Abstract: Latest computer vision architectures use a chain of feedforward computations, mainly optimizing artificial neural networks for very specific tasks. Although their impressive performance (i.e. in saliency) using real image datasets, these models do not follow several biological principles of the human visual system (e.g. feedback and horizontal connections in cortex) and are unable to predict several visual tasks simultaneously. In this study we present biologically plausible computations from the early stages of the human visual system (i.e. retina and lateral geniculate nucleus) and lateral connections in V1. Despite the simplicity of these processes and without any type of training or optimization, simulations of firing-rate dynamics of V1 are able to predict bottom-up visual attention at distinct contexts (shown previously as well to predict visual discomfort, brightness and chromatic induction). We also show functional top-down selection mechanisms as feedback inhibition projections (i.e. prefrontal cortex for search/task-based attention and parietal area for inhibition of return). Distinct saliency model predictions are tested with eye tracking datasets in free-viewing and visual search tasks, using real images and synthetically-generated patterns. Results on predicting saliency and scanpaths show that artificial models do not outperform biologically-inspired ones (specifically for datasets that lack of common endogenous biases found in eye tracking experimentation), as well as, do not correctly predict contrast sensitivities in pop-out stimulus patterns. This work remarks the importance of considering biological principles of the visual system for building models that reproduce this (and any other) visual effects.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

Abstract: The problem of dealing with missing or incomplete data in machine learning and computer vision arises in many applications. Recent strategies make use of generative models to impute missing or corrupted data. Advances in computer vision using deep generative models have found applications in image/video processing, such as denoising, restoration, super-resolution, or inpainting.
Inpainting and Denoising Challenges comprises recent efforts dealing with image and video inpainting tasks. This includes winning solutions to the ChaLearn Looking at People inpainting and denoising challenges: human pose recovery, video de-captioning and fingerprint restoration.
This volume starts with a wide review on image denoising, retracing and comparing various methods from the pioneer signal processing methods, to machine learning approaches with sparse and low-rank models, and recent deep learning architectures with autoencoders and variants. The following chapters present results from the Challenge, including three competition tasks at WCCI and ECML 2018. The top best approaches submitted by participants are described, showing interesting contributions and innovating methods. The last two chapters propose novel contributions and highlight new applications that benefit from image/video inpainting.