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Author Debora Gil; Antonio Esteban Lansaque; Agnes Borras; Esmitt Ramirez; Carles Sanchez
Title Intraoperative Extraction of Airways Anatomy in VideoBronchoscopy Type Journal Article
Year 2020 Publication IEEE Access Abbreviated Journal ACCESS
Volume 8 Issue Pages 159696 - 159704
Keywords
Abstract A main bottleneck in bronchoscopic biopsy sampling is to efficiently reach the lesion navigating across bronchial levels. Any guidance system should be able to localize the scope position during the intervention with minimal costs and alteration of clinical protocols. With the final goal of an affordable image-based guidance, this work presents a novel strategy to extract and codify the anatomical structure of bronchi, as well as, the scope navigation path from videobronchoscopy. Experiments using interventional data show that our method accurately identifies the bronchial structure. Meanwhile, experiments using simulated data verify that the extracted navigation path matches the 3D route.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes IAM; 600.139; 600.145 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ GEB2020 Serial 3467
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Author Saad Minhas; Aura Hernandez-Sabate; Shoaib Ehsan; Klaus McDonald Maier
Title Effects of Non-Driving Related Tasks during Self-Driving mode Type Journal Article
Year 2022 Publication IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems Abbreviated Journal TITS
Volume 23 Issue 2 Pages 1391-1399
Keywords
Abstract Perception reaction time and mental workload have proven to be crucial in manual driving. Moreover, in highly automated cars, where most of the research is focusing on Level 4 Autonomous driving, take-over performance is also a key factor when taking road safety into account. This study aims to investigate how the immersion in non-driving related tasks affects the take-over performance of drivers in given scenarios. The paper also highlights the use of virtual simulators to gather efficient data that can be crucial in easing the transition between manual and autonomous driving scenarios. The use of Computer Aided Simulations is of absolute importance in this day and age since the automotive industry is rapidly moving towards Autonomous technology. An experiment comprising of 40 subjects was performed to examine the reaction times of driver and the influence of other variables in the success of take-over performance in highly automated driving under different circumstances within a highway virtual environment. The results reflect the relationship between reaction times under different scenarios that the drivers might face under the circumstances stated above as well as the importance of variables such as velocity in the success on regaining car control after automated driving. The implications of the results acquired are important for understanding the criteria needed for designing Human Machine Interfaces specifically aimed towards automated driving conditions. Understanding the need to keep drivers in the loop during automation, whilst allowing drivers to safely engage in other non-driving related tasks is an important research area which can be aided by the proposed study.
Address Feb. 2022
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes IAM; 600.139; 600.145 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ MHE2022 Serial 3468
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Author Akhil Gurram; Ahmet Faruk Tuna; Fengyi Shen; Onay Urfalioglu; Antonio Lopez
Title Monocular Depth Estimation through Virtual-world Supervision and Real-world SfM Self-Supervision Type Journal Article
Year 2021 Publication IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems Abbreviated Journal TITS
Volume 23 Issue 8 Pages 12738-12751
Keywords
Abstract Depth information is essential for on-board perception in autonomous driving and driver assistance. Monocular depth estimation (MDE) is very appealing since it allows for appearance and depth being on direct pixelwise correspondence without further calibration. Best MDE models are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained in a supervised manner, i.e., assuming pixelwise ground truth (GT). Usually, this GT is acquired at training time through a calibrated multi-modal suite of sensors. However, also using only a monocular system at training time is cheaper and more scalable. This is possible by relying on structure-from-motion (SfM) principles to generate self-supervision. Nevertheless, problems of camouflaged objects, visibility changes, static-camera intervals, textureless areas, and scale ambiguity, diminish the usefulness of such self-supervision. In this paper, we perform monocular depth estimation by virtual-world supervision (MonoDEVS) and real-world SfM self-supervision. We compensate the SfM self-supervision limitations by leveraging virtual-world images with accurate semantic and depth supervision and addressing the virtual-to-real domain gap. Our MonoDEVSNet outperforms previous MDE CNNs trained on monocular and even stereo sequences.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS; 600.118 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ GTS2021 Serial 3598
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Author Carola Figueroa Flores
Title Visual Saliency for Object Recognition, and Object Recognition for Visual Saliency Type Book Whole
Year 2021 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords computer vision; visual saliency; fine-grained object recognition; convolutional neural networks; images classification
Abstract For humans, the recognition of objects is an almost instantaneous, precise and
extremely adaptable process. Furthermore, we have the innate capability to learn
new object classes from only few examples. The human brain lowers the complexity
of the incoming data by filtering out part of the information and only processing
those things that capture our attention. This, mixed with our biological predisposition to respond to certain shapes or colors, allows us to recognize in a simple
glance the most important or salient regions from an image. This mechanism can
be observed by analyzing on which parts of images subjects place attention; where
they fix their eyes when an image is shown to them. The most accurate way to
record this behavior is to track eye movements while displaying images.
