Abstract: Previous studies suggested that lateral interactions of V1 cells are responsible, among other visual effects, of bottom-up visual attention (alternatively named visual salience or saliency). Our objective is to mimic these connections with a neurodynamic network of firing-rate neurons in order to predict visual attention. Early visual subcortical processes (i.e. retinal and thalamic) are functionally simulated. An implementation of the cortical magnification function is included to define the retinotopical projections towards V1, processing neuronal activity for each distinct view during scene observation. Novel computational definitions of top-down inhibition (in terms of inhibition of return, oculomotor and selection mechanisms), are also proposed to predict attention in Free-Viewing and Visual Search tasks. Results show that our model outpeforms other biologically inspired models of saliency prediction while predicting visual saccade sequences with the same model. We also show how temporal and spatial characteristics of saccade amplitude and inhibition of return can improve prediction of saccades, as well as how distinct search strategies (in terms of feature-selective or category-specific inhibition) can predict attention at distinct image contexts.

Abstract: Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) is a tool with great potential to help endoscopists in the tasks of detecting and histologically classifying colorectal polyps. In recent years, different technologies have been described and their potential utility has been increasingly evidenced, which has generated great expectations among scientific societies. However, most of these works are retrospective and use images of different quality and characteristics which are analysed off line. This review aims to familiarise gastroenterologists with computational methods and the particularities of endoscopic imaging, which have an impact on image processing analysis. Finally, the publicly available image databases, needed to compare and confirm the results obtained with different methods, are presented.

Abstract: Oral. Paper award nominee.
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized computer vision. We now have DNNs that achieve top (performance) results in many problems, including object recognition, facial expression analysis, and semantic segmentation, to name but a few. The design of the DNNs that achieve top results is, however, non-trivial and mostly done by trailand-error. That is, typically, researchers will derive many DNN architectures (i.e., topologies) and then test them on multiple datasets. However, there are no guarantees that the selected DNN will perform well in the real world. One can use a testing set to estimate the performance gap between the training and testing sets, but avoiding overfitting-to-thetesting-data is almost impossible. Using a sequestered testing dataset may address this problem, but this requires a constant update of the dataset, a very expensive venture. Here, we derive an algorithm to estimate the performance gap between training and testing that does not require any testing dataset. Specifically, we derive a number of persistent topology measures that identify when a DNN is learning to generalize to unseen samples. This allows us to compute the DNN’s testing error on unseen samples, even when we do not have access to them. We provide extensive experimental validation on multiple networks and datasets to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Abstract: Deep video action recognition models have been highly successful in recent years but require large quantities of manually-annotated data, which are expensive and laborious to obtain. In this work, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for video action recognition, as synthetic data have been successfully used to supervise models for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation, physics models and other components of modern game engines. With this model we generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for “Procedural Human Action Videos”. PHAV contains a total of 39,982 videos, with more than 1000 examples for each of 35 action categories. Our video generation approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences: 14 of these 35 categories are procedurally-defined synthetic actions. In addition, each video is represented with 6 different data modalities, including RGB, optical flow and pixel-level semantic labels. These modalities are generated almost simultaneously using the Multiple Render Targets feature of modern GPUs. In order to leverage PHAV, we introduce a deep multi-task (i.e. that considers action classes from multiple datasets) representation learning architecture that is able to simultaneously learn from synthetic and real video datasets, even when their action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance. Our approach also significantly outperforms video representations produced by fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos.

Abstract: Many historians and linguists are working individually and in an uncoordinated fashion on the identification and decryption of historical ciphers. This is a time-consuming process as they often work without access to automatic methods and processes that can accelerate the decipherment. At the same time, computer scientists and cryptologists are developing algorithms to decrypt various cipher types without having access to a large number of original ciphertexts. In this paper, we describe the DECRYPT project aiming at the creation of resources and tools for historical cryptology by bringing the expertise of various disciplines together for collecting data, exchanging methods for faster progress to transcribe, decrypt and contextualize historical encrypted manuscripts. We present our goals and work-in progress of a general approach for analyzing historical encrypted manuscripts using standardized methods and a new set of state-of-the-art tools. We release the data and tools as open-source hoping that all mentioned disciplines would benefit and contribute to the research infrastructure of historical cryptology.

Abstract: Top-down semantic information is known to play an important role in assigning saliency. Recently, large strides have been made in improving state-of-the-art semantic image understanding in the fields of object detection and semantic segmentation. Therefore, since these methods have now reached a high-level of maturity, evaluation of the impact of high-level image understanding on saliency estimation is now feasible. We propose several saliency features which are computed from object detection and semantic segmentation results. We combine these features with a standard baseline method for saliency detection to evaluate their importance. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed features derived from object detection and semantic segmentation improve saliency estimation significantly. Moreover, they show that our method obtains state-of-the-art results on (FT, ImgSal, and SOD datasets) and obtains competitive results on four other datasets (ECSSD, PASCAL-S, MSRA-B, and HKU-IS).

Abstract: Assessing the physical condition in rehabilitation scenarios is a challenging problem, since it involves Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and kinematic analysis methods. In addition, the difficulties increase in unconstrained rehabilitation scenarios, which are much closer to the real use cases. In particular, our aim is to design an upper-limb assessment pipeline for stroke patients using smartwatches. We focus on the HAR task, as it is the first part of the assessing pipeline. Our main target is to automatically detect and recognize four key movements inspired by the Fugl-Meyer assessment scale, which are performed in both constrained and unconstrained scenarios. In addition to the application protocol and dataset, we propose two detection and classification baseline methods. We believe that the proposed framework, dataset and baseline results will serve to foster this research field.