Improving Knot Prediction in Wood Logs with Longitudinal Feature Propagation

The quality of a wood log in the wood industry depends heavily on the presence of both outer and inner defects, including inner knots that are a result of the growth of tree branches. Today, locating the inner knots require the use of expensive equipment such as X-ray scanners. In this paper, we address the task of predicting the location of inner defects from the outer shape of the logs. The dataset is built by extracting both the contours and the knots with X-ray measurements. We propose to solve this binary segmentation task by leveraging convolutional recurrent neural networks. Once the neural network is trained, inference can be performed from the outer shape measured with cheap devices such as laser profilers. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on fir and spruce tree species and perform ablation on the recurrence to demonstrate its importance.

YARBUS : Yet Another Rule Based belief Update System

We introduce a new rule based system for belief tracking in dialog systems. Despite the simplicity of the rules being considered, the proposed belief tracker ranks favourably compared to the previous submissions on the second and third Dialog State Tracking challenges. The results of this simple tracker allows to reconsider the performances of previous submissions using more elaborate techniques.