Abstract: The performances of Sign Language Recognition (SLR) systems have improved considerably in recent years. However, several open challenges still need to be solved to allow SLR to be useful in practice. The research in the field is in its infancy in regards to the robustness of the models to a large diversity of signs and signers, and to fairness of the models to performers from different demographics. This work summarises the ChaLearn LAP Large Scale Signer Independent Isolated SLR Challenge, organised at CVPR 2021 with the goal of overcoming some of the aforementioned challenges. We analyse and discuss the challenge design, top winning solutions and suggestions for future research. The challenge attracted 132 participants in the RGB track and 59 in the RGB+Depth track, receiving more than 1.5K submissions in total. Participants were evaluated using a new large-scale multi-modal Turkish Sign Language (AUTSL) dataset, consisting of 226 sign labels and 36,302 isolated sign video samples performed by 43 different signers. Winning teams achieved more than 96% recognition rate, and their approaches benefited from pose/hand/face estimation, transfer learning, external data, fusion/ensemble of modalities and different strategies to model spatio-temporal information. However, methods still fail to distinguish among very similar signs, in particular those sharing similar hand trajectories.

Abstract: Neural image compression (NIC) is a new coding paradigm where coding capabilities are captured by deep models learned from data. This data-driven nature enables new potential functionalities. In this paper, we study the adaptability of codecs to custom domains of interest. We show that NIC codecs are transferable and that they can be adapted with relatively few target domain images. However, naive adaptation interferes with the solution optimized for the original source domain, resulting in forgetting the original coding capabilities in that domain, and may even break the compatibility with previously encoded bitstreams. Addressing these problems, we propose Codec Adaptation without Forgetting (CAwF), a framework that can avoid these problems by adding a small amount of custom parameters, where the source codec remains embedded and unchanged during the adaptation process. Experiments demonstrate its effectiveness and provide useful insights on the characteristics of catastrophic interference in NIC.

Abstract: The advent of artificial intelligence has supposed an evolution on how different daily work tasks are performed. The analysis of cultural content has seen a huge boost by the development of computer-assisted methods that allows easy and transparent data access. In our case, we deal with the automation of the production of live shows, like music concerts, aiming to develop a system that can indicate the producer which camera to show based on what each of them is showing. In this context, we consider that is essential to understand where spectators look and what they are interested in so the computational method can learn from this information. The work that we present here shows the results of a first preliminary study in which we compare areas of interest defined by human beings and those indicated by an automatic system. Our system is based on the extraction of motion textures from dynamic Spatio-Temporal Volumes (STV) and then analyzing the patterns by means of texture analysis techniques. We validate our approach over several video sequences that have been labeled by 16 different experts. Our method is able to match those relevant areas identified by the experts, achieving recall scores higher than 80% when a distance of 80 pixels between method and ground truth is considered. Current performance shows promise when detecting abnormal peaks and movement trends.

Abstract: In this paper, we explore and evaluate the use of ranking-based objective functions for learning simultaneously a word string and a word image encoder. We consider retrieval frameworks in which the user expects a retrieval list ranked according to a defined relevance score. In the context of a word spotting problem, the relevance score has been set according to the string edit distance from the query string. We experimentally demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed model on query-by-string word spotting for both, handwritten and real scene word images. We also provide the results for query-by-example word spotting, although it is not the main focus of this work.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel unsupervised approach to estimate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The NDVI is obtained as the ratio between information from the visible and near infrared spectral bands; in the current work, the NDVI is estimated just from an image of the visible spectrum through a Cyclic Generative Adversarial Network (CyclicGAN). This unsupervised architecture learns to estimate the NDVI index by means of an image translation between the red channel of a given RGB image and the NDVI unpaired index’s image. The translation is obtained by means of a ResNET architecture and a multiple loss function. Experimental results obtained with this unsupervised scheme show the validity of the implemented model. Additionally, comparisons with the state of the art approaches are provided showing improvements with the proposed approach.

Abstract: Lightweight super resolution networks have extremely importance for real-world applications. In recent years several SR deep learning approaches with outstanding achievement have been introduced by sacrificing memory and computational cost. To overcome this problem, a novel lightweight super resolution network is proposed, which improves the SOTA performance in lightweight SR and performs roughly similar to computationally expensive networks. Multi-Path Residual Network designs with a set of Residual concatenation Blocks stacked with Adaptive Residual Blocks: ($i$) to adaptively extract informative features and learn more expressive spatial context information; ($ii$) to better leverage multi-level representations before up-sampling stage; and ($iii$) to allow an efficient information and gradient flow within the network. The proposed architecture also contains a new attention mechanism, Two-Fold Attention Module, to maximize the representation ability of the model. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our model against other SOTA SR approaches.

Abstract: Session-based recommenders, used for making predictions out of users’ uninterrupted sequences of actions, are attractive for many applications. Here, for this task we propose using metric learning, where a common embedding space for sessions and items is created, and distance measures dissimilarity between the provided sequence of users’ events and the next action. We discuss and compare metric learning approaches to commonly used learning-to-rank methods, where some synergies exist. We propose a simple architecture for problem analysis and demonstrate that neither extensively big nor deep architectures are necessary in order to outperform existing methods. The experimental results against strong baselines on four datasets are provided with an ablation study.

Abstract: the performance of colour correction algorithms are dependent on the reflectance sets used. Sometimes, when the testing reflectance set is changed the ranking of colour correction algorithms also changes. To remove dependence on dataset we can
make assumptions about the set of all possible reflectances. In the Maximum Ignorance with Positivity (MIP) assumption we assume that all reflectances with per wavelength values between 0 and 1 are equally likely. A weakness in the MIP is that it fails to take into account the correlation of reflectance functions between
wavelengths (many of the assumed reflectances are, in reality, not possible).
In this paper, we take the view that the maximum ignorance assumption has merit but, hitherto it has been calculated with respect to the wrong coordinate basis. Here, we propose the Discrete Cosine Maximum Ignorance assumption (DCMI), where
all reflectances that have coordinates between max and min bounds in the Discrete Cosine Basis coordinate system are equally likely.
Here, the correlation between wavelengths is encoded and this results in the set of all plausible reflectances ’looking like’ typical reflectances that occur in nature. This said the DCMI model is also a superset of all measured reflectance sets.
Experiments show that, in colour correction, adopting the DCMI results in similar colour correction performance as using a particular reflectance set.