A core process in human cognition is analogical mapping: the ability to identify a similar relational structure between different situations. We introduce a novel task, Visual Analogies of Situation Recognition, adapting the classical word-analogy task into the visual domain. Given a triplet of images, the task is to select an image candidate B' that completes the analogy (A to A' is like B to what?). Unlike previous work on visual analogy that focused on simple image transformations, we tackle complex analogies requiring understanding of scenes. We leverage situation recognition annotations and the CLIP model to generate a large set of 500k candidate analogies. Crowdsourced annotations for a sample of the data indicate that humans agree with the dataset label ~80% of the time (chance level 25%). Furthermore, we use human annotations to create a gold-standard dataset of 3,820 validated analogies. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art models do well when distractors are chosen randomly (~86%), but struggle with carefully chosen distractors (~53%, compared to 90% human accuracy). We hope our dataset will encourage the development of new analogy-making models. Website: //vasr-dataset.github.io/
A text on an image often stores important information and directly carries high level semantics, makes it as important source of information and become a very active research topic. Many studies have shown that the use of CNN-based neural networks is quite effective and accurate for image classification which is the basis of text recognition. It can also be more enhanced by using transfer learning from pre-trained model trained on ImageNet dataset as an initial weight. In this research, the recognition is trained by using Chars74K dataset and the best model results then tested on some samples of IIIT-5K-Dataset. The research results showed that the best accuracy is the model that trained using VGG-16 architecture applied with image transformation of rotation 15{\deg}, image scale of 0.9, and the application of gaussian blur effect. The research model has an accuracy of 97.94% for validation data, 98.16% for test data, and 95.62% for the test data from IIIT-5K-Dataset. Based on these results, it can be concluded that pre-trained CNN can produce good accuracy for text recognition, and the model architecture that used in this study can be used as reference material in the development of text detection systems in the future
In this work, we are dedicated to leveraging the BERT pre-training success and modeling the domain-specific statistics to fertilize the sign language recognition~(SLR) model. Considering the dominance of hand and body in sign language expression, we organize them as pose triplet units and feed them into the Transformer backbone in a frame-wise manner. Pre-training is performed via reconstructing the masked triplet unit from the corrupted input sequence, which learns the hierarchical correlation context cues among internal and external triplet units. Notably, different from the highly semantic word token in BERT, the pose unit is a low-level signal originally located in continuous space, which prevents the direct adoption of the BERT cross-entropy objective. To this end, we bridge this semantic gap via coupling tokenization of the triplet unit. It adaptively extracts the discrete pseudo label from the pose triplet unit, which represents the semantic gesture/body state. After pre-training, we fine-tune the pre-trained encoder on the downstream SLR task, jointly with the newly added task-specific layer. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on all four benchmarks with a notable gain.
Recent research using pre-trained transformer models suggests that just 10 minutes of transcribed speech may be enough to fine-tune such a model for automatic speech recognition (ASR) -- at least if we can also leverage vast amounts of text data (803 million tokens). But is that much text data necessary? We study the use of different amounts of text data, both for creating a lexicon that constrains ASR decoding to possible words (e.g. *dogz vs. dogs), and for training larger language models that bias the system toward probable word sequences (e.g. too dogs vs. two dogs). We perform experiments using 10 minutes of transcribed speech from English (for replicating prior work) and two additional pairs of languages differing in the availability of supplemental text data: Gronings and Frisian (~7.5M token corpora available), and Besemah and Nasal (only small lexica available). For all languages, we found that using only a lexicon did not appreciably improve ASR performance. For Gronings and Frisian, we found that lexica and language models derived from 'novel-length' 80k token subcorpora reduced the word error rate (WER) to 39% on average. Our findings suggest that where a text corpus in the upper tens of thousands of tokens or more is available, fine-tuning a transformer model with just tens of minutes of transcribed speech holds some promise towards obtaining human-correctable transcriptions near the 30% WER rule-of-thumb.
Visual scenes are composed of visual concepts and have the property of combinatorial explosion. An important reason for humans to efficiently learn from diverse visual scenes is the ability of compositional perception, and it is desirable for artificial intelligence to have similar abilities. Compositional scene representation learning is a task that enables such abilities. In recent years, various methods have been proposed to apply deep neural networks, which have been proven to be advantageous in representation learning, to learn compositional scene representations via reconstruction, advancing this research direction into the deep learning era. Learning via reconstruction is advantageous because it may utilize massive unlabeled data and avoid costly and laborious data annotation. In this survey, we first outline the current progress on reconstruction-based compositional scene representation learning with deep neural networks, including development history and categorizations of existing methods from the perspectives of the modeling of visual scenes and the inference of scene representations; then provide benchmarks, including an open source toolbox to reproduce the benchmark experiments, of representative methods that consider the most extensively studied problem setting and form the foundation for other methods; and finally discuss the limitations of existing methods and future directions of this research topic.
