Ali Furkan Biten. (2022). A Bitter-Sweet Symphony on Vision and Language: Bias and World Knowledge (Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Lluis Gomez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Vision and Language are broadly regarded as cornerstones of intelligence. Even though language and vision have different aims – language having the purpose of communication, transmission of information and vision having the purpose of constructing mental representations around us to navigate and interact with objects – they cooperate and depend on one another in many tasks we perform effortlessly. This reliance is actively being studied in various Computer Vision tasks, e.g. image captioning, visual question answering, image-sentence retrieval, phrase grounding, just to name a few. All of these tasks share the inherent difficulty of the aligning the two modalities, while being robust to language
priors and various biases existing in the datasets. One of the ultimate goal for vision and language research is to be able to inject world knowledge while getting rid of the biases that come with the datasets. In this thesis, we mainly focus on two vision and language tasks, namely Image Captioning and Scene-Text Visual Question Answering (STVQA).
In both domains, we start by defining a new task that requires the utilization of world knowledge and in both tasks, we find that the models commonly employed are prone to biases that exist in the data. Concretely, we introduce new tasks and discover several problems that impede performance at each level and provide remedies or possible solutions in each chapter: i) We define a new task to move beyond Image Captioning to Image Interpretation that can utilize Named Entities in the form of world knowledge. ii) We study the object hallucination problem in classic Image Captioning systems and develop an architecture-agnostic solution. iii) We define a sub-task of Visual Question Answering that requires reading the text in the image (STVQA), where we highlight the limitations of current models. iv) We propose an architecture for the STVQA task that can point to the answer in the image and show how to combine it with classic VQA models. v) We show how far language can get us in STVQA and discover yet another bias which causes the models to disregard the image while doing Visual Question Answering.
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Andres Mafla. (2022). Leveraging Scene Text Information for Image Interpretation (Dimosthenis Karatzas, & Lluis Gomez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Until recently, most computer vision models remained illiterate, largely ignoring the semantically rich and explicit information contained in scene text. Recent progress in scene text detection and recognition has recently allowed exploring its role in a diverse set of open computer vision problems, e.g. image classification, image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering to name a few. The explicit semantics of scene text closely requires specific modeling similar to language. However, scene text is a particular signal that has to be interpreted according to a comprehensive perspective that encapsulates all the visual cues in an image. Incorporating this information is a straightforward task for humans, but if we are unfamiliar with a language or scripture, achieving a complete world understanding is impossible (e.a. visiting a foreign country with a different alphabet). Despite the importance of scene text, modeling it requires considering the several ways in which scene text interacts with an image, processing and fusing an additional modality. In this thesis, we mainly focus
on two tasks, scene text-based fine-grained image classification, and cross-modal retrieval. In both studied tasks we identify existing limitations in current approaches and propose plausible solutions. Concretely, in each chapter: i) We define a compact way to embed scene text that generalizes to unseen words at training time while performing in real-time. ii) We incorporate the previously learned scene text embedding to create an image-level descriptor that overcomes optical character recognition (OCR) errors which is well-suited to the fine-grained image classification task. iii) We design a region-level reasoning network that learns the interaction through semantics among salient visual regions and scene text instances. iv) We employ scene text information in image-text matching and introduce the Scene Text Aware Cross-Modal retrieval StacMR task. We gather a dataset that incorporates scene text and design a model suited for the newly studied modality. v) We identify the drawbacks of current retrieval metrics in cross-modal retrieval. An image captioning metric is proposed as a way of better evaluating semantics in retrieved results. Ample experimentation shows that incorporating such semantics into a model yields better semantic results while
requiring significantly less data to converge.
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Mohamed Ali Souibgui. (2022). Document Image Enhancement and Recognition in Low Resource Scenarios: Application to Ciphers and Handwritten Text (Alicia Fornes, & Yousri Kessentini, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: In this thesis, we propose different contributions with the goal of enhancing and recognizing historical handwritten document images, especially the ones with rare scripts, such as cipher documents.
