Abstract: Autonomous driving models should ideally be evaluated by deploying
them on a fleet of physical vehicles in the real world. Unfortunately, this approach is not practical for the vast majority of researchers. An attractive alternative is to evaluate models offline, on a pre-collected validation dataset with ground truth annotation. In this paper, we investigate the relation between various online and offline metrics for evaluation of autonomous driving models. We find that offline prediction error is not necessarily correlated with driving quality, and two models with identical prediction error can differ dramatically in their driving performance. We show that the correlation of offline evaluation with driving quality can be significantly improved by selecting an appropriate validation dataset and
suitable offline metrics.

Abstract: This paper proposes Convolve, Attend and Spell, an attention based sequence-to-sequence model for handwritten word recognition. The proposed architecture has three main parts: an encoder, consisting of a CNN and a bi-directional GRU, an attention mechanism devoted to focus on the pertinent features and a decoder formed by a one-directional GRU, able to spell the corresponding word, character by character. Compared with the recent state-of-the-art, our model achieves competitive results on the IAM dataset without needing any pre-processing step, predefined lexicon nor language model. Code and additional results are available in https://github.com/omni-us/research-seq2seq-HTR.

Abstract: Image classification is widely researched in the literature, where models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have provided better results. When data is not enough, CNN models tend to be overfitted. To deal with this, often, traditional techniques of data augmentation are applied, such as: affine transformations, adjusting the color balance, among others. However, we argue that some techniques of data augmentation may be more appropriate for some of the classes. In order to select the techniques that work best for particular class, we propose to explore the epistemic uncertainty for the samples within each class. From our experiments, we can observe that when the data augmentation is applied class-conditionally, we improve the results in terms of accuracy and also reduce the overall epistemic uncertainty. To summarize, in this paper we propose a class-conditional data augmentation procedure that allows us to obtain better results and improve robustness of the classification in the face of model uncertainty.

Abstract: State of the art machine learning methods need huge amounts of data with unambiguous annotations for their training. In the context of medical imaging this is, in general, a very difficult task due to limited access to clinical data, the time required for manual annotations and variability across experts. Simulated data could serve for data augmentation provided that its appearance was comparable to the actual appearance of intra-operative acquisitions. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a powerful tool for artistic style transfer, but lack a criteria for selecting epochs ensuring also preservation of intra-operative content.
We propose a multi-objective optimization strategy for a selection of cycleGAN epochs ensuring a mapping between virtual images and the intra-operative domain preserving anatomical content. Our approach has been applied to simulate intra-operative bronchoscopic videos and chest CT scans from virtual sketches generated using simple graphical primitives.

Abstract: This paper presents a complete pipeline to perform deep learning-based instance segmentation of different types of grains (e.g., corn, sunflower, soybeans, lentils, chickpeas, mote, and beans). The proposed approach consists of using synthesized image datasets for the training process, which are easily generated according to the category of the instance to be segmented. The synthesized imaging process allows generating a large set of well-annotated grain samples with high variability—as large and high as the user requires. Instance segmentation is performed through a popular deep learning based approach, the Mask R-CNN architecture, but any learning-based instance segmentation approach can be considered. Results obtained by the proposed pipeline show that the strategy of using synthesized image datasets for training instance segmentation helps to avoid the time-consuming image annotation stage, as well as to achieve higher intersection over union and average precision performances. Results obtained with different varieties of grains are shown, as well as comparisons with manually annotated images, showing both the simplicity of the process and the improvements in the performance.

Abstract: Colorectal cancer is one of the main causes of cancer death worldwide. Colonoscopy is the gold standard screening tool as it allows lesion detection and removal during the same procedure. During the last decades, several efforts have been made to develop CAD systems to assist clinicians in lesion detection and classification. Regarding the latter, and in order to be used in the exploration room as part of resect and discard or leave-in-situ strategies, these systems must identify correctly all different lesion types. This is a challenging task, as the data used to train these systems presents great inter-class similarity, high class imbalance, and low representation of clinically relevant histology classes such as serrated sessile adenomas.
In this paper, a new polyp segmentation and classification method, Swin-Expand, is introduced. Based on Swin-Transformer, it uses a simple and lightweight decoder. The performance of this method has been assessed on a novel dataset, comprising 1126 high-definition images representing the three main histological classes. Results show a clear improvement in both segmentation and classification performance, also achieving competitive results when tested in public datasets. These results confirm that both the method and the data are important to obtain more accurate polyp representations.

Abstract: Vision-based semantic segmentation in urban scenarios is a key functionality for autonomous driving. Recent revolutionary results of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) foreshadow the advent of reliable classifiers to perform such visual tasks. However, DCNNs require learning of many parameters from raw images; thus, having a sufficient amount of diverse images with class annotations is needed. These annotations are obtained via cumbersome, human labour which is particularly challenging for semantic segmentation since pixel-level annotations are required. In this chapter, we propose to use a combination of a virtual world to automatically generate realistic synthetic images with pixel-level annotations, and domain adaptation to transfer the models learnt to correctly operate in real scenarios. We address the question of how useful synthetic data can be for semantic segmentation – in particular, when using a DCNN paradigm. In order to answer this question we have generated a synthetic collection of diverse urban images, named SYNTHIA, with automatically generated class annotations and object identifiers. We use SYNTHIA in combination with publicly available real-world urban images with manually provided annotations. Then, we conduct experiments with DCNNs that show that combining SYNTHIA with simple domain adaptation techniques in the training stage significantly improves performance on semantic segmentation.