Fei Yang, Luis Herranz, Yongmei Cheng, & Mikhail Mozerov. (2021). Slimmable compressive autoencoders for practical neural image compression. In 34th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 4996–5005).
Abstract: Neural image compression leverages deep neural networks to outperform traditional image codecs in rate-distortion performance. However, the resulting models are also heavy, computationally demanding and generally optimized for a single rate, limiting their practical use. Focusing on practical image compression, we propose slimmable compressive autoencoders (SlimCAEs), where rate (R) and distortion (D) are jointly optimized for different capacities. Once trained, encoders and decoders can be executed at different capacities, leading to different rates and complexities. We show that a successful implementation of SlimCAEs requires suitable capacity-specific RD tradeoffs. Our experiments show that SlimCAEs are highly flexible models that provide excellent rate-distortion performance, variable rate, and dynamic adjustment of memory, computational cost and latency, thus addressing the main requirements of practical image compression.
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Md. Mostafa Kamal Sarker, Hatem A. Rashwan, Farhan Akram, Vivek Kumar Singh, Syeda Furruka Banu, Forhad U H Chowdhury, et al. (2021). SLSNet: Skin lesion segmentation using a lightweight generative adversarial network. ESWA - Expert Systems With Applications, 183, 115433.
Abstract: The determination of precise skin lesion boundaries in dermoscopic images using automated methods faces many challenges, most importantly, the presence of hair, inconspicuous lesion edges and low contrast in dermoscopic images, and variability in the color, texture and shapes of skin lesions. Existing deep learning-based skin lesion segmentation algorithms are expensive in terms of computational time and memory. Consequently, running such segmentation algorithms requires a powerful GPU and high bandwidth memory, which are not available in dermoscopy devices. Thus, this article aims to achieve precise skin lesion segmentation with minimum resources: a lightweight, efficient generative adversarial network (GAN) model called SLSNet, which combines 1-D kernel factorized networks, position and channel attention, and multiscale aggregation mechanisms with a GAN model. The 1-D kernel factorized network reduces the computational cost of 2D filtering. The position and channel attention modules enhance the discriminative ability between the lesion and non-lesion feature representations in spatial and channel dimensions, respectively. A multiscale block is also used to aggregate the coarse-to-fine features of input skin images and reduce the effect of the artifacts. SLSNet is evaluated on two publicly available datasets: ISBI 2017 and the ISIC 2018. Although SLSNet has only 2.35 million parameters, the experimental results demonstrate that it achieves segmentation results on a par with the state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation methods with an accuracy of 97.61%, and Dice and Jaccard similarity coefficients of 90.63% and 81.98%, respectively. SLSNet can run at more than 110 frames per second (FPS) in a single GTX1080Ti GPU, which is faster than well-known deep learning-based image segmentation models, such as FCN. Therefore, SLSNet can be used for practical dermoscopic applications.
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Javier Marin, & Sergio Escalera. (2021). SSSGAN: Satellite Style and Structure Generative Adversarial Networks. Remote Sensing, 13(19), 3984.
Abstract: This work presents Satellite Style and Structure Generative Adversarial Network (SSGAN), a generative model of high resolution satellite imagery to support image segmentation. Based on spatially adaptive denormalization modules (SPADE) that modulate the activations with respect to segmentation map structure, in addition to global descriptor vectors that capture the semantic information in a vector with respect to Open Street Maps (OSM) classes, this model is able to produce
consistent aerial imagery. By decoupling the generation of aerial images into a structure map and a carefully defined style vector, we were able to improve the realism and geodiversity of the synthesis with respect to the state-of-the-art baseline. Therefore, the proposed model allows us to control the generation not only with respect to the desired structure, but also with respect to a geographic area.
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Andres Mafla, Rafael S. Rezende, Lluis Gomez, Diana Larlus, & Dimosthenis Karatzas. (2021). StacMR: Scene-Text Aware Cross-Modal Retrieval. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 2219–2229).
