pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Explicit Shape Encoding for Real-Time Instance Segmentation
Authors: Wenqiang Xu, Haiyang Wang, Fubo Qi, Cewu Lu
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Real-time Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel top-down instance segmentation framework based on explicit shape encoding, named \textbf{ESE-Seg}. It largely reduces the computational consumption of the instance segmentation by explicitly decoding the multiple object shapes with tensor operations, thus performs the instance segmentation at almost the same speed as the object detection. ESE-Seg is based on a novel shape signature Inner-center Radius (IR), Chebyshev polynomial fitting and the strong modern object detectors. ESE-Seg with YOLOv3 outperforms the Mask R-CNN on Pascal VOC 2012 at mAP$^r$@0.5 while 7 times faster.
Sentence Specified Dynamic Video Thumbnail Generation
Authors: Yitian Yuan, Lin Ma, Wenwu Zhu
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

With the tremendous growth of videos over the Internet, video thumbnails, providing video content previews, are becoming increasingly crucial to influencing users' online searching experiences. Conventional video thumbnails are generated once purely based on the visual characteristics of videos, and then displayed as requested. Hence, such video thumbnails, without considering the users' searching intentions, cannot provide a meaningful snapshot of the video contents that users concern. In this paper, we define a distinctively new task, namely sentence specified dynamic video thumbnail generation, where the generated thumbnails not only provide a concise preview of the original video contents but also dynamically relate to the users' searching intentions with semantic correspondences to the users' query sentences. To tackle such a challenging task, we propose a novel graph convolved video thumbnail pointer (GTP). Specifically, GTP leverages a sentence specified video graph convolutional network to model both the sentence-video semantic interaction and the internal video relationships incorporated with the sentence information, based on which a temporal conditioned pointer network is then introduced to sequentially generate the sentence specified video thumbnails. Moreover, we annotate a new dataset based on ActivityNet Captions for the proposed new task, which consists of 10,000+ video-sentence pairs with each accompanied by an annotated sentence specified video thumbnail. We demonstrate that our proposed GTP outperforms several baseline methods on the created dataset, and thus believe that our initial results along with the release of the new dataset will inspire further research on sentence specified dynamic video thumbnail generation. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/yytzsy/GTP.
Semi-Supervised Video Salient Object Detection Using Pseudo-Labels
Authors: Pengxiang Yan, Guanbin Li, Yuan Xie, Zhen Li, Chuan Wang, Tianshui Chen, Liang Lin
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: object-detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection, Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation, Video Salient Object Detection

Deep learning-based video salient object detection has recently achieved great success with its performance significantly outperforming any other unsupervised methods. However, existing data-driven approaches heavily rely on a large quantity of pixel-wise annotated video frames to deliver such promising results. In this paper, we address the semi-supervised video salient object detection task using pseudo-labels. Specifically, we present an effective video saliency detector that consists of a spatial refinement network and a spatiotemporal module. Based on the same refinement network and motion information in terms of optical flow, we further propose a novel method for generating pixel-level pseudo-labels from sparsely annotated frames. By utilizing the generated pseudo-labels together with a part of manual annotations, our video saliency detector learns spatial and temporal cues for both contrast inference and coherence enhancement, thus producing accurate saliency maps. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed semi-supervised method even greatly outperforms all the state-of-the-art fully supervised methods across three public benchmarks of VOS, DAVIS, and FBMS.
Automatic Fashion Knowledge Extraction from Social Media
Authors: Yunshan Ma, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00

Fashion knowledge plays a pivotal role in helping people in their dressing. In this paper, we present a novel system to automatically harvest fashion knowledge from social media. It unifies three tasks of occasion, person and clothing discovery from multiple modalities of images, texts and metadata. A contextualized fashion concept learning model is applied to leverage the rich contextual information for improving the fashion concept learning performance. At the same time, to counter the label noise within training data, we employ a weak label modeling method to further boost the performance. We build a website to demonstrate the quality of fashion knowledge extracted by our system.
Evaluating Tag Recommendations for E-Book Annotation Using a Semantic Similarity Metric
Authors: Emanuel Lacic, Dominik Kowald, Dieter Theiler, Matthias Traub, Lucky Kuffer, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Elisabeth Lex
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Diversity, Recommendation Systems, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, TAG

