The task of partial scene text retrieval involves localizing and searching for text instances that are the same or similar to a given query text from an image gallery. However, existing methods can only handle text-line instances, leaving the problem of searching for partial patches within these text-line instances unsolved due to a lack of patch annotations in the training data. To address this issue, we propose a network that can simultaneously retrieve both text-line instances and their partial patches. Our method embeds the two types of data (query text and scene text instances) into a shared feature space and measures their cross-modal similarities. To handle partial patches, our proposed approach adopts a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) approach to learn their similarities with query text, without requiring extra annotations. However, constructing bags, which is a standard step of conventional MIL approaches, can introduce numerous noisy samples for training, and lower inference speed. To address this issue, we propose a Ranking MIL (RankMIL) approach to adaptively filter those noisy samples. Additionally, we present a Dynamic Partial Match Algorithm (DPMA) that can directly search for the target partial patch from a text-line instance during the inference stage, without requiring bags. This greatly improves the search efficiency and the performance of retrieving partial patches. We evaluate the proposed method on both English and Chinese datasets in two tasks: retrieving text-line instances and partial patches. For English text retrieval, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 8.04% mAP and 12.71% mAP on average, respectively, among three datasets for the two tasks. For Chinese text retrieval, our approach surpasses state-of-the-art approaches by 24.45% mAP and 38.06% mAP on average, respectively, among three datasets for the two tasks. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lanfeng4659/PSTR.

Recently, the semantics of scene text has been proven to be essential in fine-grained image classification. However, the existing methods mainly exploit the literal meaning of scene text for fine-grained recognition, which might be irrelevant when it is not significantly related to objects/scenes. We propose an end-to-end trainable network that mines implicit contextual knowledge behind scene text image and enhance the semantics and correlation to fine-tune the image representation. Unlike the existing methods, our model integrates three modalities: visual feature extraction, text semantics extraction, and correlating background knowledge to fine-grained image classification. Specifically, we employ KnowBert to retrieve relevant knowledge for semantic representation and combine it with image features for fine-grained classification. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Con-Text, and Drink Bottle, show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 3.72% mAP and 5.39% mAp, respectively. To further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we create a new dataset on crowd activity recognition for the evaluation. The source code and new dataset of this work are available at this repository11https://github.com/lanfeng4659/KnowledgeMiningWithSceneText.

Reading arbitrary-shaped text in an end-to-end fashion has received particularly growing interested in computer vision. In this paper, we study the problem of scene text spotting, which aims to detect and recognize text from cluttered images simultaneously and propose an end-to-end trainable neural network named Boundary TextSpotter. Different from existing methods that describe the shape of text instance with bounding box or shape mask, Boundary TextSpotter formulates it as a set of boundary points. Besides, the representation of such boundary points provides the order of reading text. Benefiting from the representation on both detection and recognition, Boundary TextSpotter can easily deal with the text of arbitrary shapes. Further, to efficiently detect the boundary points of the text, a single-stage text detector is proposed, which can almost perform at a real-time speed. Experiments on three challenging datasets, including ICDAR2015, Total-Text and CTW1500 demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results, meanwhile significantly improving the inference speed.

Scene text retrieval aims to localize and search all text instances from an image gallery, which are the same or similar with a given query text. Such a task is usually realized by matching a query text to the recognized words, outputted by an end-to-end scene text spotter. In this paper, we address this problem by directly learning a cross-modal similarity between a query text and each text instance from natural images. Specifically, we establish an end-to-end trainable network, jointly optimizing the procedures of scene text detection and cross-modal similarity learning. In this way, scene text retrieval can be simply performed by ranking the detected text instances with the learned similarity. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art scene text spotting/retrieval approaches. In particular, the proposed framework of joint detection and similarity learning achieves significantly better performance than separated methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/lanfeng4659/STR-TDSL.

Although gait recognition has drawn increasing research attention recently, it remains challenging to learn discriminative temporal representation since the silhouette differences are quite subtle in spatial domain. Inspired by the observation that humans can distinguish gaits of different subjects by adaptively focusing on temporal sequences with different time scales, we propose a context-sensitive temporal feature learning (CSTL) network in this paper, which aggregates temporal features in three scales to obtain motion representation according to the temporal contextual information. Specifically, CSTL introduces relation modeling among multi-scale features to evaluate feature importances, based on which network adaptively enhances more important scale and suppresses less important scale. Besides that, we propose a salient spatial feature learning (SSFL) module to tackle the misalignment problem caused by temporal operation, e.g., temporal convolution. SSFL recombines a frame of salient spatial features by extracting the most discriminative parts across the whole sequence. In this way, we achieve adaptive temporal learning and salient spatial mining simultaneously. Extensive experiments conducted on two datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance. On CASIA-B dataset, we achieve rank-1 accuracies of 98.0%, 95.4% and 87.0% under normal walking, bag-carrying and coat-wearing conditions. On OU-MVLP dataset, we achieve rank-1 accuracy of 90.2%. The source code will be published at https://github.com/OliverHxh/CSTL.

Recently, end-to-end text spotting that aims to detect and recognize text from cluttered images simultaneously has received particularly growing interest in computer vision. Different from the existing approaches that formulate text detection as bounding box extraction or instance segmentation, we localize a set of points on the boundary of each text instance. With the representation of such boundary points, we establish a simple yet effective scheme for end-to-end text spotting, which can read the text of arbitrary shapes. Experiments on three challenging datasets, including ICDAR2015, TotalText and COCO-Text demonstrate that the proposed method consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art in both scene text detection and end-to-end text recognition tasks.

This paper presents a novel and robust descriptor, depth-projection-map-based bag of contour fragments, which is applied to extraction of hand shape and structure information from depth maps. Our method projects depth maps onto three orthogonal planes to generate the depth projection maps. Then, the bag of contour fragment descriptors are extracted from the three depth projection maps and concatenated as a final shape representation of the original depth data. A support vector machine with a linear kernel is used as a shape classifier. The proposed description method is evaluated on three public datasets, as well as a new and more challenging dataset for hand gesture recognition. Results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the previous methods on all tested datasets for both static digit recognition and letter gesture recognition. For the challenging HUST-ASL dataset, in particular, the proposed method improves on the previous state-of-the-art methods from 40.1% to 64.6%.