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Fatemeh Noroozi, Ciprian Corneanu, Dorota Kamińska, Tomasz Sapiński, Sergio Escalera, & Gholamreza Anbarjafari. (2021). Survey on Emotional Body Gesture Recognition. TAC - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 12(2), 505–523.
Abstract: Automatic emotion recognition has become a trending research topic in the past decade. While works based on facial expressions or speech abound, recognizing affect from body gestures remains a less explored topic. We present a new comprehensive survey hoping to boost research in the field. We first introduce emotional body gestures as a component of what is commonly known as “body language” and comment general aspects as gender differences and culture dependence. We then define a complete framework for automatic emotional body gesture recognition. We introduce person detection and comment static and dynamic body pose estimation methods both in RGB and 3D. We then comment the recent literature related to representation learning and emotion recognition from images of emotionally expressive gestures. We also discuss multi-modal approaches that combine speech or face with body gestures for improved emotion recognition. While pre-processing methodologies (e.g. human detection and pose estimation) are nowadays mature technologies fully developed for robust large scale analysis, we show that for emotion recognition the quantity of labelled data is scarce, there is no agreement on clearly defined output spaces and the representations are shallow and largely based on naive geometrical representations.
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Henry Velesaca, Patricia Suarez, Dario Carpio, & Angel Sappa. (2021). Synthesized Image Datasets: Towards an Annotation-Free Instance Segmentation Strategy. In 16th International Symposium on Visual Computing (Vol. 13017, 131–143). LNCS.
Abstract: This paper presents a complete pipeline to perform deep learning-based instance segmentation of different types of grains (e.g., corn, sunflower, soybeans, lentils, chickpeas, mote, and beans). The proposed approach consists of using synthesized image datasets for the training process, which are easily generated according to the category of the instance to be segmented. The synthesized imaging process allows generating a large set of well-annotated grain samples with high variability—as large and high as the user requires. Instance segmentation is performed through a popular deep learning based approach, the Mask R-CNN architecture, but any learning-based instance segmentation approach can be considered. Results obtained by the proposed pipeline show that the strategy of using synthesized image datasets for training instance segmentation helps to avoid the time-consuming image annotation stage, as well as to achieve higher intersection over union and average precision performances. Results obtained with different varieties of grains are shown, as well as comparisons with manually annotated images, showing both the simplicity of the process and the improvements in the performance.
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Neelu Madan, Arya Farkhondeh, Kamal Nasrollahi, Sergio Escalera, & Thomas B. Moeslund. (2021). Temporal Cues From Socially Unacceptable Trajectories for Anomaly Detection. In IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (pp. 2150–2158).
Abstract: State-of-the-Art (SoTA) deep learning-based approaches to detect anomalies in surveillance videos utilize limited temporal information, including basic information from motion, e.g., optical flow computed between consecutive frames. In this paper, we compliment the SoTA methods by including long-range dependencies from trajectories for anomaly detection. To achieve that, we first created trajectories by running a tracker on two SoTA datasets, namely Avenue and Shanghai-Tech. We propose a prediction-based anomaly detection method using trajectories based on Social GANs, also called in this paper as temporal-based anomaly detection. Then, we hypothesize that late fusion of the result of this temporal-based anomaly detection system with spatial-based anomaly detection systems produces SoTA results. We verify this hypothesis on two spatial-based anomaly detection systems. We show that both cases produce results better than baseline spatial-based systems, indicating the usefulness of the temporal information coming from the trajectories for anomaly detection. We observe that the proposed approach depicts the maximum improvement in micro-level Area-Under-the-Curve (AUC) by 4.1% on CUHK Avenue and 3.4% on Shanghai-Tech over one of the baseline method. We also show a high performance on cross-data evaluation, where we learn the weights to combine spatial and temporal information on Shanghai-Tech and perform evaluation on CUHK Avenue and vice-versa.
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Marc Masana, Tinne Tuytelaars, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2021). Ternary Feature Masks: zero-forgetting for task-incremental learning. In 34th IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (pp. 3565–3574).
