Ricardo Dario Perez Principi, Cristina Palmero, Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, & Sergio Escalera. (2021). On the Effect of Observed Subject Biases in Apparent Personality Analysis from Audio-visual Signals. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 12(3), 607–621.
Abstract: Personality perception is implicitly biased due to many subjective factors, such as cultural, social, contextual, gender and appearance. Approaches developed for automatic personality perception are not expected to predict the real personality of the target, but the personality external observers attributed to it. Hence, they have to deal with human bias, inherently transferred to the training data. However, bias analysis in personality computing is an almost unexplored area. In this work, we study different possible sources of bias affecting personality perception, including emotions from facial expressions, attractiveness, age, gender, and ethnicity, as well as their influence on prediction ability for apparent personality estimation. To this end, we propose a multi-modal deep neural network that combines raw audio and visual information alongside predictions of attribute-specific models to regress apparent personality. We also analyse spatio-temporal aggregation schemes and the effect of different time intervals on first impressions. We base our study on the ChaLearn First Impressions dataset, consisting of one-person conversational videos. Our model shows state-of-the-art results regressing apparent personality based on the Big-Five model. Furthermore, given the interpretability nature of our network design, we provide an incremental analysis on the impact of each possible source of bias on final network predictions.
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Parichehr Behjati Ardakani, Pau Rodriguez, Armin Mehri, Isabelle Hupont, Carles Fernandez, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2021). OverNet: Lightweight Multi-Scale Super-Resolution with Overscaling Network. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 2693–2702).
Abstract: Super-resolution (SR) has achieved great success due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, as the depth and width of the networks increase, CNN-based SR methods have been faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. More- over, most SR methods train a dedicated model for each target resolution, losing generality and increasing memory requirements. To address these limitations we introduce OverNet, a deep but lightweight convolutional network to solve SISR at arbitrary scale factors with a single model. We make the following contributions: first, we introduce a lightweight feature extractor that enforces efficient reuse of information through a novel recursive structure of skip and dense connections. Second, to maximize the performance of the feature extractor, we propose a model agnostic reconstruction module that generates accurate high-resolution images from overscaled feature maps obtained from any SR architecture. Third, we introduce a multi-scale loss function to achieve generalization across scales. Experiments show that our proposal outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in standard benchmarks, while maintaining relatively low computation and memory requirements.
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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornes, & Marçal Rusiñol. (2021). Candidate Fusion: Integrating Language Modelling into a Sequence-to-Sequence Handwritten Word Recognition Architecture. PR - Pattern Recognition, 112, 107790.
Abstract: Sequence-to-sequence models have recently become very popular for tackling
handwritten word recognition problems. However, how to effectively integrate an external language model into such recognizer is still a challenging
problem. The main challenge faced when training a language model is to
deal with the language model corpus which is usually different to the one
used for training the handwritten word recognition system. Thus, the bias
between both word corpora leads to incorrectness on the transcriptions, providing similar or even worse performances on the recognition task. In this
work, we introduce Candidate Fusion, a novel way to integrate an external
language model to a sequence-to-sequence architecture. Moreover, it provides suggestions from an external language knowledge, as a new input to
the sequence-to-sequence recognizer. Hence, Candidate Fusion provides two
improvements. On the one hand, the sequence-to-sequence recognizer has
the flexibility not only to combine the information from itself and the language model, but also to choose the importance of the information provided
by the language model. On the other hand, the external language model
has the ability to adapt itself to the training corpus and even learn the
most commonly errors produced from the recognizer. Finally, by conducting
comprehensive experiments, the Candidate Fusion proves to outperform the
state-of-the-art language models for handwritten word recognition tasks.
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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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Manisha Das, Deep Gupta, Petia Radeva, & Ashwini M. Bakde. (2021). Optimized CT-MR neurological image fusion framework using biologically inspired spiking neural model in hybrid ℓ1 - ℓ0 layer decomposition domain. BSPC - Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 68, 102535.
