Abstract: Domain adaptation (DA) aims to alleviate the domain shift between source domain and target domain. Most DA methods require access to the source data, but often that is not possible (e.g. due to data privacy or intellectual property). In this paper, we address the challenging source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) problem, where the source pretrained model is adapted to the target domain in the absence of source data. Our method is based on the observation that target data, which might no longer align with the source domain classifier, still forms clear clusters. We capture this intrinsic structure by defining local affinity of the target data, and encourage label consistency among data with high local affinity. We observe that higher affinity should be assigned to reciprocal neighbors, and propose a self regularization loss to decrease the negative impact of noisy neighbors. Furthermore, to aggregate information with more context, we consider expanded neighborhoods with small affinity values. In the experimental results we verify that the inherent structure of the target features is an important source of information for domain adaptation. We demonstrate that this local structure can be efficiently captured by considering the local neighbors, the reciprocal neighbors, and the expanded neighborhood. Finally, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on several 2D image and 3D point cloud recognition datasets. Code is available in https://github.com/Albert0147/SFDA_neighbors.

Abstract: The human visual system is not a colorimeter. The perceived colour of a region does not only depend on its colour spectrum, but also on the colour spectra and geometric arrangement of neighbouring regions, a phenomenon called chromatic induction. Chromatic induction is thought to be driven by lateral interactions: the activity of a central neuron is modified by stimuli outside its classical receptive field through excitatory–inhibitory mechanisms. As there is growing evidence of an excitation/inhibition imbalance in migraine, we compared chromatic induction in migraine and control groups. As hypothesised, we found a difference in the strength of induction between the two groups, with stronger induction effects in migraine. On the other hand, given the increased prevalence of visual phenomena in migraine with aura, we also hypothesised that the difference between migraine and control would be more important in migraine with aura than in migraine without aura. Our experiments did not support this hypothesis. Taken together, our results suggest a link between excitation/inhibition imbalance and increased induction effects.

Abstract: The determination of precise skin lesion boundaries in dermoscopic images using automated methods faces many challenges, most importantly, the presence of hair, inconspicuous lesion edges and low contrast in dermoscopic images, and variability in the color, texture and shapes of skin lesions. Existing deep learning-based skin lesion segmentation algorithms are expensive in terms of computational time and memory. Consequently, running such segmentation algorithms requires a powerful GPU and high bandwidth memory, which are not available in dermoscopy devices. Thus, this article aims to achieve precise skin lesion segmentation with minimum resources: a lightweight, efficient generative adversarial network (GAN) model called SLSNet, which combines 1-D kernel factorized networks, position and channel attention, and multiscale aggregation mechanisms with a GAN model. The 1-D kernel factorized network reduces the computational cost of 2D filtering. The position and channel attention modules enhance the discriminative ability between the lesion and non-lesion feature representations in spatial and channel dimensions, respectively. A multiscale block is also used to aggregate the coarse-to-fine features of input skin images and reduce the effect of the artifacts. SLSNet is evaluated on two publicly available datasets: ISBI 2017 and the ISIC 2018. Although SLSNet has only 2.35 million parameters, the experimental results demonstrate that it achieves segmentation results on a par with the state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation methods with an accuracy of 97.61%, and Dice and Jaccard similarity coefficients of 90.63% and 81.98%, respectively. SLSNet can run at more than 110 frames per second (FPS) in a single GTX1080Ti GPU, which is faster than well-known deep learning-based image segmentation models, such as FCN. Therefore, SLSNet can be used for practical dermoscopic applications.

Abstract: This paper presents a domain adaptation strategy to efficiently train network architectures for estimating the relative camera pose in multi-view scenarios. The network architectures are fed by a pair of simultaneously acquired images, hence in order to improve the accuracy of the solutions, and due to the lack of large datasets with pairs of overlapped images, a domain adaptation strategy is proposed. The domain adaptation strategy consists on transferring the knowledge learned from synthetic images to real-world scenarios. For this, the networks are firstly trained using pairs of synthetic images, which are captured at the same time by a pair of cameras in a virtual environment; and then, the learned weights of the networks are transferred to the real-world case, where the networks are retrained with a few real images. Different virtual 3D scenarios are generated to evaluate the relationship between the accuracy on the result and the similarity between virtual and real scenarios—similarity on both geometry of the objects contained in the scene as well as relative pose between camera and objects in the scene. Experimental results and comparisons are provided showing that the accuracy of all the evaluated networks for estimating the camera pose improves when the proposed domain adaptation strategy is used, highlighting the importance on the similarity between virtual-real scenarios.