In the first part, some effective end-to-end models for Document Image Enhancement (DIE) using deep learning models were presented. First, Generative Adversarial Networks (cGAN) for different tasks (document clean-up, binarization, deblurring, and watermark removal) were explored. Next, we further improve the results by recovering the degraded document images into a clean and readable form by integrating a text recognizer into the cGAN model to promote the generated document image to be more readable. Afterward, we present a new encoder-decoder architecture based on vision transformers to enhance both machine-printed and handwritten document images, in an end-to-end fashion.
The second part of the thesis addresses Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in low resource scenarios, i.e. when only few labeled training data is available. We propose novel methods for recognizing ciphers with rare scripts. First, a few-shot object detection based method was proposed. Then, we incorporate a progressive learning strategy that automatically assignspseudo-labels to a set of unlabeled data to reduce the human labor of annotating few pages while maintaining the good performance of the model. Secondly, a data generation technique based on Bayesian Program Learning (BPL) is proposed to overcome the lack of data in such rare scripts. Thirdly, we propose a Text-Degradation Invariant Auto Encoder (Text-DIAE). This latter self-supervised model is designed to tackle two tasks, text recognition and document image enhancement. The proposed model does not exhibit limitations of previous state-of-the-art methods based on contrastive losses, while at the same time, it requires substantially fewer data samples to converge.
In the third part of the thesis, we analyze, from the user perspective, the usage of HTR systems in low resource scenarios. This contrasts with the usual research on HTR, which often focuses on technical aspects only and rarely devotes efforts on implementing software tools for scholars in Humanities.
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Danna Xue, Fei Yang, Pei Wang, Luis Herranz, Jinqiu Sun, Yu Zhu, et al. (2022). SlimSeg: Slimmable Semantic Segmentation with Boundary Supervision. In 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (pp. 6539–6548). Association for Computing Machinery.
Abstract: Accurate semantic segmentation models typically require significant computational resources, inhibiting their use in practical applications. Recent works rely on well-crafted lightweight models to achieve fast inference. However, these models cannot flexibly adapt to varying accuracy and efficiency requirements. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective slimmable semantic segmentation (SlimSeg) method, which can be executed at different capacities during inference depending on the desired accuracy-efficiency tradeoff. More specifically, we employ parametrized channel slimming by stepwise downward knowledge distillation during training. Motivated by the observation that the differences between segmentation results of each submodel are mainly near the semantic borders, we introduce an additional boundary guided semantic segmentation loss to further improve the performance of each submodel. We show that our proposed SlimSeg with various mainstream networks can produce flexible models that provide dynamic adjustment of computational cost and better performance than independent models. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation benchmarks, Cityscapes and CamVid, demonstrate the generalization ability of our framework.
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Sonia Baeza, Debora Gil, I.Garcia Olive, M.Salcedo, J.Deportos, Carles Sanchez, et al. (2022). A novel intelligent radiomic analysis of perfusion SPECT/CT images to optimize pulmonary embolism diagnosis in COVID-19 patients. EJNMMI-PHYS - EJNMMI Physics, 9(1, Article 84), 1–17.
Abstract: Background: COVID-19 infection, especially in cases with pneumonia, is associated with a high rate of pulmonary embolism (PE). In patients with contraindications for CT pulmonary angiography (CTPA) or non-diagnostic CTPA, perfusion single-photon emission computed tomography/computed tomography (Q-SPECT/CT) is a diagnostic alternative. The goal of this study is to develop a radiomic diagnostic system to detect PE based only on the analysis of Q-SPECT/CT scans.
Methods: This radiomic diagnostic system is based on a local analysis of Q-SPECT/CT volumes that includes both CT and Q-SPECT values for each volume point. We present a combined approach that uses radiomic features extracted from each scan as input into a fully connected classifcation neural network that optimizes a weighted crossentropy loss trained to discriminate between three diferent types of image patterns (pixel sample level): healthy lungs (control group), PE and pneumonia. Four types of models using diferent confguration of parameters were tested.
