Abstract: BACKGROUND : Artificial intelligence (AI) research in colonoscopy is progressing rapidly but widespread clinical implementation is not yet a reality. We aimed to identify the top implementation research priorities. METHODS : An established modified Delphi approach for research priority setting was used. Fifteen international experts, including endoscopists and translational computer scientists/engineers, from nine countries participated in an online survey over 9 months. Questions related to AI implementation in colonoscopy were generated as a long-list in the first round, and then scored in two subsequent rounds to identify the top 10 research questions. RESULTS : The top 10 ranked questions were categorized into five themes. Theme 1: clinical trial design/end points (4 questions), related to optimum trial designs for polyp detection and characterization, determining the optimal end points for evaluation of AI, and demonstrating impact on interval cancer rates. Theme 2: technological developments (3 questions), including improving detection of more challenging and advanced lesions, reduction of false-positive rates, and minimizing latency. Theme 3: clinical adoption/integration (1 question), concerning the effective combination of detection and characterization into one workflow. Theme 4: data access/annotation (1 question), concerning more efficient or automated data annotation methods to reduce the burden on human experts. Theme 5: regulatory approval (1 question), related to making regulatory approval processes more efficient. CONCLUSIONS : This is the first reported international research priority setting exercise for AI in colonoscopy. The study findings should be used as a framework to guide future research with key stakeholders to accelerate the clinical implementation of AI in endoscopy.

Abstract: This paper describes a novel framework for detection and suppression of properly shadowed regions for most possible scenarios occurring in real video sequences. Our approach requires no prior knowledge about the scene, nor is it restricted to specific scene structures. Furthermore, the technique can detect both achromatic and chromatic shadows even in the presence of camouflage that occurs when foreground regions are very similar in color to shadowed regions. The method exploits local color constancy properties due to reflectance suppression over shadowed regions. To detect shadowed regions in a scene, the values of the background image are divided by values of the current frame in the RGB color space. We show how this luminance ratio can be used to identify segments with low gradient constancy, which in turn distinguish shadows from foreground. Experimental results on a collection of publicly available datasets illustrate the superior performance of our method compared with the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art shadow detection algorithms. These results show that our approach is robust and accurate over a broad range of shadow types and challenging video conditions.

Abstract: This thesis is devoted to moving shadows detection and suppression. Shadows could be defined as the parts of the scene that are not directly illuminated by a light source due to obstructing object or objects. Often, moving shadows in images sequences are undesirable since they could cause degradation of the expected results during processing of images for object detection, segmentation, scene surveillance or similar purposes. In this thesis first moving shadow detection methods are exhaustively overviewed. Beside the mentioned methods from literature and to compensate their limitations a new moving shadow detection method is proposed. It requires no prior knowledge about the scene, nor is it restricted to assumptions about specific scene structures. Furthermore, the technique can detect both achromatic and chromatic shadows even in the presence of camouflage that occurs when foreground regions are very similar in color to shadowed regions. The method exploits local color constancy properties due to reflectance suppression over shadowed regions. To detect shadowed regions in a scene the values of the background image are divided by values of the current frame in the RGB color space. In the thesis how this luminance ratio can be used to identify segments with low gradient constancy is shown, which in turn distinguish shadows from foreground. Experimental results on a collection of publicly available datasets illustrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared with the most sophisticated state-of-the-art shadow detection algorithms. These results show that the proposed approach is robust and accurate over a broad range of shadow types and challenging video conditions.

