentation. To this end, we propose a novel semi-supervised domain adaptation approach, namely Dual-Teacher, where the student model not only learns from labeled target data (e.g., CT), but also explores unlabeled target data and labeled source data (e.g., MR) by two teacher models. Specifically, the student model learns the knowledge of unlabeled target data from intra-domain teacher by encouraging prediction consistency, as well as the shape priors embedded in labeled source data from inter-domain teacher via knowledge distillation. Consequently, the student model can effectively exploit the information from all three data resources and comprehensively integrate them to achieve improved performance. We conduct extensive experiments on MM-WHS 2017 dataset and demonstrate that our approach is able to concurrently utilize unlabeled data and cross-modality data with superior performance, outperforming semi-supervised learning and domain adaptation methods with a large margin.

25.OpenStreetMap: Challenges and Opportunities in Machine Learning and Remote Sensing ⬇️

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a community-based, freely available, editable map service that was created as an alternative to authoritative ones. Given that it is edited mainly by volunteers with different mapping skills, the completeness and quality of its annotations are heterogeneous across different geographical locations. Despite that, OSM has been widely used in several applications in {Geosciences}, Earth Observation and environmental sciences. In this work, we present a review of recent methods based on machine learning to improve and use OSM data. Such methods aim either 1) at improving the coverage and quality of OSM layers, typically using GIS and remote sensing technologies, or 2) at using the existing OSM layers to train models based on image data to serve applications like navigation or {land use} classification. We believe that OSM (as well as other sources of open land maps) can change the way we interpret remote sensing data and that the synergy with machine learning can scale participatory map making and its quality to the level needed to serve global and up-to-date land mapping.

26.Screen Tracking for Clinical Translation of Live Ultrasound Image Analysis Methods ⬇️

Ultrasound (US) imaging is one of the most commonly used non-invasive imaging techniques. However, US image acquisition requires simultaneous guidance of the transducer and interpretation of images, which is a highly challenging task that requires years of training. Despite many recent developments in intra-examination US image analysis, the results are not easy to translate to a clinical setting. We propose a generic framework to extract the US images and superimpose the results of an analysis task, without any need for physical connection or alteration to the US system. The proposed method captures the US image by tracking the screen with a camera fixed at the sonographer's view point and reformats the captured image to the right aspect ratio, in 87.66 +- 3.73ms on average.
It is hypothesized that this would enable to input such retrieved image into an image processing pipeline to extract information that can help improve the examination. This information could eventually be projected back to the sonographer's field of view in real time using, for example, an augmented reality (AR) headset.

27.RATT: Recurrent Attention to Transient Tasks for Continual Image Captioning ⬇️

Research on continual learning has led to a variety of approaches to mitigating catastrophic forgetting in feed-forward classification networks. Until now surprisingly little attention has been focused on continual learning of recurrent models applied to problems like image captioning. In this paper we take a systematic look at continual learning of LSTM-based models for image captioning. We propose an attention-based approach that explicitly accommodates the transient nature of vocabularies in continual image captioning tasks -- i.e. that task vocabularies are not disjoint. We call our method Recurrent Attention to Transient Tasks (RATT), and also show how to adapt continual learning approaches based on weight egularization and knowledge distillation to recurrent continual learning problems. We apply our approaches to incremental image captioning problem on two new continual learning benchmarks we define using the MS-COCO and Flickr30 datasets. Our results demonstrate that RATT is able to sequentially learn five captioning tasks while incurring no forgetting of previously learned ones.

28.Expert Training: Task Hardness Aware Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Classification ⬇️

Deep neural networks are highly effective when a large number of labeled samples are available but fail with few-shot classification tasks. Recently, meta-learning methods have received much attention, which train a meta-learner on massive additional tasks to gain the knowledge to instruct the few-shot classification. Usually, the training tasks are randomly sampled and performed indiscriminately, often making the meta-learner stuck into a bad local optimum. Some works in the optimization of deep neural networks have shown that a better arrangement of training data can make the classifier converge faster and perform better. Inspired by this idea, we propose an easy-to-hard expert meta-training strategy to arrange the training tasks properly, where easy tasks are preferred in the first phase, then, hard tasks are emphasized in the second phase. A task hardness aware module is designed and integrated into the training procedure to estimate the hardness of a task based on the distinguishability of its categories. In addition, we explore multiple hardness measurements including the semantic relation, the pairwise Euclidean distance, the Hausdorff distance, and the Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion. Experimental results on the miniImageNet and tieredImageNetSketch datasets show that the meta-learners can obtain better results with our expert training strategy.

29.Location-Aware Box Reasoning for Anchor-Based Single-Shot Object Detection ⬇️

In the majority of object detection frameworks, the confidence of instance classification is used as the quality criterion of predicted bounding boxes, like the confidence-based ranking in non-maximum suppression (NMS). However, the quality of bounding boxes, indicating the spatial relations, is not only correlated with the classification scores. Compared with the region proposal network (RPN) based detectors, single-shot object detectors suffer the box quality as there is a lack of pre-selection of box proposals. In this paper, we aim at single-shot object detectors and propose a location-aware anchor-based reasoning (LAAR) for the bounding boxes. LAAR takes both the location and classification confidences into consideration for the quality evaluation of bounding boxes. We introduce a novel network block to learn the relative location between the anchors and the ground truths, denoted as a localization score, which acts as a location reference during the inference stage. The proposed localization score leads to an independent regression branch and calibrates the bounding box quality by scoring the predicted localization score so that the best-qualified bounding boxes can be picked up in NMS. Experiments on MS COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed location-aware framework enhances the performances of current anchor-based single-shot object detection frameworks and yields consistent and robust detection results.

30.Hierarchical Dynamic Filtering Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection ⬇️

The main purpose of RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) is how to better integrate and utilize cross-modal fusion information. In this paper, we explore these issues from a new perspective. We integrate the features of different modalities through densely connected structures and use their mixed features to generate dynamic filters with receptive fields of different sizes. In the end, we implement a kind of more flexible and efficient multi-scale cross-modal feature processing, i.e. dynamic dilated pyramid module. In order to make the predictions have sharper edges and consistent saliency regions, we design a hybrid enhanced loss function to further optimize the results. This loss function is also validated to be effective in the single-modal RGB SOD task. In terms of six metrics, the proposed method outperforms the existing twelve methods on eight challenging benchmark datasets. A large number of experiments verify the effectiveness of the proposed module and loss function. Our code, model and results are available at \url{this https URL}.

31.Reducing Language Biases in Visual Question Answering with Visually-Grounded Question Encoder ⬇️

Recent studies have shown that current VQA models are heavily biased on the language priors in the train set to answer the question, irrespective of the image. E.g., overwhelmingly answer "what sport is" as "tennis" or "what color banana" as "yellow." This behavior restricts them from real-world application scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel model-agnostic question encoder, Visually-Grounded Question Encoder (VGQE), for VQA that reduces this effect. VGQE utilizes both visual and language modalities equally while encoding the question. Hence the question representation itself gets sufficient visual-grounding, and thus reduces the dependency of the model on the language priors. We demonstrate the effect of VGQE on three recent VQA models and achieve state-of-the-art results on the bias-sensitive split of the VQAv2 dataset; VQA-CPv2. Further, unlike the existing bias-reduction techniques, on the standard VQAv2 benchmark, our approach does not drop the accuracy; instead, it improves the performance.

32.Data from Model: Extracting Data from Non-robust and Robust Models ⬇️

The essence of deep learning is to exploit data to train a deep neural network (DNN) model. This work explores the reverse process of generating data from a model, attempting to reveal the relationship between the data and the model. We repeat the process of Data to Model (DtM) and Data from Model (DfM) in sequence and explore the loss of feature mapping information by measuring the accuracy drop on the original validation dataset. We perform this experiment for both a non-robust and robust origin model. Our results show that the accuracy drop is limited even after multiple sequences of DtM and DfM, especially for robust models. The success of this cycling transformation can be attributed to the shared feature mapping existing in data and model. Using the same data, we observe that different DtM processes result in models having different features, especially for different network architecture families, even though they achieve comparable performance.

33.PSConv: Squeezing Feature Pyramid into One Compact Poly-Scale Convolutional Layer ⬇️

Despite their strong modeling capacities, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are often scale-sensitive. For enhancing the robustness of CNNs to scale variance, multi-scale feature fusion from different layers or filters attracts great attention among existing solutions, while the more granular kernel space is overlooked. We bridge this regret by exploiting multi-scale features in a finer granularity. The proposed convolution operation, named Poly-Scale Convolution (PSConv), mixes up a spectrum of dilation rates and tactfully allocate them in the individual convolutional kernels of each filter regarding a single convolutional layer. Specifically, dilation rates vary cyclically along the axes of input and output channels of the filters, aggregating features over a wide range of scales in a neat style. PSConv could be a drop-in replacement of the vanilla convolution in many prevailing CNN backbones, allowing better representation learning without introducing additional parameters and computational complexities. Comprehensive experiments on the ImageNet and MS COCO benchmarks validate the superior performance of PSConv. Code and models are available at this https URL.

34.Understanding Adversarial Examples from the Mutual Influence of Images and Perturbations ⬇️

A wide variety of works have explored the reason for the existence of adversarial examples, but there is no consensus on the explanation. We propose to treat the DNN logits as a vector for feature representation, and exploit them to analyze the mutual influence of two independent inputs based on the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC). We utilize this vector representation to understand adversarial examples by disentangling the clean images and adversarial perturbations, and analyze their influence on each other. Our results suggest a new perspective towards the relationship between images and universal perturbations: Universal perturbations contain dominant features, and images behave like noise to them. This feature perspective leads to a new method for generating targeted universal adversarial perturbations using random source images. We are the first to achieve the challenging task of a targeted universal attack without utilizing original training data. Our approach using a proxy dataset achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art baselines which utilize the original training dataset.

35.Learning to Learn Parameterized Classification Networks for Scalable Input Images ⬇️

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) do not have a predictable recognition behavior with respect to the input resolution change. This prevents the feasibility of deployment on different input image resolutions for a specific model. To achieve efficient and flexible image classification at runtime, we employ meta learners to generate convolutional weights of main networks for various input scales and maintain privatized Batch Normalization layers per scale. For improved training performance, we further utilize knowledge distillation on the fly over model predictions based on different input resolutions. The learned meta network could dynamically parameterize main networks to act on input images of arbitrary size with consistently better accuracy compared to individually trained models. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet demonstrate that our method achieves an improved accuracy-efficiency trade-off during the adaptive inference process. By switching executable input resolutions, our method could satisfy the requirement of fast adaption in different resource-constrained environments. Code and models are available at this https URL.

36.Bridging Maximum Likelihood and Adversarial Learning via $α$-Divergence ⬇️

Maximum likelihood (ML) and adversarial learning are two popular approaches for training generative models, and from many perspectives these techniques are complementary. ML learning encourages the capture of all data modes, and it is typically characterized by stable training. However, ML learning tends to distribute probability mass diffusely over the data space, $e.g.$, yielding blurry synthetic images. Adversarial learning is well known to synthesize highly realistic natural images, despite practical challenges like mode dropping and delicate training. We propose an $\alpha$-Bridge to unify the advantages of ML and adversarial learning, enabling the smooth transfer from one to the other via the $\alpha$-divergence. We reveal that generalizations of the $\alpha$-Bridge are closely related to approaches developed recently to regularize adversarial learning, providing insights into that prior work, and further understanding of why the $\alpha$-Bridge performs well in practice.

