Debora Gil, David Roche, Agnes Borras, & Jesus Giraldo. (2015). Terminating Evolutionary Algorithms at their Steady State. COA - Computational Optimization and Applications, 61(2), 489–515.
Abstract: Assessing the reliability of termination conditions for evolutionary algorithms (EAs) is of prime importance. An erroneous or weak stop criterion can negatively affect both the computational effort and the final result. We introduce a statistical framework for assessing whether a termination condition is able to stop an EA at its steady state, so that its results can not be improved anymore. We use a regression model in order to determine the requirements ensuring that a measure derived from EA evolving population is related to the distance to the optimum in decision variable space. Our framework is analyzed across 24 benchmark test functions and two standard termination criteria based on function fitness value in objective function space and EA population decision variable space distribution for the differential evolution (DE) paradigm. Results validate our framework as a powerful tool for determining the capability of a measure for terminating EA and the results also identify the decision variable space distribution as the best-suited for accurately terminating DE in real-world applications.
Keywords: Evolutionary algorithms; Termination condition; Steady state; Differential evolution
|
David Roche, Debora Gil, & Jesus Giraldo. (2011). An inference model for analyzing termination conditions of Evolutionary Algorithms. In 14th Congrès Català en Intel·ligencia Artificial (pp. 216–225).
Abstract: In real-world problems, it is mandatory to design a termination condition for Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) ensuring stabilization close to the unknown optimum. Distribution-based quantities are good candidates as far as suitable parameters are used. A main limitation for application to real-world problems is that such parameters strongly depend on the topology of the objective function, as well as, the EA paradigm used.
We claim that the termination problem would be fully solved if we had a model measuring to what extent a distribution-based quantity asymptotically behaves like the solution accuracy. We present a regression-prediction model that relates any two given quantities and reports if they can be statistically swapped as termination conditions. Our framework is applied to two issues. First, exploring if the parameters involved in the computation of distribution-based quantities influence their asymptotic behavior. Second, to what extent existing distribution-based quantities can be asymptotically exchanged for the accuracy of the EA solution.
Keywords: Evolutionary Computation Convergence, Termination Conditions, Statistical Inference
|
Diego Velazquez, Pau Rodriguez, Alexandre Lacoste, Issam H. Laradji, Xavier Roca, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2023). Evaluating Counterfactual Explainers. TMLR - Transactions on Machine Learning Research.
Abstract: Explainability methods have been widely used to provide insight into the decisions made by statistical models, thus facilitating their adoption in various domains within the industry. Counterfactual explanation methods aim to improve our understanding of a model by perturbing samples in a way that would alter its response in an unexpected manner. This information is helpful for users and for machine learning practitioners to understand and improve their models. Given the value provided by counterfactual explanations, there is a growing interest in the research community to investigate and propose new methods. However, we identify two issues that could hinder the progress in this field. (1) Existing metrics do not accurately reflect the value of an explainability method for the users. (2) Comparisons between methods are usually performed with datasets like CelebA, where images are annotated with attributes that do not fully describe them and with subjective attributes such as ``Attractive''. In this work, we address these problems by proposing an evaluation method with a principled metric to evaluate and compare different counterfactual explanation methods. The evaluation method is based on a synthetic dataset where images are fully described by their annotated attributes. As a result, we are able to perform a fair comparison of multiple explainability methods in the recent literature, obtaining insights about their performance. We make the code public for the benefit of the research community.
Keywords: Explainability; Counterfactuals; XAI
|
Onur Ferhat, Arcadi Llanza, & Fernando Vilariño. (2015). A Feature-Based Gaze Estimation Algorithm for Natural Light Scenarios. In Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, Proceedings of 7th Iberian Conference , ibPRIA 2015 (Vol. 9117, pp. 569–576). LNCS. Springer International Publishing.
