Abstract: Active learning is a paradigm aimed at reducing the annotation effort by training the model on actively selected informative and/or representative samples. Another paradigm to reduce the annotation effort is self-training that learns from a large amount of unlabeled data in an unsupervised way and fine-tunes on few labeled samples. Recent developments in self-training have achieved very impressive results rivaling supervised learning on some datasets. The current work focuses on whether the two paradigms can benefit from each other. We studied object recognition datasets including CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Tiny ImageNet with several labeling budgets for the evaluations. Our experiments reveal that self-training is remarkably more efficient than active learning at reducing the labeling effort, that for a low labeling budget, active learning offers no benefit to self-training, and finally that the combination of active learning and self-training is fruitful when the labeling budget is high. The performance gap between active learning trained either with self-training or from scratch diminishes as we approach to the point where almost half of the dataset is labeled.

Abstract: The study of neural generative models of handwritten text and human sketches is a hot topic in the computer vision field. The landmark SketchRNN provided a breakthrough by sequentially generating sketches as a sequence of waypoints, and more recent articles have managed to generate fully vector sketches by coding the strokes as Bézier curves. However, the previous attempts with this approach need them all a ground truth consisting in the sequence of points that make up each stroke, which seriously limits the datasets the model is able to train in. In this work, we present a self-supervised end-to-end inverse graphics approach that learns to embed each image to its best fit of Bézier curves. The self-supervised nature of the training process allows us to train the model in a wider range of datasets, but also to perform better after-training predictions by applying an overfitting process on the input binary image. We report qualitative an quantitative evaluations on the MNIST and the Quick, Draw! datasets.

Abstract: A signed distance function (SDF) as the 3D shape description is one of the most effective approaches to represent 3D geometry for rendering and reconstruction. Our work is inspired by the state-of-the-art method DeepSDF [17] that learns and analyzes the 3D shape as the iso-surface of its shell and this method has shown promising results especially in the 3D shape reconstruction and compression domain. In this paper, we consider the degeneration problem of reconstruction coming from the capacity decrease of the DeepSDF model, which approximates the SDF with a neural network and a single latent code. We propose Local Geometry Code Learning (LGCL), a model that improves the original DeepSDF results by learning from a local shape geometry of the full 3D shape. We add an extra graph neural network to split the single transmittable latent code into a set of local latent codes distributed on the 3D shape. Mentioned latent codes are used to approximate the SDF in their local regions, which will alleviate the complexity of the approximation compared to the original DeepSDF. Furthermore, we introduce a new geometric loss function to facilitate the training of these local latent codes. Note that other local shape adjusting methods use the 3D voxel representation, which in turn is a problem highly difficult to solve or even is insolvable. In contrast, our architecture is based on graph processing implicitly and performs the learning regression process directly in the latent code space, thus make the proposed architecture more flexible and also simple for realization. Our experiments on 3D shape reconstruction demonstrate that our LGCL method can keep more details with a significantly smaller size of the SDF decoder and outperforms considerably the original DeepSDF method under the most important quantitative metrics.

Abstract: Neural video compression has emerged as a novel paradigm combining trainable multilayer neural net-works and machine learning, achieving competitive rate-distortion (RD) performances, but still remaining impractical due to heavy neural architectures, with large memory and computational demands. In addition, models are usually optimized for a single RD tradeoff. Recent slimmable image codecs can dynamically adjust their model capacity to gracefully reduce the memory and computation requirements, without harming RD performance. In this paper we propose a slimmable video codec (SlimVC), by integrating a slimmable temporal entropy model in a slimmable autoencoder. Despite a significantly more complex architecture, we show that slimming remains a powerful mechanism to control rate, memory footprint, computational cost and latency, all being important requirements for practical video compression.

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel CNN architecture for the multi-thermal image super-resolution problem. In the proposed scheme, the multi-images are synthetically generated by downsampling and slightly shifting the given image; noise is also added to each of these synthesized images. The proposed architecture uses two
attention blocks paths to extract high-frequency details taking advantage of the large information extracted from multiple images of the same scene. Experimental results are provided, showing the proposed scheme has overcome the state-of-the-art approaches.

Abstract: The rapid advancement of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks helped in solving many remote sensing problems, especially the problems of super-resolution. However, most state-of-the-art methods focus more on Single Image Super-Resolution neglecting Multi-Image Super-Resolution. In this work, a new proposed 3D Residual in Residual Dense Blocks model (3DRRDB) focuses on remote sensing Multi-Image Super-Resolution for two different single spectral bands. The proposed 3DRRDB model explores the idea of 3D convolution layers in deeply connected Dense Blocks and the effect of local and global residual connections with residual scaling in Multi-Image Super-Resolution. The model tested on the Proba-V challenge dataset shows a significant improvement above the current state-of-the-art models scoring a Corrected Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (cPSNR) of 48.79 dB and 50.83 dB for Near Infrared (NIR) and RED Bands respectively. Moreover, the proposed 3DRRDB model scores a Corrected Structural Similarity Index Measure (cSSIM) of 0.9865 and 0.9909 for NIR and RED bands respectively.