37.Low to High Dimensional Modality Hallucination using Aggregated Fields of View ⬇️

Real-world robotics systems deal with data from a multitude of modalities, especially for tasks such as navigation and recognition. The performance of those systems can drastically degrade when one or more modalities become inaccessible, due to factors such as sensors' malfunctions or adverse environments. Here, we argue modality hallucination as one effective way to ensure consistent modality availability and thereby reduce unfavorable consequences. While hallucinating data from a modality with richer information, e.g., RGB to depth, has been researched extensively, we investigate the more challenging low-to-high modality hallucination with interesting use cases in robotics and autonomous systems. We present a novel hallucination architecture that aggregates information from multiple fields of view of the local neighborhood to recover the lost information from the extant modality. The process is implemented by capturing a non-linear mapping between the data modalities and the learned mapping is used to aid the extant modality to mitigate the risk posed to the system in the adverse scenarios which involve modality loss. We also conduct extensive classification and segmentation experiments on UWRGBD and NYUD datasets and demonstrate that hallucination allays the negative effects of the modality loss. Implementation and models: this https URL

38.Deep Reinforced Attention Learning for Quality-Aware Visual Recognition ⬇️

In this paper, we build upon the weakly-supervised generation mechanism of intermediate attention maps in any convolutional neural networks and disclose the effectiveness of attention modules more straightforwardly to fully exploit their potential. Given an existing neural network equipped with arbitrary attention modules, we introduce a meta critic network to evaluate the quality of attention maps in the main network. Due to the discreteness of our designed reward, the proposed learning method is arranged in a reinforcement learning setting, where the attention actors and recurrent critics are alternately optimized to provide instant critique and revision for the temporary attention representation, hence coined as Deep REinforced Attention Learning (DREAL). It could be applied universally to network architectures with different types of attention modules and promotes their expressive ability by maximizing the relative gain of the final recognition performance arising from each individual attention module, as demonstrated by extensive experiments on both category and instance recognition benchmarks.

39.AI Playground: Unreal Engine-based Data Ablation Tool for Deep Learning ⬇️

Machine learning requires data, but acquiring and labeling real-world data is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming. More importantly, it is nearly impossible to alter real data post-acquisition (e.g., change the illumination of a room), making it very difficult to measure how specific properties of the data affect performance. In this paper, we present AI Playground (AIP), an open-source, Unreal Engine-based tool for generating and labeling virtual image data. With AIP, it is trivial to capture the same image under different conditions (e.g., fidelity, lighting, etc.) and with different ground truths (e.g., depth or surface normal values). AIP is easily extendable and can be used with or without code. To validate our proposed tool, we generated eight datasets of otherwise identical but varying lighting and fidelity conditions. We then trained deep neural networks to predict (1) depth values, (2) surface normals, or (3) object labels and assessed each network's intra- and cross-dataset performance. Among other insights, we verified that sensitivity to different settings is problem-dependent. We confirmed the findings of other studies that segmentation models are very sensitive to fidelity, but we also found that they are just as sensitive to lighting. In contrast, depth and normal estimation models seem to be less sensitive to fidelity or lighting and more sensitive to the structure of the image. Finally, we tested our trained depth-estimation networks on two real-world datasets and obtained results comparable to training on real data alone, confirming that our virtual environments are realistic enough for real-world tasks.

40.Universal-to-Specific Framework for Complex Action Recognition ⬇️

Video-based action recognition has recently attracted much attention in the field of computer vision. To solve more complex recognition tasks, it has become necessary to distinguish different levels of interclass variations. Inspired by a common flowchart based on the human decision-making process that first narrows down the probable classes and then applies a "rethinking" process for finer-level recognition, we propose an effective universal-to-specific (U2S) framework for complex action recognition. The U2S framework is composed of three subnetworks: a universal network, a category-specific network, and a mask network. The universal network first learns universal feature representations. The mask network then generates attention masks for confusing classes through category regularization based on the output of the universal network. The mask is further used to guide the category-specific network for class-specific feature representations. The entire framework is optimized in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on a variety of benchmark datasets, e.g., the Something-Something, UCF101, and HMDB51 datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the U2S framework; i.e., U2S can focus on discriminative spatiotemporal regions for confusing categories. We further visualize the relationship between different classes, showing that U2S indeed improves the discriminability of learned features. Moreover, the proposed U2S model is a general framework and may adopt any base recognition network.

41.Fine-Grained Crowd Counting ⬇️

Current crowd counting algorithms are only concerned about the number of people in an image, which lacks low-level fine-grained information of the crowd. For many practical applications, the total number of people in an image is not as useful as the number of people in each sub-category. E.g., knowing the number of people waiting inline or browsing can help retail stores; knowing the number of people standing/sitting can help restaurants/cafeterias; knowing the number of violent/non-violent people can help police in crowd management. In this paper, we propose fine-grained crowd counting, which differentiates a crowd into categories based on the low-level behavior attributes of the individuals (e.g. standing/sitting or violent behavior) and then counts the number of people in each category. To enable research in this area, we construct a new dataset of four real-world fine-grained counting tasks: traveling direction on a sidewalk, standing or sitting, waiting in line or not, and exhibiting violent behavior or not. Since the appearance features of different crowd categories are similar, the challenge of fine-grained crowd counting is to effectively utilize contextual information to distinguish between categories. We propose a two branch architecture, consisting of a density map estimation branch and a semantic segmentation branch. We propose two refinement strategies for improving the predictions of the two branches. First, to encode contextual information, we propose feature propagation guided by the density map prediction, which eliminates the effect of background features during propagation. Second, we propose a complementary attention model to share information between the two branches. Experiment results confirm the effectiveness of our method.

42.Temporal Self-Ensembling Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection ⬇️

This paper focuses on the problem of Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SSOD). In the field of Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL), the Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework which consists of a teacher model and a student model is widely used to make good use of the unlabeled images. Given unlabeled images, the teacher is supposed to yield meaningful targets (e.g. well-posed logits) to regularize the training of the student. However, directly applying the KD framework in SSOD has the following obstacles. (1) Teacher and student predictions may be very close which limits the upper-bound of the student, and (2) the data imbalance dilemma caused by dense prediction from object detection hinders an efficient consistency regularization between the teacher and student. To solve these problems, we propose the Temporal Self-Ensembling Teacher (TSE-T) model on top of the KD framework. Differently from the conventional KD methods, we devise a temporally updated teacher model. First, our teacher model ensembles its temporal predictions for unlabeled images under varying perturbations. Second, our teacher model ensembles its temporal model weights by Exponential Moving Average (EMA) which allows it gradually learn from student. The above self-ensembling strategies collaboratively yield better teacher predictions for unblabeled images. Finally, we use focal loss to formulate the consistency regularization to handle the data imbalance problem. Evaluated on the widely used VOC and COCO benchmarks, our method has achieved 80.73% and 40.52% (mAP) on the VOC2007 test set and the COCO2012 test-dev set respectively, which outperforms the fully-supervised detector by 2.37% and 1.49%. Furthermore, our method sets the new state state of the art in SSOD on VOC benchmark which outperforms the baseline SSOD method by 1.44%. The source code of this work is publicly available at \url{this http URL.

43.Embedded Deep Bilinear Interactive Information and Selective Fusion for Multi-view Learning ⬇️

As a concrete application of multi-view learning, multi-view classification improves the traditional classification methods significantly by integrating various views optimally. Although most of the previous efforts have been demonstrated the superiority of multi-view learning, it can be further improved by comprehensively embedding more powerful cross-view interactive information and a more reliable multi-view fusion strategy in intensive studies. To fulfill this goal, we propose a novel multi-view learning framework to make the multi-view classification better aimed at the above-mentioned two aspects. That is, we seamlessly embed various intra-view information, cross-view multi-dimension bilinear interactive information, and a new view ensemble mechanism into a unified framework to make a decision via the optimization. In particular, we train different deep neural networks to learn various intra-view representations, and then dynamically learn multi-dimension bilinear interactive information from different bilinear similarities via the bilinear function between views. After that, we adaptively fuse the representations of multiple views by flexibly tuning the parameters of the view-weight, which not only avoids the trivial solution of weight but also provides a new way to select a few discriminative views that are beneficial to make a decision for the multi-view classification. Extensive experiments on six publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

44.Gender Classification and Bias Mitigation in Facial Images ⬇️

Gender classification algorithms have important applications in many domains today such as demographic research, law enforcement, as well as human-computer interaction. Recent research showed that algorithms trained on biased benchmark databases could result in algorithmic bias. However, to date, little research has been carried out on gender classification algorithms' bias towards gender minorities subgroups, such as the LGBTQ and the non-binary population, who have distinct characteristics in gender expression. In this paper, we began by conducting surveys on existing benchmark databases for facial recognition and gender classification tasks. We discovered that the current benchmark databases lack representation of gender minority subgroups. We worked on extending the current binary gender classifier to include a non-binary gender class. We did that by assembling two new facial image databases: 1) a racially balanced inclusive database with a subset of LGBTQ population 2) an inclusive-gender database that consists of people with non-binary gender. We worked to increase classification accuracy and mitigate algorithmic biases on our baseline model trained on the augmented benchmark database. Our ensemble model has achieved an overall accuracy score of 90.39%, which is a 38.72% increase from the baseline binary gender classifier trained on Adience. While this is an initial attempt towards mitigating bias in gender classification, more work is needed in modeling gender as a continuum by assembling more inclusive databases.

45.Locality Guided Neural Networks for Explainable Artificial Intelligence ⬇️

In current deep network architectures, deeper layers in networks tend to contain hundreds of independent neurons which makes it hard for humans to understand how they interact with each other. By organizing the neurons by correlation, humans can observe how clusters of neighbouring neurons interact with each other. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for back propagation, called Locality Guided Neural Network(LGNN) for training networks that preserves locality between neighbouring neurons within each layer of a deep network. Heavily motivated by Self-Organizing Map (SOM), the goal is to enforce a local topology on each layer of a deep network such that neighbouring neurons are highly correlated with each other. This method contributes to the domain of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), which aims to alleviate the black-box nature of current AI methods and make them understandable by humans. Our method aims to achieve XAI in deep learning without changing the structure of current models nor requiring any post processing. This paper focuses on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), but can theoretically be applied to any type of deep learning architecture. In our experiments, we train various VGG and Wide ResNet (WRN) networks for image classification on CIFAR100. In depth analyses presenting both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our method is capable of enforcing a topology on each layer while achieving a small increase in classification accuracy

46.DRWR: A Differentiable Renderer without Rendering for Unsupervised 3D Structure Learning from Silhouette Images ⬇️

Differentiable renderers have been used successfully for unsupervised 3D structure learning from 2D images because they can bridge the gap between 3D and 2D. To optimize 3D shape parameters, current renderers rely on pixel-wise losses between rendered images of 3D reconstructions and ground truth images from corresponding viewpoints. Hence they require interpolation of the recovered 3D structure at each pixel, visibility handling, and optionally evaluating a shading model. In contrast, here we propose a Differentiable Renderer Without Rendering (DRWR) that omits these steps. DRWR only relies on a simple but effective loss that evaluates how well the projections of reconstructed 3D point clouds cover the ground truth object silhouette. Specifically, DRWR employs a smooth silhouette loss to pull the projection of each individual 3D point inside the object silhouette, and a structure-aware repulsion loss to push each pair of projections that fall inside the silhouette far away from each other. Although we omit surface interpolation, visibility handling, and shading, our results demonstrate that DRWR achieves state-of-the-art accuracies under widely used benchmarks, outperforming previous methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, our training times are significantly lower due to the simplicity of DRWR.

47.EAGLE: Large-scale Dataset for Vehicle Detection in Aerial Imagery ⬇️

Multi-class vehicle detection from airborne imagery with orientation estimation is an important task in the near and remote vision domains with applications in traffic monitoring and disaster management. In the last decade, we have witnessed significant progress in object detection in ground imagery, but it is still in its infancy in airborne imagery, mostly due to the scarcity of diverse and large-scale datasets. Despite being a useful tool for different applications, current airborne datasets only partially reflect the challenges of real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce EAGLE (oriEnted object detection using Aerial imaGery in real-worLd scEnarios), a large-scale dataset for multi-class vehicle detection with object orientation information in aerial imagery. It features high-resolution aerial images composed of different real-world situations with a wide variety of camera sensor, resolution, flight altitude, weather, illumination, haze, shadow, time, city, country, occlusion, and camera angle. The annotation was done by airborne imagery experts with small- and large-vehicle classes. EAGLE contains 215,986 instances annotated with oriented bounding boxes defined by four points and orientation, making it by far the largest dataset to date in this task. It also supports researches on the haze and shadow removal as well as super-resolution and in-painting applications. We define three tasks: detection by (1) horizontal bounding boxes, (2) rotated bounding boxes, and (3) oriented bounding boxes. We carried out several experiments to evaluate several state-of-the-art methods in object detection on our dataset to form a baseline. Experiments show that the EAGLE dataset accurately reflects real-world situations and correspondingly challenging applications. The dataset will be made publicly available.

