Abstract: Effective conservation actions require effective population monitoring. However, accurately counting animals in the wild to inform conservation decision-making is difficult. Monitoring populations through image sampling has made data collection cheaper, wide-reaching and less intrusive but created a need to process and analyse this data efficiently. Counting animals from such data is challenging, particularly when densely packed in noisy images. Attempting this manually is slow and expensive, while traditional computer vision methods are limited in their generalisability. Deep learning is the state-of-the-art method for many computer vision tasks, but it has yet to be properly explored to count animals. To this end, we employ deep learning, with a density-based regression approach, to count fish in low-resolution sonar images. We introduce a large dataset of sonar videos, deployed to record wild Lebranche mullet schools (Mugil liza), with a subset of 500 labelled images. We utilise abundant unlabelled data in a self-supervised task to improve the supervised counting task. For the first time in this context, by introducing uncertainty quantification, we improve model training and provide an accompanying measure of prediction uncertainty for more informed biological decision-making. Finally, we demonstrate the generalisability of our proposed counting framework through testing it on a recent benchmark dataset of high-resolution annotated underwater images from varying habitats (DeepFish). From experiments on both contrasting datasets, we demonstrate our network outperforms the few other deep learning models implemented for solving this task. By providing an open-source framework along with training data, our study puts forth an efficient deep learning template for crowd counting aquatic animals thereby contributing effective methods to assess natural populations from the ever-increasing visual data.

Abstract: Domain Adaptation (DA) has recently raised strong interests in the medical imaging community. While a large variety of DA techniques has been proposed for image segmentation, most of these techniques have been validated either on private datasets or on small publicly available datasets. Moreover, these datasets mostly addressed single-class problems. To tackle these limitations, the Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation (crossMoDA) challenge was organised in conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2021). CrossMoDA is the first large and multi-class benchmark for unsupervised cross-modality DA. The challenge's goal is to segment two key brain structures involved in the follow-up and treatment planning of vestibular schwannoma (VS): the VS and the cochleas. Currently, the diagnosis and surveillance in patients with VS are performed using contrast-enhanced T1 (ceT1) MRI. However, there is growing interest in using non-contrast sequences such as high-resolution T2 (hrT2) MRI. Therefore, we created an unsupervised cross-modality segmentation benchmark. The training set provides annotated ceT1 (N=105) and unpaired non-annotated hrT2 (N=105). The aim was to automatically perform unilateral VS and bilateral cochlea segmentation on hrT2 as provided in the testing set (N=137). A total of 16 teams submitted their algorithm for the evaluation phase. The level of performance reached by the top-performing teams is strikingly high (best median Dice – VS:88.4%; Cochleas:85.7%) and close to full supervision (median Dice – VS:92.5%; Cochleas:87.7%). All top-performing methods made use of an image-to-image translation approach to transform the source-domain images into pseudo-target-domain images. A segmentation network was then trained using these generated images and the manual annotations provided for the source image.

Abstract: Humans modify their facial expressions in order to communicate their internal states and sometimes to mislead observers regarding their true emotional states. Evidence in experimental psychology shows that discriminative facial responses are short and subtle. This suggests that such behavior would be easier to distinguish when captured in high resolution at an increased frame rate. We are proposing SASE-FE, the first dataset of facial expressions that are either congruent or incongruent with underlying emotion states. We show that overall the problem of recognizing whether facial movements are expressions of authentic emotions or not can be successfully addressed by learning spatio-temporal representations of the data. For this purpose, we propose a method that aggregates features along fiducial trajectories in a deeply learnt space. Performance of the proposed model shows that on average, it is easier to distinguish among genuine facial expressions of emotion than among unfelt facial expressions of emotion and that certain emotion pairs such as contempt and disgust are more difficult to distinguish than the rest. Furthermore, the proposed methodology improves state of the art results on CK+ and OULU-CASIA datasets for video emotion recognition, and achieves competitive results when classifying facial action units on BP4D datase.