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Yaxing Wang, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Chenshen Wu, Luis Herranz, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Shangling Jui, et al. (2024). MineGAN++: Mining Generative Models for Efficient Knowledge Transfer to Limited Data Domains. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, .
Abstract: Given the often enormous effort required to train GANs, both computationally as well as in dataset collection, the re-use of pretrained GANs largely increases the potential impact of generative models. Therefore, we propose a novel knowledge transfer method for generative models based on mining the knowledge that is most beneficial to a specific target domain, either from a single or multiple pretrained GANs. This is done using a miner network that identifies which part of the generative distribution of each pretrained GAN outputs samples closest to the target domain. Mining effectively steers GAN sampling towards suitable regions of the latent space, which facilitates the posterior finetuning and avoids pathologies of other methods, such as mode collapse and lack of flexibility. Furthermore, to prevent overfitting on small target domains, we introduce sparse subnetwork selection, that restricts the set of trainable neurons to those that are relevant for the target dataset. We perform comprehensive experiments on several challenging datasets using various GAN architectures (BigGAN, Progressive GAN, and StyleGAN) and show that the proposed method, called MineGAN, effectively transfers knowledge to domains with few target images, outperforming existing methods. In addition, MineGAN can successfully transfer knowledge from multiple pretrained GANs. MineGAN.
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Armin Mehri, Parichehr Behjati, Dario Carpio, & Angel Sappa. (2023). SRFormer: Efficient Yet Powerful Transformer Network for Single Image Super Resolution. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 11.
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in single image super resolution have investigated the potential of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to improve performance. However, CNNs based models suffer from their limited fields and their inability to adapt to the input content. Recently, Transformer based models were presented, which demonstrated major performance gains in Natural Language Processing and Vision tasks while mitigating the drawbacks of CNNs. Nevertheless, Transformer computational complexity can increase quadratically for high-resolution images, and the fact that it ignores the original structures of the image by converting them to the 1D structure can make it problematic to capture the local context information and adapt it for real-time applications. In this paper, we present, SRFormer, an efficient yet powerful Transformer-based architecture, by making several key designs in the building of Transformer blocks and Transformer layers that allow us to consider the original structure of the image (i.e., 2D structure) while capturing both local and global dependencies without raising computational demands or memory consumption. We also present a Gated Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Feature Fusion module to aggregate the features of different stages of Transformer blocks by focusing on inter-spatial relationships while adding minor computational costs to the network. We have conducted extensive experiments on several super-resolution benchmark datasets to evaluate our approach. SRFormer demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods from both Transformer and Convolutional networks, with an improvement margin of 0.1∼0.53dB . Furthermore, while SRFormer has almost the same model size, it outperforms SwinIR by 0.47% and inference time by half the time of SwinIR. The code will be available on GitHub.
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Olivier Penacchio, Xavier Otazu, Arnold J Wilkings, & Sara M. Haigh. (2023). A mechanistic account of visual discomfort. FN - Frontiers in Neuroscience, 17.
Abstract: Much of the neural machinery of the early visual cortex, from the extraction of local orientations to contextual modulations through lateral interactions, is thought to have developed to provide a sparse encoding of contour in natural scenes, allowing the brain to process efficiently most of the visual scenes we are exposed to. Certain visual stimuli, however, cause visual stress, a set of adverse effects ranging from simple discomfort to migraine attacks, and epileptic seizures in the extreme, all phenomena linked with an excessive metabolic demand. The theory of efficient coding suggests a link between excessive metabolic demand and images that deviate from natural statistics. Yet, the mechanisms linking energy demand and image spatial content in discomfort remain elusive. Here, we used theories of visual coding that link image spatial structure and brain activation to characterize the response to images observers reported as uncomfortable in a biologically based neurodynamic model of the early visual cortex that included excitatory and inhibitory layers to implement contextual influences. We found three clear markers of aversive images: a larger overall activation in the model, a less sparse response, and a more unbalanced distribution of activity across spatial orientations. When the ratio of excitation over inhibition was increased in the model, a phenomenon hypothesised to underlie interindividual differences in susceptibility to visual discomfort, the three markers of discomfort progressively shifted toward values typical of the response to uncomfortable stimuli. Overall, these findings propose a unifying mechanistic explanation for why there are differences between images and between observers, suggesting how visual input and idiosyncratic hyperexcitability give rise to abnormal brain responses that result in visual stress.
