Abstract: Computer vision technologies are at the core of different advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and will play a key role in oncoming autonomous vehicles too. One of the main challenges for such technologies is to perceive the driving environment, i.e. to detect and track relevant driving information in a reliable manner (e.g. pedestrians in the vehicle route, free space to drive through). Nowadays it is clear that machine learning techniques are essential for developing such a visual perception for driving. In particular, the standard working pipeline consists of collecting data (i.e. on-board images), manually annotating the data (e.g. drawing bounding boxes around pedestrians), learning a discriminative data representation taking advantage of such annotations (e.g. a deformable part-based model, a deep convolutional neural network), and then assessing the reliability of such representation with the acquired data. In the last two decades most of the research efforts focused on representation learning (first, designing descriptors and learning classifiers; later doing it end-to-end). Hence, collecting data and, especially, annotating it, is essential for learning good representations. While this has been the case from the very beginning, only after the disruptive appearance of deep convolutional neural networks that it became a serious issue due to their data hungry nature. In this context, the problem is that manual data annotation is a tiresome work prone to errors. Accordingly, in the late 00’s we initiated a research line consisting of training visual models using photo-realistic computer graphics, especially focusing on assisted and autonomous driving. In this paper, we summarize such a work and show how it has become a new tendency with increasing acceptance.

Abstract: Transcriptions of historical documents are a valuable source for extracting labeled handwriting images that can be used for training recognition systems. In this paper, we introduce the Saint Gall database that includes images as well as the transcription of a Latin manuscript from the 9th century written in Carolingian script. Although the available transcription is of high quality for a human reader, the spelling of the words is not accurate when compared with the handwriting image. Hence, the transcription poses several challenges for alignment regarding, e.g., line breaks, abbreviations, and capitalization. We propose an alignment system based on character Hidden Markov Models that can cope with these challenges and efficiently aligns complete document pages. On the Saint Gall database, we demonstrate that a considerable alignment accuracy can be achieved, even with weakly trained character models.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of near-duplicate image detection techniques in a real-world use case scenario, where a document management company is commissioned to manually annotate a collection of scanned photographs. Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate photographs can reduce the time spent on manual annotation by archivists. This real use case differs from laboratory settings as the deployment dataset is available in advance, allowing the use of transductive learning. We propose a transductive learning approach that leverages state-of-the-art deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Our approach involves pre-training a deep neural network on a large dataset and then fine-tuning the network on the unlabeled target collection with self-supervised learning. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline methods in the task of near-duplicate image detection in the UKBench and an in-house private dataset.

Abstract: The field of visual document understanding has witnessed a rapid growth in emerging challenges and powerful multi-modal strategies. However, they rely on an extensive amount of document data to learn their pretext objectives in a ``pre-train-then-fine-tune'' paradigm and thus, suffer a significant performance drop in real-world online industrial settings. One major reason is the over-reliance on OCR engines to extract local positional information within a document page. Therefore, this hinders the model's generalizability, flexibility and robustness due to the lack of capturing global information within a document image. We introduce TransferDoc, a cross-modal transformer-based architecture pre-trained in a self-supervised fashion using three novel pretext objectives. TransferDoc learns richer semantic concepts by unifying language and visual representations, which enables the production of more transferable models. Besides, two novel downstream tasks have been introduced for a ``closer-to-real'' industrial evaluation scenario where TransferDoc outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: Image generation is arguably one of the most attractive, compelling, and challenging tasks in computer vision. Among the methods which perform image generation, generative adversarial networks (GANs) play a key role. The most common image generation models based on GANs can be divided into two main approaches. The first one, called simply image generation takes random noise as an input and synthesizes an image which follows the same distribution as the images in the training set. The second class, which is called image-to-image translation, aims to map an image from a source domain to one that is indistinguishable from those in the target domain. Image-to-image translation methods can further be divided into paired and unpaired image-to-image translation based on whether they require paired data or not. In this thesis, we aim to address some challenges of both image generation and image-to-image generation.GANs highly rely upon having access to vast quantities of data, and fail to generate realistic images from random noise when applied to domains with few images. To address this problem, we aim to transfer knowledge from a model trained on a large dataset (source domain) to the one learned on limited data (target domain). We find that both GANs andconditional GANs can benefit from models trained on large datasets. Our experiments show that transferring the discriminator is more important than the generator. Using both the generator and discriminator results in the best performance. We found, however, that this method suffers from overfitting, since we update all parameters to adapt to the target data. We propose a novel architecture, which is tailored to address knowledge transfer to very small target domains. Our approach effectively exploreswhich part of the latent space is more related to the target domain. Additionally, the proposed method is able to transfer knowledge from multiple pretrained GANs. Although image-to-image translation has achieved outstanding performance, it still facesseveral problems. First, for translation between complex domains (such as translations between different modalities) image-to-image translation methods require paired data. We show that when only some of the pairwise translations have been seen (i.e. during training), we can infer the remaining unseen translations (where training pairs are not available). We propose a new approach where we align multiple encoders and decoders in such a way that the desired translation can be obtained by simply cascadingthe source encoder and the target decoder, even when they have not interacted during the training stage (i.e. unseen). Second, we address the issue of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets unavoidably contain undesired changes, which are dueto the fact that the target dataset has a particular underlying visual distribution. We use carefully designed semantic constraints to reduce the effects of the bias. The semantic constraint aims to enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Finally, current approaches fail to generate diverse outputs or perform scalable image transfer in a single model. To alleviate this problem, we propose a scalable and diverse image-to-image translation. We employ random noise to control the diversity. The scalabitlity is determined by conditioning the domain label.computer vision, deep learning, imitation learning, adversarial generative networks, image generation, image-to-image translation.

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.