Abstract: Personality perception is implicitly biased due to many subjective factors, such as cultural, social, contextual, gender and appearance. Approaches developed for automatic personality perception are not expected to predict the real personality of the target, but the personality external observers attributed to it. Hence, they have to deal with human bias, inherently transferred to the training data. However, bias analysis in personality computing is an almost unexplored area. In this work, we study different possible sources of bias affecting personality perception, including emotions from facial expressions, attractiveness, age, gender, and ethnicity, as well as their influence on prediction ability for apparent personality estimation. To this end, we propose a multi-modal deep neural network that combines raw audio and visual information alongside predictions of attribute-specific models to regress apparent personality. We also analyse spatio-temporal aggregation schemes and the effect of different time intervals on first impressions. We base our study on the ChaLearn First Impressions dataset, consisting of one-person conversational videos. Our model shows state-of-the-art results regressing apparent personality based on the Big-Five model. Furthermore, given the interpretability nature of our network design, we provide an incremental analysis on the impact of each possible source of bias on final network predictions.

Abstract: Images with visual and scene text content are ubiquitous in everyday life. However, current image interpretation systems are mostly limited to using only the visual features, neglecting to leverage the scene text content. In this paper, we propose to jointly use scene text and visual channels for robust semantic interpretation of images. We do not only extract and encode visual and scene text cues, but also model their interplay to generate a contextual joint embedding with richer semantics. The contextual embedding thus generated is applied to retrieval and classification tasks on multimedia images, with scene text content, to demonstrate its effectiveness. In the retrieval framework, we augment our learned text-visual semantic representation with scene text cues, to mitigate vocabulary misses that may have occurred during the semantic embedding. To deal with irrelevant or erroneous recognition of scene text, we also apply query-based attention to our text channel. We show how the multi-channel approach, involving visual semantics and scene text, improves upon state of the art.

Abstract: JCR 2019 Q2, IF=3.121
The task of unpaired image-to-image translation is highly challenging due to the lack of explicit cross-domain pairs of instances. We consider here diverse image translation (DIT), an even more challenging setting in which an image can have multiple plausible translations. This is normally achieved by explicitly disentangling content and style in the latent representation and sampling different styles codes while maintaining the image content. Despite the success of current DIT models, they are prone to suffer from bias. In this paper, we study the problem of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets may add undesired changes (e.g. change gender or race in face images) to the output translations as a consequence of the particular underlying visual distribution in the target domain. In order to alleviate the effects of this problem we propose the use of semantic constraints that enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Our proposed model is a step towards unbiased diverse image-to-image translation (UDIT), and results in less unwanted changes in the translated images while still performing the wanted transformation. Experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in different domains such as faces, objects, and scenes.

Abstract: We present a new dataset for Visual Question Answering (VQA) on document images called DocVQA. The dataset consists of 50,000 questions defined on 12,000+ document images. Detailed analysis of the dataset in comparison with similar datasets for VQA and reading comprehension is presented. We report several baseline results by adopting existing VQA and reading comprehension models. Although the existing models perform reasonably well on certain types of questions, there is large performance gap compared to human performance (94.36% accuracy). The models need to improve specifically on questions where understanding structure of the document is crucial. The dataset, code and leaderboard are available at docvqa. org

Abstract: Developing human-like digital characters is a challenging task since humans are used to recognizing our fellows, and find the computed generated characters inadequately humanized. To fulfill the standards of the videogame and digital film productions it is necessary to model and animate these characters the most closely to human beings. However, it is an arduous and expensive task, since many artists and specialists are required to work on a single character. Therefore, to fulfill these requirements we found an interesting option to study the automatic creation of detailed characters through inexpensive setups. In this work, we develop novel techniques to bring detailed characters by combining different aspects that stand out when developing realistic characters, skin detail, facial hairs, expressions, and microexpressions. We examine each of the mentioned areas with the aim of automatically recover each of the parts without user interaction nor training data. We study the problems for their robustness but also for the simplicity of the setup, preferring single-image with uncontrolled illumination and methods that can be easily computed with the commodity of a standard laptop. A detailed face with wrinkles and skin details is vital to develop a realistic character. In this work, we introduce our method to automatically describe facial wrinkles on the image and transfer to the recovered base face. Then we advance to facial hair recovery by resolving a fitting problem with a novel parametrization model. As of last, we develop a mapping function that allows transfer expressions and microexpressions between different meshes, which provides realistic animations to our detailed mesh. We cover all the mentioned points with the focus on key aspects as (i) how to describe skin wrinkles in a simple and straightforward manner, (ii) how to recover 3D from 2D detections, (iii) how to recover and model facial hair from 2D to 3D, (iv) how to transfer expressions between models holding both skin detail and facial hair, (v) how to perform all the described actions without training data nor user interaction. In this work, we present our proposals to solve these aspects with an efficient and simple setup. We validate our work with several datasets both synthetic and real data, prooving remarkable results even in challenging cases as occlusions as glasses, thick beards, and indeed working with different face topologies like single-eyed cyclops.

Abstract: Background and objective:An accurate segmentation of lung nodules in computed tomography images is a crucial step for the physical characterization of the tumour. Being often completely manually accomplished, nodule segmentation turns to be a tedious and time-consuming procedure and this represents a high obstacle in clinical practice. In this paper, we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network for nodule segmentation that combines a light and efficient architecture with innovative loss function and segmentation strategy. Methods:In contrast to most of the standard end-to-end architectures for nodule segmentation, our network learns the context of the nodules by producing two masks representing all the background and secondary-important elements in the Computed Tomography scan. The nodule is detected by subtracting the context from the original scan image. Additionally, we introduce an asymmetric loss function that automatically compensates for potential errors in the nodule annotations. We trained and tested our Neural Network on the public LIDC-IDRI database, compared it with the state of the art and run a pseudo-Turing test between four radiologists and the network. Results:The results proved that the behaviour of the algorithm is very near to the human performance and its segmentation masks are almost indistinguishable from the ones made by the radiologists. Our method clearly outperforms the state of the art on CT nodule segmentation in terms of F1 score and IoU of and respectively. Conclusions: The main structure of the network ensures all the properties of the UNet architecture, while the Multi Convolutional Layers give a more accurate pattern recognition. The newly adopted solutions also increase the details on the border of the nodule, even under the noisiest conditions. This method can be applied now for single CT slice nodule segmentation and it represents a starting point for the future development of a fully automatic 3D segmentation software.

Abstract: This work revisits the ChaLearn First Impressions database, annotated for personality perception using pairwise comparisons via crowdsourcing. We analyse for the first time the original pairwise annotations, and reveal existing person perception biases associated to perceived attributes like gender, ethnicity, age and face attractiveness.
We show how person perception bias can influence data labelling of a subjective task, which has received little attention from the computer vision and machine learning communities by now. We further show that the mechanism used to convert pairwise annotations to continuous values may magnify the biases if no special treatment is considered. The findings of this study are relevant for the computer vision community that is still creating new datasets on subjective tasks, and using them for practical applications, ignoring these perceptual biases.