Abstract

The current Document Image Quality Assessment (DIQA) algorithms directly relate the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracies with the quality of the document to build supervised learning frameworks. This direct correlation has two major limitations: (a) OCR may be affected by factors independent of the quality of the capture and (b) it cannot account for blur variations within an image. An alternate possibility is to quantify the quality of capture using human judgement, however, it is subjective and prone to error. In this work, we build upon the idea of Spatial Frequency Response (SFR) to reliably quantify the quality of a document image. We present through quantitative and qualitative experiments that the proposed metric leads to significant improvement in document quality prediction in contrast to using OCR as ground truth.

Abstract

Uneven illumination and shadows in document images cause a challenge for digitization applications and automated workflows. In this work, we propose a new method to recover unshadowed document images from images with shadows/uneven illumination. We pose this problem as one of estimating the shading and reflectance components of the given original image. Our method first estimates the shading and uses it to compute the reflectance. The output reflectance map is then used to improve the shading and the process is repeated in an iterative manner. The iterative procedure allows for a gradual compensation and allows our algorithm to even handle difficult hard shadows without introducing any artifacts. Experiments over two different datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm and the low computation complexity makes it suitable for most practical applications.

Abstract

An effective news recommendation system should harness the historical information of the user based on her interactions as well as the content of the articles. In this paper we propose a novel deep learning model for news recommendation which utilizes the content of the news articles as well as the sequence in which the articles were read by the user. To model both of these information, which are essentially of different types, we propose a simple yet effective architecture which utilizes a 3-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network which takes the word embeddings of the articles present in the user history as its input. Using such a method endows the model with the capability to automatically learn spatial (features of a particular article) as well as temporal features (features across articles read by a user) which signify the interest of the user. At test time, we use this in combination with a 2-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network for recommending articles to users. On a real-world dataset our method outperformed strong baselines which also model the news recommendation problem using neural networks.

Abstract

We present a novel approach to optimally retarget videos for varied displays with differing aspect ratios by preserving salient scene content discovered via eye tracking. Our algorithm performs editing with cut, pan and zoom operations by optimizing the path of a cropping window within the original video while seeking to (i) preserve salient regions, and (ii) adhere to the principles of cinematography. Our approach is (a) content agnostic as the same methodology is employed to re-edit a wide-angle video recording or a close-up movie sequence captured with a static or moving camera, and (b) independent of video length and can in principle re-edit an entire movie in one shot. Our algorithm consists of two steps. The first step employs gaze transition cues to detect time stamps where new cuts are to be introduced in the original video via dynamic programming. A subsequent step optimizes the cropping window path (to create pan and zoom effects), while accounting for the original and new cuts. The cropping window path is designed to include maximum gaze information, and is composed of piecewise constant, linear and parabolic segments. It is obtained via L(1) regularized convex optimization which ensures a smooth viewing experience. We test our approach on a wide variety of videos and demonstrate significant improvement over the state-of-the-art, both in terms of computational complexity and qualitative aspects. A study performed with 16 users confirms that our approach results in a superior viewing experience as compared to gaze driven re-editing [JSSH15] and letterboxing methods, especially for wide-angle static camera recordings.

Abstract

Popular methods for news recommendation which are based on collaborative filtering and content-based filtering have multiple drawbacks. The former method does not account for the sequential nature of news reading and suffers from the problem of cold-start, while the latter, suffers from over-specialization. In order to address these issues for news recommendation we propose a Hybrid Recurrent Attention Machine (HRAM). HRAM consists of two components. The first component utilizes a neural network for matrix factorization. While in the second component, we first learn the distributed representation of each news article. We then use the historical data of the user in a sequential manner and feed it to an attention-based recurrent layer. Finally, we concatenate the outputs from both these components and use further hidden layers in order to make predictions. In this way, we harness the information present in the user reading history and boost it with the information available through collaborative filtering for providing better news recommendations. Extensive experiments over two real-world datasets show that the proposed model provides significant improvement over the state-of-the-art.