Abstract: Medical image fusion plays an important role in the clinical diagnosis of several critical neurological diseases by merging complementary information available in multimodal images. In this paper, a novel CT-MR neurological image fusion framework is proposed using an optimized biologically inspired feedforward neural model in two-scale hybrid ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition domain using gray wolf optimization to preserve the structural as well as texture information present in source CT and MR images. Initially, the source images are subjected to two-scale ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition with optimized parameters, giving a scale-1 detail layer, a scale-2 detail layer and a scale-2 base layer. Two detail layers at scale-1 and 2 are fused using an optimized biologically inspired neural model and weighted average scheme based on local energy and modified spatial frequency to maximize the preservation of edges and local textures, respectively, while the scale-2 base layer gets fused using choose max rule to preserve the background information. To optimize the hyper-parameters of hybrid ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition and biologically inspired neural model, a fitness function is evaluated based on spatial frequency and edge index of the resultant fused image obtained by adding all the fused components. The fusion performance is analyzed by conducting extensive experiments on different CT-MR neurological images. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides better-fused images and outperforms the other state-of-the-art fusion methods in both visual and quantitative assessments.
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Andreea Glavan, Alina Matei, Petia Radeva, & Estefania Talavera. (2021). Does our social life influence our nutritional behaviour? Understanding nutritional habits from egocentric photo-streams. ESWA - Expert Systems with Applications, 171, 114506.
Abstract: Nutrition and social interactions are both key aspects of the daily lives of humans. In this work, we propose a system to evaluate the influence of social interaction in the nutritional habits of a person from a first-person perspective. In order to detect the routine of an individual, we construct a nutritional behaviour pattern discovery model, which outputs routines over a number of days. Our method evaluates similarity of routines with respect to visited food-related scenes over the collected days, making use of Dynamic Time Warping, as well as considering social engagement and its correlation with food-related activities. The nutritional and social descriptors of the collected days are evaluated and encoded using an LSTM Autoencoder. Later, the obtained latent space is clustered to find similar days unaffected by outliers using the Isolation Forest method. Moreover, we introduce a new score metric to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. We validate our method on 104 days and more than 100 k egocentric images gathered by 7 users. Several different visualizations are evaluated for the understanding of the findings. Our results demonstrate good performance and applicability of our proposed model for social-related nutritional behaviour understanding. At the end, relevant applications of the model are discussed by analysing the discovered routine of particular individuals.
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Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Alicia Fornes, Y.Kessentini, & C.Tudor. (2021). A Few-shot Learning Approach for Historical Encoded Manuscript Recognition. In 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (pp. 5413–5420).
Abstract: Encoded (or ciphered) manuscripts are a special type of historical documents that contain encrypted text. The automatic recognition of this kind of documents is challenging because: 1) the cipher alphabet changes from one document to another, 2) there is a lack of annotated corpus for training and 3) touching symbols make the symbol segmentation difficult and complex. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a novel method for handwritten ciphers recognition based on few-shot object detection. Our method first detects all symbols of a given alphabet in a line image, and then a decoding step maps the symbol similarity scores to the final sequence of transcribed symbols. By training on synthetic data, we show that the proposed architecture is able to recognize handwritten ciphers with unseen alphabets. In addition, if few labeled pages with the same alphabet are used for fine tuning, our method surpasses existing unsupervised and supervised HTR methods for ciphers recognition.
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Yaxing Wang, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Luis Herranz, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2021). Controlling biases and diversity in diverse image-to-image translation. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 202, 103082.
Abstract: JCR 2019 Q2, IF=3.121
The task of unpaired image-to-image translation is highly challenging due to the lack of explicit cross-domain pairs of instances. We consider here diverse image translation (DIT), an even more challenging setting in which an image can have multiple plausible translations. This is normally achieved by explicitly disentangling content and style in the latent representation and sampling different styles codes while maintaining the image content. Despite the success of current DIT models, they are prone to suffer from bias. In this paper, we study the problem of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets may add undesired changes (e.g. change gender or race in face images) to the output translations as a consequence of the particular underlying visual distribution in the target domain. In order to alleviate the effects of this problem we propose the use of semantic constraints that enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Our proposed model is a step towards unbiased diverse image-to-image translation (UDIT), and results in less unwanted changes in the translated images while still performing the wanted transformation. Experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in different domains such as faces, objects, and scenes.
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Akhil Gurram, Ahmet Faruk Tuna, Fengyi Shen, Onay Urfalioglu, & Antonio Lopez. (2021). Monocular Depth Estimation through Virtual-world Supervision and Real-world SfM Self-Supervision. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 23(8), 12738–12751.
