2023 |
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Alloy Das, Sanket Biswas, Umapada Pal, & Josep Llados. (2023). Diving into the Depths of Spotting Text in Multi-Domain Noisy Scenes.
Abstract: When used in a real-world noisy environment, the capacity to generalize to multiple domains is essential for any autonomous scene text spotting system. However, existing state-of-the-art methods employ pretraining and fine-tuning strategies on natural scene datasets, which do not exploit the feature interaction across other complex domains. In this work, we explore and investigate the problem of domain-agnostic scene text spotting, i.e., training a model on multi-domain source data such that it can directly generalize to target domains rather than being specialized for a specific domain or scenario. In this regard, we present the community a text spotting validation benchmark called Under-Water Text (UWT) for noisy underwater scenes to establish an important case study. Moreover, we also design an efficient super-resolution based end-to-end transformer baseline called DA-TextSpotter which achieves comparable or superior performance over existing text spotting architectures for both regular and arbitrary-shaped scene text spotting benchmarks in terms of both accuracy and model efficiency. The dataset, code and pre-trained models will be released upon acceptance.
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Anders Skaarup Johansen, Kamal Nasrollahi, Sergio Escalera, & Thomas B. Moeslund. (2023). Who Cares about the Weather? Inferring Weather Conditions for Weather-Aware Object Detection in Thermal Images. AS - Applied Sciences, 13(18).
Abstract: Deployments of real-world object detection systems often experience a degradation in performance over time due to concept drift. Systems that leverage thermal cameras are especially susceptible because the respective thermal signatures of objects and their surroundings are highly sensitive to environmental changes. In this study, two types of weather-aware latent conditioning methods are investigated. The proposed method aims to guide two object detectors, (YOLOv5 and Deformable DETR) to become weather-aware. This is achieved by leveraging an auxiliary branch that predicts weather-related information while conditioning intermediate layers of the object detector. While the conditioning methods proposed do not directly improve the accuracy of baseline detectors, it can be observed that conditioned networks manage to extract a weather-related signal from the thermal images, thus resulting in a decreased miss rate at the cost of increased false positives. The extracted signal appears noisy and is thus challenging to regress accurately. This is most likely a result of the qualitative nature of the thermal sensor; thus, further work is needed to identify an ideal method for optimizing the conditioning branch, as well as to further improve the accuracy of the system.
Keywords: thermal; object detection; concept drift; conditioning; weather recognition
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Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Vladimir Somers, Floriane Magera, Xin Zhou, Hassan Mkhallati, et al. (2023). SoccerNet 2023 Challenges Results.
Abstract: The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on this https URL. Baselines and development kits can be found on this https URL.
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Antonio Carta, Andrea Cossu, Vincenzo Lomonaco, Davide Bacciu, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2023). Projected Latent Distillation for Data-Agnostic Consolidation in Distributed Continual Learning.
Abstract: Distributed learning on the edge often comprises self-centered devices (SCD) which learn local tasks independently and are unwilling to contribute to the performance of other SDCs. How do we achieve forward transfer at zero cost for the single SCDs? We formalize this problem as a Distributed Continual Learning scenario, where SCD adapt to local tasks and a CL model consolidates the knowledge from the resulting stream of models without looking at the SCD's private data. Unfortunately, current CL methods are not directly applicable to this scenario. We propose Data-Agnostic Consolidation (DAC), a novel double knowledge distillation method that consolidates the stream of SC models without using the original data. DAC performs distillation in the latent space via a novel Projected Latent Distillation loss. Experimental results show that DAC enables forward transfer between SCDs and reaches state-of-the-art accuracy on Split CIFAR100, CORe50 and Split TinyImageNet, both in reharsal-free and distributed CL scenarios. Somewhat surprisingly, even a single out-of-distribution image is sufficient as the only source of data during consolidation.
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Armin Mehri. (2023). Deep learning based architectures for cross-domain image processing (Angel Sappa, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Human vision is restricted to the visual-optical spectrum. Machine vision is not.
