Abstract: This book contains the proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) which was organized and sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), endorsed by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), and in cooperation with the ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), the European Association for Computer Graphics (EUROGRAPHICS), the EUROGRAPHICS Portuguese Chapter, the VRVis Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization Forschungs-GmbH, the French Association for Computer Graphics (AFIG), and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). The proceedings here published demonstrate new and innovative solutions and highlight technical problems in each field that are challenging and worthy of being disseminated to the interested research audiences. VISIGRAPP 2021 was organized to promote a discussion forum about the conference’s research topics between researchers, developers, manufacturers and end-users, and to establish guidelines in the development of more advanced solutions. This year VISIGRAPP was, exceptionally, held as a web-based event, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, from 8 – 10 February. We received a high number of paper submissions for this edition of VISIGRAPP, 371 in total, with contributions from 52 countries. This attests to the success and global dimension of VISIGRAPP. To evaluate each submission, we used a hierarchical process of double-blind evaluation where each paper was reviewed by two to six experts from the International Program Committee (IPC). The IPC selected for oral presentation and for publication as full papers 12 papers from GRAPP, 8 from HUCAPP, 11 papers from IVAPP, and 56 papers from VISAPP, which led to a result for the full-paper acceptance ratio of 24% and a high-quality program. Apart from the above full papers, the conference program also features 118 short papers and 67 poster presentations. We hope that these conference proceedings, which are submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index, SCOPUS, DBLP, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, EI and Microsoft Academic, will help the Computer Vision, Imaging, Visualization, Computer Graphics and Human-Computer Interaction communities to find interesting research work. Moreover, we are proud to inform that the program also includes three plenary keynote lectures, given by internationally distinguished researchers, namely Federico Tombari (Google and Technical University of Munich, Germany), Dieter Schmalstieg (Graz University of Technology, Austria) and Nathalie Henry Riche (Microsoft Research, United States), thus contributing to increase the overall quality of the conference and to provide a deeper understanding of the conference’s interest fields. Furthermore, a short list of the presented papers will be selected to be extended into a forthcoming book of VISIGRAPP Selected Papers to be published by Springer during 2021 in the CCIS series. Moreover, a short list of presented papers will be selected for publication of extended and revised versions in a special issue of the Springer Nature Computer Science journal. All papers presented at this conference will be available at the SCITEPRESS Digital Library. Three awards are delivered at the closing session, to recognize the best conference paper, the best student paper and the best poster for each of the four conferences. There is also an award for best industrial paper to be delivered at the closing session for VISAPP. We would like to express our thanks, first of all, to the authors of the technical papers, whose work and dedication made it possible to put together a program that we believe to be very exciting and of high technical quality. Next, we would like to thank the Area Chairs, all the members of the program committee and auxiliary reviewers, who helped us with their expertise and time. We would also like to thank the invited speakers for their invaluable contribution and for sharing their vision in their talks. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the professional support of the INSTICC team for all organizational processes, especially given the need to introduce online streaming, forum management, direct messaging facilitation and other web-based activities in order to make it possible for VISIGRAPP 2021 authors to present their work and share ideas with colleagues in spite of the logistic difficulties caused by the current pandemic situation. We wish you all an exciting conference. We hope to meet you again for the next edition of VISIGRAPP, details of which are available at http://www. visigrapp.org.

Abstract: The most common tool for population-wide COVID-19 identification is the Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction test that detects the presence of the virus in the throat (or sputum) in swab samples. This test has a sensitivity between 59% and 71%. However, this test does not provide precise information regarding the extension of the pulmonary infection. Moreover, it has been proven that through the reading of a computed tomography (CT) scan, a clinician can provide a more complete perspective of the severity of the disease. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive system for fully-automated COVID-19 detection and lesion segmentation from CT scans, powered by deep learning strategies to support decision-making process for the diagnosis of COVID-19.