Abstract: Depth information is essential for on-board perception in autonomous driving and driver assistance. Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is very appealing since it allows for appearance and depth being on direct pixelwise correspondence without further calibration. Best MDE models are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained in a supervised manner, i.e., assuming pixelwise ground truth (GT). Usually, this GT is acquired at training time through a calibrated multi-modal suite of sensors. However, also using only a monocular system at training time is cheaper and more scalable. This is possible by relying on structure-from-motion (SfM) principles to generate self-supervision. Nevertheless, problems of camouflaged objects, visibility changes, static-camera intervals, textureless areas, and scale ambiguity, diminish the usefulness of such self-supervision. In this paper, we perform monocular depth estimation by virtual-world supervision (MonoDEVS) and real-world SfM self-supervision. We compensate the SfM self-supervision limitations by leveraging virtual-world images with accurate semantic and depth supervision and addressing the virtual-to-real domain gap. Our MonoDEVSNet outperforms previous MDE CNNs trained on monocular and even stereo sequences.
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Diego Porres. (2021). Discriminator Synthesis: On reusing the other half of Generative Adversarial Networks. In Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, Neurips Workshop.
Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks have long since revolutionized the world of computer vision and, tied to it, the world of art. Arduous efforts have gone into fully utilizing and stabilizing training so that outputs of the Generator network have the highest possible fidelity, but little has gone into using the Discriminator after training is complete. In this work, we propose to use the latter and show a way to use the features it has learned from the training dataset to both alter an image and generate one from scratch. We name this method Discriminator Dreaming, and the full code can be found at this https URL.
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Andres Mafla, Sounak Dey, Ali Furkan Biten, Lluis Gomez, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2021). Multi-modal reasoning graph for scene-text based fine-grained image classification and retrieval. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 4022–4032).
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Andres Mafla, Rafael S. Rezende, Lluis Gomez, Diana Larlus, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2021). StacMR: Scene-Text Aware Cross-Modal Retrieval. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 2219–2229).
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Andres Mafla, Ruben Tito, Sounak Dey, Lluis Gomez, Marçal Rusiñol, Ernest Valveny, et al. (2021). Real-time Lexicon-free Scene Text Retrieval. PR - Pattern Recognition, 110, 107656.
Abstract: In this work, we address the task of scene text retrieval: given a text query, the system returns all images containing the queried text. The proposed model uses a single shot CNN architecture that predicts bounding boxes and builds a compact representation of spotted words. In this way, this problem can be modeled as a nearest neighbor search of the textual representation of a query over the outputs of the CNN collected from the totality of an image database. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art, while offering a significant increase in processing speed and unmatched expressiveness with samples never seen at training time. Several experiments to assess the generalization capability of the model are conducted in a multilingual dataset, as well as an application of real-time text spotting in videos.
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Minesh Mathew, Dimosthenis Karatzas, & C.V. Jawahar. (2021). DocVQA: A Dataset for VQA on Document Images. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 2200–2209).
Abstract: We present a new dataset for Visual Question Answering (VQA) on document images called DocVQA. The dataset consists of 50,000 questions defined on 12,000+ document images. Detailed analysis of the dataset in comparison with similar datasets for VQA and reading comprehension is presented. We report several baseline results by adopting existing VQA and reading comprehension models. Although the existing models perform reasonably well on certain types of questions, there is large performance gap compared to human performance (94.36% accuracy). The models need to improve specifically on questions where understanding structure of the document is crucial. The dataset, code and leaderboard are available at docvqa. org
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Razieh Rastgoo, Kourosh Kiani, & Sergio Escalera. (2021). Sign Language Recognition: A Deep Survey. ESWA - Expert Systems With Applications, 164, 113794.
Abstract: Sign language, as a different form of the communication language, is important to large groups of people in society. There are different signs in each sign language with variability in hand shape, motion profile, and position of the hand, face, and body parts contributing to each sign. So, visual sign language recognition is a complex research area in computer vision. Many models have been proposed by different researchers with significant improvement by deep learning approaches in recent years. In this survey, we review the vision-based proposed models of sign language recognition using deep learning approaches from the last five years. While the overall trend of the proposed models indicates a significant improvement in recognition accuracy in sign language recognition, there are some challenges yet that need to be solved. We present a taxonomy to categorize the proposed models for isolated and continuous sign language recognition, discussing applications, datasets, hybrid models, complexity, and future lines of research in the field.
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