Jorge Charco, Angel Sappa, Boris X. Vintimilla, & Henry Velesaca. (2021). Camera pose estimation in multi-view environments: From virtual scenarios to the real world. IVC - Image and Vision Computing, 110, 104182.
Abstract: This paper presents a domain adaptation strategy to efficiently train network architectures for estimating the relative camera pose in multi-view scenarios. The network architectures are fed by a pair of simultaneously acquired images, hence in order to improve the accuracy of the solutions, and due to the lack of large datasets with pairs of overlapped images, a domain adaptation strategy is proposed. The domain adaptation strategy consists on transferring the knowledge learned from synthetic images to real-world scenarios. For this, the networks are firstly trained using pairs of synthetic images, which are captured at the same time by a pair of cameras in a virtual environment; and then, the learned weights of the networks are transferred to the real-world case, where the networks are retrained with a few real images. Different virtual 3D scenarios are generated to evaluate the relationship between the accuracy on the result and the similarity between virtual and real scenarios—similarity on both geometry of the objects contained in the scene as well as relative pose between camera and objects in the scene. Experimental results and comparisons are provided showing that the accuracy of all the evaluated networks for estimating the camera pose improves when the proposed domain adaptation strategy is used, highlighting the importance on the similarity between virtual-real scenarios.
|
Andres Mafla, Ruben Tito, Sounak Dey, Lluis Gomez, Marçal Rusiñol, Ernest Valveny, et al. (2021). Real-time Lexicon-free Scene Text Retrieval. PR - Pattern Recognition, 110, 107656.
Abstract: In this work, we address the task of scene text retrieval: given a text query, the system returns all images containing the queried text. The proposed model uses a single shot CNN architecture that predicts bounding boxes and builds a compact representation of spotted words. In this way, this problem can be modeled as a nearest neighbor search of the textual representation of a query over the outputs of the CNN collected from the totality of an image database. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art, while offering a significant increase in processing speed and unmatched expressiveness with samples never seen at training time. Several experiments to assess the generalization capability of the model are conducted in a multilingual dataset, as well as an application of real-time text spotting in videos.
|
Lei Kang, Pau Riba, Mauricio Villegas, Alicia Fornes, & Marçal Rusiñol. (2021). Candidate Fusion: Integrating Language Modelling into a Sequence-to-Sequence Handwritten Word Recognition Architecture. PR - Pattern Recognition, 112, 107790.
Abstract: Sequence-to-sequence models have recently become very popular for tackling
handwritten word recognition problems. However, how to effectively integrate an external language model into such recognizer is still a challenging
problem. The main challenge faced when training a language model is to
deal with the language model corpus which is usually different to the one
used for training the handwritten word recognition system. Thus, the bias
between both word corpora leads to incorrectness on the transcriptions, providing similar or even worse performances on the recognition task. In this
work, we introduce Candidate Fusion, a novel way to integrate an external
language model to a sequence-to-sequence architecture. Moreover, it provides suggestions from an external language knowledge, as a new input to
the sequence-to-sequence recognizer. Hence, Candidate Fusion provides two
improvements. On the one hand, the sequence-to-sequence recognizer has
the flexibility not only to combine the information from itself and the language model, but also to choose the importance of the information provided
by the language model. On the other hand, the external language model
has the ability to adapt itself to the training corpus and even learn the
most commonly errors produced from the recognizer. Finally, by conducting
comprehensive experiments, the Candidate Fusion proves to outperform the
state-of-the-art language models for handwritten word recognition tasks.
|
Hannes Mueller, Andre Groeger, Jonathan Hersh, Andrea Matranga, & Joan Serrat. (2021). Monitoring war destruction from space using machine learning. PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(23), e2025400118.
