Abstract: Collaborative robotic industrial cells are workspaces where robots collaborate with human operators. In this context, safety is paramount, and for that a complete perception of the space where the collaborative robot is inserted is necessary. To ensure this, collaborative cells are equipped with a large set of sensors of multiple modalities, covering the entire work volume. However, the fusion of information from all these sensors requires an accurate extrinsic calibration. The calibration of such complex systems is challenging, due to the number of sensors and modalities, and also due to the small overlapping fields of view between the sensors, which are positioned to capture different viewpoints of the cell. This paper proposes a sensor to pattern methodology that can calibrate a complex system such as a collaborative cell in a single optimization procedure. Our methodology can tackle RGB and Depth cameras, as well as LiDARs. Results show that our methodology is able to accurately calibrate a collaborative cell containing three RGB cameras, a depth camera and three 3D LiDARs.

Abstract: For future learning systems incremental learning is desirable, because it allows for: efficient resource usage by eliminating the need to retrain from scratch at the arrival of new data; reduced memory usage by preventing or limiting the amount of data required to be stored -- also important when privacy limitations are imposed; and learning that more closely resembles human learning. The main challenge for incremental learning is catastrophic forgetting, which refers to the precipitous drop in performance on previously learned tasks after learning a new one. Incremental learning of deep neural networks has seen explosive growth in recent years. Initial work focused on task incremental learning, where a task-ID is provided at inference time. Recently we have seen a shift towards class-incremental learning where the learner must classify at inference time between all classes seen in previous tasks without recourse to a task-ID. In this paper, we provide a complete survey of existing methods for incremental learning, and in particular we perform an extensive experimental evaluation on twelve class-incremental methods. We consider several new experimental scenarios, including a comparison of class-incremental methods on multiple large-scale datasets, investigation into small and large domain shifts, and comparison on various network architectures.

Abstract: The advent of recurrent neural networks for handwriting recognition marked an important milestone reaching impressive recognition accuracies despite the great variability that we observe across different writing styles. Sequential architectures are a perfect fit to model text lines, not only because of the inherent temporal aspect of text, but also to learn probability distributions over sequences of characters and words. However, using such recurrent paradigms comes at a cost at training stage, since their sequential pipelines prevent parallelization. In this work, we introduce a non-recurrent approach to recognize handwritten text by the use of transformer models. We propose a novel method that bypasses any recurrence. By using multi-head self-attention layers both at the visual and textual stages, we are able to tackle character recognition as well as to learn language-related dependencies of the character sequences to be decoded. Our model is unconstrained to any predefined vocabulary, being able to recognize out-of-vocabulary words, i.e. words that do not appear in the training vocabulary. We significantly advance over prior art and demonstrate that satisfactory recognition accuracies are yielded even in few-shot learning scenarios.

Abstract: Handwritten document images can be highly affected by degradation for different reasons: Paper ageing, daily-life scenarios (wrinkles, dust, etc.), bad scanning process and so on. These artifacts raise many readability issues for current Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) algorithms and severely devalue their efficiency. In this paper, we propose an end to end architecture based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to recover the degraded documents into a and form. Unlike the most well-known document binarization methods, which try to improve the visual quality of the degraded document, the proposed architecture integrates a handwritten text recognizer that promotes the generated document image to be more readable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use the text information while binarizing handwritten documents. Extensive experiments conducted on degraded Arabic and Latin handwritten documents demonstrate the usefulness of integrating the recognizer within the GAN architecture, which improves both the visual quality and the readability of the degraded document images. Moreover, we outperform the state of the art in H-DIBCO challenges, after fine tuning our pre-trained model with synthetically degraded Latin handwritten images, on this task.

Abstract: Data-driven paradigms using machine learning are becoming ubiquitous in image processing and communications. In particular, image-to-image (I2I) translation is a generic and widely used approach to image processing problems, such as image synthesis, style transfer, and image restoration. At the same time, neural image compression has emerged as a data-driven alternative to traditional coding approaches in visual communications. In this paper, we study the combination of these two paradigms into a joint I2I compression and translation framework, focusing on multi-domain image synthesis. We first propose distributed I2I translation by integrating quantization and entropy coding into an I2I translation framework (i.e. I2Icodec). In practice, the image compression functionality (i.e. autoencoding) is also desirable, requiring to deploy alongside I2Icodec a regular image codec. Thus, we further propose a unified framework that allows both translation and autoencoding capabilities in a single codec. Adaptive residual blocks conditioned on the translation/compression mode provide flexible adaptation to the desired functionality. The experiments show promising results in both I2I translation and image compression using a single model.

Abstract: In the quality evaluation of high dynamic range and wide color gamut (HDR/WCG) images, a number of works have concluded that native HDR metrics, such as HDR visual difference predictor (HDR-VDP), HDR video quality metric (HDR-VQM), or convolutional neural network (CNN)-based visibility metrics for HDR content, provide the best results. These metrics consider only the luminance component, but several color difference metrics have been specifically developed for, and validated with, HDR/WCG images. In this paper, we perform subjective evaluation experiments in a professional HDR/WCG production setting, under a real use case scenario. The results are quite relevant in that they show, firstly, that the performance of HDR metrics is worse than that of a classic, simple standard dynamic range (SDR) metric applied directly to the HDR content; and secondly, that the chrominance metrics specifically developed for HDR/WCG imaging have poor correlation with observer scores and are also outperformed by an SDR metric. Based on these findings, we show how a very simple framework for creating color HDR metrics, that uses only luminance SDR metrics, transfer functions, and classic color spaces, is able to consistently outperform, by a considerable margin, state-of-the-art HDR metrics on a varied set of HDR content, for both perceptual quantization (PQ) and Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) encoding, luminance and chroma distortions, and on different color spaces of common use.

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: Despite its wide applications in criminal investigations and clinical communications with patients suffering from autism, automatic micro-expression recognition remains a challenging problem because of the lack of training data and imbalanced classes problems. In this study, we proposed a meta-learning based multi-model fusion network (Meta-MMFNet) to solve the existing problems. The proposed method is based on the metric-based meta-learning pipeline, which is specifically designed for few-shot learning and is suitable for model-level fusion. The frame difference and optical flow features were fused, deep features were extracted from the fused feature, and finally in the meta-learning-based framework, weighted sum model fusion method was applied for micro-expression classification. Meta-MMFNet achieved better results than state-of-the-art methods on four datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/wenjgong/meta-fusion-based-method.