Abstract

Abstract. We propose a new long video dataset 1 (called Track Long and Prosper - TLP) and benchmark for single object tracking. The dataset consists of 50 HD videos from real world scenarios, encompassing a duration of over 400 minutes (676K frames), making it more than 20 folds larger in average duration per sequence and more than 8 folds larger in terms of total covered duration, as compared to existing generic datasets for visual tracking. The proposed dataset paves a way to suitably assess long term tracking performance and train better deep learning architectures (avoiding/reducing augmentation, which may not reflect real world behaviour). We benchmark the dataset on 17 state of the art trackers and rank them according to tracking accuracy and run time speeds. We further present thorough qualitative and quantitative evaluation highlighting the importance of long term aspect of tracking. Our most interesting observations are (a) existing short sequence benchmarks fail to bring out the inherent differences in tracking algorithms which widen up while tracking on long sequences and (b) the accuracy of trackers abruptly drops on challenging long sequences, suggesting the potential need of research efforts in the direction of long-term tracking.

Abstract

We present an online interactive tool1 that generates titles of blog titles and thus take the first step toward automating science journalism. Science journalism aims to transform jargon-laden scientific articles into a form that the common reader can comprehend while ensuring that the underlying meaning of the article is retained. In this work, we present a tool, which, given the title and abstract of a research paper will generate a blog title by mimicking a human science journalist. The tool makes use of a model trained on a corpus of 87, 328 pairs of research papers and their corresponding blogs, built from two science news aggregators. The architecture of the model is a two stage mechanism which generates blog titles. Evaluation using standard metrics indicate the viability of the proposed system.

Abstract

The internet has transformed the way we communicate ideas and share knowledge. Online discussion forums (ODFs) play an important role by providing a platform for the internet users to interact. There exist numerous ODFs where participants (ie the agents) can post the reviews of events, restaurants, movies, books, services, and so on. Such online forums are also commonly used as a web-based discussion platform to discuss academic topics, personal experiences, views, etc. We are motivated by forums such as Quora, Stack Exchange, Reddit, WikiAnswers, and Yahoo! Answers, which provide a platform for open-ended discussions, and by platforms such as Piazza and iClicker which supplement traditional classroom teaching. These forums are also used by massive online

Abstract

Word problem solving has always been a challenging task as it involves reasoning across sentences, identification of operations and their order of application on relevant operands. Most of the earlier systems attempted to solve word problems with tailored features for handling each category of problems. In this paper, we present a new approach to solve simple arithmetic problems. Through this work we introduce a novel method where we first learn a dense representation of the problem description conditioned on the question in hand. We leverage this representation to generate the operands and operators in the appropriate order. Our approach improves upon the state-of-the-art system by 3% in one benchmark dataset while ensuring comparable accuracies in other datasets.

Abstract

Civic crowdfunding (CC) is a practice with which interested players can raise funds for a civic project. With Blockchains gaining traction, CC can be implemented in a reliable, transparent and secure manner with smart contracts. The fundamental challenge in CC is free riding. PPR, the proposal by [Zubrickas, 2014] of refund bonus to the contributors in the case of the project not getting provisioned has interesting properties. As observed by [Chandra et al, 2016], PPR faces a challenge of race condition. To address this, their proposal, PPS considers the temporal aspects of a contribution. However, PPS is computationally complex and is difficult to explain to a layperson. In this work, we look for all important properties a refund bonus scheme must satisfy in order to discourage free riding while avoiding the race condition. We identify Contribution Monotonicity and Time Monotonicity as sufficient conditions for this. We propose three refund bonus schemes satisfying these two conditions leading to three novel mechanisms for CC-PPRG, PPRE, and PPRP. We show that PPRG is the most cost-effective mechanism when deployed as a smart contract. We then prove that under certain assumptions on valuations of the players, in PPRG, the project is funded at equilibrium