Document Layout Analysis with Aesthetic-Guided Image Augmentation

Document layout analysis (DLA) plays an important role in information extraction and document understanding. At present, document layout analysis has reached a milestone achievement, however, document layout analysis of non-Manhattan is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose an image layer modeling method to tackle this challenge. To measure the proposed image layer modeling method, we propose a manually-labeled non-Manhattan layout fine-grained segmentation dataset named FPD. As far as we know, FPD is the first manually-labeled non-Manhattan layout fine-grained segmentation dataset. To effectively extract fine-grained features of documents, we propose an edge embedding network named L-E^3Net. Experimental results prove that our proposed image layer modeling method can better deal with the fine-grained segmented document of the non-Manhattan layout.

Human-In-The-Loop Document Layout Analysis

Document layout analysis (DLA) aims to divide a document image into different types of regions. DLA plays an important role in the document content understanding and information extraction systems. Exploring a method that can use less data for effective training contributes to the development of DLA. We consider a Human-in-the-loop (HITL) collaborative intelligence in the DLA. Our approach was inspired by the fact that the HITL push the model to learn from the unknown problems by adding a small amount of data based on knowledge. The HITL select key samples by using confidence. However, using confidence to find key samples is not suitable for DLA tasks. We propose the Key Samples Selection (KSS) method to find key samples in high-level tasks (semantic segmentation) more accurately through agent collaboration, effectively reducing costs. Once selected, these key samples are passed to human beings for active labeling, then the model will be updated with the labeled samples. Hence, we revisited the learning system from reinforcement learning and designed a sample-based agent update strategy, which effectively improves the agent's ability to accept new samples. It achieves significant improvement results in two benchmarks (DSSE-200 (from 77.1% to 86.3%) and CS-150 (from 88.0% to 95.6%)) by using 10% of labeled data.

A Survey of Human-in-the-loop for Machine Learning

Human-in-the-loop aims to train an accurate prediction model with minimum cost by integrating human knowledge and experience. Humans can provide training data for machine learning applications and directly accomplish some tasks that are hard for computers in the pipeline with the help of machine-based approaches. In this paper, we survey existing works on human-in-the-loop from a data perspective and classify them into three categories with a progressive relationship: (1) the work of improving model performance from data processing, (2) the work of improving model performance through interventional model training, and (3) the design of the system independent human-in-the-loop. Using the above categorization, we summarize major approaches in the field, along with their technical strengths/ weaknesses, we have simple classification and discussion in natural language processing, computer vision, and others. Besides, we provide some open challenges and opportunities. This survey intends to provide a high-level summarization for human-in-the-loop and motivates interested readers to consider approaches for designing effective human-in-the-loop solutions.

Document Layout Analysis via Dynamic Residual Feature Fusion

The document layout analysis (DLA) aims to split the document image into different interest regions and understand the role of each region, which has wide application such as optical character recognition (OCR) systems and document retrieval. However, it is a challenge to build a DLA system because the training data is very limited and lacks an efficient model. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end united network named Dynamic Residual Fusion Network (DRFN) for the DLA task. Specifically, we design a dynamic residual feature fusion module which can fully utilize low-dimensional information and maintain high-dimensional category information. Besides, to deal with the model overfitting problem that is caused by lacking enough data, we propose the dynamic select mechanism for efficient fine-tuning in limited train data. We experiment with two challenging datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed module.

Scene Text Recognition with Temporal Convolutional Encoder

Texts from scene images typically consist of several characters and exhibit a characteristic sequence structure. Existing methods capture the structure with the sequence-to-sequence models by an encoder to have the visual representations and then a decoder to translate the features into the label sequence. In this paper, we study text recognition framework by considering the long-term temporal dependencies in the encoder stage. We demonstrate that the proposed Temporal Convolutional Encoder with increased sequential extents improves the accuracy of text recognition. We also study the impact of different attention modules in convolutional blocks for learning accurate text representations. We conduct comparisons on seven datasets and the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Video Crowd Counting via Dynamic Temporal Modeling

Crowd counting aims to count the number of instantaneous people in a crowded space, which plays an increasingly important role in the field of public safety. More and more researchers have already proposed many promising solutions to the crowd counting task on the image. With the continuous extension of the application of crowd counting, how to apply the technique to video content has become an urgent problem. At present, although researchers have collected and labeled some video clips, less attention has been drawn to the spatiotemporal characteristics of videos. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel framework based on dynamic temporal modeling of the relationship between video frames. We model the relationship between adjacent features by constructing a set of dilated residual blocks for crowd counting task, with each phase having an expanded set of time convolutions to generate an initial prediction which is then improved by the next prediction. We extract features from the density map as we find the adjacent density maps share more similar information than original video frames. We also propose a smaller basic network structure to balance the computational cost with a good feature representation. We conduct experiments using the proposed framework on five crowd counting datasets and demonstrate its superiority in terms of effectiveness and efficiency over previous approaches.

Adaptive Scenario Discovery for Crowd Counting

Crowd counting, i.e., estimation number of pedestrian in crowd images, is emerging as an important research problem with the public security applications. A key ingredient in the design of crowd counting systems is the construction of counting models while being robust to various scenarios under facts such as camera perspective and physical barriers. In this paper, we present an adaptive scenario discovery framework for crowd counting. The system is structured with two parallel pathways that are trained with different sizes of receptive field to represent different scales and crowd densities. After ensuring that these components are present in the proper geometric configuration, a third branch is designed to adaptively recalibrate the pathway-wise responses by discovering and modeling the dynamic scenarios implicitly. Our system is able to represent highly variable crowd images and achieves state-of-the-art results in two challenging benchmarks.