48.VINNAS: Variational Inference-based Neural Network Architecture Search ⬇️

In recent years, neural architecture search (NAS) has received intensive scientific and industrial interest due to its capability of finding a neural architecture with high accuracy for various artificial intelligence tasks such as image classification or object detection. In particular, gradient-based NAS approaches have become one of the more popular approaches thanks to their computational efficiency during the search. However, these methods often experience a mode collapse, where the quality of the found architectures is poor due to the algorithm resorting to choosing a single operation type for the entire network, or stagnating at a local minima for various datasets or search spaces. To address these defects, we present a differentiable variational inference-based NAS method for searching sparse convolutional neural networks. Our approach finds the optimal neural architecture by dropping out candidate operations in an over-parameterised supergraph using variational dropout with automatic relevance determination prior, which makes the algorithm gradually remove unnecessary operations and connections without risking mode collapse. The evaluation is conducted through searching two types of convolutional cells that shape the neural network for classifying different image datasets. Our method finds diverse network cells, while showing state-of-the-art accuracy with up to $3 \times$ fewer parameters.

49.SkyScapes -- Fine-Grained Semantic Understanding of Aerial Scenes ⬇️

Understanding the complex urban infrastructure with centimeter-level accuracy is essential for many applications from autonomous driving to mapping, infrastructure monitoring, and urban management. Aerial images provide valuable information over a large area instantaneously; nevertheless, no current dataset captures the complexity of aerial scenes at the level of granularity required by real-world applications. To address this, we introduce SkyScapes, an aerial image dataset with highly-accurate, fine-grained annotations for pixel-level semantic labeling. SkyScapes provides annotations for 31 semantic categories ranging from large structures, such as buildings, roads and vegetation, to fine details, such as 12 (sub-)categories of lane markings. We have defined two main tasks on this dataset: dense semantic segmentation and multi-class lane-marking prediction. We carry out extensive experiments to evaluate state-of-the-art segmentation methods on SkyScapes. Existing methods struggle to deal with the wide range of classes, object sizes, scales, and fine details present. We therefore propose a novel multi-task model, which incorporates semantic edge detection and is better tuned for feature extraction from a wide range of scales. This model achieves notable improvements over the baselines in region outlines and level of detail on both tasks.

50.Sparse Graph to Sequence Learning for Vision Conditioned Long Textual Sequence Generation ⬇️

Generating longer textual sequences when conditioned on the visual information is an interesting problem to explore. The challenge here proliferate over the standard vision conditioned sentence-level generation (e.g., image or video captioning) as it requires to produce a brief and coherent story describing the visual content. In this paper, we mask this Vision-to-Sequence as Graph-to-Sequence learning problem and approach it with the Transformer architecture. To be specific, we introduce Sparse Graph-to-Sequence Transformer (SGST) for encoding the graph and decoding a sequence. The encoder aims to directly encode graph-level semantics, while the decoder is used to generate longer sequences. Experiments conducted with the benchmark image paragraph dataset show that our proposed achieve 13.3% improvement on the CIDEr evaluation measure when comparing to the previous state-of-the-art approach.

51.A Comparative Study on Polyp Classification using Convolutional Neural Networks ⬇️

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer diagnosed in both men and women in the United States. Most colorectal cancers start as a growth on the inner lining of the colon or rectum, called 'polyp'. Not all polyps are cancerous, but some can develop into cancer. Early detection and recognition of the type of polyps is critical to prevent cancer and change outcomes. However, visual classification of polyps is challenging due to varying illumination conditions of endoscopy, variant texture, appearance, and overlapping morphology between polyps. More importantly, evaluation of polyp patterns by gastroenterologists is subjective leading to a poor agreement among observers. Deep convolutional neural networks have proven very successful in object classification across various object categories. In this work, we compare the performance of the state-of-the-art general object classification models for polyp classification. We trained a total of six CNN models end-to-end using a dataset of 157 video sequences composed of two types of polyps: hyperplastic and adenomatous. Our results demonstrate that the state-of-the-art CNN models can successfully classify polyps with an accuracy comparable or better than reported among gastroenterologists. The results of this study can guide future research in polyp classification.

52.Visualizing Classification Structure in Deep Neural Networks ⬇️

We propose a measure to compute class similarity in large-scale classification based on prediction scores. Such measure has not been formally pro-posed in the literature. We show how visualizing the class similarity matrix can reveal hierarchical structures and relationships that govern the classes. Through examples with various classifiers, we demonstrate how such structures can help in analyzing the classification behavior and in inferring potential corner cases. The source code for one example is available as a notebook at this https URL

53.Learning to associate detections for real-time multiple object tracking ⬇️

With the recent advances in the object detection research field, tracking-by-detection has become the leading paradigm adopted by multi-object tracking algorithms. By extracting different features from detected objects, those algorithms can estimate the objects' similarities and association patterns along successive frames. However, since similarity functions applied by tracking algorithms are handcrafted, it is difficult to employ them in new contexts. In this study, it is investigated the use of artificial neural networks to learning a similarity function that can be used among detections. During training, the networks were introduced to correct and incorrect association patterns, sampled from a pedestrian tracking data set. For such, different motion and appearance features combinations have been explored. Finally, a trained network has been inserted into a multiple-object tracking framework, which has been assessed on the MOT Challenge benchmark. Throughout the experiments, the proposed tracker matched the results obtained by state-of-the-art methods, it has run 58% faster than a recent and similar method, used as baseline.

54.Probabilistic Jacobian-based Saliency Maps Attacks ⬇️

Machine learning models have achieved spectacular performances in various critical fields including intelligent monitoring, autonomous driving and malware detection. Therefore, robustness against adversarial attacks represents a key issue to trust these models. In particular, the Jacobian-based Saliency Map Attack (JSMA) is widely used to fool neural network classifiers. In this paper, we introduce Weighted JSMA (WJSMA) and Taylor JSMA (TJSMA), simple, faster and more efficient versions of JSMA. These attacks rely upon new saliency maps involving the neural network Jacobian, its output probabilities and the input features. We demonstrate the advantages of WJSMA and TJSMA through two computer vision applications on 1) LeNet-5, a well-known Neural Network classifier (NNC), on the MNIST database and on 2) a more challenging NNC on the CIFAR-10 dataset. We obtain that WJSMA and TJSMA significantly outperform JSMA in success rate, speed and average number of changed features. For instance, on LeNet-5 (with $100%$ and $99.49%$ accuracies on the training and test sets), WJSMA and TJSMA respectively exceed $97%$ and $98.60%$ in success rate for a maximum authorised distortion of $14.5%$, outperforming JSMA with more than $9.5$ and $11$ percentage points. The new attacks are then used to defend and create more robust models than those trained against JSMA. Like JSMA, our attacks are not scalable on large datasets such as IMAGENET but despite this fact, they remain attractive for relatively small datasets like MNIST, CIFAR-10 and may be potential tools for future applications.

55.MeDaS: An open-source platform as service to help break the walls between medicine and informatics ⬇️

In the past decade, deep learning (DL) has achieved unprecedented success in numerous fields including computer vision, natural language processing, and healthcare. In particular, DL is experiencing an increasing development in applications for advanced medical image analysis in terms of analysis, segmentation, classification, and furthermore. On the one hand, tremendous needs that leverage the power of DL for medical image analysis are arising from the research community of a medical, clinical, and informatics background to jointly share their expertise, knowledge, skills, and experience. On the other hand, barriers between disciplines are on the road for them often hampering a full and efficient collaboration. To this end, we propose our novel open-source platform, i.e., MeDaS -- the MeDical open-source platform as Service. To the best of our knowledge, MeDaS is the first open-source platform proving a collaborative and interactive service for researchers from a medical background easily using DL related toolkits, and at the same time for scientists or engineers from information sciences to understand the medical knowledge side. Based on a series of toolkits and utilities from the idea of RINV (Rapid Implementation aNd Verification), our proposed MeDaS platform can implement pre-processing, post-processing, augmentation, visualization, and other phases needed in medical image analysis. Five tasks including the subjects of lung, liver, brain, chest, and pathology, are validated and demonstrated to be efficiently realisable by using MeDaS.

56.Multi-Modality Information Fusion for Radiomics-based Neural Architecture Search ⬇️

'Radiomics' is a method that extracts mineable quantitative features from radiographic images. These features can then be used to determine prognosis, for example, predicting the development of distant metastases (DM). Existing radiomics methods, however, require complex manual effort including the design of hand-crafted radiomic features and their extraction and selection. Recent radiomics methods, based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), also require manual input in network architecture design and hyper-parameter tuning. Radiomic complexity is further compounded when there are multiple imaging modalities, for example, combined positron emission tomography - computed tomography (PET-CT) where there is functional information from PET and complementary anatomical localization information from computed tomography (CT). Existing multi-modality radiomics methods manually fuse the data that are extracted separately. Reliance on manual fusion often results in sub-optimal fusion because they are dependent on an 'expert's' understanding of medical images. In this study, we propose a multi-modality neural architecture search method (MM-NAS) to automatically derive optimal multi-modality image features for radiomics and thus negate the dependence on a manual process. We evaluated our MM-NAS on the ability to predict DM using a public PET-CT dataset of patients with soft-tissue sarcomas (STSs). Our results show that our MM-NAS had a higher prediction accuracy when compared to state-of-the-art radiomics methods.

57.Differentiable Programming for Hyperspectral Unmixing using a Physics-based Dispersion Model ⬇️

Hyperspectral unmixing is an important remote sensing task with applications including material identification and analysis. Characteristic spectral features make many pure materials identifiable from their visible-to-infrared spectra, but quantifying their presence within a mixture is a challenging task due to nonlinearities and factors of variation. In this paper, spectral variation is considered from a physics-based approach and incorporated into an end-to-end spectral unmixing algorithm via differentiable programming. The dispersion model is introduced to simulate realistic spectral variation, and an efficient method to fit the parameters is presented. Then, this dispersion model is utilized as a generative model within an analysis-by-synthesis spectral unmixing algorithm. Further, a technique for inverse rendering using a convolutional neural network to predict parameters of the generative model is introduced to enhance performance and speed when training data is available. Results achieve state-of-the-art on both infrared and visible-to-near-infrared (VNIR) datasets, and show promise for the synergy between physics-based models and deep learning in hyperspectral unmixing in the future.

58.IllumiNet: Transferring Illumination from Planar Surfaces to Virtual Objects in Augmented Reality ⬇️

This paper presents an illumination estimation method for virtual objects in real environment by learning. While previous works tackled this problem by reconstructing high dynamic range (HDR) environment maps or the corresponding spherical harmonics, we do not seek to recover the lighting environment of the entire scene. Given a single RGB image, our method directly infers the relit virtual object by transferring the illumination features extracted from planar surfaces in the scene to the desired geometries. Compared to previous works, our approach is more robust as it works in both indoor and outdoor environments with spatially-varying illumination. Experiments and evaluation results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art quantitatively and qualitatively, achieving realistic augmented experience.

59.Self-Supervised Drivable Area and Road Anomaly Segmentation using RGB-D Data for Robotic Wheelchairs ⬇️

The segmentation of drivable areas and road anomalies are critical capabilities to achieve autonomous navigation for robotic wheelchairs. The recent progress of semantic segmentation using deep learning techniques has presented effective results. However, the acquisition of large-scale datasets with hand-labeled ground truth is time-consuming and labor-intensive, making the deep learning-based methods often hard to implement in practice. We contribute to the solution of this problem for the task of drivable area and road anomaly segmentation by proposing a self-supervised learning approach. We develop a pipeline that can automatically generate segmentation labels for drivable areas and road anomalies. Then, we train RGB-D data-based semantic segmentation neural networks and get predicted labels. Experimental results show that our proposed automatic labeling pipeline achieves an impressive speed-up compared to manual labeling. In addition, our proposed self-supervised approach exhibits more robust and accurate results than the state-of-the-art traditional algorithms as well as the state-of-the-art self-supervised algorithms.