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Qingshan Chen, Zhenzhen Quan, Yifan Hu, Yujun Li, Zhi Liu, & Mikhail Mozerov. (2023). MSIF: multi-spectrum image fusion method for cross-modality person re-identification. IJMLC - International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics, .
Abstract: Sketch-RGB cross-modality person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging task that aims to match a sketch portrait drawn by a professional artist with a full-body photo taken by surveillance equipment to deal with situations where the monitoring equipment is damaged at the accident scene. However, sketch portraits only provide highly abstract frontal body contour information and lack other important features such as color, pose, behavior, etc. The difference in saliency between the two modalities brings new challenges to cross-modality person ReID. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a novel dual-stream model for cross-modality person ReID, which is able to mine modality-invariant features to reduce the discrepancy between sketch and camera images end-to-end. More specifically, we propose a multi-spectrum image fusion (MSIF) method, which aims to exploit the image appearance changes brought by multiple spectrums and guide the network to mine modality-invariant commonalities during training. It only processes the spectrum of the input images without adding additional calculations and model complexity, which can be easily integrated into other models. Moreover, we introduce a joint structure via a generalized mean pooling (GMP) layer and a self-attention (SA) mechanism to balance background and texture information and obtain the regional features with a large amount of information in the image. To further shrink the intra-class distance, a weighted regularized triplet (WRT) loss is developed without introducing additional hyperparameters. The model was first evaluated on the PKU Sketch ReID dataset, and extensive experimental results show that the Rank-1/mAP accuracy of our method is 87.00%/91.12%, reaching the current state-of-the-art performance. To further validate the effectiveness of our approach in handling cross-modality person ReID, we conducted experiments on two commonly used IR-RGB datasets (SYSU-MM01 and RegDB). The obtained results show that our method achieves competitive performance. These results confirm the ability of our method to effectively process images from different modalities.
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Qingshan Chen, Zhenzhen Quan, Yujun Li, Chao Zhai, & Mikhail Mozerov. (2023). An Unsupervised Domain Adaption Approach for Cross-Modality RGB-Infrared Person Re-Identification. IEEE-SENS - IEEE Sensors Journal, 23(24).
Abstract: Dual-camera systems commonly employed in surveillance serve as the foundation for RGB-infrared (IR) cross-modality person re-identification (ReID). However, significant modality differences give rise to inferior performance compared to single-modality scenarios. Furthermore, most existing studies in this area rely on supervised training with meticulously labeled datasets. Labeling RGB-IR image pairs is more complex than labeling conventional image data, and deploying pretrained models on unlabeled datasets can lead to catastrophic performance degradation. In contrast to previous solutions that focus solely on cross-modality or domain adaptation issues, this article presents an end-to-end unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) framework for the cross-modality person ReID, which can simultaneously address both of these challenges. This model employs source domain classes, target domain clusters, and unclustered instance samples for the training, maximizing the comprehensive use of the dataset. Moreover, it addresses the problem of mismatched clustering labels between the two modalities in the target domain by incorporating a label matching module that reassigns reliable clusters with labels, ensuring correspondence between different modality labels. We construct the loss function by incorporating distinctiveness loss and multiplicity loss, both of which are determined by the similarity of neighboring features in the predicted feature space and the difference between distant features. This approach enables efficient feature clustering and cluster class assignment to occur concurrently. Eight UDA cross-modality person ReID experiments are conducted on three real datasets and six synthetic datasets. The experimental results unequivocally demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art algorithms to a significant degree. Notably, in RegDB → RegDB_light, the Rank-1 accuracy exhibits a remarkable improvement of 8.24%.
Keywords: Q. Chen, Z. Quan, Y. Li, C. Zhai and M. G. Mozerov
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Danna Xue, Javier Vazquez, Luis Herranz, Yang Zhang, & Michael S Brown. (2023). Integrating High-Level Features for Consistent Palette-based Multi-image Recoloring. CGF - Computer Graphics Forum, .
