Logic Rules Powered Knowledge Graph Embedding

Large scale knowledge graph embedding has attracted much attention from both academia and industry in the field of Artificial Intelligence. However, most existing methods concentrate solely on fact triples contained in the given knowledge graph. Inspired by the fact that logic rules can provide a flexible and declarative language for expressing rich background knowledge, it is natural to integrate logic rules into knowledge graph embedding, to transfer human knowledge to entity and relation embedding, and strengthen the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel logic rule-enhanced method which can be easily integrated with any translation based knowledge graph embedding model, such as TransE . We first introduce a method to automatically mine the logic rules and corresponding confidences from the triples. And then, to put both triples and mined logic rules within the same semantic space, all triples in the knowledge graph are represented as first-order logic. Finally, we define several operations on the first-order logic and minimize a global loss over both of the mined logic rules and the transformed first-order logics. We conduct extensive experiments for link prediction and triple classification on three datasets: WN18, FB166, and FB15K. Experiments show that the rule-enhanced method can significantly improve the performance of several baselines. The highlight of our model is that the filtered Hits@1, which is a pivotal evaluation in the knowledge inference task, has a significant improvement (up to 700% improvement).

A Multi-Object Rectified Attention Network for Scene Text Recognition

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 irregular text. It is trained in a weak supervision way, thus requiring only images and corresponding text labels. The attention-based sequence recognition network focuses on target characters and sequentially outputs the predictions. Moreover, to improve the sensitivity of the attention-based sequence recognition network, a fractional pickup method is proposed for an attention-based decoder in the training phase. With the rectification mechanism, the MORAN can read both regular and irregular scene text. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks are conducted, which show that the MORAN achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is available.

Skeleton-based Gesture Recognition Using Several Fully Connected Layers with Path Signature Features and Temporal Transformer Module

The skeleton based gesture recognition is gaining more popularity due to its wide possible applications. The key issues are how to extract discriminative features and how to design the classification model. In this paper, we first leverage a robust feature descriptor, path signature (PS), and propose three PS features to explicitly represent the spatial and temporal motion characteristics, i.e., spatial PS (S_PS), temporal PS (T_PS) and temporal spatial PS (T_S_PS). Considering the significance of fine hand movements in the gesture, we propose an "attention on hand" (AOH) principle to define joint pairs for the S_PS and select single joint for the T_PS. In addition, the dyadic method is employed to extract the T_PS and T_S_PS features that encode global and local temporal dynamics in the motion. Secondly, without the recurrent strategy, the classification model still faces challenges on temporal variation among different sequences. We propose a new temporal transformer module (TTM) that can match the sequence key frames by learning the temporal shifting parameter for each input. This is a learning-based module that can be included into standard neural network architecture. Finally, we design a multi-stream fully connected layer based network to treat spatial and temporal features separately and fused them together for the final result. We have tested our method on three benchmark gesture datasets, i.e., ChaLearn 2016, ChaLearn 2013 and MSRC-12. Experimental results demonstrate that we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on skeleton-based gesture recognition with high computational efficiency.

EnsNet: Ensconce Text in the Wild

A new method is proposed for removing text from natural images. The challenge is to first accurately localize text on the stroke-level and then replace it with a visually plausible background. Unlike previous methods that require image patches to erase scene text, our method, namely ensconce network (EnsNet), can operate end-to-end on a single image without any prior knowledge. The overall structure is an end-to-end trainable FCN-ResNet-18 network with a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). The feature of the former is first enhanced by a novel lateral connection structure and then refined by four carefully designed losses: multiscale regression loss and content loss, which capture the global discrepancy of different level features; texture loss and total variation loss, which primarily target filling the text region and preserving the reality of the background. The latter is a novel local-sensitive GAN, which attentively assesses the local consistency of the text erased regions. Both qualitative and quantitative sensitivity experiments on synthetic images and the ICDAR 2013 dataset demonstrate that each component of the EnsNet is essential to achieve a good performance. Moreover, our EnsNet can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of all metrics. In addition, a qualitative experiment conducted on the SMBNet dataset further demonstrates that the proposed method can also preform well on general object (such as pedestrians) removal tasks. EnsNet is extremely fast, which can preform at 333 fps on an i5-8600 CPU device.

DeRPN: Taking a further step toward more general object detection

Most current detection methods have adopted anchor boxes as regression references. However, the detection performance is sensitive to the setting of the anchor boxes. A proper setting of anchor boxes may vary significantly across different datasets, which severely limits the universality of the detectors. To improve the adaptivity of the detectors, in this paper, we present a novel dimension-decomposition region proposal network (DeRPN) that can perfectly displace the traditional Region Proposal Network (RPN). DeRPN utilizes an anchor string mechanism to independently match object widths and heights, which is conducive to treating variant object shapes. In addition, a novel scale-sensitive loss is designed to address the imbalanced loss computations of different scaled objects, which can avoid the small objects being overwhelmed by larger ones. Comprehensive experiments conducted on both general object detection datasets (Pascal VOC 2007, 2012 and MS COCO) and scene text detection datasets (ICDAR 2013 and COCO-Text) all prove that our DeRPN can significantly outperform RPN. It is worth mentioning that the proposed DeRPN can be employed directly on different models, tasks, and datasets without any modifications of hyperparameters or specialized optimization, which further demonstrates its adaptivity. The code will be released at https://github.com/HCIILAB/DeRPN.

