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Ruben Ballester, Xavier Arnal Clemente, Carles Casacuberta, Meysam Madadi, & Ciprian Corneanu. (2022). Towards explaining the generalization gap in neural networks using topological data analysis.
Abstract: Understanding how neural networks generalize on unseen data is crucial for designing more robust and reliable models. In this paper, we study the generalization gap of neural networks using methods from topological data analysis. For this purpose, we compute homological persistence diagrams of weighted graphs constructed from neuron activation correlations after a training phase, aiming to capture patterns that are linked to the generalization capacity of the network. We compare the usefulness of different numerical summaries from persistence diagrams and show that a combination of some of them can accurately predict and partially explain the generalization gap without the need of a test set. Evaluation on two computer vision recognition tasks (CIFAR10 and SVHN) shows competitive generalization gap prediction when compared against state-of-the-art methods.
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S.K. Jemni, Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Yousri Kessentini, & Alicia Fornes. (2022). Enhance to Read Better: A Multi-Task Adversarial Network for Handwritten Document Image Enhancement. PR - Pattern Recognition, 123, 108370.
Abstract: Handwritten document images can be highly affected by degradation for different reasons: Paper ageing, daily-life scenarios (wrinkles, dust, etc.), bad scanning process and so on. These artifacts raise many readability issues for current Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) algorithms and severely devalue their efficiency. In this paper, we propose an end to end architecture based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to recover the degraded documents into a and form. Unlike the most well-known document binarization methods, which try to improve the visual quality of the degraded document, the proposed architecture integrates a handwritten text recognizer that promotes the generated document image to be more readable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use the text information while binarizing handwritten documents. Extensive experiments conducted on degraded Arabic and Latin handwritten documents demonstrate the usefulness of integrating the recognizer within the GAN architecture, which improves both the visual quality and the readability of the degraded document images. Moreover, we outperform the state of the art in H-DIBCO challenges, after fine tuning our pre-trained model with synthetically degraded Latin handwritten images, on this task.
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Saad Minhas, Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Shoaib Ehsan, & Klaus McDonald Maier. (2022). Effects of Non-Driving Related Tasks during Self-Driving mode. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 23(2), 1391–1399.
Abstract: Perception reaction time and mental workload have proven to be crucial in manual driving. Moreover, in highly automated cars, where most of the research is focusing on Level 4 Autonomous driving, take-over performance is also a key factor when taking road safety into account. This study aims to investigate how the immersion in non-driving related tasks affects the take-over performance of drivers in given scenarios. The paper also highlights the use of virtual simulators to gather efficient data that can be crucial in easing the transition between manual and autonomous driving scenarios. The use of Computer Aided Simulations is of absolute importance in this day and age since the automotive industry is rapidly moving towards Autonomous technology. An experiment comprising of 40 subjects was performed to examine the reaction times of driver and the influence of other variables in the success of take-over performance in highly automated driving under different circumstances within a highway virtual environment. The results reflect the relationship between reaction times under different scenarios that the drivers might face under the circumstances stated above as well as the importance of variables such as velocity in the success on regaining car control after automated driving. The implications of the results acquired are important for understanding the criteria needed for designing Human Machine Interfaces specifically aimed towards automated driving conditions. Understanding the need to keep drivers in the loop during automation, whilst allowing drivers to safely engage in other non-driving related tasks is an important research area which can be aided by the proposed study.
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Saad Minhas, Zeba Khanam, Shoaib Ehsan, Klaus McDonald Maier, & Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2022). Weather Classification by Utilizing Synthetic Data. SENS - Sensors, 22(9), 3193.
Abstract: Weather prediction from real-world images can be termed a complex task when targeting classification using neural networks. Moreover, the number of images throughout the available datasets can contain a huge amount of variance when comparing locations with the weather those images are representing. In this article, the capabilities of a custom built driver simulator are explored specifically to simulate a wide range of weather conditions. Moreover, the performance of a new synthetic dataset generated by the above simulator is also assessed. The results indicate that the use of synthetic datasets in conjunction with real-world datasets can increase the training efficiency of the CNNs by as much as 74%. The article paves a way forward to tackle the persistent problem of bias in vision-based datasets.
Keywords: Weather classification; synthetic data; dataset; autonomous car; computer vision; advanced driver assistance systems; deep learning; intelligent transportation systems
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Saiping Zhang, Luis Herranz, Marta Mrak, Marc Gorriz Blanch, Shuai Wan, & Fuzheng Yang. (2022). DCNGAN: A Deformable Convolution-Based GAN with QP Adaptation for Perceptual Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video. In 47th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution-based generative adversarial network (DCNGAN) for perceptual quality enhancement of compressed videos. DCNGAN is also adaptive to the quantization parameters (QPs). Compared with optical flows, deformable convolutions are more effective and efficient to align frames. Deformable convolutions can operate on multiple frames, thus leveraging more temporal information, which is beneficial for enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed videos. Instead of aligning frames in a pairwise manner, the deformable convolution can process multiple frames simultaneously, which leads to lower computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DCNGAN outperforms other state-of-the-art compressed video quality enhancement algorithms.
