pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FGSD: A Dataset for Fine-Grained Ship Detection in High Resolution Satellite Images
Authors: Kaiyan Chen, Ming Wu, Jiaming Liu, Chuang Zhang
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00

Ship detection using high-resolution remote sensing images is an important task, which contribute to sea surface regulation. The complex background and special visual angle make ship detection relies in high quality datasets to a certain extent. However, there is few works on giving both precise classification and accurate location of ships in existing ship detection datasets. To further promote the research of ship detection, we introduced a new fine-grained ship detection datasets, which is named as FGSD. The dataset collects high-resolution remote sensing images that containing ship samples from multiple large ports around the world. Ship samples were fine categorized and annotated with both horizontal and rotating bounding boxes. To further detailed the information of the dataset, we put forward a new representation method of ships' orientation. For future research, the dock as a new class was annotated in the dataset. Besides, rich information of images were provided in FGSD, including the source port, resolution and corresponding GoogleEarth' s resolution level of each image. As far as we know, FGSD is the most comprehensive ship detection dataset currently and it'll be available soon. Some baselines for FGSD are also provided in this paper.
Intra Order-preserving Functions for Calibration of Multi-Class Neural Networks
Authors: Amir Rahimi, Amirreza Shaban, Ching-An Cheng, Richard Hartley, Byron Boots
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

Predicting calibrated confidence scores for multi-class deep networks is important for avoiding rare but costly mistakes. A common approach is to learn a post-hoc calibration function that transforms the output of the original network into calibrated confidence scores while maintaining the network's accuracy. However, previous post-hoc calibration techniques work only with simple calibration functions, potentially lacking sufficient representation to calibrate the complex function landscape of deep networks. In this work, we aim to learn general post-hoc calibration functions that can preserve the top-k predictions of any deep network. We call this family of functions intra order-preserving functions. We propose a new neural network architecture that represents a class of intra order-preserving functions by combining common neural network components. Additionally, we introduce order-invariant and diagonal sub-families, which can act as regularization for better generalization when the training data size is small. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method across a wide range of datasets and classifiers. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art post-hoc calibration methods, namely temperature scaling and Dirichlet calibration, in several evaluation metrics for the task.
VCNet: A Robust Approach to Blind Image Inpainting
Authors: Yi Wang, Ying-Cong Chen, Xin Tao, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Image Inpainting, Prediction

Blind inpainting is a task to automatically complete visual contents without specifying masks for missing areas in an image. Previous works assume missing region patterns are known, limiting its application scope. In this paper, we relax the assumption by defining a new blind inpainting setting, making training a blind inpainting neural system robust against various unknown missing region patterns. Specifically, we propose a two-stage visual consistency network (VCN), meant to estimate where to fill (via masks) and generate what to fill. In this procedure, the unavoidable potential mask prediction errors lead to severe artifacts in the subsequent repairing. To address it, our VCN predicts semantically inconsistent regions first, making mask prediction more tractable. Then it repairs these estimated missing regions using a new spatial normalization, enabling VCN to be robust to the mask prediction errors. In this way, semantically convincing and visually compelling content is thus generated. Extensive experiments are conducted, showing our method is effective and robust in blind image inpainting. And our VCN allows for a wide spectrum of applications.
Towards Face Encryption by Generating Adversarial Identity Masks
Authors: Xiao Yang, Yinpeng Dong, Tianyu Pang, Hang Su, Jun Zhu, Yuefeng Chen, Hui Xue
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Face Recognition

As billions of personal data being shared through social media and network, the data privacy and security have drawn an increasing attention. Several attempts have been made to alleviate the leakage of identity information from face photos, with the aid of, e.g., image obfuscation techniques. However, most of the present results are either perceptually unsatisfactory or ineffective against face recognition systems. Our goal in this paper is to develop a technique that can encrypt the personal photos such that they can protect users from unauthorized face recognition systems but remain visually identical to the original version for human beings. To achieve this, we propose a targeted identity-protection iterative method (TIP-IM) to generate adversarial identity masks which can be overlaid on facial images, such that the original identities can be concealed without sacrificing the visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TIP-IM provides 95\%+ protection success rate against various state-of-the-art face recognition models under practical test scenarios. Besides, we also show the practical and effective applicability of our method on a commercial API service.
Iterative training of neural networks for intra prediction
Authors: Thierry Dumas, Franck Galpin, Philippe Bordes
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