Abstract: Existing data on building destruction in conflict zones rely on eyewitness reports or manual detection, which makes it generally scarce, incomplete, and potentially biased. This lack of reliable data imposes severe limitations for media reporting, humanitarian relief efforts, human-rights monitoring, reconstruction initiatives, and academic studies of violent conflict. This article introduces an automated method of measuring destruction in high-resolution satellite images using deep-learning techniques combined with label augmentation and spatial and temporal smoothing, which exploit the underlying spatial and temporal structure of destruction. As a proof of concept, we apply this method to the Syrian civil war and reconstruct the evolution of damage in major cities across the country. Our approach allows generating destruction data with unprecedented scope, resolution, and frequency—and makes use of the ever-higher frequency at which satellite imagery becomes available.
|
Pau Riba, Andreas Fischer, Josep Llados, & Alicia Fornes. (2021). Learning graph edit distance by graph neural networks. PR - Pattern Recognition, 120, 108132.
Abstract: The emergence of geometric deep learning as a novel framework to deal with graph-based representations has faded away traditional approaches in favor of completely new methodologies. In this paper, we propose a new framework able to combine the advances on deep metric learning with traditional approximations of the graph edit distance. Hence, we propose an efficient graph distance based on the novel field of geometric deep learning. Our method employs a message passing neural network to capture the graph structure, and thus, leveraging this information for its use on a distance computation. The performance of the proposed graph distance is validated on two different scenarios. On the one hand, in a graph retrieval of handwritten words i.e. keyword spotting, showing its superior performance when compared with (approximate) graph edit distance benchmarks. On the other hand, demonstrating competitive results for graph similarity learning when compared with the current state-of-the-art on a recent benchmark dataset.
|
Meysam Madadi, Hugo Bertiche, & Sergio Escalera. (2021). Deep unsupervised 3D human body reconstruction from a sparse set of landmarks. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 129, 2499–2512.
Abstract: In this paper we propose the first deep unsupervised approach in human body reconstruction to estimate body surface from a sparse set of landmarks, so called DeepMurf. We apply a denoising autoencoder to estimate missing landmarks. Then we apply an attention model to estimate body joints from landmarks. Finally, a cascading network is applied to regress parameters of a statistical generative model that reconstructs body. Our set of proposed loss functions allows us to train the network in an unsupervised way. Results on four public datasets show that our approach accurately reconstructs the human body from real world mocap data.
|
Mireia Sole, Joan Blanco, Debora Gil, Oliver Valero, Alvaro Pascual, B. Cardenas, et al. (2021). Chromosomal positioning in spermatogenic cells is influenced by chromosomal factors associated with gene activity, bouquet formation, and meiotic sex-chromosome inactivation. Chromosoma, 130, 163–175.
Abstract: Chromosome territoriality is not random along the cell cycle and it is mainly governed by intrinsic chromosome factors and gene expression patterns. Conversely, very few studies have explored the factors that determine chromosome territoriality and its influencing factors during meiosis. In this study, we analysed chromosome positioning in murine spermatogenic cells using three-dimensionally fluorescence in situ hybridization-based methodology, which allows the analysis of the entire karyotype. The main objective of the study was to decipher chromosome positioning in a radial axis (all analysed germ-cell nuclei) and longitudinal axis (only spermatozoa) and to identify the chromosomal factors that regulate such an arrangement. Results demonstrated that the radial positioning of chromosomes during spermatogenesis was cell-type specific and influenced by chromosomal factors associated to gene activity. Chromosomes with specific features that enhance transcription (high GC content, high gene density and high numbers of predicted expressed genes) were preferentially observed in the inner part of the nucleus in virtually all cell types. Moreover, the position of the sex chromosomes was influenced by their transcriptional status, from the periphery of the nucleus when its activity was repressed (pachytene) to a more internal position when it is partially activated (spermatid). At pachytene, chromosome positioning was also influenced by chromosome size due to the bouquet formation. Longitudinal chromosome positioning in the sperm nucleus was not random either, suggesting the importance of ordered longitudinal positioning for the release and activation of the paternal genome after fertilisation.
|
Yasuko Sugito, Trevor Canham, Javier Vazquez, & Marcelo Bertalmio. (2021). A Study of Objective Quality Metrics for HLG-Based HDR/WCG Image Coding. SMPTE - SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, 53–65.
