Arash Akbarinia, & C. Alejandro Parraga. (2018). Colour Constancy Beyond the Classical Receptive Field. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 40(9), 2081–2094.
Abstract: The problem of removing illuminant variations to preserve the colours of objects (colour constancy) has already been solved by the human brain using mechanisms that rely largely on centre-surround computations of local contrast. In this paper we adopt some of these biological solutions described by long known physiological findings into a simple, fully automatic, functional model (termed Adaptive Surround Modulation or ASM). In ASM, the size of a visual neuron's receptive field (RF) as well as the relationship with its surround varies according to the local contrast within the stimulus, which in turn determines the nature of the centre-surround normalisation of cortical neurons higher up in the processing chain. We modelled colour constancy by means of two overlapping asymmetric Gaussian kernels whose sizes are adapted based on the contrast of the surround pixels, resembling the change of RF size. We simulated the contrast-dependent surround modulation by weighting the contribution of each Gaussian according to the centre-surround contrast. In the end, we obtained an estimation of the illuminant from the set of the most activated RFs' outputs. Our results on three single-illuminant and one multi-illuminant benchmark datasets show that ASM is highly competitive against the state-of-the-art and it even outperforms learning-based algorithms in one case. Moreover, the robustness of our model is more tangible if we consider that our results were obtained using the same parameters for all datasets, that is, mimicking how the human visual system operates. These results might provide an insight on how dynamical adaptation mechanisms contribute to make object's colours appear constant to us.
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Miguel Angel Bautista, Oriol Pujol, Fernando De la Torre, & Sergio Escalera. (2018). Error-Correcting Factorization. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 40, 2388–2401.
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.
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Xialei Liu, Joost Van de Weijer, & Andrew Bagdanov. (2019). Exploiting Unlabeled Data in CNNs by Self-Supervised Learning to Rank. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 41(8), 1862–1878.
Abstract: For many applications the collection of labeled data is expensive laborious. Exploitation of unlabeled data during training is thus a long pursued objective of machine learning. Self-supervised learning addresses this by positing an auxiliary task (different, but related to the supervised task) for which data is abundantly available. In this paper, we show how ranking can be used as a proxy task for some regression problems. As another contribution, we propose an efficient backpropagation technique for Siamese networks which prevents the redundant computation introduced by the multi-branch network architecture. We apply our framework to two regression problems: Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and Crowd Counting. For both we show how to automatically generate ranked image sets from unlabeled data. Our results show that networks trained to regress to the ground truth targets for labeled data and to simultaneously learn to rank unlabeled data obtain significantly better, state-of-the-art results for both IQA and crowd counting. In addition, we show that measuring network uncertainty on the self-supervised proxy task is a good measure of informativeness of unlabeled data. This can be used to drive an algorithm for active learning and we show that this reduces labeling effort by up to 50 percent.
Keywords: Task analysis;Training;Image quality;Visualization;Uncertainty;Labeling;Neural networks;Learning from rankings;image quality assessment;crowd counting;active learning
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Mohamed Ali Souibgui, & Y.Kessentini. (2022). DE-GAN: A Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Document Enhancement. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 44(3), 1180–1191.
Abstract: Documents often exhibit various forms of degradation, which make it hard to be read and substantially deteriorate the performance of an OCR system. In this paper, we propose an effective end-to-end framework named Document Enhancement Generative Adversarial Networks (DE-GAN) that uses the conditional GANs (cGANs) to restore severely degraded document images. To the best of our knowledge, this practice has not been studied within the context of generative adversarial deep networks. We demonstrate that, in different tasks (document clean up, binarization, deblurring and watermark removal), DE-GAN can produce an enhanced version of the degraded document with a high quality. In addition, our approach provides consistent improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods over the widely used DIBCO 2013, DIBCO 2017 and H-DIBCO 2018 datasets, proving its ability to restore a degraded document image to its ideal condition. The obtained results on a wide variety of degradation reveal the flexibility of the proposed model to be exploited in other document enhancement problems.
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Marc Masana, Xialei Liu, Bartlomiej Twardowski, Mikel Menta, Andrew Bagdanov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2022). Class-incremental learning: survey and performance evaluation. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, .
