Abstract: We present a vision-inertial system which combines two RGB-Depth devices together with a wearable inertial movement unit in order to detect activities of the daily living. From multi-view videos, we extract dense trajectories enriched with a histogram of normals description computed from the depth cue and bag them into multi-view codebooks. During the later classification step a multi-class support vector machine with a RBF- 2 kernel combines the descriptions at kernel level. In order to perform action detection from the videos, a sliding window approach is utilized. On the other hand, we extract accelerations, rotation angles, and jerk features from the inertial data collected by the wearable placed on the user’s dominant wrist. During gesture spotting, a dynamic time warping is applied and the aligning costs to a set of pre-selected gesture sub-classes are thresholded to determine possible detections. The outputs of the two modules are combined in a late-fusion fashion. The system is validated in a real-case scenario with elderly from an elder home. Learning-based fusion results improve the ones from the single modalities, demonstrating the success of such multimodal approach.

Abstract: In this dissertation, we explore different ways to perform human action recognition in video clips. We focus on data efficiency, proposing new approaches that alleviate the need for laborious and time-consuming manual data annotation. In the first part of this dissertation, we start by analyzing previous state-of-the-art models, comparing their differences and similarities in order to pinpoint where their real strengths come from. Leveraging this information, we then proceed to boost the classification accuracy of shallow models to levels that rival deep neural networks. We introduce hybrid video classification architectures based on carefully designed unsupervised representations of handcrafted spatiotemporal features classified by supervised deep networks. We show in our experiments that our hybrid model combine the best of both worlds: it is data efficient (trained on 150 to 10,000 short clips) and yet improved significantly on the state of the art, including deep models trained on millions of manually labeled images and videos. In the second part of this research, we investigate the generation of synthetic training data for action recognition, as it has recently shown promising results for a variety of other computer vision tasks. We propose an interpretable parametric generative model of human action videos that relies on procedural generation and other computer graphics techniques of modern game engines. We generate a diverse, realistic, and physically plausible dataset of human action videos, called PHAV for “Procedural Human Action Videos”. It contains a total of 39,982 videos, with more than 1,000 examples for each action of 35 categories. Our approach is not limited to existing motion capture sequences, and we procedurally define 14 synthetic actions. We then introduce deep multi-task representation learning architectures to mix synthetic and real videos, even if the action categories differ. Our experiments on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 benchmarks suggest that combining our large set of synthetic videos with small real-world datasets can boost recognition performance, outperforming fine-tuning state-of-the-art unsupervised generative models of videos.

Abstract: Deep convolutional architectures have shown to be successful frameworks to solve generic computer vision problems. The estimation of intrinsic reflectance from single image is not a solved problem yet. Encoder-Decoder architectures are a perfect approach for pixel-wise reflectance estimation, although it usually suffers from the lack of large datasets. Lack of data can be partially solved with data augmentation, however usual techniques focus on geometric changes which does not help for reflectance estimation. In this paper we propose a color-based data augmentation technique that extends the training data by increasing the variability of chromaticity. Rotation on the red-green blue-yellow plane of an opponent space enable to increase the training set in a coherent and sound way that improves network generalization capability for reflectance estimation. We perform some experiments on the Sintel dataset showing that our color-based augmentation increase performance and overcomes one of the state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract: We address the problem of image translation between domains or modalities for which no direct paired data is available (i.e. zero-pair translation). We propose mix and match networks, based on multiple encoders and decoders aligned in such a way that other encoder-decoder pairs can be composed at test time to perform unseen image translation tasks between domains or modalities for which explicit paired samples were not seen during training. We study the impact of autoencoders, side information and losses in improving the alignment and transferability of trained pairwise translation models to unseen translations. We show our approach is scalable and can perform colorization and style transfer between unseen combinations of domains. We evaluate our system in a challenging cross-modal setting where semantic segmentation is estimated from depth images, without explicit access to any depth-semantic segmentation training pairs. Our model outperforms baselines based on pix2pix and CycleGAN models.