Abstract: Achieving visually consistent colors across multiple images is important when images are used in photo albums, websites, and brochures. Unfortunately, only a handful of methods address multi-image color consistency compared to one-to-one color transfer techniques. Furthermore, existing methods do not incorporate high-level features that can assist graphic designers in their work. To address these limitations, we introduce a framework that builds upon a previous palette-based color consistency method and incorporates three high-level features: white balance, saliency, and color naming. We show how these features overcome the limitations of the prior multi-consistency workflow and showcase the user-friendly nature of our framework.
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Mohammad Momeny, Ali Asghar Neshat, Ahmad Jahanbakhshi, Majid Mahmoudi, Yiannis Ampatzidis, & Petia Radeva. (2023). Grading and fraud detection of saffron via learning-to-augment incorporated Inception-v4 CNN. FC - Food Control, 147, 109554.
Abstract: Saffron is a well-known product in the food industry. It is one of the spices that are sometimes adulterated with the sole motive of gaining more economic profit. Today, machine vision systems are widely used in controlling the quality of food and agricultural products as a new, non-destructive, and inexpensive approach. In this study, a machine vision system based on deep learning was used to detect fraud and saffron quality. A dataset of 1869 images was created and categorized in 6 classes including: dried saffron stigma using a dryer; dried saffron stigma using pressing method; pure stem of saffron; sunflower; saffron stem mixed with food coloring; and corn silk mixed with food coloring. A Learning-to-Augment incorporated Inception-v4 Convolutional Neural Network (LAII-v4 CNN) was developed for grading and fraud detection of saffron in images captured by smartphones. The best policies of data augmentation were selected with the proposed LAII-v4 CNN using images corrupted by Gaussian, speckle, and impulse noise to address overfitting the model. The proposed LAII-v4 CNN compared with regular CNN-based methods and traditional classifiers. Ensemble of Bagged Decision Trees, Ensemble of Boosted Decision Trees, k-Nearest Neighbor, Random Under-sampling Boosted Trees, and Support Vector Machine were used for classification of the features extracted by Histograms of Oriented Gradients and Local Binary Patterns, and selected by the Principal Component Analysis. The results showed that the proposed LAII-v4 CNN with an accuracy of 99.5% has achieved the best performance by employing batch normalization, Dropout, and leaky ReLU.
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Razieh Rastgoo, Kourosh Kiani, & Sergio Escalera. (2023). A deep co-attentive hand-based video question answering framework using multi-view skeleton. MTAP - Multimedia Tools and Applications, 82, 1401–1429.
Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel hand –based Video Question Answering framework, entitled Multi-View Video Question Answering (MV-VQA), employing the Single Shot Detector (SSD), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and Co-Attention mechanism with RGB videos as the inputs. Our model includes three main blocks: vision, language, and attention. In the vision block, we employ a novel representation to obtain some efficient multiview features from the hand object using the combination of five 3DCNNs and one LSTM network. To obtain the question embedding, we use the BERT model in language block. Finally, we employ a co-attention mechanism on vision and language features to recognize the final answer. For the first time, we propose such a hand-based Video-QA framework including the multi-view hand skeleton features combined with the question embedding and co-attention mechanism. Our framework is capable of processing the arbitrary numbers of questions in the dataset annotations. There are different application domains for this framework. Here, as an application domain, we applied our framework to dynamic hand gesture recognition for the first time. Since the main object in dynamic hand gesture recognition is the human hand, we performed a step-by-step analysis of the hand detection and multi-view hand skeleton impact on the model performance. Evaluation results on five datasets, including two datasets in VideoQA, two datasets in dynamic hand gesture, and one dataset in hand action recognition show that MV-VQA outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives.
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Carlos Martin Isla, Victor M Campello, Cristian Izquierdo, Kaisar Kushibar, Carla Sendra Balcells, Polyxeni Gkontra, et al. (2023). Deep Learning Segmentation of the Right Ventricle in Cardiac MRI: The M&ms Challenge. JBHI - IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 27(7), 3302–3313.