This paper presents an iterative training of neural networks for intra prediction in a block-based image and video codec. First, the neural networks are trained on blocks arising from the codec partitioning of images, each paired with its context. Then, iteratively, blocks are collected from the partitioning of images via the codec including the neural networks trained at the previous iteration, each paired with its context, and the neural networks are retrained on the new pairs. Thanks to this training, the neural networks can learn intra prediction functions that both stand out from those already in the initial codec and boost the codec in terms of rate-distortion. Moreover, the iterative process allows the design of training data cleansings essential for the neural network training. When the iteratively trained neural networks are put into H.265 (HM-16.15), -4.2% of mean dB-rate reduction is obtained. By moving them into H.266 (VTM-5.0), the mean dB-rate reduction reaches -1.9%.
Semi-Modular Inference: enhanced learning in multi-modular models by tempering the influence of components
Authors: Chris Carmona, Geoff K. Nicholls
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Meta-Learning

Bayesian statistical inference loses predictive optimality when generative models are misspecified. Working within an existing coherent loss-based generalisation of Bayesian inference, we show existing Modular/Cut-model inference is coherent, and write down a new family of Semi-Modular Inference (SMI) schemes, indexed by an influence parameter, with Bayesian inference and Cut-models as special cases. We give a meta-learning criterion and estimation procedure to choose the inference scheme. This returns Bayesian inference when there is no misspecification. The framework applies naturally to Multi-modular models. Cut-model inference allows directed information flow from well-specified modules to misspecified modules, but not vice versa. An existing alternative power posterior method gives tunable but undirected control of information flow, improving prediction in some settings. In contrast, SMI allows tunable and directed information flow between modules. We illustrate our methods on two standard test cases from the literature and a motivating archaeological data set.
Experimenting with Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for the automatic characterization of Solitary Pulmonary Nodules' malignancy rating
Authors: Ioannis D. Apostolopoulos
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Diagnostic, General Classification

Lung Cancer is the most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Early and automatic diagnosis of Solitary Pulmonary Nodules (SPN) in Computer Tomography (CT) chest scans can provide early treatment as well as doctor liberation from time-consuming procedures. Deep Learning has been proven as a popular and influential method in many medical imaging diagnosis areas. In this study, we consider the problem of diagnostic classification between benign and malignant lung nodules in CT images derived from a PET/CT scanner. More specifically, we intend to develop experimental Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures and conduct experiments, by tuning their parameters, to investigate their behavior, and to define the optimal setup for the accurate classification. For the experiments, we utilize PET/CT images obtained from the Laboratory of Nuclear Medicine of the University of Patras, and the publically available database called Lung Image Database Consortium Image Collection (LIDC-IDRI). Furthermore, we apply simple data augmentation to generate new instances and to inspect the performance of the developed networks. Classification accuracy of 91% and 93% on the PET/CT dataset and on a selection of nodule images form the LIDC-IDRI dataset, is achieved accordingly. The results demonstrate that CNNs are a trustworth method for nodule classification. Also, the experiment confirms that data augmentation enhances the robustness of the CNNs.
OS2D: One-Stage One-Shot Object Detection by Matching Anchor Features
Authors: Anton Osokin, Denis Sumin, Vasily Lomakin
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, One-Shot Object Detection

In this paper, we consider the task of one-shot object detection, which consists in detecting objects defined by a single demonstration. Differently from the standard object detection, the classes of objects used for training and testing do not overlap. We build the one-stage system that performs localization and recognition jointly. We use dense correlation matching of learned local features to find correspondences, a feed-forward geometric transformation model to align features and bilinear resampling of the correlation tensor to compute the detection score of the aligned features. All the components are differentiable, which allows end-to-end training. Experimental evaluation on several challenging domains (retail products, 3D objects, buildings and logos) shows that our method can detect unseen classes (e.g., toothpaste when trained on groceries) and outperforms several baselines by a significant margin. Our code is available online: https://github.com/aosokin/os2d .
StarNet: towards Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Object Detection
Authors: Leonid Karlinsky, Joseph Shtok, Amit Alfassy, Moshe Lichtenstein, Sivan Harary, Eli Schwartz, Sivan Doveh, Prasanna Sattigeri, Rogerio Feris, Alexander Bronstein, Raja Giryes
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Learning, Few-Shot Object Detection, General Classification, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Localization

