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: When neural networks process images which do not resemble the distribution seen during training, so called out-of-distribution images, they often make wrong predictions, and do so too confidently. The capability to detect out-of-distribution images is therefore crucial for many real-world applications. We divide out-of-distribution detection between novelty detection ---images of classes which are not in the training set but are related to those---, and anomaly detection ---images with classes which are unrelated to the training set. By related we mean they contain the same type of objects, like digits in MNIST and SVHN. Most existing work has focused on anomaly detection, and has addressed this problem considering networks trained with the cross-entropy loss. Differently from them, we propose to use metric learning which does not have the drawback of the softmax layer (inherent to cross-entropy methods), which forces the network to divide its prediction power over the learned classes. We perform extensive experiments and evaluate both novelty and anomaly detection, even in a relevant application such as traffic sign recognition, obtaining comparable or better results than previous works.

Abstract: Designing discriminative powerful texture features robust to realistic imaging conditions is a challenging computer vision problem with many applications, including material recognition and analysis of satellite or aerial imagery. In the past, most texture description approaches were based on dense orderless statistical distribution of local features. However, most recent approaches to texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The de facto practice when learning these CNN models is to use RGB patches as input with training performed on large amounts of labeled data (ImageNet). In this paper, we show that Local Binary Patterns (LBP) encoded CNN models, codenamed TEX-Nets, trained using mapped coded images with explicit LBP based texture information provide complementary information to the standard RGB deep models. Additionally, two deep architectures, namely early and late fusion, are investigated to combine the texture and color information. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate Binary Patterns encoded CNNs and different deep network fusion architectures for texture recognition and remote sensing scene classification. We perform comprehensive experiments on four texture recognition datasets and four remote sensing scene classification benchmarks: UC-Merced with 21 scene categories, WHU-RS19 with 19 scene classes, RSSCN7 with 7 categories and the recently introduced large scale aerial image dataset (AID) with 30 aerial scene types. We demonstrate that TEX-Nets provide complementary information to standard RGB deep model of the same network architecture. Our late fusion TEX-Net architecture always improves the overall performance compared to the standard RGB network on both recognition problems. Furthermore, our final combination leads to consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art for remote sensing scene

Abstract: In this paper we propose an approach to avoiding catastrophic forgetting in sequential task learning scenarios. Our technique is based on a network reparameterization that approximately diagonalizes the Fisher Information Matrix of the network parameters. This reparameterization takes the form of
a factorized rotation of parameter space which, when used in conjunction with Elastic Weight Consolidation (which assumes a diagonal Fisher Information Matrix), leads to significantly better performance on lifelong learning of sequential tasks. Experimental results on the MNIST, CIFAR-100, CUB-200 and
Stanford-40 datasets demonstrate that we significantly improve the results of standard elastic weight consolidation, and that we obtain competitive results when compared to the state-of-the-art in lifelong learning without forgetting.

Abstract: This paper describes the multimodal Neural Machine Translation systems developed by LIUM and CVC for WMT18 Shared Task on Multimodal Translation. This year we propose several modifications to our previou multimodal attention architecture in order to better integrate convolutional features and refine them using encoder-side information. Our final constrained submissions
ranked first for English→French and second for English→German language pairs among the constrained submissions according to the automatic evaluation metric METEOR.

Abstract: The majority of existing color naming methods focuses on the eleven basic color terms of the English language. However, in many applications, different sets of color names are used for the accurate description of objects. Labeling data to learn these domain-specific color names is an expensive and laborious task. Therefore, in this article we aim to learn color names from weakly labeled data. For this purpose, we add an attention branch to the color naming network. The attention branch is used to modulate the pixel-wise color naming predictions of the network. In experiments, we illustrate that the attention branch correctly identifies the relevant regions. Furthermore, we show that our method obtains state-of-the-art results for pixel-wise and image-wise classification on the EBAY dataset and is able to learn color names for various domains.

Abstract: Training a Siamese architecture for re-identification with a large number of identities is a challenging task due to the difficulty of finding relevant negative samples efficiently. In this work we present Bag of Negatives (BoN), a method for accelerated and improved training of Siamese networks that scales well on datasets with a very large number of identities. BoN is an efficient and loss-independent method, able to select a bag of high quality negatives, based on a novel online hashing strategy.

Abstract: In this study we provide the analysis of eye movement behavior elicited by low-level feature distinctiveness with a dataset of synthetically-generated image patterns. Design of visual stimuli was inspired by the ones used in previous psychophysical experiments, namely in free-viewing and visual searching tasks, to provide a total of 15 types of stimuli, divided according to the task and feature to be analyzed. Our interest is to analyze the influences of low-level feature contrast between a salient region and the rest of distractors, providing fixation localization characteristics and reaction time of landing inside the salient region. Eye-tracking data was collected from 34 participants during the viewing of a 230 images dataset. Results show that saliency is predominantly and distinctively influenced by: 1. feature type, 2. feature contrast, 3. temporality of fixations, 4. task difficulty and 5. center bias. This experimentation proposes a new psychophysical basis for saliency model evaluation using synthetic images.

Abstract: We propose an end-to-end tracking framework for fusing the RGB and TIR modalities in RGB-T tracking. Our baseline tracker is DiMP (Discriminative Model Prediction), which employs a carefully designed target prediction network trained end-to-end using a discriminative loss. We analyze the effectiveness of modality fusion in each of the main components in DiMP, i.e. feature extractor, target estimation network, and classifier. We consider several fusion mechanisms acting at different levels of the framework, including pixel-level, feature-level and response-level. Our tracker is trained in an end-to-end manner, enabling the components to learn how to fuse the information from both modalities. As data to train our model, we generate a large-scale RGB-T dataset by considering an annotated RGB tracking dataset (GOT-10k) and synthesizing paired TIR images using an image-to-image translation approach. We perform extensive experiments on VOT-RGBT2019 dataset and RGBT210 dataset, evaluating each type of modality fusing on each model component. The results show that the proposed fusion mechanisms improve the performance of the single modality counterparts. We obtain our best results when fusing at the feature-level on both the IoU-Net and the model predictor, obtaining an EAO score of 0.391 on VOT-RGBT2019 dataset. With this fusion mechanism we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on RGBT210 dataset.