Abstract: It is difficult to acquire tagged cardiac MR images with a high temporal and spatial resolution using clinical MR scanners. However, if such images are used for quantifying scores based on motion, it is essential a resolution as high as possible. This paper explores the influence of the temporal resolution of a tagged series on the quantification of myocardial dynamic parameters. To such purpose we have designed a SPAMM (Spatial Modulation of Magnetization) sequence allowing acquisition of sequences at simple and double temporal resolution. Sequences are processed to compute myocardial motion by an automatic technique based on the tracking of the harmonic phase of tagged images (the Harmonic Phase Flow, HPF). The results have been compared to manual tracking of myocardial tags. The error in displacement fields for double resolution sequences reduces 17%.

Abstract: The adventitia layer appears as a weak edge in IVUS images with a non-uniform grey level, which difficulties its detection. In order to enhance edges, we apply an anisotropic filter that homogenizes the grey level along the image significant structures (ridges, valleys and edges). A standard edge detector applied to the filtered image yields a set of candidate points prone to be unconnected. The final model is obtained by interpolating the former line segments along the tangent direction to the level curves of the filtered image with an anisotropic contour closing technique based on functional extension principles

Abstract: Floods are major natural disasters which cause deaths and material damages every year. Monitoring these events is crucial in order to reduce both the affected people and the economic losses. In this work we train and test three different Deep Learning segmentation algorithms to estimate the water area from river images, and compare their performances. We discuss the implementation of a novel data chain aimed to monitor river water levels by automatically process data collected from surveillance cameras, and to give alerts in case of high increases of the water level or flooding. We also create and openly publish the first image dataset for river water segmentation.

Abstract: Error-correcting output codes (ECOC) represents a powerful framework to deal with multiclass classification problems based on combining binary classifiers. The key factor affecting the performance of ECOC methods is the independence of binary classifiers, without which the ECOC method would be ineffective. In spite of its ability on classification of problems with relatively large number of classes, it has been applied in few real world problems. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of the ECOC approach on two image vision problems: logo recognition and shape classification using Decision Tree and AdaBoost as the base learners. The results show that the ECOC method can be used to improve the classification performance in comparison with the classical multiclass approaches.

Abstract: On the road to making self-driving cars a reality, academic and industrial researchers are working hard to continue to increase safety while meeting technical and regulatory constraints Understanding the surrounding environment is a fundamental task in self-driving cars. It requires combining complex computer vision algorithms. Although state-of-the-art algorithms achieve good accuracy, their implementations often require powerful computing platforms with high power consumption. In some cases, the processing speed does not meet real-time constraints. FPGA platforms are often used to implement a category of latency-critical algorithms that demand maximum performance and energy efficiency. Since self-driving car computer vision functions fall into this category, one could expect to see a wide adoption of FPGAs in autonomous cars. In this paper, we survey the computer vision FPGA-based works from the literature targeting automotive applications over the last decade. Based on the survey, we identify the strengths and weaknesses of FPGAs in this domain and future research opportunities and challenges.

Abstract: Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have provided outstanding performance in single image super-resolution (SISR). Despite their remarkable performance, the lack of high-frequency information in the recovered images remains a core problem. Moreover, as the networks increase in depth and width, deep CNN-based SR methods are faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. A promising and under-explored solution is to adapt the amount of compute based on the different frequency bands of the input. To this end, we present a novel Frequency-based Enhancement Block (FEB) which explicitly enhances the information of high frequencies while forwarding low-frequencies to the output. In particular, this block efficiently decomposes features into low- and high-frequency and assigns more computation to high-frequency ones. Thus, it can help the network generate more discriminative representations by explicitly recovering finer details. Our FEB design is simple and generic and can be used as a direct replacement of commonly used SR blocks with no need to change network architectures. We experimentally show that when replacing SR blocks with FEB we consistently improve the reconstruction error, while reducing the number of parameters in the model. Moreover, we propose a lightweight SR model — Frequency-based Enhancement Network (FENet) — based on FEB that matches the performance of larger models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal performs favorably against the state-of-the-art SR algorithms in terms of visual quality, memory footprint, and inference time. The code is available at https://github.com/pbehjatii/FENet

Abstract: More than half of all commercial aircraft operation accidents could have been prevented by executing a go-around. Making timely decision to execute a go-around manoeuvre can potentially reduce overall aviation industry accident rate. In this paper, we describe a cockpit-deployable machine learning system to support flight crew go-around decision-making based on the prediction of a hard landing event.
This work presents a hybrid approach for hard landing prediction that uses features modelling temporal dependencies of aircraft variables as inputs to a neural network. Based on a large dataset of 58177 commercial flights, the results show that our approach has 85% of average sensitivity with 74% of average specificity at the go-around point. It follows that our approach is a cockpit-deployable recommendation system that outperforms existing approaches.