Abstract: For future learning systems incremental learning is desirable, because it allows for: efficient resource usage by eliminating the need to retrain from scratch at the arrival of new data; reduced memory usage by preventing or limiting the amount of data required to be stored -- also important when privacy limitations are imposed; and learning that more closely resembles human learning. The main challenge for incremental learning is catastrophic forgetting, which refers to the precipitous drop in performance on previously learned tasks after learning a new one. Incremental learning of deep neural networks has seen explosive growth in recent years. Initial work focused on task incremental learning, where a task-ID is provided at inference time. Recently we have seen a shift towards class-incremental learning where the learner must classify at inference time between all classes seen in previous tasks without recourse to a task-ID. In this paper, we provide a complete survey of existing methods for incremental learning, and in particular we perform an extensive experimental evaluation on twelve class-incremental methods. We consider several new experimental scenarios, including a comparison of class-incremental methods on multiple large-scale datasets, investigation into small and large domain shifts, and comparison on various network architectures.
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Zhengying Liu, Adrien Pavao, Zhen Xu, Sergio Escalera, Fabio Ferreira, Isabelle Guyon, et al. (2021). Winning Solutions and Post-Challenge Analyses of the ChaLearn AutoDL Challenge 2019. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 43(9), 3108–3125.
Abstract: This paper reports the results and post-challenge analyses of ChaLearn's AutoDL challenge series, which helped sorting out a profusion of AutoML solutions for Deep Learning (DL) that had been introduced in a variety of settings, but lacked fair comparisons. All input data modalities (time series, images, videos, text, tabular) were formatted as tensors and all tasks were multi-label classification problems. Code submissions were executed on hidden tasks, with limited time and computational resources, pushing solutions that get results quickly. In this setting, DL methods dominated, though popular Neural Architecture Search (NAS) was impractical. Solutions relied on fine-tuned pre-trained networks, with architectures matching data modality. Post-challenge tests did not reveal improvements beyond the imposed time limit. While no component is particularly original or novel, a high level modular organization emerged featuring a “meta-learner”, “data ingestor”, “model selector”, “model/learner”, and “evaluator”. This modularity enabled ablation studies, which revealed the importance of (off-platform) meta-learning, ensembling, and efficient data management. Experiments on heterogeneous module combinations further confirm the (local) optimality of the winning solutions. Our challenge legacy includes an ever-lasting benchmark (http://autodl.chalearn.org), the open-sourced code of the winners, and a free “AutoDL self-service.”
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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Marcal Rusinol, Alicia Fornes, & Mauricio Villegas. (2021). Content and Style Aware Generation of Text-line Images for Handwriting Recognition. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, .
Abstract: Handwritten Text Recognition has achieved an impressive performance in public benchmarks. However, due to the high inter- and intra-class variability between handwriting styles, such recognizers need to be trained using huge volumes of manually labeled training data. To alleviate this labor-consuming problem, synthetic data produced with TrueType fonts has been often used in the training loop to gain volume and augment the handwriting style variability. However, there is a significant style bias between synthetic and real data which hinders the improvement of recognition performance. To deal with such limitations, we propose a generative method for handwritten text-line images, which is conditioned on both visual appearance and textual content. Our method is able to produce long text-line samples with diverse handwriting styles. Once properly trained, our method can also be adapted to new target data by only accessing unlabeled text-line images to mimic handwritten styles and produce images with any textual content. Extensive experiments have been done on making use of the generated samples to boost Handwritten Text Recognition performance. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state of the art.
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Swathikiran Sudhakaran, Sergio Escalera, & Oswald Lanz. (2021). Learning to Recognize Actions on Objects in Egocentric Video with Attention Dictionaries. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, .
Abstract: We present EgoACO, a deep neural architecture for video action recognition that learns to pool action-context-object descriptors from frame level features by leveraging the verb-noun structure of action labels in egocentric video datasets. The core component of EgoACO is class activation pooling (CAP), a differentiable pooling operation that combines ideas from bilinear pooling for fine-grained recognition and from feature learning for discriminative localization. CAP uses self-attention with a dictionary of learnable weights to pool from the most relevant feature regions. Through CAP, EgoACO learns to decode object and scene context descriptors from video frame features. For temporal modeling in EgoACO, we design a recurrent version of class activation pooling termed Long Short-Term Attention (LSTA). LSTA extends convolutional gated LSTM with built-in spatial attention and a re-designed output gate. Action, object and context descriptors are fused by a multi-head prediction that accounts for the inter-dependencies between noun-verb-action structured labels in egocentric video datasets. EgoACO features built-in visual explanations, helping learning and interpretation. Results on the two largest egocentric action recognition datasets currently available, EPIC-KITCHENS and EGTEA, show that by explicitly decoding action-context-object descriptors, EgoACO achieves state-of-the-art recognition performance.