Computational saliency estimation aims to identify to what extent regions or
objects stand out with respect to their surroundings to human observers. Saliency
maps can be used in a wide range of applications including object detection, image
and video compression, and visual tracking. The majority of research in the field has
focused on automatically estimating saliency maps given an input image. Instead, in
this thesis, we set out to incorporate saliency maps in an object recognition pipeline:
we want to investigate whether saliency maps can improve object recognition
results.
In this thesis, we identify several problems related to visual saliency estimation.
First, to what extent the estimation of saliency can be exploited to improve the
training of an object recognition model when scarce training data is available. To
solve this problem, we design an image classification network that incorporates
saliency information as input. This network processes the saliency map through a
dedicated network branch and uses the resulting characteristics to modulate the
standard bottom-up visual characteristics of the original image input. We will refer to this technique as saliency-modulated image classification (SMIC). In extensive
experiments on standard benchmark datasets for fine-grained object recognition,
we show that our proposed architecture can significantly improve performance,
especially on dataset with scarce training data.
Next, we address the main drawback of the above pipeline: SMIC requires an
explicit saliency algorithm that must be trained on a saliency dataset. To solve this,
we implement a hallucination mechanism that allows us to incorporate the saliency
estimation branch in an end-to-end trained neural network architecture that only
needs the RGB image as an input. A side-effect of this architecture is the estimation
of saliency maps. In experiments, we show that this architecture can obtain similar
results on object recognition as SMIC but without the requirement of ground truth
saliency maps to train the system.
Finally, we evaluated the accuracy of the saliency maps that occur as a sideeffect of object recognition. For this purpose, we use a set of benchmark datasets
for saliency evaluation based on eye-tracking experiments. Surprisingly, the estimated saliency maps are very similar to the maps that are computed from human
eye-tracking experiments. Our results show that these saliency maps can obtain
competitive results on benchmark saliency maps. On one synthetic saliency dataset
this method even obtains the state-of-the-art without the need of ever having seen
an actual saliency image for training.
