Abstract: The future deployment of single pilot operations must be supported by new cockpit computer services. Such services require an adaptive context-aware integration of technical functionalities with the concurrent tasks that a pilot must deal with. Advanced artificial intelligence supporting services and improved communication capabilities are the key enabling technologies that will render future cockpits more integrated with the present digitalized air traffic management system. However, an issue in the integration of such technologies is the lack of socio-technical analysis in the design of these teaming mechanisms. A key factor in determining how and when a service support should be provided is the dynamic evolution of pilot workload. This paper investigates how the socio-technical model-based systems engineering approach paves the way for the design of a digital assistant framework by formalizing this workload. The model was validated in an Airbus A-320 cockpit simulator, and the results confirmed the degraded pilot behavioral model and the performance impact according to different contextual flight deck information. This study contributes to practical knowledge for designing human-machine task-sharing systems.

Abstract: A crucial part of image classification consists of capturing non-local spatial semantics of image content. This paper describes the multi-scale hybrid vision transformer (MSHViT), an extension of the classical convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone, for multi-label sewer defect classification. To better model spatial semantics in the images, features are aggregated at different scales non-locally through the use of a lightweight vision transformer, and a smaller set of tokens was produced through a novel Sinkhorn clustering-based tokenizer using distinct cluster centers. The proposed MSHViT and Sinkhorn tokenizer were evaluated on the Sewer-ML multi-label sewer defect classification dataset, showing consistent performance improvements of up to 2.53 percentage points.

Abstract: Low resource Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is a hard problem due to the scarce annotated data and the very limited linguistic information (dictionaries and language models). This appears, for example, in the case of historical ciphered manuscripts, which are usually written with invented alphabets to hide the content. Thus, in this paper we address this problem through a data generation technique based on Bayesian Program Learning (BPL). Contrary to traditional generation approaches, which require a huge amount of annotated images, our method is able to generate human-like handwriting using only one sample of each symbol from the desired alphabet. After generating symbols, we create synthetic lines to train state-of-the-art HTR architectures in a segmentation free fashion. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving competitive results compared to the usage of real annotated data.

Abstract: Artificial intelligence is innovating the fashion industry by proposing new applications and solutions to the problems encountered by researchers and engineers working in the industry. In this thesis, we address three of these problems. In the first part of the thesis, we tackle the problem of multi-label image classification which is very related to fashion attribute recognition. In the second part of the thesis, we address two problems that are specific to fashion. Firstly, we address the problem of main product detection which is the task of associating correct image parts (e.g. bounding boxes) with the fashion product being sold. Secondly, we address the problem of color naming for multicolored fashion items. The task of multi-label image classification consists in assigning various concepts such as objects or attributes to images. Usually, there are dependencies that can be learned between the concepts to capture label correlations (chair and table classes are more likely to co-exist than chair and giraffe).
If we treat the multi-label image classification problem as an orderless set prediction problem, we can exploit recurrent neural networks (RNN) to capture label correlations. However, RNNs are trained to predict ordered sequences of tokens, so if the order of the predicted sequence is different than the order of the ground truth sequence, there will be penalization although the predictions are correct. Therefore, in the first part of the thesis, we propose an orderless loss function which will order the labels in the ground truth sequence dynamically in a way that the minimum loss is achieved. This results in a significant improvement of RNN models on multi-label image classification over the previous methods.
However, RNNs suffer from long term dependencies when the cardinality of set grows bigger. The decoding process might stop early if the current hidden state cannot find any object and outputs the termination token. This would cause the remaining classes not to be predicted and lower recall metric. Transformers can be used to avoid the long term dependency problem exploiting their selfattention modules that process sequential data simultaneously. Consequently, we propose a novel transformer model for multi-label image classification which surpasses the state-of-the-art results by a large margin.
In the second part of thesis, we focus on two fashion-specific problems. Main product detection is the task of associating image parts with the fashion product that is being sold, generally using associated textual metadata (product title or description). Normally, in fashion e-commerces, products are represented by multiple images where a person wears the product along with other fashion items. If all the fashion items in the images are marked with bounding boxes, we can use the textual metadata to decide which item is the main product. The initial work treated each of these images independently, discarding the fact that they all belong to the same product. In this thesis, we represent the bounding boxes from all the images as nodes in a fully connected graph. This allows the algorithm to learn relations between the nodes during training and take the entire context into account for the final decision. Our algorithm results in a significant improvement of the state-ofthe-art.
Moreover, we address the problem of color naming for multicolored fashion items, which is a challenging task due to the external factors such as illumination changes or objects that act as clutter. In the context of multi-label classification, the vaguely defined lines between the classes in the color space cause ambiguity. For example, a shade of blue which is very close to green might cause the model to incorrectly predict the color blue and green at the same time. Based on this, models trained for color naming are expected to recognize the colors and their quantities in both single colored and multicolored fashion items. Therefore, in this thesis, we propose a novel architecture with an additional head that explicitly estimates the number of colors in fashion items. This removes the ambiguity problem and results in better color naming performance.