60.Dual Adversarial Network: Toward Real-world Noise Removal and Noise Generation ⬇️

Real-world image noise removal is a long-standing yet very challenging task in computer vision. The success of deep neural network in denoising stimulates the research of noise generation, aiming at synthesizing more clean-noisy image pairs to facilitate the training of deep denoisers. In this work, we propose a novel unified framework to simultaneously deal with the noise removal and noise generation tasks. Instead of only inferring the posteriori distribution of the latent clean image conditioned on the observed noisy image in traditional MAP framework, our proposed method learns the joint distribution of the clean-noisy image pairs. Specifically, we approximate the joint distribution with two different factorized forms, which can be formulated as a denoiser mapping the noisy image to the clean one and a generator mapping the clean image to the noisy one. The learned joint distribution implicitly contains all the information between the noisy and clean images, avoiding the necessity of manually designing the image priors and noise assumptions as traditional. Besides, the performance of our denoiser can be further improved by augmenting the original training dataset with the learned generator. Moreover, we propose two metrics to assess the quality of the generated noisy image, for which, to the best of our knowledge, such metrics are firstly proposed along this research line. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-arts both in the real noise removal and generation tasks. The training and testing code is available at this https URL.

61.Fruit classification using deep feature maps in the presence of deceptive similar classes ⬇️

Autonomous detection and classification of objects are admired area of research in many industrial applications. Though, humans can distinguish objects with high multi-granular similarities very easily; but for the machines, it is a very challenging task. The convolution neural networks (CNN) have illustrated efficient performance in multi-level representations of objects for classification. Conventionally, the existing deep learning models utilize the transformed features generated by the rearmost layer for training and testing. However, it is evident that this does not work well with multi-granular data, especially, in presence of deceptive similar classes (almost similar but different classes). The objective of the present research is to address the challenge of classification of deceptively similar multi-granular objects with an ensemble approach thfat utilizes activations from multiple layers of CNN (deep features). These multi-layer activations are further utilized to build multiple deep decision trees (known as Random forest) for classification of objects with similar appearance. The Fruits-360 dataset is utilized for evaluation of the proposed approach. With extensive trials it was observed that the proposed model outperformed over the conventional deep learning approaches.

62.Adversarial Self-Supervised Learning for Semi-Supervised 3D Action Recognition ⬇️

We consider the problem of semi-supervised 3D action recognition which has been rarely explored before. Its major challenge lies in how to effectively learn motion representations from unlabeled data. Self-supervised learning (SSL) has been proved very effective at learning representations from unlabeled data in the image domain. However, few effective self-supervised approaches exist for 3D action recognition, and directly applying SSL for semi-supervised learning suffers from misalignment of representations learned from SSL and supervised learning tasks. To address these issues, we present Adversarial Self-Supervised Learning (ASSL), a novel framework that tightly couples SSL and the semi-supervised scheme via neighbor relation exploration and adversarial learning. Specifically, we design an effective SSL scheme to improve the discrimination capability of learned representations for 3D action recognition, through exploring the data relations within a neighborhood. We further propose an adversarial regularization to align the feature distributions of labeled and unlabeled samples. To demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed ASSL in semi-supervised 3D action recognition, we conduct extensive experiments on NTU and N-UCLA datasets. The results confirm its advantageous performance over state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods in the few label regime for 3D action recognition.

63.Pose-aware Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Personalized Facial Expression Recognition ⬇️

Current facial expression recognition methods fail to simultaneously cope with pose and subject variations.
In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised adversarial domain adaptation method which can alleviate both variations at the same time. Specially, our method consists of three learning strategies: adversarial domain adaptation learning, cross adversarial feature learning, and reconstruction learning. The first aims to learn pose- and expression-related feature representations in the source domain and adapt both feature distributions to that of the target domain by imposing adversarial learning. By using personalized adversarial domain adaptation, this learning strategy can alleviate subject variations and exploit information from the source domain to help learning in the target domain.
The second serves to perform feature disentanglement between pose- and expression-related feature representations by impulsing pose-related feature representations expression-undistinguished and the expression-related feature representations pose-undistinguished.
The last can further boost feature learning by applying face image reconstructions so that the learned expression-related feature representations are more pose- and identity-robust.
Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

64.Two-Stream Deep Feature Modelling for Automated Video Endoscopy Data Analysis ⬇️

Automating the analysis of imagery of the Gastrointestinal (GI) tract captured during endoscopy procedures has substantial potential benefits for patients, as it can provide diagnostic support to medical practitioners and reduce mistakes via human error. To further the development of such methods, we propose a two-stream model for endoscopic image analysis. Our model fuses two streams of deep feature inputs by mapping their inherent relations through a novel relational network model, to better model symptoms and classify the image. In contrast to handcrafted feature-based models, our proposed network is able to learn features automatically and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets: KVASIR and Nerthus. Our extensive evaluations illustrate the importance of having two streams of inputs instead of a single stream and also demonstrates the merits of the proposed relational network architecture to combine those streams.

65.Framework for Passenger Seat Availability Using Face Detection in Passenger Bus ⬇️

Advancements in Intelligent Transportation System (IES) improve passenger traveling by providing information systems for bus arrival time and counting the number of passengers and buses in cities. Passengers still face bus waiting and seat unavailability issues which have adverse effects on traffic management and controlling authority. We propose a Face Detection based Framework (FDF) to determine passenger seat availability in a camera-equipped bus through face detection which is based on background subtraction to count empty, filled, and total seats. FDF has an integrated smartphone Passenger Application (PA) to identify the nearest bus stop. We evaluate FDF in a live test environment and results show that it gives 90% accuracy. We believe our results have the potential to address traffic management concerns and assist passengers to save their valuable time

66.PA-GAN: Progressive Attention Generative Adversarial Network for Facial Attribute Editing ⬇️

Facial attribute editing aims to manipulate attributes on the human face, e.g., adding a mustache or changing the hair color. Existing approaches suffer from a serious compromise between correct attribute generation and preservation of the other information such as identity and background, because they edit the attributes in the imprecise area. To resolve this dilemma, we propose a progressive attention GAN (PA-GAN) for facial attribute editing. In our approach, the editing is progressively conducted from high to low feature level while being constrained inside a proper attribute area by an attention mask at each level. This manner prevents undesired modifications to the irrelevant regions from the beginning, and then the network can focus more on correctly generating the attributes within a proper boundary at each level. As a result, our approach achieves correct attribute editing with irrelevant details much better preserved compared with the state-of-the-arts. Codes are released at this https URL.

67.Train Your Data Processor: Distribution-Aware and Error-Compensation Coordinate Decoding for Human Pose Estimation ⬇️

Recently, the leading performance of human pose estimation is dominated by heatmap based methods. While being a fundamental component of heatmap processing, heatmap decoding (i.e. transforming heatmaps to coordinates) receives only limited investigations, to our best knowledge. This work fills the gap by studying the heatmap decoding processing with a particular focus on the errors introduced throughout the prediction process. We found that the errors of heatmap based methods are surprisingly significant, which nevertheless was universally ignored before. In view of the discovered importance, we further reveal the intrinsic limitations of the previous widely used heatmap decoding methods and thereout propose a Distribution-Aware and Error-Compensation Coordinate Decoding (DAEC). Serving as a model-agnostic plug-in, DAEC learns its decoding strategy from training data and remarkably improves the performance of a variety of state-of-the-art human pose estimation models. Specifically, equipped with DAEC, the SimpleBaseline-ResNet152-256x192 and HRNet-W48-256x192 are significantly improved by 2.6% and 2.9% achieving 72.6% and 75.7% on COCO, respectively. Moreover, the HR-W32-256x256 and ResNet-152-256x256 frameworks enjoy even more dramatic promotions of 8.4% and 7.8% on MPII. Extensive experiments performed on these two common benchmarks, demonstrates that DAEC exceeds its competitors by considerable margins, backing up the rationality and generality of our novel heatmap decoding idea. The project is available at this https URL.

68.Anomaly Detection-Based Unknown Face Presentation Attack Detection ⬇️

Anomaly detection-based spoof attack detection is a recent development in face Presentation Attack Detection (fPAD), where a spoof detector is learned using only non-attacked images of users. These detectors are of practical importance as they are shown to generalize well to new attack types. In this paper, we present a deep-learning solution for anomaly detection-based spoof attack detection where both classifier and feature representations are learned together end-to-end. First, we introduce a pseudo-negative class during training in the absence of attacked images. The pseudo-negative class is modeled using a Gaussian distribution whose mean is calculated by a weighted running mean. Secondly, we use pairwise confusion loss to further regularize the training process. The proposed approach benefits from the representation learning power of the CNNs and learns better features for fPAD task as shown in our ablation study. We perform extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets: Replay-Attack, Rose-Youtu, OULU-NPU and Spoof in Wild to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach over the previous methods. Code is available at: \url{this https URL}

69.Efficient resource management in UAVs for Visual Assistance ⬇️

There is an increased interest in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for agriculture, military, disaster management and aerial photography around the world. UAVs are scalable, flexible and are useful in various environments where direct human intervention is difficult. In general, the use of UAVs with cameras mounted to them has increased in number due to their wide range of applications in real life scenarios. With the advent of deep learning models in computer vision many models have shown great success in visual tasks. But most of evaluation models are done on high end CPUs and GPUs. One of major challenges in using UAVs for Visual Assistance tasks in real time is managing the memory usage and power consumption of the these tasks which are computationally intensive and are difficult to be performed on low end processor board of the UAV. This projects describes a novel method to optimize the general image processing tasks like object tracking and object detection for UAV hardware in real time scenarios without affecting the flight time and not tampering the latency and accuracy of these models.

70.Complex Wavelet SSIM based Image Data Augmentation ⬇️

One of the biggest problems in neural learning networks is the lack of training data available to train the network. Data augmentation techniques over the past few years, have therefore been developed, aiming to increase the amount of artificial training data with the limited number of real world samples. In this paper, we look particularly at the MNIST handwritten dataset an image dataset used for digit recognition, and the methods of data augmentation done on this data set. We then take a detailed look into one of the most popular augmentation techniques used for this data set elastic deformation; and highlight its demerit of degradation in the quality of data, which introduces irrelevant data to the training set. To decrease this irrelevancy, we propose to use a similarity measure called Complex Wavelet Structural Similarity Index Measure (CWSSIM) to selectively filter out the irrelevant data before we augment the data set. We compare our observations with the existing augmentation technique and find our proposed method works yields better results than the existing technique.

71.Meta Soft Label Generation for Noisy Labels ⬇️

The existence of noisy labels in the dataset causes significant performance degradation for deep neural networks (DNNs). To address this problem, we propose a Meta Soft Label Generation algorithm called MSLG, which can jointly generate soft labels using meta-learning techniques and learn DNN parameters in an end-to-end fashion. Our approach adapts the meta-learning paradigm to estimate optimal label distribution by checking gradient directions on both noisy training data and noise-free meta-data. In order to iteratively update soft labels, meta-gradient descent step is performed on estimated labels, which would minimize the loss of noise-free meta samples. In each iteration, the base classifier is trained on estimated meta labels. MSLG is model-agnostic and can be added on top of any existing model at hand with ease. We performed extensive experiments on CIFAR10, Clothing1M and Food101N datasets. Results show that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

72.Lightweight Modules for Efficient Deep Learning based Image Restoration ⬇️

Low level image restoration is an integral component of modern artificial intelligence (AI) driven camera pipelines. Most of these frameworks are based on deep neural networks which present a massive computational overhead on resource constrained platform like a mobile phone. In this paper, we propose several lightweight low-level modules which can be used to create a computationally low cost variant of a given baseline model. Recent works for efficient neural networks design have mainly focused on classification. However, low-level image processing falls under the image-to-image' translation genre which requires some additional computational modules not present in classification. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by designing generic efficient modules which can replace essential components used in contemporary deep learning based image restoration networks. We also present and analyse our results highlighting the drawbacks of applying depthwise separable convolutional kernel (a popular method for efficient classification network) for sub-pixel convolution based upsampling (a popular upsampling strategy for low-level vision applications). This shows that concepts from domain of classification cannot always be seamlessly integrated into image-to-image translation tasks. We extensively validate our findings on three popular tasks of image inpainting, denoising and super-resolution. Our results show that proposed networks consistently output visually similar reconstructions compared to full capacity baselines with significant reduction of parameters, memory footprint and execution speeds on contemporary mobile devices.

