Abstract: Pooling is a ubiquitous operation in image processing algorithms that allows for higher-level processes to collect relevant low-level features from a region of interest. Currently, max-pooling is one of the most commonly used operators in the computational literature. However, it can lack robustness to outliers due to the fact that it relies merely on the peak of a function. Pooling mechanisms are also present in the primate visual cortex where neurons of higher cortical areas pool signals from lower ones. The receptive fields of these neurons have been shown to vary according to the contrast by aggregating signals over a larger region in the presence of low contrast stimuli. We hypothesise that this contrast-variant-pooling mechanism can address some of the shortcomings of maxpooling. We modelled this contrast variation through a histogram clipping in which the percentage of pooled signal is inversely proportional to the local contrast of an image. We tested our hypothesis by applying it to the phenomenon of colour constancy where a number of popular algorithms utilise a max-pooling step (e.g. White-Patch, Grey-Edge and Double-Opponency). For each of these methods, we investigated the consequences of replacing their original max-pooling by the proposed contrast-variant-pooling. Our experiments on three colour constancy benchmark datasets suggest that previous results can significantly improve by adopting a contrast-variant-pooling mechanism.

Abstract: Bronchoscopists use X‐ray fluoroscopy to guide bronchoscopes to the lesion to be biopsied without any kind of incisions. Reducing exposure to X‐ray is important for both patients and doctors but alternatives like electromagnetic navigation require specific equipment and increase the cost of the clinical procedure. We propose a guiding system based on the extraction of airway centers from intra‐operative videos. Such anatomical landmarks could be
matched to the airway centerline extracted from a pre‐planned CT to indicate the best path to the lesion. We present an extraction of lumen centers
from intra‐operative videos based on tracking of maximal stable regions of energy maps.

Abstract: One of the first usual steps in pattern recognition schemas is image segmentation, in order to reduce the dimensionality of the problem and manage smaller quantity of data. In our case as we are pursuing real-time colon cancer polyp detection, this step is crucial. In this paper we present a non-informative region estimation algorithm that will let us discard some parts of the image where we will not expect to find colon cancer polyps. The performance of our approach will be measured in terms of both non-informative areas elimination and polyps’ areas preserving. The results obtained show the importance of having correct non- informative region estimation in order to fasten the whole recognition process.

Abstract: When neural networks process images which do not resemble the distribution seen during training, so called out-of-distribution images, they often make wrong predictions, and do so too confidently. The capability to detect out-of-distribution images is therefore crucial for many real-world applications. We divide out-of-distribution detection between novelty detection ---images of classes which are not in the training set but are related to those---, and anomaly detection ---images with classes which are unrelated to the training set. By related we mean they contain the same type of objects, like digits in MNIST and SVHN. Most existing work has focused on anomaly detection, and has addressed this problem considering networks trained with the cross-entropy loss. Differently from them, we propose to use metric learning which does not have the drawback of the softmax layer (inherent to cross-entropy methods), which forces the network to divide its prediction power over the learned classes. We perform extensive experiments and evaluate both novelty and anomaly detection, even in a relevant application such as traffic sign recognition, obtaining comparable or better results than previous works.

Abstract: In the context of human action recognition using skeleton data, the 3D trajectories of joint points may be considered as multi-dimensional time series. The traditional recognition technique in the literature is based on time series dis(similarity) measures (such as Dynamic Time Warping). For these general dis(similarity) measures, k-nearest neighbor algorithms are a natural choice. However, k-NN classifiers are known to be sensitive to noise and outliers. In this paper, a new class of Support Vector Machine that is applicable to trajectory classification, such as action recognition, is developed by incorporating an efficient time-series distances measure into the kernel function. More specifically, the derivative of Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance measure is employed as the SVM kernel. In addition, the pairwise proximity learning strategy is utilized in order to make use of non-positive semi-definite (PSD) kernels in the SVM formulation. The recognition results of the proposed technique on two action recognition datasets demonstrates the ourperformance of our methodology compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, we obtained 89 % accuracy on the well-known MSRAction3D dataset using only 3D trajectories of body joints obtained by Kinect

Abstract: We present the 2016 ChaLearn Looking at People and Faces of the World Challenge and Workshop, which ran three competitions on the common theme of face analysis from still images. The first one, Looking at People, addressed age estimation, while the second and third competitions, Faces of the World, addressed accessory classification and smile and gender classification, respectively. We present two crowd-sourcing methodologies used to collect manual annotations. A custom-build application was used to collect and label data about the apparent age of people (as opposed to the real age). For the Faces of the World data, the citizen-science Zooniverse platform was used. This paper summarizes the three challenges and the data used, as well as the results achieved by the participants of the competitions. Details of the ChaLearn LAP FotW competitions can be found at http://gesture.chalearn.org.

Abstract: The simultaneous use of images from different spectracan be helpful to improve the performance of many computer vision tasks. The core idea behind the usage of crossspectral approaches is to take advantage of the strengths of each spectral band providing a richer representation of a scene, which cannot be obtained with just images from one spectral band. In this work we tackle the cross-spectral image similarity problem by using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We explore three different CNN architectures to compare the similarity of cross-spectral image patches. Specifically, we train each network with images from the visible and the near-infrared spectrum, and then test the result with two public cross-spectral datasets. Experimental results show that CNN approaches outperform the current state-of-art on both cross-spectral datasets. Additionally, our experiments show that some CNN architectures are capable of generalizing between different crossspectral domains.