pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Scene Text Magnifier
Authors: Toshiki Nakamura, Anna Zhu, Seiichi Uchida
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, text annotation

Scene text magnifier aims to magnify text in natural scene images without recognition. It could help the special groups, who have myopia or dyslexia to better understand the scene. In this paper, we design the scene text magnifier through interacted four CNN-based networks: character erasing, character extraction, character magnify, and image synthesis. The architecture of the networks are extended based on the hourglass encoder-decoders. It inputs the original scene text image and outputs the text magnified image while keeps the background unchange. Intermediately, we can get the side-output results of text erasing and text extraction. The four sub-networks are first trained independently and fine-tuned in end-to-end mode. The training samples for each stage are processed through a flow with original image and text annotation in ICDAR2013 and Flickr dataset as input, and corresponding text erased image, magnified text annotation, and text magnified scene image as output. To evaluate the performance of text magnifier, the Structural Similarity is used to measure the regional changes in each character region. The experimental results demonstrate our method can magnify scene text effectively without effecting the background.
Multi-atlas image registration of clinical data with automated quality assessment using ventricle segmentation
Authors: Florian Dubost, Marleen de Bruijne, Marco Nardin, Adrian V. Dalca, Kathleen L. Donahue, Anne-Katrin Giese, Mark R. Etherton, Ona Wu, Marius de Groot, Wiro Niessen, Meike Vernooij, Natalia S. Rost, Markus D. Schirmer
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, Image Registration

Registration is a core component of many imaging pipelines. In case of clinical scans, with lower resolution and sometimes substantial motion artifacts, registration can produce poor results. Visual assessment of registration quality in large clinical datasets is inefficient. In this work, we propose to automatically assess the quality of registration to an atlas in clinical FLAIR MRI scans of the brain. The method consists of automatically segmenting the ventricles of a given scan using a neural network, and comparing the segmentation to the atlas' ventricles propagated to image space. We used the proposed method to improve clinical image registration to a general atlas by computing multiple registrations and then selecting the registration that yielded the highest ventricle overlap. Methods were evaluated in a single-site dataset of more than 1000 scans, as well as a multi-center dataset comprising 142 clinical scans from 12 sites. The automated ventricle segmentation reached a Dice coefficient with manual annotations of 0.89 in the single-site dataset, and 0.83 in the multi-center dataset. Registration via age-specific atlases could improve ventricle overlap compared to a direct registration to the general atlas (Dice similarity coefficient increase up to 0.15). Experiments also showed that selecting scans with the registration quality assessment method could improve the quality of average maps of white matter hyperintensity burden, instead of using all scans for the computation of the white matter hyperintensity map. In this work, we demonstrated the utility of an automated tool for assessing image registration quality in clinical scans. This image quality assessment step could ultimately assist in the translation of automated neuroimaging pipelines to the clinic.
Learning Objectness from Sonar Images for Class-Independent Object Detection
Authors: Matias Valdenegro-Toro
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Template Matching

Detecting novel objects without class information is not trivial, as it is difficult to generalize from a small training set. This is an interesting problem for underwater robotics, as modeling marine objects is inherently more difficult in sonar images, and training data might not be available apriori. Detection proposals algorithms can be used for this purpose but usually requires a large amount of output bounding boxes. In this paper we propose the use of a fully convolutional neural network that regresses an objectness value directly from a Forward-Looking sonar image. By ranking objectness, we can produce high recall (96 %) with only 100 proposals per image. In comparison, EdgeBoxes requires 5000 proposals to achieve a slightly better recall of 97 %, while Selective Search requires 2000 proposals to achieve 95 % recall. We also show that our method outperforms a template matching baseline by a considerable margin, and is able to generalize to completely new objects. We expect that this kind of technique can be used in the field to find lost objects under the sea.
Online Multiple Pedestrians Tracking using Deep Temporal Appearance Matching Association
Authors: Young-chul Yoon, Du Yong Kim, Young-min Song, Kwangjin Yoon, Moongu Jeon
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Triplet