73.Generalization of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks -- A Case-study on Open-source Chest Radiographs ⬇️

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have attracted extensive attention and been applied in many areas, including medical image analysis and clinical diagnosis. One major challenge is to conceive a DCNN model with remarkable performance on both internal and external data. We demonstrate that DCNNs may not generalize to new data, but increasing the quality and heterogeneity of the training data helps to improve the generalizibility factor. We use InceptionResNetV2 and DenseNet121 architectures to predict the risk of 5 common chest pathologies. The experiments were conducted on three publicly available databases: CheXpert, ChestX-ray14, and MIMIC Chest Xray JPG. The results show the internal performance of each of the 5 pathologies outperformed external performance on both of the models. Moreover, our strategy of exposing the models to a mix of different datasets during the training phase helps to improve model performance on the external dataset.

74.Pyramid Scale Network for Crowd Counting ⬇️

Crowd counting is a challenging task in computer vision due to serious occlusions, complex background and large scale variations, etc. Multi-column architecture is widely adopted to overcome these challenges, yielding state-of-the-art performance in many public benchmarks. However, there still are two issues in such design: scale limitation and feature similarity. Further performance improvements are thus restricted. In this paper, we propose a novel crowd counting framework called Pyramid Scale Network (PSNet) to explicitly address these issues. Specifically, for scale limitation, we adopt three Pyramid Scale Module (PSM) to efficiently capture multi-scale features, which integrate a message passing mechanism and an attention mechanism into multi-column architecture. Moreover, for feature similarity, a Differential loss is introduced to make the features learned by each column in PSM appropriately different from each other. To the best of our knowledge, PSNet is the first work to explicitly address scale limitation and feature similarity in multi-column design. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed innovations as well as the superior performance over the state-of-the-art. Our code is publicly available at: this https URL

75.Generative Graph Perturbations for Scene Graph Prediction ⬇️

Inferring objects and their relationships from an image is useful in many applications at the intersection of vision and language. Due to a long tail data distribution, the task is challenging, with the inevitable appearance of zero-shot compositions of objects and relationships at test time. Current models often fail to properly understand a scene in such cases, as during training they only observe a tiny fraction of the distribution corresponding to the most frequent compositions. This motivates us to study whether increasing the diversity of the training distribution, by generating replacement for parts of real scene graphs, can lead to better generalization? We employ generative adversarial networks (GANs) conditioned on scene graphs to generate augmented visual features. To increase their diversity, we propose several strategies to perturb the conditioning. One of them is to use a language model, such as BERT, to synthesize plausible yet still unlikely scene graphs. By evaluating our model on Visual Genome, we obtain both positive and negative results. This prompts us to make several observations that can potentially lead to further improvements.

76.Driver Behavior Modelling at the Urban Intersection via Canonical Correlation Analysis ⬇️

The urban intersection is a typically dynamic and complex scenario for intelligent vehicles, which exists a variety of driving behaviors and traffic participants. Accurately modelling the driver behavior at the intersection is essential for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Previous researches mainly focus on using attention mechanism to model the degree of correlation. In this research, a canonical correlation analysis (CCA)-based framework is proposed. The value of canonical correlation is used for feature selection. Gaussian mixture model and Gaussian process regression are applied for driver behavior modelling. Two experiments using simulated and naturalistic driving data are designed for verification. Experimental results are consistent with the driver's judgment. Comparative studies show that the proposed framework can obtain a better performance.

77.Distangling Biological Noise in Cellular Images with a focus on Explainability ⬇️

The cost of some drugs and medical treatments has risen in recent years that many patients are having to go without. A classification project could make researchers more efficient.
One of the more surprising reasons behind the cost is how long it takes to bring new treatments to market. Despite improvements in technology and science, research and development continues to lag. In fact, finding new treatment takes, on average, more than 10 years and costs hundreds of millions of dollars. In turn, greatly decreasing the cost of treatments can make ensure these treatments get to patients faster. This work aims at solving a part of this problem by creating a cellular image classification model which can decipher the genetic perturbations in cell (occurring naturally or artificially). Another interesting question addressed is what makes the deep-learning model decide in a particular fashion, which can further help in demystifying the mechanism of action of certain perturbations and paves a way towards the explainability of the deep-learning model.
We show the results of Grad-CAM visualizations and make a case for the significance of certain features over others. Further we discuss how these significant features are pivotal in extracting useful diagnostic information from the deep-learning model.

78.Enhanced Behavioral Cloning Based self-driving Car Using Transfer Learning ⬇️

With the growing phase of artificial intelligence and autonomous learning, the self-driving car is one of the promising area of research and emerging as a center of focus for automobile industries. Behavioral cloning is the process of replicating human behavior via visuomotor policies by means of machine learning algorithms. In recent years, several deep learning-based behavioral cloning approaches have been developed in the context of self-driving cars specifically based on the concept of transfer learning. Concerning the same, the present paper proposes a transfer learning approach using VGG16 architecture, which is fine tuned by retraining the last block while keeping other blocks as non-trainable. The performance of proposed architecture is further compared with existing NVIDIA architecture and its pruned variants (pruned by 22.2% and 33.85% using 1x1 filter to decrease the total number of parameters). Experimental results show that the VGG16 with transfer learning architecture has outperformed other discussed approaches with faster convergence.

79.Usefulness of interpretability methods to explain deep learning based plant stress phenotyping ⬇️

Deep learning techniques have been successfully deployed for automating plant stress identification and quantification. In recent years, there is a growing push towards training models that are interpretable -i.e. that justify their classification decisions by visually highlighting image features that were crucial for classification decisions. The expectation is that trained network models utilize image features that mimic visual cues used by plant pathologists. In this work, we compare some of the most popular interpretability methods: Saliency Maps, SmoothGrad, Guided Backpropogation, Deep Taylor Decomposition, Integrated Gradients, Layer-wise Relevance Propagation and Gradient times Input, for interpreting the deep learning model. We train a DenseNet-121 network for the classification of eight different soybean stresses (biotic and abiotic). Using a dataset consisting of 16,573 RGB images of healthy and stressed soybean leaflets captured under controlled conditions, we obtained an overall classification accuracy of 95.05 %. For a diverse subset of the test data, we compared the important features with those identified by a human expert. We observed that most interpretability methods identify the infected regions of the leaf as important features for some -- but not all -- of the correctly classified images. For some images, the output of the interpretability methods indicated that spurious feature correlations may have been used to correctly classify them. Although the output explanation maps of these interpretability methods may be different from each other for a given image, we advocate the use of these interpretability methods as `hypothesis generation' mechanisms that can drive scientific insight.

80.Do We Need Sound for Sound Source Localization? ⬇️

During the performance of sound source localization which uses both visual and aural information, it presently remains unclear how much either image or sound modalities contribute to the result, i.e. do we need both image and sound for sound source localization? To address this question, we develop an unsupervised learning system that solves sound source localization by decomposing this task into two steps: (i) "potential sound source localization", a step that localizes possible sound sources using only visual information (ii) "object selection", a step that identifies which objects are actually sounding using aural information. Our overall system achieves state-of-the-art performance in sound source localization, and more importantly, we find that despite the constraint on available information, the results of (i) achieve similar performance. From this observation and further experiments, we show that visual information is dominant in "sound" source localization when evaluated with the currently adopted benchmark dataset. Moreover, we show that the majority of sound-producing objects within the samples in this dataset can be inherently identified using only visual information, and thus that the dataset is inadequate to evaluate a system's capability to leverage aural information. As an alternative, we present an evaluation protocol that enforces both visual and aural information to be leveraged, and verify this property through several experiments.

81.ECML: An Ensemble Cascade Metric Learning Mechanism towards Face Verification ⬇️

Face verification can be regarded as a 2-class fine-grained visual recognition problem. Enhancing the feature's discriminative power is one of the key problems to improve its performance. Metric learning technology is often applied to address this need, while achieving a good tradeoff between underfitting and overfitting plays the vital role in metric learning. Hence, we propose a novel ensemble cascade metric learning (ECML) mechanism. In particular, hierarchical metric learning is executed in the cascade way to alleviate underfitting. Meanwhile, at each learning level, the features are split into non-overlapping groups. Then, metric learning is executed among the feature groups in the ensemble manner to resist overfitting. Considering the feature distribution characteristics of faces, a robust Mahalanobis metric learning method (RMML) with closed-form solution is additionally proposed. It can avoid the computation failure issue on inverse matrix faced by some well-known metric learning approaches (e.g., KISSME). Embedding RMML into the proposed ECML mechanism, our metric learning paradigm (EC-RMML) can run in the one-pass learning manner. Experimental results demonstrate that EC-RMML is superior to state-of-the-art metric learning methods for face verification. And, the proposed ensemble cascade metric learning mechanism is also applicable to other metric learning approaches.

82.AutoTrajectory: Label-free Trajectory Extraction and Prediction from Videos using Dynamic Points ⬇️

Current methods for trajectory prediction operate in supervised manners, and therefore require vast quantities of corresponding ground truth data for training. In this paper, we present a novel, label-free algorithm, AutoTrajectory, for trajectory extraction and prediction to use raw videos directly. To better capture the moving objects in videos, we introduce dynamic points. We use them to model dynamic motions by using a forward-backward extractor to keep temporal consistency and using image reconstruction to keep spatial consistency in an unsupervised manner. Then we aggregate dynamic points to instance points, which stand for moving objects such as pedestrians in videos. Finally, we extract trajectories by matching instance points for prediction training. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to achieve unsupervised learning of trajectory extraction and prediction. We evaluate the performance on well-known trajectory datasets and show that our method is effective for real-world videos and can use raw videos to further improve the performance of existing models.

83.Cascade Network with Guided Loss and Hybrid Attention for Two-view Geometry ⬇️

In this paper, we are committed to designing a high-performance network for two-view geometry. We first propose a Guided Loss and theoretically establish the direct negative correlation between the loss and Fn-measure by dynamically adjusting the weights of positive and negative classes during training, so that the network is always trained towards the direction of increasing Fn-measure. By this way, the network can maintain the advantage of the cross-entropy loss while maximizing the Fn-measure. We then propose a hybrid attention block to extract feature, which integrates the bayesian attentive context normalization (BACN) and channel-wise attention (CA). BACN can mine the prior information to better exploit global context and CA can capture complex channel context to enhance the channel awareness of the network. Finally, based on our Guided Loss and hybrid attention block, a cascade network is designed to gradually optimize the result for more superior performance. Experiments have shown that our network achieves the state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.

84.Fast Video Object Segmentation With Temporal Aggregation Network and Dynamic Template Matching ⬇️

Significant progress has been made in Video Object Segmentation (VOS), the video object tracking task in its finest level. While the VOS task can be naturally decoupled into image semantic segmentation and video object tracking, significantly much more research effort has been made in segmentation than tracking. In this paper, we introduce "tracking-by-detection" into VOS which can coherently integrate segmentation into tracking, by proposing a new temporal aggregation network and a novel dynamic time-evolving template matching mechanism to achieve significantly improved performance. Notably, our method is entirely online and thus suitable for one-shot learning, and our end-to-end trainable model allows multiple object segmentation in one forward pass. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the DAVIS benchmark without complicated bells and whistles in both speed and accuracy, with a speed of 0.14 second per frame and J&F measure of 75.9% respectively.

