Abstract: This project explores the feasibility of remote patient monitoring based on the analysis of 3D movements captured with smartwatches. We base our analysis on the Kinematic Theory of Rapid Human Movement. We have validated our research in a real case scenario for stroke rehabilitation at the Guttmann Institute (https://www.guttmann.com/en/) (neurorehabilitation hospital), showing promising results. Our work could have a great impact in remote healthcare applications, improving the medical efficiency and reducing the healthcare costs. Future steps include more clinical validation, developing multi-modal analysis architectures (analysing data from sensors, images, audio, etc.), and exploring the application of our technology to monitor other neurodegenerative diseases.

Abstract: We propose a new method for exemplar-free class incremental training of ViTs. The main challenge of exemplar-free continual learning is maintaining plasticity of the learner without causing catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks. This is often achieved via exemplar replay which can help recalibrate previous task classifiers to the feature drift which occurs when learning new tasks. Exemplar replay, however, comes at the cost of retaining samples from previous tasks which for many applications may not be possible. To address the problem of continual ViT training, we first propose gated class-attention to minimize the drift in the final ViT transformer block. This mask-based gating is applied to class-attention mechanism of the last transformer block and strongly regulates the weights crucial for previous tasks. Importantly, gated class-attention does not require the task-ID during inference, which distinguishes it from other parameter isolation methods. Secondly, we propose a new method of feature drift compensation that accommodates feature drift in the backbone when learning new tasks. The combination of gated class-attention and cascaded feature drift compensation allows for plasticity towards new tasks while limiting forgetting of previous ones. Extensive experiments performed on CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet and ImageNet100 demonstrate that our exemplar-free method obtains competitive results when compared to rehearsal based ViT methods.

Abstract: This paper presents a multi-view scheme to tackle the challenging problem of the self-occlusion in human pose estimation problem. The proposed approach first obtains the human body joints of a set of images, which are captured from different views at the same time. Then, it enhances the obtained joints by using a
multi-view scheme. Basically, the joints from a given view are used to enhance poorly estimated joints from another view, especially intended to tackle the self occlusions cases. A network architecture initially proposed for the monocular case is adapted to be used in the proposed multi-view scheme. Experimental results and
comparisons with the state-of-the-art approaches on Human3.6m dataset are presented showing improvements in the accuracy of body joints estimations.

Abstract: Radiomics is an emerging technique for the quantification of imaging data that has recently shown great promise for deeper phenotyping of cardiovascular disease. Thus far, the technique has been mostly applied in single-centre studies. However, one of the main difficulties in multi-centre imaging studies is the inherent variability of image characteristics due to centre differences. In this paper, a comprehensive analysis of radiomics variability under several image- and feature-based normalisation techniques was conducted using a multi-centre cardiovascular magnetic resonance dataset. 218 subjects divided into healthy (n = 112) and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (n = 106, HCM) groups from five different centres were considered. First and second order texture radiomic features were extracted from three regions of interest, namely the left and right ventricular cavities and the left ventricular myocardium. Two methods were used to assess features’ variability. First, feature distributions were compared across centres to obtain a distribution similarity index. Second, two classification tasks were proposed to assess: (1) the amount of centre-related information encoded in normalised features (centre identification) and (2) the generalisation ability for a classification model when trained on these features (healthy versus HCM classification). The results showed that the feature-based harmonisation technique ComBat is able to remove the variability introduced by centre information from radiomic features, at the expense of slightly degrading classification performance. Piecewise linear histogram matching normalisation gave features with greater generalisation ability for classification ( balanced accuracy in between 0.78 ± 0.08 and 0.79 ± 0.09). Models trained with features from images without normalisation showed the worst performance overall ( balanced accuracy in between 0.45 ± 0.28 and 0.60 ± 0.22). In conclusion, centre-related information removal did not imply good generalisation ability for classification.

