Abstract: In this paper we introduce a novel application of the diffusion tensor for anisotropic image processing. The Anisotropic Contour Completion (ACC) we suggest consists in extending the characteristic function of the open curve by means of a degenerated diffusion tensor that prevents any diffusion in the normal direction. We show that ACC is equivalent to a dilation with a continuous elliptic structural element that takes into account the local orientation of the contours to be closed. Experiments on contours extracted from real images show that ACC produces shapes able to adapt to any curve in an active contour framework. 1.

Abstract: International benchmarking competitions have become fundamental for the comparative performance assessment of image analysis methods. However, little attention has been given to investigating what can be learnt from these competitions. Do they really generate scientific progress? What are common and successful participation strategies? What makes a solution superior to a competing method? To address this gap in the literature, we performed a multi-center study with all 80 competitions that were conducted in the scope of IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021. Statistical analyses performed based on comprehensive descriptions of the submitted algorithms linked to their rank as well as the underlying participation strategies revealed common characteristics of winning solutions. These typically include the use of multi-task learning (63%) and/or multi-stage pipelines (61%), and a focus on augmentation (100%), image preprocessing (97%), data curation (79%), and postprocessing (66%). The “typical” lead of a winning team is a computer scientist with a doctoral degree, five years of experience in biomedical image analysis, and four years of experience in deep learning. Two core general development strategies stood out for highly-ranked teams: the reflection of the metrics in the method design and the focus on analyzing and handling failure cases. According to the organizers, 43% of the winning algorithms exceeded the state of the art but only 11% completely solved the respective domain problem. The insights of our study could help researchers (1) improve algorithm development strategies when approaching new problems, and (2) focus on open research questions revealed by this work.

Abstract: This paper reviews the NTIRE 2023 challenge on image denoising (σ = 50) with a focus on the proposed solutions and results. The aim is to obtain a network design capable to produce high-quality results with the best performance measured by PSNR for image denoising. Independent additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is assumed and the noise level is 50. The challenge had 225 registered participants, and 16 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art for image denoising.

Abstract: This paper presents the results of two tracks from the fourth Thermal Image Super-Resolution (TISR) challenge, held at the Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum (PBVS) 2023 workshop. Track-1 uses the same thermal image dataset as previous challenges, with 951 training images and 50 validation images at each resolution. In this track, two evaluations were conducted: the first consists of generating a SR image from a HR thermal noisy image downsampled by four, and the second consists of generating a SR image from a mid-resolution image and compare it with its semi-registered HR image (acquired with another camera). The results of Track-1 outperformed those from last year’s challenge. On the other hand, Track-2 uses a new acquired dataset consisting of 160 registered visible and thermal images of the same scenario for training and 30 validation images. This year, more than 150 teams participated in the challenge tracks, demonstrating the community’s ongoing interest in this topic.

Abstract: We investigate the problem of incremental learning for object counting, where a method must learn to count a variety of object classes from a sequence of datasets. A naïve approach to incremental object counting would suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where it would suffer from a dramatic performance drop on previous tasks. In this paper, we propose a new exemplar-free functional regularization method, called Density Map Distillation (DMD). During training, we introduce a new counter head for each task and introduce a distillation loss to prevent forgetting of previous tasks. Additionally, we introduce a cross-task adaptor that projects the features of the current backbone to the previous backbone. This projector allows for the learning of new features while the backbone retains the relevant features for previous tasks. Finally, we set up experiments of incremental learning for counting new objects. Results confirm that our method greatly reduces catastrophic forgetting and outperforms existing methods.

Abstract: While there has been a growing research interest in developing out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods, there has been comparably little discussion around how these methods should be evaluated. Given their relevance for safe(r) AI, it is important to examine whether the basis for comparing OOD detection methods is consistent with practical needs. In this work, we take a closer look at the go-to metrics for evaluating OOD detection, and question the approach of exclusively reducing OOD detection to a binary classification task with little consideration for the detection threshold. We illustrate the limitations of current metrics (AUROC & its friends) and propose a new metric – Area Under the Threshold Curve (AUTC), which explicitly penalizes poor separation between ID and OOD samples. Scripts and data are available at https://github.com/glhr/beyond-auroc