Abstract: JCR 2019 Q2, IF=3.121
The task of unpaired image-to-image translation is highly challenging due to the lack of explicit cross-domain pairs of instances. We consider here diverse image translation (DIT), an even more challenging setting in which an image can have multiple plausible translations. This is normally achieved by explicitly disentangling content and style in the latent representation and sampling different styles codes while maintaining the image content. Despite the success of current DIT models, they are prone to suffer from bias. In this paper, we study the problem of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets may add undesired changes (e.g. change gender or race in face images) to the output translations as a consequence of the particular underlying visual distribution in the target domain. In order to alleviate the effects of this problem we propose the use of semantic constraints that enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Our proposed model is a step towards unbiased diverse image-to-image translation (UDIT), and results in less unwanted changes in the translated images while still performing the wanted transformation. Experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in different domains such as faces, objects, and scenes.

Abstract: Deep convolutional networks can achieve impressive results on RGB scene recognition thanks to large data sets such as places. In contrast, RGB-D scene recognition is still underdeveloped in comparison, due to two limitations of RGB-D data we address in this paper. The first limitation is the lack of depth data for training deep learning models. Rather than fine tuning or transferring RGB-specific features, we address this limitation by proposing an architecture and a two-step training approach that directly learns effective depth-specific features using weak supervision via patches. The resulting RGB-D model also benefits from more complementary multimodal features. Another limitation is the short range of depth sensors (typically 0.5 m to 5.5 m), resulting in depth images not capturing distant objects in the scenes that RGB images can. We show that this limitation can be addressed by using RGB-D videos, where more comprehensive depth information is accumulated as the camera travels across the scenes. Focusing on this scenario, we introduce the ISIA RGB-D video data set to evaluate RGB-D scene recognition with videos. Our video recognition architecture combines convolutional and recurrent neural networks that are trained in three steps with increasingly complex data to learn effective features (i.e., patches, frames, and sequences). Our approach obtains the state-of-the-art performances on RGB-D image (NYUD2 and SUN RGB-D) and video (ISIA RGB-D) scene recognition.

Abstract: Saliency is the perceptual capacity of our visual system to focus our attention (i.e. gaze) on relevant objects instead of the background. So far, computational methods for saliency estimation required the explicit generation of a saliency map, process which is usually achieved via eyetracking experiments on still images. This is a tedious process that needs to be repeated for each new dataset. In the current paper, we demonstrate that is possible to automatically generate saliency maps without ground-truth. In our approach, saliency maps are learned as a side effect of object recognition. Extensive experiments carried out on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrated that our approach is able to generate accurate saliency maps, achieving competitive results when compared with supervised methods.