Abstract: Colorectal cancer is one of the main causes of cancer death worldwide. Colonoscopy is the gold standard screening tool as it allows lesion detection and removal during the same procedure. During the last decades, several efforts have been made to develop CAD systems to assist clinicians in lesion detection and classification. Regarding the latter, and in order to be used in the exploration room as part of resect and discard or leave-in-situ strategies, these systems must identify correctly all different lesion types. This is a challenging task, as the data used to train these systems presents great inter-class similarity, high class imbalance, and low representation of clinically relevant histology classes such as serrated sessile adenomas.
In this paper, a new polyp segmentation and classification method, Swin-Expand, is introduced. Based on Swin-Transformer, it uses a simple and lightweight decoder. The performance of this method has been assessed on a novel dataset, comprising 1126 high-definition images representing the three main histological classes. Results show a clear improvement in both segmentation and classification performance, also achieving competitive results when tested in public datasets. These results confirm that both the method and the data are important to obtain more accurate polyp representations.

Abstract: On end-to-end driving, human driving demonstrations are used to train perception-based driving models by imitation learning. This process is supervised on vehicle signals (e.g., steering angle, acceleration) but does not require extra costly supervision (human labeling of sensor data). As a representative of such vision-based end-to-end driving models, CILRS is commonly used as a baseline to compare with new driving models. So far, some latest models achieve better performance than CILRS by using expensive sensor suites and/or by using large amounts of human-labeled data for training. Given the difference in performance, one may think that it is not worth pursuing vision-based pure end-to-end driving. However, we argue that this approach still has great value and potential considering cost and maintenance. In this paper, we present CIL++, which improves on CILRS by both processing higher-resolution images using a human-inspired HFOV as an inductive bias and incorporating a proper attention mechanism. CIL++ achieves competitive performance compared to models which are more costly to develop. We propose to replace CILRS with CIL++ as a strong vision-based pure end-to-end driving baseline supervised by only vehicle signals and trained by conditional imitation learning.

Abstract: People are becoming increasingly concerned about their diet, whether for disease prevention, medical treatment or other purposes. In meals served in restaurants, schools or public canteens, it is not easy to identify the ingredients and/or the nutritional information they contain. Currently, technological solutions based on deep learning models have facilitated the recording and tracking of food consumed based on the recognition of the main dish present in an image. Considering that sometimes there may be multiple foods served on the same plate, food analysis should be treated as a multi-class object detection problem. EfficientDet and YOLOv5 are object detection algorithms that have demonstrated high mAP and real-time performance on general domain data. However, these models have not been evaluated and compared on public food datasets. Unlike general domain objects, foods have more challenging features inherent in their nature that increase the complexity of detection. In this work, we performed a performance evaluation of Efficient-Det and YOLOv5 on three public food datasets: UNIMIB2016, UECFood256 and ChileanFood64. From the results obtained, it can be seen that YOLOv5 provides a significant difference in terms of both mAP and response time compared to EfficientDet in all datasets. Furthermore, YOLOv5 outperforms the state-of-the-art on UECFood256, achieving an improvement of more than 4% in terms of mAP@.50 over the best reported.

Abstract: Several recent works on self-supervised learning are trained by mapping different augmentations of the same image to the same feature representation. The data augmentations used are of crucial importance to the quality of learned feature representations. In this paper, we analyze how the color jitter traditionally used in data augmentation negatively impacts the quality of the color features in learned feature representations. To address this problem, we propose a more realistic, physics-based color data augmentation – which we call Planckian Jitter – that creates realistic variations in chromaticity and produces a model robust to illumination changes that can be commonly observed in real life, while maintaining the ability to discriminate image content based on color information. Experiments confirm that such a representation is complementary to the representations learned with the currently-used color jitter augmentation and that a simple concatenation leads to significant performance gains on a wide range of downstream datasets. In addition, we present a color sensitivity analysis that documents the impact of different training methods on model neurons and shows that the performance of the learned features is robust with respect to illuminant variations.

Abstract: Developing arbitrary symbol recognition systems is a challenging endeavour. Even using content-agnostic architectures such as few-shot models, performance can be substantially improved by providing a number of well-annotated examples into training. In some contexts, transcripts of the symbols are available without any position information associated to them, which enables using line-level recognition architectures. A way of providing this position information to detection-based architectures is finding systems that can align the input symbols with the transcription. In this paper we discuss some symbol alignment techniques that are suitable for low-data scenarios and provide an insight on their perceived strengths and weaknesses. In particular, we study the usage of Connectionist Temporal Classification models, Attention-Based Sequence to Sequence models and we compare them with the results obtained on a few-shot recognition system.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of near-duplicate image detection techniques in a real-world use case scenario, where a document management company is commissioned to manually annotate a collection of scanned photographs. Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate photographs can reduce the time spent on manual annotation by archivists. This real use case differs from laboratory settings as the deployment dataset is available in advance, allowing the use of transductive learning. We propose a transductive learning approach that leverages state-of-the-art deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Our approach involves pre-training a deep neural network on a large dataset and then fine-tuning the network on the unlabeled target collection with self-supervised learning. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline methods in the task of near-duplicate image detection in the UKBench and an in-house private dataset.