CMFN: Cross-Modal Fusion Network for Irregular Scene Text Recognition

Scene text recognition, as a cross-modal task involving vision and text, is an important research topic in computer vision. Most existing methods use language models to extract semantic information for optimizing visual recognition. However, the guidance of visual cues is ignored in the process of semantic mining, which limits the performance of the algorithm in recognizing irregular scene text. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel cross-modal fusion network (CMFN) for irregular scene text recognition, which incorporates visual cues into the semantic mining process. Specifically, CMFN consists of a position self-enhanced encoder, a visual recognition branch and an iterative semantic recognition branch. The position self-enhanced encoder provides character sequence position encoding for both the visual recognition branch and the iterative semantic recognition branch. The visual recognition branch carries out visual recognition based on the visual features extracted by CNN and the position encoding information provided by the position self-enhanced encoder. The iterative semantic recognition branch, which consists of a language recognition module and a cross-modal fusion gate, simulates the way that human recognizes scene text and integrates cross-modal visual cues for text recognition. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed CMFN algorithm achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art algorithms, indicating its effectiveness.

Text Region Multiple Information Perception Network for Scene Text Detection

Segmentation-based scene text detection algorithms can handle arbitrary shape scene texts and have strong robustness and adaptability, so it has attracted wide attention. Existing segmentation-based scene text detection algorithms usually only segment the pixels in the center region of the text, while ignoring other information of the text region, such as edge information, distance information, etc., thus limiting the detection accuracy of the algorithm for scene text. This paper proposes a plug-and-play module called the Region Multiple Information Perception Module (RMIPM) to enhance the detection performance of segmentation-based algorithms. Specifically, we design an improved module that can perceive various types of information about scene text regions, such as text foreground classification maps, distance maps, direction maps, etc. Experiments on MSRA-TD500 and TotalText datasets show that our method achieves comparable performance with current state-of-the-art algorithms.

BPDO:Boundary Points Dynamic Optimization for Arbitrary Shape Scene Text Detection

Arbitrary shape scene text detection is of great importance in scene understanding tasks. Due to the complexity and diversity of text in natural scenes, existing scene text algorithms have limited accuracy for detecting arbitrary shape text. In this paper, we propose a novel arbitrary shape scene text detector through boundary points dynamic optimization(BPDO). The proposed model is designed with a text aware module (TAM) and a boundary point dynamic optimization module (DOM). Specifically, the model designs a text aware module based on segmentation to obtain boundary points describing the central region of the text by extracting a priori information about the text region. Then, based on the idea of deformable attention, it proposes a dynamic optimization model for boundary points, which gradually optimizes the exact position of the boundary points based on the information of the adjacent region of each boundary point. Experiments on CTW-1500, Total-Text, and MSRA-TD500 datasets show that the model proposed in this paper achieves a performance that is better than or comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithm, proving the effectiveness of the model.

Multi-Granularity Alignment Domain Adaptation for Object Detection

Domain adaptive object detection is challenging due to distinctive data distribution between source domain and target domain. In this paper, we propose a unified multi-granularity alignment based object detection framework towards domain-invariant feature learning. To this end, we encode the dependencies across different granularity perspectives including pixel-, instance-, and category-levels simultaneously to align two domains. Based on pixel-level feature maps from the backbone network, we first develop the omni-scale gated fusion module to aggregate discriminative representations of instances by scale-aware convolutions, leading to robust multi-scale object detection. Meanwhile, the multi-granularity discriminators are proposed to identify which domain different granularities of samples(i.e., pixels, instances, and categories) come from. Notably, we leverage not only the instance discriminability in different categories but also the category consistency between two domains. Extensive experiments are carried out on multiple domain adaptation scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework over state-of-the-art algorithms on top of anchor-free FCOS and anchor-based Faster RCNN detectors with different backbones.

Adversarial Attacks against Windows PE Malware Detection: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

The malware has been being one of the most damaging threats to computers that span across multiple operating systems and various file formats. To defend against the ever-increasing and ever-evolving threats of malware, tremendous efforts have been made to propose a variety of malware detection methods that attempt to effectively and efficiently detect malware. Recent studies have shown that, on the one hand, existing ML and DL enable the superior detection of newly emerging and previously unseen malware. However, on the other hand, ML and DL models are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the form of adversarial examples, which are maliciously generated by slightly and carefully perturbing the legitimate inputs to confuse the targeted models. Basically, adversarial attacks are initially extensively studied in the domain of computer vision, and some quickly expanded to other domains, including NLP, speech recognition and even malware detection. In this paper, we focus on malware with the file format of portable executable (PE) in the family of Windows operating systems, namely Windows PE malware, as a representative case to study the adversarial attack methods in such adversarial settings. To be specific, we start by first outlining the general learning framework of Windows PE malware detection based on ML/DL and subsequently highlighting three unique challenges of performing adversarial attacks in the context of PE malware. We then conduct a comprehensive and systematic review to categorize the state-of-the-art adversarial attacks against PE malware detection, as well as corresponding defenses to increase the robustness of PE malware detection. We conclude the paper by first presenting other related attacks against Windows PE malware detection beyond the adversarial attacks and then shedding light on future research directions and opportunities.

