Abstract: Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is necessary. To ensure this, collaborative cells are equipped with a large set of sensors of multiple modalities, covering the entire work volume. However, the fusion of information from all these sensors requires an accurate extrinsic calibration. The calibration of such complex systems is challenging, due to the number of sensors and modalities, and also due to the small overlapping fields of view between the sensors, which are positioned to capture different viewpoints of the cell. This paper proposes a sensor to pattern methodology that can calibrate a complex system such as a collaborative cell in a single optimization procedure. Our methodology can tackle RGB and Depth cameras, as well as LiDARs. Results show that our methodology is able to accurately calibrate a collaborative cell containing three RGB cameras, a depth camera and three 3D LiDARs.

Abstract: This paper presents results from the third Thermal Image Super-Resolution (TISR) challenge organized in the Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum (PBVS) 2022 workshop. The challenge uses the same thermal image dataset as the first two challenges, with 951 training images and 50 validation images at each resolution. A set of 20 images was kept aside for testing. The evaluation tasks were to measure the PSNR and SSIM between the SR image and the ground truth (HR thermal noisy image downsampled by four), and also to measure the PSNR and SSIM between the SR image and the semi-registered HR image (acquired with another camera). The results outperformed those from last year’s challenge, improving both evaluation metrics. This year, almost 100 teams participants registered for the challenge, showing the community’s interest in this hot topic.

Abstract: Lateral connections in the primary visual cortex (V1) have long been hypothesized to be responsible for several visual processing mechanisms such as brightness induction, chromatic induction, visual discomfort, and bottom-up visual attention (also named saliency). Many computational models have been developed to independently predict these and other visual processes, but no computational model has been able to reproduce all of them simultaneously. In this work, we show that a biologically plausible computational model of lateral interactions of V1 is able to simultaneously predict saliency and all the aforementioned visual processes. Our model's architecture (NSWAM) is based on Penacchio's neurodynamic model of lateral connections of V1. It is defined as a network of firing rate neurons, sensitive to visual features such as brightness, color, orientation, and scale. We tested NSWAM saliency predictions using images from several eye tracking data sets. We show that the accuracy of predictions obtained by our architecture, using shuffled metrics, is similar to other state-of-the-art computational methods, particularly with synthetic images (CAT2000-Pattern and SID4VAM) that mainly contain low-level features. Moreover, we outperform other biologically inspired saliency models that are specifically designed to exclusively reproduce saliency. We show that our biologically plausible model of lateral connections can simultaneously explain different visual processes present in V1 (without applying any type of training or optimization and keeping the same parameterization for all the visual processes). This can be useful for the definition of a unified architecture of the primary visual cortex.

Abstract: This paper presents final results of the Out-Of-Vocabulary 2022 (OOV) challenge. The OOV contest introduces an important aspect that is not commonly studied by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) models, namely, the recognition of unseen scene text instances at training time. The competition compiles a collection of public scene text datasets comprising of 326,385 images with 4,864,405 scene text instances, thus covering a wide range of data distributions. A new and independent validation and test set is formed with scene text instances that are out of vocabulary at training time. The competition was structured in two tasks, end-to-end and cropped scene text recognition respectively. A thorough analysis of results from baselines and different participants is presented. Interestingly, current state-of-the-art models show a significant performance gap under the newly studied setting. We conclude that the OOV dataset proposed in this challenge will be an essential area to be explored in order to develop scene text models that achieve more robust and generalized predictions.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a framework for Multilingual Scene Text Visual Question Answering that deals with new languages in a zero-shot fashion. Specifically, we consider the task of Scene Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA) in which the question can be asked in different languages and it is not necessarily aligned to the scene text language. Thus, we first introduce a natural step towards a more generalized version of STVQA: MUST-VQA. Accounting for this, we discuss two evaluation scenarios in the constrained setting, namely IID and zero-shot and we demonstrate that the models can perform on a par on a zero-shot setting. We further provide extensive experimentation and show the effectiveness of adapting multilingual language models into STVQA tasks.

Abstract: Geometric Deep Learning has recently attracted significant interest in a wide range of machine learning fields, including document analysis. The application of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has become crucial in various document-related tasks since they can unravel important structural patterns, fundamental in key information extraction processes. Previous works in the literature propose task-driven models and do not take into account the full power of graphs. We propose Doc2Graph, a task-agnostic document understanding framework based on a GNN model, to solve different tasks given different types of documents. We evaluated our approach on two challenging datasets for key information extraction in form understanding, invoice layout analysis and table detection.

Abstract: Human-machine, human-robot interaction, and collaboration appear in diverse fields, from homecare to Cyber-Physical Systems. Technological development is fast, whereas real-time methods for social communication analysis that can measure small changes in sentiment and personality states, including visual, acoustic and language modalities are lagging, particularly when the goal is to build robust, appearance invariant, and fair methods. We study and compare methods capable of fusing modalities while satisfying real-time and invariant appearance conditions. We compare state-of-the-art transformer architectures in sentiment estimation and introduce them in the much less explored field of personality perception. We show that the architectures perform differently on automatic sentiment and personality perception, suggesting that each task may be better captured/modeled by a particular method. Our work calls attention to the attractive properties of the linear versions of the transformer architectures. In particular, we show that the best results are achieved by fusing the different architectures{’} preprocessing methods. However, they pose extreme conditions in computation power and energy consumption for real-time computations for quadratic transformers due to their memory requirements. In turn, linear transformers pave the way for quantifying small changes in sentiment estimation and personality perception for real-time social communications for machines and robots.

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.