Abstract: This article presents an efficient approach to classify a set of corn kernels in contact, which may contain good, or defective kernels along with impurities. The proposed approach consists of two stages, the first one is a next-generation segmentation network, trained by using a set of synthesized images that is applied to divide the given image into a set of individual instances. An ad-hoc lightweight CNN architecture is then proposed to classify each instance into one of three categories (ie good, defective, and impurities). The segmentation network is trained using a strategy that avoids the time-consuming and human-error-prone task of manual data annotation. Regarding the classification stage, the proposed ad-hoc network is designed with only a few sets of layers to result in a lightweight architecture capable of being used in integrated solutions. Experimental results and comparisons with previous approaches showing both the improvement in accuracy and the reduction in time are provided. Finally, the segmentation and classification approach proposed can be easily adapted for use with other cereal types.

Abstract: This study shows the generation process and the subsequent study of the representation space obtained by extracting GLCM texture features from computer-aided tomography (CT) scans of pulmonary nodules (PN). For this, data from 92 patients from the Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital were used. The workflow focuses on feature extraction using Pyradiomics and the VGG16 Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The aim of the study is to assess whether the data obtained have a positive impact on the diagnosis of lung cancer (LC). To design a machine learning (ML) model training method that allows generalization, we train SVM and neural network (NN) models, evaluating diagnosis performance using metrics defined at slice and nodule level.

Abstract: The PAD competitions we organized attracted more than 835 teams from home and abroad, most of them from the industry, which shows that the topic of face anti-spoofing is closely related to daily life, and there is an urgent need for advanced algorithms to solve its application needs. Specifically, the Chalearn LAP multi-modal face anti-spoofing attack detection challenge attracted more than 300 teams for the development phase with a total of 13 teams qualifying for the final round; the Chalearn Face Anti-spoofing Attack Detection Challenge attracted 340 teams in the development stage, and finally, 11 and 8 teams have submitted their codes in the single-modal and multi-modal face anti-spoofing recognition challenges, respectively; the 3D High-Fidelity Mask Face Presentation Attack Detection Challenge attracted 195 teams for the development phase with a total of 18 teams qualifying for the final round. All the results were verified and re-run by the organizing team, and the results were used for the final ranking. In this chapter, we briefly the methods developed by the teams participating in each competition, and introduce the algorithm details of the top-three ranked teams in detail.

Abstract: Human vision is restricted to the visual-optical spectrum. Machine vision is not.
Cameras sensitive to diverse infrared spectral bands can improve the capacities of
autonomous systems and provide a comprehensive view. Relevant scene content
can be made visible, particularly in situations when sensors of other modalities,
such as a visual-optical camera, require a source of illumination. As a result, increasing the level of automation not only avoids human errors but also reduces
machine-induced errors. Furthermore, multi-spectral sensor systems with infrared
imagery as one modality are a rich source of information and can conceivably
increase the robustness of many autonomous systems. Robotics, automobiles,
biometrics, security, surveillance, and the military are some examples of fields
that can profit from the use of infrared imagery in their respective applications.
Although multimodal spectral sensors have come a long way, there are still several
bottlenecks that prevent us from combining their output information and using
them as comprehensive images. The primary issue with infrared imaging is the lack
of potential benefits due to their cost influence on sensor resolution, which grows
exponentially with greater resolution. Due to the more costly sensor technology
required for their development, their resolutions are substantially lower than thoseof regular digital cameras.
This thesis aims to improve beyond-visible-spectrum machine vision by integrating multi-modal spectral sensors. The emphasis is on transforming the produced images to enhance their resolution to match expected human perception, bring the color representation close to human understanding of natural color, and improve machine vision application performance. This research focuses mainly on two tasks, image Colorization and Image Super resolution for both single- and cross-domain problems. We first start with an extensive review of the state of the art in both tasks, point out the shortcomings of existing approaches, and then present our solutions to address their limitations. Our solutions demonstrate that low-cost channel information (i.e., visible image) can be used to improve expensive channel
information (i.e., infrared image), resulting in images with higher quality and closer to human perception at a lower cost than a high-cost infrared camera.