Few-shot detection and classification have advanced significantly in recent years. Yet, detection approaches require strong annotation (bounding boxes) both for pre-training and for adaptation to novel classes, and classification approaches rarely provide localization of objects in the scene. In this paper, we introduce StarNet - a few-shot model featuring an end-to-end differentiable non-parametric star-model detection and classification head. Through this head, the backbone is meta-trained using only image-level labels to produce good features for jointly localizing and classifying previously unseen categories of few-shot test tasks using a star-model that geometrically matches between the query and support images (to find corresponding object instances). Being a few-shot detector, StarNet does not require any bounding box annotations, neither during pre-training nor for novel classes adaptation. It can thus be applied to the previously unexplored and challenging task of Weakly Supervised Few-Shot Object Detection (WS-FSOD), where it attains significant improvements over the baselines. In addition, StarNet shows significant gains on few-shot classification benchmarks that are less cropped around the objects (where object localization is key).
Towards automated kernel selection in machine learning systems: A SYCL case study
Authors: John Lawson
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Automated tuning of compute kernels is a popular area of research, mainly focused on finding optimal kernel parameters for a problem with fixed input sizes. This approach is good for deploying machine learning models, where the network topology is constant, but machine learning research often involves changing network topologies and hyperparameters. Traditional kernel auto-tuning has limited impact in this case; a more general selection of kernels is required for libraries to accelerate machine learning research. In this paper we present initial results using machine learning to select kernels in a case study deploying high performance SYCL kernels in libraries that target a range of heterogeneous devices from desktop GPUs to embedded accelerators. The techniques investigated apply more generally and could similarly be integrated with other heterogeneous programming systems. By combining auto-tuning and machine learning these kernel selection processes can be deployed with little developer effort to achieve high performance on new hardware.
Performance Evaluation of Advanced Deep Learning Architectures for Offline Handwritten Character Recognition
Authors: Moazam Soomro, Muhammad Ali Farooq, Rana Hammad Raza
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00

This paper presents a hand-written character recognition comparison and performance evaluation for robust and precise classification of different hand-written characters. The system utilizes advanced multilayer deep neural network by collecting features from raw pixel values. The hidden layers stack deep hierarchies of non-linear features since learning complex features from conventional neural networks is very challenging. Two state of the art deep learning architectures were used which includes Caffe AlexNet and GoogleNet models in NVIDIA DIGITS.The frameworks were trained and tested on two different datasets for incorporating diversity and complexity. One of them is the publicly available dataset i.e. Chars74K comprising of 7705 characters and has upper and lowercase English alphabets, along with numerical digits. While the other dataset created locally consists of 4320 characters. The local dataset consists of 62 classes and was created by 40 subjects. It also consists upper and lowercase English alphabets, along with numerical digits. The overall dataset is divided in the ratio of 80% for training and 20% for testing phase. The time required for training phase is approximately 90 minutes. For validation part, the results obtained were compared with the groundtruth. The accuracy level achieved with AlexNet was 77.77% and 88.89% with Google Net. The higher accuracy level of GoogleNet is due to its unique combination of inception modules, each including pooling, convolutions at various scales and concatenation procedures.
Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement
Authors: Syed Waqas Zamir, Aditya Arora, Salman Khan, Munawar Hayat, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Ling Shao
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Image Enhancement, Image Restoration, Spectral Reconstruction, Super-Resolution

With the goal of recovering high-quality image content from its degraded version, image restoration enjoys numerous applications, such as in surveillance, computational photography, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved dramatic improvements over conventional approaches for image restoration task. Existing CNN-based methods typically operate either on full-resolution or on progressively low-resolution representations. In the former case, spatially precise but contextually less robust results are achieved, while in the latter case, semantically reliable but spatially less accurate outputs are generated. In this paper, we present a novel architecture with the collective goals of maintaining spatially-precise high-resolution representations through the entire network and receiving strong contextual information from the low-resolution representations. The core of our approach is a multi-scale residual block containing several key elements: (a) parallel multi-resolution convolution streams for extracting multi-scale features, (b) information exchange across the multi-resolution streams, (c) spatial and channel attention mechanisms for capturing contextual information, and (d) attention based multi-scale feature aggregation. In a nutshell, our approach learns an enriched set of features that combines contextual information from multiple scales, while simultaneously preserving the high-resolution spatial details. Extensive experiments on five real image benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method, named as MIRNet, achieves state-of-the-art results for a variety of image processing tasks, including image denoising, super-resolution, and image enhancement. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/swz30/MIRNet.
GMM-UNIT: Unsupervised Multi-Domain and Multi-Modal Image-to-Image Translation via Attribute Gaussian Mixture Modeling
Authors: Yahui Liu, Marco De Nadai, Jian Yao, Nicu Sebe, Bruno Lepri, Xavier Alameda-Pineda
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Diversity, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation, Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation

