Abstract: We present a novel solution to the garment animation problem through deep learning. Our contribution allows animating any template outfit with arbitrary topology and geometric complexity. Recent works develop models for garment edition, resizing and animation at the same time by leveraging the support body model (encoding garments as body homotopies). This leads to complex engineering solutions that suffer from scalability, applicability and compatibility. By limiting our scope to garment animation only, we are able to propose a simple model that can animate any outfit, independently of its topology, vertex order or connectivity. Our proposed architecture maps outfits to animated 3D models into the standard format for 3D animation (blend weights and blend shapes matrices), automatically providing of compatibility with any graphics engine. We also propose a methodology to complement supervised learning with an unsupervised physically based learning that implicitly solves collisions and enhances cloth quality.

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: In this paper we propose the first deep unsupervised approach in human body reconstruction to estimate body surface from a sparse set of landmarks, so called DeepMurf. We apply a denoising autoencoder to estimate missing landmarks. Then we apply an attention model to estimate body joints from landmarks. Finally, a cascading network is applied to regress parameters of a statistical generative model that reconstructs body. Our set of proposed loss functions allows us to train the network in an unsupervised way. Results on four public datasets show that our approach accurately reconstructs the human body from real world mocap data.

Abstract: We present EgoACO, a deep neural architecture for video action recognition that learns to pool action-context-object descriptors from frame level features by leveraging the verb-noun structure of action labels in egocentric video datasets. The core component of EgoACO is class activation pooling (CAP), a differentiable pooling operation that combines ideas from bilinear pooling for fine-grained recognition and from feature learning for discriminative localization. CAP uses self-attention with a dictionary of learnable weights to pool from the most relevant feature regions. Through CAP, EgoACO learns to decode object and scene context descriptors from video frame features. For temporal modeling in EgoACO, we design a recurrent version of class activation pooling termed Long Short-Term Attention (LSTA). LSTA extends convolutional gated LSTM with built-in spatial attention and a re-designed output gate. Action, object and context descriptors are fused by a multi-head prediction that accounts for the inter-dependencies between noun-verb-action structured labels in egocentric video datasets. EgoACO features built-in visual explanations, helping learning and interpretation. Results on the two largest egocentric action recognition datasets currently available, EPIC-KITCHENS and EGTEA, show that by explicitly decoding action-context-object descriptors, EgoACO achieves state-of-the-art recognition performance.

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.

Abstract: This paper presents a complete pipeline to perform deep learning-based instance segmentation of different types of grains (e.g., corn, sunflower, soybeans, lentils, chickpeas, mote, and beans). The proposed approach consists of using synthesized image datasets for the training process, which are easily generated according to the category of the instance to be segmented. The synthesized imaging process allows generating a large set of well-annotated grain samples with high variability—as large and high as the user requires. Instance segmentation is performed through a popular deep learning based approach, the Mask R-CNN architecture, but any learning-based instance segmentation approach can be considered. Results obtained by the proposed pipeline show that the strategy of using synthesized image datasets for training instance segmentation helps to avoid the time-consuming image annotation stage, as well as to achieve higher intersection over union and average precision performances. Results obtained with different varieties of grains are shown, as well as comparisons with manually annotated images, showing both the simplicity of the process and the improvements in the performance.

Abstract: Active learning is a paradigm aimed at reducing the annotation effort by training the model on actively selected informative and/or representative samples. Another paradigm to reduce the annotation effort is self-training that learns from a large amount of unlabeled data in an unsupervised way and fine-tunes on few labeled samples. Recent developments in self-training have achieved very impressive results rivaling supervised learning on some datasets. The current work focuses on whether the two paradigms can benefit from each other. We studied object recognition datasets including CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Tiny ImageNet with several labeling budgets for the evaluations. Our experiments reveal that self-training is remarkably more efficient than active learning at reducing the labeling effort, that for a low labeling budget, active learning offers no benefit to self-training, and finally that the combination of active learning and self-training is fruitful when the labeling budget is high. The performance gap between active learning trained either with self-training or from scratch diminishes as we approach to the point where almost half of the dataset is labeled.