We present a neural network model -based on Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks and a novel attention mechanism -which achieves 84.2% accuracy on the challenging French Street Name Signs (FSNS) dataset, significantly outperforming the previous state of the art (Smith'16), which achieved 72.46%. Furthermore, our new method is much simpler and more general than the previous approach. To demonstrate the generality of our model, we show that it also performs well on an even more challenging dataset derived from Google Street View, in which the goal is to extract business names from store fronts. Finally, we study the speed/accuracy tradeoff that results from using CNN feature extractors of different depths. Surprisingly, we find that deeper is not always better (in terms of accuracy, as well as speed). Our resulting model is simple, accurate and fast, allowing it to be used at scale on a variety of challenging real-world text extraction problems.

The design and implementation of a portable meeting recorder is presented. Composed of an omni-directional video camera with four-channel audio capture, the system saves a view of all the activity in a meeting and the directions from which people spoke. Subsequent analysis computes metadata that includes video activity analysis of the compressed data stream and audio processing that helps locate events that occurred during the meeting. Automatic calculation of the room in which the meeting occurred allows for efficient navigation of a collection of recorded meetings. A user interface is populated from the metadata description to allow for simple browsing and location of significant events.

Abstract

We introduce the French Street Name Signs (FSNS) Dataset consisting of more than a million images of street name signs cropped from Google Street View images of France. Each image contains several views of the same street name sign. Every image has normalized, title case folded ground-truth text as it would appear on a map. We believe that the FSNS dataset is large and complex enough to train a deep network of significant complexity to solve the street name extraction problem "end-to-end" or to explore the design trade-offs between a single complex engineered network and multiple sub-networks designed and trained to solve sub-problems. We present such an "end-to-end" network/graph for Tensor Flow and its results on the FSNS dataset. 1

Abstract-Adaptive Gaussian mixtures have been used for modeling nonstationary temporal distributions of pixels in video surveillance applications. However, a common problem for this approach is balancing between model convergence speed and stability. This paper proposes an effective scheme to improve the convergence rate without compromising model stability. This is achieved by replacing the global, static retention factor with an adaptive learning rate calculated for each Gaussian at every frame. Significant improvements are shown on both synthetic and real video data. Incorporating this algorithm into a statistical framework for background subtraction leads to an improved segmentation performance compared to a standard method.