Abstract: The current study is part of the EMPATHIC project, whose aim is to develop an Empathic Virtual Coach (VC) capable of promoting healthy and independent aging. To this end, the VC needs to be capable of perceiving the emotional states of users and adjusting its behaviour during the interactions according to what the users are experiencing in terms of emotions and comfort. Thus, the present work focuses on some sessions where elderly users of three different countries interact with a simulated system. Audio and video information extracted from these sessions were examined by external observers to assess participants' emotional experience with the EMPATHIC-VC in terms of categorical and dimensional assessment of emotions. Analyses were conducted on the emotional labels assigned by the external observers while participants were engaged in two different scenarios: a generic one, where the interaction was carried out with no intention to discuss a specific topic, and a nutrition one, aimed to accomplish a conversation on users' nutritional habits. Results of analyses performed on both audio and video data revealed that the EMPATHIC coach did not elicit negative feelings in the users. Indeed, users from all countries have shown relaxed and positive behavior when interacting with the simulated VC during both scenarios. Overall, the EMPATHIC-VC was capable to offer an enjoyable experience without eliciting negative feelings in the users. This supports the hypothesis that an Empathic Virtual Coach capable of considering users' expectations and emotional states could support elderly people in daily life activities and help them to remain independent.

Abstract: State-of-the-Art (SoTA) deep learning-based approaches to detect anomalies in surveillance videos utilize limited temporal information, including basic information from motion, e.g., optical flow computed between consecutive frames. In this paper, we compliment the SoTA methods by including long-range dependencies from trajectories for anomaly detection. To achieve that, we first created trajectories by running a tracker on two SoTA datasets, namely Avenue and Shanghai-Tech. We propose a prediction-based anomaly detection method using trajectories based on Social GANs, also called in this paper as temporal-based anomaly detection. Then, we hypothesize that late fusion of the result of this temporal-based anomaly detection system with spatial-based anomaly detection systems produces SoTA results. We verify this hypothesis on two spatial-based anomaly detection systems. We show that both cases produce results better than baseline spatial-based systems, indicating the usefulness of the temporal information coming from the trajectories for anomaly detection. We observe that the proposed approach depicts the maximum improvement in micro-level Area-Under-the-Curve (AUC) by 4.1% on CUHK Avenue and 3.4% on Shanghai-Tech over one of the baseline method. We also show a high performance on cross-data evaluation, where we learn the weights to combine spatial and temporal information on Shanghai-Tech and perform evaluation on CUHK Avenue and vice-versa.

Abstract: This work presents Satellite Style and Structure Generative Adversarial Network (SSGAN), a generative model of high resolution satellite imagery to support image segmentation. Based on spatially adaptive denormalization modules (SPADE) that modulate the activations with respect to segmentation map structure, in addition to global descriptor vectors that capture the semantic information in a vector with respect to Open Street Maps (OSM) classes, this model is able to produce
consistent aerial imagery. By decoupling the generation of aerial images into a structure map and a carefully defined style vector, we were able to improve the realism and geodiversity of the synthesis with respect to the state-of-the-art baseline. Therefore, the proposed model allows us to control the generation not only with respect to the desired structure, but also with respect to a geographic area.

Abstract: The emergence of deep learning has considerably advanced the state-of-the-art in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) segmentation. Many techniques have been proposed over the last few years, bringing the accuracy of automated segmentation close to human performance. However, these models have been all too often trained and validated using cardiac imaging samples from single clinical centres or homogeneous imaging protocols. This has prevented the development and validation of models that are generalizable across different clinical centres, imaging conditions or scanner vendors. To promote further research and scientific benchmarking in the field of generalizable deep learning for cardiac segmentation, this paper presents the results of the Multi-Centre, Multi-Vendor and Multi-Disease Cardiac Segmentation (M&Ms) Challenge, which was recently organized as part of the MICCAI 2020 Conference. A total of 14 teams submitted different solutions to the problem, combining various baseline models, data augmentation strategies, and domain adaptation techniques. The obtained results indicate the importance of intensity-driven data augmentation, as well as the need for further research to improve generalizability towards unseen scanner vendors or new imaging protocols. Furthermore, we present a new resource of 375 heterogeneous CMR datasets acquired by using four different scanner vendors in six hospitals and three different countries (Spain, Canada and Germany), which we provide as open-access for the community to enable future research in the field.