Abstract: In this work, we study the suitability of high dynamic range, wide color gamut (HDR/WCG) objective quality metrics to assess the perceived deterioration of compressed images encoded using the hybrid log-gamma (HLG) method, which is the standard for HDR television. Several image quality metrics have been developed to deal specifically with HDR content, although in previous work we showed that the best results (i.e., better matches to the opinion of human expert observers) are obtained by an HDR metric that consists simply in applying a given standard dynamic range metric, called visual information fidelity (VIF), directly to HLG-encoded images. However, all these HDR metrics ignore the chroma components for their calculations, that is, they consider only the luminance channel. For this reason, in the current work, we conduct subjective evaluation experiments in a professional setting using compressed HDR/WCG images encoded with HLG and analyze the ability of the best HDR metric to detect perceivable distortions in the chroma components, as well as the suitability of popular color metrics (including ΔITPR , which supports parameters for HLG) to correlate with the opinion scores. Our first contribution is to show that there is a need to consider the chroma components in HDR metrics, as there are color distortions that subjects perceive but that the best HDR metric fails to detect. Our second contribution is the surprising result that VIF, which utilizes only the luminance channel, correlates much better with the subjective evaluation scores than the metrics investigated that do consider the color components.
|
Meysam Madadi, Hugo Bertiche, Wafa Bouzouita, Isabelle Guyon, & Sergio Escalera. (2021). Learning Cloth Dynamics: 3D+Texture Garment Reconstruction Benchmark. In Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (Vol. 133, pp. 57–76).
Abstract: Human avatars are important targets in many computer applications. Accurately tracking, capturing, reconstructing and animating the human body, face and garments in 3D are critical for human-computer interaction, gaming, special effects and virtual reality. In the past, this has required extensive manual animation. Regardless of the advances in human body and face reconstruction, still modeling, learning and analyzing human dynamics need further attention. In this paper we plan to push the research in this direction, e.g. understanding human dynamics in 2D and 3D, with special attention to garments. We provide a large-scale dataset (more than 2M frames) of animated garments with variable topology and type, calledCLOTH3D++. The dataset contains RGBA video sequences paired with its corresponding 3D data. We pay special care to garment dynamics and realistic rendering of RGB data, including lighting, fabric type and texture. With this dataset, we hold a competition at NeurIPS2020. We design three tracks so participants can compete to develop the best method to perform 3D garment reconstruction in a sequence from (1) 3D-to-3D garments, (2) RGB-to-3D garments, and (3) RGB-to-3D garments plus texture. We also provide a baseline method, based on graph convolutional networks, for each track. Baseline results show that there is a lot of room for improvements. However, due to the challenging nature of the problem, no participant could outperform the baselines.
|
Giuseppe Pezzano, Oliver Diaz, Vicent Ribas Ripoll, & Petia Radeva. (2021). CoLe-CNN+: Context learning – Convolutional neural network for COVID-19-Ground-Glass-Opacities detection and segmentation. CBM - Computers in Biology and Medicine, 136, 104689.
Abstract: The most common tool for population-wide COVID-19 identification is the Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction test that detects the presence of the virus in the throat (or sputum) in swab samples. This test has a sensitivity between 59% and 71%. However, this test does not provide precise information regarding the extension of the pulmonary infection. Moreover, it has been proven that through the reading of a computed tomography (CT) scan, a clinician can provide a more complete perspective of the severity of the disease. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive system for fully-automated COVID-19 detection and lesion segmentation from CT scans, powered by deep learning strategies to support decision-making process for the diagnosis of COVID-19.
|
Arka Ujjal Dey, Suman Ghosh, Ernest Valveny, & Gaurav Harit. (2021). Beyond Visual Semantics: Exploring the Role of Scene Text in Image Understanding. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 149, 164–171.
Abstract: Images with visual and scene text content are ubiquitous in everyday life. However, current image interpretation systems are mostly limited to using only the visual features, neglecting to leverage the scene text content. In this paper, we propose to jointly use scene text and visual channels for robust semantic interpretation of images. We do not only extract and encode visual and scene text cues, but also model their interplay to generate a contextual joint embedding with richer semantics. The contextual embedding thus generated is applied to retrieval and classification tasks on multimedia images, with scene text content, to demonstrate its effectiveness. In the retrieval framework, we augment our learned text-visual semantic representation with scene text cues, to mitigate vocabulary misses that may have occurred during the semantic embedding. To deal with irrelevant or erroneous recognition of scene text, we also apply query-based attention to our text channel. We show how the multi-channel approach, involving visual semantics and scene text, improves upon state of the art.
|
Carola Figueroa Flores, David Berga, Joost Van de Weijer, & Bogdan Raducanu. (2021). Saliency for free: Saliency prediction as a side-effect of object recognition. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 150, 1–7.
