Abstract: Colorectal cancer is the fourth most common cause of cancer death worldwide and its survival rate depends on the stage in which it is detected on hence the necessity for an early colon screening. There are several screening techniques but colonoscopy is still nowadays the gold standard, although it has some drawbacks such as the miss rate. Our contribution, in the field of intelligent systems for colonoscopy, aims at providing a polyp localization and a polyp segmentation system based on a model of appearance for polyps. To develop both methods we define a model of appearance for polyps, which describes a polyp as enclosed by intensity valleys. The novelty of our contribution resides on the fact that we include in our model aspects of the image formation and we also consider the presence of other elements from the endoluminal scene such as specular highlights and blood vessels, which have an impact on the performance of our methods. In order to develop our polyp localization method we accumulate valley information in order to generate energy maps, which are also used to guide the polyp segmentation. Our methods achieve promising results in polyp localization and segmentation. As we want to explore the usability of our methods we present a comparative analysis between physicians fixations obtained via an eye tracking device and our polyp localization method. The results show that our method is indistinguishable to novice physicians although it is far from expert physicians.

Abstract: Colour is derived from three physical properties: incident light, object reflectance and sensor sensitivities. Incident light varies under natural conditions; hence, recovering scene illuminant is an important issue in computational colour. One way to deal with this problem under calibrated conditions is by following three steps, 1) building a narrow-band sensor basis to accomplish the diagonal model, 2) building a feasible set of illuminants, and 3) defining criteria to select the best illuminant. In this work we focus on colour constancy for natural images by introducing perceptual criteria in the first and third stages.
To deal with the illuminant selection step, we hypothesise that basic colour categories can be used as anchor categories to recover the best illuminant. These colour names are related to the way that the human visual system has evolved to encode relevant natural colour statistics. Therefore the recovered image provides the best representation of the scene labelled with the basic colour terms. We demonstrate with several experiments how this selection criterion achieves current state-of-art results in computational colour constancy. In addition to this result, we psychophysically prove that usual angular error used in colour constancy does not correlate with human preferences, and we propose a new perceptual colour constancy evaluation.
The implementation of this selection criterion strongly relies on the use of a diagonal
model for illuminant change. Consequently, the second contribution focuses on building an appropriate narrow-band sensor basis to represent natural images. We propose to use the spectral sharpening technique to compute a unique narrow-band basis optimised to represent a large set of natural reflectances under natural illuminants and given in the basis of human cones. The proposed sensors allow predicting unique hues and the World colour Survey data independently of the illuminant by using a compact singularity function. Additionally, we studied different families of sharp sensors to minimise different perceptual measures. This study brought us to extend the spherical sampling procedure from 3D to 6D.
Several research lines still remain open. One natural extension would be to measure the
effects of using the computed sharp sensors on the category hypothesis, while another might be to insert spatial contextual information to improve category hypothesis. Finally, much work still needs to be done to explore how individual sensors can be adjusted to the colours in a scene.

Abstract: Counterfeiting and piracy are a form of theft that has been steadily growing in recent years. A counterfeit is an unauthorized reproduction of an authentic/genuine object. Banknotes and identity documents are two common objects of counterfeiting. The former is used by organized criminal groups to finance a variety of illegal activities or even to destabilize entire countries due the inflation effect. Generally, in order to run their illicit businesses, counterfeiters establish companies and bank accounts using fraudulent identity documents. The illegal activities generated by counterfeit banknotes and identity documents has a damaging effect on business, the economy and the general population. To fight against counterfeiters, governments and authorities around the globe cooperate and develop security features to protect their security documents. Many of the security features in identity documents can also be found in banknotes. In this dissertation we focus our efforts in detecting the counterfeit banknotes and identity documents by analyzing the security features at the background printing. Background areas on secure documents contain fine-line patterns and designs that are difficult to reproduce without the manufacturers cutting-edge printing equipment. Our objective is to find the loose of resolution between the genuine security document and the printed counterfeit version with a publicly available commercial printer. We first present the most complete survey to date in identity and banknote security features. The compared algorithms and systems are based on computer vision and machine learning. Then we advance to present the banknote and identity counterfeit dataset we have built and use along all this thesis. Afterwards, we evaluate and adapt algorithms in the literature for the security background texture analysis. We study this problem from the point of view of robustness, computational efficiency and applicability into a real and non-controlled industrial scenario, proposing key insights to use these algorithms. Next, within the industrial environment of this thesis, we build a complete service oriented architecture to detect counterfeit documents. The mobile application and the server framework intends to be used even by non-expert document examiners to spot counterfeits. Later, we re-frame the problem of background texture counterfeit detection as a full-reference game of spotting the differences, by alternating glimpses between a counterfeit and a genuine background using recurrent neural networks. Finally, we deal with the lack of counterfeit samples, studying different approaches based on anomaly detection.

Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved superior performance in many visual recognition applications, such as image classification, detection and segmentation. Training deep CNNs requires huge amounts of labeled data, which is expensive and labor intensive to collect. Active learning is a paradigm aimed at reducing the annotation effort by training the model on actively selected
informative and/or representative samples. In this thesis we study several aspects of active learning including video object detection for autonomous driving systems, image classification on balanced and imbalanced datasets and the incorporation of self-supervised learning in active learning. We briefly describe our approach in each of these areas to reduce the labeling effort.
In chapter two we introduce a novel active learning approach for object detection in videos by exploiting temporal coherence. Our criterion is based on the estimated number of errors in terms of false positives and false negatives. Additionally, we introduce a synthetic video dataset, called SYNTHIA-AL, specially designed to evaluate active
learning for video object detection in road scenes. Finally, we show that our
approach outperforms active learning baselines tested on two outdoor datasets.
In the next chapter we address the well-known problem of over confidence in the neural networks. As an alternative to network confidence, we propose a new informativeness-based active learning method that captures the learning dynamics of neural network with a metric called label-dispersion. This metric is low when the network consistently assigns the same label to the sample during the course of training and high when the assigned label changes frequently. We show that label-dispersion is a promising predictor of the uncertainty of the network, and show on two benchmark datasets that an active learning algorithm based on label-dispersion obtains excellent results.
In chapter four, we tackle the problem of sampling bias in active learning methods on imbalanced datasets. Active learning is generally studied on balanced datasets where an equal amount of images per class is available. However, real-world datasets suffer from severe imbalanced classes, the so called longtail distribution. We argue that this further complicates the active learning process, since the imbalanced data pool can result in suboptimal classifiers. To address this problem in the context of active learning, we propose a general optimization framework that explicitly takes class-balancing into account. Results on three datasets show that the method is general (it can be combined with most existing active learning algorithms) and can be effectively applied to boost the performance of both informative and representative-based active learning methods. In addition, we show that also on balanced datasets our method generally results in a performance gain.
Another paradigm to reduce the annotation effort is self-training that learns from a large amount of unlabeled data in an unsupervised way and fine-tunes on few labeled samples. Recent advancements in self-training have achieved very impressive results rivaling supervised learning on some datasets. In the last chapter we focus on whether active learning and self supervised learning can benefit from each other.
We study object recognition datasets with several labeling budgets for the evaluations. Our experiments reveal that self-training is remarkably more efficient than active learning at reducing the labeling effort, that for a low labeling budget, active learning offers no benefit to self-training, and finally that the combination of active learning and self-training is fruitful when the labeling budget is high.

Abstract: Deep learning has made tremendous progress in the last decade due to the explosion of training data and computational power. Through end-to-end training on a
large dataset, image representations are more discriminative than the previously
used hand-crafted features. However, for many real-world applications, training
and testing on a single dataset is not realistic, as the test distribution may change over time. Continuous learning takes this situation into account, where the learner must adapt to a sequence of tasks, each with a different distribution. If you would naively continue training the model with a new task, the performance of the model would drop dramatically for the previously learned data. This phenomenon is known as catastrophic forgetting.
Many approaches have been proposed to address this problem, which can be divided into three main categories: regularization-based approaches, rehearsal-based
approaches, and parameter isolation-based approaches. However, most of the existing works focus on image classification tasks and many other computer vision tasks
have not been well-explored in the continual learning setting. Therefore, in this
thesis, we study continual learning for image generation, object re-identification,
and object counting.
For the image generation problem, since the model can generate images from the previously learned task, it is free to apply rehearsal without any limitation. We developed two methods based on generative replay. The first one uses the generated image for joint training together with the new data. The second one is based on
output pixel-wise alignment. We extensively evaluate these methods on several
benchmarks.
Next, we study continual learning for object Re-Identification (ReID). Although
most state-of-the-art methods of ReID and continual ReID use softmax-triplet loss,
we found that it is better to solve the ReID problem from a meta-learning perspective because continual learning of reID can benefit a lot from the generalization of metalearning. We also propose a distillation loss and found that the removal of the positive pairs before the distillation loss is critical.
Finally, we study continual learning for the counting problem. We study the mainstream method based on density maps and propose a new approach for density
map distillation. We found that fixing the counter head is crucial for the continual learning of object counting. To further improve results, we propose an adaptor to adapt the changing feature extractor for the fixed counter head. Extensive evaluation shows that this results in improved continual learning performance.