In online multi-target tracking, modeling of appearance and geometric similarities between pedestrians visual scenes is of great importance. The higher dimension of inherent information in the appearance model compared to the geometric model is problematic in many ways. However, due to the recent success of deep-learning-based methods, handling of high-dimensional appearance information becomes feasible. Among many deep neural networks, Siamese network with triplet loss has been widely adopted as an effective appearance feature extractor. Since the Siamese network can extract the features of each input independently, one can update and maintain target-specific features. However, it is not suitable for multi-target settings that require comparison with other inputs. To address this issue, we propose a novel track appearance model based on the joint-inference network. The proposed method enables a comparison of two inputs to be used for adaptive appearance modeling and contributes to the disambiguation of target-observation matching and to the consolidation of identity consistency. Diverse experimental results support the effectiveness of our method. Our work was recognized as the 3rd-best tracker in BMTT MOTChallenge 2019, held at CVPR2019. The code is available at https://github.com/yyc9268/Deep-TAMA.
SLSNet: Skin lesion segmentation using a lightweight generative adversarial network
Authors: Md. Mostafa Kamal Sarker, Hatem A. Rashwan, Farhan Akram, Vivek Kumar Singh, Syeda Furruka Banu, Forhad U H Chowdhury, Kabir Ahmed Choudhury, Sylvie Chambon, Petia Radeva, Domenec Puig, Mohamed Abdel-Nasser
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, GPU, Image Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Position, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Skin Lesion Segmentation

The determination of precise skin lesion boundaries in dermoscopic images using automated methods faces many challenges, most importantly, the presence of hair, inconspicuous lesion edges and low contrast in dermoscopic images, and variability in the color, texture and shapes of skin lesions. Existing deep learning-based skin lesion segmentation algorithms are expensive in terms of computational time and memory. Consequently, running such segmentation algorithms requires a powerful GPU and high bandwidth memory, which are not available in dermoscopy devices. Thus, this article aims to achieve precise skin lesion segmentation with minimum resources: a lightweight, efficient generative adversarial network (GAN) model called SLSNet, which combines 1-D kernel factorized networks, position and channel attention, and multiscale aggregation mechanisms with a GAN model. The 1-D kernel factorized network reduces the computational cost of 2D filtering. The position and channel attention modules enhance the discriminative ability between the lesion and non-lesion feature representations in spatial and channel dimensions, respectively. A multiscale block is also used to aggregate the coarse-to-fine features of input skin images and reduce the effect of the artifacts. SLSNet is evaluated on two publicly available datasets: ISBI 2017 and the ISIC 2018. Although SLSNet has only 2.35 million parameters, the experimental results demonstrate that it achieves segmentation results on a par with the state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation methods with an accuracy of 97.61%, and Dice and Jaccard similarity coefficients of 90.63% and 81.98%, respectively. SLSNet can run at more than 110 frames per second (FPS) in a single GTX1080Ti GPU, which is faster than well-known deep learning-based image segmentation models, such as FCN. Therefore, SLSNet can be used for practical dermoscopic applications.
An Efficient Solution for Breast Tumor Segmentation and Classification in Ultrasound Images Using Deep Adversarial Learning
Authors: Vivek Kumar Singh, Hatem A. Rashwan, Mohamed Abdel-Nasser, Md. Mostafa Kamal Sarker, Farhan Akram, Nidhi Pandey, Santiago Romani, Domenec Puig
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Generative Adversarial Network, Segmentation, SSIM, Tumor Segmentation

This paper proposes an efficient solution for tumor segmentation and classification in breast ultrasound (BUS) images. We propose to add an atrous convolution layer to the conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) segmentation model to learn tumor features at different resolutions of BUS images. To automatically re-balance the relative impact of each of the highest level encoded features, we also propose to add a channel-wise weighting block in the network. In addition, the SSIM and L1-norm loss with the typical adversarial loss are used as a loss function to train the model. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art segmentation models in terms of the Dice and IoU metrics, achieving top scores of 93.76% and 88.82%, respectively. In the classification stage, we show that few statistics features extracted from the shape of the boundaries of the predicted masks can properly discriminate between benign and malignant tumors with an accuracy of 85%$
Pano Popups: Indoor 3D Reconstruction with a Plane-Aware Network
Authors: Marc Eder, Pierre Moulon, Li Guan
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Depth Estimation, Surface Normal Estimation

In this work we present a method to train a plane-aware convolutional neural network for dense depth and surface normal estimation as well as plane boundaries from a single indoor $360^\circ$ image. Using our proposed loss function, our network outperforms existing methods for single-view, indoor, omnidirectional depth estimation and provides an initial benchmark for surface normal prediction from $360^\circ$ images. Our improvements are due to the use of a novel plane-aware loss that leverages principal curvature as an indicator of planar boundaries. We also show that including geodesic coordinate maps as network priors provides a significant boost in surface normal prediction accuracy. Finally, we demonstrate how we can combine our network's outputs to generate high quality 3D "pop-up" models of indoor scenes.
Estimating brain age based on a healthy population with deep learning and structural MRI
Authors: Xinyang Feng, Zachary C. Lipton, Jie Yang, Scott A. Small, Frank A. Provenzano
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation

Numerous studies have established that estimated brain age, as derived from statistical models trained on healthy populations, constitutes a valuable biomarker that is predictive of cognitive decline and various neurological diseases. In this work, we curate a large-scale heterogeneous dataset (N = 10,158, age range 18 - 97) of structural brain MRIs in a healthy population from multiple publicly-available sources, upon which we train a deep learning model for brain age estimation. The availability of the large-scale dataset enables a more uniform age distribution across adult life-span for effective age estimation with no bias toward certain age groups. We demonstrate that the age estimation accuracy, evaluated with mean absolute error (MAE) and correlation coefficient (r), outperforms previously reported methods in both a hold-out test set reflective of the custom population (MAE = 4.06 years, r = 0.970) and an independent life-span evaluation dataset (MAE = 4.21 years, r = 0.960) on which a previous study has evaluated. We further demonstrate the utility of the estimated age in life-span aging analysis of cognitive functions. Furthermore, we conduct extensive ablation tests and employ feature-attribution techniques to analyze which regions contribute the most predictive value, demonstrating the prominence of the frontal lobe as well as pattern shift across life-span. In summary, we achieve superior age estimation performance confirming the efficacy of deep learning and the added utility of training with data both in larger number and more uniformly distributed than in previous studies. We demonstrate the regional contribution to our brain age predictions through multiple routes and confirm the association of divergence between estimated and chronological brain age with neuropsychological measures.
ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Multi-lingual Scene Text Detection and Recognition -- RRC-MLT-2019
Authors: Nibal Nayef, Yash Patel, Michal Busta, Pinaki Nath Chowdhury, Dimosthenis Karatzas, Wafa Khlif, Jiri Matas, Umapada Pal, Jean-Christophe Burie, Cheng-Lin Liu, Jean-Marc Ogier
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, General Classification, Scene Text Detection, Text Detection

With the growing cosmopolitan culture of modern cities, the need of robust Multi-Lingual scene Text (MLT) detection and recognition systems has never been more immense. With the goal to systematically benchmark and push the state-of-the-art forward, the proposed competition builds on top of the RRC-MLT-2017 with an additional end-to-end task, an additional language in the real images dataset, a large scale multi-lingual synthetic dataset to assist the training, and a baseline End-to-End recognition method. The real dataset consists of 20,000 images containing text from 10 languages. The challenge has 4 tasks covering various aspects of multi-lingual scene text: (a) text detection, (b) cropped word script classification, (c) joint text detection and script classification and (d) end-to-end detection and recognition. In total, the competition received 60 submissions from the research and industrial communities. This paper presents the dataset, the tasks and the findings of the presented RRC-MLT-2019 challenge.
Going Deeper with Lean Point Networks
Authors: Eric-Tuan Le, Iasonas Kokkinos, Niloy J. Mitra
Date: 2019-07-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6

In this work we introduce Lean Point Networks (LPNs) to train deeper and more accurate point processing networks by relying on three novel point processing blocks that improve memory consumption, inference time, and accuracy: a convolution-type block for point sets that blends neighborhood information in a memory-efficient manner; a crosslink block that efficiently shares information across low- and high-resolution processing branches; and a multiresolution point cloud processing block for faster diffusion of information. By combining these blocks, we design wider and deeper point-based architectures. We report systematic accuracy and memory consumption improvements on multiple publicly available segmentation tasks by using our generic modules as drop-in replacements for the blocks of multiple architectures (PointNet++, DGCNN, SpiderNet, PointCNN).
Robust Linear Discriminant Analysis Using Ratio Minimization of L1,2-Norms
Authors: Feiping Nie, Hua Wang, Zheng Wang, Heng Huang
Date: 2019-06-29 00:00:00

