Curved Text Detection in Natural Scene Images with Semi- and Weakly-Supervised Learning
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
Detecting curved text in the wild is very challenging. Recently, most state-of-the-art methods are segmentation based and require pixel-level annotations. We propose a novel scheme to train an accurate text detector using only a small amount of pixel-level annotated data and a large amount of data annotated with rectangles or even unlabeled data. A baseline model is first obtained by training with the pixel-level annotated data and then used to annotate unlabeled or weakly labeled data. A novel strategy which utilizes ground-truth bounding boxes to generate pseudo mask annotations is proposed in weakly-supervised learning. Experimental results on CTW1500 and Total-Text demonstrate that our method can substantially reduce the requirement of pixel-level annotated data. Our method can also generalize well across two datasets. The performance of the proposed method is comparable with the state-of-the-art methods with only 10% pixel-level annotated data and 90% rectangle-level weakly annotated data.
Shahid Beheshti University（沙希德·贝赫什提大学）；Cyberspace Research Institute, Shahid Beheshti University（沙希德·贝赫什提大学网络空间研究院）
Image semantic segmentation is parsing image into several partitions in such a way that each region of which involves a semantic concept. In a weakly supervised manner, since only image-level labels are available, discriminating objects from the background is challenging, and in some cases, much more difficult. More specifically, some objects which are commonly seen in one specific scene (e.g. 'train' typically is seen on 'railroad track') are much more likely to be confused. In this paper, we propose a method to add the target-specific scenes in order to overcome the aforementioned problem. A…
Institute for Infocomm Research（资讯通信研究院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
The requiring of large amounts of annotated training data has become a common constraint on various deep learning systems. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised scene text detection method (WeText) that trains robust and accurate scene text detection models by learning from unannotated or weakly annotated data. With a "light" supervised model trained on a small fully annotated dataset, we explore semi-supervised and weakly supervised learning on a large unannotated dataset and a large weakly annotated dataset, respectively. For the unsupervised learning, the light supervised model is a…
INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Woven Planet Holdings；Toyota Motor Europe（丰田汽车欧洲公司）
Video anomaly detection in surveillance systems with only video-level labels (i.e. weakly-supervised) is challenging. This is due to, (i) the complex integration of human and scene based anomalies comprising of subtle and sharp spatio-temporal cues in real-world scenarios, (ii) non-optimal optimization between normal and anomaly instances under weak supervision. In this paper, we propose a Human-Scene Network to learn discriminative representations by capturing both subtle and strong cues in a dissociative manner. In addition, a self-rectifying loss is also proposed that dynamically computes t…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
This paper investigates a fundamental problem of scene understanding: how to parse a scene image into a structured configuration (i.e., a semantic object hierarchy with object interaction relations). We propose a deep architecture consisting of two networks: i) a convolutional neural network (CNN) extracting the image representation for pixel-wise object labeling and ii) a recursive neural network (RsNN) discovering the hierarchical object structure and the inter-object relations. Rather than relying on elaborative annotations (e.g., manually labeled semantic maps and relations), we train our …
State-of-the-art scene text detection techniques predict quadrilateral boxes that are prone to localization errors while dealing with straight or curved text lines of different orientations and lengths in scenes. This paper presents a novel multi-scale shape regression network (MSR) that is capable of locating text lines of different lengths, shapes and curvatures in scenes. The proposed MSR detects scene texts by predicting dense text boundary points that inherently capture the location and shape of text lines accurately and are also more tolerant to the variation of text line length as compa…
Peking University（北京大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
In this paper, we present a new Mask R-CNN based text detection approach which can robustly detect multi-oriented and curved text from natural scene images in a unified manner. To enhance the feature representation ability of Mask R-CNN for text detection tasks, we propose to use the Pyramid Attention Network (PAN) as a new backbone network of Mask R-CNN. Experiments demonstrate that PAN can suppress false alarms caused by text-like backgrounds more effectively. Our proposed approach has achieved superior performance on both multi-oriented (ICDAR-2015, ICDAR-2017 MLT) and curved (SCUT-CTW1500)…
Since the preparation of labeled data for training semantic segmentation networks of point clouds is a time-consuming process, weakly supervised approaches have been introduced to learn from only a small fraction of data. These methods are typically based on learning with contrastive losses while automatically deriving per-point pseudo-labels from a sparse set of user-annotated labels. In this paper, our key observation is that the selection of what samples to annotate is as important as how these samples are used for training. Thus, we introduce a method for weakly supervised segmentation of …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Scene text detection is an important step of scene text reading system. The main challenges lie on significantly varied sizes and aspect ratios, arbitrary orientations and shapes. Driven by recent progress in deep learning, impressive performances have been achieved for multi-oriented text detection. Yet, the performance drops dramatically in detecting curved texts due to the limited text representation (e.g., horizontal bounding boxes, rotated rectangles, or quadrilaterals). It is of great interest to detect curved texts, which are actually very common in natural scenes. In this paper, we pre…
