In the past decades the set of human tasks that are solved by machines was extended dramatically. From simple image classification problems researchers now move towards solving more sophisticated and vital problems, like, autonomous driving and language translation. The case of language translation includes a challenging area of sign language translation that incorporates both image and language processing. We make a step in that direction by proposing a lightweight network for ASL gesture recognition with a performance sufficient for practical applications. The proposed solution demonstrates impressive robustness on MS-ASL dataset and in live mode for continuous sign gesture recognition scenario. Additionally, we describe how to combine action recognition model training with metric-learning to train the network on the database of limited size. The training code is available as part of Intel OpenVINO Training Extensions.
Mutual Modality Trust with Lightweight Reconstruction Regularization for Fine-grained Tire Pattern Recognition
School of Communications and Information Engineering, Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications（西安邮电大学通信与信息工程学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Hainan Normal University（海南师范大学人工智能学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学人工智能与光电学院）
The target of this research is to experiment, iterate and recommend a system that is successful in recognition of American Sign Language (ASL). It is a challenging as well as an interesting problem that if solved will bring a leap in social and technological aspects alike. In this paper, we propose a real-time recognizer of ASL based on a mobile platform, so that it will have more accessibility and provides an ease of use. The technique implemented is Transfer Learning of new data of Hand gestures for alphabets in ASL to be modelled on various pre-trained high- end models and optimize the best…
Sign language recognition is a challenging and often underestimated problem comprising multi-modal articulators (handshape, orientation, movement, upper body and face) that integrate asynchronously on multiple streams. Learning powerful statistical models in such a scenario requires much data, particularly to apply recent advances of the field. However, labeled data is a scarce resource for sign language due to the enormous cost of transcribing these unwritten languages. We propose the first real-life large-scale sign language data set comprising over 25,000 annotated videos, which we thorough…
University of West Bohemia（西波西米亚大学）；Gymnasium of Johannes Kepler（约翰内斯·开普勒文理中学）
Today's sign language recognition models require large training corpora of laboratory-like videos, whose collection involves an extensive workforce and financial resources. As a result, only a handful of such systems are publicly available, not to mention their limited localization capabilities for less-populated sign languages. Utilizing online text-to-video dictionaries, which inherently hold annotated data of various attributes and sign languages, and training models in a few-shot fashion hence poses a promising path for the democratization of this technology. In this work, we collect and o…
In this paper, we develop four spiking neural network (SNN) models for two static American Sign Language (ASL) hand gesture classification tasks, i.e., the ASL Alphabet and ASL Digits. The SNN models are deployed on Intel's neuromorphic platform, Loihi, and then compared against equivalent deep neural network (DNN) models deployed on an edge computing device, the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 (NCS2). We perform a comprehensive comparison between the two systems in terms of accuracy, latency, power consumption, and energy. The best DNN model achieves an accuracy of 99.93% on the ASL Alphabet dat…
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
In this thesis, we study the problem of recognizing video sequences of fingerspelled letters in American Sign Language (ASL). Fingerspelling comprises a significant but relatively understudied part of ASL, and recognizing it is challenging for a number of reasons: It involves quick, small motions that are often highly coarticulated; it exhibits significant variation between signers; and there has been a dearth of continuous fingerspelling data collected. In this work, we propose several types of recognition approaches, and explore the signer variation problem. Our best-performing models are se…
Sign language is an essential resource enabling access to communication and proper socioemotional development for individuals suffering from disabling hearing loss. As this population is expected to reach 700 million by 2050, the importance of the language becomes even more essential as it plays a critical role to ensure the inclusion of such individuals in society. The Sign Language Recognition field aims to bridge the gap between users and non-users of sign languages. However, the scarcity in quantity and quality of datasets is one of the main challenges limiting the exploration of novel app…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
Building extraction in VHR RSIs remains a challenging task due to occlusion and boundary ambiguity problems. Although conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based methods are capable of exploiting local texture and context information, they fail to capture the shape patterns of buildings, which is a necessary constraint in the human recognition. To address this issue, we propose an adversarial shape learning network (ASLNet) to model the building shape patterns that improve the accuracy of building segmentation. In the proposed ASLNet, we introduce the adversarial learning strategy …
Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；Sign-Speak
American Sign Language (ASL) is the fourth most commonly used language in the United States and is the language most commonly used by Deaf people in the United States and the English-speaking regions of Canada. Unfortunately, until recently, ASL received little research. This is due, in part, to its delayed recognition as a language until William C. Stokoe's publication in 1960. Limited data has been a long-standing obstacle to ASL research and computational modeling. The lack of large-scale datasets has prohibited many modern machine-learning techniques, such as Neural Machine Translation, fr…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
The American Sign Language Linguistic Research Project (ASLLRP) provides Internet access to high-quality ASL video data, generally including front and side views and a close-up of the face. The manual and non-manual components of the signing have been linguistically annotated using SignStream(R). The recently expanded video corpora can be browsed and searched through the Data Access Interface (DAI 2) we have designed; it is possible to carry out complex searches. The data from our corpora can also be downloaded; annotations are available in an XML export format. We have also developed the ASLL…
Neuromorphic visual attention for Sign-language recognition on SpiNNaker
Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague（信息技术学院，布拉格捷克技术大学）；Dept. of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague（电子工程系，捷克技术大学）；Université de Lille, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStAL（里尔大学，法国国家科学研究中心，里尔中央大学，UMR 9189 CRIStAL）
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
We study the problem of recognizing video sequences of fingerspelled letters in American Sign Language (ASL). Fingerspelling comprises a significant but relatively understudied part of ASL. Recognizing fingerspelling is challenging for a number of reasons: It involves quick, small motions that are often highly coarticulated; it exhibits significant variation between signers; and there has been a dearth of continuous fingerspelling data collected. In this work we collect and annotate a new data set of continuous fingerspelling videos, compare several types of recognizers, and explore the proble…
Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka（斯里兰卡萨伯勒格穆沃大学）
Automatic tomato disease recognition from leaf images is vital to avoid crop losses by applying control measures on time. Even though recent deep learning-based tomato disease recognition methods with classical training procedures showed promising recognition results, they demand large labelled data and involve expensive training. The traditional deep learning models proposed for tomato disease recognition also consume high memory and storage because of a high number of parameters. While lightweight networks overcome some of these issues to a certain extent, they continue to show low performan…
American Sign Language recognition is a difficult gesture recognition problem, characterized by fast, highly articulate gestures. These are comprised of arm movements with different hand shapes, facial expression and head movements. Among these components, hand shape is the vital, often the most discriminative part of a gesture. In this work, we present an approach for effective learning of hand shape embeddings, which are discriminative for ASL gestures. For hand shape recognition our method uses a mix of manually labelled hand shapes and high confidence predictions to train deep convolutiona…
In video action recognition, transformers consistently reach state-of-the-art accuracy. However, many models are too heavyweight for the average researcher with limited hardware resources. In this work, we explore the limitations of video transformers for lightweight action recognition. We benchmark 13 video transformers and baselines across 3 large-scale datasets and 10 hardware devices. Our study is the first to evaluate the efficiency of action recognition models in depth across multiple devices and train a wide range of video transformers under the same conditions. We categorize current me…
Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Deep neural networks have been widely used in numerous computer vision applications, particularly in face recognition. However, deploying deep neural network face recognition on mobile devices has recently become a trend but still limited since most high-accuracy deep models are both time and GPU consumption in the inference stage. Therefore, developing a lightweight deep neural network is one of the most practical solutions to deploy face recognition on mobile devices. Such the lightweight deep neural network requires efficient memory with small number of weights representation and low cost o…
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur（印度理工学院克勒格布尔分校）
In this paper, we present a texture aware lightweight deep learning framework for iris recognition. Our contributions are primarily three fold. Firstly, to address the dearth of labelled iris data, we propose a reconstruction loss guided unsupervised pre-training stage followed by supervised refinement. This drives the network weights to focus on discriminative iris texture patterns. Next, we propose several texture aware improvisations inside a Convolution Neural Net to better leverage iris textures. Finally, we show that our systematic training and architectural choices enable us to design a…
In recent years, image recognition applications have developed rapidly. A large number of studies and techniques have emerged in different fields, such as face recognition, pedestrian and vehicle re-identification, landmark retrieval, and product recognition. In this paper, we propose a practical lightweight image recognition system, named PP-ShiTu, consisting of the following 3 modules, mainbody detection, feature extraction and vector search. We introduce popular strategies including metric learning, deep hash, knowledge distillation and model quantization to improve accuracy and inference s…
Sign language is the primary language for people with a hearing loss. Sign language recognition (SLR) is the automatic recognition of sign language, which represents a challenging problem for computers, though some progress has been made recently using deep learning. Huge amounts of data are generally required to train deep learning models. However, corresponding datasets are missing for the majority of sign languages. Transfer learning is a technique to utilize a related task with an abundance of data available to help solve a target task lacking sufficient data. Transfer learning has been ap…
Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University（沙希德·拉贾伊师范大学）；Shahid Bahonar University（沙希德·巴哈尔大学）；Hamedan Science and Research University（哈马丹科学与研究大学）
Hand gesture recognition possesses extensive applications in virtual reality, sign language recognition, and computer games. The direct interface of hand gestures provides us a new way for communicating with the virtual environment. In this paper a novel and real-time approach for hand gesture recognition system is presented. In the suggested method, first, the hand gesture is extracted from the main image by the image segmentation and morphological operation and then is sent to feature extraction stage. In feature extraction stage the Cross-correlation coefficient is applied on the gesture to…
In this paper, we present an ultra lightweight system that can effectively recognize different circuit components in an image with very limited training data. Along with the system, we also release the data set we created for the task. A two-stage approach is employed by our system. Selective search was applied to find the location of each circuit component. Based on its result, we crop the original image into smaller pieces. The pieces are then fed to the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for classification to identify each circuit component. It is of engineering significance and works well …
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) aim at extending deep learning to arbitrary irregular domains, namely graphs. Their success is highly dependent on how the topology of input graphs is defined and most of the existing GCN architectures rely on predefined or handcrafted graph structures. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that learns the topology (or connectivity) of input graphs as a part of GCN design. The main contribution of our method resides in building an orthogonal connectivity basis that optimally aggregates nodes, through their neighborhood, prior to achieve convolution. Our…
