Abstract: A crucial part of image classification consists of capturing non-local spatial semantics of image content. This paper describes the multi-scale hybrid vision transformer (MSHViT), an extension of the classical convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone, for multi-label sewer defect classification. To better model spatial semantics in the images, features are aggregated at different scales non-locally through the use of a lightweight vision transformer, and a smaller set of tokens was produced through a novel Sinkhorn clustering-based tokenizer using distinct cluster centers. The proposed MSHViT and Sinkhorn tokenizer were evaluated on the Sewer-ML multi-label sewer defect classification dataset, showing consistent performance improvements of up to 2.53 percentage points.

Abstract: Although this book is on IR computer vision and its main focus lies on IR image and video processing and analysis, a special attention is dedicated to cross-spectral image processing due to the increasing number of publications and applications in this domain. In these cross-spectral frameworks, IR information is used together with information from other spectral bands to tackle some specific problems by developing more robust solutions. Tasks considered for cross-spectral processing are for instance dehazing, segmentation, vegetation index estimation, or face recognition. This increasing number of applications is motivated by cross- and multi-spectral camera setups available already on the market like for example smartphones, remote sensing multispectral cameras, or multi-spectral cameras for automotive systems or drones. In this chapter, different cross-spectral image processing techniques will be reviewed together with possible applications. Initially, image registration approaches for the cross-spectral case are reviewed: the registration stage is the first image processing task, which is needed to align images acquired by different sensors within the same reference coordinate system. Then, recent cross-spectral image colorization approaches, which are intended to colorize infrared images for different applications are presented. Finally, the cross-spectral image enhancement problem is tackled by including guided super resolution techniques, image dehazing approaches, cross-spectral filtering and edge detection. Figure 3.1 illustrates cross-spectral image processing stages as well as their possible connections. Table 3.1 presents some of the available public cross-spectral datasets generally used as reference data to evaluate cross-spectral image registration, colorization, enhancement, or exploitation results.

Abstract: Image and video enhancement aims at improving the signal quality relative to imaging artifacts such as noise and blur or atmospheric perturbations such as turbulence and haze. It is usually performed in order to assist humans in analyzing image and video content or simply to present humans visually appealing images and videos. However, image and video enhancement can also be used as a preprocessing technique to ease the task and thus improve the performance of subsequent automatic image content analysis algorithms: preceding dehazing can improve object detection as shown by [23] or explicit turbulence modeling can improve moving object detection as discussed by [24]. But it remains an open question whether image and video enhancement should rather be performed explicitly as a preprocessing step or implicitly for example by feeding affected images directly to a neural network for image content analysis like object detection [25]. Especially for real-time video processing at low latency it can be better to handle image perturbation implicitly in order to minimize the processing time of an algorithm. This can be achieved by making algorithms for image content analysis robust or even invariant to perturbations such as noise or blur. Additionally, mistakes of an individual preprocessing module can obviously affect the quality of the entire processing pipeline.

Abstract: This chapter reviews state-of-the-art approaches generally present in the pipeline of video analytics on urban scenarios. A typical pipeline is used to cluster approaches in the literature, including image preprocessing, object detection, object classification, and object tracking modules. Then, a review of recent approaches for each module is given. Additionally, applications and datasets generally used for training and evaluating the performance of these approaches are included. This chapter does not pretend to be an exhaustive review of state-of-the-art video analytics in urban environments but rather an illustration of some of the different recent contributions. The chapter concludes by presenting current trends in video analytics in the urban scenario field.

Abstract: Automatic waste recycling has become a very important societal challenge nowadays, raising people’s awareness for a cleaner environment and a more sustainable lifestyle. With the transition to Smart Cities, and thanks to advanced ICT solutions, this problem has received a new impulse. The waste recycling focus has shifted from general waste treating facilities to an individual responsibility, where each person should become aware of selective waste separation. The surge of the mobile devices, accompanied by a significant increase in computation power, has potentiated and facilitated this individual role. An automated image-based waste classification mechanism can help with a more efficient recycling and a reduction of contamination from residuals. Despite the good results achieved with the deep learning methodologies for this task, the Achille’s heel is that they require large neural networks which need significant computational resources for training and therefore are not suitable for mobile devices. To circumvent this apparently intractable problem, we will rely on knowledge distillation in order to transfer the network’s knowledge from a larger network (called ‘teacher’) to a smaller, more compact one, (referred as ‘student’) and thus making it possible the task of image classification on a device with limited resources. For evaluation, we considered as ‘teachers’ large architectures such as InceptionResNet or DenseNet and as ‘students’, several configurations of the MobileNets. We used the publicly available TrashNet dataset to demonstrate that the distillation process does not significantly affect system’s performance (e.g. classification accuracy) of the student network.

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate model adaptation under domain and category shift, where the final goal is to achieve
(SF-UNDA), which addresses the situation where there exist both domain and category shifts between source and target domains. Under the SF-UNDA setting, the model cannot access source data anymore during target adaptation, which aims to address data privacy concerns. We propose a novel training scheme to learn a (
+1)-way classifier to predict the
source classes and the unknown class, where samples of only known source categories are available for training. Furthermore, for target adaptation, we simply adopt a weighted entropy minimization to adapt the source pretrained model to the unlabeled target domain without source data. In experiments, we show:
After source training, the resulting source model can get excellent performance for
;
After target adaptation, our method surpasses current UNDA approaches which demand source data during adaptation. The versatility to several different tasks strongly proves the efficacy and generalization ability of our method.
When augmented with a closed-set domain adaptation approach during target adaptation, our source-free method further outperforms the current state-of-the-art UNDA method by 2.5%, 7.2% and 13% on Office-31, Office-Home and VisDA respectively.

Abstract: Understanding how neural networks generalize on unseen data is crucial for designing more robust and reliable models. In this paper, we study the generalization gap of neural networks using methods from topological data analysis. For this purpose, we compute homological persistence diagrams of weighted graphs constructed from neuron activation correlations after a training phase, aiming to capture patterns that are linked to the generalization capacity of the network. We compare the usefulness of different numerical summaries from persistence diagrams and show that a combination of some of them can accurately predict and partially explain the generalization gap without the need of a test set. Evaluation on two computer vision recognition tasks (CIFAR10 and SVHN) shows competitive generalization gap prediction when compared against state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) is a long challenging task in Computer Vision due to the difficulties in detecting the explicit boundaries between the words in a sign sentence. To deal with this challenge, we propose a two-stage model. In the first stage, the predictor model, which includes a combination of CNN, SVD, and LSTM, is trained with the isolated signs. In the second stage, we apply a post-processing algorithm to the Softmax outputs obtained from the first part of the model in order to separate the isolated signs in the continuous signs. Due to the lack of a large dataset, including both the sign sequences and the corresponding isolated signs, two public datasets in Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR), RKS-PERSIANSIGN and ASLVID, are used for evaluation. Results of the continuous sign videos confirm the efficiency of the proposed model to deal with isolated sign boundaries detection.