Abstract: This paper proposes a novel approach to remove haze from RGB images using a near infrared images based on a dense stacked conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN). The architecture of the deep network implemented
receives, besides the images with haze, its corresponding image in the near infrared spectrum, which serve to accelerate the learning process of the details of the characteristics of the images. The model uses a triplet layer that allows the independence learning of each channel of the visible spectrum image to remove the haze on each color channel separately. A multiple loss function scheme is proposed, which ensures balanced learning between the colors
and the structure of the images. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method effectively removes the haze from the images. Additionally, the proposed approach is compared with a state of the art approach showing better results.

Abstract: Face anti-spoofing is critical to prevent face recognition systems from a security breach. The biometrics community has %possessed achieved impressive progress recently due the excellent performance of deep neural networks and the availability of large datasets. Although ethnic bias has been verified to severely affect the performance of face recognition systems, it still remains an open research problem in face anti-spoofing. Recently, a multi-ethnic face anti-spoofing dataset, CASIA-SURF CeFA, has been released with the goal of measuring the ethnic bias. It is the largest up to date cross-ethnicity face anti-spoofing dataset covering 3 ethnicities, 3 modalities, 1,607 subjects, 2D plus 3D attack types, and the first dataset including explicit ethnic labels among the recently released datasets for face anti-spoofing. We organized the Chalearn Face Anti-spoofing Attack Detection Challenge which consists of single-modal (e.g., RGB) and multi-modal (e.g., RGB, Depth, Infrared (IR)) tracks around this novel resource to boost research aiming to alleviate the ethnic bias. Both tracks have attracted 340 teams in the development stage, and finally 11 and 8 teams have submitted their codes in the single-modal and multi-modal face anti-spoofing recognition challenges, respectively. All the results were verified and re-ran by the organizing team, and the results were used for the final ranking. This paper presents an overview of the challenge, including its design, evaluation protocol and a summary of results. We analyze the top ranked solutions and draw conclusions derived from the competition. In addition we outline future work directions.

Abstract: Vehicle type classification is considered to be a central part of Intelligent Traffic Systems. In the recent years, deep learning methods have emerged in as being the state-of-the-art in many computer vision tasks. In this paper, we present a novel yet simple deep learning framework for the vehicle type classification problem. We propose an end-to-end trainable system, that combines convolution neural network for feature extraction and recurrent neural network as a classifier. The recurrent network structure is used to handle various types of feature inputs, and at the same time allows to produce a single or a set of class predictions. In order to assess the effectiveness of our solution, we have conducted a set of experiments in two public datasets, obtaining state of the art results. In addition, we also report results on the newly released MIO-TCD dataset.

Abstract: Creases are a type of ridge/valley structures that can be characterized by local conditions. Therefore, creaseness refers to local ridgeness and valleyness. The curvature K of the level curves and the mean curvature kM of the level surfaces are good measures of creaseness for 2-d and 3-d images, respectively. However, the way they are computed gives rise to discontinuities, reducing their usefulness in many applications. We propose a new creaseness measure, based on these curvatures, that avoids the discontinuities. We demonstrate its usefulness in the registration of CT and MR brain volumes, from the same patient, by searching the maximum in the correlation of their creaseness responses (ridgeness from the CT and valleyness from the MR). Due to the high dimensionality of the space of transforms, the search is performed by a hierarchical approach combined with an optimization method at each level of the hierarchy

Abstract: First impressions strongly influence social interactions, having a high impact in the personal and professional life. In this paper, we present a deep Classification-Regression Network (CR-Net) for analyzing the Big Five personality problem and further assisting on job interview recommendation in a first impressions setup. The setup is based on the ChaLearn First Impressions dataset, including multimodal data with video, audio, and text converted from the corresponding audio data, where each person is talking in front of a camera. In order to give a comprehensive prediction, we analyze the videos from both the entire scene (including the person’s motions and background) and the face of the person. Our CR-Net first performs personality trait classification and applies a regression later, which can obtain accurate predictions for both personality traits and interview recommendation. Furthermore, we present a new loss function called Bell Loss to address inaccurate predictions caused by the regression-to-the-mean problem. Extensive experiments on the First Impressions dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed network, outperforming the state-of-the-art.

Abstract: Domain adaptation addresses the problem of accuracy drop that a classifier may suffer when the training data (source domain) and the testing data (target domain) are drawn from different distributions. In this work, we focus on domain adaptation for structured SVM (SSVM). We propose a cost-sensitive domain adaptation method for SSVM, namely COSS-SSVM. In particular, during the re-training of an adapted classifier based on target and source data, the idea that we explore consists in introducing a non-zero cost even for correctly classified source domain samples. Eventually, we aim to learn a more targetoriented classifier by not rewarding (zero loss) properly classified source-domain training samples. We assess the effectiveness of COSS-SSVM on multi-category object recognition.