Abstract: Social networks have attracted the attention of psychologists, as the behavior of users can be used to assess personality traits, and to detect sentiments and critical mental situations such as depression or suicidal tendencies. Recently, the increasing amount of image uploads to social networks has shifted the focus from text to image-based personality assessment. However, obtaining the ground-truth requires giving personality questionnaires to the users, making the process very costly and slow, and hindering research on large populations. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict which images are most associated with each personality trait of the OCEAN personality model, without requiring ground-truth personality labels. Namely, we present a weakly supervised framework which shows that the personality scores obtained using specific images textually associated with particular personality traits are highly correlated with scores obtained using standard text-based personality questionnaires. We trained an OCEAN trait model based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), learned from 120K pictures posted with specific textual hashtags, to infer whether the personality scores from the images uploaded by users are consistent with those scores obtained from text. In order to validate our claims, we performed a personality test on a heterogeneous group of 280 human subjects, showing that our model successfully predicts which kind of image will match a person with a given level of a trait. Looking at the results, we obtained evidence that personality is not only correlated with text, but with image content too. Interestingly, different visual patterns emerged from those images most liked by persons with a particular personality trait: for instance, pictures most associated with high conscientiousness usually contained healthy food, while low conscientiousness pictures contained injuries, guns, and alcohol. These findings could pave the way to complement text-based personality questionnaires with image-based questions.

Abstract: Extraction of spatio-chromatic features from color images is usually performed independently on each color channel. Usual 3D color spaces, such as RGB, present a high inter-channel correlation for natural images. This correlation can be reduced using color-opponent representations, but the spatial structure of regions with small color differences is not fully captured in two generic Red-Green and Blue-Yellow channels. To overcome these problems, we propose a new color coding that is adapted to the specific content of each image. Our proposal is based on two steps: (a) setting the number of channels to the number of distinctive colors we find in each image (avoiding the problem of channel correlation), and (b) building a channel representation that maximizes contrast differences within each color channel (avoiding the problem of low local contrast). We call this approach more-than-three color coding (MTT) to enhance the fact that the number of channels is adapted to the image content. The higher color complexity an image has, the more channels can be used to represent it. Here we select distinctive colors as the most predominant in the image, which we call color pivots, and we build the new color coding using these color pivots as a basis. To evaluate the proposed approach we measure its efficiency in an image categorization task. We show how a generic descriptor improves its performance at the description level when applied on the MTT coding.

Abstract: Recent works have made significant progress in novelty detection, i.e., the problem of detecting samples of novel classes, never seen during training, while classifying those that belong to known classes. However, the only information this task provides about novel samples is that they are unknown. In this work, we leverage hierarchical taxonomies of classes to provide informative outputs for samples of novel classes. We predict their closest class in the taxonomy, i.e., its parent class. We address this problem, known as hierarchical novelty detection, by proposing a novel loss, namely Hierarchical Cosine Loss that is designed to learn class prototypes along with an embedding of discriminative features consistent with the taxonomy. We apply it to traffic sign recognition, where we predict the parent class semantics for new types of traffic signs. Our model beats state-of-the art approaches on two large scale traffic sign benchmarks, Mapillary Traffic Sign Dataset (MTSD) and Tsinghua-Tencent 100K (TT100K), and performs similarly on natural images benchmarks (AWA2, CUB). For TT100K and MTSD, our approach is able to detect novel samples at the correct nodes of the hierarchy with 81% and 36% of accuracy, respectively, at 80% known class accuracy.

Abstract: Se analizan los sistemas de procesamiento automático que trabajan sobre documentos digitalizados con el objetivo de describir los contenidos. De esta forma contribuyen a facilitar el acceso, permitir la indización automática y hacer accesibles los documentos a los motores de búsqueda. El objetivo de estas tecnologías es poder entrenar modelos computacionales que sean capaces de clasificar, agrupar o realizar búsquedas sobre documentos digitales. Así, se describen las tareas de clasificación, agrupamiento y búsqueda. Cuando utilizamos tecnologías de inteligencia artificial en los sistemas de
clasificación esperamos que la herramienta nos devuelva etiquetas semánticas; en sistemas de agrupamiento que nos devuelva documentos agrupados en clusters significativos; y en sistemas de búsqueda esperamos que dada una consulta, nos devuelva una lista ordenada de documentos en función de la relevancia. A continuación se da una visión de conjunto de los métodos que nos permiten describir los documentos digitales, tanto de manera visual (cuál es su apariencia), como a partir de sus contenidos semánticos (de qué hablan). En cuanto a la descripción visual de documentos se aborda el estado de la cuestión de las representaciones numéricas de documentos digitalizados
tanto por métodos clásicos como por métodos basados en el aprendizaje profundo (deep learning). Respecto de la descripción semántica de los contenidos se analizan técnicas como el reconocimiento óptico de caracteres (OCR); el cálculo de estadísticas básicas sobre la aparición de las diferentes palabras en un texto (bag-of-words model); y los métodos basados en aprendizaje profundo como el método word2vec, basado en una red neuronal que, dadas unas cuantas palabras de un texto, debe predecir cuál será la
siguiente palabra. Desde el campo de las ingenierías se están transfiriendo conocimientos que se han integrado en productos o servicios en los ámbitos de la archivística, la biblioteconomía, la documentación y las plataformas de gran consumo, sin embargo los algoritmos deben ser lo suficientemente eficientes no sólo para el reconocimiento y transcripción literal sino también para la capacidad de interpretación de los contenidos.

Abstract: In this paper, we study the effect of taking the user into account in a query-by-example handwritten word spotting framework. Several off-the-shelf query fusion and relevance feedback strategies have been tested in the handwritten word spotting context. The increase in terms of precision when the user is included in the loop is assessed using two datasets of historical handwritten documents and two baseline word spotting approaches both based on the bag-of-visual-words model. We finally present two alternative ways of presenting the results to the user that might be more attractive and suitable to the user's needs than the classic ranked list.

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.