Abstract: Bronchoscopy examinations allow biopsy of pulmonary nodules with minimum risk for the patient. Even for experienced bronchoscopists, it is difficult to guide the bronchoscope to most distal lesions and obtain an accurate diagnosis. This paper presents an image-based codification of the bronchial anatomy for bronchoscopy biopsy guiding. The 3D anatomy of each patient is codified as a binary tree with nodes representing bronchial levels and edges labeled using their position on images projecting the 3D anatomy from a set of branching points. The paths from the root to leaves provide a codification of navigation routes with spatially consistent labels according to the anatomy observes in video bronchoscopy explorations. We evaluate our labeling approach as a guiding system in terms of the number of bronchial levels correctly codified, also in the number of labels-based instructions correctly supplied, using generalized mixed models and computer-generated data. Results obtained for three independent observers prove the consistency and reproducibility of our guiding system. We trust that our codification based on viewer’s projection might be used as a foundation for the navigation process in Virtual Bronchoscopy systems.

Abstract: We propose a novel attention mechanism to enhance Convolutional Neural Networks for fine-grained recognition. It learns to attend to lower-level feature activations without requiring part annotations and uses these activations to update and rectify the output likelihood distribution. In contrast to other approaches, the proposed mechanism is modular, architecture-independent and efficient both in terms of parameters and computation required. Experiments show that networks augmented with our approach systematically improve their classification accuracy and become more robust to clutter. As a result, Wide Residual Networks augmented with our proposal surpasses the state of the art classification accuracies in CIFAR-10, the Adience gender recognition task, Stanford dogs, and UEC Food-100.

Abstract: Visual impairment affects the normal course of activities in everyday life including mobility, education, employment, and social interaction. Most of the existing technical solutions devoted to empowering the visually impaired people are in the areas of navigation (obstacle avoidance), access to printed information and object recognition. Less effort has been dedicated so far in developing solutions to support social interactions. In this paper, we introduce a Social-Aware Assistant (SAA) that provides visually impaired people with cues to enhance their face-to-face conversations. The system consists of a perceptive component (represented by smartglasses with an embedded video camera) and a feedback component (represented by a haptic belt). When the vision system detects a head nodding, the belt vibrates, thus suggesting the user to replicate (mirror) the gesture. In our experiments, sighted persons interacted with blind people wearing the SAA. We instructed the former to mirror the noddings according to the vibratory signal, while the latter interacted naturally. After the face-to-face conversation, the participants had an interview to express their experience regarding the use of this new technological assistant. With the data collected during the experiment, we have assessed quantitatively and qualitatively the device usefulness and user satisfaction.

Abstract: Image datasets have heavily been used to build computer vision systems.
These datasets are either manually or automatically labeled, which is a
problem as both labeling methods are prone to errors. To investigate this problem, we use a majority voting ensemble that combines the results from several Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Majority voting ensembles not only enhance the overall performance, but can also be used to estimate the confidence level of each sample. We also examined Softmax as another form to estimate posterior probability. We have designed various experiments with a range of different ensembles built from one or different, or temporal/snapshot CNNs, which have been trained multiple times stochastically. We analyzed CIFAR10, CIFAR100, EMNIST, and SVHN datasets and we found quite a few incorrect
labels, both in the training and testing sets. We also present detailed confidence analysis on these datasets and we found that the ensemble is better than the Softmax when used estimate the per-sample confidence. This work thus proposes an approach that can be used to scrutinize and verify the labeling of computer vision datasets, which can later be applied to weakly/semi-supervised learning. We propose a measure, based on the Odds-Ratio, to quantify how many of these incorrectly classified labels are actually incorrectly labeled and how many of these are confusing. The proposed methods are easily scalable to larger datasets, like ImageNet, LSUN and SUN, as each CNN instance is trained for 60 epochs; or even faster, by implementing a temporal (snapshot) ensemble.

Abstract: Image dehazing deals with the removal of undesired loss of visibility in outdoor images due to the presence of fog. Retinex is a color vision model mimicking the ability of the Human Visual System to robustly discount varying illuminations when observing a scene under different spectral lighting conditions. Retinex has been widely explored in the computer vision literature for image enhancement and other related tasks. While these two problems are apparently unrelated, the goal of this work is to show that they can be connected by a simple linear relationship. Specifically, most Retinex-based algorithms have the characteristic feature of always increasing image brightness, which turns them into ideal candidates for effective image dehazing by directly applying Retinex to a hazy image whose intensities have been inverted. In this paper, we give theoretical proof that Retinex on inverted intensities is a solution to the image dehazing problem. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative results indicate that several classical and modern implementations of Retinex can be transformed into competing image dehazing algorithms performing on pair with more complex fog removal methods, and can overcome some of the main challenges associated with this problem.

Abstract: In 2015, a picture of a Dress (henceforth the Dress) triggered popular and scientific interest; some reported seeing the Dress in white and gold (W&G) and others in blue and black (B&B). We aimed to describe the phenomenon and investigate the role of contextualization. Few days after the Dress had appeared on the Internet, we projected it to 240 students on two large screens in the classroom. Participants reported seeing the Dress in B&B (48%), W&G (38%), or blue and brown (B&Br; 7%). Amongst numerous socio-demographic variables, we only observed that W&G viewers were most likely to have always seen the Dress as W&G. In the laboratory, we tested how much contextual information is necessary for the phenomenon to occur. Fifty-seven participants selected colours most precisely matching predominant colours of parts or the full Dress. We presented, in this order, small squares (a), vertical strips (b), and the full Dress (c). We found that (1) B&B, B&Br, and W&G viewers had selected colours differing in lightness and chroma levels for contextualized images only (b, c conditions) and hue for fully contextualized condition only (c) and (2) B&B viewers selected colours most closely matching displayed colours of the Dress. Thus, the Dress phenomenon emerges due to inter-individual differences in subjectively perceived lightness, chroma, and hue, at least when all aspects of the picture need to be integrated. Our results support the previous conclusions that contextual information is key to colour perception; it should be important to understand how this actually happens.

Abstract: In this paper we propose an approach for multi-modal image retrieval in multi-labelled images. A multi-modal deep network architecture is formulated to jointly model sketches and text as input query modalities into a common embedding space, which is then further aligned with the image feature space. Our architecture also relies on a salient object detection through a supervised LSTM-based visual attention model learned from convolutional features. Both the alignment between the queries and the image and the supervision of the attention on the images are obtained by generalizing the Hungarian Algorithm using different loss functions. This permits encoding the object-based features and its alignment with the query irrespective of the availability of the co-occurrence of different objects in the training set. We validate the performance of our approach on standard single/multi-object datasets, showing state-of-the art performance in every dataset.