As one of the most popular linear subspace learning methods, the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) method has been widely studied in machine learning community and applied to many scientific applications. Traditional LDA minimizes the ratio of squared L2-norms, which is sensitive to outliers. In recent research, many L1-norm based robust Principle Component Analysis methods were proposed to improve the robustness to outliers. However, due to the difficulty of L1-norm ratio optimization, so far there is no existing work to utilize sparsity-inducing norms for LDA objective. In this paper, we propose a novel robust linear discriminant analysis method based on the L1,2-norm ratio minimization. Minimizing the L1,2-norm ratio is a much more challenging problem than the traditional methods, and there is no existing optimization algorithm to solve such non-smooth terms ratio problem. We derive a new efficient algorithm to solve this challenging problem, and provide a theoretical analysis on the convergence of our algorithm. The proposed algorithm is easy to implement, and converges fast in practice. Extensive experiments on both synthetic data and nine real benchmark data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed robust LDA method.
Dissecting Pruned Neural Networks
Authors: Jonathan Frankle, David Bau
Date: 2019-06-29 00:00:00

Pruning is a standard technique for removing unnecessary structure from a neural network to reduce its storage footprint, computational demands, or energy consumption. Pruning can reduce the parameter-counts of many state-of-the-art neural networks by an order of magnitude without compromising accuracy, meaning these networks contain a vast amount of unnecessary structure. In this paper, we study the relationship between pruning and interpretability. Namely, we consider the effect of removing unnecessary structure on the number of hidden units that learn disentangled representations of human-recognizable concepts as identified by network dissection. We aim to evaluate how the interpretability of pruned neural networks changes as they are compressed. We find that pruning has no detrimental effect on this measure of interpretability until so few parameters remain that accuracy beings to drop. Resnet-50 models trained on ImageNet maintain the same number of interpretable concepts and units until more than 90% of parameters have been pruned.
Collaboration of AI Agents via Cooperative Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Niranjan Balachandar, Justin Dieter, Govardana Sachithanandam Ramachandran
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

There are many AI tasks involving multiple interacting agents where agents should learn to cooperate and collaborate to effectively perform the task. Here we develop and evaluate various multi-agent protocols to train agents to collaborate with teammates in grid soccer. We train and evaluate our multi-agent methods against a team operating with a smart hand-coded policy. As a baseline, we train agents concurrently and independently, with no communication. Our collaborative protocols were parameter sharing, coordinated learning with communication, and counterfactual policy gradients. Against the hand-coded team, the team trained with parameter sharing and the team trained with coordinated learning performed the best, scoring on 89.5% and 94.5% of episodes respectively when playing against the hand-coded team. Against the parameter sharing team, with adversarial training the coordinated learning team scored on 75% of the episodes, indicating it is the most adaptable of our methods. The insights gained from our work can be applied to other domains where multi-agent collaboration could be beneficial.
GarmNet: Improving Global with Local Perception for Robotic Laundry Folding
Authors: Daniel Fernandes Gomes, Shan Luo, Luis F. Teixeira
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00

Developing autonomous assistants to help with domestic tasks is a vital topic in robotics research. Among these tasks, garment folding is one of them that is still far from being achieved mainly due to the large number of possible configurations that a crumpled piece of clothing may exhibit. Research has been done on either estimating the pose of the garment as a whole or detecting the landmarks for grasping separately. However, such works constrain the capability of the robots to perceive the states of the garment by limiting the representations for one single task. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning model named GarmNet that is able to simultaneously localize the garment and detect landmarks for grasping. The localization of the garment represents the global information for recognising the category of the garment, whereas the detection of landmarks can facilitate subsequent grasping actions. We train and evaluate our proposed GarmNet model using the CloPeMa Garment dataset that contains 3,330 images of different garment types in different poses. The experiments show that the inclusion of landmark detection (GarmNet-B) can largely improve the garment localization, with an error rate of 24.7% lower. Solutions as ours are important for robotics applications, as these offer scalable to many classes, memory and processing efficient solutions.
Multi-Label Product Categorization Using Multi-Modal Fusion Models
Authors: Pasawee Wirojwatanakul, Artit Wangperawong
Date: 2019-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Product Categorization

In this study, we investigated multi-modal approaches using images, descriptions, and titles to categorize e-commerce products on Amazon. Specifically, we examined late fusion models, where the modalities are fused at the decision level. Products were each assigned multiple labels, and the hierarchy in the labels were flattened and filtered. For our individual baseline models, we modified a CNN architecture to classify the description and title, and then modified Keras' ResNet-50 to classify the images, achieving $F_1$ scores of 77.0%, 82.7%, and 61.0%, respectively. In comparison, our tri-modal late fusion model can classify products more effectively than single modal models can, improving the $F_1$ score to 88.2%. Each modality complemented the shortcomings of the other modalities, demonstrating that increasing the number of modalities can be an effective method for improving the performance of multi-label classification problems.