Address March 2021
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Joost Van de Weijer;Bogdan Raducanu
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-122714-4-7 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes LAMP; 600.120 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Fig2021 Serial 3600
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Author Debora Gil; Guillermo Torres
Title A multi-shape loss function with adaptive class balancing for the segmentation of lung structures Type Conference Article
Year 2020 Publication 34th International Congress and Exhibition on Computer Assisted Radiology & Surgery Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract
Address Virtual; June 2020
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference CARS
Notes IAM; 600.139; 600.145 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ GiT2020 Serial 3472
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Author Debora Gil; Oriol Ramos Terrades; Raquel Perez
Title Topological Radiomics (TOPiomics): Early Detection of Genetic Abnormalities in Cancer Treatment Evolution Type Conference Article
Year 2020 Publication Women in Geometry and Topology Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract
Address Barcelona; September 2019
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes IAM; DAG; 600.139; 600.145; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ GRP2020 Serial 3473
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Author Debora Gil; Katerine Diaz; Carles Sanchez; Aura Hernandez-Sabate
Title Early Screening of SARS-CoV-2 by Intelligent Analysis of X-Ray Images Type Miscellaneous
Year 2020 Publication Arxiv Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Future SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak COVID-XX might possibly occur during the next years. However the pathology in humans is so recent that many clinical aspects, like early detection of complications, side effects after recovery or early screening, are currently unknown. In spite of the number of cases of COVID-19, its rapid spread putting many sanitary systems in the edge of collapse has hindered proper collection and analysis of the data related to COVID-19 clinical aspects. We describe an interdisciplinary initiative that integrates clinical research, with image diagnostics and the use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence and radiomics with the aim of clarifying some of SARS-CoV-2 open questions. The whole initiative addresses 3 main points: 1) collection of standardize data including images, clinical data and analytics; 2) COVID-19 screening for its early diagnosis at primary care centers; 3) define radiomic signatures of COVID-19 evolution and associated pathologies for the early treatment of complications. In particular, in this paper we present a general overview of the project, the experimental design and first results of X-ray COVID-19 detection using a classic approach based on HoG and feature selection. Our experiments include a comparison to some recent methods for COVID-19 screening in X-Ray and an exploratory analysis of the feasibility of X-Ray COVID-19 screening. Results show that classic approaches can outperform deep-learning methods in this experimental setting, indicate the feasibility of early COVID-19 screening and that non-COVID infiltration is the group of patients most similar to COVID-19 in terms of radiological description of X-ray. Therefore, an efficient COVID-19 screening should be complemented with other clinical data to better discriminate these cases.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes IAM; 600.139; 600.145; 601.337 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ GDS2020 Serial 3474
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Author Oriol Ramos Terrades; Albert Berenguel; Debora Gil
Title A flexible outlier detector based on a topology given by graph communities Type Miscellaneous
Year 2020 Publication Arxiv Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Outlier, or anomaly, detection is essential for optimal performance of machine learning methods and statistical predictive models. It is not just a technical step in a data cleaning process but a key topic in many fields such as fraudulent document detection, in medical applications and assisted diagnosis systems or detecting security threats. In contrast to population-based methods, neighborhood based local approaches are simple flexible methods that have the potential to perform well in small sample size unbalanced problems. However, a main concern of local approaches is the impact that the computation of each sample neighborhood has on the method performance. Most approaches use a distance in the feature space to define a single neighborhood that requires careful selection of several parameters. This work presents a local approach based on a local measure of the heterogeneity of sample labels in the feature space considered as a topological manifold. Topology is computed using the communities of a weighted graph codifying mutual nearest neighbors in the feature space. This way, we provide with a set of multiple neighborhoods able to describe the structure of complex spaces without parameter fine tuning. The extensive experiments on real-world data sets show that our approach overall outperforms, both, local and global strategies in multi and single view settings.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes IAM; DAG; 600.139; 600.145; 600.140; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ RBG2020 Serial 3475
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Author Diego Porres
Title Discriminator Synthesis: On reusing the other half of Generative Adversarial Networks Type Conference Article
Year 2021 Publication Machine Learning for Creativity and Design, Neurips Workshop Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Generative Adversarial Networks have long since revolutionized the world of computer vision and, tied to it, the world of art. Arduous efforts have gone into fully utilizing and stabilizing training so that outputs of the Generator network have the highest possible fidelity, but little has gone into using the Discriminator after training is complete. In this work, we propose to use the latter and show a way to use the features it has learned from the training dataset to both alter an image and generate one from scratch. We name this method Discriminator Dreaming, and the full code can be found at this https URL.
