Abstract: In recent years, deep learning models have considerably advanced the performance of segmentation tasks on Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). However, these models show a considerable performance drop when they are evaluated on unseen data from a different distribution. Since annotation is often a hard and costly task requiring expert supervision, it is necessary to develop ways in which existing models can be adapted to the unseen domains without any additional labelled information. In this work, we explore one such technique which extends the CycleGAN [2] architecture to generate label-preserving data in the target domain. The synthetic target domain data is used to train the nn-UNet [3] framework for the task of multi-label segmentation. The experiments are conducted and evaluated on the dataset [1] provided in the ‘Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation’ challenge [23] for segmentation of vestibular schwannoma (VS) tumour and cochlea on contrast enhanced (ceT1) and high resolution (hrT2) MRI scans. In the proposed approach, our model obtains dice scores (DSC) 0.73 and 0.49 for tumour and cochlea respectively on the validation set of the dataset. This indicates the applicability of the proposed technique to real-world problems where data may be obtained by different acquisition protocols as in [1] where hrT2 images are more reliable, safer, and lower-cost alternative to ceT1.

Abstract: Although this book is on IR computer vision and its main focus lies on IR image and video processing and analysis, a special attention is dedicated to cross-spectral image processing due to the increasing number of publications and applications in this domain. In these cross-spectral frameworks, IR information is used together with information from other spectral bands to tackle some specific problems by developing more robust solutions. Tasks considered for cross-spectral processing are for instance dehazing, segmentation, vegetation index estimation, or face recognition. This increasing number of applications is motivated by cross- and multi-spectral camera setups available already on the market like for example smartphones, remote sensing multispectral cameras, or multi-spectral cameras for automotive systems or drones. In this chapter, different cross-spectral image processing techniques will be reviewed together with possible applications. Initially, image registration approaches for the cross-spectral case are reviewed: the registration stage is the first image processing task, which is needed to align images acquired by different sensors within the same reference coordinate system. Then, recent cross-spectral image colorization approaches, which are intended to colorize infrared images for different applications are presented. Finally, the cross-spectral image enhancement problem is tackled by including guided super resolution techniques, image dehazing approaches, cross-spectral filtering and edge detection. Figure 3.1 illustrates cross-spectral image processing stages as well as their possible connections. Table 3.1 presents some of the available public cross-spectral datasets generally used as reference data to evaluate cross-spectral image registration, colorization, enhancement, or exploitation results.

Abstract: Image and video enhancement aims at improving the signal quality relative to imaging artifacts such as noise and blur or atmospheric perturbations such as turbulence and haze. It is usually performed in order to assist humans in analyzing image and video content or simply to present humans visually appealing images and videos. However, image and video enhancement can also be used as a preprocessing technique to ease the task and thus improve the performance of subsequent automatic image content analysis algorithms: preceding dehazing can improve object detection as shown by [23] or explicit turbulence modeling can improve moving object detection as discussed by [24]. But it remains an open question whether image and video enhancement should rather be performed explicitly as a preprocessing step or implicitly for example by feeding affected images directly to a neural network for image content analysis like object detection [25]. Especially for real-time video processing at low latency it can be better to handle image perturbation implicitly in order to minimize the processing time of an algorithm. This can be achieved by making algorithms for image content analysis robust or even invariant to perturbations such as noise or blur. Additionally, mistakes of an individual preprocessing module can obviously affect the quality of the entire processing pipeline.

Abstract: Pretraining has proven successful in Document Intelligence tasks where deluge of documents are used to pretrain the models only later to be finetuned on downstream tasks. One of the problems of the pretraining approaches is the inconsistent usage of pretraining data with different OCR engines leading to incomparable results between models. In other words, it is not obvious whether the performance gain is coming from diverse usage of amount of data and distinct OCR engines or from the proposed models. To remedy the problem, we make public the OCR annotations for IDL documents using commercial OCR engine given their superior performance over open source OCR models. The contributed dataset (OCR-IDL) has an estimated monetary value over 20K US$. It is our hope that OCR-IDL can be a starting point for future works on Document Intelligence. All of our data and its collection process with the annotations can be found in this https URL.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework to enhance the perceptual quality of compressed videos. Our framework includes attention and adaptation to different quantization parameters (QPs) in a single model. The attention module exploits global receptive fields that can capture and align long-range correlations between consecutive frames, which can be beneficial for enhancing perceptual quality of videos. The frame to be enhanced is fed into the deep network together with its neighboring frames, and in the first stage features at different depths are extracted. Then extracted features are fed into attention blocks to explore global temporal correlations, followed by a series of upsampling and convolution layers. Finally, the resulting features are processed by the QP-conditional adaptation module which leverages the corresponding QP information. In this way, a single model can be used to enhance adaptively to various QPs without requiring multiple models specific for every QP value, while having similar performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed PeQuENet compared with the state-of-the-art compressed video quality enhancement algorithms.

Abstract: Recent joint embedding-based self-supervised methods have surpassed standard supervised approaches on various image recognition tasks such as image classification. These self-supervised methods aim at maximizing agreement between features extracted from two differently transformed views of the same image, which results in learning an invariant representation with respect to appearance and geometric image transformations. However, the effectiveness of these approaches remains unclear in the context of gaze estimation, a structured regression task that requires equivariance under geometric transformations (e.g., rotations, horizontal flip). In this work, we propose SwAT, an equivariant version of the online clustering-based self-supervised approach SwAV, to learn more informative representations for gaze estimation. We demonstrate that SwAT, with ResNet-50 and supported with uncurated unlabeled face images, outperforms state-of-the-art gaze estimation methods and supervised baselines in various experiments. In particular, we achieve up to 57% and 25% improvements in cross-dataset and within-dataset evaluation tasks on existing benchmarks (ETH-XGaze, Gaze360, and MPIIFaceGaze).

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.