Scene text erasing, which replaces text regions with reasonable content in natural images, has drawn significant attention in the computer vision community in recent years. There are two potential subtasks in scene text erasing: text detection and image inpainting. Both subtasks require considerable data to achieve better performance; however, the lack of a large-scale real-world scene-text removal dataset does not allow existing methods to realize their potential. To compensate for the lack of pairwise real-world data, we made considerable use of synthetic text after additional enhancement and subsequently trained our model only on the dataset generated by the improved synthetic text engine. Our proposed network contains a stroke mask prediction module and background inpainting module that can extract the text stroke as a relatively small hole from the cropped text image to maintain more background content for better inpainting results. This model can partially erase text instances in a scene image with a bounding box or work with an existing scene-text detector for automatic scene text erasing. The experimental results from the qualitative and quantitative evaluation on the SCUT-Syn, ICDAR2013, and SCUT-EnsText datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods even when they are trained on real-world data.

Feature extraction is essential for chemical property estimation of molecules using machine learning. Recently, graph neural networks have attracted attention for feature extraction from molecules. However, existing methods focus only on specific structural information, such as node relationship. In this paper, we propose a novel graph convolutional neural network that performs feature extraction with simultaneously considering multiple structures. Specifically, we propose feature extraction paths specialized in node, edge, and three-dimensional structures. Moreover, we propose an attention mechanism to aggregate the features extracted by the paths. The attention aggregation enables us to select useful features dynamically. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperformed previous methods.

In Japan, blue and chub mackerels are often caught simultaneously, and their market prices are different. Humans need to sort them manually, which requires heavy labor. The demand for automatic sorting machines is increasing. The aim of this paper is to develop an automatic sorting machine of mackerels, which is a challenging task. There are two required functions. Firstly, it needs localization of mackerels on a conveyor belt so that mackerels can be transported to destinations. Secondly, species classification is needed, but it is difficult due to similar appearance among the species. In this paper, we propose an automatic sorting machine using deep neural networks and a red laser light. Specifically, we irradiate red laser to abdomen, and the shape of the laser will be circle and ellipse on the blue and chub mackerels, respectively. We take images and use neural networks to locate the whole body and irradiated regions. Then, we classify mackerels using features extracted from the whole body and irradiated regions. Using both the features makes the classification accurate and robust. Experimental results show that the proposed classification is superior to the methods using either features of irradiated or whole body regions. Moreover, we confirmed that the automatic mackerel-sorting machine performs accurately.

This paper proposes a method for automatic discrimination of two mackerel species: Scomber japonicus (chub mackerel) and Scomber australasicus (blue mackerel). Because S. japonicus has a much higher market price than S. australasicus, the two species must be properly sorted before shipment, but their similar appearance makes discrimination difficult. These species can be effectively distinguished using the ratio of the base length between the dorsal fin’s first and ninth spines to the fork length. However, manual measurement of this ratio is time-consuming and reduces fish freshness. The proposed technique instead uses image processing to measure these lengths. We were able to successfully discriminate between the two species using the ratio as a geometric feature, in combination with several texture features. We then quantitatively verified the effectiveness of the proposed method and demonstrated that it is highly accurate in classifying mackerel.

Recently, attention has surged concerning intelligent sensors using text detection. However, there are challenges in detecting small texts. To solve this problem, we propose a novel text detection CNN (convolutional neural network) architecture sensitive to text scale. We extract multi-resolution feature maps in multi-stage convolution layers that have been employed to prevent losing information and maintain the feature size. In addition, we developed the CNN considering the receptive field size to generate proposal stages. The experimental results show the importance of the receptive field size.

When a disaster occurs, video communication is an effective way to disseminate large quantities of important information. However, video coding standards such as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compress entire videos, whatever the contents are; at low bit rates, the quality of significant objects deteriorates. In this paper, an object-based video coding method is proposed to address this problem. The proposed method extracts objects on the basis of visual saliency and temporal correlation between frames. Subsequently, we execute pre-processing which degrades the background quality before encoding the video with HEVC. This method can reduce the bit rate while preserving target object quality. Experimental comparison with HEVC demonstrates the superior performance of the proposed method.