Abstract: JCR 2019 Q2, IF=3.121
The task of unpaired image-to-image translation is highly challenging due to the lack of explicit cross-domain pairs of instances. We consider here diverse image translation (DIT), an even more challenging setting in which an image can have multiple plausible translations. This is normally achieved by explicitly disentangling content and style in the latent representation and sampling different styles codes while maintaining the image content. Despite the success of current DIT models, they are prone to suffer from bias. In this paper, we study the problem of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets may add undesired changes (e.g. change gender or race in face images) to the output translations as a consequence of the particular underlying visual distribution in the target domain. In order to alleviate the effects of this problem we propose the use of semantic constraints that enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Our proposed model is a step towards unbiased diverse image-to-image translation (UDIT), and results in less unwanted changes in the translated images while still performing the wanted transformation. Experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in different domains such as faces, objects, and scenes.

Abstract: One of the attractive characteristics of deep neural networks is their ability to transfer knowledge obtained in one domain to other related domains. As a result, high-quality networks can be trained in domains with relatively little training data. This property has been extensively studied for discriminative networks but has received significantly less attention for generative models. Given the often enormous effort required to train GANs, both computationally as well as in the dataset collection, the re-use of pretrained GANs is a desirable objective. We propose a novel knowledge transfer method for generative models based on mining the knowledge that is most beneficial to a specific target domain, either from a single or multiple pretrained GANs. This is done using a miner network that identifies which part of the generative distribution of each pretrained GAN outputs samples closest to the target domain. Mining effectively steers GAN sampling towards suitable regions of the latent space, which facilitates the posterior finetuning and avoids pathologies of other methods such as mode collapse and lack of flexibility. We perform experiments on several complex datasets using various GAN architectures (BigGAN, Progressive GAN) and show that the proposed method, called MineGAN, effectively transfers knowledge to domains with few target images, outperforming existing methods. In addition, MineGAN can successfully transfer knowledge from multiple pretrained GANs.

Abstract: Image generation is arguably one of the most attractive, compelling, and challenging tasks in computer vision. Among the methods which perform image generation, generative adversarial networks (GANs) play a key role. The most common image generation models based on GANs can be divided into two main approaches. The first one, called simply image generation takes random noise as an input and synthesizes an image which follows the same distribution as the images in the training set. The second class, which is called image-to-image translation, aims to map an image from a source domain to one that is indistinguishable from those in the target domain. Image-to-image translation methods can further be divided into paired and unpaired image-to-image translation based on whether they require paired data or not. In this thesis, we aim to address some challenges of both image generation and image-to-image generation.GANs highly rely upon having access to vast quantities of data, and fail to generate realistic images from random noise when applied to domains with few images. To address this problem, we aim to transfer knowledge from a model trained on a large dataset (source domain) to the one learned on limited data (target domain). We find that both GANs andconditional GANs can benefit from models trained on large datasets. Our experiments show that transferring the discriminator is more important than the generator. Using both the generator and discriminator results in the best performance. We found, however, that this method suffers from overfitting, since we update all parameters to adapt to the target data. We propose a novel architecture, which is tailored to address knowledge transfer to very small target domains. Our approach effectively exploreswhich part of the latent space is more related to the target domain. Additionally, the proposed method is able to transfer knowledge from multiple pretrained GANs. Although image-to-image translation has achieved outstanding performance, it still facesseveral problems. First, for translation between complex domains (such as translations between different modalities) image-to-image translation methods require paired data. We show that when only some of the pairwise translations have been seen (i.e. during training), we can infer the remaining unseen translations (where training pairs are not available). We propose a new approach where we align multiple encoders and decoders in such a way that the desired translation can be obtained by simply cascadingthe source encoder and the target decoder, even when they have not interacted during the training stage (i.e. unseen). Second, we address the issue of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets unavoidably contain undesired changes, which are dueto the fact that the target dataset has a particular underlying visual distribution. We use carefully designed semantic constraints to reduce the effects of the bias. The semantic constraint aims to enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Finally, current approaches fail to generate diverse outputs or perform scalable image transfer in a single model. To alleviate this problem, we propose a scalable and diverse image-to-image translation. We employ random noise to control the diversity. The scalabitlity is determined by conditioning the domain label.computer vision, deep learning, imitation learning, adversarial generative networks, image generation, image-to-image translation.

Abstract: In this work, we study the suitability of high dynamic range, wide color gamut (HDR/WCG) objective quality metrics to assess the perceived deterioration of compressed images encoded using the hybrid log-gamma (HLG) method, which is the standard for HDR television. Several image quality metrics have been developed to deal specifically with HDR content, although in previous work we showed that the best results (i.e., better matches to the opinion of human expert observers) are obtained by an HDR metric that consists simply in applying a given standard dynamic range metric, called visual information fidelity (VIF), directly to HLG-encoded images. However, all these HDR metrics ignore the chroma components for their calculations, that is, they consider only the luminance channel. For this reason, in the current work, we conduct subjective evaluation experiments in a professional setting using compressed HDR/WCG images encoded with HLG and analyze the ability of the best HDR metric to detect perceivable distortions in the chroma components, as well as the suitability of popular color metrics (including ΔITPR , which supports parameters for HLG) to correlate with the opinion scores. Our first contribution is to show that there is a need to consider the chroma components in HDR metrics, as there are color distortions that subjects perceive but that the best HDR metric fails to detect. Our second contribution is the surprising result that VIF, which utilizes only the luminance channel, correlates much better with the subjective evaluation scores than the metrics investigated that do consider the color components.

Abstract: We present different techniques to adapt a pedestrian classifier trained with synthetic images and the corresponding automatically generated annotations to operate with far infrared (FIR) images. The information contained in this kind of images allow us to develop a robust pedestrian detector invariant to extreme illumination changes.

Abstract: Automatic prediction of personality traits is a subjective task that has recently received much attention. Specifically, automatic apparent personality trait prediction from multimodal data has emerged as a hot topic within the filed of computer vision and, more particularly, the so called “looking
at people” sub-field. Considering “apparent” personality traits as opposed to real ones considerably reduces the subjectivity of the task. The real world applications are encountered in a wide range of domains, including entertainment, health, human computer interaction, recruitment and security. Predictive models of personality traits are useful for individuals in many scenarios (e.g., preparing for job interviews, preparing for public speaking). However, these predictions in and of themselves might be deemed to be untrustworthy without human understandable supportive evidence. Through a series of experiments on a recently released benchmark dataset for automatic apparent personality trait prediction, this paper characterizes the audio and
visual information that is used by a state-of-the-art model while making its predictions, so as to provide such supportive evidence by explaining predictions made. Additionally, the paper describes a new web application, which gives feedback on apparent personality traits of its users by combining
model predictions with their explanations.

Abstract: The immense success of deep learning based methods in computer vision heavily relies on large scale training datasets. These richly annotated datasets help the network learn discriminative visual features. Collecting and annotating such datasets requires a tremendous amount of human effort and annotations are limited to popular set of classes. As an alternative, learning visual features by designing auxiliary tasks which make use of freely available self-supervision has become increasingly popular in the computer vision community.
In this paper, we put forward an idea to take advantage of multi-modal context to provide self-supervision for the training of computer vision algorithms. We show that adequate visual features can be learned efficiently by training a CNN to predict the semantic textual context in which a particular image is more probable to appear as an illustration. More specifically we use popular text embedding techniques to provide the self-supervision for the training of deep CNN.