Abstract: Current image captioning systems perform at a merely descriptive level, essentially enumerating the objects in the scene and their relations. Humans, on the contrary, interpret images by integrating several sources of prior knowledge of the world. In this work, we aim to take a step closer to producing captions that offer a plausible interpretation of the scene, by integrating such contextual information into the captioning pipeline. For this we focus on the captioning of images used to illustrate news articles. We propose a novel captioning method that is able to leverage contextual information provided by the text of news articles associated with an image. Our model is able to selectively draw information from the article guided by visual cues, and to dynamically extend the output dictionary to out-of-vocabulary named entities that appear in the context source. Furthermore we introduce“ GoodNews”, the largest news image captioning dataset in the literature and demonstrate state-of-the-art results.

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct retrieval of photos from unseen categories. We importantly advance prior arts by proposing a novel ZS-SBIR scenario that represents a firm step forward in its practical application. The new setting uniquely recognizes two important yet often neglected challenges of practical ZS-SBIR, (i) the large domain gap between amateur sketch and photo, and (ii) the necessity for moving towards large-scale retrieval. We first contribute to the community a novel ZS-SBIR dataset, QuickDraw-Extended, that consists of 330,000 sketches and 204,000 photos spanning across 110 categories. Highly abstract amateur human sketches are purposefully sourced to maximize the domain gap, instead of ones included in existing datasets that can often be semi-photorealistic. We then formulate a ZS-SBIR framework to jointly model sketches and photos into a common embedding space. A novel strategy to mine the mutual information among domains is specifically engineered to alleviate the domain gap. External semantic knowledge is further embedded to aid semantic transfer. We show that, rather surprisingly, retrieval performance significantly outperforms that of state-of-the-art on existing datasets that can already be achieved using a reduced version of our model. We further demonstrate the superior performance of our full model by comparing with a number of alternatives on the newly proposed dataset. The new dataset, plus all training and testing code of our model, will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Abstract: In this work we present a novel compact scene representation based on Stixels that infers geometric and semantic information. Our approach overcomes the previous rather restrictive geometric assumptions for Stixels by introducing a novel depth model to account for non-flat roads and slanted objects. Both semantic and depth cues are used jointly to infer the scene representation in a sound global energy minimization formulation. Furthermore, a novel approximation scheme is introduced that uses an extremely efficient over-segmentation. In doing so, the computational complexity of the Stixel inference algorithm is reduced significantly, achieving real-time computation capabilities with only a slight drop in accuracy. We evaluate the proposed approach in terms of semantic and geometric accuracy as well as run-time on four publicly available benchmark datasets. Our approach maintains accuracy on flat road scene datasets while improving substantially on a novel non-flat road dataset.

Abstract: “Memory Fields” is a trans-disciplinary project aiming at the (re)valorisation of digital collections.Its main deliverable is an interface for a dual screen installation, used to access and mix the public library digital collections. The collections being used in this case are a collection of digitised posters from the Spanish Civil War, belonging to the Arxiu General de Catalunya, and a collection of field recordings made by Dan Norton. The system generates visualisations, and the images and sounds are mixed together using narrative primitives of video dj. Users contribute to the digital collections by adding personal memories and observations. The comments and recollections appear as flowers growing in a “memory field” and memories remain public in a Twitter feed (@Memoryfields).

Abstract: Lifelong object re-identification incrementally learns from a stream of re-identification tasks. The objective is to learn a representation that can be applied to all tasks and that generalizes to previously unseen re-identification tasks. The main challenge is that at inference time the representation must generalize to previously unseen identities. To address this problem, we apply continual meta metric learning to lifelong object re-identification. To prevent forgetting of previous tasks, we use knowledge distillation and explore the roles of positive and negative pairs. Based on our observation that the distillation and metric losses are antagonistic, we propose to remove positive pairs from distillation to robustify model updates. Our method, called Distillation without Positive Pairs (DwoPP), is evaluated on extensive intra-domain experiments on person and vehicle re-identification datasets, as well as inter-domain experiments on the LReID benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that DwoPP significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Abstract: Estimating spectral data such as camera sensor responses or illuminant spectral power distribution from raw RGB camera outputs is crucial in many computer vision applications.
Usually, 2D color charts with various patches of known spectral reflectance are
used as reference for such purpose. Deducing n-D spectral data (n»3) from 3D RGB inputs is an ill-posed problem that requires a high number of inputs. Unfortunately, most of the natural color surfaces have spectral reflectances that are well described by low-dimensional linear models, i.e. each spectral reflectance can be approximated by a weighted sum of the others. It has been shown that adding patches to color charts does not help in practice, because the information they add is redundant with the information provided by the first set of patches. In this paper, we propose to use spectral data of
higher dimensionality by using 3D color charts that create inter-reflections between the surfaces. These inter-reflections produce multiplications between natural spectral curves and so provide non-linear spectral curves. We show that such data provide enough information for accurate spectral data estimation.

Abstract: The measure of lumen volume on radial arteries can be used to evaluate the vessel response to different vasodilators. In this paper, we present a framework for automatic lumen segmentation in longitudinal cut images of radial artery from Intravascular ultrasound sequences. The segmentation is tackled as a classification problem where the contextual information is exploited by means of Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). A multi-class classification framework is proposed, and inference is achieved by combining binary CRFs according to the Error-Correcting-Output-Code technique. The results are validated against manually segmented sequences. Finally, the method is compared with other state-of-the-art classifiers.