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Saad Minhas, Zeba Khanam, Shoaib Ehsan, Klaus McDonald Maier, & Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2022). Weather Classification by Utilizing Synthetic Data. SENS - Sensors, 22(9), 3193.
Abstract: Weather prediction from real-world images can be termed a complex task when targeting classification using neural networks. Moreover, the number of images throughout the available datasets can contain a huge amount of variance when comparing locations with the weather those images are representing. In this article, the capabilities of a custom built driver simulator are explored specifically to simulate a wide range of weather conditions. Moreover, the performance of a new synthetic dataset generated by the above simulator is also assessed. The results indicate that the use of synthetic datasets in conjunction with real-world datasets can increase the training efficiency of the CNNs by as much as 74%. The article paves a way forward to tackle the persistent problem of bias in vision-based datasets.
Keywords: Weather classification; synthetic data; dataset; autonomous car; computer vision; advanced driver assistance systems; deep learning; intelligent transportation systems
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Shiqi Yang, Yaxing Wang, Kai Wang, Shangling Jui, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2022). Local Prediction Aggregation: A Frustratingly Easy Source-free Domain Adaptation Method.
Abstract: We propose a simple but effective source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) method. Treating SFDA as an unsupervised clustering problem and following the intuition that local neighbors in feature space should have more similar predictions than other features, we propose to optimize an objective of prediction consistency. This objective encourages local neighborhood features in feature space to have similar predictions while features farther away in feature space have dissimilar predictions, leading to efficient feature clustering and cluster assignment simultaneously. For efficient training, we seek to optimize an upper-bound of the objective resulting in two simple terms. Furthermore, we relate popular existing methods in domain adaptation, source-free domain adaptation and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity. The experimental results prove the superiority of our method, and our method can be adopted as a simple but strong baseline for future research in SFDA. Our method can be also adapted to source-free open-set and partial-set DA which further shows the generalization ability of our method. Code is available in this https URL.
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Shiqi Yang, Yaxing Wang, Kai Wang, Shangling Jui, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2022). Attracting and Dispersing: A Simple Approach for Source-free Domain Adaptation. In 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
Abstract: We propose a simple but effective source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) method.
Treating SFDA as an unsupervised clustering problem and following the intuition
that local neighbors in feature space should have more similar predictions than
other features, we propose to optimize an objective of prediction consistency. This
objective encourages local neighborhood features in feature space to have similar
predictions while features farther away in feature space have dissimilar predictions, leading to efficient feature clustering and cluster assignment simultaneously. For efficient training, we seek to optimize an upper-bound of the objective resulting in two simple terms. Furthermore, we relate popular existing methods in domain adaptation, source-free domain adaptation and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity. The experimental results prove the superiority of our method, and our method can be adopted as a simple but strong baseline for future research in SFDA. Our method can be also adapted to source-free open-set and partial-set DA which further shows the generalization ability of our method.
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Marco Cotogni, Fei Yang, Claudio Cusano, Andrew Bagdanov, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2022). Gated Class-Attention with Cascaded Feature Drift Compensation for Exemplar-free Continual Learning of Vision Transformers.
Abstract: We propose a new method for exemplar-free class incremental training of ViTs. The main challenge of exemplar-free continual learning is maintaining plasticity of the learner without causing catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks. This is often achieved via exemplar replay which can help recalibrate previous task classifiers to the feature drift which occurs when learning new tasks. Exemplar replay, however, comes at the cost of retaining samples from previous tasks which for many applications may not be possible. To address the problem of continual ViT training, we first propose gated class-attention to minimize the drift in the final ViT transformer block. This mask-based gating is applied to class-attention mechanism of the last transformer block and strongly regulates the weights crucial for previous tasks. Importantly, gated class-attention does not require the task-ID during inference, which distinguishes it from other parameter isolation methods. Secondly, we propose a new method of feature drift compensation that accommodates feature drift in the backbone when learning new tasks. The combination of gated class-attention and cascaded feature drift compensation allows for plasticity towards new tasks while limiting forgetting of previous ones. Extensive experiments performed on CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet and ImageNet100 demonstrate that our exemplar-free method obtains competitive results when compared to rehearsal based ViT methods.
Keywords: Marco Cotogni, Fei Yang, Claudio Cusano, Andrew D. Bagdanov, Joost van de Weijer
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Dustin Carrion Ojeda, Hong Chen, Adrian El Baz, Sergio Escalera, Chaoyu Guan, Isabelle Guyon, et al. (2022). NeurIPS’22 Cross-Domain MetaDL competition: Design and baseline results. In Understanding Social Behavior in Dyadic and Small Group Interactions (Vol. 191, pp. 24–37).
