Runner-up at VizWiz Grand Challenge 2018
Analyze images taken by visually impaired people and provide answers
SK Telecom announced on the 16th that its AI center 'T-Brain' won second place at the 'VizWiz Grand Challenge 2018' hosted by the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), an international computer vision conference. The award ceremony took place on the 14th, local time, in Munich, Germany.

The VizWiz Grand Challenge 2018 is a competition that evaluates the appropriate responses to various questions on images taken by visually impaired people using a dataset built by the University of Texas at Austin.

The biggest feature of this competition is that, rather than the conventional Visual Question Answering (VQA) method of answering questions using refined images, more than 10,000 visually impaired people will take photos with their smartphones and answer questions about them.

Images taken directly by visually impaired people require a higher level of recognition ability than recognizing refined images, as they contain many images that are distorted, unrelated to the question, and often contain light bleed due to their physical limitations.

In addition to SK Telecom T-Brain, the research team of Professor Jang Byeong-tak of Seoul National University jointly participated in this competition, and submitted 8,000 images that the organizer had previously released to the organizers using the Bilinear Attention Networks (BAN) algorithm from June 20 to August 17.

Dr. Kim Jin-hwa, who led the research team along with Dr. Choi Yong-seok and Dr. Hong Seong-eun of T-Brain in this competition, said, “It is very meaningful that we have increased the recognition rate for real data, such as photos, that visually impaired people are curious about, rather than recognizing standardized image data,” and “With this award, SK Telecom has taken a meaningful first step toward developing an artificial intelligence program for the socially disadvantaged, the visually impaired.”

Runner-up in this VizWiz competitionThe research paper on the winning algorithm is scheduled to be presented at the International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), the world's most prestigious international academic conference in the field of AI (machine learning), held in Montreal, Canada in December.