Address Virtual; December 2021
Corporate Author Thesis
Publisher Place of Publication Editor
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN Medium
Area Expedition Conference NEURIPSW
Notes ADAS; 601.365 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Por2021 Serial 3597
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Author Gabriel Villalonga
Title Leveraging Synthetic Data to Create Autonomous Driving Perception Systems Type Book Whole
Year 2021 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Manually annotating images to develop vision models has been a major bottleneck
since computer vision and machine learning started to walk together. This has
been more evident since computer vision falls on the shoulders of data-hungry
deep learning techniques. When addressing on-board perception for autonomous
driving, the curse of data annotation is exacerbated due to the use of additional
sensors such as LiDAR. Therefore, any approach aiming at reducing such a timeconsuming and costly work is of high interest for addressing autonomous driving
and, in fact, for any application requiring some sort of artificial perception. In the
last decade, it has been shown that leveraging from synthetic data is a paradigm
worth to pursue in order to minimizing manual data annotation. The reason is
that the automatic process of generating synthetic data can also produce different
types of associated annotations (e.g. object bounding boxes for synthetic images
and LiDAR pointclouds, pixel/point-wise semantic information, etc.). Directly
using synthetic data for training deep perception models may not be the definitive
solution in all circumstances since it can appear a synth-to-real domain shift. In
this context, this work focuses on leveraging synthetic data to alleviate manual
annotation for three perception tasks related to driving assistance and autonomous
driving. In all cases, we assume the use of deep convolutional neural networks
(CNNs) to develop our perception models.
The first task addresses traffic sign recognition (TSR), a kind of multi-class
classification problem. We assume that the number of sign classes to be recognized
must be suddenly increased without having annotated samples to perform the
corresponding TSR CNN re-training. We show that leveraging synthetic samples of
such new classes and transforming them by a generative adversarial network (GAN)
trained on the known classes (i.e. without using samples from the new classes), it is
possible to re-train the TSR CNN to properly classify all the signs for a ∼ 1/4 ratio of
new/known sign classes. The second task addresses on-board 2D object detection,
focusing on vehicles and pedestrians. In this case, we assume that we receive a set
of images without the annotations required to train an object detector, i.e. without
object bounding boxes. Therefore, our goal is to self-annotate these images so
that they can later be used to train the desired object detector. In order to reach
this goal, we leverage from synthetic data and propose a semi-supervised learning
approach based on the co-training idea. In fact, we use a GAN to reduce the synthto-real domain shift before applying co-training. Our quantitative results show
that co-training and GAN-based image-to-image translation complement each
other up to allow the training of object detectors without manual annotation, and still almost reaching the upper-bound performances of the detectors trained from
human annotations. While in previous tasks we focus on vision-based perception,
the third task we address focuses on LiDAR pointclouds. Our initial goal was to
develop a 3D object detector trained on synthetic LiDAR-style pointclouds. While
for images we may expect synth/real-to-real domain shift due to differences in
their appearance (e.g. when source and target images come from different camera
sensors), we did not expect so for LiDAR pointclouds since these active sensors
factor out appearance and provide sampled shapes. However, in practice, we have
seen that it can be domain shift even among real-world LiDAR pointclouds. Factors
such as the sampling parameters of the LiDARs, the sensor suite configuration onboard the ego-vehicle, and the human annotation of 3D bounding boxes, do induce
a domain shift. We show it through comprehensive experiments with different
publicly available datasets and 3D detectors. This redirected our goal towards the
design of a GAN for pointcloud-to-pointcloud translation, a relatively unexplored
topic.
Finally, it is worth to mention that all the synthetic datasets used for these three
tasks, have been designed and generated in the context of this PhD work and will
be publicly released. Overall, we think this PhD presents several steps forward to
encourage leveraging synthetic data for developing deep perception models in the
field of driving assistance and autonomous driving.
Address February 2021
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Antonio Lopez;German Ros
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-122714-2-3 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes ADAS; 600.118 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Vil2021 Serial 3599
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Author Pau Riba
Title Distilling Structure from Imagery: Graph-based Models for the Interpretation of Document Images Type Book Whole
Year 2020 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract From its early stages, the community of Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision has considered the importance of leveraging the structural information when understanding images. Usually, graphs have been proposed as a suitable model to represent this kind of information due to their flexibility and representational power able to codify both, the components, objects, or entities and their pairwise relationship. Even though graphs have been successfully applied to a huge variety of tasks, as a result of their symbolic and relational nature, graphs have always suffered from some limitations compared to statistical approaches. Indeed, some trivial mathematical operations do not have an equivalence in the graph domain. For instance, in the core of many pattern recognition applications, there is a need to compare two objects. This operation, which is trivial when considering feature vectors defined in \(\mathbb{R}^n\), is not properly defined for graphs.