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Swathikiran Sudhakaran, Sergio Escalera, & Oswald Lanz. (2023). Gate-Shift-Fuse for Video Action Recognition. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 45(9), 10913–10928.
Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks are the de facto models for image recognition. However 3D CNNs, the straight forward extension of 2D CNNs for video recognition, have not achieved the same success on standard action recognition benchmarks. One of the main reasons for this reduced performance of 3D CNNs is the increased computational complexity requiring large scale annotated datasets to train them in scale. 3D kernel factorization approaches have been proposed to reduce the complexity of 3D CNNs. Existing kernel factorization approaches follow hand-designed and hard-wired techniques. In this paper we propose Gate-Shift-Fuse (GSF), a novel spatio-temporal feature extraction module which controls interactions in spatio-temporal decomposition and learns to adaptively route features through time and combine them in a data dependent manner. GSF leverages grouped spatial gating to decompose input tensor and channel weighting to fuse the decomposed tensors. GSF can be inserted into existing 2D CNNs to convert them into an efficient and high performing spatio-temporal feature extractor, with negligible parameter and compute overhead. We perform an extensive analysis of GSF using two popular 2D CNN families and achieve state-of-the-art or competitive performance on five standard action recognition benchmarks.
Keywords: Action Recognition; Video Classification; Spatial Gating; Channel Fusion
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Javier Selva, Anders S. Johansen, Sergio Escalera, Kamal Nasrollahi, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Albert Clapes. (2023). Video transformers: A survey. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 45(11), 12922–12943.
Abstract: Transformer models have shown great success handling long-range interactions, making them a promising tool for modeling video. However, they lack inductive biases and scale quadratically with input length. These limitations are further exacerbated when dealing with the high dimensionality introduced by the temporal dimension. While there are surveys analyzing the advances of Transformers for vision, none focus on an in-depth analysis of video-specific designs. In this survey, we analyze the main contributions and trends of works leveraging Transformers to model video. Specifically, we delve into how videos are handled at the input level first. Then, we study the architectural changes made to deal with video more efficiently, reduce redundancy, re-introduce useful inductive biases, and capture long-term temporal dynamics. In addition, we provide an overview of different training regimes and explore effective self-supervised learning strategies for video. Finally, we conduct a performance comparison on the most common benchmark for Video Transformers (i.e., action classification), finding them to outperform 3D ConvNets even with less computational complexity.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Vision; Self-Attention; Transformers; Video Representations
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Akshita Gupta, Sanath Narayan, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ling Shao, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2023). Generative Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 45(12), 14611–14624.
Abstract: Multi-label zero-shot learning strives to classify images into multiple unseen categories for which no data is available during training. The test samples can additionally contain seen categories in the generalized variant. Existing approaches rely on learning either shared or label-specific attention from the seen classes. Nevertheless, computing reliable attention maps for unseen classes during inference in a multi-label setting is still a challenge. In contrast, state-of-the-art single-label generative adversarial network (GAN) based approaches learn to directly synthesize the class-specific visual features from the corresponding class attribute embeddings. However, synthesizing multi-label features from GANs is still unexplored in the context of zero-shot setting. When multiple objects occur jointly in a single image, a critical question is how to effectively fuse multi-class information. In this work, we introduce different fusion approaches at the attribute-level, feature-level and cross-level (across attribute and feature-levels) for synthesizing multi-label features from their corresponding multi-label class embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to tackle the problem of multi-label feature synthesis in the (generalized) zero-shot setting. Our cross-level fusion-based generative approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on three zero-shot benchmarks: NUS-WIDE, Open Images and MS COCO. Furthermore, we show the generalization capabilities of our fusion approach in the zero-shot detection task on MS COCO, achieving favorable performance against existing methods.
Keywords: Generalized zero-shot learning; Multi-label classification; Zero-shot object detection; Feature synthesis
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Shiqi Yang, Yaxing Wang, Joost Van de Weijer, Luis Herranz, Shangling Jui, & Jian Yang. (2023). Trust Your Good Friends: Source-Free Domain Adaptation by Reciprocal Neighborhood Clustering. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 45(12), 15883–15895.
