Giuseppe Pezzano, Vicent Ribas Ripoll, & Petia Radeva. (2021). CoLe-CNN: Context-learning convolutional neural network with adaptive loss function for lung nodule segmentation. CMPB - Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, 198, 105792.
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.
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Domicele Jonauskaite, Lucia Camenzind, C. Alejandro Parraga, Cecile N Diouf, Mathieu Mercapide Ducommun, Lauriane Müller, et al. (2021). Colour-emotion associations in individuals with red-green colour blindness. PeerJ, 9, e11180.
Abstract: Colours and emotions are associated in languages and traditions. Some of us may convey sadness by saying feeling blue or by wearing black clothes at funerals. The first example is a conceptual experience of colour and the second example is an immediate perceptual experience of colour. To investigate whether one or the other type of experience more strongly drives colour-emotion associations, we tested 64 congenitally red-green colour-blind men and 66 non-colour-blind men. All participants associated 12 colours, presented as terms or patches, with 20 emotion concepts, and rated intensities of the associated emotions. We found that colour-blind and non-colour-blind men associated similar emotions with colours, irrespective of whether colours were conveyed via terms (r = .82) or patches (r = .80). The colour-emotion associations and the emotion intensities were not modulated by participants' severity of colour blindness. Hinting at some additional, although minor, role of actual colour perception, the consistencies in associations for colour terms and patches were higher in non-colour-blind than colour-blind men. Together, these results suggest that colour-emotion associations in adults do not require immediate perceptual colour experiences, as conceptual experiences are sufficient.
Keywords: Affect; Chromotherapy; Colour cognition; Colour vision deficiency; Cross-modal correspondences; Daltonism; Deuteranopia; Dichromatic; Emotion; Protanopia.
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Henry Velesaca, Patricia Suarez, Raul Mira, & Angel Sappa. (2021). Computer Vision based Food Grain Classification: a Comprehensive Survey. CEA - Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, 187, 106287.
Abstract: This manuscript presents a comprehensive survey on recent computer vision based food grain classification techniques. It includes state-of-the-art approaches intended for different grain varieties. The approaches proposed in the literature are analyzed according to the processing stages considered in the classification pipeline, making it easier to identify common techniques and comparisons. Additionally, the type of images considered by each approach (i.e., images from the: visible, infrared, multispectral, hyperspectral bands) together with the strategy used to generate ground truth data (i.e., real and synthetic images) are reviewed. Finally, conclusions highlighting future needs and challenges are presented.
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Michael Teutsch, Angel Sappa, & Riad I. Hammoud. (2021). Computer Vision in the Infrared Spectrum: Challenges and Approaches (Vol. 10).
Abstract: Human visual perception is limited to the visual-optical spectrum. Machine vision is not. Cameras sensitive to the different infrared spectra can enhance the abilities of autonomous systems and visually perceive the environment in a holistic way. Relevant scene content can be made visible especially in situations, where sensors of other modalities face issues like a visual-optical camera that needs a source of illumination. As a consequence, not only human mistakes can be avoided by increasing the level of automation, but also machine-induced errors can be reduced that, for example, could make a self-driving car crash into a pedestrian under difficult illumination conditions. Furthermore, multi-spectral sensor systems with infrared imagery as one modality are a rich source of information and can provably increase the robustness of many autonomous systems. Applications that can benefit from utilizing infrared imagery range from robotics to automotive and from biometrics to surveillance. In this book, we provide a brief yet concise introduction to the current state-of-the-art of computer vision and machine learning in the infrared spectrum. Based on various popular computer vision tasks such as image enhancement, object detection, or object tracking, we first motivate each task starting from established literature in the visual-optical spectrum. Then, we discuss the differences between processing images and videos in the visual-optical spectrum and the various infrared spectra. An overview of the current literature is provided together with an outlook for each task. Furthermore, available and annotated public datasets and common evaluation methods and metrics are presented. In a separate chapter, popular applications that can greatly benefit from the use of infrared imagery as a data source are presented and discussed. Among them are automatic target recognition, video surveillance, or biometrics including face recognition. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for well-fitting sensor setups and data processing algorithms for certain computer vision tasks. We address this book to prospective researchers and engineers new to the field but also to anyone who wants to get introduced to the challenges and the approaches of computer vision using infrared images or videos. Readers will be able to start their work directly after reading the book supported by a highly comprehensive backlog of recent and relevant literature as well as related infrared datasets including existing evaluation frameworks. Together with consistently decreasing costs for infrared cameras, new fields of application appear and make computer vision in the infrared spectrum a great opportunity to face nowadays scientific and engineering challenges.
