Xin He

Fei Shen, Xin He, Mengwan Wei et al.

In this report, we introduce the technical details of our submission to the VIPriors object detection challenge. Our solution is based on mmdetction of a strong baseline open-source detection toolbox. Firstly, we introduce an effective data augmentation method to address the lack of data problem, which contains bbox-jitter, grid-mask, and mix-up. Secondly, we present a robust region of interest (ROI) extraction method to learn more significant ROI features via embedding global context features. Thirdly, we propose a multi-model integration strategy to refinement the prediction box, which weighted boxes fusion (WBF). Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve the average precision (AP) of object detection on the subset of the COCO2017 dataset.

Shangbang Long, Xin He, Cong Yao

With the rise and development of deep learning, computer vision has been tremendously transformed and reshaped. As an important research area in computer vision, scene text detection and recognition has been inescapably influenced by this wave of revolution, consequentially entering the era of deep learning. In recent years, the community has witnessed substantial advancements in mindset, approach and performance. This survey is aimed at summarizing and analyzing the major changes and significant progresses of scene text detection and recognition in the deep learning era. Through this article, we devote to: (1) introduce new insights and ideas; (2) highlight recent techniques and benchmarks; (3) look ahead into future trends. Specifically, we will emphasize the dramatic differences brought by deep learning and the grand challenges still remained. We expect that this review paper would serve as a reference book for researchers in this field. Related resources are also collected and compiled in our Github repository: https://github.com/Jyouhou/SceneTextPapers.

Xin He, Shihao Wang, Xiaowen Chu et al.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread globally for several months. Because its transmissibility and high pathogenicity seriously threaten people's lives, it is crucial to accurately and quickly detect COVID-19 infection. Many recent studies have shown that deep learning (DL) based solutions can help detect COVID-19 based on chest CT scans. However, most existing work focuses on 2D datasets, which may result in low quality models as the real CT scans are 3D images. Besides, the reported results span a broad spectrum on different datasets with a relatively unfair comparison. In this paper, we first use three state-of-the-art 3D models (ResNet3D101, DenseNet3D121, and MC3\_18) to establish the baseline performance on the three publicly available chest CT scan datasets. Then we propose a differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) framework to automatically search for the 3D DL models for 3D chest CT scans classification with the Gumbel Softmax technique to improve the searching efficiency. We further exploit the Class Activation Mapping (CAM) technique on our models to provide the interpretability of the results. The experimental results show that our automatically searched models (CovidNet3D) outperform the baseline human-designed models on the three datasets with tens of times smaller model size and higher accuracy. Furthermore, the results also verify that CAM can be well applied in CovidNet3D for COVID-19 datasets to provide interpretability for medical diagnosis.

Xin He, Shihao Wang, Shaohuai Shi et al.

Skin disease is one of the most common types of human diseases, which may happen to everyone regardless of age, gender or race. Due to the high visual diversity, human diagnosis highly relies on personal experience; and there is a serious shortage of experienced dermatologists in many countries. To alleviate this problem, computer-aided diagnosis with state-of-the-art (SOTA) machine learning techniques would be a promising solution. In this paper, we aim at understanding the performance of convolutional neural network (CNN) based approaches. We first build two versions of skin disease datasets from Internet images: (a) Skin-10, which contains 10 common classes of skin disease with a total of 10,218 images; (b) Skin-100, which is a larger dataset that consists of 19,807 images of 100 skin disease classes. Based on these datasets, we benchmark several SOTA CNN models and show that the accuracy of skin-100 is much lower than the accuracy of skin-10. We then implement an ensemble method based on several CNN models and achieve the best accuracy of 79.01\% for Skin-10 and 53.54\% for Skin-100. We also present an object detection based approach by introducing bounding boxes into the Skin-10 dataset. Our results show that object detection can help improve the accuracy of some skin disease classes.

Yuxin Wang, Qiang Wang, Shaohuai Shi et al.

Deep learning has become widely used in complex AI applications. Yet, training a deep neural network (DNNs) model requires a considerable amount of calculations, long running time, and much energy. Nowadays, many-core AI accelerators (e.g., GPUs and TPUs) are designed to improve the performance of AI training. However, processors from different vendors perform dissimilarly in terms of performance and energy consumption. To investigate the differences among several popular off-the-shelf processors (i.e., Intel CPU, NVIDIA GPU, AMD GPU, and Google TPU) in training DNNs, we carry out a comprehensive empirical study on the performance and energy efficiency of these processors by benchmarking a representative set of deep learning workloads, including computation-intensive operations, classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural networks (LSTM), Deep Speech 2, and Transformer. Different from the existing end-to-end benchmarks which only present the training time, We try to investigate the impact of hardware, vendor's software library, and deep learning framework on the performance and energy consumption of AI training. Our evaluation methods and results not only provide an informative guide for end-users to select proper AI accelerators, but also expose some opportunities for the hardware vendors to improve their software library.

Xin He, Kaiyong Zhao, Xiaowen Chu

Deep learning (DL) techniques have penetrated all aspects of our lives and brought us great convenience. However, building a high-quality DL system for a specific task highly relies on human expertise, hindering the applications of DL to more areas. Automated machine learning (AutoML) becomes a promising solution to build a DL system without human assistance, and a growing number of researchers focus on AutoML. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) in AutoML. First, we introduce AutoML methods according to the pipeline, covering data preparation, feature engineering, hyperparameter optimization, and neural architecture search (NAS). We focus more on NAS, as it is currently very hot sub-topic of AutoML. We summarize the performance of the representative NAS algorithms on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets and further discuss several worthy studying directions of NAS methods: one/two-stage NAS, one-shot NAS, and joint hyperparameter and architecture optimization. Finally, we discuss some open problems of the existing AutoML methods for future research.

Shangbang Long, Jiaqiang Ruan, Wenjie Zhang et al.

Driven by deep neural networks and large scale datasets, scene text detection methods have progressed substantially over the past years, continuously refreshing the performance records on various standard benchmarks. However, limited by the representations (axis-aligned rectangles, rotated rectangles or quadrangles) adopted to describe text, existing methods may fall short when dealing with much more free-form text instances, such as curved text, which are actually very common in real-world scenarios. To tackle this problem, we propose a more flexible representation for scene text, termed as TextSnake, which is able to effectively represent text instances in horizontal, oriented and curved forms. In TextSnake, a text instance is described as a sequence of ordered, overlapping disks centered at symmetric axes, each of which is associated with potentially variable radius and orientation. Such geometry attributes are estimated via a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) model. In experiments, the text detector based on TextSnake achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance on Total-Text and SCUT-CTW1500, the two newly published benchmarks with special emphasis on curved text in natural images, as well as the widely-used datasets ICDAR 2015 and MSRA-TD500. Specifically, TextSnake outperforms the baseline on Total-Text by more than 40% in F-measure.