Towards Real-World Prohibited Item Detection: A Large-Scale X-ray Benchmark

Automatic security inspection using computer vision technology is a challenging task in real-world scenarios due to various factors, including intra-class variance, class imbalance, and occlusion. Most of the previous methods rarely solve the cases that the prohibited items are deliberately hidden in messy objects due to the lack of large-scale datasets, restricted their applications in real-world scenarios. Towards real-world prohibited item detection, we collect a large-scale dataset, named as PIDray, which covers various cases in real-world scenarios for prohibited item detection, especially for deliberately hidden items. With an intensive amount of effort, our dataset contains $12$ categories of prohibited items in $47,677$ X-ray images with high-quality annotated segmentation masks and bounding boxes. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest prohibited items detection dataset to date. Meanwhile, we design the selective dense attention network (SDANet) to construct a strong baseline, which consists of the dense attention module and the dependency refinement module. The dense attention module formed by the spatial and channel-wise dense attentions, is designed to learn the discriminative features to boost the performance. The dependency refinement module is used to exploit the dependencies of multi-scale features. Extensive experiments conducted on the collected PIDray dataset demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods, especially for detecting the deliberately hidden items.

Spatial Attention Pyramid Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation is critical in various computer vision tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation, which aims to alleviate performance degradation caused by domain-shift. Most of previous methods rely on a single-mode distribution of source and target domains to align them with adversarial learning, leading to inferior results in various scenarios. To that end, in this paper, we design a new spatial attention pyramid network for unsupervised domain adaptation. Specifically, we first build the spatial pyramid representation to capture context information of objects at different scales. Guided by the task-specific information, we combine the dense global structure representation and local texture patterns at each spatial location effectively using the spatial attention mechanism. In this way, the network is enforced to focus on the discriminative regions with context information for domain adaption. We conduct extensive experiments on various challenging datasets for unsupervised domain adaptation on object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation, which demonstrates that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our source code is available at code_path.

SiamMan: Siamese Motion-aware Network for Visual Tracking

In this paper, we present a novel siamese motion-aware network (SiamMan) for visual tracking, which consists of the siamese feature extraction subnetwork, followed by the classification, regression, and localization branches in parallel. The classification branch is used to distinguish the foreground from background, and the regression branch is adopt to regress the bounding box of target. To reduce the impact of manually designed anchor boxes to adapt to different target motion patterns, we design the localization branch, which aims to coarsely localize the target to help the regression branch to generate accurate results. Meanwhile, we introduce the global context module into the localization branch to capture long-range dependency for more robustness in large displacement of target. In addition, we design a multi-scale learnable attention module to guide these three branches to exploit discriminative features for better performance. The whole network is trained offline in an end-to-end fashion with large-scale image pairs using the standard SGD algorithm with back-propagation. Extensive experiments on five challenging benchmarks, i.e., VOT2016, VOT2018, OTB100, UAV123 and LTB35, demonstrate that SiamMan achieves leading accuracy with high efficiency. Code can be found at https://isrc.iscas.ac.cn/gitlab/research/siamman.

Towards Interpretable and Robust Hand Detection via Pixel-wise Prediction

The lack of interpretability of existing CNN-based hand detection methods makes it difficult to understand the rationale behind their predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model, which introduces interpretability into hand detection for the first time. The main improvements include: (1) Detect hands at pixel level to explain what pixels are the basis for its decision and improve transparency of the model. (2) The explainable Highlight Feature Fusion block highlights distinctive features among multiple layers and learns discriminative ones to gain robust performance. (3) We introduce a transparent representation, the rotation map, to learn rotation features instead of complex and non-transparent rotation and derotation layers. (4) Auxiliary supervision accelerates the training process, which saves more than 10 hours in our experiments. Experimental results on the VIVA and Oxford hand detection and tracking datasets show competitive accuracy of our method compared with state-of-the-art methods with higher speed.

Learning Semantic Neural Tree for Human Parsing

The majority of existing human parsing methods formulate the task as semantic segmentation, which regard each semantic category equally and fail to exploit the intrinsic physiological structure of human body, resulting in inaccurate results. In this paper, we design a novel semantic neural tree for human parsing, which uses a tree architecture to encode physiological structure of human body, and designs a coarse to fine process in a cascade manner to generate accurate results. Specifically, the semantic neural tree is designed to segment human regions into multiple semantic subregions (e.g., face, arms, and legs) in a hierarchical way using a new designed attention routing module. Meanwhile, we introduce the semantic aggregation module to combine multiple hierarchical features to exploit more context information for better performance. Our semantic neural tree can be trained in an end-to-end fashion by standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with back-propagation. Several experiments conducted on four challenging datasets for both single and multiple human parsing, i.e., LIP, PASCAL-Person-Part, CIHP and MHP-v2, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code can be found at https://isrc.iscas.ac.cn/gitlab/research/sematree.