In this paper, we present our work to support publishers and editors in finding descriptive tags for e-books through tag recommendations. We propose a hybrid tag recommendation system for e-books, which leverages search query terms from Amazon users and e-book metadata, which is assigned by publishers and editors. Our idea is to mimic the vocabulary of users in Amazon, who search for and review e-books, and to combine these search terms with editor tags in a hybrid tag recommendation approach. In total, we evaluate 19 tag recommendation algorithms on the review content of Amazon users, which reflects the readers' vocabulary. Our results show that we can improve the performance of tag recommender systems for e-books both concerning tag recommendation accuracy, diversity as well as a novel semantic similarity metric, which we also propose in this paper.
Is it Raining Outside? Detection of Rainfall using General-Purpose Surveillance Cameras
Authors: Joakim Bruslund Haurum, Chris H. Bahnsen, Thomas B. Moeslund
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Rain Removal

In integrated surveillance systems based on visual cameras, the mitigation of adverse weather conditions is an active research topic. Within this field, rain removal algorithms have been developed that artificially remove rain streaks from images or video. In order to deploy such rain removal algorithms in a surveillance setting, one must detect if rain is present in the scene. In this paper, we design a system for the detection of rainfall by the use of surveillance cameras. We reimplement the former state-of-the-art method for rain detection and compare it against a modern CNN-based method by utilizing 3D convolutions. The two methods are evaluated on our new AAU Visual Rain Dataset (VIRADA) that consists of 215 hours of general-purpose surveillance video from two traffic crossings. The results show that the proposed 3D CNN outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by a large margin on all metrics, for both of the traffic crossings. Finally, it is shown that the choice of region-of-interest has a large influence on performance when trying to generalize the investigated methods. The AAU VIRADA dataset and our implementation of the two rain detection algorithms are publicly available at https://bitbucket.org/aauvap/aau-virada.
An End-to-End Neighborhood-based Interaction Model for Knowledge-enhanced Recommendation
Authors: Yanru Qu, Ting Bai, Wei-Nan Zhang, Jian-Yun Nie, Jian Tang
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Knowledge Graphs

This paper studies graph-based recommendation, where an interaction graph is constructed from historical records and is lever-aged to alleviate data sparsity and cold start problems. We reveal an early summarization problem in existing graph-based models, and propose Neighborhood Interaction (NI) model to capture each neighbor pair (between user-side and item-side) distinctively. NI model is more expressive and can capture more complicated structural patterns behind user-item interactions. To further enrich node connectivity and utilize high-order structural information, we incorporate extra knowledge graphs (KGs) and adopt graph neural networks (GNNs) in NI, called Knowledge-enhanced NeighborhoodInteraction (KNI). Compared with the state-of-the-art recommendation methods,e.g., feature-based, meta path-based, and KG-based models, our KNI achieves superior performance in click-through rate prediction (1.1%-8.4% absolute AUC improvements) and out-performs by a wide margin in top-N recommendation on 4 real-world datasets.
Modeling continuous-time stochastic processes using $\mathcal{N}$-Curve mixtures
Authors: Ronny Hug, Wolfgang Hübner, Michael Arens
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Representations of sequential data are commonly based on the assumption that observed sequences are realizations of an unknown underlying stochastic process, where the learning problem includes determination of the model parameters. In this context the model must be able to capture the multi-modal nature of the data, without blurring between modes. This property is essential for applications like trajectory prediction or human motion modeling. Towards this end, a neural network model for continuous-time stochastic processes usable for sequence prediction is proposed. The model is based on Mixture Density Networks using B\'ezier curves with Gaussian random variables as control points (abbrev.: $\mathcal{N}$-Curves). Key advantages of the model include the ability of generating smooth multi-mode predictions in a single inference step which reduces the need for Monte Carlo simulation, as required in many multi-step prediction models, based on state-of-the-art neural networks. Essential properties of the proposed approach are illustrated by several toy examples and the task of multi-step sequence prediction. Further, the model performance is evaluated on two real world use-cases, i.e. human trajectory prediction and human motion modeling, outperforming different state-of-the-art models.
Self-supervised Data Bootstrapping for Deep Optical Character Recognition of Identity Documents
Authors: Oliver Mothes, Joachim Denzler
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The essential task of verifying person identities at airports and national borders is very time consuming. To accelerate it, optical character recognition for identity documents (IDs) using dictionaries is not appropriate due to high variability of the text content in IDs, e.g., individual street names or surnames. Additionally, no properties of the used fonts in IDs are known. Therefore, we propose an iterative self-supervised bootstrapping approach using a smart strategy to mine real character data from IDs. In combination with synthetically generated character data, the real data is used to train efficient convolutional neural networks for character classification serving a practical runtime as well as a high accuracy. On a dataset with 74 character classes, we achieve an average class-wise accuracy of 99.4 %. In contrast, if we would apply a classifier trained only using synthetic data, the accuracy is reduced to 58.1 %. Finally, we show that our whole proposed pipeline outperforms an established open-source framework
An overlapping-free leaf segmentation method for plant point clouds
Authors: Dawei Li, Yan Cao, Guoliang Shi, Xin Cai, Yang Chen, Sifan Wang, Siyuan Yan
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Plant Phenotyping, Segmentation

