We investigate the fine grained object categorization problem of determining the breed of animal from an image. To this end we introduce a new annotated dataset of pets covering 37 different breeds of cats and dogs. The visual problem is very challenging as these animals, particularly cats, are very deformable and there can be quite subtle differences between the breeds. We make a number of contributions: first, we introduce a model to classify a pet breed automatically from an image. The model combines shape, captured by a deformable part model detecting the pet face, and appearance, captured by a bag-of-words model that describes the pet fur. Fitting the model involves automatically segmenting the animal in the image. Second, we compare two classification approaches: a hierarchical one, in which a pet is first assigned to the cat or dog family and then to a breed, and a flat one, in which the breed is obtained directly. We also investigate a number of animal and image orientated spatial layouts. These models are very good: they beat all previously published results on the challenging ASIRRA test (cat vs dog discrimination). When applied to the task of discriminating the 37 different breeds of pets, the models obtain an average accuracy of about 59%, a very encouraging result considering the difficulty of the problem.

International audienceIn this paper we present a framework for pixel-wise object segmentation of road scenes that combines motion and appearance features. It is designed to handle street-level imagery such as that on Google Street View and Microsoft Bing Maps. We formulate the problem in a CRF framework in order to probabilistically model the label likelihoods and the a priori knowledge. An extended set of appearance-based features is used, which consists of textons, colour, location and HOG descriptors. A novel boosting approach is then applied to combine the motion and appearance-based features. We also incorporate higher order potentials in our CRF model, which produce segmentations with precise object boundaries. We evaluate our method both quantitatively and qualitatively on the challenging Cambridge-driving Labeled Video dataset. Our approach shows an overall recognition accuracy of 84% compared to the state-of-the-art accuracy of 69%

The ICDAR 2019 Challenge on "Scanned receipts OCR and key information extraction" (SROIE) covers important aspects related to the automated analysis of scanned receipts. The SROIE tasks play a key role in many document analysis systems and hold significant commercial potential. Although a lot of work has been published over the years on administrative document analysis, the community has advanced relatively slowly, as most datasets have been kept private. One of the key contributions of SROIE to the document analysis community is to offer a first, standardized dataset of 1000 whole scanned receipt images and annotations, as well as an evaluation procedure for such tasks. The Challenge is structured around three tasks, namely Scanned Receipt Text Localization (Task 1), Scanned Receipt OCR (Task 2) and Key Information Extraction from Scanned Receipts (Task 3). The competition opened on 10th February, 2019 and closed on 5th May, 2019. We received 29, 24 and 18 valid submissions received for the three competition tasks, respectively. This report presents the competition datasets, define the tasks and the evaluation protocols, offer detailed submission statistics, as well as an analysis of the submitted performance. While the tasks of text localization and recognition seem to be relatively easy to tackle, it is interesting to observe the variety of ideas and approaches proposed for the information extraction task. According to the submissions' performance we believe there is still margin for improving information extraction performance, although the current dataset would have to grow substantially in following editions. Given the success of the SROIE competition evidenced by the wide interest generated and the healthy number of submissions from academic, research institutes and industry over different countries, we consider that the SROIE competition can evolve into a useful resource for the community, drawing further attention and promoting research and development efforts in this field.

While several datasets for autonomous navigation have become available in recent years, they have tended to focus on structured driving environments. This usually corresponds to well-delineated infrastructure such as lanes, a small number of well-defined categories for traffic participants, low variation in object or background appearance and strong adherence to traffic rules. We propose DS, a novel dataset for road scene understanding in unstructured environments where the above assumptions are largely not satisfied. It consists of 10,004 images, finely annotated with 34 classes collected from 182 drive sequences on Indian roads. The label set is expanded in comparison to popular benchmarks such as Cityscapes, to account for new classes. It also reflects label distributions of road scenes significantly different from existing datasets, with most classes displaying greater within-class diversity. Consistent with real driving behaviors, it also identifies new classes such as drivable areas besides the road. We propose a new four-level label hierarchy, which allows varying degrees of complexity and opens up possibilities for new training methods. Our empirical study provides an in-depth analysis of the label characteristics. State-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation achieve much lower accuracies on our dataset, demonstrating its distinction compared to Cityscapes. Finally, we propose that our dataset is an ideal opportunity for new problems such as domain adaptation, few-shot learning and behavior prediction in road scenes.

The automatic discovery of distinctive parts for an object or scene class is challenging since it requires simultaneously to learn the part appearance and also to identify the part occurrences in images. In this paper, we propose a simple, efficient, and effective method to do so. We address this problem by learning parts incrementally, starting from a single part occurrence with an Exemplar SVM. In this manner, additional part instances are discovered and aligned reliably before being considered as training examples. We also propose entropy-rank curves as a means of evaluating the distinctiveness of parts shareable between categories and use them to select useful parts out of a set of candidates. We apply the new representation to the task of scene categorisation on the MIT Scene 67 benchmark. We show that our method can learn parts which are significantly more informative and for a fraction of the cost, compared to previous part-learning methods such as Singh et al. [28]. We also show that a well constructed bag of words or Fisher vector model can substantially outperform the previous state-of-the-art classification performance on this data.