Abstract: This paper reviews and discusses research advances on “explainable machine learning” in computer vision. We focus on a particular area of the “Looking at People” (LAP) thematic domain: first impressions and personality analysis. Our aim is to make the computational intelligence and computer vision communities aware of the importance of developing explanatory mechanisms for computer-assisted decision making applications, such as automating recruitment. Judgments based on personality traits are being made routinely by human resource departments to evaluate the candidates' capacity of social insertion and their potential of career growth. However, inferring personality traits and, in general, the process by which we humans form a first impression of people, is highly subjective and may be biased. Previous studies have demonstrated that learning machines can learn to mimic human decisions. In this paper, we go one step further and formulate the problem of explaining the decisions of the models as a means of identifying what visual aspects are important, understanding how they relate to decisions suggested, and possibly gaining insight into undesirable negative biases. We design a new challenge on explainability of learning machines for first impressions analysis. We describe the setting, scenario, evaluation metrics and preliminary outcomes of the competition. To the best of our knowledge this is the first effort in terms of challenges for explainability in computer vision. In addition our challenge design comprises several other quantitative and qualitative elements of novelty, including a “coopetition” setting, which combines competition and collaboration.

Abstract: This paper reports the ICDAR2019 Robust Reading Challenge on Arbitrary-Shaped Text – RRC-ArT that consists of three major challenges: i) scene text detection, ii) scene text recognition, and iii) scene text spotting. A total of 78 submissions from 46 unique teams/individuals were received for this competition. The top performing score of each challenge is as follows: i) T1 – 82.65%, ii) T2.1 – 74.3%, iii) T2.2 – 85.32%, iv) T3.1 – 53.86%, and v) T3.2 – 54.91%. Apart from the results, this paper also details the ArT dataset, tasks description, evaluation metrics and participants' methods. The dataset, the evaluation kit as well as the results are publicly available at the challenge website.

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the DocILE 2023 Competition, its tasks, participant submissions, the competition results and possible future research directions. This first edition of the competition focused on two Information Extraction tasks, Key Information Localization and Extraction (KILE) and Line Item Recognition (LIR). Both of these tasks require detection of pre-defined categories of information in business documents. The second task additionally requires correctly grouping the information into tuples, capturing the structure laid out in the document. The competition used the recently published DocILE dataset and benchmark that stays open to new submissions. The diversity of the participant solutions indicates the potential of the dataset as the submissions included pure Computer Vision, pure Natural Language Processing, as well as multi-modal solutions and utilized all of the parts of the dataset, including the annotated, synthetic and unlabeled subsets.

Abstract: This paper proposes the use of a CycleGAN architecture for thermal image super-resolution under a transfer domain strategy, where middle-resolution images from one camera are transferred to a higher resolution domain of another camera. The proposed approach is trained with a large dataset acquired using three thermal cameras at different resolutions. An unsupervised learning process is followed to train the architecture. Additional loss function is proposed trying to improve results from the state of the art approaches. Following the first thermal image super-resolution challenge (PBVS-CVPR2020) evaluations are performed. A comparison with previous works is presented showing the proposed approach reaches the best results.

Abstract: This paper proposes an imaging system for computing sparse depth maps from multispectral images. A special stereo head consisting of an infrared and a color camera defines the proposed multimodal acquisition system. The cameras are rigidly attached so that their image planes are parallel. Details about the calibration and image rectification procedure are provided. Sparse disparity maps are obtained by the combined use of mutual information enriched with gradient information. The proposed approach is evaluated using a Receiver Operating Characteristics curve. Furthermore, a multispectral dataset, color and infrared images, together with their corresponding ground truth disparity maps, is generated and used as a test bed. Experimental results in real outdoor scenarios are provided showing its viability and that the proposed approach is not restricted to a specific domain.

Abstract: This paper proposes a technique for RGB-D scene segmentation using Multi-class
Multi-scale Stacked Sequential Learning (MMSSL) paradigm. Following recent trends in state-of-the-art, a base classifier uses an initial SLIC segmentation to obtain superpixels which provide a diminution of data while retaining object boundaries. A series of color and depth features are extracted from the superpixels, and are used in a Conditional Random Field (CRF) to predict superpixel labels. Furthermore, a Random Forest (RF) classifier using random offset features is also used as an input to the CRF, acting as an initial prediction. As a stacked classifier, another Random Forest is used acting on a spatial multi-scale decomposition of the CRF confidence map to correct the erroneous labels assigned by the previous classifier. The model is tested on the popular NYU-v2 dataset.
The approach shows that simple multi-modal features with the power of the MMSSL
paradigm can achieve better performance than state of the art results on the same dataset.

Abstract: This paper proposes a runlength histogram signature as a perceptual descriptor of architectural plans in a retrieval scenario. The style of an architectural drawing is characterized by the perception of lines, shapes and texture. Such visual stimuli are the basis for defining semantic concepts as space properties, symmetry, density, etc. We propose runlength histograms extracted in vertical, horizontal and diagonal directions as a characterization of line and space properties in floorplans, so it can be roughly associated to a description of walls and room structure. A retrieval application illustrates the performance of the proposed approach, where given a plan as a query, similar ones are obtained from a database. A ground truth based on human observation has been constructed to validate the hypothesis. Additional retrieval results on sketched building’s facades are reported qualitatively in this paper. Its good description and its adaptability to two different sketch drawings despite its simplicity shows the interest of the proposed approach and opens a challenging research line in graphics recognition.