Pau Riba, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2020). Hierarchical graphs for coarse-to-fine error tolerant matching. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 134, 116–124.
Abstract: During the last years, graph-based representations are experiencing a growing usage in visual recognition and retrieval due to their ability to capture both structural and appearance-based information. Thus, they provide a greater representational power than classical statistical frameworks. However, graph-based representations leads to high computational complexities usually dealt by graph embeddings or approximated matching techniques. Despite their representational power, they are very sensitive to noise and small variations of the input image. With the aim to cope with the time complexity and the variability present in the generated graphs, in this paper we propose to construct a novel hierarchical graph representation. Graph clustering techniques adapted from social media analysis have been used in order to contract a graph at different abstraction levels while keeping information about the topology. Abstract nodes attributes summarise information about the contracted graph partition. For the proposed representations, a coarse-to-fine matching technique is defined. Hence, small graphs are used as a filtering before more accurate matching methods are applied. This approach has been validated in real scenarios such as classification of colour images or retrieval of handwritten words (i.e. word spotting).
Keywords: Hierarchical graph representation; Coarse-to-fine graph matching; Graph-based retrieval
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Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, & Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora. (2020). Browsing of the Social Network of the Past: Information Extraction from Population Manuscript Images. In Handwritten Historical Document Analysis, Recognition, and Retrieval – State of the Art and Future Trends. World Scientific.
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Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora, Alicia Fornes, Josep Llados, Gabriel Brea-Martinez, & Miquel Valls-Figols. (2019). The Baix Llobregat (BALL) Demographic Database, between Historical Demography and Computer Vision (nineteenth–twentieth centuries. In Nominative Data in Demographic Research in the East and the West: monograph (pp. 29–61).
Abstract: The Baix Llobregat (BALL) Demographic Database is an ongoing database project containing individual census data from the Catalan region of Baix Llobregat (Spain) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The BALL Database is built within the project ‘NETWORKS: Technology and citizen innovation for building historical social networks to understand the demographic past’ directed by Alícia Fornés from the Center for Computer Vision and Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora from the Center for Demographic Studies, both at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, funded by the Recercaixa program (2017–2019).
Its webpage is http://dag.cvc.uab.es/xarxes/.The aim of the project is to develop technologies facilitating massive digitalization of demographic sources, and more specifically the padrones (local censuses), in order to reconstruct historical ‘social’ networks employing computer vision technology. Such virtual networks can be created thanks to the linkage of nominative records compiled in the local censuses across time and space. Thus, digitized versions of individual and family lifespans are established, and individuals and families can be located spatially.
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Debora Gil, Carles Sanchez, Agnes Borras, Marta Diez-Ferrer, & Antoni Rosell. (2019). Segmentation of Distal Airways using Structural Analysis. Plos - PloS one, 14(12).
Abstract: Segmentation of airways in Computed Tomography (CT) scans is a must for accurate support of diagnosis and intervention of many pulmonary disorders. In particular, lung cancer diagnosis would benefit from segmentations reaching most distal airways. We present a method that combines descriptors of bronchi local appearance and graph global structural analysis to fine-tune thresholds on the descriptors adapted for each bronchial level. We have compared our method to the top performers of the EXACT09 challenge and to a commercial software for biopsy planning evaluated in an own-collected data-base of high resolution CT scans acquired under different breathing conditions. Results on EXACT09 data show that our method provides a high leakage reduction with minimum loss in airway detection. Results on our data-base show the reliability across varying breathing conditions and a competitive performance for biopsy planning compared to a commercial solution.
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Rada Deeb, Joost Van de Weijer, Damien Muselet, Mathieu Hebert, & Alain Tremeau. (2019). Deep spectral reflectance and illuminant estimation from self-interreflections. JOSA A - Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 31(1), 105–114.