Abstract: Saliency is the perceptual capacity of our visual system to focus our attention (i.e. gaze) on relevant objects instead of the background. So far, computational methods for saliency estimation required the explicit generation of a saliency map, process which is usually achieved via eyetracking experiments on still images. This is a tedious process that needs to be repeated for each new dataset. In the current paper, we demonstrate that is possible to automatically generate saliency maps without ground-truth. In our approach, saliency maps are learned as a side effect of object recognition. Extensive experiments carried out on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrated that our approach is able to generate accurate saliency maps, achieving competitive results when compared with supervised methods.
Keywords: Saliency maps; Unsupervised learning; Object recognition
|
Kai Wang, Joost Van de Weijer, & Luis Herranz. (2021). ACAE-REMIND for online continual learning with compressed feature replay. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 150, 122–129.
Abstract: Online continual learning aims to learn from a non-IID stream of data from a number of different tasks, where the learner is only allowed to consider data once. Methods are typically allowed to use a limited buffer to store some of the images in the stream. Recently, it was found that feature replay, where an intermediate layer representation of the image is stored (or generated) leads to superior results than image replay, while requiring less memory. Quantized exemplars can further reduce the memory usage. However, a drawback of these methods is that they use a fixed (or very intransigent) backbone network. This significantly limits the learning of representations that can discriminate between all tasks. To address this problem, we propose an auxiliary classifier auto-encoder (ACAE) module for feature replay at intermediate layers with high compression rates. The reduced memory footprint per image allows us to save more exemplars for replay. In our experiments, we conduct task-agnostic evaluation under online continual learning setting and get state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet-Subset, CIFAR100 and CIFAR10 dataset.
Keywords: online continual learning; autoencoders; vector quantization
|
Lluis Gomez, Ali Furkan Biten, Ruben Tito, Andres Mafla, Marçal Rusiñol, Ernest Valveny, et al. (2021). Multimodal grid features and cell pointers for scene text visual question answering. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 150, 242–249.
Abstract: This paper presents a new model for the task of scene text visual question answering. In this task questions about a given image can only be answered by reading and understanding scene text. Current state of the art models for this task make use of a dual attention mechanism in which one attention module attends to visual features while the other attends to textual features. A possible issue with this is that it makes difficult for the model to reason jointly about both modalities. To fix this problem we propose a new model that is based on an single attention mechanism that attends to multi-modal features conditioned to the question. The output weights of this attention module over a grid of multi-modal spatial features are interpreted as the probability that a certain spatial location of the image contains the answer text to the given question. Our experiments demonstrate competitive performance in two standard datasets with a model that is faster than previous methods at inference time. Furthermore, we also provide a novel analysis of the ST-VQA dataset based on a human performance study. Supplementary material, code, and data is made available through this link.
|
Razieh Rastgoo, Kourosh Kiani, & Sergio Escalera. (2021). Sign Language Recognition: A Deep Survey. ESWA - Expert Systems With Applications, 164, 113794.
Abstract: Sign language, as a different form of the communication language, is important to large groups of people in society. There are different signs in each sign language with variability in hand shape, motion profile, and position of the hand, face, and body parts contributing to each sign. So, visual sign language recognition is a complex research area in computer vision. Many models have been proposed by different researchers with significant improvement by deep learning approaches in recent years. In this survey, we review the vision-based proposed models of sign language recognition using deep learning approaches from the last five years. While the overall trend of the proposed models indicates a significant improvement in recognition accuracy in sign language recognition, there are some challenges yet that need to be solved. We present a taxonomy to categorize the proposed models for isolated and continuous sign language recognition, discussing applications, datasets, hybrid models, complexity, and future lines of research in the field.
|
