Abstract: Automatic waste recycling has become a very important societal challenge nowadays, raising people’s awareness for a cleaner environment and a more sustainable lifestyle. With the transition to Smart Cities, and thanks to advanced ICT solutions, this problem has received a new impulse. The waste recycling focus has shifted from general waste treating facilities to an individual responsibility, where each person should become aware of selective waste separation. The surge of the mobile devices, accompanied by a significant increase in computation power, has potentiated and facilitated this individual role. An automated image-based waste classification mechanism can help with a more efficient recycling and a reduction of contamination from residuals. Despite the good results achieved with the deep learning methodologies for this task, the Achille’s heel is that they require large neural networks which need significant computational resources for training and therefore are not suitable for mobile devices. To circumvent this apparently intractable problem, we will rely on knowledge distillation in order to transfer the network’s knowledge from a larger network (called ‘teacher’) to a smaller, more compact one, (referred as ‘student’) and thus making it possible the task of image classification on a device with limited resources. For evaluation, we considered as ‘teachers’ large architectures such as InceptionResNet or DenseNet and as ‘students’, several configurations of the MobileNets. We used the publicly available TrashNet dataset to demonstrate that the distillation process does not significantly affect system’s performance (e.g. classification accuracy) of the student network.

Abstract: Memes evolve and mutate through their diffusion in social media. They have the potential to propagate ideas and, by extension, products. Many studies have focused on memes, but none so far, to our knowledge, on the users that post them, their relationships, and the reach of their influence. In this article, we define a meme influence graph together with suitable metrics to visualize and quantify influence between users who post memes, and we also describe a process to implement our definitions using a new approach to meme detection based on text-to-image area ratio and contrast. After applying our method to a set of users of the social media platform Instagram, we conclude that our metrics add information to already existing user characteristics.

Abstract: This paper proposes the use of a CycleGAN architecture for thermal image super-resolution under a transfer domain strategy, where middle-resolution images from one camera are transferred to a higher resolution domain of another camera. The proposed approach is trained with a large dataset acquired using three thermal cameras at different resolutions. An unsupervised learning process is followed to train the architecture. Additional loss function is proposed trying to improve results from the state of the art approaches. Following the first thermal image super-resolution challenge (PBVS-CVPR2020) evaluations are performed. A comparison with previous works is presented showing the proposed approach reaches the best results.

Abstract: Domain Adaptation methods can be classified into two basic families of approaches: non-parametric and parametric. Non-parametric approaches depend on statistical indicators such as feature covariances to minimize the domain shift. Non-parametric approaches tend to be fast to compute and require no additional parameters, but they are unable to leverage probability density functions with complex internal structures. Parametric approaches, on the other hand, use models of the probability distributions as surrogates in minimizing the domain shift, but they require additional trainable parameters to model these distributions. In this work, we propose a new statistical approach to minimizing the domain shift based on stochastically projecting and evaluating the cumulative density function in both domains. As with non-parametric approaches, there are no additional trainable parameters. As with parametric approaches, the internal structure of both domains’ probability distributions is considered, thus leveraging a higher amount of information when reducing the domain shift. Evaluation on standard datasets used for Domain Adaptation shows better performance of the proposed model compared to non-parametric approaches while being competitive with parametric ones. (Code available at: https://github.com/moliusimon/mca).

Abstract: Visual data obtained during driving scenarios usually contain large amounts of text that conveys semantic information necessary to analyse the urban environment and is integral to the traffic control plan. Yet, research on autonomous driving or driver assistance systems typically ignores this information. To advance research in this direction, we present RoadText-3K, a large driving video dataset with fully annotated text. RoadText-3K is three times bigger than its predecessor and contains data from varied geographical locations, unconstrained driving conditions and multiple languages and scripts. We offer a comprehensive analysis of tracking by detection and detection by tracking methods exploring the limits of state-of-the-art text detection. Finally, we propose a new end-to-end trainable tracking model that yields state-of-the-art results on this challenging dataset. Our experiments demonstrate the complexity and variability of RoadText-3K and establish a new, realistic benchmark for scene text tracking in the wild.

Abstract: Assessing the quality of movements for post-stroke patients during the rehabilitation phase is vital given that there is no standard stroke rehabilitation plan for all the patients. In fact, it depends basically on the patient’s functional independence and its progress along the rehabilitation sessions. To tackle this challenge and make neurorehabilitation more agile, we propose an automatic assessment pipeline that starts by recognising patients’ movements by means of a shallow deep learning architecture, then measuring the movement quality using jerk measure and related measures. A particularity of this work is that the dataset used is clinically relevant, since it represents movements inspired from Fugl-Meyer a well common upper-limb clinical stroke assessment scale for stroke patients. We show that it is possible to detect the contrast between healthy and patients movements in terms of smoothness, besides achieving conclusions about the patients’ progress during the rehabilitation sessions that correspond to the clinicians’ findings about each case.

Abstract: This work proposes a novel approach based on deep learning to address the classification of shrimp (Pennaeus vannamei) into two classes, according to their level of pigmentation accepted by shrimp commerce. The main goal of this actual study is to support the shrimp industry in terms of price and process. An efficient CNN architecture is proposed to perform image classification through a program that could be set other in mobile devices or in fixed support in the shrimp supply chain. The proposed approach is a lightweight model that uses HSV color space shrimp images. A simple pipeline shows the most important stages performed to determine a pattern that identifies the class to which they belong based on their pigmentation. For the experiments, a database acquired with mobile devices of various brands and models has been used to capture images of shrimp. The results obtained with the images in the RGB and HSV color space allow for testing the effectiveness of the proposed model.