Abstract: We propose an approach without any forgetting to continual learning for the task-aware regime, where at inference the task-label is known. By using ternary masks we can upgrade a model to new tasks, reusing knowledge from previous tasks while not forgetting anything about them. Using masks prevents both catastrophic forgetting and backward transfer. We argue -- and show experimentally -- that avoiding the former largely compensates for the lack of the latter, which is rarely observed in practice. In contrast to earlier works, our masks are applied to the features (activations) of each layer instead of the weights. This considerably reduces the number of mask parameters for each new task; with more than three orders of magnitude for most networks. The encoding of the ternary masks into two bits per feature creates very little overhead to the network, avoiding scalability issues. To allow already learned features to adapt to the current task without changing the behavior of these features for previous tasks, we introduce task-specific feature normalization. Extensive experiments on several finegrained datasets and ImageNet show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art while reducing memory overhead in comparison to weight-based approaches.
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Josep Llados. (2021). The 5G of Document Intelligence. In 3rd Workshop on Future of Document Analysis and Recognition.
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Graham D. Finlayson, Javier Vazquez, & Fufu Fang. (2021). The Discrete Cosine Maximum Ignorance Assumption. In 29th Color and Imaging Conference (pp. 13–18).
Abstract: the performance of colour correction algorithms are dependent on the reflectance sets used. Sometimes, when the testing reflectance set is changed the ranking of colour correction algorithms also changes. To remove dependence on dataset we can
make assumptions about the set of all possible reflectances. In the Maximum Ignorance with Positivity (MIP) assumption we assume that all reflectances with per wavelength values between 0 and 1 are equally likely. A weakness in the MIP is that it fails to take into account the correlation of reflectance functions between
wavelengths (many of the assumed reflectances are, in reality, not possible).
In this paper, we take the view that the maximum ignorance assumption has merit but, hitherto it has been calculated with respect to the wrong coordinate basis. Here, we propose the Discrete Cosine Maximum Ignorance assumption (DCMI), where
all reflectances that have coordinates between max and min bounds in the Discrete Cosine Basis coordinate system are equally likely.
Here, the correlation between wavelengths is encoded and this results in the set of all plausible reflectances ’looking like’ typical reflectances that occur in nature. This said the DCMI model is also a superset of all measured reflectance sets.
Experiments show that, in colour correction, adopting the DCMI results in similar colour correction performance as using a particular reflectance set.
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Javier M. Olaso, Alain Vazquez, Leila Ben Letaifa, Mikel de Velasco, Aymen Mtibaa, Mohamed Amine Hmani, et al. (2021). The EMPATHIC Virtual Coach: a demo. In 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp. 848–851).
Abstract: The main objective of the EMPATHIC project has been the design and development of a virtual coach to engage the healthy-senior user and to enhance well-being through awareness of personal status. The EMPATHIC approach addresses this objective through multimodal interactions supported by the GROW coaching model. The paper summarizes the main components of the EMPATHIC Virtual Coach (EMPATHIC-VC) and introduces a demonstration of the coaching sessions in selected scenarios.
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Rafael E. Rivadeneira, Angel Sappa, Boris X. Vintimilla, Sabari Nathan, Priya Kansal, Armin Mehri, et al. (2021). Thermal Image Super-Resolution Challenge – PBVS 2021. In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (pp. 4359–4367).
Abstract: This paper presents results from the second Thermal Image Super-Resolution (TISR) challenge organized in the framework of the Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum (PBVS) 2021 workshop. For this second edition, the same thermal image dataset considered during the first challenge has been used; only mid-resolution (MR) and high-resolution (HR) sets have been considered. The dataset consists of 951 training images and 50 testing images for each resolution. A set of 20 images for each resolution is kept aside for evaluation. The two evaluation methodologies proposed for the first challenge are also considered in this opportunity. The first evaluation task consists of measuring the PSNR and SSIM between the obtained SR image and the corresponding ground truth (i.e., the HR thermal image downsampled by four). The second evaluation also consists of measuring the PSNR and SSIM, but in this case, considers the x2 SR obtained from the given MR thermal image; this evaluation is performed between the SR image with respect to the semi-registered HR image, which has been acquired with another camera. The results outperformed those from the first challenge, thus showing an improvement in both evaluation metrics.
