Perla Sai Raj Kishore

Sudip Das, Perla Sai Raj Kishore, Ujjwal Bhattacharya

Pose estimation in the wild is a challenging problem, particularly in situations of (i) occlusions of varying degrees and (ii) crowded outdoor scenes. Most of the existing studies of pose estimation did not report the performance in similar situations. Moreover, pose annotations for occluded parts of human figures have not been provided in any of the relevant standard datasets which in turn creates further difficulties to the required studies for pose estimation of the entire figure of occluded humans. Well known pedestrian detection datasets such as CityPersons contains samples of outdoor scenes but it does not include pose annotations. Here, we propose a novel multi-task framework for end-to-end training towards the entire pose estimation of pedestrians including in situations of any kind of occlusion. To tackle this problem for training the network, we make use of a pose estimation dataset, MS-COCO, and employ unsupervised adversarial instance-level domain adaptation for estimating the entire pose of occluded pedestrians. The experimental studies show that the proposed framework outperforms the SOTA results for pose estimation, instance segmentation and pedestrian detection in cases of heavy occlusions (HO) and reasonable + heavy occlusions (R + HO) on the two benchmark datasets.

Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Abhirup Das, Ankan Kumar Bhunia et al.

Handwritten Word Recognition and Spotting is a challenging field dealing with handwritten text possessing irregular and complex shapes. The design of deep neural network models makes it necessary to extend training datasets in order to introduce variations and increase the number of samples; word-retrieval is therefore very difficult in low-resource scripts. Much of the existing literature comprises preprocessing strategies which are seldom sufficient to cover all possible variations. We propose the Adversarial Feature Deformation Module (AFDM) that learns ways to elastically warp extracted features in a scalable manner. The AFDM is inserted between intermediate layers and trained alternatively with the original framework, boosting its capability to better learn highly informative features rather than trivial ones. We test our meta-framework, which is built on top of popular word-spotting and word-recognition frameworks and enhanced by the AFDM, not only on extensive Latin word datasets but also sparser Indic scripts. We record results for varying training data sizes, and observe that our enhanced network generalizes much better in the low-data regime; the overall word-error rates and mAP scores are observed to improve as well.

Perla Sai Raj Kishore, Ayan Kumar Bhunia, Shuvozit Ghose et al.

Thumbnails are widely used all over the world as a preview for digital images. In this work we propose a deep neural framework to generate thumbnails of any size and aspect ratio, even for unseen values during training, with high accuracy and precision. We use Global Context Aggregation (GCA) and a modified Region Proposal Network (RPN) with adaptive convolutions to generate thumbnails in real time. GCA is used to selectively attend and aggregate the global context information from the entire image while the RPN is used to predict candidate bounding boxes for the thumbnail image. Adaptive convolution eliminates the problem of generating thumbnails of various aspect ratios by using filter weights dynamically generated from the aspect ratio information. The experimental results indicate the superior performance of the proposed model over existing state-of-the-art techniques.