Abstract: In recent years, several deep learning models have been proposed to accurately quantify and diagnose cardiac pathologies. These automated tools heavily rely on the accurate segmentation of cardiac structures in MRI images. However, segmentation of the right ventricle is challenging due to its highly complex shape and ill-defined borders. Hence, there is a need for new methods to handle such structure's geometrical and textural complexities, notably in the presence of pathologies such as Dilated Right Ventricle, Tricuspid Regurgitation, Arrhythmogenesis, Tetralogy of Fallot, and Inter-atrial Communication. The last MICCAI challenge on right ventricle segmentation was held in 2012 and included only 48 cases from a single clinical center. As part of the 12th Workshop on Statistical Atlases and Computational Models of the Heart (STACOM 2021), the M&Ms-2 challenge was organized to promote the interest of the research community around right ventricle segmentation in multi-disease, multi-view, and multi-center cardiac MRI. Three hundred sixty CMR cases, including short-axis and long-axis 4-chamber views, were collected from three Spanish hospitals using nine different scanners from three different vendors, and included a diverse set of right and left ventricle pathologies. The solutions provided by the participants show that nnU-Net achieved the best results overall. However, multi-view approaches were able to capture additional information, highlighting the need to integrate multiple cardiac diseases, views, scanners, and acquisition protocols to produce reliable automatic cardiac segmentation algorithms.
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Razieh Rastgoo, Kourosh Kiani, & Sergio Escalera. (2023). ZS-GR: zero-shot gesture recognition from RGB-D videos. MTAP - Multimedia Tools and Applications, 82, 43781–43796.
Abstract: Gesture Recognition (GR) is a challenging research area in computer vision. To tackle the annotation bottleneck in GR, we formulate the problem of Zero-Shot Gesture Recognition (ZS-GR) and propose a two-stream model from two input modalities: RGB and Depth videos. To benefit from the vision Transformer capabilities, we use two vision Transformer models, for human detection and visual features representation. We configure a transformer encoder-decoder architecture, as a fast and accurate human detection model, to overcome the challenges of the current human detection models. Considering the human keypoints, the detected human body is segmented into nine parts. A spatio-temporal representation from human body is obtained using a vision Transformer and a LSTM network. A semantic space maps the visual features to the lingual embedding of the class labels via a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model. We evaluated the proposed model on five datasets, Montalbano II, MSR Daily Activity 3D, CAD-60, NTU-60, and isoGD obtaining state-of-the-art results compared to state-of-the-art ZS-GR models as well as the Zero-Shot Action Recognition (ZS-AR).
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Lei Li, Fuping Wu, Sihan Wang, Xinzhe Luo, Carlos Martin Isla, Shuwei Zhai, et al. (2023). MyoPS: A benchmark of myocardial pathology segmentation combining three-sequence cardiac magnetic resonance images. MIA - Medical Image Analysis, 87, 102808.
Abstract: Assessment of myocardial viability is essential in diagnosis and treatment management of patients suffering from myocardial infarction, and classification of pathology on the myocardium is the key to this assessment. This work defines a new task of medical image analysis, i.e., to perform myocardial pathology segmentation (MyoPS) combining three-sequence cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images, which was first proposed in the MyoPS challenge, in conjunction with MICCAI 2020. Note that MyoPS refers to both myocardial pathology segmentation and the challenge in this paper. The challenge provided 45 paired and pre-aligned CMR images, allowing algorithms to combine the complementary information from the three CMR sequences for pathology segmentation. In this article, we provide details of the challenge, survey the works from fifteen participants and interpret their methods according to five aspects, i.e., preprocessing, data augmentation, learning strategy, model architecture and post-processing. In addition, we analyze the results with respect to different factors, in order to examine the key obstacles and explore the potential of solutions, as well as to provide a benchmark for future research. The average Dice scores of submitted algorithms were and for myocardial scars and edema, respectively. We conclude that while promising results have been reported, the research is still in the early stage, and more in-depth exploration is needed before a successful application to the clinics. MyoPS data and evaluation tool continue to be publicly available upon registration via its homepage (www.sdspeople.fudan.edu.cn/zhuangxiahai/0/myops20/).
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Armin Mehri, Parichehr Behjati, & Angel Sappa. (2023). TnTViT-G: Transformer in Transformer Network for Guidance Super Resolution. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 11, 11529–11540.