Abstract: We present the design and baseline results for a new challenge in the ChaLearn meta-learning series, accepted at NeurIPS'22, focusing on “cross-domain” meta-learning. Meta-learning aims to leverage experience gained from previous tasks to solve new tasks efficiently (i.e., with better performance, little training data, and/or modest computational resources). While previous challenges in the series focused on within-domain few-shot learning problems, with the aim of learning efficiently N-way k-shot tasks (i.e., N class classification problems with k training examples), this competition challenges the participants to solve “any-way” and “any-shot” problems drawn from various domains (healthcare, ecology, biology, manufacturing, and others), chosen for their humanitarian and societal impact. To that end, we created Meta-Album, a meta-dataset of 40 image classification datasets from 10 domains, from which we carve out tasks with any number of “ways” (within the range 2-20) and any number of “shots” (within the range 1-20). The competition is with code submission, fully blind-tested on the CodaLab challenge platform. The code of the winners will be open-sourced, enabling the deployment of automated machine learning solutions for few-shot image classification across several domains.
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Aitor Alvarez-Gila, Joost Van de Weijer, Yaxing Wang, & Estibaliz Garrote. (2022). MVMO: A Multi-Object Dataset for Wide Baseline Multi-View Semantic Segmentation. In 29th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing.
Abstract: We present MVMO (Multi-View, Multi-Object dataset): a synthetic dataset of 116,000 scenes containing randomly placed objects of 10 distinct classes and captured from 25 camera locations in the upper hemisphere. MVMO comprises photorealistic, path-traced image renders, together with semantic segmentation ground truth for every view. Unlike existing multi-view datasets, MVMO features wide baselines between cameras and high density of objects, which lead to large disparities, heavy occlusions and view-dependent object appearance. Single view semantic segmentation is hindered by self and inter-object occlusions that could benefit from additional viewpoints. Therefore, we expect that MVMO will propel research in multi-view semantic segmentation and cross-view semantic transfer. We also provide baselines that show that new research is needed in such fields to exploit the complementary information of multi-view setups 1 .
Keywords: multi-view; cross-view; semantic segmentation; synthetic dataset
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Hugo Bertiche, Meysam Madadi, & Sergio Escalera. (2022). Neural Cloth Simulation. ACMTGraph - ACM Transactions on Graphics, 41(6), 1–14.
Abstract: We present a general framework for the garment animation problem through unsupervised deep learning inspired in physically based simulation. Existing trends in the literature already explore this possibility. Nonetheless, these approaches do not handle cloth dynamics. Here, we propose the first methodology able to learn realistic cloth dynamics unsupervisedly, and henceforth, a general formulation for neural cloth simulation. The key to achieve this is to adapt an existing optimization scheme for motion from simulation based methodologies to deep learning. Then, analyzing the nature of the problem, we devise an architecture able to automatically disentangle static and dynamic cloth subspaces by design. We will show how this improves model performance. Additionally, this opens the possibility of a novel motion augmentation technique that greatly improves generalization. Finally, we show it also allows to control the level of motion in the predictions. This is a useful, never seen before, tool for artists. We provide of detailed analysis of the problem to establish the bases of neural cloth simulation and guide future research into the specifics of this domain.
ACM Transactions on GraphicsVolume 41Issue 6December 2022 Article No.: 220pp 1–
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Alex Gomez-Villa, Adrian Martin, Javier Vazquez, Marcelo Bertalmio, & Jesus Malo. (2022). On the synthesis of visual illusions using deep generative models. JOV - Journal of Vision, 22(8)(2), 1–18.
Abstract: Visual illusions expand our understanding of the visual system by imposing constraints in the models in two different ways: i) visual illusions for humans should induce equivalent illusions in the model, and ii) illusions synthesized from the model should be compelling for human viewers too. These constraints are alternative strategies to find good vision models. Following the first research strategy, recent studies have shown that artificial neural network architectures also have human-like illusory percepts when stimulated with classical hand-crafted stimuli designed to fool humans. In this work we focus on the second (less explored) strategy: we propose a framework to synthesize new visual illusions using the optimization abilities of current automatic differentiation techniques. The proposed framework can be used with classical vision models as well as with more recent artificial neural network architectures. This framework, validated by psychophysical experiments, can be used to study the difference between a vision model and the actual human perception and to optimize the vision model to decrease this difference.