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Debora Gil, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Raquel Perez. (2021). Topological Radiomics (TOPiomics): Early Detection of Genetic Abnormalities in Cancer Treatment Evolution. In Extended Abstracts GEOMVAP 2019, Trends in Mathematics 15 (Vol. 15, 89–93). Springer Nature.
Abstract: Abnormalities in radiomic measures correlate to genomic alterations prone to alter the outcome of personalized anti-cancer treatments. TOPiomics is a new method for the early detection of variations in tumor imaging phenotype from a topological structure in multi-view radiomic spaces.
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Alina Matei, Andreea Glavan, Petia Radeva, & Estefania Talavera. (2021). Towards Eating Habits Discovery in Egocentric Photo-Streams. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 9, 17495–17506.
Abstract: Eating habits are learned throughout the early stages of our lives. However, it is not easy to be aware of how our food-related routine affects our healthy living. In this work, we address the unsupervised discovery of nutritional habits from egocentric photo-streams. We build a food-related behavioral pattern discovery model, which discloses nutritional routines from the activities performed throughout the days. To do so, we rely on Dynamic-Time-Warping for the evaluation of similarity among the collected days. Within this framework, we present a simple, but robust and fast novel classification pipeline that outperforms the state-of-the-art on food-related image classification with a weighted accuracy and F-score of 70% and 63%, respectively. Later, we identify days composed of nutritional activities that do not describe the habits of the person as anomalies in the daily life of the user with the Isolation Forest method. Furthermore, we show an application for the identification of food-related scenes when the camera wearer eats in isolation. Results have shown the good performance of the proposed model and its relevance to visualize the nutritional habits of individuals.
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Fei Yang. (2021). Towards Practical Neural Image Compression (Luis Herranz, Mikhail Mozerov, & Yongmei Cheng, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Images and videos are pervasive in our life and communication. With advances in smart and portable devices, high capacity communication networks and high definition cinema, image and video compression are more relevant than ever. Traditional block-based linear transform codecs such as JPEG, H.264/AVC or the recent H.266/VVC are carefully designed to meet not only the rate-distortion criteria, but also the practical requirements of applications.
Recently, a new paradigm based on deep neural networks (i.e., neural image/video compression) has become increasingly popular due to its ability to learn powerful nonlinear transforms and other coding tools directly from data instead of being crafted by humans, as was usual in previous coding formats. While achieving excellent rate-distortion performance, these approaches are still limited mostly to research environments due to heavy models and other practical limitations, such as being limited to function on a particular rate and due to high memory and computational cost. In this thesis, we study these practical limitations, and designing more practical neural image compression approaches.
After analyzing the differences between traditional and neural image compression, our first contribution is the modulated autoencoder (MAE), a framework that includes a mechanism to provide multiple rate-distortion options within a single model with comparable performance to independent models. In a second contribution, we propose the slimmable compressive autoencoder (SlimCAE), which in addition to variable rate, can optimize the complexity of the model and thus reduce significantly the memory and computational burden.
Modern generative models can learn custom image transformation directly from suitable datasets following encoder-decoder architectures, task known as image-to-image (I2I) translation. Building on our previous work, we study the problem of distributed I2I translation, where the latent representation is transmitted through a binary channel and decoded in a remote receiving side. We also propose a variant that can perform both translation and the usual autoencoding functionality.
Finally, we also consider neural video compression, where the autoencoder is typically augmented with temporal prediction via motion compensation. One of the main bottlenecks of that framework is the optical flow module that estimates the displacement to predict the next frame. Focusing on this module, we propose a method that improves the accuracy of the optical flow estimation and a simplified variant that reduces the computational cost.
Key words: neural image compression, neural video compression, optical flow, practical neural image compression, compressive autoencoders, image-to-image translation, deep learning.
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