Automatic leaf segmentation, as well as identification and classification methods that built upon it, are able to provide immediate monitoring for plant growth status to guarantee the output. Although 3D plant point clouds contain abundant phenotypic features, plant leaves are usually distributed in clusters and are sometimes seriously overlapped in the canopy. Therefore, it is still a big challenge to automatically segment each individual leaf from a highly crowded plant canopy in 3D for plant phenotyping purposes. In this work, we propose an overlapping-free individual leaf segmentation method for plant point clouds using the 3D filtering and facet region growing. In order to separate leaves with different overlapping situations, we develop a new 3D joint filtering operator, which integrates a Radius-based Outlier Filter (RBOF) and a Surface Boundary Filter (SBF) to help to separate occluded leaves. By introducing the facet over-segmentation and facet-based region growing, the noise in segmentation is suppressed and labeled leaf centers can expand to their whole leaves, respectively. Our method can work on point clouds generated from three types of 3D imaging platforms, and also suitable for different kinds of plant species. In experiments, it obtains a point-level cover rate of 97% for Epipremnum aureum, 99% for Monstera deliciosa, 99% for Calathea makoyana, and 87% for Hedera nepalensis sample plants. At the leaf level, our method reaches an average Recall at 100.00%, a Precision at 99.33%, and an average F-measure at 99.66%, respectively. The proposed method can also facilitate the automatic traits estimation of each single leaf (such as the leaf area, length, and width), which has potential to become a highly effective tool for plant research and agricultural engineering.
Using the Open Meta Kaggle Dataset to Evaluate Tripartite Recommendations in Data Markets
Authors: Dominik Kowald, Matthias Traub, Dieter Theiler, Heimo Gursch, Emanuel Lacic, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Roman Kern, Elisabeth Lex
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems

This work addresses the problem of providing and evaluating recommendations in data markets. Since most of the research in recommender systems is focused on the bipartite relationship between users and items (e.g., movies), we extend this view to the tripartite relationship between users, datasets and services, which is present in data markets. Between these entities, we identify four use cases for recommendations: (i) recommendation of datasets for users, (ii) recommendation of services for users, (iii) recommendation of services for datasets, and (iv) recommendation of datasets for services. Using the open Meta Kaggle dataset, we evaluate the recommendation accuracy of a popularity-based as well as a collaborative filtering-based algorithm for these four use cases and find that the recommendation accuracy strongly depends on the given use case. The presented work contributes to the tripartite recommendation problem in general and to the under-researched portfolio of evaluating recommender systems for data markets in particular.
Variational Autoencoded Regression: High Dimensional Regression of Visual Data on Complex Manifold
Authors: YoungJoon Yoo, Sangdoo Yun, Hyung Jin Chang, Yiannis Demiris, Jin Young Choi
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2017 7
Tasks: Decoder, regression

This paper proposes a new high dimensional regression method by merging Gaussian process regression into a variational autoencoder framework. In contrast to other regression methods, the proposed method focuses on the case where output responses are on a complex high dimensional manifold, such as images. Our contributions are summarized as follows: (i) A new regression method estimating high dimensional image responses, which is not handled by existing regression algorithms, is proposed. (ii) The proposed regression method introduces a strategy to learn the latent space as well as the encoder and decoder so that the result of the regressed response in the latent space coincide with the corresponding response in the data space. (iii) The proposed regression is embedded into a generative model, and the whole procedure is developed by the variational autoencoder framework. We demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of our method through a number of experiments on various visual data regression problems.
Douglas-Quaid -- Open Source Image Matching Library
Authors: Vincent Falconieri
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Security analysts need to classify, search and correlate numerous images. Automatic classification tools improve the efficiency of such tasks. However, no open-source and turnkey library was found able to reach this goal. The present paper introduces an Open-Source modular library for the specific cases of visual correlation and Image Matching named Douglas-Quaid. The design of the library, chosen tradeoffs, encountered challenges, envisioned solutions as well as quality and speed results are presented in this paper. We also explore researches directions and future potential developments of the library. Our claim is that even partial automation of screenshots classification would reduce the burden on security teams and that Douglas-Quaid is a step forward in this direction.
Multi-Frame Content Integration with a Spatio-Temporal Attention Mechanism for Person Video Motion Transfer
Authors: Kun Cheng, Hao-Zhi Huang, Chun Yuan, Lingyiqing Zhou, Wei Liu
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