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Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Marcal Rusinol, Alicia Fornes, & Mauricio Villegas. (2021). Content and Style Aware Generation of Text-line Images for Handwriting Recognition. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, .
Abstract: Handwritten Text Recognition has achieved an impressive performance in public benchmarks. However, due to the high inter- and intra-class variability between handwriting styles, such recognizers need to be trained using huge volumes of manually labeled training data. To alleviate this labor-consuming problem, synthetic data produced with TrueType fonts has been often used in the training loop to gain volume and augment the handwriting style variability. However, there is a significant style bias between synthetic and real data which hinders the improvement of recognition performance. To deal with such limitations, we propose a generative method for handwritten text-line images, which is conditioned on both visual appearance and textual content. Our method is able to produce long text-line samples with diverse handwriting styles. Once properly trained, our method can also be adapted to new target data by only accessing unlabeled text-line images to mimic handwritten styles and produce images with any textual content. Extensive experiments have been done on making use of the generated samples to boost Handwritten Text Recognition performance. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state of the art.
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Cristina Palmero, Javier Selva, Sorina Smeureanu, Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, Albert Clapes, Alexa Mosegui, et al. (2021). Context-Aware Personality Inference in Dyadic Scenarios: Introducing the UDIVA Dataset. In IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 1–12).
Abstract: This paper introduces UDIVA, a new non-acted dataset of face-to-face dyadic interactions, where interlocutors perform competitive and collaborative tasks with different behavior elicitation and cognitive workload. The dataset consists of 90.5 hours of dyadic interactions among 147 participants distributed in 188 sessions, recorded using multiple audiovisual and physiological sensors. Currently, it includes sociodemographic, self- and peer-reported personality, internal state, and relationship profiling from participants. As an initial analysis on UDIVA, we propose a
transformer-based method for self-reported personality inference in dyadic scenarios, which uses audiovisual data and different sources of context from both interlocutors to
regress a target person’s personality traits. Preliminary results from an incremental study show consistent improvements when using all available context information.
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Kai Wang, Luis Herranz, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2021). Continual learning in cross-modal retrieval. In 2nd CLVISION workshop (pp. 3628–3638).
Abstract: Multimodal representations and continual learning are two areas closely related to human intelligence. The former considers the learning of shared representation spaces where information from different modalities can be compared and integrated (we focus on cross-modal retrieval between language and visual representations). The latter studies how to prevent forgetting a previously learned task when learning a new one. While humans excel in these two aspects, deep neural networks are still quite limited. In this paper, we propose a combination of both problems into a continual cross-modal retrieval setting, where we study how the catastrophic interference caused by new tasks impacts the embedding spaces and their cross-modal alignment required for effective retrieval. We propose a general framework that decouples the training, indexing and querying stages. We also identify and study different factors that may lead to forgetting, and propose tools to alleviate it. We found that the indexing stage pays an important role and that simply avoiding reindexing the database with updated embedding networks can lead to significant gains. We evaluated our methods in two image-text retrieval datasets, obtaining significant gains with respect to the fine tuning baseline.
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Yaxing Wang, Abel Gonzalez-Garcia, Luis Herranz, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2021). Controlling biases and diversity in diverse image-to-image translation. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 202, 103082.
Abstract: JCR 2019 Q2, IF=3.121
The task of unpaired image-to-image translation is highly challenging due to the lack of explicit cross-domain pairs of instances. We consider here diverse image translation (DIT), an even more challenging setting in which an image can have multiple plausible translations. This is normally achieved by explicitly disentangling content and style in the latent representation and sampling different styles codes while maintaining the image content. Despite the success of current DIT models, they are prone to suffer from bias. In this paper, we study the problem of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets may add undesired changes (e.g. change gender or race in face images) to the output translations as a consequence of the particular underlying visual distribution in the target domain. In order to alleviate the effects of this problem we propose the use of semantic constraints that enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Our proposed model is a step towards unbiased diverse image-to-image translation (UDIT), and results in less unwanted changes in the translated images while still performing the wanted transformation. Experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in different domains such as faces, objects, and scenes.
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Patricia Suarez, Angel Sappa, Boris X. Vintimilla, & Riad I. Hammoud. (2021). Cycle Generative Adversarial Network: Towards A Low-Cost Vegetation Index Estimation. In 28th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (pp. 19–22).
Abstract: This paper presents a novel unsupervised approach to estimate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The NDVI is obtained as the ratio between information from the visible and near infrared spectral bands; in the current work, the NDVI is estimated just from an image of the visible spectrum through a Cyclic Generative Adversarial Network (CyclicGAN). This unsupervised architecture learns to estimate the NDVI index by means of an image translation between the red channel of a given RGB image and the NDVI unpaired index’s image. The translation is obtained by means of a ResNET architecture and a multiple loss function. Experimental results obtained with this unsupervised scheme show the validity of the implemented model. Additionally, comparisons with the state of the art approaches are provided showing improvements with the proposed approach.