Results: The proposed radiomic diagnostic system was trained on 20 patients (4,927 sets of samples of three types of image patterns) and validated in a group of 39 patients (4,410 sets of samples of three types of image patterns). In the training group, COVID-19 infection corresponded to 45% of the cases and 51.28% in the test group. In the test group, the best model for determining diferent types of image patterns with PE presented a sensitivity, specifcity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of 75.1%, 98.2%, 88.9% and 95.4%, respectively. The best model for detecting
pneumonia presented a sensitivity, specifcity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of 94.1%, 93.6%, 85.2% and 97.6%, respectively. The area under the curve (AUC) was 0.92 for PE and 0.91 for pneumonia. When the results obtained at the pixel sample level are aggregated into regions of interest, the sensitivity of the PE increases to 85%, and all metrics improve for pneumonia.
Conclusion: This radiomic diagnostic system was able to identify the diferent lung imaging patterns and is a frst step toward a comprehensive intelligent radiomic system to optimize the diagnosis of PE by Q-SPECT/CT.
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David Castells, Vinh Ngo, Juan Borrego-Carazo, Marc Codina, Carles Sanchez, Debora Gil, et al. (2022). A Survey of FPGA-Based Vision Systems for Autonomous Cars. ACESS - IEEE Access, 10, 132525–132563.
Abstract: On the road to making self-driving cars a reality, academic and industrial researchers are working hard to continue to increase safety while meeting technical and regulatory constraints Understanding the surrounding environment is a fundamental task in self-driving cars. It requires combining complex computer vision algorithms. Although state-of-the-art algorithms achieve good accuracy, their implementations often require powerful computing platforms with high power consumption. In some cases, the processing speed does not meet real-time constraints. FPGA platforms are often used to implement a category of latency-critical algorithms that demand maximum performance and energy efficiency. Since self-driving car computer vision functions fall into this category, one could expect to see a wide adoption of FPGAs in autonomous cars. In this paper, we survey the computer vision FPGA-based works from the literature targeting automotive applications over the last decade. Based on the survey, we identify the strengths and weaknesses of FPGAs in this domain and future research opportunities and challenges.
Keywords: Autonomous automobile; Computer vision; field programmable gate arrays; reconfigurable architectures
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Saad Minhas, Zeba Khanam, Shoaib Ehsan, Klaus McDonald Maier, & Aura Hernandez-Sabate. (2022). Weather Classification by Utilizing Synthetic Data. SENS - Sensors, 22(9), 3193.
Abstract: Weather prediction from real-world images can be termed a complex task when targeting classification using neural networks. Moreover, the number of images throughout the available datasets can contain a huge amount of variance when comparing locations with the weather those images are representing. In this article, the capabilities of a custom built driver simulator are explored specifically to simulate a wide range of weather conditions. Moreover, the performance of a new synthetic dataset generated by the above simulator is also assessed. The results indicate that the use of synthetic datasets in conjunction with real-world datasets can increase the training efficiency of the CNNs by as much as 74%. The article paves a way forward to tackle the persistent problem of bias in vision-based datasets.
Keywords: Weather classification; synthetic data; dataset; autonomous car; computer vision; advanced driver assistance systems; deep learning; intelligent transportation systems
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Eduardo Aguilar, Bhalaji Nagarajan, Beatriz Remeseiro, & Petia Radeva. (2022). Bayesian deep learning for semantic segmentation of food images. CEE - Computers and Electrical Engineering, 103, 108380.
Abstract: Deep learning has provided promising results in various applications; however, algorithms tend to be overconfident in their predictions, even though they may be entirely wrong. Particularly for critical applications, the model should provide answers only when it is very sure of them. This article presents a Bayesian version of two different state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods to perform multi-class segmentation of foods and estimate the uncertainty about the given predictions. The proposed methods were evaluated on three public pixel-annotated food datasets. As a result, we can conclude that Bayesian methods improve the performance achieved by the baseline architectures and, in addition, provide information to improve decision-making. Furthermore, based on the extracted uncertainty map, we proposed three measures to rank the images according to the degree of noisy annotations they contained. Note that the top 135 images ranked by one of these measures include more than half of the worst-labeled food images.