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems（马克斯·普朗克-ETH学习系统中心）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Microsoft（微软）
Representing scenes at the granularity of objects is a prerequisite for scene understanding and decision making. We propose PriSMONet, a novel approach based on Prior Shape knowledge for learning Multi-Object 3D scene decomposition and representations from single images. Our approach learns to decompose images of synthetic scenes with multiple objects on a planar surface into its constituent scene objects and to infer their 3D properties from a single view. A recurrent encoder regresses a latent representation of 3D shape, pose and texture of each object from an input RGB image. By differentia…
Semantic segmentation, a pixel-level vision task, is developed rapidly by using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Training CNNs requires a large amount of labeled data, but manually annotating data is difficult. For emancipating manpower, in recent years, some synthetic datasets are released. However, they are still different from real scenes, which causes that training a model on the synthetic data (source domain) cannot achieve a good performance on real urban scenes (target domain). In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised adversarial domain adaptation to improve the segmentation p…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；ByteDance Inc.（字节跳动公司）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Recently, Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) techniques have greatly benefited various vision-language tasks by jointly learning visual and textual representations, which intuitively helps in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tasks due to the rich visual and textual information in scene text images. However, these methods cannot well cope with OCR tasks because of the difficulty in both instance-level text encoding and image-text pair acquisition (i.e. images and captured texts in them). This paper presents a weakly supervised pre-training method, oCLIP, which can acquire effective scene tex…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；University of Maryland - Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
People can recognize scenes across many different modalities beyond natural images. In this paper, we investigate how to learn cross-modal scene representations that transfer across modalities. To study this problem, we introduce a new cross-modal scene dataset. While convolutional neural networks can categorize cross-modal scenes well, they also learn an intermediate representation not aligned across modalities, which is undesirable for cross-modal transfer applications. We present methods to regularize cross-modal convolutional neural networks so that they have a shared representation that i…
UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）；OPPO US Research Center（OPPO美国研究中心）；InnoPeak Technology（InnoPeak科技）
Segmentation-based scene text detection methods have been widely adopted for arbitrary-shaped text detection recently, since they make accurate pixel-level predictions on curved text instances and can facilitate real-time inference without time-consuming processing on anchors. However, current segmentation-based models are unable to learn the shapes of curved texts and often require complex label assignments or repeated feature aggregations for more accurate detection. In this paper, we propose RSCA: a Real-time Segmentation-based Context-Aware model for arbitrary-shaped scene text detection, …
Humans naturally perceive a 3D scene in front of them through accumulation of information obtained from multiple interconnected projections of the scene and by interpreting their correspondence. This phenomenon has inspired artificial intelligence models to extract the depth and view angle of the observed scene by modeling the correspondence between different views of that scene. Our paper is built upon previous works in the field of unsupervised depth and relative camera pose estimation from temporal consecutive video frames using deep learning (DL) models. Our approach uses a hybrid learning…
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Shenzhen Research Institute（香港理工大学深圳研究院）；Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Smart Cities Research Institute, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学潘乐陶慈善基金会智慧城市研究院）
Reliance on vast annotations to achieve leading performance severely restricts the practicality of large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation. For the purpose of reducing data annotation costs, effective labeling schemes are developed and contribute to attaining competitive results under weak supervision strategy. Revisiting current weak label forms, we introduce One Class One Click (OCOC), a low cost yet informative quasi scene-level label, which encapsulates point-level and scene-level annotations. An active weakly supervised framework is proposed to leverage scarce labels by involving we…
Peking University（北京大学）；IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
Semantic scene parsing is suffering from the fact that pixel-level annotations are hard to be collected. To tackle this issue, we propose a Point-based Distance Metric Learning (PDML) in this paper. PDML does not require dense annotated masks and only leverages several labeled points that are much easier to obtain to guide the training process. Concretely, we leverage semantic relationship among the annotated points by encouraging the feature representations of the intra- and inter-category points to keep consistent, i.e. points within the same category should have more similar feature represe…
We present a detector for curved text in natural images. We model scene text instances as tubes around their medial axes and introduce a parametrization-invariant loss function. We train a two-stage curved text detector, and evaluate it on the curved text benchmarks CTW-1500 and Total-Text. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results or improves upon them, notably for CTW-1500 by over 8 percentage points in F-score.