Abstract: The determination of precise skin lesion boundaries in dermoscopic images using automated methods faces many challenges, most importantly, the presence of hair, inconspicuous lesion edges and low contrast in dermoscopic images, and variability in the color, texture and shapes of skin lesions. Existing deep learning-based skin lesion segmentation algorithms are expensive in terms of computational time and memory. Consequently, running such segmentation algorithms requires a powerful GPU and high bandwidth memory, which are not available in dermoscopy devices. Thus, this article aims to achieve precise skin lesion segmentation with minimum resources: a lightweight, efficient generative adversarial network (GAN) model called SLSNet, which combines 1-D kernel factorized networks, position and channel attention, and multiscale aggregation mechanisms with a GAN model. The 1-D kernel factorized network reduces the computational cost of 2D filtering. The position and channel attention modules enhance the discriminative ability between the lesion and non-lesion feature representations in spatial and channel dimensions, respectively. A multiscale block is also used to aggregate the coarse-to-fine features of input skin images and reduce the effect of the artifacts. SLSNet is evaluated on two publicly available datasets: ISBI 2017 and the ISIC 2018. Although SLSNet has only 2.35 million parameters, the experimental results demonstrate that it achieves segmentation results on a par with the state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation methods with an accuracy of 97.61%, and Dice and Jaccard similarity coefficients of 90.63% and 81.98%, respectively. SLSNet can run at more than 110 frames per second (FPS) in a single GTX1080Ti GPU, which is faster than well-known deep learning-based image segmentation models, such as FCN. Therefore, SLSNet can be used for practical dermoscopic applications.

Abstract: Nutrition and social interactions are both key aspects of the daily lives of humans. In this work, we propose a system to evaluate the influence of social interaction in the nutritional habits of a person from a first-person perspective. In order to detect the routine of an individual, we construct a nutritional behaviour pattern discovery model, which outputs routines over a number of days. Our method evaluates similarity of routines with respect to visited food-related scenes over the collected days, making use of Dynamic Time Warping, as well as considering social engagement and its correlation with food-related activities. The nutritional and social descriptors of the collected days are evaluated and encoded using an LSTM Autoencoder. Later, the obtained latent space is clustered to find similar days unaffected by outliers using the Isolation Forest method. Moreover, we introduce a new score metric to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. We validate our method on 104 days and more than 100 k egocentric images gathered by 7 users. Several different visualizations are evaluated for the understanding of the findings. Our results demonstrate good performance and applicability of our proposed model for social-related nutritional behaviour understanding. At the end, relevant applications of the model are discussed by analysing the discovered routine of particular individuals.

Abstract: Deep learning methods show great promise in a range of settings including the biomedical field. Explainability of these models is important in these fields for building end-user trust and to facilitate their confident deployment. Although several Machine Learning Interpretability tools have been proposed so far, there is currently no recognized evaluation standard to transfer the explainability results into a quantitative score. Several measures have been proposed as proxies for quantitative assessment of explainability methods. However, the robustness of the list of significant features provided by the explainability methods has not been addressed. In this work, we propose a new proxy for assessing the robustness of the list of significant features provided by two explainability methods. Our validation is defined at functionality-grounded level based on the ranked correlation statistical index and demonstrates its successful application in the framework of brain aging estimation. We assessed our proxy to estimate brain age using neuroscience data. Our results indicate small variability and high robustness in the considered explainability methods using this new proxy.

Abstract: From the early stages of Computer Vision, scene reconstruction has been one of the most studied topics leading to a wide variety of new discoveries and applications. Object grasping and manipulation, localization and mapping, or even visual effect generation are different examples of applications in which scene reconstruction has taken an important role for industries such as robotics, factory automation, or audio visual production. However, scene reconstruction is an extensive topic that can be approached in many different ways with already existing solutions that effectively work in controlled environments. Formally, the problem of scene reconstruction can be formulated as a sequence of independent processes which compose a pipeline. In this thesis, we analyse some parts of the reconstruction pipeline from which we contribute with novel methods using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) proposing innovative solutions that consider the optimisation of the methods in an end-to-end fashion. First, we review the state of the art of classical local features detectors and descriptors and contribute with two novel methods that inherently improve pre-existing solutions in the scene reconstruction pipeline.
It is a fact that computer science and software engineering are two fields that usually go hand in hand and evolve according to mutual needs making easier the design of complex and efficient algorithms. For this reason, we contribute with Kornia, a library specifically designed to work with classical computer vision techniques along with deep neural networks. In essence, we created a framework that eases the design of complex pipelines for computer vision algorithms so that can be included within neural networks and be used to backpropagate gradients throw a common optimisation framework. Finally, in the last chapter of this thesis we develop the aforementioned concept of designing end-to-end systems with classical projective geometry. Thus, we contribute with a solution to the problem of synthetic view generation by hallucinating novel views from high deformable cloths objects using a geometry aware end-to-end system. To summarize, in this thesis we demonstrate that with a proper design that combine classical geometric computer vision methods with deep learning techniques can lead to improve pre-existing solutions for the problem of scene reconstruction.

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: Chapter 9