Text recognition has attracted considerable research interests because of its various applications. The cutting-edge text recognition methods are based on attention mechanisms. However, most of attention methods usually suffer from serious alignment problem due to its recurrency alignment operation, where the alignment relies on historical decoding results. To remedy this issue, we propose a decoupled attention network (DAN), which decouples the alignment operation from using historical decoding results. DAN is an effective, flexible and robust end-to-end text recognizer, which consists of three components: 1) a feature encoder that extracts visual features from the input image; 2) a convolutional alignment module that performs the alignment operation based on visual features from the encoder; and 3) a decoupled text decoder that makes final prediction by jointly using the feature map and attention maps. Experimental results show that DAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple text recognition tasks, including offline handwritten text recognition and regular/irregular scene text recognition.
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；SCUT-Zhuhai Institute of Modern Industrial Innovation（华南理工大学珠海现代产业创新研究院）
Irregular text is widely used. However, it is considerably difficult to recognize because of its various shapes and distorted patterns. In this paper, we thus propose a multi-object rectified attention network (MORAN) for general scene text recognition. The MORAN consists of a multi-object rectification network and an attention-based sequence recognition network. The multi-object rectification network is designed for rectifying images that contain irregular text. It decreases the difficulty of recognition and enables the attention-based sequence recognition network to more easily read irregula…
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）；TAL Education Group（好未来教育集团）
Scene text recognition has been a hot topic in computer vision. Recent methods adopt the attention mechanism for sequence prediction which achieve convincing results. However, we argue that the existing attention mechanism faces the problem of attention diffusion, in which the model may not focus on a certain character area. In this paper, we propose Gaussian Constrained Attention Network to deal with this problem. It is a 2D attention-based method integrated with a novel Gaussian Constrained Refinement Module, which predicts an additional Gaussian mask to refine the attention weights. Differe…
University of Kansas（堪萨斯大学）；Sony Interactive Entertainment Global R&D（索尼互动娱乐全球研发部）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
The paper proposes a new text recognition network for scene-text images. Many state-of-the-art methods employ the attention mechanism either in the text encoder or decoder for the text alignment. Although the encoder-based attention yields promising results, these schemes inherit noticeable limitations. They perform the feature extraction (FE) and visual attention (VA) sequentially, which bounds the attention mechanism to rely only on the FE final single-scale output. Moreover, the utilization of the attention process is limited by only applying it directly to the single scale feature-maps. To…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
Dynamic skeletal data, represented as the 2D/3D coordinates of human joints, has been widely studied for human action recognition due to its high-level semantic information and environmental robustness. However, previous methods heavily rely on designing hand-crafted traversal rules or graph topologies to draw dependencies between the joints, which are limited in performance and generalizability. In this work, we present a novel decoupled spatial-temporal attention network(DSTA-Net) for skeleton-based action recognition. It involves solely the attention blocks, allowing for modeling spatial-te…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Human multimodal emotion recognition (MER) aims to perceive human emotions via language, visual and acoustic modalities. Despite the impressive performance of previous MER approaches, the inherent multimodal heterogeneities still haunt and the contribution of different modalities varies significantly. In this work, we mitigate this issue by proposing a decoupled multimodal distillation (DMD) approach that facilitates flexible and adaptive crossmodal knowledge distillation, aiming to enhance the discriminative features of each modality. Specially, the representation of each modality is decouple…
Harbin Institute of Technology at Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Baidu Inc（百度公司）
Typical text spotters follow the two-stage spotting paradigm which detects the boundary for a text instance first and then performs text recognition within the detected regions. Despite the remarkable progress of such spotting paradigm, an important limitation is that the performance of text recognition depends heavily on the precision of text detection, resulting in the potential error propagation from detection to recognition. In this work, we propose the single shot Self-Reliant Scene Text Spotter v2 (SRSTS v2), which circumvents this limitation by decoupling recognition from detection whil…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation receives much research attention since it alleviates the need to obtain a large amount of dense pixel-wise ground-truth annotations for the training images. Compared with other forms of weak supervision, image labels are quite efficient to obtain. In our work, we focus on the weakly supervised semantic segmentation with image label annotations. Recent progress for this task has been largely dependent on the quality of generated pseudo-annotations. In this work, inspired by spatial neural-attention for image captioning, we propose a decoupled spatial neur…
