Abstract: Recent advances in endoscopic devices have increased their use for minimal invasive diagnostic and intervention procedures. Among all endoscopic modalities, bronchoscopy is one of the most frequent with around 261 millions of procedures per year. Although the use of bronchoscopy is spread among clinical facilities it presents some drawbacks, being the visual inspection for the assessment of anatomical measurements the most prevalent of them. In
particular, inaccuracies in the estimation of the degree of stenosis (the percentage of obstructed airway) decreases its diagnostic yield and might lead to erroneous treatments. An objective computation of tracheal stenosis in bronchoscopy videos would constitute a breakthrough for this non-invasive technique and a reduction in treatment cost.
This thesis settles the first steps towards on-line reliable extraction of anatomical information from videobronchoscopy for computation of objective measures. In particular, we focus on the computation of the degree of stenosis, which is obtained by comparing the area delimited by a healthy tracheal ring and the stenosed lumen. Reliable extraction of airway structures in interventional videobronchoscopy is a challenging task. This is mainly due to the large variety of acquisition conditions (positions and illumination), devices (different digitalizations) and in videos acquired at the operating room the unpredicted presence of surgical devices (such as probe ends). This thesis contributes to on-line stenosis assessment in several ways. We
propose a parametric strategy for the extraction of lumen and tracheal rings regions based on the characterization of their geometry and appearance that guide a deformable model. The geometric and appearance characterization is based on a physical model describing the way bronchoscopy images are obtained and includes local and global descriptions. In order to ensure a systematic applicability we present a statistical framework to select the optimal
parameters of our method. Experiments perform on the first public annotated database, show that the performance of our method is comparable to the one provided by clinicians and its computation time allows for a on-line implementation in the operating room.

Abstract: Though they achieve great success, deep neural networks typically require a huge
amount of labeled data for training. However, collecting labeled data is often laborious and expensive. It would, therefore, be ideal if the knowledge obtained from label-rich datasets could be transferred to unlabeled data. However, deep networks are weak at generalizing to unseen domains, even when the differences are only subtle between the datasets. In real-world situations, a typical factor impairing the model generalization ability is the distribution shift between data from different domains, which is a long-standing problem usually termed as (unsupervised) domain adaptation.
A crucial requirement in the methodology of these domain adaptation methods is that they require access to source domain data during the adaptation process to the target domain. Accessibility to the source data of a trained source model is often impossible in real-world applications, for example, when deploying domain adaptation algorithms on mobile devices where the computational capacity is limited or in situations where data privacy rules limit access to the source domain data. Without access to the source domain data, existing methods suffer from inferior performance. Thus, in this thesis, we investigate domain adaptation without source data (termed as source-free domain adaptation) in multiple different scenarios that focus on image classification tasks.
We first study the source-free domain adaptation problem in a closed-set setting,
where the label space of different domains is identical. Only accessing the pretrained source model, we propose to address source-free domain adaptation from the perspective of unsupervised clustering. We achieve this based on nearest neighborhood clustering. In this way, we can transfer the challenging source-free domain adaptation task to a type of clustering problem. The final optimization objective is an upper bound containing only two simple terms, which can be explained as discriminability and diversity. We show that this allows us to relate several other methods in domain adaptation, unsupervised clustering and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity.

Abstract: This thesis embarks on an exploratory journey into robustness in deep learning,
with a keen focus on the intertwining facets of generalization, explainability, and
edge cases within the realm of computer vision. In deep learning, robustness
epitomizes a model’s resilience and flexibility, grounded on its capacity to generalize across diverse data distributions, explain its predictions transparently, and navigate the intricacies of edge cases effectively. The challenges associated with robust generalization are multifaceted, encompassing the model’s performance on unseen data and its defense against out-of-distribution data and adversarial attacks. Bridging this gap, the potential of Embedding Propagation (EP) for improving out-of-distribution generalization is explored. EP is depicted as a powerful tool facilitating manifold smoothing, which in turn fortifies the model’s robustness against adversarial onslaughts and bolsters performance in few-shot and self-/semi-supervised learning scenarios. In the labyrinth of deep learning models, the path to robustness often intersects with explainability. As model complexity increases, so does the urgency to decipher their decision-making
processes. Acknowledging this, the thesis introduces a robust framework for
evaluating and comparing various counterfactual explanation methods, echoing
the imperative of explanation quality over quantity and spotlighting the intricacies of diversifying explanations. Simultaneously, the deep learning landscape is fraught with edge cases – anomalies in the form of small objects or rare instances in object detection tasks that defy the norm. Confronting this, the
thesis presents an extension of the DETR (DEtection TRansformer) model to enhance small object detection. The devised DETR-FP, embedding the Feature Pyramid technique, demonstrating improvement in small objects detection accuracy, albeit facing challenges like high computational costs. With emergence of foundation models in mind, the thesis unveils EarthView, the largest scale remote sensing dataset to date, built for the self-supervised learning of a robust foundational model for remote sensing. Collectively, these studies contribute to the grand narrative of robustness in deep learning, weaving together the strands of generalization, explainability, and edge case performance. Through these methodological advancements and novel datasets, the thesis calls for continued exploration, innovation, and refinement to fortify the bastion of robust computer vision.

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.