Abstract: In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network based approach to estimate the spectral reflectance of a surface and spectral power distribution of light from a single RGB image of a V-shaped surface. Interreflections happening in a concave surface lead to gradients of RGB values over its area. These gradients carry a lot of information concerning the physical properties of the surface and the illuminant. Our network is trained with only simulated data constructed using a physics-based interreflection model. Coupling interreflection effects with deep learning helps to retrieve the spectral reflectance under an unknown light and to estimate spectral power distribution of this light as well. In addition, it is more robust to the presence of image noise than classical approaches. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art learning-based approaches on simulated data. In addition, it gives better results on real data compared to other interreflection-based approaches.
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Arka Ujjal Dey, Suman Ghosh, Ernest Valveny, & Gaurav Harit. (2021). Beyond Visual Semantics: Exploring the Role of Scene Text in Image Understanding. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 149, 164–171.
Abstract: Images with visual and scene text content are ubiquitous in everyday life. However, current image interpretation systems are mostly limited to using only the visual features, neglecting to leverage the scene text content. In this paper, we propose to jointly use scene text and visual channels for robust semantic interpretation of images. We do not only extract and encode visual and scene text cues, but also model their interplay to generate a contextual joint embedding with richer semantics. The contextual embedding thus generated is applied to retrieval and classification tasks on multimedia images, with scene text content, to demonstrate its effectiveness. In the retrieval framework, we augment our learned text-visual semantic representation with scene text cues, to mitigate vocabulary misses that may have occurred during the semantic embedding. To deal with irrelevant or erroneous recognition of scene text, we also apply query-based attention to our text channel. We show how the multi-channel approach, involving visual semantics and scene text, improves upon state of the art.
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Estefania Talavera, Alexandre Cola, Nicolai Petkov, & Petia Radeva. (2019). Towards Egocentric Person Re-identification and Social Pattern Analysis. In Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (Vol. 310, pp. 203–211).
Abstract: CoRR abs/1905.04073
Wearable cameras capture a first-person view of the daily activities of the camera wearer, offering a visual diary of the user behaviour. Detection of the appearance of people the camera user interacts with for social interactions analysis is of high interest. Generally speaking, social events, lifestyle and health are highly correlated, but there is a lack of tools to monitor and analyse them. We consider that egocentric vision provides a tool to obtain information and understand users social interactions. We propose a model that enables us to evaluate and visualize social traits obtained by analysing social interactions appearance within egocentric photostreams. Given sets of egocentric images, we detect the appearance of faces within the days of the camera wearer, and rely on clustering algorithms to group their feature descriptors in order to re-identify persons. Recurrence of detected faces within photostreams allows us to shape an idea of the social pattern of behaviour of the user. We validated our model over several weeks recorded by different camera wearers. Our findings indicate that social profiles are potentially useful for social behaviour interpretation.
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Estefania Talavera, Maria Leyva-Vallina, Md. Mostafa Kamal Sarker, Domenec Puig, Nicolai Petkov, & Petia Radeva. (2020). Hierarchical approach to classify food scenes in egocentric photo-streams. J-BHI - IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 24(3), 866–877.
Abstract: Recent studies have shown that the environment where people eat can affect their nutritional behaviour. In this work, we provide automatic tools for a personalised analysis of a person's health habits by the examination of daily recorded egocentric photo-streams. Specifically, we propose a new automatic approach for the classification of food-related environments, that is able to classify up to 15 such scenes. In this way, people can monitor the context around their food intake in order to get an objective insight into their daily eating routine. We propose a model that classifies food-related scenes organized in a semantic hierarchy. Additionally, we present and make available a new egocentric dataset composed of more than 33000 images recorded by a wearable camera, over which our proposed model has been tested. Our approach obtains an accuracy and F-score of 56\% and 65\%, respectively, clearly outperforming the baseline methods.
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Estefania Talavera, Nicolai Petkov, & Petia Radeva. (2019). Towards Unsupervised Familiar Scene Recognition in Egocentric Videos.
Abstract: CoRR abs/1905.04093
Nowadays, there is an upsurge of interest in using lifelogging devices. Such devices generate huge amounts of image data; consequently, the need for automatic methods for analyzing and summarizing these data is drastically increasing. We present a new method for familiar scene recognition in egocentric videos, based on background pattern detection through automatically configurable COSFIRE filters. We present some experiments over egocentric data acquired with the Narrative Clip.
