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: Two key factors affecting the performance of Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) in multiclass classification problems are the independence of binary classifiers and the problem-dependent coding design. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary algorithm-based approach to the design of an application-dependent codematrix in the ECOC framework. The central idea of this work is to design a three-dimensional codematrix, where the third dimension is the feature space of the problem domain. In order to do that, we consider the feature space in the design process of the codematrix with the aim of improving the independence and accuracy of binary classifiers. The proposed method takes advantage of some basic concepts of ensemble classification, such as diversity of classifiers, and also benefits from the evolutionary approach for optimizing the three-dimensional codematrix, taking into account the problem domain. We provide a set of experimental results using a set of benchmark datasets from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, as well as two real multiclass Computer Vision problems. Both sets of experiments are conducted using two different base learners: Neural Networks and Decision Trees. The results show that the proposed method increases the classification accuracy in comparison with the state-of-the-art ECOC coding techniques.

Abstract: Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) is a successful technique in multi-class classification, which is a core problem in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. A major advantage of ECOC over other methods is that the multi- class problem is decoupled into a set of binary problems that are solved independently. However, literature defines a general error-correcting capability for ECOCs without analyzing how it distributes among classes, hindering a deeper analysis of pair-wise error-correction. To address these limitations this paper proposes an Error-Correcting Factorization (ECF) method, our contribution is three fold: (I) We propose a novel representation of the error-correction capability, called the design matrix, that enables us to build an ECOC on the basis of allocating correction to pairs of classes. (II) We derive the optimal code length of an ECOC using rank properties of the design matrix. (III) ECF is formulated as a discrete optimization problem, and a relaxed solution is found using an efficient constrained block coordinate descent approach. (IV) Enabled by the flexibility introduced with the design matrix we propose to allocate the error-correction on classes that are prone to confusion. Experimental results in several databases show that when allocating the error-correction to confusable classes ECF outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.