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Saiping Zhang, L. H., Marta Mrak, Marc Gorriz Blanch, Shuai Wan, Fuzheng Yang. (2022). PeQuENet: Perceptual Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video with Adaptation-and Attention-based Network.
Abstract: In this paper we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework to enhance the perceptual quality of compressed videos. Our framework includes attention and adaptation to different quantization parameters (QPs) in a single model. The attention module exploits global receptive fields that can capture and align long-range correlations between consecutive frames, which can be beneficial for enhancing perceptual quality of videos. The frame to be enhanced is fed into the deep network together with its neighboring frames, and in the first stage features at different depths are extracted. Then extracted features are fed into attention blocks to explore global temporal correlations, followed by a series of upsampling and convolution layers. Finally, the resulting features are processed by the QP-conditional adaptation module which leverages the corresponding QP information. In this way, a single model can be used to enhance adaptively to various QPs without requiring multiple models specific for every QP value, while having similar performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed PeQuENet compared with the state-of-the-art compressed video quality enhancement algorithms.
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Sergi Garcia Bordils, Andres Mafla, Ali Furkan Biten, Oren Nuriel, Aviad Aberdam, Shai Mazor, et al. (2022). Out-of-Vocabulary Challenge Report. In Proceedings European Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (Vol. 13804, 359–375). LNCS.
Abstract: This paper presents final results of the Out-Of-Vocabulary 2022 (OOV) challenge. The OOV contest introduces an important aspect that is not commonly studied by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models, namely, the recognition of unseen scene text instances at training time. The competition compiles a collection of public scene text datasets comprising of 326,385 images with 4,864,405 scene text instances, thus covering a wide range of data distributions. A new and independent validation and test set is formed with scene text instances that are out of vocabulary at training time. The competition was structured in two tasks, end-to-end and cropped scene text recognition respectively. A thorough analysis of results from baselines and different participants is presented. Interestingly, current state-of-the-art models show a significant performance gap under the newly studied setting. We conclude that the OOV dataset proposed in this challenge will be an essential area to be explored in order to develop scene text models that achieve more robust and generalized predictions.
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Sergi Garcia Bordils, George Tom, Sangeeth Reddy, Minesh Mathew, Marçal Rusiñol, C.V. Jawahar, et al. (2022). Read While You Drive-Multilingual Text Tracking on the Road. In 15th IAPR International workshop on document analysis systems (Vol. 13237, 756–770). LNCS.
Abstract: Visual data obtained during driving scenarios usually contain large amounts of text that conveys semantic information necessary to analyse the urban environment and is integral to the traffic control plan. Yet, research on autonomous driving or driver assistance systems typically ignores this information. To advance research in this direction, we present RoadText-3K, a large driving video dataset with fully annotated text. RoadText-3K is three times bigger than its predecessor and contains data from varied geographical locations, unconstrained driving conditions and multiple languages and scripts. We offer a comprehensive analysis of tracking by detection and detection by tracking methods exploring the limits of state-of-the-art text detection. Finally, we propose a new end-to-end trainable tracking model that yields state-of-the-art results on this challenging dataset. Our experiments demonstrate the complexity and variability of RoadText-3K and establish a new, realistic benchmark for scene text tracking in the wild.
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Shiqi Yang, Yaxing Wang, Kai Wang, Shangling Jui, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2022). Attracting and Dispersing: A Simple Approach for Source-free Domain Adaptation. In 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
Abstract: We propose a simple but effective source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) method.
Treating SFDA as an unsupervised clustering problem and following the intuition
that local neighbors in feature space should have more similar predictions than
other features, we propose to optimize an objective of prediction consistency. This
objective encourages local neighborhood features in feature space to have similar
predictions while features farther away in feature space have dissimilar predictions, leading to efficient feature clustering and cluster assignment simultaneously. For efficient training, we seek to optimize an upper-bound of the objective resulting in two simple terms. Furthermore, we relate popular existing methods in domain adaptation, source-free domain adaptation and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity. The experimental results prove the superiority of our method, and our method can be adopted as a simple but strong baseline for future research in SFDA. Our method can be also adapted to source-free open-set and partial-set DA which further shows the generalization ability of our method.
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Shiqi Yang, Yaxing Wang, Kai Wang, Shangling Jui, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2022). Local Prediction Aggregation: A Frustratingly Easy Source-free Domain Adaptation Method.
Abstract: We propose a simple but effective source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) method. Treating SFDA as an unsupervised clustering problem and following the intuition that local neighbors in feature space should have more similar predictions than other features, we propose to optimize an objective of prediction consistency. This objective encourages local neighborhood features in feature space to have similar predictions while features farther away in feature space have dissimilar predictions, leading to efficient feature clustering and cluster assignment simultaneously. For efficient training, we seek to optimize an upper-bound of the objective resulting in two simple terms. Furthermore, we relate popular existing methods in domain adaptation, source-free domain adaptation and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity. The experimental results prove the superiority of our method, and our method can be adopted as a simple but strong baseline for future research in SFDA. Our method can be also adapted to source-free open-set and partial-set DA which further shows the generalization ability of our method. Code is available in this https URL.
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