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Sergi Garcia Bordils, George Tom, Sangeeth Reddy, Minesh Mathew, Marçal Rusiñol, C.V. Jawahar, et al. (2022). Read While You Drive-Multilingual Text Tracking on the Road. In 15th IAPR International workshop on document analysis systems (Vol. 13237, 756–770). LNCS.
Abstract: Visual data obtained during driving scenarios usually contain large amounts of text that conveys semantic information necessary to analyse the urban environment and is integral to the traffic control plan. Yet, research on autonomous driving or driver assistance systems typically ignores this information. To advance research in this direction, we present RoadText-3K, a large driving video dataset with fully annotated text. RoadText-3K is three times bigger than its predecessor and contains data from varied geographical locations, unconstrained driving conditions and multiple languages and scripts. We offer a comprehensive analysis of tracking by detection and detection by tracking methods exploring the limits of state-of-the-art text detection. Finally, we propose a new end-to-end trainable tracking model that yields state-of-the-art results on this challenging dataset. Our experiments demonstrate the complexity and variability of RoadText-3K and establish a new, realistic benchmark for scene text tracking in the wild.
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Ali Furkan Biten. (2022). A Bitter-Sweet Symphony on Vision and Language: Bias and World Knowledge (Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Lluis Gomez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Vision and Language are broadly regarded as cornerstones of intelligence. Even though language and vision have different aims – language having the purpose of communication, transmission of information and vision having the purpose of constructing mental representations around us to navigate and interact with objects – they cooperate and depend on one another in many tasks we perform effortlessly. This reliance is actively being studied in various Computer Vision tasks, e.g. image captioning, visual question answering, image-sentence retrieval, phrase grounding, just to name a few. All of these tasks share the inherent difficulty of the aligning the two modalities, while being robust to language
priors and various biases existing in the datasets. One of the ultimate goal for vision and language research is to be able to inject world knowledge while getting rid of the biases that come with the datasets. In this thesis, we mainly focus on two vision and language tasks, namely Image Captioning and Scene-Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA).
In both domains, we start by defining a new task that requires the utilization of world knowledge and in both tasks, we find that the models commonly employed are prone to biases that exist in the data. Concretely, we introduce new tasks and discover several problems that impede performance at each level and provide remedies or possible solutions in each chapter: i) We define a new task to move beyond Image Captioning to Image Interpretation that can utilize Named Entities in the form of world knowledge. ii) We study the object hallucination problem in classic Image Captioning systems and develop an architecture-agnostic solution. iii) We define a sub-task of Visual Question Answering that requires reading the text in the image (STVQA), where we highlight the limitations of current models. iv) We propose an architecture for the STVQA task that can point to the answer in the image and show how to combine it with classic VQA models. v) We show how far language can get us in STVQA and discover yet another bias which causes the models to disregard the image while doing Visual Question Answering.
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Alex Falcon, Swathikiran Sudhakaran, Giuseppe Serra, Sergio Escalera, & Oswald Lanz. (2022). Relevance-based Margin for Contrastively-trained Video Retrieval Models. In ICMR '22: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (pp. 146–157).
Abstract: Video retrieval using natural language queries has attracted increasing interest due to its relevance in real-world applications, from intelligent access in private media galleries to web-scale video search. Learning the cross-similarity of video and text in a joint embedding space is the dominant approach. To do so, a contrastive loss is usually employed because it organizes the embedding space by putting similar items close and dissimilar items far. This framework leads to competitive recall rates, as they solely focus on the rank of the groundtruth items. Yet, assessing the quality of the ranking list is of utmost importance when considering intelligent retrieval systems, since multiple items may share similar semantics, hence a high relevance. Moreover, the aforementioned framework uses a fixed margin to separate similar and dissimilar items, treating all non-groundtruth items as equally irrelevant. In this paper we propose to use a variable margin: we argue that varying the margin used during training based on how much relevant an item is to a given query, i.e. a relevance-based margin, easily improves the quality of the ranking lists measured through nDCG and mAP. We demonstrate the advantages of our technique using different models on EPIC-Kitchens-100 and YouCook2. We show that even if we carefully tuned the fixed margin, our technique (which does not have the margin as a hyper-parameter) would still achieve better performance. Finally, extensive ablation studies and qualitative analysis support the robustness of our approach. Code will be released at \urlhttps://github.com/aranciokov/RelevanceMargin-ICMR22.
