pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Blind Inpainting of Large-scale Masks of Thin Structures with Adversarial and Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hao Chen, Mario Valerio Giuffrida, Peter Doerner, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Segmentation

Several imaging applications (vessels, retina, plant roots, road networks from satellites) require the accurate segmentation of thin structures for subsequent analysis. Discontinuities (gaps) in the extracted foreground may hinder down-stream image-based analysis of biomarkers, organ structure and topology. In this paper, we propose a general post-processing technique to recover such gaps in large-scale segmentation masks. We cast this problem as a blind inpainting task, where the regions of missing lines in the segmentation masks are not known to the algorithm, which we solve with an adversarially trained neural network. One challenge of using large images is the memory capacity of current GPUs. The typical approach of dividing a large image into smaller patches to train the network does not guarantee global coherence of the reconstructed image that preserves structure and topology. We use adversarial training and reinforcement learning (Policy Gradient) to endow the model with both global context and local details. We evaluate our method in several datasets in medical imaging, plant science, and remote sensing. Our experiments demonstrate that our model produces the most realistic and complete inpainted results, outperforming other approaches. In a dedicated study on plant roots we find that our approach is also comparable to human performance. Implementation available at \url{https://github.com/Hhhhhhhhhhao/Thin-Structure-Inpainting}.
Smartphone Multi-modal Biometric Authentication: Database and Evaluation
Authors: Raghavendra Ramachandra, Martin Stokkenes, Amir Mohammadi, Sushma Venkatesh, Kiran Raja, Pankaj Wasnik, Eric Poiret, Sébastien Marcel, Christoph Busch
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Biometric-based verification is widely employed on the smartphones for various applications, including financial transactions. In this work, we present a new multimodal biometric dataset (face, voice, and periocular) acquired using a smartphone. The new dataset is comprised of 150 subjects that are captured in six different sessions reflecting real-life scenarios of smartphone assisted authentication. One of the unique features of this dataset is that it is collected in four different geographic locations representing a diverse population and ethnicity. Additionally, we also present a multimodal Presentation Attack (PA) or spoofing dataset using a low-cost Presentation Attack Instrument (PAI) such as print and electronic display attacks. The novel acquisition protocols and the diversity of the data subjects collected from different geographic locations will allow developing a novel algorithm for either unimodal or multimodal biometrics. Further, we also report the performance evaluation of the baseline biometric verification and Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) on the newly collected dataset.
E2-Capsule Neural Networks for Facial Expression Recognition Using AU-Aware Attention
Authors: Shan Cao, Yuqian Yao, Gaoyun An
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Capsule neural network is a new and popular technique in deep learning. However, the traditional capsule neural network does not extract features sufficiently before the dynamic routing between the capsules. In this paper, the one Double Enhanced Capsule Neural Network (E2-Capsnet) that uses AU-aware attention for facial expression recognition (FER) is proposed. The E2-Capsnet takes advantage of dynamic routing between the capsules, and has two enhancement modules which are beneficial for FER. The first enhancement module is the convolutional neural network with AU-aware attention, which can help focus on the active areas of the expression. The second enhancement module is the capsule neural network with multiple convolutional layers, which enhances the ability of the feature representation. Finally, squashing function is used to classify the facial expression. We demonstrate the effectiveness of E2-Capsnet on the two public benchmark datasets, RAF-DB and EmotioNet. The experimental results show that our E2-Capsnet is superior to the state-of-the-art methods. Our implementation will be publicly available online.
A Document Skew Detection Method Using Fast Hough Transform
Authors: Pavel Bezmaternykh, Dmitry Nikolaev
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00

The majority of document image analysis systems use a document skew detection algorithm to simplify all its further processing stages. A huge amount of such algorithms based on Hough transform (HT) analysis has already been proposed. Despite this, we managed to find only one work where the Fast Hough Transform (FHT) usage was suggested to solve the indicated problem. Unfortunately, no study of that method was provided. In this work, we propose and study a skew detection algorithm for the document images which relies on FHT analysis. To measure this algorithm quality we use the dataset from the problem oriented DISEC'13 contest and its evaluation methodology. Obtained values for AED, TOP80, and CE criteria are equal to 0.086, 0.056, 68.80 respectively.
Post-Mortem Iris Recognition Resistant to Biological Eye Decay Processes
Authors: Mateusz Trokielewicz, Adam Czajka, Piotr Maciejewicz
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Iris Recognition