Spatial-Temporal Decoupled Adapter for Micro-gesture Online Recognition
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；United Arab Emirates University（阿联酋大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（人工智能研究院，合肥国家综合科学中心）；Anhui Evolution Technology Co., Ltd.（安徽进化科技有限公司）
Tencent（腾讯）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have demonstrated remarkable performance when the training and testing data are from the same distribution. However, such trained CNN models often largely degrade on testing data which is unseen and Out-Of-the-Distribution (OOD). To address this issue, we propose a novel "Decoupled-Mixup" method to train CNN models for OOD visual recognition. Different from previous work combining pairs of images homogeneously, our method decouples each image into discriminative and noise-prone regions, and then heterogeneously combines these regions of image pairs to train …
Two in One Go: Single-stage Emotion Recognition with Decoupled Subject-context Transformer
College of Big Data and Internet, Shenzhen Technology University (SZTU)（深圳技术大学大数据与互联网学院）；The University of Hong Kong (HKU)（香港大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom（中国电信人工智能研究院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU)（西北工业大学人工智能与光学电子学院）；School of Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech)（南方科技大学工程学院）
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；AI Labs, Didi Chuxing（滴滴出行人工智能实验室）
In zero-shot image retrieval (ZSIR) task, embedding learning becomes more attractive, however, many methods follow the traditional metric learning idea and omit the problems behind zero-shot settings. In this paper, we first emphasize the importance of learning visual discriminative metric and preventing the partial/selective learning behavior of learner in ZSIR, and then propose the Decoupled Metric Learning (DeML) framework to achieve these individually. Instead of coarsely optimizing an unified metric, we decouple it into multiple attention-specific parts so as to recurrently induce the dis…
Spatio-temporal Decoupled Knowledge Compensator for Few-Shot Action Recognition
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（计算机科学与工程学院，南京理工大学）；State Key Lab of Brain-Machine Intelligence, Zhejiang University（脑机智能国家重点实验室，浙江大学）
Although transformer has achieved great progress on computer vision tasks, the scale variation in dense image prediction is still the key challenge. Few effective multi-scale techniques are applied in transformer and there are two main limitations in the current methods. On one hand, self-attention module in vanilla transformer fails to sufficiently exploit the diversity of semantic information because of its rigid mechanism. On the other hand, it is hard to build attention and interaction among different levels due to the heavy computational burden. To alleviate this problem, we first revisit…
GaitKD: A Universal Decoupled Distillation Framework for Efficient Gait Recognition
The City University of New York（纽约城市大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
Decoupled Hierarchical Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition
School of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, Southeast University（计算机科学与工程学院，新一代人工智能技术及跨学科应用重点实验室，东南大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology（计算机科学与工程学院，南京理工大学）；Institute of Intelligent Information Processing, Taizhou University（智能信息处理研究院，台州大学）；School of Engineering Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（工程科学学院，中国科学院大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（计算机科学与工程学院，南洋理工大学）
Hierarchically Decoupled Mixture-of-Experts for Robust Traffic Sign Recognition in Complex Driving Scenarios
School of Automotive and Traffic Engineering, Liaoning University of Technology（辽宁科技学院汽车与交通工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Green Vehicles and Mobility, School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（智能绿色车辆与移动State Key Laboratory，清华大学车辆与移动学院）
School of Control and Computer Engineering, North China Electric Power University（华北电力大学控制与计算机工程学院）；China Mobile (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co., Ltd.（中国移动（杭州）信息技术有限公司）
As the scale of object detection dataset is smaller than that of image recognition dataset ImageNet, transfer learning has become a basic training method for deep learning object detection models, which will pretrain the backbone network of object detection model on ImageNet dataset to extract features for classification and localization subtasks. However, the classification task focuses on the salient region features of object, while the location task focuses on the edge features of object, so there is certain deviation between the features extracted by pretrained backbone network and the fea…
Efficient-LVSM: Faster, Cheaper, and Better Large View Synthesis Model via Decoupled Co-Refinement Attention
Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI (TEAI)（可信具身人工智能研究院）；Sch. of Computer Science & Sch. of Artificial Intelligence（计算机科学学院与人工智能学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Recent work has shown that self-attention can serve as a basic building block for image recognition models. We explore variations of self-attention and assess their effectiveness for image recognition. We consider two forms of self-attention. One is pairwise self-attention, which generalizes standard dot-product attention and is fundamentally a set operator. The other is patchwise self-attention, which is strictly more powerful than convolution. Our pairwise self-attention networks match or outperform their convolutional counterparts, and the patchwise models substantially outperform the convo…