In this thesis, we have investigated the importance of the structural information from two perspectives, the traditional graph-based methods and the new advances on Geometric Deep Learning. On the one hand, we explore the problem of defining a graph representation and how to deal with it on a large scale and noisy scenario. On the other hand, Graph Neural Networks are proposed to first redefine a Graph Edit Distance methodologies as a metric learning problem, and second, to apply them in a real use case scenario for the detection of repetitive patterns which define tables in invoice documents. As experimental framework, we have validated the different methodological contributions in the domain of Document Image Analysis and Recognition.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Josep Llados;Alicia Fornes
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-121011-6-4 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Rib20 Serial 3478
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Author Raul Gomez
Title Exploiting the Interplay between Visual and Textual Data for Scene Interpretation Type Book Whole
Year 2020 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Machine learning experimentation under controlled scenarios and standard datasets is necessary to compare algorithms performance by evaluating all of them in the same setup. However, experimentation on how those algorithms perform on unconstrained data and applied tasks to solve real world problems is also a must to ascertain how that research can contribute to our society.
In this dissertation we experiment with the latest computer vision and natural language processing algorithms applying them to multimodal scene interpretation. Particularly, we research on how image and text understanding can be jointly exploited to address real world problems, focusing on learning from Social Media data.
We address several tasks that involve image and textual information, discuss their characteristics and offer our experimentation conclusions. First, we work on detection of scene text in images. Then, we work with Social Media posts, exploiting the captions associated to images as supervision to learn visual features, which we apply to multimodal semantic image retrieval. Subsequently, we work with geolocated Social Media images with associated tags, experimenting on how to use the tags as supervision, on location sensitive image retrieval and on exploiting location information for image tagging. Finally, we work on a specific classification problem of Social Media publications consisting on an image and a text: Multimodal hate speech classification.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Dimosthenis Karatzas;Lluis Gomez;Jaume Gibert
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-121011-7-1 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Gom20 Serial 3479
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Author Sounak Dey
Title Mapping between Images and Conceptual Spaces: Sketch-based Image Retrieval Type Book Whole
Year 2020 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract This thesis presents several contributions to the literature of sketch based image retrieval (SBIR). In SBIR the first challenge we face is how to map two different domains to common space for effective retrieval of images, while tackling the different levels of abstraction people use to express their notion of objects around while sketching. To this extent we first propose a cross-modal learning framework that maps both sketches and text into a joint embedding space invariant to depictive style, while preserving semantics. Then we have also investigated different query types possible to encompass people's dilema in sketching certain world objects. For this 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. 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.

Finally, we explore the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR), where human sketches are used as queries to conduct retrieval of photos from unseen categories. We importantly advance prior arts by proposing a novel ZS-SBIR scenario that represents a firm step forward in its practical application. The new setting uniquely recognises two important yet often neglected challenges of practical ZS-SBIR, (i) the large domain gap between amateur sketch and photo, and (ii) the necessity for moving towards large-scale retrieval. We first contribute to the community a novel ZS-SBIR dataset, QuickDraw-Extended. We also in this dissertation pave the path to the future direction of research in this domain.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Josep Llados;Umapada Pal
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-121011-8-8 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Dey20 Serial 3480
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Author Marc Masana
Title Lifelong Learning of Neural Networks: Detecting Novelty and Adapting to New Domains without Forgetting Type Book Whole
Year 2020 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Computer vision has gone through considerable changes in the last decade as neural networks have come into common use. As available computational capabilities have grown, neural networks have achieved breakthroughs in many computer vision tasks, and have even surpassed human performance in others. With accuracy being so high, focus has shifted to other issues and challenges. One research direction that saw a notable increase in interest is on lifelong learning systems. Such systems should be capable of efficiently performing tasks, identifying and learning new ones, and should moreover be able to deploy smaller versions of themselves which are experts on specific tasks. In this thesis, we contribute to research on lifelong learning and address the compression and adaptation of networks to small target domains, the incremental learning of networks faced with a variety of tasks, and finally the detection of out-of-distribution samples at inference time.

