Abstract: In recent years, deep learning models have considerably advanced the performance of segmentation tasks on Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). However, these models show a considerable performance drop when they are evaluated on unseen data from a different distribution. Since annotation is often a hard and costly task requiring expert supervision, it is necessary to develop ways in which existing models can be adapted to the unseen domains without any additional labelled information. In this work, we explore one such technique which extends the CycleGAN [2] architecture to generate label-preserving data in the target domain. The synthetic target domain data is used to train the nn-UNet [3] framework for the task of multi-label segmentation. The experiments are conducted and evaluated on the dataset [1] provided in the ‘Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation’ challenge [23] for segmentation of vestibular schwannoma (VS) tumour and cochlea on contrast enhanced (ceT1) and high resolution (hrT2) MRI scans. In the proposed approach, our model obtains dice scores (DSC) 0.73 and 0.49 for tumour and cochlea respectively on the validation set of the dataset. This indicates the applicability of the proposed technique to real-world problems where data may be obtained by different acquisition protocols as in [1] where hrT2 images are more reliable, safer, and lower-cost alternative to ceT1.

Abstract: Large-scale accurate labels are very important to the Deep Neural Networks to train them and assure high performance. However, it is very expensive to create a clean dataset since usually it relies on human interaction. To this purpose, the labelling process is made cheap with a trade-off of having noisy labels. Learning with Noisy Labels is an active area of research being at the same time very challenging. The recent advances in Self-supervised learning and robust loss functions have helped in advancing noisy label research. In this paper, we propose a loss correction method that relies on dynamic weights computed based on the model training. We extend the existing Contrast to Divide algorithm coupled with DivideMix using a new class-conditional weighted scheme. We validate the method using the standard noise experiments and achieved encouraging results.

Abstract: The problem of food image recognition is an essential one in today’s context because health conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease require constant monitoring of a person’s diet. To automate this process, several models are available to recognize food images. Due to a considerable number of unique food dishes and various cuisines, a traditional flat classifier ceases to perform well. To address this issue, prediction schemes consisting of both flat and hierarchical classifiers, with the analysis of epistemic uncertainty are used to switch between the classifiers. However, the accuracy of the predictions made using epistemic uncertainty data remains considerably low. Therefore, this paper presents a prediction scheme using three different threshold criteria that helps to increase the accuracy of epistemic uncertainty predictions. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated using several experiments performed on the MAFood-121 dataset. The experimental results validate the proposal performance and show that the proposed threshold criteria help to increase the overall accuracy of the predictions by correctly classifying the uncertainty distribution of the samples.

Abstract: Lifelong object re-identification incrementally learns from a stream of re-identification tasks. The objective is to learn a representation that can be applied to all tasks and that generalizes to previously unseen re-identification tasks. The main challenge is that at inference time the representation must generalize to previously unseen identities. To address this problem, we apply continual meta metric learning to lifelong object re-identification. To prevent forgetting of previous tasks, we use knowledge distillation and explore the roles of positive and negative pairs. Based on our observation that the distillation and metric losses are antagonistic, we propose to remove positive pairs from distillation to robustify model updates. Our method, called Distillation without Positive Pairs (DwoPP), is evaluated on extensive intra-domain experiments on person and vehicle re-identification datasets, as well as inter-domain experiments on the LReID benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that DwoPP significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Abstract: We propose a simple but effective source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) method.
Treating SFDA as an unsupervised clustering problem and following the intuition
that local neighbors in feature space should have more similar predictions than
other features, we propose to optimize an objective of prediction consistency. This
objective encourages local neighborhood features in feature space to have similar
predictions while features farther away in feature space have dissimilar predictions, leading to efficient feature clustering and cluster assignment simultaneously. For efficient training, we seek to optimize an upper-bound of the objective resulting in two simple terms. Furthermore, we relate popular existing methods in domain adaptation, source-free domain adaptation and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity. The experimental results prove the superiority of our method, and our method can be adopted as a simple but strong baseline for future research in SFDA. Our method can be also adapted to source-free open-set and partial-set DA which further shows the generalization ability of our method.

Abstract: In video compression the luma channel can be useful for predicting chroma channels (Cb, Cr), as has been demonstrated with the Cross-Component Linear Model (CCLM) used in Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. More recently, it has been shown that neural networks can even better capture the relationship among different channels. In this paper, a new attention-based neural network is proposed for cross-component intra prediction. With the goal to simplify neural network design, the new framework consists of four branches: boundary branch and luma branch for extracting features from reference samples, attention branch for fusing the first two branches, and prediction branch for computing the predicted chroma samples. The proposed scheme is integrated into VVC test model together with one additional binary block-level syntax flag which indicates whether a given block makes use of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate 0.31%/2.36%/2.00% BD-rate reductions on Y/Cb/Cr components, respectively, on top of the VVC Test Model (VTM) 7.0 which uses CCLM.

Abstract: Text watermark detection in video images is challenging because text watermark characteristics are different from caption and scene texts in the video images. Developing a successful model for detecting text watermark, caption, and scene texts is an open challenge. This study aims at developing a new Deep End-to-End model for Text Watermark Detection (TWD), caption and scene text in video images. To standardize non-uniform contrast, quality, and resolution, we explore the U-Net3+ model for enhancing poor quality text without affecting high-quality text. Similarly, to address the challenges of arbitrary orientation, text shapes and complex background, we explore Stacked Hourglass Encoded Fourier Contour Embedding Network (SFCENet) by feeding the output of the U-Net3+ model as input. Furthermore, the proposed work integrates enhancement and detection models as an end-to-end model for detecting multi-type text in video images. To validate the proposed model, we create our own dataset (named TW-866), which provides video images containing text watermark, caption (subtitles), as well as scene text. The proposed model is also evaluated on standard natural scene text detection datasets, namely, ICDAR 2019 MLT, CTW1500, Total-Text, and DAST1500. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods. This is the first work on text watermark detection in video images to the best of our knowledge

Abstract: GANs have matured in recent years and are able to generate high-resolution, realistic images. However, the computational resources and the data required for the training of high-quality GANs are enormous, and the study of transfer learning of these models is therefore an urgent topic. Many of the available high-quality pretrained GANs are unconditional (like StyleGAN). For many applications, however, conditional GANs are preferable, because they provide more control over the generation process, despite often suffering more training difficulties. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on transferring from high-quality pretrained unconditional GANs to conditional GANs. This requires architectural adaptation of the pretrained GAN to perform the conditioning. To this end, we propose hyper-modulated generative networks that allow for shared and complementary supervision. To prevent the additional weights of the hypernetwork to overfit, with subsequent mode collapse on small target domains, we introduce a self-initialization procedure that does not require any real data to initialize the hypernetwork parameters. To further improve the sample efficiency of the transfer, we apply contrastive learning in the discriminator, which effectively works on very limited batch sizes. In extensive experiments, we validate the efficiency of the hypernetworks, self-initialization and contrastive loss for knowledge transfer on standard benchmarks.