Abstract: Single image super-resolution (SISR) is an important task in image processing which aims to enhance the resolution of imaging systems. Recently, SISR has witnessed great strides with the rapid development of deep learning. Recent advances in SISR are mostly devoted to designing deeper and wider networks to enhance their representation learning capacity. However, as the depth of networks increases, deep learning-based methods are faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. Moreover, most existing methods rarely leverage the intermediate features and also do not discriminate the computation of features by their frequencial components, thereby achieving relatively low performance. Aside from the aforementioned problems, another desired ability is to upsample images to arbitrary scales using a single model. Most current SISR methods train a dedicated model for each target resolution, losing generality and increasing memory requirements. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned issues and propose solutions to them: i) We present a novel frequency-based enhancement block which treats different frequencies in a heterogeneous way and also models inter-channel dependencies, which consequently enrich the output feature. Thus it helps the network generate more discriminative representations by explicitly recovering finer details. ii) We introduce OverNet which contains two main parts: a lightweight feature extractor that follows a novel recursive framework of skip and dense connections to reduce low-level feature degradation, and an overscaling module that generates an accurate SR image by internally constructing an overscaled intermediate representation of the output features. Then, to solve the problem of reconstruction at arbitrary scale factors, we introduce a novel multi-scale loss, that allows the simultaneous training of all scale factors using a single model. iii) We propose a directional variance attention network which leverages a novel attention mechanism to enhance features in different channels and spatial regions. Moreover, we introduce a novel procedure for using attention mechanisms together with residual blocks to facilitate the preservation of finer details. Finally, we demonstrate that our approaches achieve considerably better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both quantitative and visual quality.

Abstract: The curse of data labeling is a costly bottleneck in supervised deep learning, where large amounts of labeled data are needed to train intelligent systems. In onboard perception for autonomous driving, this cost corresponds to the labeling of raw data from sensors such as cameras, LiDARs, RADARs, etc. Therefore, synthetic data with automatically generated ground truth (labels) has aroused as a reliable alternative for training onboard perception models.
However, synthetic data commonly suffers from synth-to-real domain shift, i.e., models trained on the synthetic domain do not show their achievable accuracy when performing in the real world. This shift needs to be addressed by techniques falling in the realm of domain adaptation (DA).
The semi-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm can be followed to address DA. In this case, a model is trained using source data with labels (here synthetic) and leverages minimal knowledge from target data (here the real world) to generate pseudo-labels. These pseudo-labels help the training process to reduce the gap between the source and the target domains. In general, we can assume accessing both, pseudo-labels and a few amounts of human-provided labels for the target-domain data. However, the most interesting and challenging setting consists in assuming that we do not have human-provided labels at all. This setting is known as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). This PhD focuses on applying SSL to the UDA setting, for onboard visual tasks related to autonomous driving. We start by addressing the synth-to-real UDA problem on onboard vision-based object detection (pedestrians and cars), a critical task for autonomous driving and driving assistance. In particular, we propose to apply an SSL technique known as co-training, which we adapt to work with deep models that process a multi-modal input. The multi-modality consists of the visual appearance of the images (RGB) and their monocular depth estimation. The synthetic data we use as the source domain contains both, object bounding boxes and depth information. This prior knowledge is the
starting point for the co-training technique, which iteratively labels unlabeled real-world data and uses such pseudolabels (here bounding boxes with an assigned object class) to progressively improve the labeling results. Along this
process, two models collaborate to automatically label the images, in a way that one model compensates for the errors of the other, so avoiding error drift. While this automatic labeling process is done offline, the resulting pseudolabels can be used to train object detection models that must perform in real-time onboard a vehicle. We show that multi-modal co-training improves the labeling results compared to single-modal co-training, remaining competitive compared to human labeling.
Given the success of co-training in the context of object detection, we have also adapted this technique to a more crucial and challenging visual task, namely, onboard semantic segmentation. In fact, providing labels for a single image
can take from 30 to 90 minutes for a human labeler, depending on the content of the image. Thus, developing automatic labeling techniques for this visual task is of great interest to the automotive industry. In particular, the new co-training framework addresses synth-to-real UDA by an initial stage of self-training. Intermediate models arising from this stage are used to start the co-training procedure, for which we have elaborated an accurate collaboration policy between the two models performing the automatic labeling. Moreover, our co-training seamlessly leverages datasets from different synthetic domains. In addition, the co-training procedure is agnostic to the loss function used to train the semantic segmentation models which perform the automatic labeling. We achieve state-of-the-art results on publicly available benchmark datasets, again, remaining competitive compared to human labeling.
Finally, on the ground of our previous experience, we have designed and implemented a new SSL technique for UDA in the context of visual semantic segmentation. In this case, we mimic the labeling methodology followed by human labelers. In particular, rather than labeling full images at a time, categories of semantic classes are defined and only those are labeled in a labeling pass. In fact, different human labelers can become specialists in labeling different categories. Afterward, these per-category-labeled layers are combined to provide fully labeled images. Our technique is inspired by this methodology since we perform synth-to-real UDA per category, using the self-training stage previously developed as part of our co-training framework. The pseudo-labels obtained for each category are finally
fused to obtain fully automatically labeled images. In this context, we have also contributed to the development of a new photo-realistic synthetic dataset based on path-tracing rendering. Our new SSL technique seamlessly leverages publicly available synthetic datasets as well as this new one to obtain state-of-the-art results on synth-to-real UDA for semantic segmentation. We show that the new dataset allows us to reach better labeling accuracy than previously existing datasets, at the same time that it complements well them when combined. Moreover, we also show that the new human-inspired SSL technique outperforms co-training.