|
Carola Figueroa Flores, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Joost Van de Weijer, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2019). Saliency for fine-grained object recognition in domains with scarce training data. PR - Pattern Recognition, 94, 62–73.
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of saliency to improve the classification accuracy of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the case when scarce training data is available. Our approach consists in adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture which is used to modulate the standard bottom-up visual features from the original image input, acting as an attentional mechanism that guides the feature extraction process. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enable the effective training of a fine-grained recognition model with limited training samples and to improve the performance on the task, thereby alleviating the need to annotate a large dataset. The vast majority of saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline. Our proposed pipeline allows to evaluate saliency methods for the high-level task of object recognition. We perform extensive experiments on various fine-grained datasets (Flowers, Birds, Cars, and Dogs) under different conditions and show that saliency can considerably improve the network’s performance, especially for the case of scarce training data. Furthermore, our experiments show that saliency methods that obtain improved saliency maps (as measured by traditional saliency benchmarks) also translate to saliency methods that yield improved performance gains when applied in an object recognition pipeline.
|
|
|
Cristhian A. Aguilera-Carrasco, Luis Felipe Gonzalez-Böhme, Francisco Valdes, Francisco Javier Quitral Zapata, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2023). A Hand-Drawn Language for Human–Robot Collaboration in Wood Stereotomy. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 11, 100975–100985.
Abstract: This study introduces a novel, hand-drawn language designed to foster human-robot collaboration in wood stereotomy, central to carpentry and joinery professions. Based on skilled carpenters’ line and symbol etchings on timber, this language signifies the location, geometry of woodworking joints, and timber placement within a framework. A proof-of-concept prototype has been developed, integrating object detectors, keypoint regression, and traditional computer vision techniques to interpret this language and enable an extensive repertoire of actions. Empirical data attests to the language’s efficacy, with the successful identification of a specific set of symbols on various wood species’ sawn surfaces, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) exceeding 90%. Concurrently, the system can accurately pinpoint critical positions that facilitate robotic comprehension of carpenter-indicated woodworking joint geometry. The positioning error, approximately 3 pixels, meets industry standards.
|
|
|
Aymen Azaza, Joost Van de Weijer, Ali Douik, Javad Zolfaghari Bengar, & Marc Masana. (2020). Saliency from High-Level Semantic Image Features. SN - SN Computer Science, 1–12.
Abstract: Top-down semantic information is known to play an important role in assigning saliency. Recently, large strides have been made in improving state-of-the-art semantic image understanding in the fields of object detection and semantic segmentation. Therefore, since these methods have now reached a high-level of maturity, evaluation of the impact of high-level image understanding on saliency estimation is now feasible. We propose several saliency features which are computed from object detection and semantic segmentation results. We combine these features with a standard baseline method for saliency detection to evaluate their importance. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed features derived from object detection and semantic segmentation improve saliency estimation significantly. Moreover, they show that our method obtains state-of-the-art results on (FT, ImgSal, and SOD datasets) and obtains competitive results on four other datasets (ECSSD, PASCAL-S, MSRA-B, and HKU-IS).
|
|
|
Fei Yang, Luis Herranz, Joost Van de Weijer, Jose Antonio Iglesias, Antonio Lopez, & Mikhail Mozerov. (2020). Variable Rate Deep Image Compression with Modulated Autoencoder. SPL - IEEE Signal Processing Letters, 27, 331–335.
Abstract: Variable rate is a requirement for flexible and adaptable image and video compression. However, deep image compression methods (DIC) are optimized for a single fixed rate-distortion (R-D) tradeoff. While this can be addressed by training multiple models for different tradeoffs, the memory requirements increase proportionally to the number of models. Scaling the bottleneck representation of a shared autoencoder can provide variable rate compression with a single shared autoencoder. However, the R-D performance using this simple mechanism degrades in low bitrates, and also shrinks the effective range of bitrates. To address these limitations, we formulate the problem of variable R-D optimization for DIC, and propose modulated autoencoders (MAEs), where the representations of a shared autoencoder are adapted to the specific R-D tradeoff via a modulation network. Jointly training this modulated autoencoder and the modulation network provides an effective way to navigate the R-D operational curve. Our experiments show that the proposed method can achieve almost the same R-D performance of independent models with significantly fewer parameters.
|
|
|
Alex Gomez-Villa, Adrian Martin, Javier Vazquez, Marcelo Bertalmio, & Jesus Malo. (2022). On the synthesis of visual illusions using deep generative models. JOV - Journal of Vision, 22(8)(2), 1–18.
Abstract: Visual illusions expand our understanding of the visual system by imposing constraints in the models in two different ways: i) visual illusions for humans should induce equivalent illusions in the model, and ii) illusions synthesized from the model should be compelling for human viewers too. These constraints are alternative strategies to find good vision models. Following the first research strategy, recent studies have shown that artificial neural network architectures also have human-like illusory percepts when stimulated with classical hand-crafted stimuli designed to fool humans. In this work we focus on the second (less explored) strategy: we propose a framework to synthesize new visual illusions using the optimization abilities of current automatic differentiation techniques. The proposed framework can be used with classical vision models as well as with more recent artificial neural network architectures. This framework, validated by psychophysical experiments, can be used to study the difference between a vision model and the actual human perception and to optimize the vision model to decrease this difference.
|
|