Abstract: One of the challenges in computer vision models, especially sign language, is real-time recognition. In this work, we present a simple yet low-complex and efficient model, comprising single shot detector, 2D convolutional neural network, singular value decomposition (SVD), and long short term memory, to real-time isolated hand sign language recognition (IHSLR) from RGB video. We employ the SVD method as an efficient, compact, and discriminative feature extractor from the estimated 3D hand keypoints coordinators. Despite the previous works that employ the estimated 3D hand keypoints coordinates as raw features, we propose a novel and revolutionary way to apply the SVD to the estimated 3D hand keypoints coordinates to get more discriminative features. SVD method is also applied to the geometric relations between the consecutive segments of each finger in each hand and also the angles between these sections. We perform a detailed analysis of recognition time and accuracy. One of our contributions is that this is the first time that the SVD method is applied to the hand pose parameters. Results on four datasets, RKS-PERSIANSIGN (99.5±0.04), First-Person (91±0.06), ASVID (93±0.05), and isoGD (86.1±0.04), confirm the efficiency of our method in both accuracy (mean+std) and time recognition. Furthermore, our model outperforms or gets competitive results with the state-of-the-art alternatives in IHSLR and hand action recognition.

Abstract: The task of image-text matching aims to map representations from different modalities into a common joint visual-textual embedding. However, the most widely used datasets for this task, MSCOCO and Flickr30K, are actually image captioning datasets that offer a very limited set of relationships between images and sentences in their ground-truth annotations. This limited ground truth information forces us to use evaluation metrics based on binary relevance: given a sentence query we consider only one image as relevant. However, many other relevant images or captions may be present in the dataset. In this work, we propose two metrics that evaluate the degree of semantic relevance of retrieved items, independently of their annotated binary relevance. Additionally, we incorporate a novel strategy that uses an image captioning metric, CIDEr, to define a Semantic Adaptive Margin (SAM) to be optimized in a standard triplet loss. By incorporating our formulation to existing models, a large improvement is obtained in scenarios where available training data is limited. We also demonstrate that the performance on the annotated image-caption pairs is maintained while improving on other non-annotated relevant items when employing the full training set. The code for our new metric can be found at github. com/furkanbiten/ncsmetric and the model implementation at github. com/andrespmd/semanticadaptive_margin.

Abstract: In this paper we consider the problem of incremental meta-learning in which classes are presented incrementally in discrete tasks. We propose Episodic Replay Distillation (ERD), that mixes classes from the current task with exemplars from previous tasks when sampling episodes for meta-learning. To allow the training to benefit from a large as possible variety of classes, which leads to more gener-
alizable feature representations, we propose the cross-task meta loss. Furthermore, we propose episodic replay distillation that also exploits exemplars for improved knowledge distillation. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that ERD surpasses the state-of-the-art. In particular, on the more challenging one-shot, long task sequence scenarios, we reduce the gap between Incremental Meta-Learning and
the joint-training upper bound from 3.5% / 10.1% / 13.4% / 11.7% with the current state-of-the-art to 2.6% / 2.9% / 5.0% / 0.2% with our method on Tiered-ImageNet / Mini-ImageNet / CIFAR100 / CUB, respectively.

Abstract: This paper presents a multi-view scheme to tackle the challenging problem of the self-occlusion in human pose estimation problem. The proposed approach first obtains the human body joints of a set of images, which are captured from different views at the same time. Then, it enhances the obtained joints by using a
multi-view scheme. Basically, the joints from a given view are used to enhance poorly estimated joints from another view, especially intended to tackle the self occlusions cases. A network architecture initially proposed for the monocular case is adapted to be used in the proposed multi-view scheme. Experimental results and
comparisons with the state-of-the-art approaches on Human3.6m dataset are presented showing improvements in the accuracy of body joints estimations.