Cameras sensitive to diverse infrared spectral bands can improve the capacities of
autonomous systems and provide a comprehensive view. Relevant scene content
can be made visible, particularly in situations when sensors of other modalities,
such as a visual-optical camera, require a source of illumination. As a result, increasing the level of automation not only avoids human errors but also reduces
machine-induced errors. Furthermore, multi-spectral sensor systems with infrared
imagery as one modality are a rich source of information and can conceivably
increase the robustness of many autonomous systems. Robotics, automobiles,
biometrics, security, surveillance, and the military are some examples of fields
that can profit from the use of infrared imagery in their respective applications.
Although multimodal spectral sensors have come a long way, there are still several
bottlenecks that prevent us from combining their output information and using
them as comprehensive images. The primary issue with infrared imaging is the lack
of potential benefits due to their cost influence on sensor resolution, which grows
exponentially with greater resolution. Due to the more costly sensor technology
required for their development, their resolutions are substantially lower than thoseof regular digital cameras.
This thesis aims to improve beyond-visible-spectrum machine vision by integrating multi-modal spectral sensors. The emphasis is on transforming the produced images to enhance their resolution to match expected human perception, bring the color representation close to human understanding of natural color, and improve machine vision application performance. This research focuses mainly on two tasks, image Colorization and Image Super resolution for both single- and cross-domain problems. We first start with an extensive review of the state of the art in both tasks, point out the shortcomings of existing approaches, and then present our solutions to address their limitations. Our solutions demonstrate that low-cost channel information (i.e., visible image) can be used to improve expensive channel
information (i.e., infrared image), resulting in images with higher quality and closer to human perception at a lower cost than a high-cost infrared camera.
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Armin Mehri, Parichehr Behjati, & Angel Sappa. (2023). TnTViT-G: Transformer in Transformer Network for Guidance Super Resolution. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 11, 11529–11540.
Abstract: Image Super Resolution is a potential approach that can improve the image quality of low-resolution optical sensors, leading to improved performance in various industrial applications. It is important to emphasize that most state-of-the-art super resolution algorithms often use a single channel of input data for training and inference. However, this practice ignores the fact that the cost of acquiring high-resolution images in various spectral domains can differ a lot from one another. In this paper, we attempt to exploit complementary information from a low-cost channel (visible image) to increase the image quality of an expensive channel (infrared image). We propose a dual stream Transformer-based super resolution approach that uses the visible image as a guide to super-resolve another spectral band image. To this end, we introduce Transformer in Transformer network for Guidance super resolution, named TnTViT-G, an efficient and effective method that extracts the features of input images via different streams and fuses them together at various stages. In addition, unlike other guidance super resolution approaches, TnTViT-G is not limited to a fixed upsample size and it can generate super-resolved images of any size. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art super resolution approaches. TnTViT-G surpasses state-of-the-art methods by up to 0.19∼2.3dB , while it is memory efficient.
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Armin Mehri, Parichehr Behjati, Dario Carpio, & Angel Sappa. (2023). SRFormer: Efficient Yet Powerful Transformer Network for Single Image Super Resolution. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 11.
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in single image super resolution have investigated the potential of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to improve performance. However, CNNs based models suffer from their limited fields and their inability to adapt to the input content. Recently, Transformer based models were presented, which demonstrated major performance gains in Natural Language Processing and Vision tasks while mitigating the drawbacks of CNNs. Nevertheless, Transformer computational complexity can increase quadratically for high-resolution images, and the fact that it ignores the original structures of the image by converting them to the 1D structure can make it problematic to capture the local context information and adapt it for real-time applications. In this paper, we present, SRFormer, an efficient yet powerful Transformer-based architecture, by making several key designs in the building of Transformer blocks and Transformer layers that allow us to consider the original structure of the image (i.e., 2D structure) while capturing both local and global dependencies without raising computational demands or memory consumption. We also present a Gated Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Feature Fusion module to aggregate the features of different stages of Transformer blocks by focusing on inter-spatial relationships while adding minor computational costs to the network. We have conducted extensive experiments on several super-resolution benchmark datasets to evaluate our approach. SRFormer demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods from both Transformer and Convolutional networks, with an improvement margin of 0.1∼0.53dB . Furthermore, while SRFormer has almost the same model size, it outperforms SwinIR by 0.47% and inference time by half the time of SwinIR. The code will be available on GitHub.
