Abstract: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has greatly benefited from computer vision. Recently, deep learning approaches are widely used to accurately estimate the state of deterioration of infrastructure. In this work, we focus on the problem of bridge surface structural damage detection, such as delamination and rebar exposure. It is well known that the quality of a deep learning model is highly dependent on the quality of the training dataset. Bridge damage detection, our application domain, has the following main challenges: (i) labeling the damages requires knowledgeable civil engineering professionals, which makes it difficult to collect a large annotated dataset; (ii) the damage area could be very small, whereas the background area is large, which creates an unbalanced training environment; (iii) due to the difficulty to exactly determine the extension of the damage, there is often a variation among different labelers who perform pixel-wise labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel model for bridge structural damage detection to address the first two challenges. This paper follows the idea of an atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) module that is designed as a novel network for bridge damage detection. Further, we introduce the weight balanced Intersection over Union (IoU) loss function to achieve accurate segmentation on a highly unbalanced small dataset. The experimental results show that (i) the IoU loss function improves the overall performance of damage detection, as compared to cross entropy loss or focal loss, and (ii) the proposed model has a better ability to detect a minority class than other light segmentation networks.

Abstract: A new approach for 2D to 3D garment retexturing is proposed based on Gaussian mixture models and thin plate splines (TPS). An automatically segmented garment of an individual is matched to a new source garment and rendered, resulting in augmented images in which the target garment has been retextured using the texture of the source garment. We divide the problem into garment boundary matching based on Gaussian mixture models and then interpolate inner points using surface topology extracted through geodesic paths, which leads to a more realistic result than standard approaches. We evaluated and compared our system quantitatively by root mean square error (RMS) and qualitatively using the mean opinion score (MOS), showing the benefits of the proposed methodology on our gathered dataset.

Abstract: Action recognition is a challenging task that plays an important role in many robotic systems, which highly depend on visual input feeds. However, due to privacy concerns, it is important to find a method which can recognise actions without using visual feed. In this paper, we propose a concept for detecting actions while preserving the test subject’s privacy. Our proposed method relies only on recording the temporal evolution of light pulses scattered back from the scene.
Such data trace to record one action contains a sequence of one-dimensional arrays of voltage values acquired by a single-pixel detector at 1 GHz repetition rate. Information about both the distance to the object and its shape are embedded in the traces. We apply machine learning in the form of recurrent neural networks for data analysis and demonstrate successful action recognition. The experimental results show that our proposed method could achieve on average 96.47% accuracy on the actions walking forward, walking backwards, sitting down, standing up and waving hand, using recurrent
neural network.

Abstract: Driving requires reacting to a wide variety of complex environment conditions and agent behaviors. Explicitly modeling each possible scenario is unrealistic. In contrast, imitation learning can, in theory, leverage data from large fleets of human-driven cars. Behavior cloning in particular has been successfully used to learn simple visuomotor policies end-to-end, but scaling to the full spectrum of driving behaviors remains an unsolved problem. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark to experimentally investigate the scalability and limitations of behavior cloning. We show that behavior cloning leads to state-of-the-art results, executing complex lateral and longitudinal maneuvers, even in unseen environments, without being explicitly programmed to do so. However, we confirm some limitations of the behavior cloning approach: some well-known limitations (eg, dataset bias and overfitting), new generalization issues (eg, dynamic objects and the lack of a causal modeling), and training instabilities, all requiring further research before behavior cloning can graduate to real-world driving. The code, dataset, benchmark, and agent studied in this paper can be found at github.

Abstract: In recent years, deep learning-based networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance in medical image segmentation. Among the existing networks, U-Net has been successfully applied on medical image segmentation. In this paper, we propose an extension of U-Net, Bi-directional ConvLSTM U-Net with Densely connected convolutions (BCDU-Net), for medical image segmentation, in which we take full advantages of U-Net, bi-directional ConvLSTM (BConvLSTM) and the mechanism of dense convolutions. Instead of a simple concatenation in the skip connection of U-Net, we employ BConvLSTM to combine the feature maps extracted from the corresponding encoding path and the previous decoding up-convolutional layer in a non-linear way. To strengthen feature propagation and encourage feature reuse, we use densely connected convolutions in the last convolutional layer of the encoding path. Finally, we can accelerate the convergence speed of the proposed network by employing batch normalization (BN). The proposed model is evaluated on three datasets of: retinal blood vessel segmentation, skin lesion segmentation, and lung nodule segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Abstract: While many individual tasks in the domain of human analysis have recently received an accuracy boost from deep learning approaches, multi-task learning has mostly been ignored due to a lack of data. New synthetic datasets are being released, filling this gap with synthetic generated data. In this work, we analyze four related human analysis tasks in still images in a multi-task scenario by leveraging such datasets. Specifically, we study the correlation of 2D/3D pose estimation, body part segmentation and full-body depth estimation. These tasks are learned via the well-known Stacked Hourglass module such that each of the task-specific streams shares information with the others. The main goal is to analyze how training together these four related tasks can benefit each individual task for a better generalization. Results on the newly released SURREAL dataset show that all four tasks benefit from the multi-task approach, but with different combinations of tasks: while combining all four tasks improves 2D pose estimation the most, 2D pose improves neither 3D pose nor full-body depth estimation. On the other hand 2D parts segmentation can benefit from 2D pose but not from 3D pose. In all cases, as expected, the maximum improvement is achieved on those human body parts that show more variability in terms of spatial distribution, appearance and shape, e.g. wrists and ankles.

Abstract: This volume presents the results of the Neural Information Processing Systems Competition track at the 2018 NeurIPS conference. The competition follows the same format as the 2017 competition track for NIPS. Out of 21 submitted proposals, eight competition proposals were selected, spanning the area of Robotics, Health, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Systems and Physics. Competitions have become an integral part of advancing state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence (AI). They exhibit one important difference to benchmarks: Competitions test a system end-to-end rather than evaluating only a single component; they assess the practicability of an algorithmic solution in addition to assessing feasibility.