Abstract: Mirror symmetry is a property most likely to be encountered in animals than in medium scale vegetation or inanimate objects in the natural world. This might be the reason why the human visual system has evolved to detect it quickly and robustly. Indeed, the perception of symmetry assists higher-level visual processing that are crucial for survival such as target recognition and identification irrespective of position and location. Although the task of detecting symmetrical objects seems effortless to us, it is very challenging for computers (to the extent that it has been proposed as a robust “captcha” by Funk & Liu in 2016). Indeed, the exact mechanism of symmetry detection in primates is not well understood: fMRI studies have shown that symmetrical shapes activate specific higher-level areas of the visual cortex (Sasaki et al.; 2005) and similarly, a large body of psychophysical experiments suggest that the symmetry perception is critically influenced by low-level mechanisms (Treder; 2010). In this work we attempt to find plausible low-level mechanisms that might form the basis for symmetry perception. Our simple model is made from banks of (i) odd-symmetric Gabors (resembling edge-detecting V1 neurons); and (ii) banks of larger odd- and even-symmetric Gabors (resembling higher visual cortex neurons), that pool signals from the 'edge image'. As reported previously (Akbarinia et al, ECVP2017), the convolution of the symmetrical lines with the two Gabor kernels of alternative phase produces a minimum in one and a maximum in the other (Osorio; 1996), and the rectification and combination of these signals create lines which hint of mirror symmetry in natural images. We improved the algorithm by combining these signals across several spatial scales. Our preliminary results suggest that such multiscale combination of convolutional operations might form the basis for much of the operation of the HVS in terms of symmetry detection and representation.

Abstract: The future deployment of single pilot operations must be supported by new cockpit computer services. Such services require an adaptive context-aware integration of technical functionalities with the concurrent tasks that a pilot must deal with. Advanced artificial intelligence supporting services and improved communication capabilities are the key enabling technologies that will render future cockpits more integrated with the present digitalized air traffic management system. However, an issue in the integration of such technologies is the lack of socio-technical analysis in the design of these teaming mechanisms. A key factor in determining how and when a service support should be provided is the dynamic evolution of pilot workload. This paper investigates how the socio-technical model-based systems engineering approach paves the way for the design of a digital assistant framework by formalizing this workload. The model was validated in an Airbus A-320 cockpit simulator, and the results confirmed the degraded pilot behavioral model and the performance impact according to different contextual flight deck information. This study contributes to practical knowledge for designing human-machine task-sharing systems.

Abstract: The power requirements of video-oculography systems can be prohibitive for high-speed operation on portable devices. Recently, low-power alternatives such as photosensors have been evaluated, providing gaze estimates at high frequency with a trade-off in accuracy and robustness. Potentially, an approach combining slow/high-fidelity and fast/low-fidelity sensors should be able to exploit their complementarity to track fast eye motion accurately and robustly. To foster research on this topic, we introduce OpenSFEDS, a near-eye gaze estimation dataset containing approximately 2M synthetic camera-photosensor image pairs sampled at 500 Hz under varied appearance and camera position. We also formulate the task of sensor fusion for gaze estimation, proposing a deep learning framework consisting in appearance-based encoding and temporal eye-state dynamics. We evaluate several single- and multi-rate fusion baselines on OpenSFEDS, achieving 8.7% error decrease when tracking fast eye movements with a multi-rate approach vs. a gaze forecasting approach operating with a low-speed sensor alone.

Abstract: Best commercial paper award.

Abstract: The human visual system is able to recognize the object in an image even if the object is partially occluded, from various points of view, in different colors, or with independence of the distance to the object. To do this, the eye obtains an image and extracts features that are sent to the brain, and then, in the brain the object is recognized. In computer vision, the object recognition branch tries to learns from the human visual system behaviour to achieve its goal. Hence, an algorithm is used to identify representative features of the scene (detection), then another algorithm is used to describe these points (descriptor) and finally the extracted information is used for classifying the object in the scene. The selection of this set of algorithms is a very complicated task and thus, a very active research field. In this thesis we are focused on the selection/learning of the best descriptor for a given image. In the state of the art there are several descriptors but we do not know how to choose the best descriptor because depends on scenes that we will use (dataset) and the algorithm chosen to do the classification. We propose a framework based on reinforcement learning and bag of features to choose the best descriptor according to the given image. The system can analyse the behaviour of different learning algorithms and descriptor sets. Furthermore the proposed framework for improving the classification/recognition ratio can be used with minor changes in other computer vision fields, such as video retrieval.

Abstract: In this work we contribute a novel pipeline to automatically generate training data, and to improve over state-of-the-art multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) methods. Our proposed track mining algorithm turns raw street-level videos into high-fidelity MOTS training data, is scalable and overcomes the need of expensive and time-consuming manual annotation approaches. We leverage state-of-the-art instance segmentation results in combination with optical flow predictions, also trained on automatically harvested training data. Our second major contribution is MOTSNet – a deep learning, tracking-by-detection architecture for MOTS – deploying a novel mask-pooling layer for improved object association over time. Training MOTSNet with our automatically extracted data leads to significantly improved sMOTSA scores on the novel KITTI MOTS dataset (+1.9%/+7.5% on cars/pedestrians), and MOTSNet improves by +4.1% over previously best methods on the MOTSChallenge dataset. Our most impressive finding is that we can improve over previous best-performing works, even in complete absence of manually annotated MOTS training data.

Abstract: Cross-modal retrieval methods have been significantly improved in last years with the use of deep neural networks and large-scale annotated datasets such as ImageNet and Places. However, collecting and annotating such datasets requires a tremendous amount of human effort and, besides, their annotations are limited to discrete sets of popular visual classes that may not be representative of the richer semantics found on large-scale cross-modal retrieval datasets. In this paper, we present a self-supervised cross-modal retrieval framework that leverages as training data the correlations between images and text on the entire set of Wikipedia articles. Our method consists in training a CNN to predict: (1) the semantic context of the article in which an image is more probable to appear as an illustration, and (2) the semantic context of its caption. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is not only capable of learning discriminative visual representations for solving vision tasks like classification, but that the learned representations are better for cross-modal retrieval when compared to supervised pre-training of the network on the ImageNet dataset.