No Arabic abstract
Automatic, template-free extraction of information from form images is challenging due to the variety of form layouts. This is even more challenging for historical forms due to noise and degradation. A crucial part of the extraction process is associating input text with pre-printed labels. We present a learned, template-free solution to detecting pre-printed text and input text/handwriting and predicting pair-wise relationships between them. While previous approaches to this problem have been focused on clean images and clear layouts, we show our approach is effective in the domain of noisy, degraded, and varied form images. We introduce a new dataset of historical form images (late 1800s, early 1900s) for training and validating our approach. Our method uses a convolutional network to detect pre-printed text and input text lines. We pool features from the detection network to classify possible relationships in a language-agnostic way. We show that our proposed pairing method outperforms heuristic rules and that visual features are critical to obtaining high accuracy.
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to extract entities, predicates and their semantic structure from images, enabling deep understanding of visual content, with many applications such as visual reasoning and image retrieval. Nevertheless, existing SGG methods require millions of manually annotated bounding boxes for training, and are computationally inefficient, as they exhaustively process all pairs of object proposals to detect predicates. In this paper, we address those two limitations by first proposing a generalized formulation of SGG, namely Visual Semantic Parsing, which disentangles entity and predicate recognition, and enables sub-quadratic performance. Then we propose the Visual Semantic Parsing Network, VSPNet, based on a dynamic, attention-based, bipartite message passing framework that jointly infers graph nodes and edges through an iterative process. Additionally, we propose the first graph-based weakly supervised learning framework, based on a novel graph alignment algorithm, which enables training without bounding box annotations. Through extensive experiments, we show that VSPNet outperforms weakly supervised baselines significantly and approaches fully supervised performance, while being several times faster. We publicly release the source code of our method.
It is an innate ability for humans to imagine something only according to their impression, without having to memorize all the details of what they have seen. In this work, we would like to demonstrate that a trained convolutional neural network also has the capability to remember its input images. To achieve this, we propose a simple but powerful framework to establish an {emph{Impression Space}} upon an off-the-shelf pretrained network. This network is referred to as the {emph{Template Network}} because its filters will be used as templates to reconstruct images from the impression. In our framework, the impression space and image space are bridged by a layer-wise encoding and iterative decoding process. It turns out that the impression space indeed captures the salient features from images, and it can be directly applied to tasks such as unpaired image translation and image synthesis through impression matching without further network training. Furthermore, the impression naturally constructs a high-level common space for different data. Based on this, we propose a mechanism to model the data relations inside the impression space, which is able to reveal the feature similarity between images. Our code will be released.
3D object grounding aims to locate the most relevant target object in a raw point cloud scene based on a free-form language description. Understanding complex and diverse descriptions, and lifting them directly to a point cloud is a new and challenging topic due to the irregular and sparse nature of point clouds. There are three main challenges in 3D object grounding: to find the main focus in the complex and diverse description; to understand the point cloud scene; and to locate the target object. In this paper, we address all three challenges. Firstly, we propose a language scene graph module to capture the rich structure and long-distance phrase correlations. Secondly, we introduce a multi-level 3D proposal relation graph module to extract the object-object and object-scene co-occurrence relationships, and strengthen the visual features of the initial proposals. Lastly, we develop a description guided 3D visual graph module to encode global contexts of phrases and proposals by a nodes matching strategy. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmark datasets (ScanRefer and Nr3D) show that our algorithm outperforms existing state-of-the-art. Our code is available at https://github.com/PNXD/FFL-3DOG.
In this paper, we introduce a new problem, named audio-visual video parsing, which aims to parse a video into temporal event segments and label them as either audible, visible, or both. Such a problem is essential for a complete understanding of the scene depicted inside a video. To facilitate exploration, we collect a Look, Listen, and Parse (LLP) dataset to investigate audio-visual video parsing in a weakly-supervised manner. This task can be naturally formulated as a Multimodal Multiple Instance Learning (MMIL) problem. Concretely, we propose a novel hybrid attention network to explore unimodal and cross-modal temporal contexts simultaneously. We develop an attentive MMIL pooling method to adaptively explore useful audio and visual content from different temporal extent and modalities. Furthermore, we discover and mitigate modality bias and noisy label issues with an individual-guided learning mechanism and label smoothing technique, respectively. Experimental results show that the challenging audio-visual video parsing can be achieved even with only video-level weak labels. Our proposed framework can effectively leverage unimodal and cross-modal temporal contexts and alleviate modality bias and noisy labels problems.
We propose an Auto-Parsing Network (APN) to discover and exploit the input datas hidden tree structures for improving the effectiveness of the Transformer-based vision-language systems. Specifically, we impose a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM) parameterized by the attention operations on each self-attention layer to incorporate sparse assumption. We use this PGM to softly segment an input sequence into a few clusters where each cluster can be treated as the parent of the inside entities. By stacking these PGM constrained self-attention layers, the clusters in a lower layer compose into a new sequence, and the PGM in a higher layer will further segment this sequence. Iteratively, a sparse tree can be implicitly parsed, and this trees hierarchical knowledge is incorporated into the transformed embeddings, which can be used for solving the target vision-language tasks. Specifically, we showcase that our APN can strengthen Transformer based networks in two major vision-language tasks: Captioning and Visual Question Answering. Also, a PGM probability-based parsing algorithm is developed by which we can discover what the hidden structure of input is during the inference.