This paper proposes an end-to-end iris recognition method designed specifically for post-mortem samples, and thus serving as a perfect application for iris biometrics in forensics. To our knowledge, it is the first method specific for verification of iris samples acquired after demise. We have fine-tuned a convolutional neural network-based segmentation model with a large set of diversified iris data (including post-mortem and diseased eyes), and combined Gabor kernels with newly designed, iris-specific kernels learnt by Siamese networks. The resulting method significantly outperforms the existing off-the-shelf iris recognition methods (both academic and commercial) on the newly collected database of post-mortem iris images and for all available time horizons since death. We make all models and the method itself available along with this paper.
Multi-Modal Deep Clustering: Unsupervised Partitioning of Images
Authors: Guy Shiran, Daphna Weinshall
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Clustering, Image Clustering

The clustering of unlabeled raw images is a daunting task, which has recently been approached with some success by deep learning methods. Here we propose an unsupervised clustering framework, which learns a deep neural network in an end-to-end fashion, providing direct cluster assignments of images without additional processing. Multi-Modal Deep Clustering (MMDC), trains a deep network to align its image embeddings with target points sampled from a Gaussian Mixture Model distribution. The cluster assignments are then determined by mixture component association of image embeddings. Simultaneously, the same deep network is trained to solve an additional self-supervised task of predicting image rotations. This pushes the network to learn more meaningful image representations that facilitate a better clustering. Experimental results show that MMDC achieves or exceeds state-of-the-art performance on six challenging benchmarks. On natural image datasets we improve on previous results with significant margins of up to 20% absolute accuracy points, yielding an accuracy of 82% on CIFAR-10, 45% on CIFAR-100 and 69% on STL-10.
Fingerprint Spoof Generalization
Authors: Tarang Chugh, Anil K. Jain
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

We present a style-transfer based wrapper, called Universal Material Generator (UMG), to improve the generalization performance of any fingerprint spoof detector against spoofs made from materials not seen during training. Specifically, we transfer the style (texture) characteristics between fingerprint images of known materials with the goal of synthesizing fingerprint images corresponding to unknown materials, that may occupy the space between the known materials in the deep feature space. Synthetic live fingerprint images are also added to the training dataset to force the CNN to learn generative-noise invariant features which discriminate between lives and spoofs. The proposed approach is shown to improve the generalization performance of a state-of-the-art spoof detector, namely Fingerprint Spoof Buster, from TDR of 75.24% to 91.78% @ FDR = 0.2%. These results are based on a large-scale dataset of 5,743 live and 4,912 spoof images fabricated using 12 different materials. Additionally, the UMG wrapper is shown to improve the average cross-sensor spoof detection performance from 67.60% to 80.63% when tested on the LivDet 2017 dataset. Training the UMG wrapper requires only 100 live fingerprint images from the target sensor, alleviating the time and resources required to generate large-scale live and spoof datasets for a new sensor. We also fabricate physical spoof artifacts using a mixture of known spoof materials to explore the role of cross-material style transfer in improving generalization performance.
Revisiting Few-Shot Learning for Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Anca-Nicoleta Ciubotaru, Arnout Devos, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Jean-Philippe Thiran, Maria Gabrani
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER), Few-Shot Learning

Most of the existing deep neural nets on automatic facial expression recognition focus on a set of predefined emotion classes, where the amount of training data has the biggest impact on performance. However, in the standard setting over-parameterised neural networks are not amenable for learning from few samples as they can quickly over-fit. In addition, these approaches do not have such a strong generalisation ability to identify a new category, where the data of each category is too limited and significant variations exist in the expression within the same semantic category. We embrace these challenges and formulate the problem as a low-shot learning, where once the base classifier is deployed, it must rapidly adapt to recognise novel classes using a few samples. In this paper, we revisit and compare existing few-shot learning methods for the low-shot facial expression recognition in terms of their generalisation ability via episode-training. In particular, we extend our analysis on the cross-domain generalisation, where training and test tasks are not drawn from the same distribution. We demonstrate the efficacy of low-shot learning methods through extensive experiments.
Self-Supervised Learning of Video-Induced Visual Invariances
Authors: Michael Tschannen, Josip Djolonga, Marvin Ritter, Aravindh Mahendran, Xiaohua Zhai, Neil Houlsby, Sylvain Gelly, Mario Lucic
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Classification, Self-Supervised Learning, Transfer Learning

We propose a general framework for self-supervised learning of transferable visual representations based on Video-Induced Visual Invariances (VIVI). We consider the implicit hierarchy present in the videos and make use of (i) frame-level invariances (e.g. stability to color and contrast perturbations), (ii) shot/clip-level invariances (e.g. robustness to changes in object orientation and lighting conditions), and (iii) video-level invariances (semantic relationships of scenes across shots/clips), to define a holistic self-supervised loss. Training models using different variants of the proposed framework on videos from the YouTube-8M (YT8M) data set, we obtain state-of-the-art self-supervised transfer learning results on the 19 diverse downstream tasks of the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB), using only 1000 labels per task. We then show how to co-train our models jointly with labeled images, outperforming an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 by 0.8 points with 10x fewer labeled images, as well as the previous best supervised model by 3.7 points using the full ImageNet data set.
CLOTH3D: Clothed 3D Humans
Authors: Hugo Bertiche, Meysam Madadi, Sergio Escalera
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8