Abstract: Domain adaptation (DA) aims to alleviate the domain shift between source domain and target domain. Most DA methods require access to the source data, but often that is not possible (e.g., due to data privacy or intellectual property). In this paper, we address the challenging source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) problem, where the source pretrained model is adapted to the target domain in the absence of source data. Our method is based on the observation that target data, which might not align with the source domain classifier, still forms clear clusters. We capture this intrinsic structure by defining local affinity of the target data, and encourage label consistency among data with high local affinity. We observe that higher affinity should be assigned to reciprocal neighbors. To aggregate information with more context, we consider expanded neighborhoods with small affinity values. Furthermore, we consider the density around each target sample, which can alleviate the negative impact of potential outliers. In the experimental results we verify that the inherent structure of the target features is an important source of information for domain adaptation. We demonstrate that this local structure can be efficiently captured by considering the local neighbors, the reciprocal neighbors, and the expanded neighborhood. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on several 2D image and 3D point cloud recognition datasets.
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Daniel Hernandez, Antonio Espinosa, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, & Juan C. Moure. (2021). 3D Perception With Slanted Stixels on GPU. TPDS - IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 32(10), 2434–2447.
Abstract: This article presents a GPU-accelerated software design of the recently proposed model of Slanted Stixels, which represents the geometric and semantic information of a scene in a compact and accurate way. We reformulate the measurement depth model to reduce the computational complexity of the algorithm, relying on the confidence of the depth estimation and the identification of invalid values to handle outliers. The proposed massively parallel scheme and data layout for the irregular computation pattern that corresponds to a Dynamic Programming paradigm is described and carefully analyzed in performance terms. Performance is shown to scale gracefully on current generation embedded GPUs. We assess the proposed methods in terms of semantic and geometric accuracy as well as run-time performance on three publicly available benchmark datasets. Our approach achieves real-time performance with high accuracy for 2048 × 1024 image sizes and 4 × 4 Stixel resolution on the low-power embedded GPU of an NVIDIA Tegra Xavier.
Keywords: Daniel Hernandez-Juarez; Antonio Espinosa; David Vazquez; Antonio M. Lopez; Juan C. Moure
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David Masip, Agata Lapedriza, & Jordi Vitria. (2009). Boosted Online Learning for Face Recognition. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics part B, 39(2), 530–538.
Abstract: Face recognition applications commonly suffer from three main drawbacks: a reduced training set, information lying in high-dimensional subspaces, and the need to incorporate new people to recognize. In the recent literature, the extension of a face classifier in order to include new people in the model has been solved using online feature extraction techniques. The most successful approaches of those are the extensions of the principal component analysis or the linear discriminant analysis. In the current paper, a new online boosting algorithm is introduced: a face recognition method that extends a boosting-based classifier by adding new classes while avoiding the need of retraining the classifier each time a new person joins the system. The classifier is learned using the multitask learning principle where multiple verification tasks are trained together sharing the same feature space. The new classes are added taking advantage of the structure learned previously, being the addition of new classes not computationally demanding. The present proposal has been (experimentally) validated with two different facial data sets by comparing our approach with the current state-of-the-art techniques. The results show that the proposed online boosting algorithm fares better in terms of final accuracy. In addition, the global performance does not decrease drastically even when the number of classes of the base problem is multiplied by eight.
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Fadi Dornaika, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2009). Three-Dimensional Face Pose Detection and Tracking Using Monocular Videos: Tool and Application. TSMCB - IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics part B, 39(4), 935–944.
Abstract: Recently, we have proposed a real-time tracker that simultaneously tracks the 3-D head pose and facial actions in monocular video sequences that can be provided by low quality cameras. This paper has two main contributions. First, we propose an automatic 3-D face pose initialization scheme for the real-time tracker by adopting a 2-D face detector and an eigenface system. Second, we use the proposed methods-the initialization and tracking-for enhancing the human-machine interaction functionality of an AIBO robot. More precisely, we show how the orientation of the robot's camera (or any active vision system) can be controlled through the estimation of the user's head pose. Applications based on head-pose imitation such as telepresence, virtual reality, and video games can directly exploit the proposed techniques. Experiments on real videos confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed methods.
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