School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院计算机与通信科学学院）
Following the performance breakthrough of denoising networks, improvements have come chiefly through novel architecture designs and increased depth. While novel denoising networks were designed for real images coming from different distributions, or for specific applications, comparatively small improvement was achieved on Gaussian denoising. The denoising solutions suffer from epistemic uncertainty that can limit further advancements. This uncertainty is traditionally mitigated through different ensemble approaches. However, such ensembles are prohibitively costly with deep networks, which ar…
We present an attention-based model for end-to-end handwriting recognition. Our system does not require any segmentation of the input paragraph. The model is inspired by the differentiable attention models presented recently for speech recognition, image captioning or translation. The main difference is the covert and overt attention, implemented as a multi-dimensional LSTM network. Our principal contribution towards handwriting recognition lies in the automatic transcription without a prior segmentation into lines, which was crucial in previous approaches. To the best of our knowledge this is…
Few-shot action recognition has attracted increasing attention due to the difficulty in acquiring the properly labelled training samples. Current works have shown that preserving spatial information and comparing video descriptors are crucial for few-shot action recognition. However, the importance of preserving temporal information is not well discussed. In this paper, we propose a Contents and Length-based Temporal Attention (CLTA) model, which learns customized temporal attention for the individual video to tackle the few-shot action recognition problem. CLTA utilizes the Gaussian likelihoo…
The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）
We introduce a simple yet surprisingly powerful model to incorporate attention in action recognition and human object interaction tasks. Our proposed attention module can be trained with or without extra supervision, and gives a sizable boost in accuracy while keeping the network size and computational cost nearly the same. It leads to significant improvements over state of the art base architecture on three standard action recognition benchmarks across still images and videos, and establishes new state of the art on MPII dataset with 12.5% relative improvement. We also perform an extensive an…
Handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) is an important research direction in handwriting recognition. The performance of HMER suffers from the two-dimensional structure of mathematical expressions (MEs). To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a high-performance HMER model with scale augmentation and drop attention. Specifically, tackling ME with unstable scale in both horizontal and vertical directions, scale augmentation improves the performance of the model on MEs of various scales. An attention-based encoder-decoder network is used for extracting features and gener…
Institute of Cognitive Intelligence, DeepBlue Academy of Sciences（深蓝科学院认知智能研究所）；DeepBlue Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.（深蓝科技（上海）有限公司）
With the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, action recognition in video has achieved many important research results. One issue in action recognition, Zero-Shot Action Recognition (ZSAR), has recently attracted considerable attention, which classify new categories without any positive examples. Another difficulty in action recognition is that untrimmed data may seriously affect model performance. We propose a composite two-stream framework with a pre-trained model. Our proposed framework includes a classifier branch and a composite feature branch. The graph network model is adopted…
We propose the Recurrent Soft Attention Model, which integrates the visual attention from the original image to a LSTM memory cell through a down-sample network. The model recurrently transmits visual attention to the memory cells for glimpse mask generation, which is a more natural way for attention integration and exploitation in general object detection and recognition problem. We test our model under the metric of the top-1 accuracy on the CIFAR-10 dataset. The experiment shows that our down-sample network and feedback mechanism plays an effective role among the whole network structure.
Visual explanation enables human to understand the decision making of Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), but it is insufficient to contribute the performance improvement. In this paper, we focus on the attention map for visual explanation, which represents high response value as the important region in image recognition. This region significantly improves the performance of CNN by introducing an attention mechanism that focuses on a specific region in an image. In this work, we propose Attention Branch Network (ABN), which extends the top-down visual explanation model by introducing a br…
Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（基础科学研究所（IPM））
This study is concerned with the top-down visual processing benefit in the task of occluded object recognition. To this end, a psychophysical experiment is designed and carried out which aimed at investigating the effect of consistency of contextual information on the recognition of objects which are partially occluded. The results demonstrate the facilitative impact of consistent contextual clues on the task of object recognition in presence of occlusion.
