Abstract: In this work, we propose an encoder-decoder-like architecture to perform face reenactment in image sequences. Our goal is to transfer the training subject identity to a given test subject. We regularize face reenactment by facial action unit intensity and 3D gaze vector regression. This way, we enforce the network to transfer subtle facial expressions and eye dynamics, providing a more lifelike result. The proposed encoder-decoder receives as input the previous sequence frame stacked to the current frame image of facial landmarks. Thus, the generated frames benefit from appearance and geometry, while keeping temporal coherence for the generated sequence. At test stage, a new target subject with the facial performance of the source subject and the appearance of the training subject is reenacted. Principal component analysis is applied to project the test subject geometry to the closest training subject geometry before reenactment. Evaluation of our proposal shows faster convergence, and more accurate and realistic results in comparison to other architectures without action units and gaze regularization.

Abstract: This work presents CLOTH3D, the first big scale synthetic dataset of 3D clothed human sequences. CLOTH3D contains a large variability on garment type, topology, shape, size, tightness and fabric. Clothes are simulated on top of thousands of different pose sequences and body shapes, generating realistic cloth dynamics. We provide the dataset with a generative model for cloth generation. We propose a Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE) based on graph convolutions (GCVAE) to learn garment latent spaces. This allows for realistic generation of 3D garments on top of SMPL model for any pose and shape.

Abstract: Sign language, as a different form of the communication language, is important to large groups of people in society. There are different signs in each sign language with variability in hand shape, motion profile, and position of the hand, face, and body parts contributing to each sign. So, visual sign language recognition is a complex research area in computer vision. Many models have been proposed by different researchers with significant improvement by deep learning approaches in recent years. In this survey, we review the vision-based proposed models of sign language recognition using deep learning approaches from the last five years. While the overall trend of the proposed models indicates a significant improvement in recognition accuracy in sign language recognition, there are some challenges yet that need to be solved. We present a taxonomy to categorize the proposed models for isolated and continuous sign language recognition, discussing applications, datasets, hybrid models, complexity, and future lines of research in the field.

Abstract: Face anti-spoofing is critical to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. The biometrics community has %possessed achieved impressive progress recently due the excellent performance of deep neural networks and the availability of large datasets. Although ethnic bias has been verified to severely affect the performance of face recognition systems, it still remains an open research problem in face anti-spoofing. Recently, a multi-ethnic face anti-spoofing dataset, CASIA-SURF CeFA, has been released with the goal of measuring the ethnic bias. It is the largest up to date cross-ethnicity face anti-spoofing dataset covering 3 ethnicities, 3 modalities, 1,607 subjects, 2D plus 3D attack types, and the first dataset including explicit ethnic labels among the recently released datasets for face anti-spoofing. We organized the Chalearn Face Anti-spoofing Attack Detection Challenge which consists of single-modal (e.g., RGB) and multi-modal (e.g., RGB, Depth, Infrared (IR)) tracks around this novel resource to boost research aiming to alleviate the ethnic bias. Both tracks have attracted 340 teams in the development stage, and finally 11 and 8 teams have submitted their codes in the single-modal and multi-modal face anti-spoofing recognition challenges, respectively. All the results were verified and re-ran by the organizing team, and the results were used for the final ranking. This paper presents an overview of the challenge, including its design, evaluation protocol and a summary of results. We analyze the top ranked solutions and draw conclusions derived from the competition. In addition we outline future work directions.

Abstract: Food image recognition has recently attracted the attention of many researchers, due to the challenging problem it poses, the ease collection of food images, and its numerous applications to health and leisure. In real applications, it is necessary to analyze and recognize thousands of different foods. For this purpose, we propose a novel prediction scheme based on a class hierarchy that considers local classifiers, in addition to a flat classifier. In order to make a decision about which approach to use, we define different criteria that take into account both the analysis of the Epistemic Uncertainty estimated from the ‘children’ classifiers and the prediction from the ‘parent’ classifier. We evaluate our proposal using three Uncertainty estimation methods, tested on two public food datasets. The results show that the proposed method reduces parent-child error propagation in hierarchical schemes and improves classification results compared to the single flat classifier, meanwhile maintains good performance regardless the Uncertainty estimation method chosen.

Abstract: The automatic discovery of behaviour is of high importance when aiming to assess and improve the quality of life of people. Egocentric images offer a rich and objective description of the daily life of the camera wearer. This work proposes a new method to identify a person’s patterns of behaviour from collected egocentric photo-streams. Our model characterizes time-frames based on the context (place, activities and environment objects) that define the images composition. Based on the similarity among the time-frames that describe the collected days for a user, we propose a new unsupervised greedy method to discover the behavioural pattern set based on a novel semantic clustering approach. Moreover, we present a new score metric to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. We validate our method on 104 days and more than 100k images extracted from 7 users. Results show that behavioural patterns can be discovered to characterize the routine of individuals and consequently their lifestyle.

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.