Pyramid Mask Text Detector (PMTD)
Scene text detection, an essential step of scene text recognition system, is to locate text instances in natural scene images automatically. Some recent attempts benefiting from Mask R-CNN formulate scene text detection task as an instance segmentation problem and achieve remarkable performance. In this paper, we present a new Mask R-CNN based framework named Pyramid Mask Text Detector (PMTD) to handle the scene text detection. Instead of binary text mask generated by the existing Mask R-CNN based methods, our PMTD performs pixel-level regression under the guidance of location-aware supervision, yielding a more informative soft text mask for each text instance. As for the generation of text boxes, PMTD reinterprets the obtained 2D soft mask into 3D space and introduces a novel plane clustering algorithm to derive the optimal text box on the basis of 3D shape. Experiments on standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed PMTD brings consistent and noticeable gain and clearly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, it achieves an F-measure of 80.13% on ICDAR 2017 MLT dataset. …

AFEL-REC
In this paper, we present preliminary results of AFEL-REC, a recommender system for social learning environments. AFEL-REC is build upon a scalable software architecture to provide recommendations of learning resources in near real-time. Furthermore, AFEL-REC can cope with any kind of data that is present in social learning environments such as resource metadata, user interactions or social tags. We provide a preliminary evaluation of three recommendation use cases implemented in AFEL-REC and we find that utilizing social data in form of tags is helpful for not only improving recommendation accuracy but also coverage. This paper should be valuable for both researchers and practitioners interested in providing resource recommendations in social learning environments. …

Superpixel-Based Patch (SuperPatch)
Superpixels have become very popular in many computer vision applications. Nevertheless, they remain underexploited since the superpixel decomposition may produce irregular and non stable segmentation results due to the dependency to the image content. In this paper, we first introduce a novel structure, a superpixel-based patch, called SuperPatch. The proposed structure, based on superpixel neighborhood, leads to a robust descriptor since spatial information is naturally included. The generalization of the PatchMatch method to SuperPatches, named SuperPatchMatch, is introduced. Finally, we propose a framework to perform fast segmentation and labeling from an image database, and demonstrate the potential of our approach since we outperform, in terms of computational cost and accuracy, the results of state-of-the-art methods on both face labeling and medical image segmentation. …

Multi-Resolution Flexible Irregular Time Series Network (Multi-FIT)
Missing values, irregularly collected samples, and multi-resolution signals commonly occur in multivariate time series data, making predictive tasks difficult. These challenges are especially prevalent in the healthcare domain, where patients’ vital signs and electronic records are collected at different frequencies and have occasionally missing information due to the imperfections in equipment or patient circumstances. Researchers have handled each of these issues differently, often handling missing data through mean value imputation and then using sequence models over the multivariate signals while ignoring the different resolution of signals. We propose a unified model named Multi-resolution Flexible Irregular Time series Network (Multi-FIT). The building block for Multi-FIT is the FIT network. The FIT network creates an informative dense representation at each time step using signal information such as last observed value, time difference since the last observed time stamp and overall mean for the signal. Vertical FIT (FIT-V) is a variant of FIT which also models the relationship between different temporal signals while creating the informative dense representations for the signal. The multi-FIT model uses multiple FIT networks for sets of signals with different resolutions, further facilitating the construction of flexible representations. Our model has three main contributions: a.) it does not impute values but rather creates informative representations to provide flexibility to the model for creating task-specific representations b.) it models the relationship between different signals in the form of support signals c.) it models different resolutions in parallel before merging them for the final prediction task. The FIT, FIT-V and Multi-FIT networks improve upon the state-of-the-art models for three predictive tasks, including the forecasting of patient survival. …