85.Fast Real-time Counterfactual Explanations ⬇️

Counterfactual explanations are considered, which is to answer {\it why the prediction is class A but not B.} Different from previous optimization based methods, an optimization-free Fast ReAl-time Counterfactual Explanation (FRACE) algorithm is proposed benefiting from the development of multi-domain image to image translation algorithms. Built from starGAN, a transformer is trained as a residual generator conditional on a classifier constrained under a proposal perturbation loss which maintains the content information of the query image, but just the class-specific semantic information is changed. The transformer can transfer the query image to any counterfactual class, and during inference, our explanation can be generated by it only within a forward time. It is fast and can satisfy the real-time practical application. Because of the adversarial training of GAN, our explanation is also more realistic compared to other counterparts. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposal is better than the existing state of the art in terms of quality and speed.

86.Learning Object Depth from Camera Motion and Video Object Segmentation ⬇️

Video object segmentation, i.e., the separation of a target object from background in video, has made significant progress on real and challenging videos in recent years. To leverage this progress in 3D applications, this paper addresses the problem of learning to estimate the depth of segmented objects given some measurement of camera motion (e.g., from robot kinematics or vehicle odometry). We achieve this by, first, introducing a diverse, extensible dataset and, second, designing a novel deep network that estimates the depth of objects using only segmentation masks and uncalibrated camera movement. Our data-generation framework creates artificial object segmentations that are scaled for changes in distance between the camera and object, and our network learns to estimate object depth even with segmentation errors. We demonstrate our approach across domains using a robot camera to locate objects from the YCB dataset and a vehicle camera to locate obstacles while driving.

87.Coarse-to-Fine Pseudo-Labeling Guided Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Classification ⬇️

To endow neural networks with the potential to learn rapidly from a handful of samples, meta-learning blazes a trail to acquire across-task knowledge from a variety of few-shot learning tasks. However, most existing meta-learning algorithms retain the requirement of fine-grained supervision, which is expensive in many applications. In this paper, we show that meta-learning models can extract transferable knowledge from coarse-grained supervision for few-shot classification. We propose a weakly-supervised framework, namely Coarse-to-fine Pseudo-labeling Guided Meta-Learning (CPGML), to alleviate the need for data annotation. In our framework, the coarse-categories are grouped into pseudo sub-categories to construct a task distribution for meta-training, following the cosine distance between the corresponding embedding vectors of images. For better feature representation in this process, we develop Dual-level Discriminative Embedding (DDE) aiming to keep the distance between learned embeddings consistent with the visual similarity and semantic relation of input images simultaneously. Moreover, we propose a task-attention mechanism to reduce the weight of the training tasks with potentially higher label noises based on the observation of task-nonequivalence. Extensive experiments conducted on two hierarchical meta-learning benchmarks demonstrate that, under the proposed framework, meta-learning models can effectively extract task-independent knowledge from the roughly-generated tasks and generalize well to unseen tasks.

88.To filter prune, or to layer prune, that is the question ⬇️

Recent advances in pruning of neural networks have made it possible to remove a large number of filters or weights without any perceptible drop in accuracy. The number of parameters and that of FLOPs are usually the reported metrics to measure the quality of the pruned models. However, the gain in speed for these pruned methods is often overlooked in the literature due to the complex nature of latency measurements. In this paper, we show the limitation of filter pruning methods in terms of latency reduction and propose LayerPrune framework. LayerPrune presents set of layer pruning methods based on different criteria that achieve higher latency reduction than filter pruning methods on similar accuracy. The advantage of layer pruning over filter pruning in terms of latency reduction is a result of the fact that the former is not constrained by the original model's depth and thus allows for a larger range of latency reduction. For each filter pruning method we examined, we use the same filter importance criterion to calculate a per-layer importance score in one-shot. We then prune the least important layers and fine-tune the shallower model which obtains comparable or better accuracy than its filter-based pruning counterpart. This one-shot process allows to remove layers from single path networks like VGG before fine-tuning, unlike in iterative filter pruning, a minimum number of filters per layer is required to allow for data flow which constraint the search space. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to examine the effect of pruning methods on latency metric instead of FLOPs for multiple networks, datasets and hardware targets. LayerPrune also outperforms handcrafted architectures such as Shufflenet, MobileNet, MNASNet and ResNet18 by 7.3%, 4.6%, 2.8% and 0.5% respectively on similar latency budget on ImageNet dataset.

89.Deep Patch-based Human Segmentation ⬇️

3D human segmentation has seen noticeable progress in re-cent years. It, however, still remains a challenge to date. In this paper, weintroduce a deep patch-based method for 3D human segmentation. Wefirst extract a local surface patch for each vertex and then parameterizeit into a 2D grid (or image). We then embed identified shape descriptorsinto the 2D grids which are further fed into the powerful 2D Convolu-tional Neural Network for regressing corresponding semantic labels (e.g.,head, torso). Experiments demonstrate that our method is effective inhuman segmentation, and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy.

90.Evolving Graphical Planner: Contextual Global Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation ⬇️

The ability to perform effective planning is crucial for building an instruction-following agent. When navigating through a new environment, an agent is challenged with (1) connecting the natural language instructions with its progressively growing knowledge of the world; and (2) performing long-range planning and decision making in the form of effective exploration and error correction. Current methods are still limited on both fronts despite extensive efforts. In this paper, we introduce the Evolving Graphical Planner (EGP), a model that performs global planning for navigation based on raw sensory input. The model dynamically constructs a graphical representation, generalizes the action space to allow for more flexible decision making, and performs efficient planning on a proxy graph representation. We evaluate our model on a challenging Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task with photorealistic images and achieve superior performance compared to previous navigation architectures. For instance, we achieve a 53% success rate on the test split of the Room-to-Room navigation task through pure imitation learning, outperforming previous navigation architectures by up to 5%.

91.Learning Local Complex Features using Randomized Neural Networks for Texture Analysis ⬇️

Texture is a visual attribute largely used in many problems of image analysis. Currently, many methods that use learning techniques have been proposed for texture discrimination, achieving improved performance over previous handcrafted methods. In this paper, we present a new approach that combines a learning technique and the Complex Network (CN) theory for texture analysis. This method takes advantage of the representation capacity of CN to model a texture image as a directed network and uses the topological information of vertices to train a randomized neural network. This neural network has a single hidden layer and uses a fast learning algorithm, which is able to learn local CN patterns for texture characterization. Thus, we use the weighs of the trained neural network to compose a feature vector. These feature vectors are evaluated in a classification experiment in four widely used image databases. Experimental results show a high classification performance of the proposed method when compared to other methods, indicating that our approach can be used in many image analysis problems.

92.Quantization in Relative Gradient Angle Domain For Building Polygon Estimation ⬇️

Building footprint extraction in remote sensing data benefits many important applications, such as urban planning and population estimation. Recently, rapid development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and open-sourced high resolution satellite building image datasets have pushed the performance boundary further for automated building extractions. However, CNN approaches often generate imprecise building morphologies including noisy edges and round corners. In this paper, we leverage the performance of CNNs, and propose a module that uses prior knowledge of building corners to create angular and concise building polygons from CNN segmentation outputs. We describe a new transform, Relative Gradient Angle Transform (RGA Transform) that converts object contours from time vs. space to time vs. angle. We propose a new shape descriptor, Boundary Orientation Relation Set (BORS), to describe angle relationship between edges in RGA domain, such as orthogonality and parallelism. Finally, we develop an energy minimization framework that makes use of the angle relationship in BORS to straighten edges and reconstruct sharp corners, and the resulting corners create a polygon. Experimental results demonstrate that our method refines CNN output from a rounded approximation to a more clear-cut angular shape of the building footprint.

93.PCAMs: Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Using Point Supervision ⬇️

Current state of the art methods for generating semantic segmentation rely heavily on a large set of images that have each pixel labeled with a class of interest label or background. Coming up with such labels, especially in domains that require an expert to do annotations, comes at a heavy cost in time and money. Several methods have shown that we can learn semantic segmentation from less expensive image-level labels, but the effectiveness of point level labels, a healthy compromise between all pixels labelled and none, still remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a novel procedure for producing semantic segmentation from images given some point level annotations. This method includes point annotations in the training of a convolutional neural network (CNN) for producing improved localization and class activation maps. Then, we use another CNN for predicting semantic affinities in order to propagate rough class labels and create pseudo semantic segmentation labels. Finally, we propose training a CNN that is normally fully supervised using our pseudo labels in place of ground truth labels, which further improves performance and simplifies the inference process by requiring just one CNN during inference rather than two. Our method achieves state of the art results for point supervised semantic segmentation on the PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset \cite{everingham2010pascal}, even outperforming state of the art methods for stronger bounding box and squiggle supervision.

94.Image Captioning with Compositional Neural Module Networks ⬇️

In image captioning where fluency is an important factor in evaluation, e.g., $n$-gram metrics, sequential models are commonly used; however, sequential models generally result in overgeneralized expressions that lack the details that may be present in an input image. Inspired by the idea of the compositional neural module networks in the visual question answering task, we introduce a hierarchical framework for image captioning that explores both compositionality and sequentiality of natural language. Our algorithm learns to compose a detail-rich sentence by selectively attending to different modules corresponding to unique aspects of each object detected in an input image to include specific descriptions such as counts and color. In a set of experiments on the MSCOCO dataset, the proposed model outperforms a state-of-the art model across multiple evaluation metrics, more importantly, presenting visually interpretable results. Furthermore, the breakdown of subcategories $f$-scores of the SPICE metric and human evaluation on Amazon Mechanical Turk show that our compositional module networks effectively generate accurate and detailed captions.

95.Attention-guided Quality Assessment for Automated Cryo-EM Grid Screening ⬇️

Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has become an enabling technology in drug discovery and in understanding molecular bases of disease by producing near-atomic resolution (less than 0.4 nm) 3D reconstructions of biological macromolecules. The imaging process required for 3D reconstructions involves a highly iterative and empirical screening process, starting with the acquisition of low magnification images of the cryo-EM grids. These images are inspected for squares that are likely to contain useful molecular signals. Potentially useful squares within the grid are then imaged at progressively higher magnifications, with the goal of identifying sub-micron areas within circular holes (bounded by the squares) for imaging at high magnification. This arduous, multi-step data acquisition process represents a bottleneck for obtaining a high throughput data collection. Here, we focus on automating the early decision making for the microscope operator, scoring low magnification images of squares, and proposing the first deep learning framework, XCryoNet, for automated cryo-EM grid screening. XCryoNet is a semi-supervised, attention-guided deep learning approach that provides explainable scoring of automatically extracted square images using limited amounts of labeled data. Results show up to 8% and 37% improvements over a fully supervised and a no-attention solution, respectively, when labeled data is scarce.

96.Improved Detection of Adversarial Images Using Deep Neural Networks ⬇️

Machine learning techniques are immensely deployed in both industry and academy. Recent studies indicate that machine learning models used for classification tasks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which limits the usage of applications in the fields with high precision requirements. We propose a new approach called Feature Map Denoising to detect the adversarial inputs and show the performance of detection on the mixed dataset consisting of adversarial examples generated by different attack algorithms, which can be used to associate with any pre-trained DNNs at a low cost. Wiener filter is also introduced as the denoise algorithm to the defense model, which can further improve performance. Experimental results indicate that good accuracy of detecting the adversarial examples can be achieved through our Feature Map Denoising algorithm.

97.Multi-Domain Image Completion for Random Missing Input Data ⬇️

Multi-domain data are widely leveraged in vision applications taking advantage of complementary information from different modalities, e.g., brain tumor segmentation from multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, due to possible data corruption and different imaging protocols, the availability of images for each domain could vary amongst multiple data sources in practice, which makes it challenging to build a universal model with a varied set of input data. To tackle this problem, we propose a general approach to complete the random missing domain(s) data in real applications. Specifically, we develop a novel multi-domain image completion method that utilizes a generative adversarial network (GAN) with a representational disentanglement scheme to extract shared skeleton encoding and separate flesh encoding across multiple domains. We further illustrate that the learned representation in multi-domain image completion could be leveraged for high-level tasks, e.g., segmentation, by introducing a unified framework consisting of image completion and segmentation with a shared content encoder. The experiments demonstrate consistent performance improvement on three datasets for brain tumor segmentation, prostate segmentation, and facial expression image completion respectively.