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Artur Xarles, Sergio Escalera, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Albert Clapes. (2023). ASTRA: An Action Spotting TRAnsformer for Soccer Videos. In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Multimedia Content Analysis in Sports (93–102).
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce ASTRA, a Transformer-based model designed for the task of Action Spotting in soccer matches. ASTRA addresses several challenges inherent in the task and dataset, including the requirement for precise action localization, the presence of a long-tail data distribution, non-visibility in certain actions, and inherent label noise. To do so, ASTRA incorporates (a) a Transformer encoder-decoder architecture to achieve the desired output temporal resolution and to produce precise predictions, (b) a balanced mixup strategy to handle the long-tail distribution of the data, (c) an uncertainty-aware displacement head to capture the label variability, and (d) input audio signal to enhance detection of non-visible actions. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of ASTRA, achieving a tight Average-mAP of 66.82 on the test set. Moreover, in the SoccerNet 2023 Action Spotting challenge, we secure the 3rd position with an Average-mAP of 70.21 on the challenge set.
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Asma Bensalah, Antonio Parziale, Giuseppe De Gregorio, Angelo Marcelli, Alicia Fornes, & Josep Llados. (2023). I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better: In-air Movement for Alzheimer Handwriting Synthetic Generation. In 21st International Graphonomics Conference (136–148).
Abstract: During recent years, there here has been a boom in terms of deep learning use for handwriting analysis and recognition. One main application for handwriting analysis is early detection and diagnosis in the health field. Unfortunately, most real case problems still suffer a scarcity of data, which makes difficult the use of deep learning-based models. To alleviate this problem, some works resort to synthetic data generation. Lately, more works are directed towards guided data synthetic generation, a generation that uses the domain and data knowledge to generate realistic data that can be useful to train deep learning models. In this work, we combine the domain knowledge about the Alzheimer’s disease for handwriting and use it for a more guided data generation. Concretely, we have explored the use of in-air movements for synthetic data generation.
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Ayan Banerjee, Sanket Biswas, Josep Llados, & Umapada Pal. (2023). SemiDocSeg: Harnessing Semi-Supervised Learning for Document Layout Analysis.
Abstract: Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is the process of automatically identifying and categorizing the structural components (e.g. Text, Figure, Table, etc.) within a document to extract meaningful content and establish the page's layout structure. It is a crucial stage in document parsing, contributing to their comprehension. However, traditional DLA approaches often demand a significant volume of labeled training data, and the labor-intensive task of generating high-quality annotated training data poses a substantial challenge. In order to address this challenge, we proposed a semi-supervised setting that aims to perform learning on limited annotated categories by eliminating exhaustive and expensive mask annotations. The proposed setting is expected to be generalizable to novel categories as it learns the underlying positional information through a support set and class information through Co-Occurrence that can be generalized from annotated categories to novel categories. Here, we first extract features from the input image and support set with a shared multi-scale feature acquisition backbone. Then, the extracted feature representation is fed to the transformer encoder as a query. Later on, we utilize a semantic embedding network before the decoder to capture the underlying semantic relationships and similarities between different instances, enabling the model to make accurate predictions or classifications with only a limited amount of labeled data. Extensive experimentation on competitive benchmarks like PRIMA, DocLayNet, and Historical Japanese (HJ) demonstrate that this generalized setup obtains significant performance compared to the conventional supervised approach.
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