Multi-Domain Few-Shot Learning and Dataset for Agricultural Applications

Automatic classification of pests and plants (both healthy and diseased) is of paramount importance in agriculture to improve yield. Conventional deep learning models based on convolutional neural networks require thousands of labeled examples per category. In this work we propose a method to learn from a few samples to automatically classify different pests, plants, and their diseases, using Few-Shot Learning (FSL). We learn a feature extractor to generate embeddings and then update the embeddings using Transformers. Using Mahalanobis distance, a class-covariance-based metric, we then calculate the similarity of the transformed embeddings with the embedding of the image to be classified. Using our proposed architecture, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets showing the effectiveness of our proposed model. We conduct 42 experiments in total to comprehensively analyze the model and it achieves up to 14% and 24% performance gains on few-shot image classification benchmarks on two datasets. We also compile a new FSL dataset containing images of healthy and diseased plants taken in real-world settings. Using our proposed architecture which has been shown to outperform several existing FSL architectures in agriculture, we provide strong baselines on our newly proposed dataset.

Pose-based Sign Language Recognition using GCN and BERT

Sign language recognition (SLR) plays a crucial role in bridging the communication gap between the hearing and vocally impaired community and the rest of the society. Word-level sign language recognition (WSLR) is the first important step towards understanding and interpreting sign language. However, recognizing signs from videos is a challenging task as the meaning of a word depends on a combination of subtle body motions, hand configurations, and other movements. Recent pose-based architectures for WSLR either model both the spatial and temporal dependencies among the poses in different frames simultaneously or only model the temporal information without fully utilizing the spatial information. We tackle the problem of WSLR using a novel pose-based approach, which captures spatial and temporal information separately and performs late fusion. Our proposed architecture explicitly captures the spatial interactions in the video using a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). The temporal dependencies between the frames are captured using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). Experimental results on WLASL, a standard word-level sign language recognition dataset show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on pose-based methods by achieving an improvement in the prediction accuracy by up to 5%.