98.ISINet: An Instance-Based Approach for Surgical Instrument Segmentation ⬇️

We study the task of semantic segmentation of surgical instruments in robotic-assisted surgery scenes. We propose the Instance-based Surgical Instrument Segmentation Network (ISINet), a method that addresses this task from an instance-based segmentation perspective. Our method includes a temporal consistency module that takes into account the previously overlooked and inherent temporal information of the problem. We validate our approach on the existing benchmark for the task, the Endoscopic Vision 2017 Robotic Instrument Segmentation Dataset, and on the 2018 version of the dataset, whose annotations we extended for the fine-grained version of instrument segmentation. Our results show that ISINet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with our baseline version duplicating the Intersection over Union (IoU) of previous methods and our complete model triplicating the IoU.

99.Graph Structure of Neural Networks ⬇️

Neural networks are often represented as graphs of connections between neurons. However, despite their wide use, there is currently little understanding of the relationship between the graph structure of the neural network and its predictive performance. Here we systematically investigate how does the graph structure of neural networks affect their predictive performance. To this end, we develop a novel graph-based representation of neural networks called relational graph, where layers of neural network computation correspond to rounds of message exchange along the graph structure. Using this representation we show that: (1) a "sweet spot" of relational graphs leads to neural networks with significantly improved predictive performance; (2) neural network's performance is approximately a smooth function of the clustering coefficient and average path length of its relational graph; (3) our findings are consistent across many different tasks and datasets; (4) the sweet spot can be identified efficiently; (5) top-performing neural networks have graph structure surprisingly similar to those of real biological neural networks. Our work opens new directions for the design of neural architectures and the understanding on neural networks in general.

100.Free-running SIMilarity-Based Angiography (SIMBA) for simplified anatomical MR imaging of the heart ⬇️

Purpose: Whole-heart MRA techniques typically target pre-determined motion states and address cardiac and respiratory dynamics independently. We propose a novel fast reconstruction algorithm, applicable to ungated free-running sequences, that leverages inherent similarities in the acquired data to avoid such physiological constraints.
Theory and Methods: The proposed SIMilarity-Based Angiography (SIMBA) method clusters the continuously acquired k-space data in order to find a motion-consistent subset that can be reconstructed into a motion-suppressed whole-heart MRA. Free-running 3D radial datasets from six ferumoxytol-enhanced scans of pediatric cardiac patients and twelve non-contrast scans of healthy volunteers were reconstructed with a non-motion-suppressed regridding of all the acquired data (All Data), our proposed SIMBA method, and a previously published free-running framework (FRF) that uses cardiac and respiratory self-gating and compressed sensing. Images were compared for blood-myocardium interface sharpness, contrast ratio, and visibility of coronary artery ostia.
Results: Both the fast SIMBA reconstruction (~20s) and the FRF provided significantly higher blood-myocardium sharpness than All Data (P<0.001). No significant difference was observed among the former two. Significantly higher blood-myocardium contrast ratio was obtained with SIMBA compared to All Data and FRF (P<0.01). More coronary ostia could be visualized with both SIMBA and FRF than with All Data (All Data: 4/36, SIMBA: 30/36, FRF: 33/36, both P<0.001) but no significant difference was found between the first two.
Conclusion: The combination of free-running sequences and the fast SIMBA reconstruction, which operates without a priori assumptions related to physiological motion, forms a simple workflow for obtaining whole-heart MRA with sharp anatomical structures.

101.Blockchain-Federated-Learning and Deep Learning Models for COVID-19 detection using CT Imaging ⬇️

With the increase of COVID-19 cases worldwide, an effective way is required to diagnose COVID-19 patients. The primary problem in diagnosing COVID-19 patients is the shortage of testing kits, due to the quick spread of the virus, medical practitioners are facing difficulty identifying the positive cases. The second real-world problem is to share the data among the hospitals globally while keeping in view the privacy concern of the organizations. To address the problem of building a collaborative network model without leakage privacy of data are major concerns for training the deep learning model, this paper proposes a framework that collects a huge amount of data from different sources (various hospitals) and to train the deep learning model over a decentralized network for the newest information about COVID-19 patients. The main goal of this paper is to improve the recognition of a global deep learning model using, novel and up-to-date data, and learn itself from such data to improve recognition of COVID-19 patients based on computed tomography (CT) slices. Moreover, the integration of blockchain and federated-learning technology collects the data from different hospitals without leakage the privacy of the data. Firstly, we collect real-life COVID-19 patients data open to the research community. Secondly, we use various deep learning models (VGG, DenseNet, AlexNet, MobileNet, ResNet, and Capsule Network) to recognize the patterns via COVID-19 patients' lung screening. Thirdly, securely share the data among various hospitals with the integration of federated learning and blockchain. Finally, our results demonstrate a better performance to detect COVID-19 patients.

102.Single Image Dehazing Algorithm Based on Sky Region Segmentation ⬇️

In this paper a hybrid image defogging approach based on region segmentation is proposed to address the dark channel priori algorithm's shortcomings in de-fogging the sky regions. The preliminary stage of the proposed approach focuses on the segmentation of sky and non-sky regions in a foggy image taking the advantageous of Meanshift and edge detection with embedded confidence. In the second stage, an improved dark channel priori algorithm is employed to defog the non-sky region. Ultimately, the sky area is processed by DehazeNet algorithm, which relies on deep learning Convolutional Neural Networks. The simulation results show that the proposed hybrid approach in this research addresses the problem of color distortion associated with sky regions in foggy images. The approach greatly improves the image quality indices including entropy information, visibility ratio of the edges, average gradient, and the saturation percentage with a very fast computation time, which is a good indication of the excellent performance of this model.

103.Whitening for Self-Supervised Representation Learning ⬇️

Recent literature on self-supervised learning is based on the contrastive loss, where image instances which share the same semantic content ("positives") are contrasted with instances extracted from other images ("negatives"). However, in order for the learning to be effective, a lot of negatives should be compared with a positive pair. This is not only computationally demanding, but it also requires that the positive and the negative representations are kept consistent with each other over a long training period. In this paper we propose a different direction and a new loss function for self-supervised learning which is based on the whitening of the latent-space features. The whitening operation has a "scattering" effect on the batch samples, which compensates the lack of a large number of negatives, avoiding degenerate solutions where all the sample representations collapse to a single point. We empirically show that our loss accelerates self-supervised training and the learned representations are much more effective for downstream tasks than previously published work.

104.DeU-Net: Deformable U-Net for 3D Cardiac MRI Video Segmentation ⬇️

Automatic segmentation of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) facilitates efficient and accurate volume measurement in clinical applications. However, due to anisotropic resolution and ambiguous border (e.g., right ventricular endocardium), existing methods suffer from the degradation of accuracy and robustness in 3D cardiac MRI video segmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel Deformable U-Net (DeU-Net) to fully exploit spatio-temporal information from 3D cardiac MRI video, including a Temporal Deformable Aggregation Module (TDAM) and a Deformable Global Position Attention (DGPA) network. First, the TDAM takes a cardiac MRI video clip as input with temporal information extracted by an offset prediction network. Then we fuse extracted temporal information via a temporal aggregation deformable convolution to produce fused feature maps. Furthermore, to aggregate meaningful features, we devise the DGPA network by employing deformable attention U-Net, which can encode a wider range of multi-dimensional contextual information into global and local features. Experimental results show that our DeU-Net achieves the state-of-the-art performance on commonly used evaluation metrics, especially for cardiac marginal information (ASSD and HD).

105.Accelerated FBP for computed tomography image reconstruction ⬇️

Filtered back projection (FBP) is a commonly used technique in tomographic image reconstruction demonstrating acceptable quality. The classical direct implementations of this algorithm require the execution of $\Theta(N^3)$ operations, where $N$ is the linear size of the 2D slice. Recent approaches including reconstruction via the Fourier slice theorem require $\Theta(N^2\log N)$ multiplication operations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that reduces the computational complexity of the algorithm to $\Theta(N^2\log N)$ addition operations avoiding Fourier space. For speeding up the convolution, ramp filter is approximated by a pair of causal and anticausal recursive filters, also known as Infinite Impulse Response filters. The back projection is performed with the fast discrete Hough transform. Experimental results on simulated data demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.

106.CheXphoto: 10,000+ Smartphone Photos and Synthetic Photographic Transformations of Chest X-rays for Benchmarking Deep Learning Robustness ⬇️

Clinical deployment of deep learning algorithms for chest x-ray interpretation requires a solution that can integrate into the vast spectrum of clinical workflows across the world. An appealing solution to scaled deployment is to leverage the existing ubiquity of smartphones: in several parts of the world, clinicians and radiologists capture photos of chest x-rays to share with other experts or clinicians via smartphone using messaging services like WhatsApp. However, the application of chest x-ray algorithms to photos of chest x-rays requires reliable classification in the presence of smartphone photo artifacts such as screen glare and poor viewing angle not typically encountered on digital x-rays used to train machine learning models. We introduce CheXphoto, a dataset of smartphone photos and synthetic photographic transformations of chest x-rays sampled from the CheXpert dataset. To generate CheXphoto we (1) automatically and manually captured photos of digital x-rays under different settings, including various lighting conditions and locations, and, (2) generated synthetic transformations of digital x-rays targeted to make them look like photos of digital x-rays and x-ray films. We release this dataset as a resource for testing and improving the robustness of deep learning algorithms for automated chest x-ray interpretation on smartphone photos of chest x-rays.

107.MS-NAS: Multi-Scale Neural Architecture Search for Medical Image Segmentation ⬇️

The recent breakthroughs of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) have motivated various applications in medical image segmentation. However, most existing work either simply rely on hyper-parameter tuning or stick to a fixed network backbone, thereby limiting the underlying search space to identify more efficient architecture. This paper presents a Multi-Scale NAS (MS-NAS) framework that is featured with multi-scale search space from network backbone to cell operation, and multi-scale fusion capability to fuse features with different sizes. To mitigate the computational overhead due to the larger search space, a partial channel connection scheme and a two-step decoding method are utilized to reduce computational overhead while maintaining optimization quality. Experimental results show that on various datasets for segmentation, MS-NAS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves 0.6-5.4% mIOU and 0.4-3.5% DSC improvements, while the computational resource consumption is reduced by 18.0-24.9%.

108.Exploiting Uncertainties from Ensemble Learners to Improve Decision-Making in Healthcare AI ⬇️

Ensemble learning is widely applied in Machine Learning (ML) to improve model performance and to mitigate decision risks. In this approach, predictions from a diverse set of learners are combined to obtain a joint decision. Recently, various methods have been explored in literature for estimating decision uncertainties using ensemble learning; however, determining which metrics are a better fit for certain decision-making applications remains a challenging task. In this paper, we study the following key research question in the selection of uncertainty metrics: when does an uncertainty metric outperforms another? We answer this question via a rigorous analysis of two commonly used uncertainty metrics in ensemble learning, namely ensemble mean and ensemble variance. We show that, under mild assumptions on the ensemble learners, ensemble mean is preferable with respect to ensemble variance as an uncertainty metric for decision making. We empirically validate our assumptions and theoretical results via an extensive case study: the diagnosis of referable diabetic retinopathy.

109.It Is Likely That Your Loss Should be a Likelihood ⬇️

We recall that certain common losses are simplified likelihoods and instead argue for optimizing full likelihoods that include their parameters, such as the variance of the normal distribution and the temperature of the softmax distribution. Joint optimization of likelihood and model parameters can adaptively tune the scales and shapes of losses and the weights of regularizers. We survey and systematically evaluate how to parameterize and apply likelihood parameters for robust modeling and re-calibration. Additionally, we propose adaptively tuning $L_2$ and $L_1$ weights by fitting the scale parameters of normal and Laplace priors and introduce more flexible element-wise regularizers.