This work presents CLOTH3D, the first big scale synthetic dataset of 3D clothed human sequences. CLOTH3D contains a large variability on garment type, topology, shape, size, tightness and fabric. Clothes are simulated on top of thousands of different pose sequences and body shapes, generating realistic cloth dynamics. We provide the dataset with a generative model for cloth generation. We propose a Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE) based on graph convolutions (GCVAE) to learn garment latent spaces. This allows for realistic generation of 3D garments on top of SMPL model for any pose and shape.
PolyTransform: Deep Polygon Transformer for Instance Segmentation
Authors: Justin Liang, Namdar Homayounfar, Wei-Chiu Ma, Yuwen Xiong, Rui Hu, Raquel Urtasun
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we propose PolyTransform, a novel instance segmentation algorithm that produces precise, geometry-preserving masks by combining the strengths of prevailing segmentation approaches and modern polygon-based methods. In particular, we first exploit a segmentation network to generate instance masks. We then convert the masks into a set of polygons that are then fed to a deforming network that transforms the polygons such that they better fit the object boundaries. Our experiments on the challenging Cityscapes dataset show that our PolyTransform significantly improves the performance of the backbone instance segmentation network and ranks 1st on the Cityscapes test-set leaderboard. We also show impressive gains in the interactive annotation setting. We release the code at https://github.com/uber-research/PolyTransform.
KeyPose: Multi-View 3D Labeling and Keypoint Estimation for Transparent Objects
Authors: Xingyu Liu, Rico Jonschkowski, Anelia Angelova, Kurt Konolige
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 3D Pose Estimation, Keypoint Estimation, Pose Estimation, Transparent objects

Estimating the 3D pose of desktop objects is crucial for applications such as robotic manipulation. Many existing approaches to this problem require a depth map of the object for both training and prediction, which restricts them to opaque, lambertian objects that produce good returns in an RGBD sensor. In this paper we forgo using a depth sensor in favor of raw stereo input. We address two problems: first, we establish an easy method for capturing and labeling 3D keypoints on desktop objects with an RGB camera; and second, we develop a deep neural network, called $KeyPose$, that learns to accurately predict object poses using 3D keypoints, from stereo input, and works even for transparent objects. To evaluate the performance of our method, we create a dataset of 15 clear objects in five classes, with 48K 3D-keypoint labeled images. We train both instance and category models, and show generalization to new textures, poses, and objects. KeyPose surpasses state-of-the-art performance in 3D pose estimation on this dataset by factors of 1.5 to 3.5, even in cases where the competing method is provided with ground-truth depth. Stereo input is essential for this performance as it improves results compared to using monocular input by a factor of 2. We will release a public version of the data capture and labeling pipeline, the transparent object database, and the KeyPose models and evaluation code. Project website: https://sites.google.com/corp/view/keypose.
Toward Filament Segmentation Using Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Azim Ahmadzadeh, Sushant S. Mahajan, Dustin J. Kempton, Rafal A. Angryk, Shihao Ji
Date: 2019-11-20 00:00:00

We use a well-known deep neural network framework, called Mask R-CNN, for identification of solar filaments in full-disk H-alpha images from Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO). The image data, collected from BBSO's archive, are integrated with the spatiotemporal metadata of filaments retrieved from the Heliophysics Events Knowledgebase (HEK) system. This integrated data is then treated as the ground-truth in the training process of the model. The available spatial metadata are the output of a currently running filament-detection module developed and maintained by the Feature Finding Team; an international consortium selected by NASA. Despite the known challenges in the identification and characterization of filaments by the existing module, which in turn are inherited into any other module that intends to learn from such outputs, Mask R-CNN shows promising results. Trained and validated on two years worth of BBSO data, this model is then tested on the three following years. Our case-by-case and overall analyses show that Mask R-CNN can clearly compete with the existing module and in some cases even perform better. Several cases of false positives and false negatives, that are correctly segmented by this model are also shown. The overall advantages of using the proposed model are two-fold: First, deep neural networks' performance generally improves as more annotated data, or better annotations are provided. Second, such a model can be scaled up to detect other solar events, as well as a single multi-purpose module. The results presented in this study introduce a proof of concept in benefits of employing deep neural networks for detection of solar events, and in particular, filaments.
Correspondent Banking Networks: Theory and Experiment
Authors: Nima Safaei, Ivan A. Sergienko
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00

