Abstract: The Barcelona Historical Marriage Database (BHMD) gathers records of the more than 600,000 marriages celebrated in the Diocese of Barcelona and their taxation registered in Barcelona Cathedral's so-called Marriage Licenses Books for the long period 1451–1905 and the BALL Demographic Database brings together the individual information recorded in the population registers, censuses and fiscal censuses of the main municipalities of the county of Baix Llobregat (Barcelona). In this ongoing collection 263,786 individual observations have been assembled, dating from the period between 1828 and 1965 by December 2020. The two databases started as part of different interdisciplinary research projects at the crossroads of Historical Demography and Computer Vision. Their construction uses artificial intelligence and computer vision methods as Handwriting Recognition to reduce the time of execution. However, its current state still requires some human intervention which explains the implemented crowdsourcing and game sourcing experiences. Moreover, knowledge graph techniques have allowed the application of advanced record linkage to link the same individuals and families across time and space. Moreover, we will discuss the main research lines using both databases developed so far in historical demography.

Abstract: A crucial part of image classification consists of capturing non-local spatial semantics of image content. This paper describes the multi-scale hybrid vision transformer (MSHViT), an extension of the classical convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone, for multi-label sewer defect classification. To better model spatial semantics in the images, features are aggregated at different scales non-locally through the use of a lightweight vision transformer, and a smaller set of tokens was produced through a novel Sinkhorn clustering-based tokenizer using distinct cluster centers. The proposed MSHViT and Sinkhorn tokenizer were evaluated on the Sewer-ML multi-label sewer defect classification dataset, showing consistent performance improvements of up to 2.53 percentage points.

Abstract: Active learning aims to reduce the labeling effort that is required to train algorithms by learning an acquisition function selecting the most relevant data for which a label should be requested from a large unlabeled data pool. Active learning is generally studied on balanced datasets where an equal amount of images per class is available. However, real-world datasets suffer from severe imbalanced classes, the so called long-tail distribution. We argue that this further complicates the active learning process, since the imbalanced data pool can result in suboptimal classifiers. To address this problem in the context of active learning, we proposed a general optimization framework that explicitly takes class-balancing into account. Results on three datasets showed that the method is general (it can be combined with most existing active learning algorithms) and can be effectively applied to boost the performance of both informative and representative-based active learning methods. In addition, we showed that also on balanced datasets
our method 1 generally results in a performance gain.

Abstract: Metric learning refers to the problem in machine learning of learning a distance or similarity measurement to compare data. In particular, deep metric learning involves learning a representation, also referred to as embedding, such that in the embedding space data samples can be compared based on the distance, directly providing a similarity measure. This step is necessary to perform several tasks in computer vision. It allows to perform the classification of images, regions or pixels, re-identification, out-of-distribution detection, object tracking in image sequences and any other task that requires computing a similarity score for their solution. This thesis addresses three specific problems that share this common requirement. The first one is person re-identification. Essentially, it is an image retrieval task that aims at finding instances of the same person according to a similarity measure. We first compare in terms of accuracy and efficiency, classical metric learning to basic deep learning based methods for this problem. In this context, we also study network distillation as a strategy to optimize the trade-off between accuracy and speed at inference time. The second problem we contribute to is novelty detection in image classification. It consists in detecting samples of novel classes, i.e. never seen during training. However, standard novelty detection does not provide any information about the novel samples besides they are unknown. Aiming at more informative outputs, we take advantage from the hierarchical taxonomies that are intrinsic to the classes. We propose a metric learning based approach that leverages the hierarchical relationships among classes during training, being able to predict the parent class for a novel sample in such hierarchical taxonomy. Our third contribution is in multi-object tracking and segmentation. This joint task comprises classification, detection, instance segmentation and tracking. Tracking can be formulated as a retrieval problem to be addressed with metric learning approaches. We tackle the existing difficulty in academic research that is the lack of annotated benchmarks for this task. To this matter, we introduce the problem of weakly supervised multi-object tracking and segmentation, facing the challenge of not having available ground truth for instance segmentation. We propose a synergistic training strategy that benefits from the knowledge of the supervised tasks that are being learnt simultaneously.

Abstract: Explainability and interpretability are two critical aspects of decision support systems. Despite their importance, it is only recently that researchers are starting to explore these aspects. This paper provides an introduction to explainability and interpretability in the context of apparent personality recognition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort in this direction. We describe a challenge we organized on explainability in first impressions analysis from video. We analyze in detail the newly introduced data set, evaluation protocol, proposed solutions and summarize the results of the challenge. We investigate the issue of bias in detail. Finally, derived from our study, we outline research opportunities that we foresee will be relevant in this area in the near future.

Abstract: This chapter reviews state-of-the-art approaches generally present in the pipeline of video analytics on urban scenarios. A typical pipeline is used to cluster approaches in the literature, including image preprocessing, object detection, object classification, and object tracking modules. Then, a review of recent approaches for each module is given. Additionally, applications and datasets generally used for training and evaluating the performance of these approaches are included. This chapter does not pretend to be an exhaustive review of state-of-the-art video analytics in urban environments but rather an illustration of some of the different recent contributions. The chapter concludes by presenting current trends in video analytics in the urban scenario field.

Abstract: GANs have matured in recent years and are able to generate high-resolution, realistic images. However, the computational resources and the data required for the training of high-quality GANs are enormous, and the study of transfer learning of these models is therefore an urgent topic. Many of the available high-quality pretrained GANs are unconditional (like StyleGAN). For many applications, however, conditional GANs are preferable, because they provide more control over the generation process, despite often suffering more training difficulties. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on transferring from high-quality pretrained unconditional GANs to conditional GANs. This requires architectural adaptation of the pretrained GAN to perform the conditioning. To this end, we propose hyper-modulated generative networks that allow for shared and complementary supervision. To prevent the additional weights of the hypernetwork to overfit, with subsequent mode collapse on small target domains, we introduce a self-initialization procedure that does not require any real data to initialize the hypernetwork parameters. To further improve the sample efficiency of the transfer, we apply contrastive learning in the discriminator, which effectively works on very limited batch sizes. In extensive experiments, we validate the efficiency of the hypernetworks, self-initialization and contrastive loss for knowledge transfer on standard benchmarks.

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution-based generative adversarial network (DCNGAN) for perceptual quality enhancement of compressed videos. DCNGAN is also adaptive to the quantization parameters (QPs). Compared with optical flows, deformable convolutions are more effective and efficient to align frames. Deformable convolutions can operate on multiple frames, thus leveraging more temporal information, which is beneficial for enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed videos. Instead of aligning frames in a pairwise manner, the deformable convolution can process multiple frames simultaneously, which leads to lower computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DCNGAN outperforms other state-of-the-art compressed video quality enhancement algorithms.