Abstract: Aesthetic image analysis is essential for improving the performance of multimedia image retrieval systems, especially from a repository of social media and multimedia content stored on mobile devices. This paper presents a novel method for classifying aesthetic natural scene images by studying the naturalness of image content using statistical features, and reading text in the images using semantic features. Unlike existing methods that focus only on image quality with human information, the proposed approach focuses on image features as well as text-based semantic features without human intervention to reduce the gap between subjectivity and objectivity in the classification. The aesthetic classes considered in this work are (i) Very Pleasant, (ii) Pleasant, (iii) Normal and (iv) Unpleasant. The naturalness is represented by features of focus, defocus, perceived brightness, perceived contrast, blurriness and noisiness, while semantics are represented by text recognition, description of the images and labels of images, profile pictures, and banner images. Furthermore, a deep learning model is proposed in a novel way to fuse statistical and semantic features for the classification of aesthetic natural scene images. Experiments on our own dataset and the standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves 92.74%, 88.67% and 83.22% average classification rates on our own dataset, AVA dataset and CUHKPQ dataset, respectively. Furthermore, a comparative study of the proposed model with the existing methods shows that the proposed method is effective for the classification of aesthetic social media images.

Abstract: The performance of deep neural networks highly depends on the quality and volume of the training data. However, cost-effective labelling processes such as crowdsourcing and web crawling often lead to data with noisy (i.e., wrong) labels. Making models robust to this label noise is thus of prime importance. A common approach is using loss distributions to model the label noise. However, the robustness of these methods highly depends on the accuracy of the division of training set into clean and noisy samples. In this work, we dive in this research direction highlighting the existing problem of treating this distribution globally and propose a class-conditional approach to split the clean and noisy samples. We apply our approach to the popular DivideMix algorithm and show how the local treatment fares better with respect to the global treatment of loss distribution. We validate our hypothesis on two popular benchmark datasets and show substantial improvements over the baseline experiments. We further analyze the effectiveness of the proposal using two different metrics – Noise Division Accuracy and Classiness.

Abstract: Deep learning has made significant advances in recent years, and as a result, it is now in a stage where it can achieve outstanding results in tasks requiring visual understanding of scenes. However, its performance tends to decline when dealing with low-quality images. The advent of super-resolution (SR) techniques has started to have an impact on the field of remote sensing by enabling the restoration of fine details and enhancing image quality, which could help to increase performance in other vision tasks. However, in previous works, contradictory results for scene visual understanding were achieved when SR techniques were applied. In this paper, we present an experimental study on the impact of SR on enhancing aerial scene classification. Through the analysis of different state-of-the-art SR algorithms, including traditional methods and deep learning-based approaches, we unveil the transformative potential of SR in overcoming the limitations of low-resolution (LR) aerial imagery. By enhancing spatial resolution, more fine details are captured, opening the door for an improvement in scene understanding. We also discuss the effect of different image scales on the quality of SR and its effect on aerial scene classification. Our experimental work demonstrates the significant impact of SR on enhancing aerial scene classification compared to LR images, opening new avenues for improved remote sensing applications.

Abstract: Recent advances in single image super-resolution (SISR) explore the power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to achieve better performance. However, most of the progress has been made by scaling CNN architectures, which usually raise computational demands and memory consumption. This makes modern architectures less applicable in practice. In addition, most CNN-based SR methods do not fully utilize the informative hierarchical features that are helpful for final image recovery. In order to address these issues, we propose a directional variance attention network (DiVANet), a computationally efficient yet accurate network for SISR. Specifically, we introduce a novel directional variance attention (DiVA) mechanism to capture long-range spatial dependencies and exploit inter-channel dependencies simultaneously for more discriminative representations. Furthermore, we propose a residual attention feature group (RAFG) for parallelizing attention and residual block computation. The output of each residual block is linearly fused at the RAFG output to provide access to the whole feature hierarchy. In parallel, DiVA extracts most relevant features from the network for improving the final output and preventing information loss along the successive operations inside the network. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of DiVANet over the state of the art in several datasets, while maintaining relatively low computation and memory footprint. The code is available at https://github.com/pbehjatii/DiVANet.