Keywords: Deep learning; Uncertainty quantification; Bayesian inference; Image segmentation; Food analysis
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Zhen Xu, Sergio Escalera, Adrien Pavao, Magali Richard, Wei-Wei Tu, Quanming Yao, et al. (2022). Codabench: Flexible, easy-to-use, and reproducible meta-benchmark platform. PATTERNS - Patterns, 3(7), 100543.
Abstract: Obtaining a standardized benchmark of computational methods is a major issue in data-science communities. Dedicated frameworks enabling fair benchmarking in a unified environment are yet to be developed. Here, we introduce Codabench, a meta-benchmark platform that is open sourced and community driven for benchmarking algorithms or software agents versus datasets or tasks. A public instance of Codabench is open to everyone free of charge and allows benchmark organizers to fairly compare submissions under the same setting (software, hardware, data, algorithms), with custom protocols and data formats. Codabench has unique features facilitating easy organization of flexible and reproducible benchmarks, such as the possibility of reusing templates of benchmarks and supplying compute resources on demand. Codabench has been used internally and externally on various applications, receiving more than 130 users and 2,500 submissions. As illustrative use cases, we introduce four diverse benchmarks covering graph machine learning, cancer heterogeneity, clinical diagnosis, and reinforcement learning.
Keywords: Machine learning; data science; benchmark platform; reproducibility; competitions
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Shiqi Yang, Yaxing Wang, Kai Wang, Shangling Jui, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2022). Attracting and Dispersing: A Simple Approach for Source-free Domain Adaptation. In 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
Abstract: We propose a simple but effective source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) method.
Treating SFDA as an unsupervised clustering problem and following the intuition
that local neighbors in feature space should have more similar predictions than
other features, we propose to optimize an objective of prediction consistency. This
objective encourages local neighborhood features in feature space to have similar
predictions while features farther away in feature space have dissimilar predictions, leading to efficient feature clustering and cluster assignment simultaneously. For efficient training, we seek to optimize an upper-bound of the objective resulting in two simple terms. Furthermore, we relate popular existing methods in domain adaptation, source-free domain adaptation and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity. The experimental results prove the superiority of our method, and our method can be adopted as a simple but strong baseline for future research in SFDA. Our method can be also adapted to source-free open-set and partial-set DA which further shows the generalization ability of our method.
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Saiping Zhang, Luis Herranz, Marta Mrak, Marc Gorriz Blanch, Shuai Wan, & Fuzheng Yang. (2022). DCNGAN: A Deformable Convolution-Based GAN with QP Adaptation for Perceptual Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video. In 47th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution-based generative adversarial network (DCNGAN) for perceptual quality enhancement of compressed videos. DCNGAN is also adaptive to the quantization parameters (QPs). Compared with optical flows, deformable convolutions are more effective and efficient to align frames. Deformable convolutions can operate on multiple frames, thus leveraging more temporal information, which is beneficial for enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed videos. Instead of aligning frames in a pairwise manner, the deformable convolution can process multiple frames simultaneously, which leads to lower computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DCNGAN outperforms other state-of-the-art compressed video quality enhancement algorithms.
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German Barquero, Johnny Nuñez, Sergio Escalera, Zhen Xu, Wei-Wei Tu, & Isabelle Guyon. (2022). Didn’t see that coming: a survey on non-verbal social human behavior forecasting. In Understanding Social Behavior in Dyadic and Small Group Interactions (Vol. 173, pp. 139–178).
Abstract: Non-verbal social human behavior forecasting has increasingly attracted the interest of the research community in recent years. Its direct applications to human-robot interaction and socially-aware human motion generation make it a very attractive field. In this survey, we define the behavior forecasting problem for multiple interactive agents in a generic way that aims at unifying the fields of social signals prediction and human motion forecasting, traditionally separated. We hold that both problem formulations refer to the same conceptual problem, and identify many shared fundamental challenges: future stochasticity, context awareness, history exploitation, etc. We also propose a taxonomy that comprises
methods published in the last 5 years in a very informative way and describes the current main concerns of the community with regard to this problem. In order to promote further research on this field, we also provide a summarized and friendly overview of audiovisual datasets featuring non-acted social interactions. Finally, we describe the most common metrics used in this task and their particular issues.