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Sudeep Katakol, Luis Herranz, Fei Yang, & Marta Mrak. (2021). DANICE: Domain adaptation without forgetting in neural image compression. In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (pp. 1921–1925).
Abstract: Neural image compression (NIC) is a new coding paradigm where coding capabilities are captured by deep models learned from data. This data-driven nature enables new potential functionalities. In this paper, we study the adaptability of codecs to custom domains of interest. We show that NIC codecs are transferable and that they can be adapted with relatively few target domain images. However, naive adaptation interferes with the solution optimized for the original source domain, resulting in forgetting the original coding capabilities in that domain, and may even break the compatibility with previously encoded bitstreams. Addressing these problems, we propose Codec Adaptation without Forgetting (CAwF), a framework that can avoid these problems by adding a small amount of custom parameters, where the source codec remains embedded and unchanged during the adaptation process. Experiments demonstrate its effectiveness and provide useful insights on the characteristics of catastrophic interference in NIC.
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Adria Molina, Pau Riba, Lluis Gomez, Oriol Ramos Terrades, & Josep Llados. (2021). Date Estimation in the Wild of Scanned Historical Photos: An Image Retrieval Approach. In 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (Vol. 12822, pp. 306–320). LNCS.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel method for date estimation of historical photographs from archival sources. The main contribution is to formulate the date estimation as a retrieval task, where given a query, the retrieved images are ranked in terms of the estimated date similarity. The closer are their embedded representations the closer are their dates. Contrary to the traditional models that design a neural network that learns a classifier or a regressor, we propose a learning objective based on the nDCG ranking metric. We have experimentally evaluated the performance of the method in two different tasks: date estimation and date-sensitive image retrieval, using the DEW public database, overcoming the baseline methods.
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Clementine Decamps, Alexis Arnaud, Florent Petitprez, Mira Ayadi, Aurelia Baures, Lucile Armenoult, et al. (2021). DECONbench: a benchmarking platform dedicated to deconvolution methods for tumor heterogeneity quantification. BMC Bioinformatics, 22, 473.
Abstract: Quantification of tumor heterogeneity is essential to better understand cancer progression and to adapt therapeutic treatments to patient specificities. Bioinformatic tools to assess the different cell populations from single-omic datasets as bulk transcriptome or methylome samples have been recently developed, including reference-based and reference-free methods. Improved methods using multi-omic datasets are yet to be developed in the future and the community would need systematic tools to perform a comparative evaluation of these algorithms on controlled data.
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Reza Azad, Afshin Bozorgpour, Maryam Asadi-Aghbolaghi, Dorit Merhof, & Sergio Escalera. (2021). Deep Frequency Re-Calibration U-Net for Medical Image Segmentation. In IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops (pp. 3274–3283).
Abstract: We present a novel solution to the garment animation problem through deep learning. Our contribution allows animating any template outfit with arbitrary topology and geometric complexity. Recent works develop models for garment edition, resizing and animation at the same time by leveraging the support body model (encoding garments as body homotopies). This leads to complex engineering solutions that suffer from scalability, applicability and compatibility. By limiting our scope to garment animation only, we are able to propose a simple model that can animate any outfit, independently of its topology, vertex order or connectivity. Our proposed architecture maps outfits to animated 3D models into the standard format for 3D animation (blend weights and blend shapes matrices), automatically providing of compatibility with any graphics engine. We also propose a methodology to complement supervised learning with an unsupervised physically based learning that implicitly solves collisions and enhances cloth quality.
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Patricia Suarez, Angel Sappa, & Boris X. Vintimilla. (2021). Deep learning-based vegetation index estimation. In A.Solanki, A.Nayyar, & M.Naved (Eds.), Generative Adversarial Networks for Image-to-Image Translation (pp. 205–234). Elsevier.
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Hugo Bertiche, Meysam Madadi, & Sergio Escalera. (2021). Deep Parametric Surfaces for 3D Outfit Reconstruction from Single View Image. In 16th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (pp. 1–8).
Abstract: We present a methodology to retrieve analytical surfaces parametrized as a neural network. Previous works on 3D reconstruction yield point clouds, voxelized objects or meshes. Instead, our approach yields 2-manifolds in the euclidean space through deep learning. To this end, we implement a novel formulation for fully connected layers as parametrized manifolds that allows continuous predictions with differential geometry. Based on this property we propose a novel smoothness loss. Results on CLOTH3D++ dataset show the possibility to infer different topologies and the benefits of the smoothness term based on differential geometry.
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