Structured representations, such as Bags of Words, VLAD and Fisher Vectors, have proven highly effective to tackle complex visual recognition tasks. As such, they have recently been incorporated into deep architectures. However, while effective, the resulting deep structured representation learning strategies typically aggregate local features from the entire image, ignoring the fact that, in complex recognition tasks, some regions provide much more discriminative information than others. In this paper, we introduce an attentional structured representation learning framework that incorporates …
In this paper, we build upon the weakly-supervised generation mechanism of intermediate attention maps in any convolutional neural networks and disclose the effectiveness of attention modules more straightforwardly to fully exploit their potential. Given an existing neural network equipped with arbitrary attention modules, we introduce a meta critic network to evaluate the quality of attention maps in the main network. Due to the discreteness of our designed reward, the proposed learning method is arranged in a reinforcement learning setting, where the attention actors and recurrent critics ar…
Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
In this paper we propose an end-to-end trainable deep neural network model for egocentric activity recognition. Our model is built on the observation that egocentric activities are highly characterized by the objects and their locations in the video. Based on this, we develop a spatial attention mechanism that enables the network to attend to regions containing objects that are correlated with the activity under consideration. We learn highly specialized attention maps for each frame using class-specific activations from a CNN pre-trained for generic image recognition, and use them for spatio-…
Human action recognition in 3D skeleton sequences has attracted a lot of research attention. Recently, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks have shown promising performance in this task due to their strengths in modeling the dependencies and dynamics in sequential data. As not all skeletal joints are informative for action recognition, and the irrelevant joints often bring noise which can degrade the performance, we need to pay more attention to the informative ones. However, the original LSTM network does not have explicit attention ability. In this paper, we propose a new class of LSTM net…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, CAS（中国科学院重庆绿色智能技术研究院）；Southwest University（西南大学）；Institute of Psychology, CAS（中国科学院心理研究所）
Micro-expression, for its high objectivity in emotion detection, has emerged to be a promising modality in affective computing. Recently, deep learning methods have been successfully introduced into the micro-expression recognition area. Whilst the higher recognition accuracy achieved, substantial challenges in micro-expression recognition remain. The existence of micro expression in small-local areas on face and limited size of available databases still constrain the recognition accuracy on such emotional facial behavior. In this work, to tackle such challenges, we propose a novel attention m…
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)（光州科学技术院）
Deep learning has achieved outstanding performance for face recognition benchmarks, but performance reduces significantly for low resolution (LR) images. We propose an attention similarity knowledge distillation approach, which transfers attention maps obtained from a high resolution (HR) network as a teacher into an LR network as a student to boost LR recognition performance. Inspired by humans being able to approximate an object's region from an LR image based on prior knowledge obtained from HR images, we designed the knowledge distillation loss using the cosine similarity to make the stude…
Despite the notable progress made in action recognition tasks, not much work has been done in action recognition specifically for human-robot interaction. In this paper, we deeply explore the characteristics of the action recognition task in interaction scenarios and propose an attention-oriented multi-level network framework to meet the need for real-time interaction. Specifically, a Pre-Attention network is employed to roughly focus on the interactor in the scene at low resolution firstly and then perform fine-grained pose estimation at high resolution. The other compact CNN receives the ext…
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
Chinese herbs play a critical role in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Due to different recognition granularity, they can be recognized accurately only by professionals with much experience. It is expected that they can be recognized automatically using new techniques like machine learning. However, there is no Chinese herbal image dataset available. Simultaneously, there is no machine learning method which can deal with Chinese herbal image recognition well. Therefore, this paper begins with building a new standard Chinese-Herbs dataset. Subsequently, a new Attentional Pyramid Networks (APN) for…
The use of vision transformers (ViT) in computer vision is increasing due to limited inductive biases (e.g., locality, weight sharing, etc.) and increased scalability compared to other deep learning methods. This has led to some initial studies on the use of ViT for biometric recognition, including fingerprint recognition. In this work, we improve on these initial studies for transformers in fingerprint recognition by i.) evaluating additional attention-based architectures, ii.) scaling to larger and more diverse training and evaluation datasets, and iii.) combining the complimentary represent…
A key challenge in fine-grained recognition is how to find and represent discriminative local regions. Recent attention models are capable of learning discriminative region localizers only from category labels with reinforcement learning. However, not utilizing any explicit part information, they are not able to accurately find multiple distinctive regions. In this work, we introduce an attribute-guided attention localization scheme where the local region localizers are learned under the guidance of part attribute descriptions. By designing a novel reward strategy, we are able to learn to loca…