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Guillem Martinez, Maya Aghaei, Martin Dijkstra, Bhalaji Nagarajan, Femke Jaarsma, Jaap van de Loosdrecht, et al. (2022). Hyper-Spectral Imaging for Overlapping Plastic Flakes Segmentation. In 47th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution-based generative adversarial network (DCNGAN) for perceptual quality enhancement of compressed videos. DCNGAN is also adaptive to the quantization parameters (QPs). Compared with optical flows, deformable convolutions are more effective and efficient to align frames. Deformable convolutions can operate on multiple frames, thus leveraging more temporal information, which is beneficial for enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed videos. Instead of aligning frames in a pairwise manner, the deformable convolution can process multiple frames simultaneously, which leads to lower computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DCNGAN outperforms other state-of-the-art compressed video quality enhancement algorithms.
Keywords: Hyper-spectral imaging; plastic sorting; multi-label segmentation; bitfield encoding
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Spencer Low, Oliver Nina, Angel Sappa, Erik Blasch, & Nathan Inkawhich. (2022). Multi-Modal Aerial View Object Classification Challenge Results – PBVS 2022. In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW) (pp. 350–358).
Abstract: This paper details the results and main findings of the second iteration of the Multi-modal Aerial View Object Classification (MAVOC) challenge. The primary goal of both MAVOC challenges is to inspire research into methods for building recognition models that utilize both synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and electro-optical (EO) imagery. Teams are encouraged to develop multi-modal approaches that incorporate complementary information from both domains. While the 2021 challenge showed a proof of concept that both modalities could be used together, the 2022 challenge focuses on the detailed multi-modal methods. The 2022 challenge uses the same UNIfied Coincident Optical and Radar for recognitioN (UNICORN) dataset and competition format that was used in 2021. Specifically, the challenge focuses on two tasks, (1) SAR classification and (2) SAR + EO classification. The bulk of this document is dedicated to discussing the top performing methods and describing their performance on our blind test set. Notably, all of the top ten teams outperform a Resnet-18 baseline. For SAR classification, the top team showed a 129% improvement over baseline and an 8% average improvement from the 2021 winner. The top team for SAR + EO classification shows a 165% improvement with a 32% average improvement over 2021.
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Adam Fodor, Rachid R. Saboundji, Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, Sergio Escalera, David Gallardo Pujol, & Andras Lorincz. (2022). Multimodal Sentiment and Personality Perception Under Speech: A Comparison of Transformer-based Architectures. In Understanding Social Behavior in Dyadic and Small Group Interactions (Vol. 173, pp. 218–241).
Abstract: Human-machine, human-robot interaction, and collaboration appear in diverse fields, from homecare to Cyber-Physical Systems. Technological development is fast, whereas real-time methods for social communication analysis that can measure small changes in sentiment and personality states, including visual, acoustic and language modalities are lagging, particularly when the goal is to build robust, appearance invariant, and fair methods. We study and compare methods capable of fusing modalities while satisfying real-time and invariant appearance conditions. We compare state-of-the-art transformer architectures in sentiment estimation and introduce them in the much less explored field of personality perception. We show that the architectures perform differently on automatic sentiment and personality perception, suggesting that each task may be better captured/modeled by a particular method. Our work calls attention to the attractive properties of the linear versions of the transformer architectures. In particular, we show that the best results are achieved by fusing the different architectures{’} preprocessing methods. However, they pose extreme conditions in computation power and energy consumption for real-time computations for quadratic transformers due to their memory requirements. In turn, linear transformers pave the way for quantifying small changes in sentiment estimation and personality perception for real-time social communications for machines and robots.
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