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与成像工程技术研究中心）
Depth estimation is usually ill-posed and ambiguous for monocular camera-based 3D multi-person pose estimation. Since LiDAR can capture accurate depth information in long-range scenes, it can benefit both the global localization of individuals and the 3D pose estimation by providing rich geometry features. Motivated by this, we propose a monocular camera and single LiDAR-based method for 3D multi-person pose estimation in large-scale scenes, which is easy to deploy and insensitive to light. Specifically, we design an effective fusion strategy to take advantage of multi-modal input data, includ…
Text in curve orientation, despite being one of the common text orientations in real world environment, has close to zero existence in well received scene text datasets such as ICDAR2013 and MSRA-TD500. The main motivation of Total-Text is to fill this gap and facilitate a new research direction for the scene text community. On top of the conventional horizontal and multi-oriented texts, it features curved-oriented text. Total-Text is highly diversified in orientations, more than half of its images have a combination of more than two orientations. Recently, a new breed of solutions that casted…
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（产业技术综合研究所）；Artificial Intelligence Research Center（人工智能研究中心）
This paper presents a novel semantic scene change detection scheme with only weak supervision. A straightforward approach for this task is to train a semantic change detection network directly from a large-scale dataset in an end-to-end manner. However, a specific dataset for this task, which is usually labor-intensive and time-consuming, becomes indispensable. To avoid this problem, we propose to train this kind of network from existing datasets by dividing this task into change detection and semantic extraction. On the other hand, the difference in camera viewpoints, for example, images of t…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；University of California, Irvine（加利福尼亚大学尔湾分校）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Traditional feature encoding scheme (e.g., Fisher vector) with local descriptors (e.g., SIFT) and recent convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are two classes of successful methods for image recognition. In this paper, we propose a hybrid representation, which leverages the discriminative capacity of CNNs and the simplicity of descriptor encoding schema for image recognition, with a focus on scene recognition. To this end, we make three main contributions from the following aspects. First, we propose a patch-level and end-to-end architecture to model the appearance of local patches, called {\em…
We propose a weakly-supervised approach for conditional image generation of complex scenes where a user has fine control over objects appearing in the scene. We exploit sparse semantic maps to control object shapes and classes, as well as textual descriptions or attributes to control both local and global style. In order to condition our model on textual descriptions, we introduce a semantic attention module whose computational cost is independent of the image resolution. To further augment the controllability of the scene, we propose a two-step generation scheme that decomposes background and…
Weakly Supervised Cross-Modal Learning for 4D Radar Scene Flow Estimation
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China（浙江大学）；Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Multi-Modal Communication Networks and Intelligent Information Processing（浙江省多模态通信网络与智能信息处理重点实验室）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Recently, increasing efforts have been focused on Weakly Supervised Scene Graph Generation (WSSGG). The mainstream solution for WSSGG typically follows the same pipeline: they first align text entities in the weak image-level supervisions (e.g., unlocalized relation triplets or captions) with image regions, and then train SGG models in a fully-supervised manner with aligned instance-level "pseudo" labels. However, we argue that most existing WSSGG works only focus on object-consistency, which means the grounded regions should have the same object category label as text entities. While they neg…
The City College of New York（纽约城市学院）；The City College（城市学院）；The Graduate Center, the City University of New York（纽约城市大学研究生中心）
The deficiency of 3D segmentation labels is one of the main obstacles to effective point cloud segmentation, especially for scenes in the wild with varieties of different objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel deep graph convolutional network-based framework for large-scale semantic scene segmentation in point clouds with sole 2D supervision. Different with numerous preceding multi-view supervised approaches focusing on single object point clouds, we argue that 2D supervision is capable of providing sufficient guidance information for training 3D semantic segmentation models of n…
