Abstract: In real-life logistics and distribution activities it is usual to face situations in which the distribution of goods has to be made from multiple warehouses or depots to the nal customers. This problem is known as the Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem (MDVRP), and it typically includes two sequential and correlated stages: (a) the assignment map of customers to depots, and (b) the corresponding design of the distribution routes. Most of the existing work in the literature has focused on minimizing distance-based distribution costs while satisfying a number of capacity constraints. However, no attention has been given so far to potential variations in demands due to the tness of the customerdepot mapping in the case of heterogeneous depots. In this paper, we consider this realistic version of the problem in which the depots are heterogeneous in terms of their commercial oer and customers show dierent willingness to consume depending on how well the assigned depot ts their preferences. Thus, we assume that dierent customer-depot assignment maps will lead to dierent customer-expenditure levels. As a consequence, market-segmentation strategiesneed to be considered in order to increase sales and total income while accounting for the distribution costs. To solve this extension of the MDVRP, we propose a hybrid approach that combines statistical learning techniques with a metaheuristic framework. First, a set of predictive models is generated from historical data. These statistical models allow estimating the demand of any customer depending on the assigned depot. Then, the estimated expenditure of each customer is included as part of an enriched objective function as a way to better guide the stochastic local search inside the metaheuristic framework. A set of computational experiments contribute to illustrate our approach and how the extended MDVRP considered here diers in terms of the proposed solutions from the traditional one.

Abstract: The Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) technology allows the visualization of the whole small intestine tract. Since the capsule is freely moving, mainly by the means of peristalsis, the data acquired during the study gives a lot of information about the intestinal motility. However, due to: (1) huge amount of frames, (2) complex intestinal scene appearance and (3) intestinal dynamics that make difficult the visualization of the small intestine physiological phenomena, the analysis of the WCE data requires computer-aided systems to speed up the analysis. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for building a novel representation of the WCE video data, optimal for motility analysis and inspection. The algorithm transforms the 3D video data into 2D longitudinal view by choosing the most informative, from the intestinal motility point of view, part of each frame. This step maximizes the lumen visibility in its longitudinal extension. The task of finding “the best longitudinal view” has been defined as a cost function optimization problem which global minimum is obtained by using Dynamic Programming. Validation on both synthetic data and WCE data shows that the adaptive longitudinal view is a good alternative to the traditional motility analysis done by video analysis. The proposed novel data representation a new, holistic insight into the small intestine motility, allowing to easily define and analyze motility events that are difficult to spot by analyzing WCE video. Moreover, the visual inspection of small intestine motility is 4 times faster then by means of video skimming of the WCE.

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.