Abstract: Human avatars are important targets in many computer applications. Accurately tracking, capturing, reconstructing and animating the human body, face and garments in 3D are critical for human-computer interaction, gaming, special effects and virtual reality. In the past, this has required extensive manual animation. Regardless of the advances in human body and face reconstruction, still modeling, learning and analyzing human dynamics need further attention. In this paper we plan to push the research in this direction, e.g. understanding human dynamics in 2D and 3D, with special attention to garments. We provide a large-scale dataset (more than 2M frames) of animated garments with variable topology and type, calledCLOTH3D++. The dataset contains RGBA video sequences paired with its corresponding 3D data. We pay special care to garment dynamics and realistic rendering of RGB data, including lighting, fabric type and texture. With this dataset, we hold a competition at NeurIPS2020. We design three tracks so participants can compete to develop the best method to perform 3D garment reconstruction in a sequence from (1) 3D-to-3D garments, (2) RGB-to-3D garments, and (3) RGB-to-3D garments plus texture. We also provide a baseline method, based on graph convolutional networks, for each track. Baseline results show that there is a lot of room for improvements. However, due to the challenging nature of the problem, no participant could outperform the baselines.

Abstract: Automatic emotion recognition has become a trending research topic in the past decade. While works based on facial expressions or speech abound, recognizing affect from body gestures remains a less explored topic. We present a new comprehensive survey hoping to boost research in the field. We first introduce emotional body gestures as a component of what is commonly known as “body language” and comment general aspects as gender differences and culture dependence. We then define a complete framework for automatic emotional body gesture recognition. We introduce person detection and comment static and dynamic body pose estimation methods both in RGB and 3D. We then comment the recent literature related to representation learning and emotion recognition from images of emotionally expressive gestures. We also discuss multi-modal approaches that combine speech or face with body gestures for improved emotion recognition. While pre-processing methodologies (e.g. human detection and pose estimation) are nowadays mature technologies fully developed for robust large scale analysis, we show that for emotion recognition the quantity of labelled data is scarce, there is no agreement on clearly defined output spaces and the representations are shallow and largely based on naive geometrical representations.

Abstract: People suffering Bipolar Disorder (BD) experiment changes in mood status having depressive or manic episodes with normal periods in the middle. BD is a chronic disease with a high level of non-adherence to medication that needs a continuous monitoring of patients to detect when they relapse in an episode, so that physicians can take care of them. Here we present MoodRecord, an easy-to-use, non-intrusive, multilingual, robust and scalable platform suitable for home monitoring patients with BD, that allows physicians and relatives to track the patient state and get alarms when abnormalities occur.
MoodRecord takes advantage of the capabilities of smartphones as a communication and recording device to do a continuous monitoring of patients. It automatically records user activity, and asks the user to answer some questions or to record himself in video, according to a predefined plan designed by physicians. The video is analysed, recognising the mood status from images and bipolar assessment scores are extracted from speech parameters. The data obtained from the different sources are merged periodically to observe if a relapse may start and if so, raise the corresponding alarm. The application got a positive evaluation in a pilot with users from three different countries. During the pilot, the predictions of the voice and image modules showed a coherent correlation with the diagnosis performed by clinicians.

Abstract: The issue of ethnic bias has proven to affect the performance of face recognition in previous works, while it still remains to be vacant in face anti-spoofing. Therefore, in order to study the ethnic bias for face anti-spoofing, we introduce the largest CASIA-SURF Cross-ethnicity Face Anti-spoofing (CeFA) dataset, covering 3 ethnicities, 3 modalities, 1,607 subjects, and 2D plus 3D attack types. Five protocols are introduced to measure the affect under varied evaluation conditions, such as cross-ethnicity, unknown spoofs or both of them. As our knowledge, CASIA-SURF CeFA is the first dataset including explicit ethnic labels in current released datasets. Then, we propose a novel multi-modal fusion method as a strong baseline to alleviate the ethnic bias, which employs a partially shared fusion strategy to learn complementary information from multiple modalities. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the proposed dataset to verify its significance and generalization capability for other existing datasets, i.e., CASIA-SURF, OULU-NPU and SiW datasets. The dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/qq.com/face-anti-spoofing/welcome/challengecvpr2020?authuser=0.