Abstract: Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is necessary. To ensure this, collaborative cells are equipped with a large set of sensors of multiple modalities, covering the entire work volume. However, the fusion of information from all these sensors requires an accurate extrinsic calibration. The calibration of such complex systems is challenging, due to the number of sensors and modalities, and also due to the small overlapping fields of view between the sensors, which are positioned to capture different viewpoints of the cell. This paper proposes a sensor to pattern methodology that can calibrate a complex system such as a collaborative cell in a single optimization procedure. Our methodology can tackle RGB and Depth cameras, as well as LiDARs. Results show that our methodology is able to accurately calibrate a collaborative cell containing three RGB cameras, a depth camera and three 3D LiDARs.

Abstract: Handwritten document images can be highly affected by degradation for different reasons: Paper ageing, daily-life scenarios (wrinkles, dust, etc.), bad scanning process and so on. These artifacts raise many readability issues for current Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) algorithms and severely devalue their efficiency. In this paper, we propose an end to end architecture based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to recover the degraded documents into a and form. Unlike the most well-known document binarization methods, which try to improve the visual quality of the degraded document, the proposed architecture integrates a handwritten text recognizer that promotes the generated document image to be more readable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use the text information while binarizing handwritten documents. Extensive experiments conducted on degraded Arabic and Latin handwritten documents demonstrate the usefulness of integrating the recognizer within the GAN architecture, which improves both the visual quality and the readability of the degraded document images. Moreover, we outperform the state of the art in H-DIBCO challenges, after fine tuning our pre-trained model with synthetically degraded Latin handwritten images, on this task.

Abstract: Despite recent advances in 3D pose estimation of human hands, especially thanks to the advent of CNNs and depth cameras, this task is still far from being solved. This is mainly due to the highly non-linear dynamics of fingers, which make hand model training a challenging task. In this paper, we exploit a novel hierarchical tree-like structured CNN, in which branches are trained to become specialized in predefined subsets of hand joints, called local poses. We further fuse local pose features, extracted from hierarchical CNN branches, to learn higher order dependencies among joints in the final pose by end-to-end training. Lastly, the loss function used is also defined to incorporate appearance and physical constraints about doable hand motion and deformation. Finally, we introduce a non-rigid data augmentation approach to increase the amount of training depth data. Experimental results suggest that feeding a tree-shaped CNN, specialized in local poses, into a fusion network for modeling joints correlations and dependencies, helps to increase the precision of final estimations, outperforming state-of-the-art results on NYU and SyntheticHand datasets.

Abstract: Data-driven paradigms using machine learning are becoming ubiquitous in image processing and communications. In particular, image-to-image (I2I) translation is a generic and widely used approach to image processing problems, such as image synthesis, style transfer, and image restoration. At the same time, neural image compression has emerged as a data-driven alternative to traditional coding approaches in visual communications. In this paper, we study the combination of these two paradigms into a joint I2I compression and translation framework, focusing on multi-domain image synthesis. We first propose distributed I2I translation by integrating quantization and entropy coding into an I2I translation framework (i.e. I2Icodec). In practice, the image compression functionality (i.e. autoencoding) is also desirable, requiring to deploy alongside I2Icodec a regular image codec. Thus, we further propose a unified framework that allows both translation and autoencoding capabilities in a single codec. Adaptive residual blocks conditioned on the translation/compression mode provide flexible adaptation to the desired functionality. The experiments show promising results in both I2I translation and image compression using a single model.

Abstract: In the quality evaluation of high dynamic range and wide color gamut (HDR/WCG) images, a number of works have concluded that native HDR metrics, such as HDR visual difference predictor (HDR-VDP), HDR video quality metric (HDR-VQM), or convolutional neural network (CNN)-based visibility metrics for HDR content, provide the best results. These metrics consider only the luminance component, but several color difference metrics have been specifically developed for, and validated with, HDR/WCG images. In this paper, we perform subjective evaluation experiments in a professional HDR/WCG production setting, under a real use case scenario. The results are quite relevant in that they show, firstly, that the performance of HDR metrics is worse than that of a classic, simple standard dynamic range (SDR) metric applied directly to the HDR content; and secondly, that the chrominance metrics specifically developed for HDR/WCG imaging have poor correlation with observer scores and are also outperformed by an SDR metric. Based on these findings, we show how a very simple framework for creating color HDR metrics, that uses only luminance SDR metrics, transfer functions, and classic color spaces, is able to consistently outperform, by a considerable margin, state-of-the-art HDR metrics on a varied set of HDR content, for both perceptual quantization (PQ) and Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) encoding, luminance and chroma distortions, and on different color spaces of common use.

Abstract: Color induction is the phenomenon where the physical and the perceived colors of an object differ owing to the color distribution and the spatial configuration of the surrounding objects. Previous works studying this phenomenon on the lsY MacLeod–Boynton color space, show that color assimilation is present only when the magnocellular pathway (i.e., the Y axis) is activated (i.e., when there are luminance differences). Concretely, the authors showed that the effect is mainly induced by the koniocellular pathway (s axis), but not by the parvocellular pathway (l axis), suggesting that when magnocellular pathway is activated it inhibits the koniocellular pathway. In the present work, we study whether parvo-, konio-, and magnocellular pathways may influence on each other through the color induction effect. Our results show that color assimilation does not depend on a chromatic–chromatic interaction, and that chromatic assimilation is driven by the interaction between luminance and chromatic channels (mainly the magno- and the koniocellular pathways). Our results also show that chromatic induction is greatly decreased when all three visual pathways are simultaneously activated, and that chromatic pathways could influence each other through the magnocellular (luminance) pathway. In addition, we observe that chromatic channels can influence the luminance channel, hence inducing a small brightness induction. All these results show that color induction is a highly complex process where interactions between the several visual pathways are yet unknown and should be studied in greater detail.

Abstract: Lateral connections in the primary visual cortex (V1) have long been hypothesized to be responsible for several visual processing mechanisms such as brightness induction, chromatic induction, visual discomfort, and bottom-up visual attention (also named saliency). Many computational models have been developed to independently predict these and other visual processes, but no computational model has been able to reproduce all of them simultaneously. In this work, we show that a biologically plausible computational model of lateral interactions of V1 is able to simultaneously predict saliency and all the aforementioned visual processes. Our model's architecture (NSWAM) is based on Penacchio's neurodynamic model of lateral connections of V1. It is defined as a network of firing rate neurons, sensitive to visual features such as brightness, color, orientation, and scale. We tested NSWAM saliency predictions using images from several eye tracking data sets. We show that the accuracy of predictions obtained by our architecture, using shuffled metrics, is similar to other state-of-the-art computational methods, particularly with synthetic images (CAT2000-Pattern and SID4VAM) that mainly contain low-level features. Moreover, we outperform other biologically inspired saliency models that are specifically designed to exclusively reproduce saliency. We show that our biologically plausible model of lateral connections can simultaneously explain different visual processes present in V1 (without applying any type of training or optimization and keeping the same parameterization for all the visual processes). This can be useful for the definition of a unified architecture of the primary visual cortex.