We explore how knowledge can be transferred from large pretrained models to more task-specific networks capable of running on smaller devices by extracting the most relevant information. Using a pretrained model provides more robust representations and a more stable initialization when learning a smaller task, which leads to higher performance and is known as domain adaptation. However, those models are too large for certain applications that need to be deployed on devices with limited memory and computational capacity. In this thesis we show that, after performing domain adaptation, some learned activations barely contribute to the predictions of the model. Therefore, we propose to apply network compression based on low-rank matrix decomposition using the activation statistics. This results in a significant reduction of the model size and the computational cost.

Like human intelligence, machine intelligence aims to have the ability to learn and remember knowledge. However, when a trained neural network is presented with learning a new task, it ends up forgetting previous ones. This is known as catastrophic forgetting and its avoidance is studied in continual learning. The work presented in this thesis extensively surveys continual learning techniques and presents an approach to avoid catastrophic forgetting in sequential task learning scenarios. Our technique is based on using ternary masks in order to update a network to new tasks, reusing the knowledge of previous ones while not forgetting anything about them. In contrast to earlier work, our masks are applied to the activations of each layer instead of the weights. This considerably reduces the number of parameters to be added for each new task. Furthermore, the analysis on a wide range of work on incremental learning without access to the task-ID, provides insight on current state-of-the-art approaches that focus on avoiding catastrophic forgetting by using regularization, rehearsal of previous tasks from a small memory, or compensating the task-recency bias.

Neural networks trained with a cross-entropy loss force the outputs of the model to tend toward a one-hot encoded vector. This leads to models being too overly confident when presented with images or classes that were not present in the training distribution. The capacity of a system to be aware of the boundaries of the learned tasks and identify anomalies or classes which have not been learned yet is key to lifelong learning and autonomous systems. In this thesis, we present a metric learning approach to out-of-distribution detection that learns the task at hand on an embedding space.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Joost Van de Weijer;Andrew Bagdanov
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-121011-9-5 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes LAMP; 600.120 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Mas20 Serial 3481
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Author Lei Kang
Title Robust Handwritten Text Recognition in Scarce Labeling Scenarios: Disentanglement, Adaptation and Generation Type Book Whole
Year 2020 Publication PhD Thesis, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona-CVC Abbreviated Journal
Volume Issue Pages
Keywords
Abstract Handwritten documents are not only preserved in historical archives but also widely used in administrative documents such as cheques and claims. With the rise of the deep learning era, many state-of-the-art approaches have achieved good performance on specific datasets for Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR). However, it is still challenging to solve real use cases because of the varied handwriting styles across different writers and the limited labeled data. Thus, both explorin a more robust handwriting recognition architectures and proposing methods to diminish the gap between the source and target data in an unsupervised way are
demanded.
In this thesis, firstly, we explore novel architectures for HTR, from Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) method with attention mechanism to non-recurrent Transformer-based method. Secondly, we focus on diminishing the performance gap between source and target data in an unsupervised way. Finally, we propose a group of generative methods for handwritten text images, which could be utilized to increase the training set to obtain a more robust recognizer. In addition, by simply modifying the generative method and joining it with a recognizer, we end up with an effective disentanglement method to distill textual content from handwriting styles so as to achieve a generalized recognition performance.
We outperform state-of-the-art HTR performances in the experimental results among different scientific and industrial datasets, which prove the effectiveness of the proposed methods. To the best of our knowledge, the non-recurrent recognizer and the disentanglement method are the first contributions in the handwriting recognition field. Furthermore, we have outlined the potential research lines, which would be interesting to explore in the future.
Address
Corporate Author Thesis Ph.D. thesis
Publisher Ediciones Graficas Rey Place of Publication Editor Alicia Fornes;Marçal Rusiñol;Mauricio Villegas
Language (up) Summary Language Original Title
Series Editor Series Title Abbreviated Series Title
Series Volume Series Issue Edition
ISSN ISBN 978-84-122714-0-9 Medium
Area Expedition Conference
Notes DAG; 600.121 Approved no
Call Number Admin @ si @ Kan20 Serial 3482
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