Abstract: Accurate semantic segmentation models typically require significant computational resources, inhibiting their use in practical applications. Recent works rely on well-crafted lightweight models to achieve fast inference. However, these models cannot flexibly adapt to varying accuracy and efficiency requirements. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective slimmable semantic segmentation (SlimSeg) method, which can be executed at different capacities during inference depending on the desired accuracy-efficiency tradeoff. More specifically, we employ parametrized channel slimming by stepwise downward knowledge distillation during training. Motivated by the observation that the differences between segmentation results of each submodel are mainly near the semantic borders, we introduce an additional boundary guided semantic segmentation loss to further improve the performance of each submodel. We show that our proposed SlimSeg with various mainstream networks can produce flexible models that provide dynamic adjustment of computational cost and better performance than independent models. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation benchmarks, Cityscapes and CamVid, demonstrate the generalization ability of our framework.

Abstract: This paper describes an image classification approach oriented to identify specimens of lepidopterous insects at Ecuadorian ecological reserves. This work seeks to contribute to studies in the area of biology about genus of butterflies and also to facilitate the registration of unrecognized specimens. The proposed approach is based on the fine-tuning of three widely used pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This strategy is intended to overcome the reduced number of labeled images. Experimental results with a dataset labeled by expert biologists is presented, reaching a recognition accuracy above 92%.

Abstract: While many individual tasks in the domain of human analysis have recently received an accuracy boost from deep learning approaches, multi-task learning has mostly been ignored due to a lack of data. New synthetic datasets are being released, filling this gap with synthetic generated data. In this work, we analyze four related human analysis tasks in still images in a multi-task scenario by leveraging such datasets. Specifically, we study the correlation of 2D/3D pose estimation, body part segmentation and full-body depth estimation. These tasks are learned via the well-known Stacked Hourglass module such that each of the task-specific streams shares information with the others. The main goal is to analyze how training together these four related tasks can benefit each individual task for a better generalization. Results on the newly released SURREAL dataset show that all four tasks benefit from the multi-task approach, but with different combinations of tasks: while combining all four tasks improves 2D pose estimation the most, 2D pose improves neither 3D pose nor full-body depth estimation. On the other hand 2D parts segmentation can benefit from 2D pose but not from 3D pose. In all cases, as expected, the maximum improvement is achieved on those human body parts that show more variability in terms of spatial distribution, appearance and shape, e.g. wrists and ankles.

Abstract: Mirror symmetry is a property most likely to be encountered in animals than in medium scale vegetation or inanimate objects in the natural world. This might be the reason why the human visual system has evolved to detect it quickly and robustly. Indeed, the perception of symmetry assists higher-level visual processing that are crucial for survival such as target recognition and identification irrespective of position and location. Although the task of detecting symmetrical objects seems effortless to us, it is very challenging for computers (to the extent that it has been proposed as a robust “captcha” by Funk & Liu in 2016). Indeed, the exact mechanism of symmetry detection in primates is not well understood: fMRI studies have shown that symmetrical shapes activate specific higher-level areas of the visual cortex (Sasaki et al.; 2005) and similarly, a large body of psychophysical experiments suggest that the symmetry perception is critically influenced by low-level mechanisms (Treder; 2010). In this work we attempt to find plausible low-level mechanisms that might form the basis for symmetry perception. Our simple model is made from banks of (i) odd-symmetric Gabors (resembling edge-detecting V1 neurons); and (ii) banks of larger odd- and even-symmetric Gabors (resembling higher visual cortex neurons), that pool signals from the 'edge image'. As reported previously (Akbarinia et al, ECVP2017), the convolution of the symmetrical lines with the two Gabor kernels of alternative phase produces a minimum in one and a maximum in the other (Osorio; 1996), and the rectification and combination of these signals create lines which hint of mirror symmetry in natural images. We improved the algorithm by combining these signals across several spatial scales. Our preliminary results suggest that such multiscale combination of convolutional operations might form the basis for much of the operation of the HVS in terms of symmetry detection and representation.