Abstract: We present an eye tracking system that works with regular webcams. We base our work on open source CVC Eye Tracker [7] and we propose a number of improvements and a novel gaze estimation method. The new method uses features extracted from iris segmentation and it does not fall into the traditional categorization of appearance–based/model–based methods. Our experiments show that our approach reduces the gaze estimation errors by 34 % in the horizontal direction and by 12 % in the vertical direction compared to the baseline system.
Keywords: Eye tracking; Gaze estimation; Natural light; Webcam
|
Maedeh Aghaei, Mariella Dimiccoli, & Petia Radeva. (2017). All the people around me: face clustering in egocentric photo streams. In 24th International Conference on Image Processing.
Abstract: arxiv1703.01790
Given an unconstrained stream of images captured by a wearable photo-camera (2fpm), we propose an unsupervised bottom-up approach for automatic clustering appearing faces into the individual identities present in these data. The problem is challenging since images are acquired under real world conditions; hence the visible appearance of the people in the images undergoes intensive variations. Our proposed pipeline consists of first arranging the photo-stream into events, later, localizing the appearance of multiple people in them, and
finally, grouping various appearances of the same person across different events. Experimental results performed on a dataset acquired by wearing a photo-camera during one month, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for the considered purpose.
Keywords: face discovery; face clustering; deepmatching; bag-of-tracklets; egocentric photo-streams
|
Agata Lapedriza, David Masip, & Jordi Vitria. (2006). On the Use of External Face Features for Identity Verification. Journal of Multimedia, 1(4): 11–20, 11–20.
Abstract: In general automatic face classification applications images are captured in natural environments. In these cases, the performance is affected by variations in facial images related to illumination, pose, occlusion or expressions. Most of the existing face classification systems use only the internal features information, composed by eyes, nose and mouth, since they are more difficult to imitate. Nevertheless, nowadays a lot of applications not related to security are developed, and in these cases the information located at head, chin or ears zones (external features) can be useful to improve the current accuracies. However, the lack of a natural alignment in these areas makes difficult to extract these features applying classic Bottom-Up methods. In this paper, we propose a complete scheme based on a Top-Down reconstruction algorithm to extract external features of face images. To test our system we have performed face verification experiments using public databases, given that identity verification is a general task that has many real life applications. We have considered images uniformly illuminated, images with occlusions and images with high local changes in the illumination, and the obtained results show that the information contributed by the external features can be useful for verification purposes, specially significant when faces are partially occluded.
Keywords: Face Verification, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
|
Ciprian Corneanu, Marc Oliu, Jeffrey F. Cohn, & Sergio Escalera. (2016). Survey on RGB, 3D, Thermal, and Multimodal Approaches for Facial Expression Recognition: History. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 28(8), 1548–1568.
Abstract: Facial expressions are an important way through which humans interact socially. Building a system capable of automatically recognizing facial expressions from images and video has been an intense field of study in recent years. Interpreting such expressions remains challenging and much research is needed about the way they relate to human affect. This paper presents a general overview of automatic RGB, 3D, thermal and multimodal facial expression analysis. We define a new taxonomy for the field, encompassing all steps from face detection to facial expression recognition, and describe and classify the state of the art methods accordingly. We also present the important datasets and the bench-marking of most influential methods. We conclude with a general discussion about trends, important questions and future lines of research.
Keywords: Facial expression; affect; emotion recognition; RGB; 3D; thermal; multimodal
|
David Sanchez-Mendoza, David Masip, & Agata Lapedriza. (2015). Emotion recognition from mid-level features. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 67(Part 1), 66–74.
Abstract: In this paper we present a study on the use of Action Units as mid-level features for automatically recognizing basic and subtle emotions. We propose a representation model based on mid-level facial muscular movement features. We encode these movements dynamically using the Facial Action Coding System, and propose to use these intermediate features based on Action Units (AUs) to classify emotions. AUs activations are detected fusing a set of spatiotemporal geometric and appearance features. The algorithm is validated in two applications: (i) the recognition of 7 basic emotions using the publicly available Cohn-Kanade database, and (ii) the inference of subtle emotional cues in the Newscast database. In this second scenario, we consider emotions that are perceived cumulatively in longer periods of time. In particular, we Automatically classify whether video shoots from public News TV channels refer to Good or Bad news. To deal with the different video lengths we propose a Histogram of Action Units and compute it using a sliding window strategy on the frame sequences. Our approach achieves accuracies close to human perception.
Keywords: Facial expression; Emotion recognition; Action units; Computer vision
|
Dennis H. Lundtoft, Kamal Nasrollahi, Thomas B. Moeslund, & Sergio Escalera. (2016). Spatiotemporal Facial Super-Pixels for Pain Detection. In 9th Conference on Articulated Motion and Deformable Objects.
Abstract: Best student paper award.
Pain detection using facial images is of critical importance in many Health applications. Since pain is a spatiotemporal process, recent works on this topic employ facial spatiotemporal features to detect pain. These systems extract such features from the entire area of the face. In this paper, we show that by employing super-pixels we can divide the face into three regions, in a way that only one of these regions (about one third of the face) contributes to the pain estimation and the other two regions can be discarded. The experimental results on the UNBCMcMaster database show that the proposed system using this single region outperforms state-of-the-art systems in detecting no-pain scenarios, while it reaches comparable results in detecting weak and severe pain scenarios.
Keywords: Facial images; Super-pixels; Spatiotemporal filters; Pain detection
|
Antoni Gurgui, Debora Gil, & Enric Marti. (2015). Laplacian Unitary Domain for Texture Morphing. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications VISIGRAPP2015 (Vol. 1, pp. 693–699). SciTePress.
Abstract: Deformation of expressive textures is the gateway to realistic computer synthesis of expressions. By their good mathematical properties and flexible formulation on irregular meshes, most texture mappings rely on solutions to the Laplacian in the cartesian space. In the context of facial expression morphing, this approximation can be seen from the opposite point of view by neglecting the metric. In this paper, we use the properties of the Laplacian in manifolds to present a novel approach to warping expressive facial images in order to generate a morphing between them.
Keywords: Facial; metamorphosis;LaplacianMorphing
|
Wenjuan Gong, Zhang Yue, Wei Wang, Cheng Peng, & Jordi Gonzalez. (2022). Meta-MMFNet: Meta-Learning Based Multi-Model Fusion Network for Micro-Expression Recognition. ACMTMC - ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, .
Abstract: Despite its wide applications in criminal investigations and clinical communications with patients suffering from autism, automatic micro-expression recognition remains a challenging problem because of the lack of training data and imbalanced classes problems. In this study, we proposed a meta-learning based multi-model fusion network (Meta-MMFNet) to solve the existing problems. The proposed method is based on the metric-based meta-learning pipeline, which is specifically designed for few-shot learning and is suitable for model-level fusion. The frame difference and optical flow features were fused, deep features were extracted from the fused feature, and finally in the meta-learning-based framework, weighted sum model fusion method was applied for micro-expression classification. Meta-MMFNet achieved better results than state-of-the-art methods on four datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/wenjgong/meta-fusion-based-method.
Keywords: Feature Fusion; Model Fusion; Meta-Learning; Micro-Expression Recognition
|
Mariella Dimiccoli. (2016). Figure-ground segregation: A fully nonlocal approach. VR - Vision Research, 126, 308–317.
Abstract: We present a computational model that computes and integrates in a nonlocal fashion several configural cues for automatic figure-ground segregation. Our working hypothesis is that the figural status of each pixel is a nonlocal function of several geometric shape properties and it can be estimated without explicitly relying on object boundaries. The methodology is grounded on two elements: multi-directional linear voting and nonlinear diffusion. A first estimation of the figural status of each pixel is obtained as a result of a voting process, in which several differently oriented line-shaped neighborhoods vote to express their belief about the figural status of the pixel. A nonlinear diffusion process is then applied to enforce the coherence of figural status estimates among perceptually homogeneous regions. Computer simulations fit human perception and match the experimental evidence that several cues cooperate in defining figure-ground segregation. The results of this work suggest that figure-ground segregation involves feedback from cells with larger receptive fields in higher visual cortical areas.
Keywords: Figure-ground segregation; Nonlocal approach; Directional linear voting; Nonlinear diffusion
|
Marçal Rusiñol, Lluis Pere de las Heras, & Oriol Ramos Terrades. (2014). Flowchart Recognition for Non-Textual Information Retrieval in Patent Search. IR - Information Retrieval, 17(5-6), 545–562.
Abstract: Relatively little research has been done on the topic of patent image retrieval and in general in most of the approaches the retrieval is performed in terms of a similarity measure between the query image and the images in the corpus. However, systems aimed at overcoming the semantic gap between the visual description of patent images and their conveyed concepts would be very helpful for patent professionals. In this paper we present a flowchart recognition method aimed at achieving a structured representation of flowchart images that can be further queried semantically. The proposed method was submitted to the CLEF-IP 2012 flowchart recognition task. We report the obtained results on this dataset.
Keywords: Flowchart recognition; Patent documents; Text/graphics separation; Raster-to-vector conversion; Symbol recognition
|
Marçal Rusiñol, & Josep Llados. (2010). Symbol Spotting in Digital Libraries:Focused Retrieval over Graphic-rich Document Collections. Springer.
Abstract: The specific problem of symbol recognition in graphical documents requires additional techniques to those developed for character recognition. The most well-known obstacle is the so-called Sayre paradox: Correct recognition requires good segmentation, yet improvement in segmentation is achieved using information provided by the recognition process. This dilemma can be avoided by techniques that identify sets of regions containing useful information. Such symbol-spotting methods allow the detection of symbols in maps or technical drawings without having to fully segment or fully recognize the entire content.
This unique text/reference provides a complete, integrated and large-scale solution to the challenge of designing a robust symbol-spotting method for collections of graphic-rich documents. The book examines a number of features and descriptors, from basic photometric descriptors commonly used in computer vision techniques to those specific to graphical shapes, presenting a methodology which can be used in a wide variety of applications. Additionally, readers are supplied with an insight into the problem of performance evaluation of spotting methods. Some very basic knowledge of pattern recognition, document image analysis and graphics recognition is assumed.
Keywords: Focused Retrieval , Graphical Pattern Indexation,Graphics Recognition ,Pattern Recognition , Performance Evaluation , Symbol Description ,Symbol Spotting
|
Aura Hernandez-Sabate, Debora Gil, Eduard Fernandez-Nofrerias, Petia Radeva, & Enric Marti. (2009). Approaching Artery Rigid Dynamics in IVUS. TMI - IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 28(11), 1670–1680.
Abstract: Tissue biomechanical properties (like strain and stress) are playing an increasing role in diagnosis and long-term treatment of intravascular coronary diseases. Their assessment strongly relies on estimation of vessel wall deformation. Since intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) sequences allow visualizing vessel morphology and reflect its dynamics, this technique represents a useful tool for evaluation of tissue mechanical properties. Image misalignment introduced by vessel-catheter motion is a major artifact for a proper tracking of tissue deformation. In this work, we focus on compensating and assessing IVUS rigid in-plane motion due to heart beating. Motion parameters are computed by considering both the vessel geometry and its appearance in the image. Continuum mechanics laws serve to introduce a novel score measuring motion reduction in in vivo sequences. Synthetic experiments validate the proposed score as measure of motion parameters accuracy; whereas results in in vivo pullbacks show the reliability of the presented methodologies in clinical cases.
Keywords: Fourier analysis; intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) dynamics; longitudinal motion; quality measures; tissue deformation.
|