Unsupervised image-to-image translation (UNIT) aims at learning a mapping between several visual domains by using unpaired training images. Recent studies have shown remarkable success for multiple domains but they suffer from two main limitations: they are either built from several two-domain mappings that are required to be learned independently, or they generate low-diversity results, a problem known as mode collapse. To overcome these limitations, we propose a method named GMM-UNIT, which is based on a content-attribute disentangled representation where the attribute space is fitted with a GMM. Each GMM component represents a domain, and this simple assumption has two prominent advantages. First, it can be easily extended to most multi-domain and multi-modal image-to-image translation tasks. Second, the continuous domain encoding allows for interpolation between domains and for extrapolation to unseen domains and translations. Additionally, we show how GMM-UNIT can be constrained down to different methods in the literature, meaning that GMM-UNIT is a unifying framework for unsupervised image-to-image translation.
Self-trained Deep Ordinal Regression for End-to-End Video Anomaly Detection
Authors: Guansong Pang, Cheng Yan, Chunhua Shen, Anton Van Den Hengel, Xiao Bai
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, regression, Representation Learning, Video Anomaly Detection

Video anomaly detection is of critical practical importance to a variety of real applications because it allows human attention to be focused on events that are likely to be of interest, in spite of an otherwise overwhelming volume of video. We show that applying self-trained deep ordinal regression to video anomaly detection overcomes two key limitations of existing methods, namely, 1) being highly dependent on manually labeled normal training data; and 2) sub-optimal feature learning. By formulating a surrogate two-class ordinal regression task we devise an end-to-end trainable video anomaly detection approach that enables joint representation learning and anomaly scoring without manually labeled normal/abnormal data. Experiments on eight real-world video scenes show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods that require no labeled training data by a substantial margin, and enables easy and accurate localization of the identified anomalies. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method offers effective human-in-the-loop anomaly detection which can be critical in applications where anomalies are rare and the false-negative cost is high.
A proto-object based audiovisual saliency map
Authors: Sudarshan Ramenahalli
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, valid, Video Compression

Natural environment and our interaction with it is essentially multisensory, where we may deploy visual, tactile and/or auditory senses to perceive, learn and interact with our environment. Our objective in this study is to develop a scene analysis algorithm using multisensory information, specifically vision and audio. We develop a proto-object based audiovisual saliency map (AVSM) for the analysis of dynamic natural scenes. A specialized audiovisual camera with $360 \degree$ Field of View, capable of locating sound direction, is used to collect spatiotemporally aligned audiovisual data. We demonstrate that the performance of proto-object based audiovisual saliency map in detecting and localizing salient objects/events is in agreement with human judgment. In addition, the proto-object based AVSM that we compute as a linear combination of visual and auditory feature conspicuity maps captures a higher number of valid salient events compared to unisensory saliency maps. Such an algorithm can be useful in surveillance, robotic navigation, video compression and related applications.
On Initializing Airline Crew Pairing Optimization for Large-scale Complex Flight Networks
Authors: Divyam Aggarwal, Dhish Kumar Saxena, Thomas Bäck, Michael Emmerich
Date: 2020-03-15 00:00:00

Crew pairing optimization (CPO) is critically important for any airline, since its crew operating costs are second-largest, next to the fuel-cost. CPO aims at generating a set of flight sequences (crew pairings) covering a flight-schedule, at minimum-cost, while satisfying several legality constraints. For large-scale complex flight networks, billion-plus legal pairings (variables) are possible, rendering their offline enumeration intractable and an exhaustive search for their minimum-cost full flight-coverage subset impractical. Even generating an initial feasible solution (IFS: a manageable set of legal pairings covering all flights), which could be subsequently optimized is a difficult (NP-complete) problem. Though, as part of a larger project the authors have developed a crew pairing optimizer (AirCROP), this paper dedicatedly focuses on IFS-generation through a novel heuristic based on divide-and-cover strategy and Integer Programming. For real-world large and complex flight network datasets (including over 3200 flights and 15 crew bases) provided by GE Aviation, the proposed heuristic shows upto a ten-fold speed improvement over another state-of-the-art approach. Unprecedentedly, this paper presents an empirical investigation of the impact of IFS-cost on the final (optimized) solution-cost, revealing that too low an IFS-cost does not necessarily imply faster convergence for AirCROP or even lower cost for the optimized solution.