Abstract: Sequence-to-sequence models have recently become very popular for tackling
handwritten word recognition problems. However, how to effectively integrate an external language model into such recognizer is still a challenging
problem. The main challenge faced when training a language model is to
deal with the language model corpus which is usually different to the one
used for training the handwritten word recognition system. Thus, the bias
between both word corpora leads to incorrectness on the transcriptions, providing similar or even worse performances on the recognition task. In this
work, we introduce Candidate Fusion, a novel way to integrate an external
language model to a sequence-to-sequence architecture. Moreover, it provides suggestions from an external language knowledge, as a new input to
the sequence-to-sequence recognizer. Hence, Candidate Fusion provides two
improvements. On the one hand, the sequence-to-sequence recognizer has
the flexibility not only to combine the information from itself and the language model, but also to choose the importance of the information provided
by the language model. On the other hand, the external language model
has the ability to adapt itself to the training corpus and even learn the
most commonly errors produced from the recognizer. Finally, by conducting
comprehensive experiments, the Candidate Fusion proves to outperform the
state-of-the-art language models for handwritten word recognition tasks.

Abstract: Medical image fusion plays an important role in the clinical diagnosis of several critical neurological diseases by merging complementary information available in multimodal images. In this paper, a novel CT-MR neurological image fusion framework is proposed using an optimized biologically inspired feedforward neural model in two-scale hybrid ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition domain using gray wolf optimization to preserve the structural as well as texture information present in source CT and MR images. Initially, the source images are subjected to two-scale ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition with optimized parameters, giving a scale-1 detail layer, a scale-2 detail layer and a scale-2 base layer. Two detail layers at scale-1 and 2 are fused using an optimized biologically inspired neural model and weighted average scheme based on local energy and modified spatial frequency to maximize the preservation of edges and local textures, respectively, while the scale-2 base layer gets fused using choose max rule to preserve the background information. To optimize the hyper-parameters of hybrid ℓ1 − ℓ0 decomposition and biologically inspired neural model, a fitness function is evaluated based on spatial frequency and edge index of the resultant fused image obtained by adding all the fused components. The fusion performance is analyzed by conducting extensive experiments on different CT-MR neurological images. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides better-fused images and outperforms the other state-of-the-art fusion methods in both visual and quantitative assessments.

Abstract: JCR 2019 Q2, IF=3.121
The task of unpaired image-to-image translation is highly challenging due to the lack of explicit cross-domain pairs of instances. We consider here diverse image translation (DIT), an even more challenging setting in which an image can have multiple plausible translations. This is normally achieved by explicitly disentangling content and style in the latent representation and sampling different styles codes while maintaining the image content. Despite the success of current DIT models, they are prone to suffer from bias. In this paper, we study the problem of bias in image-to-image translation. Biased datasets may add undesired changes (e.g. change gender or race in face images) to the output translations as a consequence of the particular underlying visual distribution in the target domain. In order to alleviate the effects of this problem we propose the use of semantic constraints that enforce the preservation of desired image properties. Our proposed model is a step towards unbiased diverse image-to-image translation (UDIT), and results in less unwanted changes in the translated images while still performing the wanted transformation. Experiments on several heavily biased datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques in different domains such as faces, objects, and scenes.

Abstract: In this work, we address the task of scene text retrieval: given a text query, the system returns all images containing the queried text. The proposed model uses a single shot CNN architecture that predicts bounding boxes and builds a compact representation of spotted words. In this way, this problem can be modeled as a nearest neighbor search of the textual representation of a query over the outputs of the CNN collected from the totality of an image database. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art, while offering a significant increase in processing speed and unmatched expressiveness with samples never seen at training time. Several experiments to assess the generalization capability of the model are conducted in a multilingual dataset, as well as an application of real-time text spotting in videos.