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Estefania Talavera, Petia Radeva, & Nicolai Petkov. (2019). Towards Emotion Retrieval in Egocentric PhotoStream.
Abstract: CoRR abs/1905.04107
The availability and use of egocentric data are rapidly increasing due to the growing use of wearable cameras. Our aim is to study the effect (positive, neutral or negative) of egocentric images or events on an observer. Given egocentric photostreams capturing the wearer's days, we propose a method that aims to assign sentiment to events extracted from egocentric photostreams. Such moments can be candidates to retrieve according to their possibility of representing a positive experience for the camera's wearer. The proposed approach obtained a classification accuracy of 75% on the test set, with a deviation of 8%. Our model makes a step forward opening the door to sentiment recognition in egocentric photostreams.
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Alejandro Cartas, Jordi Luque, Petia Radeva, Carlos Segura, & Mariella Dimiccoli. (2019). How Much Does Audio Matter to Recognize Egocentric Object Interactions?.
Abstract: CoRR abs/1906.00634
Sounds are an important source of information on our daily interactions with objects. For instance, a significant amount of people can discern the temperature of water that it is being poured just by using the sense of hearing. However, only a few works have explored the use of audio for the classification of object interactions in conjunction with vision or as single modality. In this preliminary work, we propose an audio model for egocentric action recognition and explore its usefulness on the parts of the problem (noun, verb, and action classification). Our model achieves a competitive result in terms of verb classification (34.26% accuracy) on a standard benchmark with respect to vision-based state of the art systems, using a comparatively lighter architecture.
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Md. Mostafa Kamal Sarker, Hatem A. Rashwan, Mohamed Abdel-Nasser, Vivek Kumar Singh, Syeda Furruka Banu, Farhan Akram, et al. (2019). MobileGAN: Skin Lesion Segmentation Using a Lightweight Generative Adversarial Network.
Abstract: CoRR abs/1907.00856
Skin lesion segmentation in dermoscopic images is a challenge due to their blurry and irregular boundaries. Most of the segmentation approaches based on deep learning are time and memory consuming due to the hundreds of millions of parameters. Consequently, it is difficult to apply them to real dermatoscope devices with limited GPU and memory resources. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and efficient Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) model, called MobileGAN for skin lesion segmentation. More precisely, the MobileGAN combines 1D non-bottleneck factorization networks with position and channel attention modules in a GAN model. The proposed model is evaluated on the test dataset of the ISBI 2017 challenges and the validation dataset of ISIC 2018 challenges. Although the proposed network has only 2.35 millions of parameters, it is still comparable with the state-of-the-art. The experimental results show that our MobileGAN obtains comparable performance with an accuracy of 97.61%.
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Pau Rodriguez, Diego Velazquez, Guillem Cucurull, Josep M. Gonfaus, Xavier Roca, Seiichi Ozawa, et al. (2020). Personality Trait Analysis in Social Networks Based on Weakly Supervised Learning of Shared Images. APPLSCI - Applied Sciences, 10(22), 8170.
Abstract: Social networks have attracted the attention of psychologists, as the behavior of users can be used to assess personality traits, and to detect sentiments and critical mental situations such as depression or suicidal tendencies. Recently, the increasing amount of image uploads to social networks has shifted the focus from text to image-based personality assessment. However, obtaining the ground-truth requires giving personality questionnaires to the users, making the process very costly and slow, and hindering research on large populations. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict which images are most associated with each personality trait of the OCEAN personality model, without requiring ground-truth personality labels. Namely, we present a weakly supervised framework which shows that the personality scores obtained using specific images textually associated with particular personality traits are highly correlated with scores obtained using standard text-based personality questionnaires. We trained an OCEAN trait model based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), learned from 120K pictures posted with specific textual hashtags, to infer whether the personality scores from the images uploaded by users are consistent with those scores obtained from text. In order to validate our claims, we performed a personality test on a heterogeneous group of 280 human subjects, showing that our model successfully predicts which kind of image will match a person with a given level of a trait. Looking at the results, we obtained evidence that personality is not only correlated with text, but with image content too. Interestingly, different visual patterns emerged from those images most liked by persons with a particular personality trait: for instance, pictures most associated with high conscientiousness usually contained healthy food, while low conscientiousness pictures contained injuries, guns, and alcohol. These findings could pave the way to complement text-based personality questionnaires with image-based questions.
