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.

Abstract: Sign Language is the dominant form of communication language used in the deaf and hearing-impaired community. To make an easy and mutual communication between the hearing-impaired and the hearing communities, building a robust system capable of translating the spoken language into sign language and vice versa is fundamental.
To this end, sign language recognition and production are two necessary parts for making such a two-way system. Signlanguage recognition and production need to cope with some critical challenges. In this survey, we review recent advances in
Sign Language Production (SLP) and related areas using deep learning. To have more realistic perspectives to sign language, we present an introduction to the Deaf culture, Deaf centers, psychological perspective of sign language, the main differences between spoken language and sign language. Furthermore, we present the fundamental components of a bi-directional sign language translation system, discussing the main challenges in this area. Also, the backbone architectures and methods in SLP are briefly introduced and the proposed taxonomy on SLP is presented. Finally, a general framework for SLP and performance evaluation, and also a discussion on the recent developments, advantages, and limitations in SLP, commenting on possible lines for future research are presented.

Abstract: Active learning aims to reduce the labeling effort that is required to train algorithms by learning an acquisition function selecting the most relevant data for which a label should be requested from a large unlabeled data pool. Active learning is generally studied on balanced datasets where an equal amount of images per class is available. However, real-world datasets suffer from severe imbalanced classes, the so called long-tail distribution. We argue that this further complicates the active learning process, since the imbalanced data pool can result in suboptimal classifiers. To address this problem in the context of active learning, we proposed a general optimization framework that explicitly takes class-balancing into account. Results on three datasets showed that the method is general (it can be combined with most existing active learning algorithms) and can be effectively applied to boost the performance of both informative and representative-based active learning methods. In addition, we showed that also on balanced datasets
our method 1 generally results in a performance gain.

Abstract: Cross domain image retrieval is a challenging task that implies matching images from one domain to their pairs from another domain. In this paper we focus on fashion image retrieval, which involves matching an image of a fashion item taken by users, to the images of the same item taken in controlled condition, usually by professional photographer. When facing this problem, we have different products
in train and test time, and we use triplet loss to train the network. We stress the importance of proper training of simple architecture, as well as adapting general models to the specific task.

Abstract: Training a deep architecture using a ranking loss has become standard for the person re-identification task. Increasingly, these deep architectures include additional components that leverage part detections, attribute predictions, pose estimators and other auxiliary information, in order to more effectively localize and align discriminative image regions. In this paper we adopt a different approach and carefully design each component of a simple deep architecture and, critically, the strategy for training it effectively for person re-identification. We extensively evaluate each design choice, leading to a list of good practices for person re-identification. By following these practices, our approach outperforms the state of the art, including more complex methods with auxiliary components, by large margins on four benchmark datasets. We also provide a qualitative analysis of our trained representation which indicates that, while compact, it is able to capture information from localized and discriminative regions, in a manner akin to an implicit attention mechanism.

Abstract: Single image super-resolution (SISR) is an important task in image processing which aims to enhance the resolution of imaging systems. Recently, SISR has witnessed great strides with the rapid development of deep learning. Recent advances in SISR are mostly devoted to designing deeper and wider networks to enhance their representation learning capacity. However, as the depth of networks increases, deep learning-based methods are faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. Moreover, most existing methods rarely leverage the intermediate features and also do not discriminate the computation of features by their frequencial components, thereby achieving relatively low performance. Aside from the aforementioned problems, another desired ability is to upsample images to arbitrary scales using a single model. Most current SISR methods train a dedicated model for each target resolution, losing generality and increasing memory requirements. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned issues and propose solutions to them: i) We present a novel frequency-based enhancement block which treats different frequencies in a heterogeneous way and also models inter-channel dependencies, which consequently enrich the output feature. Thus it helps the network generate more discriminative representations by explicitly recovering finer details. ii) We introduce OverNet which contains two main parts: a lightweight feature extractor that follows a novel recursive framework of skip and dense connections to reduce low-level feature degradation, and an overscaling module that generates an accurate SR image by internally constructing an overscaled intermediate representation of the output features. Then, to solve the problem of reconstruction at arbitrary scale factors, we introduce a novel multi-scale loss, that allows the simultaneous training of all scale factors using a single model. iii) We propose a directional variance attention network which leverages a novel attention mechanism to enhance features in different channels and spatial regions. Moreover, we introduce a novel procedure for using attention mechanisms together with residual blocks to facilitate the preservation of finer details. Finally, we demonstrate that our approaches achieve considerably better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both quantitative and visual quality.

Abstract: The mass irruption of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision since 2012 led to a dominance of the image understanding paradigm consisting in an end-to-end fully supervised learning workflow over large-scale annotated datasets. This approach proved to be extremely useful at solving a myriad of classic and new computer vision tasks with unprecedented performance —often, surpassing that of humans—, at the expense of vast amounts of human-labeled data, extensive computational resources and the disposal of all of our prior knowledge on the task at hand. Even though simple transfer learning methods, such as fine-tuning, have achieved remarkable impact, their success when the amount of labeled data in the target domain is small is limited. Furthermore, the non-static nature of data generation sources will often derive in data distribution shifts that degrade the performance of deployed models. As a consequence, there is a growing demand for methods that can exploit elements of prior knowledge and sources of information other than the manually generated ground truth annotations of the images during the network training process, so that they can adapt to new domains that constitute, if not a small data regime, at least a small labeled data regime. This thesis targets such few or no labeled data scenario in three distinct image-to-image mapping learning problems. It contributes with various approaches that leverage our previous knowledge of different elements of the image formation process: We first present a data-efficient framework for both defocus and motion blur detection, based on a model able to produce realistic synthetic local degradations. The framework comprises a self-supervised, a weakly-supervised and a semi-supervised instantiation, depending on the absence or availability and the nature of human annotations, and outperforms fully-supervised counterparts in a variety of settings. Our knowledge on color image formation is then used to gather input and target ground truth image pairs for the RGB to hyperspectral image reconstruction task. We make use of a CNN to tackle this problem, which, for the first time, allows us to exploit spatial context and achieve state-of-the-art results given a limited hyperspectral image set. In our last contribution to the subfield of data-efficient image-to-image transformation problems, we present the novel semi-supervised task of zero-pair cross-view semantic segmentation: we consider the case of relocation of the camera in an end-to-end trained and deployed monocular, fixed-view semantic segmentation system often found in industry. Under the assumption that we are allowed to obtain an additional set of synchronized but unlabeled image pairs of new scenes from both original and new camera poses, we present ZPCVNet, a model and training procedure that enables the production of dense semantic predictions in either source or target views at inference time. The lack of existing suitable public datasets to develop this approach led us to the creation of MVMO, a large-scale Multi-View, Multi-Object path-traced dataset with per-view semantic segmentation annotations. We expect MVMO to propel future research in the exciting under-developed fields of cross-view and multi-view semantic segmentation. Last, in a piece of applied research of direct application in the context of process monitoring of an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) in a steelmaking plant, we also consider the problem of simultaneously estimating the temperature and spectral emissivity of distant hot emissive samples. To that end, we design our own capturing device, which integrates three point spectrometers covering a wide range of the Ultra-Violet, visible, and Infra-Red spectra and is capable of registering the radiance signal incoming from an 8cm diameter spot located up to 20m away. We then define a physically accurate radiative transfer model that comprises the effects of atmospheric absorbance, of the optical system transfer function, and of the sample temperature and spectral emissivity themselves. We solve this inverse problem without the need for annotated data using a probabilistic programming-based Bayesian approach, which yields full posterior distribution estimates of the involved variables that are consistent with laboratory-grade measurements.