Abstract: Aesthetic image analysis is essential for improving the performance of multimedia image retrieval systems, especially from a repository of social media and multimedia content stored on mobile devices. This paper presents a novel method for classifying aesthetic natural scene images by studying the naturalness of image content using statistical features, and reading text in the images using semantic features. Unlike existing methods that focus only on image quality with human information, the proposed approach focuses on image features as well as text-based semantic features without human intervention to reduce the gap between subjectivity and objectivity in the classification. The aesthetic classes considered in this work are (i) Very Pleasant, (ii) Pleasant, (iii) Normal and (iv) Unpleasant. The naturalness is represented by features of focus, defocus, perceived brightness, perceived contrast, blurriness and noisiness, while semantics are represented by text recognition, description of the images and labels of images, profile pictures, and banner images. Furthermore, a deep learning model is proposed in a novel way to fuse statistical and semantic features for the classification of aesthetic natural scene images. Experiments on our own dataset and the standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves 92.74%, 88.67% and 83.22% average classification rates on our own dataset, AVA dataset and CUHKPQ dataset, respectively. Furthermore, a comparative study of the proposed model with the existing methods shows that the proposed method is effective for the classification of aesthetic social media images.

Abstract: One of the first usual steps in pattern recognition schemas is image segmentation, in order to reduce the dimensionality of the problem and manage smaller quantity of data. In our case as we are pursuing real-time colon cancer polyp detection, this step is crucial. In this paper we present a non-informative region estimation algorithm that will let us discard some parts of the image where we will not expect to find colon cancer polyps. The performance of our approach will be measured in terms of both non-informative areas elimination and polyps’ areas preserving. The results obtained show the importance of having correct non- informative region estimation in order to fasten the whole recognition process.

Abstract: In this paper we present our image preprocessing methods as a key part of our automatic polyp localization scheme. These methods are used to assess the impact of different endoluminal scene elements when characterizing polyps. More precisely we tackle the influence of specular highlights, blood vessels and black mask surrounding the scene. Experimental results prove that the appropriate handling of these elements leads to a great improvement in polyp localization results.

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: Current visual question answering datasets do not consider the rich semantic information conveyed by text within an image. In this work, we present a new dataset, ST-VQA, that aims to highlight the importance of exploiting highlevel semantic information present in images as textual cues in the Visual Question Answering process. We use this dataset to define a series of tasks of increasing difficulty for which reading the scene text in the context provided by the visual information is necessary to reason and generate an appropriate answer. We propose a new evaluation metric for these tasks to account both for reasoning errors as well as shortcomings of the text recognition module. In addition we put forward a series of baseline methods, which provide further insight to the newly released dataset, and set the scene for further research.

Abstract: Rainfall is a problem in automated traffic surveillance. Rain streaks occlude the road users and degrade the overall visibility which in turn decrease object detection performance. One way of alleviating this is by artificially removing the rain from the images. This requires knowledge of corresponding rainy and rain-free images. Such images are often produced by overlaying synthetic rain on top of rain-free images. However, this method fails to incorporate the fact that rain fall in the entire three-dimensional volume of the scene. To overcome this, we introduce training data from the SYNTHIA virtual world that models rain streaks in the entirety of a scene. We train a conditional Generative Adversarial Network for rain removal and apply it on traffic surveillance images from SYNTHIA and the AAU RainSnow datasets. To measure the applicability of the rain-removed images in a traffic surveillance context, we run the YOLOv2 object detection algorithm on the original and rain-removed frames. The results on SYNTHIA show an 8% increase in detection accuracy compared to the original rain image. Interestingly, we find that high PSNR or SSIM scores do not imply good object detection performance.

Abstract: We present in this paper a novel study aiming at identifying the differences in visual search patterns between physicians of diverse levels of expertise during the screening of colonoscopy videos. Physicians were clustered into two groups -experts and novices- according to the number of procedures performed, and fixations were captured by an eye-tracker device during the task of polyp search in different video sequences. These fixations were integrated into heat maps, one for each cluster. The obtained maps were validated over a ground truth consisting of a mask of the polyp, and the comparison between experts and novices was performed by using metrics such as reaction time, dwelling time and energy concentration ratio. Experimental results show a statistically significant difference between experts and novices, and the obtained maps show to be a useful tool for the characterisation of the behaviour of each group.