CAD model retrieval to real-world scene observations has shown strong promise as a basis for 3D perception of objects and a clean, lightweight mesh-based scene representation; however, current approaches to retrieve CAD models to a query scan rely on expensive manual annotations of 1:1 associations of CAD-scan objects, which typically contain strong lower-level geometric differences. We thus propose a new weakly-supervised approach to retrieve semantically and structurally similar CAD models to a query 3D scanned scene without requiring any CAD-scan associations, and only object detection info…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Recognizing text in natural images is a challenging task with many unsolved problems. Different from those in documents, words in natural images often possess irregular shapes, which are caused by perspective distortion, curved character placement, etc. We propose RARE (Robust text recognizer with Automatic REctification), a recognition model that is robust to irregular text. RARE is a specially-designed deep neural network, which consists of a Spatial Transformer Network (STN) and a Sequence Recognition Network (SRN). In testing, an image is firstly rectified via a predicted Thin-Plate-Spline…
Weakly-Supervised 3D Scene Graph Generation via Visual-Linguistic Assisted Pseudo-labeling
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机与软件学院）；College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学电子与信息工程学院）；Meituan（美团）
School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）
It is laborious to manually label point cloud data for training high-quality 3D object detectors. This work proposes a weakly supervised approach for 3D object detection, only requiring a small set of weakly annotated scenes, associated with a few precisely labeled object instances. This is achieved by a two-stage architecture design. Stage-1 learns to generate cylindrical object proposals under weak supervision, i.e., only the horizontal centers of objects are click-annotated on bird's view scenes. Stage-2 learns to refine the cylindrical proposals to get cuboids and confidence scores, using …
Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学哈索·普拉特纳学院）
The challenging field of scene text detection requires complex data annotation, which is time-consuming and expensive. Techniques, such as weak supervision, can reduce the amount of data needed. In this paper we propose a weak supervision method for scene text detection, which makes use of reinforcement learning (RL). The reward received by the RL agent is estimated by a neural network, instead of being inferred from ground-truth labels. First, we enhance an existing supervised RL approach to text detection with several training optimizations, allowing us to close the performance gap to regres…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
High-resolution hyperspectral images (HSIs) contain the response of each pixel in different spectral bands, which can be used to effectively distinguish various objects in complex scenes. While HSI cameras have become low cost, algorithms based on it have not been well exploited. In this paper, we focus on a novel topic, weakly-supervised semantic segmentation in cityscape via HSIs. It is based on the idea that high-resolution HSIs in city scenes contain rich spectral information, which can be easily associated to semantics without manual labeling. Therefore, it enables low cost, highly reliab…
In this paper we propose a novel learning framework called Supervised and Weakly Supervised Learning where the goal is to learn simultaneously from weakly and strongly labeled data. Strongly labeled data can be simply understood as fully supervised data where all labeled instances are available. In weakly supervised learning only data is weakly labeled which prevents one from directly applying supervised learning methods. Our proposed framework is motivated by the fact that a small amount of strongly labeled data can give considerable improvement over only weakly supervised learning. The prima…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Meituan（美团）
Scene text detection, which is one of the most popular topics in both academia and industry, can achieve remarkable performance with sufficient training data. However, the annotation costs of scene text detection are huge with traditional labeling methods due to the various shapes of texts. Thus, it is practical and insightful to study simpler labeling methods without harming the detection performance. In this paper, we propose to annotate the texts by scribble lines instead of polygons for text detection. It is a general labeling method for texts with various shapes and requires low labeling …
Recently proposed methods for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation have achieved impressive performance in predicting pixel classes despite being trained with only image labels which lack positional information. Because image annotations are cheaper and quicker to generate, weak supervision is more practical than full supervision for training segmentation algorithms. These methods have been predominantly developed to solve the background separation and partial segmentation problems presented by natural scene images and it is unclear whether they can be simply transferred to other domains wi…
SLAMcore Ltd（SLAMcore有限公司）；Université Paris Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）；CEA（法国原子能和替代能源委员会）；LIST（（法国原子能委员会）实验室集成系统与技术研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；UCA（克莱蒙奥弗涅大学）；CHU（克莱蒙费朗大学医院）