Abstract: Depth perception is a key aspect of human vision. It is a routine and essential visual task that the human do effortlessly in many daily activities. This has often been associated with stereo vision, but humans have an amazing ability to perceive depth relations even from a single image by using several monocular cues.
In the computer vision field, if image depth information were available, many tasks could be posed from a different perspective for the sake of higher performance and robustness. Nevertheless, given a single image, this possibility is usually discarded, since obtaining depth information has frequently been performed by three-dimensional reconstruction techniques, requiring two or more images of the same scene taken from different viewpoints. Recently, some proposals have shown the feasibility of computing depth information from single images. In essence, the idea is to take advantage of a priori knowledge of the acquisition conditions and the observed scene to estimate depth from monocular pictorial cues. These approaches try to precisely estimate the scene depth maps by employing computationally demanding techniques. However, to assist many computer vision algorithms, it is not really necessary computing a costly and detailed depth map of the image. Indeed, just a rough depth description can be very valuable in many problems.
In this thesis, we have demonstrated how coarse depth information can be integrated in different tasks following alternative strategies to obtain more precise and robust results. In that sense, we have proposed a simple, but reliable enough technique, whereby image scene regions are categorized into discrete depth ranges to build a coarse depth map. Based on this representation, we have explored the potential usefulness of our method in three application domains from novel viewpoints: camera rotation parameters estimation, background estimation and pedestrian candidate generation. In the first case, we have computed camera rotation mounted in a moving vehicle applying two novels methods based on distant elements in the image, where the translation component of the image flow vectors is negligible. In background estimation, we have proposed a novel method to reconstruct the background by penalizing close regions in a cost function, which integrates color, motion, and depth terms. Finally, we have benefited of geometric and depth information available on single images for pedestrian candidate generation to significantly reduce the number of generated windows to be further processed by a pedestrian classifier. In all cases, results have shown that our approaches contribute to better performances.

Abstract: Developing human-like digital characters is a challenging task since humans are used to recognizing our fellows, and find the computed generated characters inadequately humanized. To fulfill the standards of the videogame and digital film productions it is necessary to model and animate these characters the most closely to human beings. However, it is an arduous and expensive task, since many artists and specialists are required to work on a single character. Therefore, to fulfill these requirements we found an interesting option to study the automatic creation of detailed characters through inexpensive setups. In this work, we develop novel techniques to bring detailed characters by combining different aspects that stand out when developing realistic characters, skin detail, facial hairs, expressions, and microexpressions. We examine each of the mentioned areas with the aim of automatically recover each of the parts without user interaction nor training data. We study the problems for their robustness but also for the simplicity of the setup, preferring single-image with uncontrolled illumination and methods that can be easily computed with the commodity of a standard laptop. A detailed face with wrinkles and skin details is vital to develop a realistic character. In this work, we introduce our method to automatically describe facial wrinkles on the image and transfer to the recovered base face. Then we advance to facial hair recovery by resolving a fitting problem with a novel parametrization model. As of last, we develop a mapping function that allows transfer expressions and microexpressions between different meshes, which provides realistic animations to our detailed mesh. We cover all the mentioned points with the focus on key aspects as (i) how to describe skin wrinkles in a simple and straightforward manner, (ii) how to recover 3D from 2D detections, (iii) how to recover and model facial hair from 2D to 3D, (iv) how to transfer expressions between models holding both skin detail and facial hair, (v) how to perform all the described actions without training data nor user interaction. In this work, we present our proposals to solve these aspects with an efficient and simple setup. We validate our work with several datasets both synthetic and real data, prooving remarkable results even in challenging cases as occlusions as glasses, thick beards, and indeed working with different face topologies like single-eyed cyclops.