Abstract: Achieving visually consistent colors across multiple images is important when images are used in photo albums, websites, and brochures. Unfortunately, only a handful of methods address multi-image color consistency compared to one-to-one color transfer techniques. Furthermore, existing methods do not incorporate high-level features that can assist graphic designers in their work. To address these limitations, we introduce a framework that builds upon a previous palette-based color consistency method and incorporates three high-level features: white balance, saliency, and color naming. We show how these features overcome the limitations of the prior multi-consistency workflow and showcase the user-friendly nature of our framework.

Abstract: The power requirements of video-oculography systems can be prohibitive for high-speed operation on portable devices. Recently, low-power alternatives such as photosensors have been evaluated, providing gaze estimates at high frequency with a trade-off in accuracy and robustness. Potentially, an approach combining slow/high-fidelity and fast/low-fidelity sensors should be able to exploit their complementarity to track fast eye motion accurately and robustly. To foster research on this topic, we introduce OpenSFEDS, a near-eye gaze estimation dataset containing approximately 2M synthetic camera-photosensor image pairs sampled at 500 Hz under varied appearance and camera position. We also formulate the task of sensor fusion for gaze estimation, proposing a deep learning framework consisting in appearance-based encoding and temporal eye-state dynamics. We evaluate several single- and multi-rate fusion baselines on OpenSFEDS, achieving 8.7% error decrease when tracking fast eye movements with a multi-rate approach vs. a gaze forecasting approach operating with a low-speed sensor alone.

Abstract: Automated skill assessment in sports using video-based analysis holds great potential for revolutionizing coaching methodologies. This paper focuses on the problem of skill determination in golfers by leveraging deep learning models applied to a large database of video recordings of golf swings. We investigate different regression, ranking and classification based methods and compare to a simple baseline approach. The performance is evaluated using mean squared error (MSE) as well as computing the percentages of correctly ranked pairs based on the Kendall correlation. Our results demonstrate an improvement over the baseline, with a 35% lower mean squared error and 68% correctly ranked pairs. However, achieving fine-grained skill assessment remains challenging. This work contributes to the development of AI-driven coaching systems and advances the understanding of video-based skill determination in the context of golf.

Abstract: A long-standing view is that lightness illusions are by-products of strategies employed by the visual system to stabilize its perceptual representation of surface reflectance against changes in illumination. Computationally, one such strategy is to infer reflectance from the retinal image, and to base the lightness percept on this inference. CNNs trained to infer reflectance from images have proven successful at solving this problem under limited conditions. To evaluate whether these CNNs provide suitable starting points for computational models of human lightness perception, we tested a state-of-the-art CNN on several lightness illusions, and compared its behaviour to prior measurements of human performance. We trained a CNN (Yu & Smith, 2019) to infer reflectance from luminance images. The network had a 30-layer hourglass architecture with skip connections. We trained the network via supervised learning on 100K images, rendered in Blender, each showing randomly placed geometric objects (surfaces, cubes, tori, etc.), with random Lambertian reflectance patterns (solid, Voronoi, or low-pass noise), under randomized point+ambient lighting. The renderer also provided the ground-truth reflectance images required for training. After training, we applied the network to several visual illusions. These included the argyle, Koffka-Adelson, snake, White’s, checkerboard assimilation, and simultaneous contrast illusions, along with their controls where appropriate. The CNN correctly predicted larger illusions in the argyle, Koffka-Adelson, and snake images than in their controls. It also correctly predicted an assimilation effect in White's illusion. It did not, however, account for the checkerboard assimilation or simultaneous contrast effects. These results are consistent with the view that at least some lightness phenomena are by-products of a rational approach to inferring stable representations of physical properties from intrinsically ambiguous retinal images. Furthermore, they suggest that CNN models may be a promising starting point for new models of human lightness perception.