Specularity prediction is essential to many computer vision applications, giving important visual cues usable in Augmented Reality (AR), Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM), 3D reconstruction and material modeling. However, it is a challenging task requiring numerous information from the scene including the camera pose, the geometry of the scene, the light sources and the material properties. Our previous work addressed this task by creating an explicit model using an ellipsoid whose projection fits the specularity image contours for a given camera pose. These ellipsoid-based approach…
Institute of Engineering & Management（工程与管理学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）；Indian Statistical Institute（印度统计研究所）
In this paper, we bring forth a novel approach of video text detection using Fourier-Laplacian filtering in the frequency domain that includes a verification technique using Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The proposed approach deals with the text region appearing not only in horizontal or vertical directions, but also in any other oblique or curved orientation in the image. Until now only a few methods have been proposed that look into curved text detection in video frames, wherein lies our novelty. In our approach, we first apply Fourier-Laplacian transform on the image followed by an ideal Lapla…
Scene text detection methods based on neural networks have emerged recently and have shown promising results. Previous methods trained with rigid word-level bounding boxes exhibit limitations in representing the text region in an arbitrary shape. In this paper, we propose a new scene text detection method to effectively detect text area by exploring each character and affinity between characters. To overcome the lack of individual character level annotations, our proposed framework exploits both the given character-level annotations for synthetic images and the estimated character-level ground…
Southeast University（东南大学）；Centre de Recherche en Information Biomédicale Sino-Français (CRIBs)（中法生物医学信息研究中心）；Univ Rennes（雷恩大学）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；LTSI - UMR1099（信号与图像处理实验室）
Deep learning-based medical image registration and segmentation joint models utilize the complementarity (augmentation data or weakly supervised data from registration, region constraints from segmentation) to bring mutual improvement in complex scene and few-shot situation. However, further adoption of the joint models are hindered: 1) the diversity of augmentation data is reduced limiting the further enhancement of segmentation, 2) misaligned regions in weakly supervised data disturb the training process, 3) lack of label-based region constraints in few-shot situation limits the registration…
We propose a data-driven scene flow estimation algorithm exploiting the observation that many 3D scenes can be explained by a collection of agents moving as rigid bodies. At the core of our method lies a deep architecture able to reason at the \textbf{object-level} by considering 3D scene flow in conjunction with other 3D tasks. This object level abstraction, enables us to relax the requirement for dense scene flow supervision with simpler binary background segmentation mask and ego-motion annotations. Our mild supervision requirements make our method well suited for recently released massive …
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Weakly supervised detection of anomalies in surveillance videos is a challenging task. Going beyond existing works that have deficient capabilities to localize anomalies in long videos, we propose a novel glance and focus network to effectively integrate spatial-temporal information for accurate anomaly detection. In addition, we empirically found that existing approaches that use feature magnitudes to represent the degree of anomalies typically ignore the effects of scene variations, and hence result in sub-optimal performance due to the inconsistency of feature magnitudes across scenes. To a…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Westone Cryptologic Research Center（威斯顿密码学研究中心）；Xiamen No.1 High School（厦门第一中学）
In this paper, we introduce a novel end-end framework for multi-oriented scene text detection from an instance-aware semantic segmentation perspective. We present Fused Text Segmentation Networks, which combine multi-level features during the feature extracting as text instance may rely on finer feature expression compared to general objects. It detects and segments the text instance jointly and simultaneously, leveraging merits from both semantic segmentation task and region proposal based object detection task. Not involving any extra pipelines, our approach surpasses the current state of th…
We propose to model complex visual scenes using a non-parametric Bayesian model learned from weakly labelled images abundant on media sharing sites such as Flickr. Given weak image-level annotations of objects and attributes without locations or associations between them, our model aims to learn the appearance of object and attribute classes as well as their association on each object instance. Once learned, given an image, our model can be deployed to tackle a number of vision problems in a joint and coherent manner, including recognising objects in the scene (automatic object annotation), de…
General Geometry-aware Weakly Supervised 3D Object Detection
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, HKISI, CAS（中国科学院香港人工智能与机器人研究所）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
