Abstract: Deployments of real-world object detection systems often experience a degradation in performance over time due to concept drift. Systems that leverage thermal cameras are especially susceptible because the respective thermal signatures of objects and their surroundings are highly sensitive to environmental changes. In this study, two types of weather-aware latent conditioning methods are investigated. The proposed method aims to guide two object detectors, (YOLOv5 and Deformable DETR) to become weather-aware. This is achieved by leveraging an auxiliary branch that predicts weather-related information while conditioning intermediate layers of the object detector. While the conditioning methods proposed do not directly improve the accuracy of baseline detectors, it can be observed that conditioned networks manage to extract a weather-related signal from the thermal images, thus resulting in a decreased miss rate at the cost of increased false positives. The extracted signal appears noisy and is thus challenging to regress accurately. This is most likely a result of the qualitative nature of the thermal sensor; thus, further work is needed to identify an ideal method for optimizing the conditioning branch, as well as to further improve the accuracy of the system.

Abstract: The oral communication competence is defined on the top of the most relevant skills for one's professional and personal life. Because of the importance of communication in our activities of daily living, it is crucial to study methods to evaluate and provide the necessary feedback that can be used in order to improve these communication capabilities and, therefore, learn how to express ourselves better. In this work, we propose a system capable of evaluating quantitatively the quality of oral presentations in an automatic fashion. The system is based on a multi-modal RGB, depth, and audio data description and a fusion approach in order to recognize behavioral cues and train classifiers able to eventually predict communication quality levels. The performance of the proposed system is tested on a novel dataset containing Bachelor thesis' real defenses, presentations from an 8th semester Bachelor courses, and Master courses' presentations at Universitat de Barcelona. Using as groundtruth the marks assigned by actual instructors, our system achieves high performance categorizing and ranking presentations by their quality, and also making real-valued mark predictions.

Abstract: We present a vision-inertial system which combines two RGB-Depth devices together with a wearable inertial movement unit in order to detect activities of the daily living. From multi-view videos, we extract dense trajectories enriched with a histogram of normals description computed from the depth cue and bag them into multi-view codebooks. During the later classification step a multi-class support vector machine with a RBF- 2 kernel combines the descriptions at kernel level. In order to perform action detection from the videos, a sliding window approach is utilized. On the other hand, we extract accelerations, rotation angles, and jerk features from the inertial data collected by the wearable placed on the user’s dominant wrist. During gesture spotting, a dynamic time warping is applied and the aligning costs to a set of pre-selected gesture sub-classes are thresholded to determine possible detections. The outputs of the two modules are combined in a late-fusion fashion. The system is validated in a real-case scenario with elderly from an elder home. Learning-based fusion results improve the ones from the single modalities, demonstrating the success of such multimodal approach.