Abstract: Pretraining has proven successful in Document Intelligence tasks where deluge of documents are used to pretrain the models only later to be finetuned on downstream tasks. One of the problems of the pretraining approaches is the inconsistent usage of pretraining data with different OCR engines leading to incomparable results between models. In other words, it is not obvious whether the performance gain is coming from diverse usage of amount of data and distinct OCR engines or from the proposed models. To remedy the problem, we make public the OCR annotations for IDL documents using commercial OCR engine given their superior performance over open source OCR models. The contributed dataset (OCR-IDL) has an estimated monetary value over 20K US$. It is our hope that OCR-IDL can be a starting point for future works on Document Intelligence. All of our data and its collection process with the annotations can be found in this https URL.

Abstract: Text watermark detection in video images is challenging because text watermark characteristics are different from caption and scene texts in the video images. Developing a successful model for detecting text watermark, caption, and scene texts is an open challenge. This study aims at developing a new Deep End-to-End model for Text Watermark Detection (TWD), caption and scene text in video images. To standardize non-uniform contrast, quality, and resolution, we explore the U-Net3+ model for enhancing poor quality text without affecting high-quality text. Similarly, to address the challenges of arbitrary orientation, text shapes and complex background, we explore Stacked Hourglass Encoded Fourier Contour Embedding Network (SFCENet) by feeding the output of the U-Net3+ model as input. Furthermore, the proposed work integrates enhancement and detection models as an end-to-end model for detecting multi-type text in video images. To validate the proposed model, we create our own dataset (named TW-866), which provides video images containing text watermark, caption (subtitles), as well as scene text. The proposed model is also evaluated on standard natural scene text detection datasets, namely, ICDAR 2019 MLT, CTW1500, Total-Text, and DAST1500. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods. This is the first work on text watermark detection in video images to the best of our knowledge

Abstract: Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have provided outstanding performance in single image super-resolution (SISR). Despite their remarkable performance, the lack of high-frequency information in the recovered images remains a core problem. Moreover, as the networks increase in depth and width, deep CNN-based SR methods are faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. A promising and under-explored solution is to adapt the amount of compute based on the different frequency bands of the input. To this end, we present a novel Frequency-based Enhancement Block (FEB) which explicitly enhances the information of high frequencies while forwarding low-frequencies to the output. In particular, this block efficiently decomposes features into low- and high-frequency and assigns more computation to high-frequency ones. Thus, it can help the network generate more discriminative representations by explicitly recovering finer details. Our FEB design is simple and generic and can be used as a direct replacement of commonly used SR blocks with no need to change network architectures. We experimentally show that when replacing SR blocks with FEB we consistently improve the reconstruction error, while reducing the number of parameters in the model. Moreover, we propose a lightweight SR model — Frequency-based Enhancement Network (FENet) — based on FEB that matches the performance of larger models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal performs favorably against the state-of-the-art SR algorithms in terms of visual quality, memory footprint, and inference time. The code is available at https://github.com/pbehjatii/FENet

Abstract: This paper presents an algorithm for automated detection and classification of multi-cell phytoliths, one of the major components of many archaeological and paleoenvironmental deposits. This identification, based on phytolith wave pattern, is made using a pretrained VGG19 deep learning model. This approach has been tested in three key phytolith genera for the study of agricultural origins in Near East archaeology: Avena, Hordeum and Triticum. Also, this classification has been validated at species-level using Triticum boeoticum and dicoccoides images. Due to the diversity of microscopes, cameras and chemical treatments that can influence images of phytolith slides, three types of data augmentation techniques have been implemented: rotation of the images at 45-degree angles, random colour and brightness jittering, and random blur/sharpen. The implemented workflow has resulted in an overall accuracy of 93.68% for phytolith genera, improving previous attempts. The algorithm has also demonstrated its potential to automatize the classification of phytoliths species with an overall accuracy of 100%. The open code and platforms employed to develop the algorithm assure the method's accessibility, reproducibility and reusability.