Every Scene Text Recognition (STR) task consists of text localization \& text recognition as the prominent sub-tasks. However, in real-world applications with fixed camera positions such as equipment monitor reading, image-based data entry, and printed document data extraction, the underlying data tends to be regular scene text. Hence, in these tasks, the use of generic, bulky models comes up with significant disadvantages compared to customized, efficient models in terms of model deployability, data privacy \& model reliability. Therefore, this paper introduces the underlying concepts, theory, implementation, and experiment results to develop models, which are highly specialized for the task itself, to achieve not only the SOTA performance but also to have minimal model weights, shorter inference time, and high model reliability. We introduce a novel deep learning architecture (GeoTRNet), trained to identify digits in a regular scene image, only using the geometrical features present, mimicking human perception over text recognition. The code is publicly available at //github.com/ACRA-FL/GeoTRNet
We present a novel counterfactual framework for both Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and Open-Set Recognition (OSR), whose common challenge is generalizing to the unseen-classes by only training on the seen-classes. Our idea stems from the observation that the generated samples for unseen-classes are often out of the true distribution, which causes severe recognition rate imbalance between the seen-class (high) and unseen-class (low). We show that the key reason is that the generation is not Counterfactual Faithful, and thus we propose a faithful one, whose generation is from the sample-specific counterfactual question: What would the sample look like, if we set its class attribute to a certain class, while keeping its sample attribute unchanged? Thanks to the faithfulness, we can apply the Consistency Rule to perform unseen/seen binary classification, by asking: Would its counterfactual still look like itself? If ``yes'', the sample is from a certain class, and ``no'' otherwise. Through extensive experiments on ZSL and OSR, we demonstrate that our framework effectively mitigates the seen/unseen imbalance and hence significantly improves the overall performance. Note that this framework is orthogonal to existing methods, thus, it can serve as a new baseline to evaluate how ZSL/OSR models generalize. Codes are available at //github.com/yue-zhongqi/gcm-cf.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.
With the rise and development of deep learning, computer vision has been tremendously transformed and reshaped. As an important research area in computer vision, scene text detection and recognition has been inescapably influenced by this wave of revolution, consequentially entering the era of deep learning. In recent years, the community has witnessed substantial advancements in mindset, approach and performance. This survey is aimed at summarizing and analyzing the major changes and significant progresses of scene text detection and recognition in the deep learning era. Through this article, we devote to: (1) introduce new insights and ideas; (2) highlight recent techniques and benchmarks; (3) look ahead into future trends. Specifically, we will emphasize the dramatic differences brought by deep learning and the grand challenges still remained. We expect that this review paper would serve as a reference book for researchers in this field. Related resources are also collected and compiled in our Github repository: //github.com/Jyouhou/SceneTextPapers.
Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been a frequent topic of research due to many practical applications. However, many of the current solutions are still not robust in real-world situations, commonly depending on many constraints. This paper presents a robust and efficient ALPR system based on the state-of-the-art YOLO object detection. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are trained and fine-tuned for each ALPR stage so that they are robust under different conditions (e.g., variations in camera, lighting, and background). Specially for character segmentation and recognition, we design a two-stage approach employing simple data augmentation tricks such as inverted License Plates (LPs) and flipped characters. The resulting ALPR approach achieved impressive results in two datasets. First, in the SSIG dataset, composed of 2,000 frames from 101 vehicle videos, our system achieved a recognition rate of 93.53% and 47 Frames Per Second (FPS), performing better than both Sighthound and OpenALPR commercial systems (89.80% and 93.03%, respectively) and considerably outperforming previous results (81.80%). Second, targeting a more realistic scenario, we introduce a larger public dataset, called UFPR-ALPR dataset, designed to ALPR. This dataset contains 150 videos and 4,500 frames captured when both camera and vehicles are moving and also contains different types of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, buses and trucks). In our proposed dataset, the trial versions of commercial systems achieved recognition rates below 70%. On the other hand, our system performed better, with recognition rate of 78.33% and 35 FPS.