Abstract: Depth estimation provides essential information to perform autonomous driving and driver assistance. A promising line of work consists of introducing additional semantic information about the traffic scene when training CNNs for depth estimation. In practice, this means that the depth data used for CNN training is complemented with images having pixel-wise semantic labels where the same raw training data is associated with both types of ground truth, i.e., depth and semantic labels. The main contribution of this paper is to show that this hard constraint can be circumvented, i.e., that we can train CNNs for depth estimation by leveraging the depth and semantic information coming from heterogeneous datasets. In order to illustrate the benefits of our approach, we combine KITTI depth and Cityscapes semantic segmentation datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art results on monocular depth estimation.

Abstract: Previous work from Wloka et al. (2017) presented the Selective Tuning Attentive Reference model Fixation Controller (STAR-FC), an active vision model for saccade prediction. Although the model is able to efficiently predict saccades during free-viewing, it is well known that stimulus and task instructions can strongly affect eye movement patterns (Yarbus, 1967). These factors are considered in previous Selective Tuning architectures (Tsotsos and Kruijne, 2014)(Tsotsos, Kotseruba and Wloka, 2016)(Rosenfeld, Biparva & Tsotsos 2017), proposing a way to combine bottom-up and top-down contributions to fixation and saccade programming. In particular, task priming has been shown to be crucial to the deployment of eye movements, involving interactions between brain areas related to goal-directed behavior, working and long-term memory in combination with stimulus-driven eye movement neuronal correlates. Initial theories and models of these influences include (Rao, Zelinsky, Hayhoe and Ballard, 2002)(Navalpakkam and Itti, 2005)(Huang and Pashler, 2007) and show distinct ways to process the task requirements in combination with bottom-up attention. In this study we extend the STAR-FC with novel computational definitions of Long-Term Memory, Visual Task Executive and a Task Relevance Map. With these modules we are able to use textual instructions in order to guide the model to attend to specific categories of objects and/or places in the scene. We have designed our memory model by processing a hierarchy of visual features learned from salient object detection datasets. The relationship between the executive task instructions and the memory representations has been specified using a tree of semantic similarities between the learned features and the object category labels. Results reveal that by using this model, the resulting relevance maps and predicted saccades have a higher probability to fall inside the salient regions depending on the distinct task instructions.

Abstract: The impressive performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) when solving different vision problems is shadowed by their black-box nature and our consequent lack of understanding of the representations they build and how these representations are organized. To help understanding these issues, we propose to describe the activity of individual neurons by their Neuron Feature visualization and quantify their inherent selectivity with two specific properties. We explore selectivity indexes for: an image feature (color); and an image label (class membership). Our contribution is a framework to seek or classify neurons by indexing on these selectivity properties. It helps to find color selective neurons, such as a red-mushroom neuron in layer Conv4 or class selective neurons such as dog-face neurons in layer Conv5 in VGG-M, and establishes a methodology to derive other selectivity properties. Indexing on neuron selectivity can statistically draw how features and classes are represented through layers in a moment when the size of trained nets is growing and automatic tools to index neurons can be helpful.

Abstract: With the consolidation of the new data protection regulation paradigm for each individual within the European Union (EU), major biometric technologies are now confronted with many concerns related to user privacy in biometric deployments. When individual biometrics are disclosed, the sensitive information about his/her personal data such as financial or health are at high risk of being misused or compromised. This issue can be escalated considerably over scenarios of non-cooperative users, such as elderly people residing in care homes, with their inability to interact conveniently and securely with the biometric system. The primary goal of this study is to design a novel database to investigate the problem of automatic people recognition under privacy constraints. To do so, the collected data-set contains the subject’s hand and foot traits and excludes the face biometrics of individuals in order to protect their privacy. We carried out extensive simulations using different baseline methods, including deep learning. Simulation results show that, with the spatial features extracted from the subject sequence in both individual hand or foot videos, state-of-the-art deep models provide promising recognition performance.

Abstract: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has benefited from computer vision and more recently, Deep Learning approaches, to accurately estimate the state of deterioration of infrastructure. In our work, we test Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) with a dataset of deck areas of bridges for damage segmentation. We create a dataset for delamination and rebar exposure that has been collected from inspection records of bridges in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. The dataset consists of 734 images with three labels per image, which makes it the largest dataset of images of bridge deck damage. This data allows us to estimate the performance of our method based on regions of agreement, which emulates the uncertainty of in-field inspections. We demonstrate the practicality of FCNs to perform automated semantic segmentation of surface damages. Our model achieves a mean accuracy of 89.7% for delamination and 78.4% for rebar exposure, and a weighted F1 score of 81.9%.

Abstract: This work proposes a fully convolutional network architecture for RGB face image generation from a given input thermal face image to be applied in face recognition scenarios. The proposed method is based on the FusionNet architecture and increases robustness against overfitting using dropout after bridge connections, randomised leaky ReLUs (RReLUs), and orthogonal regularization. Furthermore, we propose to use a decoding block with resize convolution instead of transposed convolution to improve final RGB face image generation. To validate our proposed network architecture, we train a face classifier and compare its face recognition rate on the reconstructed RGB images from the proposed architecture, to those when reconstructing images with the original FusionNet, as well as when using the original RGB images. As a result, we are introducing a new architecture which leads to a more accurate network.

Abstract: Dealing with incomplete information is a well studied problem in the context of machine learning and computational intelligence. However, in the context of computer vision, the problem has only been studied in specific scenarios (e.g., certain types of occlusions in specific types of images), although it is common to have incomplete information in visual data. This chapter describes the design of an academic competition focusing on inpainting of images and video sequences that was part of the competition program of WCCI2018 and had a satellite event collocated with ECCV2018. The ChaLearn Looking at People Inpainting Challenge aimed at advancing the state of the art on visual inpainting by promoting the development of methods for recovering missing and occluded information from images and video. Three tracks were proposed in which visual inpainting might be helpful but still challenging: human body pose estimation, text overlays removal and fingerprint denoising. This chapter describes the design of the challenge, which includes the release of three novel datasets, and the description of evaluation metrics, baselines and evaluation protocol. The results of the challenge are analyzed and discussed in detail and conclusions derived from this event are outlined.