Abstract: The mass irruption of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision since 2012 led to a dominance of the image understanding paradigm consisting in an end-to-end fully supervised learning workflow over large-scale annotated datasets. This approach proved to be extremely useful at solving a myriad of classic and new computer vision tasks with unprecedented performance —often, surpassing that of humans—, at the expense of vast amounts of human-labeled data, extensive computational resources and the disposal of all of our prior knowledge on the task at hand. Even though simple transfer learning methods, such as fine-tuning, have achieved remarkable impact, their success when the amount of labeled data in the target domain is small is limited. Furthermore, the non-static nature of data generation sources will often derive in data distribution shifts that degrade the performance of deployed models. As a consequence, there is a growing demand for methods that can exploit elements of prior knowledge and sources of information other than the manually generated ground truth annotations of the images during the network training process, so that they can adapt to new domains that constitute, if not a small data regime, at least a small labeled data regime. This thesis targets such few or no labeled data scenario in three distinct image-to-image mapping learning problems. It contributes with various approaches that leverage our previous knowledge of different elements of the image formation process: We first present a data-efficient framework for both defocus and motion blur detection, based on a model able to produce realistic synthetic local degradations. The framework comprises a self-supervised, a weakly-supervised and a semi-supervised instantiation, depending on the absence or availability and the nature of human annotations, and outperforms fully-supervised counterparts in a variety of settings. Our knowledge on color image formation is then used to gather input and target ground truth image pairs for the RGB to hyperspectral image reconstruction task. We make use of a CNN to tackle this problem, which, for the first time, allows us to exploit spatial context and achieve state-of-the-art results given a limited hyperspectral image set. In our last contribution to the subfield of data-efficient image-to-image transformation problems, we present the novel semi-supervised task of zero-pair cross-view semantic segmentation: we consider the case of relocation of the camera in an end-to-end trained and deployed monocular, fixed-view semantic segmentation system often found in industry. Under the assumption that we are allowed to obtain an additional set of synchronized but unlabeled image pairs of new scenes from both original and new camera poses, we present ZPCVNet, a model and training procedure that enables the production of dense semantic predictions in either source or target views at inference time. The lack of existing suitable public datasets to develop this approach led us to the creation of MVMO, a large-scale Multi-View, Multi-Object path-traced dataset with per-view semantic segmentation annotations. We expect MVMO to propel future research in the exciting under-developed fields of cross-view and multi-view semantic segmentation. Last, in a piece of applied research of direct application in the context of process monitoring of an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) in a steelmaking plant, we also consider the problem of simultaneously estimating the temperature and spectral emissivity of distant hot emissive samples. To that end, we design our own capturing device, which integrates three point spectrometers covering a wide range of the Ultra-Violet, visible, and Infra-Red spectra and is capable of registering the radiance signal incoming from an 8cm diameter spot located up to 20m away. We then define a physically accurate radiative transfer model that comprises the effects of atmospheric absorbance, of the optical system transfer function, and of the sample temperature and spectral emissivity themselves. We solve this inverse problem without the need for annotated data using a probabilistic programming-based Bayesian approach, which yields full posterior distribution estimates of the involved variables that are consistent with laboratory-grade measurements.

Abstract: Road traffic crashes have become a major cause of death and injury throughout the world.
Hence, in order to improve road safety, the automobile manufacture is moving towards the
development of vehicles with autonomous functionalities such as keeping in the right lane, safe distance keeping between vehicles or regulating the speed of the vehicle according to the traffic conditions. A key component of these systems is vision–based road detection that aims to detect the free road surface ahead the moving vehicle. Detecting the road using a monocular vision system is very challenging since the road is an outdoor scenario imaged from a mobile platform. Hence, the detection algorithm must be able to deal with continuously changing imaging conditions such as the presence ofdifferent objects (vehicles, pedestrians), different environments (urban, highways, off–road), different road types (shape, color), and different imaging conditions (varying illumination, different viewpoints and changing weather conditions). Therefore, in this thesis, we focus on vision–based road detection using a single color camera. More precisely, we first focus on analyzing and grouping pixels according to their low–level properties. In this way, two different approaches are presented to exploit
color and photometric invariance. Then, we focus the research of the thesis on exploiting context information. This information provides relevant knowledge about the road not using pixel features from road regions but semantic information from the analysis of the scene.
In this way, we present two different approaches to infer the geometry of the road ahead
the moving vehicle. Finally, we focus on combining these context and appearance (color)
approaches to improve the overall performance of road detection algorithms. The qualitative and quantitative results presented in this thesis on real–world driving sequences show that the proposed method is robust to varying imaging conditions, road types and scenarios going beyond the state–of–the–art.

Abstract: Word-spotting methods based on the Bag-ofVisual-Words framework have demonstrated a good retrieval performance even when used in a completely unsupervised manner. Although unsupervised approaches are suitable for
large document collections due to the cost of acquiring labeled data, these methods also present some drawbacks. For instance, having to train a suitable “codebook” for a certain dataset has a high computational cost. Therefore, in
this paper we present a database agnostic codebook which is trained from synthetic data. The aim of the proposed approach is to generate a codebook where the only information required is the type of script used in the document. The use of synthetic data also allows to easily incorporate semantic
information in the codebook generation. So, the proposed method is able to determine which set of codewords have a semantic representation of the descriptor feature space. Experimental results show that the resulting codebook attains a state-of-the-art performance while having a more compact representation.