Abstract: Despite its wide applications in criminal investigations and clinical communications with patients suffering from autism, automatic micro-expression recognition remains a challenging problem because of the lack of training data and imbalanced classes problems. In this study, we proposed a meta-learning based multi-model fusion network (Meta-MMFNet) to solve the existing problems. The proposed method is based on the metric-based meta-learning pipeline, which is specifically designed for few-shot learning and is suitable for model-level fusion. The frame difference and optical flow features were fused, deep features were extracted from the fused feature, and finally in the meta-learning-based framework, weighted sum model fusion method was applied for micro-expression classification. Meta-MMFNet achieved better results than state-of-the-art methods on four datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/wenjgong/meta-fusion-based-method.

Abstract: Despite recent advances in 3D pose estimation of human hands, especially thanks to the advent of CNNs and depth cameras, this task is still far from being solved. This is mainly due to the highly non-linear dynamics of fingers, which make hand model training a challenging task. In this paper, we exploit a novel hierarchical tree-like structured CNN, in which branches are trained to become specialized in predefined subsets of hand joints, called local poses. We further fuse local pose features, extracted from hierarchical CNN branches, to learn higher order dependencies among joints in the final pose by end-to-end training. Lastly, the loss function used is also defined to incorporate appearance and physical constraints about doable hand motion and deformation. Finally, we introduce a non-rigid data augmentation approach to increase the amount of training depth data. Experimental results suggest that feeding a tree-shaped CNN, specialized in local poses, into a fusion network for modeling joints correlations and dependencies, helps to increase the precision of final estimations, outperforming state-of-the-art results on NYU and SyntheticHand datasets.

Abstract: Existing color constancy methods are all based on specific assumptions such as the spatial and spectral characteristics of images. As a consequence, no algorithm can be considered as universal. However, with the large variety of available methods, the question is how to select the method that performs best for a specific image. To achieve selection and combining of color constancy algorithms, in this paper natural image statistics are used to identify the most important characteristics of color images. Then, based on these image characteristics, the proper color constancy algorithm (or best combination of algorithms) is selected for a specific image. To capture the image characteristics, the Weibull parameterization (e.g., grain size and contrast) is used. It is shown that the Weibull parameterization is related to the image attributes to which the used color constancy methods are sensitive. An MoG-classifier is used to learn the correlation and weighting between the Weibull-parameters and the image attributes (number of edges, amount of texture, and SNR). The output of the classifier is the selection of the best performing color constancy method for a certain image. Experimental results show a large improvement over state-of-the-art single algorithms. On a data set consisting of more than 11,000 images, an increase in color constancy performance up to 20 percent (median angular error) can be obtained compared to the best-performing single algorithm. Further, it is shown that for certain scene categories, one specific color constancy algorithm can be used instead of the classifier considering several algorithms.