Detecting Heads using Feature Refine Net and Cascaded Multi-Scale Architecture

This paper presents a method that can accurately detect heads especially small heads under the indoor scene. To achieve this, we propose a novel method, Feature Refine Net (FRN), and a cascaded multi-scale architecture. FRN exploits the multi-scale hierarchical features created by deep convolutional neural networks. The proposed channel weighting method enables FRN to make use of features alternatively and effectively. To improve the performance of small head detection, we propose a cascaded multi-scale architecture which has two detectors. One called global detector is responsible for detecting large objects and acquiring the global distribution information. The other called local detector is designed for small objects detection and makes use of the information provided by global detector. Due to the lack of head detection datasets, we have collected and labeled a new large dataset named SCUT-HEAD which includes 4405 images with 111251 heads annotated. Experiments show that our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on SCUT-HEAD.

SCUT-FBP5500: A Diverse Benchmark Dataset for Multi-Paradigm Facial Beauty Prediction

Facial beauty prediction (FBP) is a significant visual recognition problem to make assessment of facial attractiveness that is consistent to human perception. To tackle this problem, various data-driven models, especially state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, were introduced, and benchmark dataset become one of the essential elements to achieve FBP. Previous works have formulated the recognition of facial beauty as a specific supervised learning problem of classification, regression or ranking, which indicates that FBP is intrinsically a computation problem with multiple paradigms. However, most of FBP benchmark datasets were built under specific computation constrains, which limits the performance and flexibility of the computational model trained on the dataset. In this paper, we argue that FBP is a multi-paradigm computation problem, and propose a new diverse benchmark dataset, called SCUT-FBP5500, to achieve multi-paradigm facial beauty prediction. The SCUT-FBP5500 dataset has totally 5500 frontal faces with diverse properties (male/female, Asian/Caucasian, ages) and diverse labels (face landmarks, beauty scores within [1,~5], beauty score distribution), which allows different computational models with different FBP paradigms, such as appearance-based/shape-based facial beauty classification/regression model for male/female of Asian/Caucasian. We evaluated the SCUT-FBP5500 dataset for FBP using different combinations of feature and predictor, and various deep learning methods. The results indicates the improvement of FBP and the potential applications based on the SCUT-FBP5500.

Feature Enhancement Network: A Refined Scene Text Detector

In this paper, we propose a refined scene text detector with a \textit{novel} Feature Enhancement Network (FEN) for Region Proposal and Text Detection Refinement. Retrospectively, both region proposal with \textit{only} $3\times 3$ sliding-window feature and text detection refinement with \textit{single scale} high level feature are insufficient, especially for smaller scene text. Therefore, we design a new FEN network with \textit{task-specific}, \textit{low} and \textit{high} level semantic features fusion to improve the performance of text detection. Besides, since \textit{unitary} position-sensitive RoI pooling in general object detection is unreasonable for variable text regions, an \textit{adaptively weighted} position-sensitive RoI pooling layer is devised for further enhancing the detecting accuracy. To tackle the \textit{sample-imbalance} problem during the refinement stage, we also propose an effective \textit{positives mining} strategy for efficiently training our network. Experiments on ICDAR 2011 and 2013 robust text detection benchmarks demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results, outperforming all reported methods in terms of F-measure.

Leveraging the Path Signature for Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Human action recognition in videos is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision. One important issue is how to design discriminative features for representing spatial context and temporal dynamics. Here, we introduce a path signature feature to encode information from intra-frame and inter-frame contexts. A key step towards leveraging this feature is to construct the proper trajectories (paths) for the data steam. In each frame, the correlated constraints of human joints are treated as small paths, then the spatial path signature features are extracted from them. In video data, the evolution of these spatial features over time can also be regarded as paths from which the temporal path signature features are extracted. Eventually, all these features are concatenated to constitute the input vector of a fully connected neural network for action classification. Experimental results on four standard benchmark action datasets, J-HMDB, SBU Dataset, Berkeley MHAD, and NTURGB+D demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy even in comparison with recent deep learning based models.

Learning Spatial-Semantic Context with Fully Convolutional Recurrent Network for Online Handwritten Chinese Text Recognition

Online handwritten Chinese text recognition (OHCTR) is a challenging problem as it involves a large-scale character set, ambiguous segmentation, and variable-length input sequences. In this paper, we exploit the outstanding capability of path signature to translate online pen-tip trajectories into informative signature feature maps using a sliding window-based method, successfully capturing the analytic and geometric properties of pen strokes with strong local invariance and robustness. A multi-spatial-context fully convolutional recurrent network (MCFCRN) is proposed to exploit the multiple spatial contexts from the signature feature maps and generate a prediction sequence while completely avoiding the difficult segmentation problem. Furthermore, an implicit language model is developed to make predictions based on semantic context within a predicting feature sequence, providing a new perspective for incorporating lexicon constraints and prior knowledge about a certain language in the recognition procedure. Experiments on two standard benchmarks, Dataset-CASIA and Dataset-ICDAR, yielded outstanding results, with correct rates of 97.10% and 97.15%, respectively, which are significantly better than the best result reported thus far in the literature.