Abstract: The curse of data labeling is a costly bottleneck in supervised deep learning, where large amounts of labeled data are needed to train intelligent systems. In onboard perception for autonomous driving, this cost corresponds to the labeling of raw data from sensors such as cameras, LiDARs, RADARs, etc. Therefore, synthetic data with automatically generated ground truth (labels) has aroused as a reliable alternative for training onboard perception models.
However, synthetic data commonly suffers from synth-to-real domain shift, i.e., models trained on the synthetic domain do not show their achievable accuracy when performing in the real world. This shift needs to be addressed by techniques falling in the realm of domain adaptation (DA).
The semi-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm can be followed to address DA. In this case, a model is trained using source data with labels (here synthetic) and leverages minimal knowledge from target data (here the real world) to generate pseudo-labels. These pseudo-labels help the training process to reduce the gap between the source and the target domains. In general, we can assume accessing both, pseudo-labels and a few amounts of human-provided labels for the target-domain data. However, the most interesting and challenging setting consists in assuming that we do not have human-provided labels at all. This setting is known as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). This PhD focuses on applying SSL to the UDA setting, for onboard visual tasks related to autonomous driving. We start by addressing the synth-to-real UDA problem on onboard vision-based object detection (pedestrians and cars), a critical task for autonomous driving and driving assistance. In particular, we propose to apply an SSL technique known as co-training, which we adapt to work with deep models that process a multi-modal input. The multi-modality consists of the visual appearance of the images (RGB) and their monocular depth estimation. The synthetic data we use as the source domain contains both, object bounding boxes and depth information. This prior knowledge is the
starting point for the co-training technique, which iteratively labels unlabeled real-world data and uses such pseudolabels (here bounding boxes with an assigned object class) to progressively improve the labeling results. Along this
process, two models collaborate to automatically label the images, in a way that one model compensates for the errors of the other, so avoiding error drift. While this automatic labeling process is done offline, the resulting pseudolabels can be used to train object detection models that must perform in real-time onboard a vehicle. We show that multi-modal co-training improves the labeling results compared to single-modal co-training, remaining competitive compared to human labeling.
Given the success of co-training in the context of object detection, we have also adapted this technique to a more crucial and challenging visual task, namely, onboard semantic segmentation. In fact, providing labels for a single image
can take from 30 to 90 minutes for a human labeler, depending on the content of the image. Thus, developing automatic labeling techniques for this visual task is of great interest to the automotive industry. In particular, the new co-training framework addresses synth-to-real UDA by an initial stage of self-training. Intermediate models arising from this stage are used to start the co-training procedure, for which we have elaborated an accurate collaboration policy between the two models performing the automatic labeling. Moreover, our co-training seamlessly leverages datasets from different synthetic domains. In addition, the co-training procedure is agnostic to the loss function used to train the semantic segmentation models which perform the automatic labeling. We achieve state-of-the-art results on publicly available benchmark datasets, again, remaining competitive compared to human labeling.
Finally, on the ground of our previous experience, we have designed and implemented a new SSL technique for UDA in the context of visual semantic segmentation. In this case, we mimic the labeling methodology followed by human labelers. In particular, rather than labeling full images at a time, categories of semantic classes are defined and only those are labeled in a labeling pass. In fact, different human labelers can become specialists in labeling different categories. Afterward, these per-category-labeled layers are combined to provide fully labeled images. Our technique is inspired by this methodology since we perform synth-to-real UDA per category, using the self-training stage previously developed as part of our co-training framework. The pseudo-labels obtained for each category are finally
fused to obtain fully automatically labeled images. In this context, we have also contributed to the development of a new photo-realistic synthetic dataset based on path-tracing rendering. Our new SSL technique seamlessly leverages publicly available synthetic datasets as well as this new one to obtain state-of-the-art results on synth-to-real UDA for semantic segmentation. We show that the new dataset allows us to reach better labeling accuracy than previously existing datasets, at the same time that it complements well them when combined. Moreover, we also show that the new human-inspired SSL technique outperforms co-training.

Abstract: Though they achieve great success, deep neural networks typically require a huge
amount of labeled data for training. However, collecting labeled data is often laborious and expensive. It would, therefore, be ideal if the knowledge obtained from label-rich datasets could be transferred to unlabeled data. However, deep networks are weak at generalizing to unseen domains, even when the differences are only subtle between the datasets. In real-world situations, a typical factor impairing the model generalization ability is the distribution shift between data from different domains, which is a long-standing problem usually termed as (unsupervised) domain adaptation.
A crucial requirement in the methodology of these domain adaptation methods is that they require access to source domain data during the adaptation process to the target domain. Accessibility to the source data of a trained source model is often impossible in real-world applications, for example, when deploying domain adaptation algorithms on mobile devices where the computational capacity is limited or in situations where data privacy rules limit access to the source domain data. Without access to the source domain data, existing methods suffer from inferior performance. Thus, in this thesis, we investigate domain adaptation without source data (termed as source-free domain adaptation) in multiple different scenarios that focus on image classification tasks.
We first study the source-free domain adaptation problem in a closed-set setting,
where the label space of different domains is identical. Only accessing the pretrained source model, we propose to address source-free domain adaptation from the perspective of unsupervised clustering. We achieve this based on nearest neighborhood clustering. In this way, we can transfer the challenging source-free domain adaptation task to a type of clustering problem. The final optimization objective is an upper bound containing only two simple terms, which can be explained as discriminability and diversity. We show that this allows us to relate several other methods in domain adaptation, unsupervised clustering and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity.