Abstract: A family of recent successful approaches to few-shot learning relies on learning an embedding space in which predictions are made by computing similarities between examples. This corresponds to combining information between support and query examples at a very late stage of the prediction pipeline. Inspired by this observation, we hypothesize that there may be benefits to combining the information at various levels of abstraction along the pipeline. We present an architecture called Cross-Modulation Networks which allows support and query examples to interact throughout the feature extraction process via a feature-wise modulation mechanism. We adapt the Matching Networks architecture to take advantage of these interactions and show encouraging initial results on miniImageNet in the 5-way, 1-shot setting, where we close the gap with state-of-the-art.

Abstract: The central role of food in our individual and social life, combined with recent technological advances, has motivated a growing interest in applications that help to better monitor dietary habits as well as the exploration and retrieval of food-related information. We review how visual content, context and external knowledge can be integrated effectively into food-oriented applications, with special focus on recipe analysis and retrieval, food recommendation and restaurant context as emerging directions.

Abstract: Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneous histologic sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edematous/invaded tissue, necrotic core, active and non-enhancing core. This intrinsic heterogeneity is also portrayed in their radio-phenotype, as their sub-regions are depicted by varying intensity profiles disseminated across multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans, reflecting varying biological properties. Their heterogeneous shape, extent, and location are some of the factors that make these tumors difficult to resect, and in some cases inoperable. The amount of resected tumor is a factor also considered in longitudinal scans, when evaluating the apparent tumor for potential diagnosis of progression. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that accurate segmentation of the various tumor sub-regions can offer the basis for quantitative image analysis towards prediction of patient overall survival. This study assesses the state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods used for brain tumor image analysis in mpMRI scans, during the last seven instances of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge, i.e. 2012-2018. Specifically, we focus on i) evaluating segmentations of the various glioma sub-regions in preoperative mpMRI scans, ii) assessing potential tumor progression by virtue of longitudinal growth of tumor sub-regions, beyond use of the RECIST criteria, and iii) predicting the overall survival from pre-operative mpMRI scans of patients that undergone gross total resection. Finally, we investigate the challenge of identifying the best ML algorithms for each of these tasks, considering that apart from being diverse on each instance of the challenge, the multi-institutional mpMRI BraTS dataset has also been a continuously evolving/growing dataset.

Abstract: A computer-implemented video classification method and system are disclosed. The method includes receiving an input video including a sequence of frames. At least one transformation of the input video is generated, each transformation including a sequence of frames. For the input video and each transformation, local descriptors are extracted from the respective sequence of frames. The local descriptors of the input video and each transformation are aggregated to form an aggregated feature vector with a first set of processing layers learned using unsupervised learning. An output classification value is generated for the input video, based on the aggregated feature vector with a second set of processing layers learned using supervised learning.

Abstract: This book compiles leading research on the development of explainable and interpretable machine learning methods in the context of computer vision and machine learning.
Research progress in computer vision and pattern recognition has led to a variety of modeling techniques with almost human-like performance. Although these models have obtained astounding results, they are limited in their explainability and interpretability: what is the rationale behind the decision made? what in the model structure explains its functioning? Hence, while good performance is a critical required characteristic for learning machines, explainability and interpretability capabilities are needed to take learning machines to the next step to include them in decision support systems involving human supervision.
This book, written by leading international researchers, addresses key topics of explainability and interpretability, including the following:

·Evaluation and Generalization in Interpretable Machine Learning
·Explanation Methods in Deep Learning
·Learning Functional Causal Models with Generative Neural Networks
·Learning Interpreatable Rules for Multi-Label Classification
·Structuring Neural Networks for More Explainable Predictions
·Generating Post Hoc Rationales of Deep Visual Classification Decisions
·Ensembling Visual Explanations
·Explainable Deep Driving by Visualizing Causal Attention
·Interdisciplinary Perspective on Algorithmic Job Candidate Search
·Multimodal Personality Trait Analysis for Explainable Modeling of Job Interview Decisions
·Inherent Explainability Pattern Theory-based Video Event Interpretations