Keywords: sentiment analysis, personality trait analysis; weakly-supervised learning; visual classification; OCEAN model; social networks
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Felipe Codevilla. (2019). On Building End-to-End Driving Models Through Imitation Learning (Antonio Lopez, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Autonomous vehicles are now considered as an assured asset in the future. Literally, all the relevant car-markers are now in a race to produce fully autonomous vehicles. These car-makers usually make use of modular pipelines for designing autonomous vehicles. This strategy decomposes the problem in a variety of tasks such as object detection and recognition, semantic and instance segmentation, depth estimation, SLAM and place recognition, as well as planning and control. Each module requires a separate set of expert algorithms, which are costly specially in the amount of human labor and necessity of data labelling. An alternative, that recently has driven considerable interest, is the end-to-end driving. In the end-to-end driving paradigm, perception and control are learned simultaneously using a deep network. These sensorimotor models are typically obtained by imitation learning fromhuman demonstrations. The main advantage is that this approach can directly learn from large fleets of human-driven vehicles without requiring a fixed ontology and extensive amounts of labeling. However, scaling end-to-end driving methods to behaviors more complex than simple lane keeping or lead vehicle following remains an open problem. On this thesis, in order to achieve more complex behaviours, we
address some issues when creating end-to-end driving system through imitation
learning. The first of themis a necessity of an environment for algorithm evaluation and collection of driving demonstrations. On this matter, we participated on the creation of the CARLA simulator, an open source platformbuilt from ground up for autonomous driving validation and prototyping. Since the end-to-end approach is purely reactive, there is also the necessity to provide an interface with a global planning system. With this, we propose the conditional imitation learning that conditions the actions produced into some high level command. Evaluation is also a concern and is commonly performed by comparing the end-to-end network output to some pre-collected driving dataset. We show that this is surprisingly weakly correlated to the actual driving and propose strategies on how to better acquire data and a better comparison strategy. Finally, we confirmwell-known generalization issues
(due to dataset bias and overfitting), new ones (due to dynamic objects and the
lack of a causal model), and training instability; problems requiring further research before end-to-end driving through imitation can scale to real-world driving.
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Zhijie Fang. (2019). Behavior understanding of vulnerable road users by 2D pose estimation (Antonio Lopez, & David Vazquez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, Ediciones Graficas Rey, .
Abstract: Anticipating the intentions of vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians
and cyclists can be critical for performing safe and comfortable driving maneuvers. This is the case for human driving and, therefore, should be taken into account by systems providing any level of driving assistance, i.e. from advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) to fully autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this PhD work, we show how the latest advances on monocular vision-based human pose estimation, i.e. those relying on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), enable to recognize the intentions of such VRUs. In the case of cyclists, we assume that they follow the established traffic codes to indicate future left/right turns and stop maneuvers with arm signals. In the case of pedestrians, no indications can be assumed a priori. Instead, we hypothesize that the walking pattern of a pedestrian can allow us to determine if he/she has the intention of crossing the road in the path of the egovehicle, so that the ego-vehicle must maneuver accordingly (e.g. slowing down or stopping). In this PhD work, we show how the same methodology can be used for recognizing pedestrians and cyclists’ intentions. For pedestrians, we perform experiments on the publicly available Daimler and JAAD datasets. For cyclists, we did not found an analogous dataset, therefore, we created our own one by acquiring
and annotating corresponding video-sequences which we aim to share with the
research community. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-of-the-art results on the intention recognition of VRUs.
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