In this paper, the multi-task learning of lightweight convolutional neural networks is studied for face identification and classification of facial attributes (age, gender, ethnicity) trained on cropped faces without margins. The necessity to fine-tune these networks to predict facial expressions is highlighted. Several models are presented based on MobileNet, EfficientNet and RexNet architectures. It was experimentally demonstrated that they lead to near state-of-the-art results in age, gender and race recognition on the UTKFace dataset and emotion classification on the AffectNet dataset. Mor…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
With the development of convolutional neural network, significant progress has been made in computer vision tasks. However, the commonly used loss function softmax loss and highly efficient network architecture for common visual tasks are not as effective for face recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function named Li-ArcFace based on ArcFace. Li-ArcFace takes the value of the angle through linear function as the target logit rather than through cosine function, which has better convergence and performance on low dimensional embedding feature learning for face recognition. In te…
University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
In the last few years, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (D-CNNs) have shown state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for Visual Place Recognition (VPR), a pivotal component of long-term intelligent robotic vision (vision-aware localization and navigation systems). The prestigious generalization power of D-CNNs gained upon training on large scale places datasets and learned persistent image regions which are found to be robust for specific place recognition under changing conditions and camera viewpoints. However, against the computation and power intensive D-CNNs based VPR algorithms that are emp…
University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）
Low-overhead visual place recognition (VPR) is a highly active research topic. Mobile robotics applications often operate under low-end hardware, and even more hardware capable systems can still benefit from freeing up onboard system resources for other navigation tasks. This work addresses lightweight VPR by proposing a novel system based on the combination of binary-weighted classifier networks with a one-dimensional convolutional network, dubbed merger. Recent work in fusing multiple VPR techniques has mainly focused on increasing VPR performance, with computational efficiency not being hig…
HierCode: A Lightweight Hierarchical Codebook for Zero-shot Chinese Text Recognition
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China（华南理工大学电子与信息学院）；Alibaba DAMO Academy, Hangzhou, China（阿里巴巴达摩院）
With an increasing number of elders living alone, care-giving from a distance becomes a compelling need, particularly for safety. Real-time monitoring and action recognition are essential to raise an alert timely when abnormal behaviors or unusual activities occur. While wearable sensors are widely recognized as a promising solution, highly depending on user's ability and willingness makes them inefficient. In contrast, video streams collected through non-contact optical cameras provide richer information and release the burden on elders. In this paper, leveraging the Independently-Recurrent n…
To improve the discriminative and generalization ability of lightweight network for face recognition, we propose an efficient variable group convolutional network called VarGFaceNet. Variable group convolution is introduced by VarGNet to solve the conflict between small computational cost and the unbalance of computational intensity inside a block. We employ variable group convolution to design our network which can support large scale face identification while reduce computational cost and parameters. Specifically, we use a head setting to reserve essential information at the start of the net…
The recognition of sign language is a challenging task with an important role in society to facilitate the communication of deaf persons. We propose a new approach of Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network to sign language recognition based on the human skeletal movements. The method uses graphs to capture the signs dynamics in two dimensions, spatial and temporal, considering the complex aspects of the language. Additionally, we present a new dataset of human skeletons for sign language based on ASLLVD to contribute to future related studies.
A HamNoSys-Guided Dataset and Baselines for Fine-Grained Isolated Handshape Recognition in Sign Language
Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre（可变能量回旋加速器中心）；Homi Bhabha National Institute（霍米·巴巴国家研究所）；Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute（罗摩克里希纳使命维韦卡南达教育与研究院）
University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）；Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）
Disentangled representations have been commonly adopted to Age-invariant Face Recognition (AiFR) tasks. However, these methods have reached some limitations with (1) the requirement of large-scale face recognition (FR) training data with age labels, which is limited in practice; (2) heavy deep network architectures for high performance; and (3) their evaluations are usually taken place on age-related face databases while neglecting the standard large-scale FR databases to guarantee robustness. This work presents a novel Lightweight Attentive Angular Distillation (LIAAD) approach to Large-scale…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Hubei University of Technology（湖北工业大学）
X-ray images are commonly used to ensure the security of devices in quality inspection industry. The recognition of signs printed on X-ray weld images plays an essential role in digital traceability system of manufacturing industry. However, the scales of objects vary different greatly in weld images, and it hinders us to achieve satisfactory recognition. In this paper, we propose a signs recognition framework based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for weld images. The proposed framework firstly contains a shallow classification network for correcting the pose of images. Moreover, we pr…
Growing amount of different practical tasks in a video understanding problem has addressed the great challenge aiming to design an universal solution, which should be available for broad masses and suitable for the demanding edge-oriented inference. In this paper we are focused on designing a network architecture and a training pipeline to tackle the mentioned challenges. Our architecture takes the best from the previous ones and brings the ability to be successful not only in appearance-based action recognition tasks but in motion-based problems too. Furthermore, the induced label noise probl…