We employ the mathematical programming approach in conjunction with the graph theory to study the structure of correspondent banking networks. Optimizing the network requires decisions to be made to onboard, terminate or restrict the bank relationships to optimize the size and overall risk of the network. This study provides theoretical foundation to detect the components, the removal of which does not affect some key properties of the network such as connectivity and diameter. We find that the correspondent banking networks have a feature we call k-accessibility, which helps to drastically reduce the computational burden required for finding the above mentioned components. We prove a number of fundamental theorems related to k-accessible directed graphs, which should be also applicable beyond the particular problem of financial networks. The theoretical findings are verified through the data from a large international bank.
HABNet: Machine Learning, Remote Sensing Based Detection and Prediction of Harmful Algal Blooms
Authors: P. R. Hill, A. Kumar, M. Temimi, D. R. Bull
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This paper describes the application of machine learning techniques to develop a state-of-the-art detection and prediction system for spatiotemporal events found within remote sensing data; specifically, Harmful Algal Bloom events (HABs). We propose an HAB detection system based on: a ground truth historical record of HAB events, a novel spatiotemporal datacube representation of each event (from MODIS and GEBCO bathymetry data) and a variety of machine learning architectures utilising state-of-the-art spatial and temporal analysis methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) components together with Random Forest and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification methods. This work has focused specifically on the case study of the detection of Karenia Brevis Algae (K. brevis) HAB events within the coastal waters of Florida (over 2850 events from 2003 to 2018; an order of magnitude larger than any previous machine learning detection study into HAB events). The development of multimodal spatiotemporal datacube data structures and associated novel machine learning methods give a unique architecture for the automatic detection of environmental events. Specifically, when applied to the detection of HAB events it gives a maximum detection accuracy of 91% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.81 for the Florida data considered. A HAB forecast system was also developed where a temporal subset of each datacube was used to predict the presence of a HAB in the future. This system was not significantly less accurate than the detection system being able to predict with 86% accuracy up to 8 days in the future.
Region-Wise Attack: On Efficient Generation of Robust Physical Adversarial Examples
Authors: Bo Luo, Qiang Xu
Date: 2019-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are shown to be susceptible to adversarial example attacks. Most existing works achieve this malicious objective by crafting subtle pixel-wise perturbations, and they are difficult to launch in the physical world due to inevitable transformations (e.g., different photographic distances and angles). Recently, there are a few research works on generating physical adversarial examples, but they generally require the details of the model a priori, which is often impractical. In this work, we propose a novel physical adversarial attack for arbitrary black-box DNN models, namely Region-Wise Attack. To be specific, we present how to efficiently search for regionwise perturbations to the inputs and determine their shapes, locations and colors via both top-down and bottom-up techniques. In addition, we introduce two fine-tuning techniques to further improve the robustness of our attack. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of the proposed Region-Wise Attack in real world.
Towards better social crisis data with HERMES: Hybrid sensing for EmeRgency ManagEment System
Authors: Marco Avvenuti, Salvatore Bellomo, Stefano Cresci, Leonardo Nizzoli, Maurizio Tesconi
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

People involved in mass emergencies increasingly publish information-rich contents in online social networks (OSNs), thus acting as a distributed and resilient network of human sensors. In this work we present HERMES, a system designed to enrich the information spontaneously disclosed by OSN users in the aftermath of disasters. HERMES leverages a mixed data collection strategy, called hybrid sensing, and state-of-the-art AI techniques. Evaluated in real-world emergencies, HERMES proved to increase: (i) the amount of the available damage information; (ii) the density (up to 7x) and the variety (up to 18x) of the retrieved geographic information; (iii) the geographic coverage (up to 30%) and granularity.
Reinforcement learning for bandwidth estimation and congestion control in real-time communications
Authors: Joyce Fang, Martin Ellis, Bin Li, Siyao Liu, Yasaman Hosseinkashi, Michael Revow, Albert Sadovnikov, Ziyuan Liu, Peng Cheng, Sachin Ashok, David Zhao, Ross Cutler, Yan Lu, Johannes Gehrke
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Bandwidth estimation and congestion control for real-time communications (i.e., audio and video conferencing) remains a difficult problem, despite many years of research. Achieving high quality of experience (QoE) for end users requires continual updates due to changing network architectures and technologies. In this paper, we apply reinforcement learning for the first time to the problem of real-time communications (RTC), where we seek to optimize user-perceived quality. We present initial proof-of-concept results, where we learn an agent to control sending rate in an RTC system, evaluating using both network simulation and real Internet video calls. We discuss the challenges we observed, particularly in designing realistic reward functions that reflect QoE, and in bridging the gap between the training environment and real-world networks.