110.Deep Network Interpolation for Accelerated Parallel MR Image Reconstruction ⬇️

We present a deep network interpolation strategy for accelerated parallel MR image reconstruction. In particular, we examine the network interpolation in parameter space between a source model that is formulated in an unrolled scheme with L1 and SSIM losses and its counterpart that is trained with an adversarial loss. We show that by interpolating between the two different models of the same network structure, the new interpolated network can model a trade-off between perceptual quality and fidelity.

111.Representation Learning via Adversarially-Contrastive Optimal Transport ⬇️

In this paper, we study the problem of learning compact (low-dimensional) representations for sequential data that captures its implicit spatio-temporal cues. To maximize extraction of such informative cues from the data, we set the problem within the context of contrastive representation learning and to that end propose a novel objective via optimal transport. Specifically, our formulation seeks a low-dimensional subspace representation of the data that jointly (i) maximizes the distance of the data (embedded in this subspace) from an adversarial data distribution under the optimal transport, a.k.a. the Wasserstein distance, (ii) captures the temporal order, and (iii) minimizes the data distortion. To generate the adversarial distribution, we propose a novel framework connecting Wasserstein GANs with a classifier, allowing a principled mechanism for producing good negative distributions for contrastive learning, which is currently a challenging problem. Our full objective is cast as a subspace learning problem on the Grassmann manifold and solved via Riemannian optimization. To empirically study our formulation, we provide experiments on the task of human action recognition in video sequences. Our results demonstrate competitive performance against challenging baselines.

112.AutoEmbedder: A semi-supervised DNN embedding system for clustering ⬇️

Clustering is widely used in unsupervised learning method that deals with unlabeled data. Deep clustering has become a popular study area that relates clustering with Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture. Deep clustering method downsamples high dimensional data, which may also relate clustering loss. Deep clustering is also introduced in semi-supervised learning (SSL). Most SSL methods depend on pairwise constraint information, which is a matrix containing knowledge if data pairs can be in the same cluster or not. This paper introduces a novel embedding system named AutoEmbedder, that downsamples higher dimensional data to clusterable embedding points. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research endeavor that relates to traditional classifier DNN architecture with a pairwise loss reduction technique. The training process is semi-supervised and uses Siamese network architecture to compute pairwise constraint loss in the feature learning phase. The AutoEmbedder outperforms most of the existing DNN based semi-supervised methods tested on famous datasets.

113.Understanding Object Detection Through An Adversarial Lens ⬇️

Deep neural networks based object detection models have revolutionized computer vision and fueled the development of a wide range of visual recognition applications. However, recent studies have revealed that deep object detectors can be compromised under adversarial attacks, causing a victim detector to detect no object, fake objects, or mislabeled objects. With object detection being used pervasively in many security-critical applications, such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities, we argue that a holistic approach for an in-depth understanding of adversarial attacks and vulnerabilities of deep object detection systems is of utmost importance for the research community to develop robust defense mechanisms. This paper presents a framework for analyzing and evaluating vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art object detectors under an adversarial lens, aiming to analyze and demystify the attack strategies, adverse effects, and costs, as well as the cross-model and cross-resolution transferability of attacks. Using a set of quantitative metrics, extensive experiments are performed on six representative deep object detectors from three popular families (YOLOv3, SSD, and Faster R-CNN) with two benchmark datasets (PASCAL VOC and MS COCO). We demonstrate that the proposed framework can serve as a methodical benchmark for analyzing adversarial behaviors and risks in real-time object detection systems. We conjecture that this framework can also serve as a tool to assess the security risks and the adversarial robustness of deep object detectors to be deployed in real-world applications.

114.Decoupling Inherent Risk and Early Cancer Signs in Image-based Breast Cancer Risk Models ⬇️

The ability to accurately estimate risk of developing breast cancer would be invaluable for clinical decision-making. One promising new approach is to integrate image-based risk models based on deep neural networks. However, one must take care when using such models, as selection of training data influences the patterns the network will learn to identify. With this in mind, we trained networks using three different criteria to select the positive training data (i.e. images from patients that will develop cancer): an inherent risk model trained on images with no visible signs of cancer, a cancer signs model trained on images containing cancer or early signs of cancer, and a conflated model trained on all images from patients with a cancer diagnosis. We find that these three models learn distinctive features that focus on different patterns, which translates to contrasts in performance. Short-term risk is best estimated by the cancer signs model, whilst long-term risk is best estimated by the inherent risk model. Carelessly training with all images conflates inherent risk with early cancer signs, and yields sub-optimal estimates in both regimes. As a consequence, conflated models may lead physicians to recommend preventative action when early cancer signs are already visible.

115.Leaky Integrate-and-Fire Spiking Neuron with Learnable Membrane Time Parameter ⬇️

The Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted research interest due to its temporal information processing capability, low power consumption, and high biological plausibility. The Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron model is one of the most popular spiking neuron models used in SNNs for it achieves a balance between computing cost and biological plausibility. The most important parameter of a LIF neuron is the membrane time constant $\tau$, which determines the decay rate of membrane potential. The value of $\tau$ plays a crucial role in SNNs containing LIF neurons. However, $\tau$ is usually treated as a hyper-parameter, which is preset before training SNNs and adjusted manually. In this article, we propose a novel spiking neuron, namely parametric Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (PLIF) neuron, whose $\tau$ is a learnable parameter rather than an empirical hyper-parameter. We evaluate the performance of SNNs with PLIF neurons for image classification tasks on both traditional static MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10 datasets, and neuromorphic N-MNIST, CIFAR10-DVS datasets. The experiment results show that SNNs augmented by PLIF neurons outperform those with conventional spiking neurons.

116.Relation-Guided Representation Learning ⬇️

Deep auto-encoders (DAEs) have achieved great success in learning data representations via the powerful representability of neural networks. But most DAEs only focus on the most dominant structures which are able to reconstruct the data from a latent space and neglect rich latent structural information. In this work, we propose a new representation learning method that explicitly models and leverages sample relations, which in turn is used as supervision to guide the representation learning. Different from previous work, our framework well preserves the relations between samples. Since the prediction of pairwise relations themselves is a fundamental problem, our model adaptively learns them from data. This provides much flexibility to encode real data manifold. The important role of relation and representation learning is evaluated on the clustering task. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. By seeking to embed samples into subspace, we further show that our method can address the large-scale and out-of-sample problem.

117.Batch-Incremental Triplet Sampling for Training Triplet Networks Using Bayesian Updating Theorem ⬇️

Variants of Triplet networks are robust entities for learning a discriminative embedding subspace. There exist different triplet mining approaches for selecting the most suitable training triplets. Some of these mining methods rely on the extreme distances between instances, and some others make use of sampling. However, sampling from stochastic distributions of data rather than sampling merely from the existing embedding instances can provide more discriminative information. In this work, we sample triplets from distributions of data rather than from existing instances. We consider a multivariate normal distribution for the embedding of each class. Using Bayesian updating and conjugate priors, we update the distributions of classes dynamically by receiving the new mini-batches of training data. The proposed triplet mining with Bayesian updating can be used with any triplet-based loss function, e.g., triplet-loss or Neighborhood Component Analysis (NCA) loss. Accordingly, Our triplet mining approaches are called Bayesian Updating Triplet (BUT) and Bayesian Updating NCA (BUNCA), depending on which loss function is being used. Experimental results on two public datasets, namely MNIST and histopathology colorectal cancer (CRC), substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed triplet mining method.

118.Neuromorphic Processing and Sensing: Evolutionary Progression of AI to Spiking ⬇️

The increasing rise in machine learning and deep learning applications is requiring ever more computational resources to successfully meet the growing demands of an always-connected, automated world. Neuromorphic technologies based on Spiking Neural Network algorithms hold the promise to implement advanced artificial intelligence using a fraction of the computations and power requirements by modeling the functioning, and spiking, of the human brain. With the proliferation of tools and platforms aiding data scientists and machine learning engineers to develop the latest innovations in artificial and deep neural networks, a transition to a new paradigm will require building from the current well-established foundations. This paper explains the theoretical workings of neuromorphic technologies based on spikes, and overviews the state-of-art in hardware processors, software platforms and neuromorphic sensing devices. A progression path is paved for current machine learning specialists to update their skillset, as well as classification or predictive models from the current generation of deep neural networks to SNNs. This can be achieved by leveraging existing, specialized hardware in the form of SpiNNaker and the Nengo migration toolkit. First-hand, experimental results of converting a VGG-16 neural network to an SNN are shared. A forward gaze into industrial, medical and commercial applications that can readily benefit from SNNs wraps up this investigation into the neuromorphic computing future.

119.EMIXER: End-to-end Multimodal X-ray Generation via Self-supervision ⬇️

Deep generative models have enabled the automated synthesis of high-quality data for diverse applications. However, the most effective generative models are specialized to data from a single domain (e.g., images or text). Real-world applications such as healthcare require multi-modal data from multiple domains (e.g., both images and corresponding text), which are difficult to acquire due to limited availability and privacy concerns and are much harder to synthesize. To tackle this joint synthesis challenge, we propose an End-to-end MultImodal X-ray genERative model (EMIXER) for jointly synthesizing x-ray images and corresponding free-text reports, all conditional on diagnosis labels. EMIXER is an conditional generative adversarial model by 1) generating an image based on a label, 2) encoding the image to a hidden embedding, 3) producing the corresponding text via a hierarchical decoder from the image embedding, and 4) a joint discriminator for assessing both the image and the corresponding text. EMIXER also enables self-supervision to leverage vast amount of unlabeled data. Extensive experiments with real X-ray reports data illustrate how data augmentation using synthesized multimodal samples can improve the performance of a variety of supervised tasks including COVID-19 X-ray classification with very limited samples. The quality of generated images and reports are also confirmed by radiologists. We quantitatively show that EMIXER generated synthetic datasets can augment X-ray image classification, report generation models to achieve 5.94% and 6.9% improvement on models trained only on real data samples. Taken together, our results highlight the promise of state of generative models to advance clinical machine learning.

120.Experiments of Federated Learning for COVID-19 Chest X-ray Images ⬇️

AI plays an important role in COVID-19 identification. Computer vision and deep learning techniques can assist in determining COVID-19 infection with Chest X-ray Images. However, for the protection and respect of the privacy of patients, the hospital's specific medical-related data did not allow leakage and sharing without permission. Collecting such training data was a major challenge. To a certain extent, this has caused a lack of sufficient data samples when performing deep learning approaches to detect COVID-19. Federated Learning is an available way to address this issue. It can effectively address the issue of data silos and get a shared model without obtaining local data. In the work, we propose the use of federated learning for COVID-19 data training and deploy experiments to verify the effectiveness. And we also compare performances of four popular models (MobileNet, ResNet18, MoblieNet, and COVID-Net) with the federated learning framework and without the framework. This work aims to inspire more researches on federated learning about COVID-19.

121.IoT Device Fingerprint using Deep Learning ⬇️

Device Fingerprinting (DFP) is the identification of a device without using its network or other assigned identities including IP address, Medium Access Control (MAC) address, or International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. DFP identifies a device using information from the packets which the device uses to communicate over the network. Packets are received at a router and processed to extract the information. In this paper, we worked on the DFP using Inter Arrival Time (IAT). IAT is the time interval between the two consecutive packets received. This has been observed that the IAT is unique for a device because of different hardware and the software used for the device. The existing work on the DFP uses the statistical techniques to analyze the IAT and to further generate the information using which a device can be identified uniquely. This work presents a novel idea of DFP by plotting graphs of IAT for packets with each graph plotting 100 IATs and subsequently processing the resulting graphs for the identification of the device. This approach improves the efficiency to identify a device DFP due to achieved benchmark of the deep learning libraries in the image processing. We configured Raspberry Pi to work as a router and installed our packet sniffer application on the Raspberry Pi . The packet sniffer application captured the packet information from the connected devices in a log file. We connected two Apple devices iPad4 and iPhone 7 Plus to the router and created IAT graphs for these two devices. We used Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to identify the devices and observed the accuracy of 86.7%.