Abstract: Image Super Resolution is a potential approach that can improve the image quality of low-resolution optical sensors, leading to improved performance in various industrial applications. It is important to emphasize that most state-of-the-art super resolution algorithms often use a single channel of input data for training and inference. However, this practice ignores the fact that the cost of acquiring high-resolution images in various spectral domains can differ a lot from one another. In this paper, we attempt to exploit complementary information from a low-cost channel (visible image) to increase the image quality of an expensive channel (infrared image). We propose a dual stream Transformer-based super resolution approach that uses the visible image as a guide to super-resolve another spectral band image. To this end, we introduce Transformer in Transformer network for Guidance super resolution, named TnTViT-G, an efficient and effective method that extracts the features of input images via different streams and fuses them together at various stages. In addition, unlike other guidance super resolution approaches, TnTViT-G is not limited to a fixed upsample size and it can generate super-resolved images of any size. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art super resolution approaches. TnTViT-G surpasses state-of-the-art methods by up to 0.19∼2.3dB , while it is memory efficient.
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Chengyi Zou, Shuai Wan, Tiannan Ji, Marc Gorriz Blanch, Marta Mrak, & Luis Herranz. (2023). Chroma Intra Prediction with Lightweight Attention-Based Neural Networks. TCSVT - IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 34(1), 549–560.
Abstract: Neural networks can be successfully used for cross-component prediction in video coding. In particular, attention-based architectures are suitable for chroma intra prediction using luma information because of their capability to model relations between difierent channels. However, the complexity of such methods is still very high and should be further reduced, especially for decoding. In this paper, a cost-effective attention-based neural network is designed for chroma intra prediction. Moreover, with the goal of further improving coding performance, a novel approach is introduced to utilize more boundary information effectively. In addition to improving prediction, a simplification methodology is also proposed to reduce inference complexity by simplifying convolutions. The proposed schemes are integrated into H.266/Versatile Video Coding (VVC) pipeline, and only one additional binary block-level syntax flag is introduced to indicate whether a given block makes use of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves up to −0.46%/−2.29%/−2.17% BD-rate reduction on Y/Cb/Cr components, respectively, compared with H.266/VVC anchor. Reductions in the encoding and decoding complexity of up to 22% and 61%, respectively, are achieved by the proposed scheme with respect to the previous attention-based chroma intra prediction method while maintaining coding performance.
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Shiqi Yang, Yaxing Wang, Luis Herranz, Shangling Jui, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2023). Casting a BAIT for offline and online source-free domain adaptation. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 234, 103747.
Abstract: We address the source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) problem, where only the source model is available during adaptation to the target domain. We consider two settings: the offline setting where all target data can be visited multiple times (epochs) to arrive at a prediction for each target sample, and the online setting where the target data needs to be directly classified upon arrival. Inspired by diverse classifier based domain adaptation methods, in this paper we introduce a second classifier, but with another classifier head fixed. When adapting to the target domain, the additional classifier initialized from source classifier is expected to find misclassified features. Next, when updating the feature extractor, those features will be pushed towards the right side of the source decision boundary, thus achieving source-free domain adaptation. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves competitive results for offline SFDA on several benchmark datasets compared with existing DA and SFDA methods, and our method surpasses by a large margin other SFDA methods under online source-free domain adaptation setting.
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Kunal Biswas, Palaiahnakote Shivakumara, Umapada Pal, Tong Lu, Michel Blumenstein, & Josep Llados. (2023). Classification of aesthetic natural scene images using statistical and semantic features. MTAP - Multimedia Tools and Applications, 82(9), 13507–13532.
Abstract: Aesthetic image analysis is essential for improving the performance of multimedia image retrieval systems, especially from a repository of social media and multimedia content stored on mobile devices. This paper presents a novel method for classifying aesthetic natural scene images by studying the naturalness of image content using statistical features, and reading text in the images using semantic features. Unlike existing methods that focus only on image quality with human information, the proposed approach focuses on image features as well as text-based semantic features without human intervention to reduce the gap between subjectivity and objectivity in the classification. The aesthetic classes considered in this work are (i) Very Pleasant, (ii) Pleasant, (iii) Normal and (iv) Unpleasant. The naturalness is represented by features of focus, defocus, perceived brightness, perceived contrast, blurriness and noisiness, while semantics are represented by text recognition, description of the images and labels of images, profile pictures, and banner images. Furthermore, a deep learning model is proposed in a novel way to fuse statistical and semantic features for the classification of aesthetic natural scene images. Experiments on our own dataset and the standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves 92.74%, 88.67% and 83.22% average classification rates on our own dataset, AVA dataset and CUHKPQ dataset, respectively. Furthermore, a comparative study of the proposed model with the existing methods shows that the proposed method is effective for the classification of aesthetic social media images.
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