Abstract: PURPOSE:
Personalized computational simulations of the heart could open up new improved approaches to diagnosis and surgery assistance systems. While it is fully recognized that myocardial fiber orientation is central for the construction of realistic computational models of cardiac electromechanics, the role of its overall architecture and connectivity remains unclear. Morphological studies show that the distribution of cardiac muscular fibers at the basal ring connects epicardium and endocardium. However, computational models simplify their distribution and disregard the basal loop. This work explores the influence in computational simulations of fiber distribution at different short-axis cuts.
METHODS:
We have used a highly parallelized computational solver to test different fiber models of ventricular muscular connectivity. We have considered two rule-based mathematical models and an own-designed method preserving basal connectivity as observed in experimental data. Simulated cardiac functional scores (rotation, torsion and longitudinal shortening) were compared to experimental healthy ranges using generalized models (rotation) and Mahalanobis distances (shortening, torsion).
RESULTS:
The probability of rotation was significantly lower for ruled-based models [95% CI (0.13, 0.20)] in comparison with experimental data [95% CI (0.23, 0.31)]. The Mahalanobis distance for experimental data was in the edge of the region enclosing 99% of the healthy population.
CONCLUSIONS:
Cardiac electromechanical simulations of the heart with fibers extracted from experimental data produce functional scores closer to healthy ranges than rule-based models disregarding architecture connectivity.

Abstract: Abstract
RATIONALE:
Virtual bronchoscopic navigation (VBN) guidance to peripheral pulmonary lesions is often limited by insufficient segmentation of the peripheral airways.
OBJECTIVES:
To test the effect of applying positive airway pressure (PAP) during CT acquisition to improve segmentation, particularly at end-expiration.
METHODS:
CT acquisitions in inspiration and expiration with 4 PAP protocols were recorded prospectively and compared to baseline inspiratory acquisitions in 20 patients. The 4 protocols explored differences between devices (flow vs. turbine), exposures (within seconds vs. 15-min) and pressure levels (10 vs. 14 cmH2O). Segmentation quality was evaluated with the number of airways and number of endpoints reached. A generalized mixed-effects model explored the estimated effect of each protocol.
MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS:
Patient characteristics and lung function did not significantly differ between protocols. Compared to baseline inspiratory acquisitions, expiratory acquisitions after 15 min of 14 cmH2O PAP segmented 1.63-fold more airways (95% CI 1.07-2.48; p = 0.018) and reached 1.34-fold more endpoints (95% CI 1.08-1.66; p = 0.004). Inspiratory acquisitions performed immediately under 10 cmH2O PAP reached 1.20-fold (95% CI 1.09-1.33; p < 0.001) more endpoints; after 15 min the increase was 1.14-fold (95% CI 1.05-1.24; p < 0.001).
CONCLUSIONS:
CT acquisitions with PAP segment more airways and reach more endpoints than baseline inspiratory acquisitions. The improvement is particularly evident at end-expiration after 15 min of 14 cmH2O PAP. Further studies must confirm that the improvement increases diagnostic yield when using VBN to evaluate peripheral pulmonary lesions.

Abstract: Person re-identification has received special attention by the human analysis community in the last few years. To address the challenges in this field, many researchers have proposed different strategies, which basically exploit either cross-view invariant features or cross-view robust metrics. In this work, we propose to exploit a post-ranking approach and combine different feature representations through ranking aggregation. Spatial information, which potentially benefits the person matching, is represented using a 2D body model, from which color and texture information are extracted and combined. We also consider background/foreground information, automatically extracted via Deep Decompositional Network, and the usage of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) features. To describe the matching between images we use the polynomial feature map, also taking into account local and global information. The Discriminant Context Information Analysis based post-ranking approach is used to improve initial ranking lists. Finally, the Stuart ranking aggregation method is employed to combine complementary ranking lists obtained from different feature representations. Experimental results demonstrated that we improve the state-of-the-art on VIPeR and PRID450s datasets, achieving 67.21% and 75.64% on top-1 rank recognition rate, respectively, as well as obtaining competitive results on CUHK01 dataset.

Abstract: Few-shot learning has become essential for producing models that generalize from few examples. In this work, we identify that metric scaling and metric task conditioning are important to improve the performance of few-shot algorithms. Our analysis reveals that simple metric scaling completely changes the nature of few-shot algorithm parameter updates. Metric scaling provides improvements up to 14% in accuracy for certain metrics on the mini-Imagenet 5-way 5-shot classification task. We further propose a simple and effective way of conditioning a learner on the task sample set, resulting in learning a task-dependent metric space. Moreover, we propose and empirically test a practical end-to-end optimization procedure based on auxiliary task co-training to learn a task-dependent metric space. The resulting few-shot learning model based on the task-dependent scaled metric achieves state of the art on mini-Imagenet. We confirm these results on another few-shot dataset that we introduce in this paper based on CIFAR100.