Abstract: This paper presents results from the third Thermal Image Super-Resolution (TISR) challenge organized in the Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum (PBVS) 2022 workshop. The challenge uses the same thermal image dataset as the first two challenges, with 951 training images and 50 validation images at each resolution. A set of 20 images was kept aside for testing. The evaluation tasks were to measure the PSNR and SSIM between the SR image and the ground truth (HR thermal noisy image downsampled by four), and also to measure the PSNR and SSIM between the SR image and the semi-registered HR image (acquired with another camera). The results outperformed those from last year’s challenge, improving both evaluation metrics. This year, almost 100 teams participants registered for the challenge, showing the community’s interest in this hot topic.

Abstract: Color induction is the phenomenon where the physical and the perceived colors of an object differ owing to the color distribution and the spatial configuration of the surrounding objects. Previous works studying this phenomenon on the lsY MacLeod–Boynton color space, show that color assimilation is present only when the magnocellular pathway (i.e., the Y axis) is activated (i.e., when there are luminance differences). Concretely, the authors showed that the effect is mainly induced by the koniocellular pathway (s axis), but not by the parvocellular pathway (l axis), suggesting that when magnocellular pathway is activated it inhibits the koniocellular pathway. In the present work, we study whether parvo-, konio-, and magnocellular pathways may influence on each other through the color induction effect. Our results show that color assimilation does not depend on a chromatic–chromatic interaction, and that chromatic assimilation is driven by the interaction between luminance and chromatic channels (mainly the magno- and the koniocellular pathways). Our results also show that chromatic induction is greatly decreased when all three visual pathways are simultaneously activated, and that chromatic pathways could influence each other through the magnocellular (luminance) pathway. In addition, we observe that chromatic channels can influence the luminance channel, hence inducing a small brightness induction. All these results show that color induction is a highly complex process where interactions between the several visual pathways are yet unknown and should be studied in greater detail.

Abstract: Tabular structures in business documents offer a complementary dimension to the raw textual data. For instance, there is information about the relationships among pieces of information. Nowadays, digital mailroom applications have become a key service for workflow automation. Therefore, the detection and interpretation of tables is crucial. With the recent advances in information extraction, table detection and recognition has gained interest in document image analysis, in particular, with the absence of rule lines and unknown information about rows and columns. However, business documents usually contain sensitive contents limiting the amount of public benchmarking datasets. In this paper, we propose a graph-based approach for detecting tables in document images which do not require the raw content of the document. Hence, the sensitive content can be previously removed and, instead of using the raw image or textual content, we propose a purely structural approach to keep sensitive data anonymous. Our framework uses graph neural networks (GNNs) to describe the local repetitive structures that constitute a table. In particular, our main application domain are business documents. We have carefully validated our approach in two invoice datasets and a modern document benchmark. Our experiments demonstrate that tables can be detected by purely structural approaches.

Abstract: Accurate semantic segmentation models typically require significant computational resources, inhibiting their use in practical applications. Recent works rely on well-crafted lightweight models to achieve fast inference. However, these models cannot flexibly adapt to varying accuracy and efficiency requirements. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective slimmable semantic segmentation (SlimSeg) method, which can be executed at different capacities during inference depending on the desired accuracy-efficiency tradeoff. More specifically, we employ parametrized channel slimming by stepwise downward knowledge distillation during training. Motivated by the observation that the differences between segmentation results of each submodel are mainly near the semantic borders, we introduce an additional boundary guided semantic segmentation loss to further improve the performance of each submodel. We show that our proposed SlimSeg with various mainstream networks can produce flexible models that provide dynamic adjustment of computational cost and better performance than independent models. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation benchmarks, Cityscapes and CamVid, demonstrate the generalization ability of our framework.

Abstract: This paper summarizes the top contributions to the first semi-supervised hyperspectral object detection (SSHOD) challenge, which was organized as a part of the Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum (PBVS) 2022 workshop at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference. The SSHODC challenge is a first-of-its-kind hyperspectral dataset with temporally contiguous frames collected from a university rooftop observing a 4-way vehicle intersection over a period of three days. The dataset contains a total of 2890 frames, captured at an average resolution of 1600 × 192 pixels, with 51 hyperspectral bands from 400nm to 900nm. SSHOD challenge uses 989 images as the training set, 605 images as validation set and 1296 images as the evaluation (test) set. Each set was acquired on a different day to maximize the variance in weather conditions. Labels are provided for 10% of the annotated data, hence formulating a semi-supervised learning task for the participants which is evaluated in terms of average precision over the entire set of classes, as well as individual moving object classes: namely vehicle, bus and bike. The challenge received participation registration from 38 individuals, with 8 participating in the validation phase and 3 participating in the test phase. This paper describes the dataset acquisition, with challenge formulation, proposed methods and qualitative and quantitative results.