Abstract: Praxis test is a gesture-based diagnostic test which has been accepted as diagnostically indicative of cortical pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease. Despite being simple, this test is oftentimes skipped by the clinicians. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to investigate the potential of static and dynamic upper-body gestures based on the Praxis test and their potential in a medical framework to automatize the test procedures for computer-assisted cognitive assessment of older adults.
In order to carry out gesture recognition as well as correctness assessment of the performances we have recollected a novel challenging RGB-D gesture video dataset recorded by Kinect v2, which contains 29 specific gestures suggested by clinicians and recorded from both experts and patients performing the gesture set. Moreover, we propose a framework to learn the dynamics of upper-body gestures, considering the videos as sequences of short-term clips of gestures. Our approach first uses body part detection to extract image patches surrounding the hands and then, by means of a fine-tuned convolutional neural network (CNN) model, it learns deep hand features which are then linked to a long short-term memory to capture the temporal dependencies between video frames.
We report the results of four developed methods using different modalities. The experiments show effectiveness of our deep learning based approach in gesture recognition and performance assessment tasks. Satisfaction of clinicians from the assessment reports indicates the impact of framework corresponding to the diagnosis.

Abstract: Training a deep architecture using a ranking loss has become standard for the person re-identification task. Increasingly, these deep architectures include additional components that leverage part detections, attribute predictions, pose estimators and other auxiliary information, in order to more effectively localize and align discriminative image regions. In this paper we adopt a different approach and carefully design each component of a simple deep architecture and, critically, the strategy for training it effectively for person re-identification. We extensively evaluate each design choice, leading to a list of good practices for person re-identification. By following these practices, our approach outperforms the state of the art, including more complex methods with auxiliary components, by large margins on four benchmark datasets. We also provide a qualitative analysis of our trained representation which indicates that, while compact, it is able to capture information from localized and discriminative regions, in a manner akin to an implicit attention mechanism.

Abstract: Text understanding in scene images has gained plenty of attention in the computer vision community and it is an important task in many applications as text carries semantically rich information about scene content and context. For instance, reading text in a scene can be applied to autonomous driving, scene understanding or assisting visually impaired people. The general aim of scene text understanding is to localize and recognize text in scene images. Text regions are first localized in the original image by a trained detector model and afterwards fed into a recognition module. The tasks of localization and recognition are highly correlated since an inaccurate localization can affect the recognition task.
The main purpose of this thesis is to devise efficient methods for scene text understanding. We investigate how the latest results on deep learning can advance text understanding pipelines. Recently, Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and derived methods have achieved a significant performance on semantic segmentation and pixel level classification tasks. Therefore, we took benefit of the strengths of FCN approaches in order to detect text in natural scenes. In this thesis we have focused on two challenging tasks of scene text understanding which are Text Detection and Word Spotting. For the task of text detection, we have proposed an efficient text proposal technique in scene images. We have considered the Text Proposals method as the baseline which is an approach to reduce the search space of possible text regions in an image. In order to improve the Text Proposals method we combined it with Fully Convolutional Networks to efficiently reduce the number of proposals while maintaining the same level of accuracy and thus gaining a significant speed up. Our experiments demonstrate that this text proposal approach yields significantly higher recall rates than the line based text localization techniques, while also producing better-quality localization. We have also applied this technique on compressed images such as videos from wearable egocentric cameras. For the task of word spotting, we have introduced a novel mid-level word representation method. We have proposed a technique to create and exploit an intermediate representation of images based on text attributes which roughly correspond to character probability maps. Our representation extends the concept of Pyramidal Histogram Of Characters (PHOC) by exploiting Fully Convolutional Networks to derive a pixel-wise mapping of the character distribution within candidate word regions. We call this representation the Soft-PHOC. Furthermore, we show how to use Soft-PHOC descriptors for word spotting tasks through an efficient text line proposal algorithm. To evaluate the detected text, we propose a novel line based evaluation along with the classic bounding box based approach. We test our method on incidental scene text images which comprises real-life scenarios such as urban scenes. The importance of incidental scene text images is due to the complexity of backgrounds, perspective, variety of script and language, short text and little linguistic context. All of these factors together makes the incidental scene text images challenging.