Existing person video generation methods either lack the flexibility in controlling both the appearance and motion, or fail to preserve detailed appearance and temporal consistency. In this paper, we tackle the problem of motion transfer for generating person videos, which provides controls on both the appearance and the motion. Specifically, we transfer the motion of one person in a target video to another person in a source video, while preserving the appearance of the source person. Besides only relying on one source frame as the existing state-of-the-art methods, our proposed method integrates information from multiple source frames based on a spatio-temporal attention mechanism to preserve rich appearance details. In addition to a spatial discriminator employed for encouraging the frame-level fidelity, a multi-range temporal discriminator is adopted to enforce the generated video to resemble temporal dynamics of a real video in various time ranges. A challenging real-world dataset, which contains about 500 dancing video clips with complex and unpredictable motions, is collected for the training and testing. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method can produce more photo-realistic and temporally consistent person videos than previous methods. As our method decomposes the syntheses of the foreground and background into two branches, a flexible background substitution application can also be achieved.
Matching Images and Text with Multi-modal Tensor Fusion and Re-ranking
Authors: Tan Wang, Xing Xu, Yang Yang, Alan Hanjalic, Heng Tao Shen, Jingkuan Song
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, General Classification, Image-text matching, Re-Ranking, Text Matching, text similarity

A major challenge in matching images and text is that they have intrinsically different data distributions and feature representations. Most existing approaches are based either on embedding or classification, the first one mapping image and text instances into a common embedding space for distance measuring, and the second one regarding image-text matching as a binary classification problem. Neither of these approaches can, however, balance the matching accuracy and model complexity well. We propose a novel framework that achieves remarkable matching performance with acceptable model complexity. Specifically, in the training stage, we propose a novel Multi-modal Tensor Fusion Network (MTFN) to explicitly learn an accurate image-text similarity function with rank-based tensor fusion rather than seeking a common embedding space for each image-text instance. Then, during testing, we deploy a generic Cross-modal Re-ranking (RR) scheme for refinement without requiring additional training procedure. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our MTFN-RR consistently achieves the state-of-the-art matching performance with much less time complexity. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/Wangt-CN/MTFN-RR-PyTorch-Code.
Instance Enhancement Batch Normalization: an Adaptive Regulator of Batch Noise
Authors: Senwei Liang, Zhongzhan Huang, Mingfu Liang, Haizhao Yang
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Batch Normalization (BN)(Ioffe and Szegedy 2015) normalizes the features of an input image via statistics of a batch of images and hence BN will bring the noise to the gradient of the training loss. Previous works indicate that the noise is important for the optimization and generalization of deep neural networks, but too much noise will harm the performance of networks. In our paper, we offer a new point of view that self-attention mechanism can help to regulate the noise by enhancing instance-specific information to obtain a better regularization effect. Therefore, we propose an attention-based BN called Instance Enhancement Batch Normalization (IEBN) that recalibrates the information of each channel by a simple linear transformation. IEBN has a good capacity of regulating noise and stabilizing network training to improve generalization even in the presence of two kinds of noise attacks during training. Finally, IEBN outperforms BN with only a light parameter increment in image classification tasks for different network structures and benchmark datasets.
Deep Hashing for Signed Social Network Embedding
Authors: Jia-Nan Guo, Xian-Ling Mao, Xiao-Jian Jiang, Ying-Xiang Sun, Wei Wei, He-Yan Huang
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Hashing, Link Prediction, Network Embedding, Node Classification

Network embedding is a promising way of network representation, facilitating many signed social network processing and analysis tasks such as link prediction and node classification. Recently, feature hashing has been adopted in several existing embedding algorithms to improve the efficiency, which has obtained a great success. However, the existing feature hashing based embedding algorithms only consider the positive links in signed social networks. Intuitively, negative links can also help improve the performance. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel deep hashing method for signed social network embedding by considering simultaneously positive and negative links. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method performs better than several state-of-the-art baselines through link prediction task over two real-world signed social networks.
Decision making in dynamic and interactive environments based on cognitive hierarchy theory, Bayesian inference, and predictive control
Authors: Sisi Li, Nan Li, Anouck Girard, Ilya Kolmanovsky
Date: 2019-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Bayesian Inference, Decision Making

In this paper, we describe an integrated framework for autonomous decision making in a dynamic and interactive environment. We model the interactions between the ego agent and its operating environment as a two-player dynamic game, and integrate cognitive behavioral models, Bayesian inference, and receding-horizon optimal control to define a dynamically-evolving decision strategy for the ego agent. Simulation examples representing autonomous vehicle control in three traffic scenarios where the autonomous ego vehicle interacts with a human-driven vehicle are reported.