Abstract: The mass irruption of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision since 2012 led to a dominance of the image understanding paradigm consisting in an end-to-end fully supervised learning workflow over large-scale annotated datasets. This approach proved to be extremely useful at solving a myriad of classic and new computer vision tasks with unprecedented performance —often, surpassing that of humans—, at the expense of vast amounts of human-labeled data, extensive computational resources and the disposal of all of our prior knowledge on the task at hand. Even though simple transfer learning methods, such as fine-tuning, have achieved remarkable impact, their success when the amount of labeled data in the target domain is small is limited. Furthermore, the non-static nature of data generation sources will often derive in data distribution shifts that degrade the performance of deployed models. As a consequence, there is a growing demand for methods that can exploit elements of prior knowledge and sources of information other than the manually generated ground truth annotations of the images during the network training process, so that they can adapt to new domains that constitute, if not a small data regime, at least a small labeled data regime. This thesis targets such few or no labeled data scenario in three distinct image-to-image mapping learning problems. It contributes with various approaches that leverage our previous knowledge of different elements of the image formation process: We first present a data-efficient framework for both defocus and motion blur detection, based on a model able to produce realistic synthetic local degradations. The framework comprises a self-supervised, a weakly-supervised and a semi-supervised instantiation, depending on the absence or availability and the nature of human annotations, and outperforms fully-supervised counterparts in a variety of settings. Our knowledge on color image formation is then used to gather input and target ground truth image pairs for the RGB to hyperspectral image reconstruction task. We make use of a CNN to tackle this problem, which, for the first time, allows us to exploit spatial context and achieve state-of-the-art results given a limited hyperspectral image set. In our last contribution to the subfield of data-efficient image-to-image transformation problems, we present the novel semi-supervised task of zero-pair cross-view semantic segmentation: we consider the case of relocation of the camera in an end-to-end trained and deployed monocular, fixed-view semantic segmentation system often found in industry. Under the assumption that we are allowed to obtain an additional set of synchronized but unlabeled image pairs of new scenes from both original and new camera poses, we present ZPCVNet, a model and training procedure that enables the production of dense semantic predictions in either source or target views at inference time. The lack of existing suitable public datasets to develop this approach led us to the creation of MVMO, a large-scale Multi-View, Multi-Object path-traced dataset with per-view semantic segmentation annotations. We expect MVMO to propel future research in the exciting under-developed fields of cross-view and multi-view semantic segmentation. Last, in a piece of applied research of direct application in the context of process monitoring of an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) in a steelmaking plant, we also consider the problem of simultaneously estimating the temperature and spectral emissivity of distant hot emissive samples. To that end, we design our own capturing device, which integrates three point spectrometers covering a wide range of the Ultra-Violet, visible, and Infra-Red spectra and is capable of registering the radiance signal incoming from an 8cm diameter spot located up to 20m away. We then define a physically accurate radiative transfer model that comprises the effects of atmospheric absorbance, of the optical system transfer function, and of the sample temperature and spectral emissivity themselves. We solve this inverse problem without the need for annotated data using a probabilistic programming-based Bayesian approach, which yields full posterior distribution estimates of the involved variables that are consistent with laboratory-grade measurements.

Abstract: Video retrieval using natural language queries has attracted increasing interest due to its relevance in real-world applications, from intelligent access in private media galleries to web-scale video search. Learning the cross-similarity of video and text in a joint embedding space is the dominant approach. To do so, a contrastive loss is usually employed because it organizes the embedding space by putting similar items close and dissimilar items far. This framework leads to competitive recall rates, as they solely focus on the rank of the groundtruth items. Yet, assessing the quality of the ranking list is of utmost importance when considering intelligent retrieval systems, since multiple items may share similar semantics, hence a high relevance. Moreover, the aforementioned framework uses a fixed margin to separate similar and dissimilar items, treating all non-groundtruth items as equally irrelevant. In this paper we propose to use a variable margin: we argue that varying the margin used during training based on how much relevant an item is to a given query, i.e. a relevance-based margin, easily improves the quality of the ranking lists measured through nDCG and mAP. We demonstrate the advantages of our technique using different models on EPIC-Kitchens-100 and YouCook2. We show that even if we carefully tuned the fixed margin, our technique (which does not have the margin as a hyper-parameter) would still achieve better performance. Finally, extensive ablation studies and qualitative analysis support the robustness of our approach. Code will be released at \urlhttps://github.com/aranciokov/RelevanceMargin-ICMR22.