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Andres Mafla. (2022). Leveraging Scene Text Information for Image Interpretation (Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Lluis Gomez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Until recently, most computer vision models remained illiterate, largely ignoring the semantically rich and explicit information contained in scene text. Recent progress in scene text detection and recognition has recently allowed exploring its role in a diverse set of open computer vision problems, e.g. image classification, image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering to name a few. The explicit semantics of scene text closely requires specific modeling similar to language. However, scene text is a particular signal that has to be interpreted according to a comprehensive perspective that encapsulates all the visual cues in an image. Incorporating this information is a straightforward task for humans, but if we are unfamiliar with a language or scripture, achieving a complete world understanding is impossible (e.a. visiting a foreign country with a different alphabet). Despite the importance of scene text, modeling it requires considering the several ways in which scene text interacts with an image, processing and fusing an additional modality. In this thesis, we mainly focus
on two tasks, scene text-based fine-grained image classification, and cross-modal retrieval. In both studied tasks we identify existing limitations in current approaches and propose plausible solutions. Concretely, in each chapter: i) We define a compact way to embed scene text that generalizes to unseen words at training time while performing in real-time. ii) We incorporate the previously learned scene text embedding to create an image-level descriptor that overcomes optical character recognition (OCR) errors which is well-suited to the fine-grained image classification task. iii) We design a region-level reasoning network that learns the interaction through semantics among salient visual regions and scene text instances. iv) We employ scene text information in image-text matching and introduce the Scene Text Aware Cross-Modal retrieval StacMR task. We gather a dataset that incorporates scene text and design a model suited for the newly studied modality. v) We identify the drawbacks of current retrieval metrics in cross-modal retrieval. An image captioning metric is proposed as a way of better evaluating semantics in retrieved results. Ample experimentation shows that incorporating such semantics into a model yields better semantic results while
requiring significantly less data to converge.
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Ruben Ballester, Xavier Arnal Clemente, Carles Casacuberta, Meysam Madadi, & Ciprian Corneanu. (2022). Towards explaining the generalization gap in neural networks using topological data analysis.
Abstract: Understanding how neural networks generalize on unseen data is crucial for designing more robust and reliable models. In this paper, we study the generalization gap of neural networks using methods from topological data analysis. For this purpose, we compute homological persistence diagrams of weighted graphs constructed from neuron activation correlations after a training phase, aiming to capture patterns that are linked to the generalization capacity of the network. We compare the usefulness of different numerical summaries from persistence diagrams and show that a combination of some of them can accurately predict and partially explain the generalization gap without the need of a test set. Evaluation on two computer vision recognition tasks (CIFAR10 and SVHN) shows competitive generalization gap prediction when compared against state-of-the-art methods.
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Patricia Suarez, Angel Sappa, Dario Carpio, Henry Velesaca, Francisca Burgos, & Patricia Urdiales. (2022). Deep Learning Based Shrimp Classification. In 17th International Symposium on Visual Computing (Vol. 13598, 36–45).
Abstract: This work proposes a novel approach based on deep learning to address the classification of shrimp (Pennaeus vannamei) into two classes, according to their level of pigmentation accepted by shrimp commerce. The main goal of this actual study is to support the shrimp industry in terms of price and process. An efficient CNN architecture is proposed to perform image classification through a program that could be set other in mobile devices or in fixed support in the shrimp supply chain. The proposed approach is a lightweight model that uses HSV color space shrimp images. A simple pipeline shows the most important stages performed to determine a pattern that identifies the class to which they belong based on their pigmentation. For the experiments, a database acquired with mobile devices of various brands and models has been used to capture images of shrimp. The results obtained with the images in the RGB and HSV color space allow for testing the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Keywords: Pigmentation; Color space; Light weight network
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Angel Sappa, Patricia Suarez, Henry Velesaca, & Dario Carpio. (2022). Domain Adaptation in Image Dehazing: Exploring the Usage of Images from Virtual Scenarios. In 16th International Conference on Computer Graphics, Visualization, Computer Vision and Image Processing (pp. 85–92).
Abstract: This work presents a novel domain adaptation strategy for deep learning-based approaches to solve the image dehazing
problem. Firstly, a large set of synthetic images is generated by using a realistic 3D graphic simulator; these synthetic
images contain different densities of haze, which are used for training the model that is later adapted to any real scenario.
The adaptation process requires just a few images to fine-tune the model parameters. The proposed strategy allows
overcoming the limitation of training a given model with few images. In other words, the proposed strategy implements
the adaptation of a haze removal model trained with synthetic images to real scenarios. It should be noticed that it is quite
difficult, if not impossible, to have large sets of pairs of real-world images (with and without haze) to train in a supervised
way dehazing algorithms. Experimental results are provided showing the validity of the proposed domain adaptation
strategy.
Keywords: Domain adaptation; Synthetic hazed dataset; Dehazing
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