Abstract: Poster

Abstract: Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have provided outstanding performance in single image super-resolution (SISR). Despite their remarkable performance, the lack of high-frequency information in the recovered images remains a core problem. Moreover, as the networks increase in depth and width, deep CNN-based SR methods are faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. A promising and under-explored solution is to adapt the amount of compute based on the different frequency bands of the input. To this end, we present a novel Frequency-based Enhancement Block (FEB) which explicitly enhances the information of high frequencies while forwarding low-frequencies to the output. In particular, this block efficiently decomposes features into low- and high-frequency and assigns more computation to high-frequency ones. Thus, it can help the network generate more discriminative representations by explicitly recovering finer details. Our FEB design is simple and generic and can be used as a direct replacement of commonly used SR blocks with no need to change network architectures. We experimentally show that when replacing SR blocks with FEB we consistently improve the reconstruction error, while reducing the number of parameters in the model. Moreover, we propose a lightweight SR model — Frequency-based Enhancement Network (FENet) — based on FEB that matches the performance of larger models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposal performs favorably against the state-of-the-art SR algorithms in terms of visual quality, memory footprint, and inference time. The code is available at https://github.com/pbehjatii/FENet

Abstract: Social networks have attracted the attention of psychologists, as the behavior of users can be used to assess personality traits, and to detect sentiments and critical mental situations such as depression or suicidal tendencies. Recently, the increasing amount of image uploads to social networks has shifted the focus from text to image-based personality assessment. However, obtaining the ground-truth requires giving personality questionnaires to the users, making the process very costly and slow, and hindering research on large populations. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict which images are most associated with each personality trait of the OCEAN personality model, without requiring ground-truth personality labels. Namely, we present a weakly supervised framework which shows that the personality scores obtained using specific images textually associated with particular personality traits are highly correlated with scores obtained using standard text-based personality questionnaires. We trained an OCEAN trait model based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), learned from 120K pictures posted with specific textual hashtags, to infer whether the personality scores from the images uploaded by users are consistent with those scores obtained from text. In order to validate our claims, we performed a personality test on a heterogeneous group of 280 human subjects, showing that our model successfully predicts which kind of image will match a person with a given level of a trait. Looking at the results, we obtained evidence that personality is not only correlated with text, but with image content too. Interestingly, different visual patterns emerged from those images most liked by persons with a particular personality trait: for instance, pictures most associated with high conscientiousness usually contained healthy food, while low conscientiousness pictures contained injuries, guns, and alcohol. These findings could pave the way to complement text-based personality questionnaires with image-based questions.

Abstract: This paper presents a Lightweight Dense Convolutional (LDC) neural network for edge detection. The proposed model is an adaptation of two state-of-the-art approaches, but it requires less than 4% of parameters in comparison with these approaches. The proposed architecture generates thin edge maps and reaches the highest score (i.e., ODS) when compared with lightweight models (models with less than 1 million parameters), and reaches a similar performance when compare with heavy architectures (models with about 35 million parameters). Both quantitative and qualitative results and comparisons with state-of-the-art models, using different edge detection datasets, are provided. The proposed LDC does not use pre-trained weights and requires straightforward hyper-parameter settings. The source code is released at https://github.com/xavysp/LDC

Abstract: Human visual perception is limited to the visual-optical spectrum. Machine vision is not. Cameras sensitive to the different infrared spectra can enhance the abilities of autonomous systems and visually perceive the environment in a holistic way. Relevant scene content can be made visible especially in situations, where sensors of other modalities face issues like a visual-optical camera that needs a source of illumination. As a consequence, not only human mistakes can be avoided by increasing the level of automation, but also machine-induced errors can be reduced that, for example, could make a self-driving car crash into a pedestrian under difficult illumination conditions. Furthermore, multi-spectral sensor systems with infrared imagery as one modality are a rich source of information and can provably increase the robustness of many autonomous systems. Applications that can benefit from utilizing infrared imagery range from robotics to automotive and from biometrics to surveillance. In this book, we provide a brief yet concise introduction to the current state-of-the-art of computer vision and machine learning in the infrared spectrum. Based on various popular computer vision tasks such as image enhancement, object detection, or object tracking, we first motivate each task starting from established literature in the visual-optical spectrum. Then, we discuss the differences between processing images and videos in the visual-optical spectrum and the various infrared spectra. An overview of the current literature is provided together with an outlook for each task. Furthermore, available and annotated public datasets and common evaluation methods and metrics are presented. In a separate chapter, popular applications that can greatly benefit from the use of infrared imagery as a data source are presented and discussed. Among them are automatic target recognition, video surveillance, or biometrics including face recognition. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for well-fitting sensor setups and data processing algorithms for certain computer vision tasks. We address this book to prospective researchers and engineers new to the field but also to anyone who wants to get introduced to the challenges and the approaches of computer vision using infrared images or videos. Readers will be able to start their work directly after reading the book supported by a highly comprehensive backlog of recent and relevant literature as well as related infrared datasets including existing evaluation frameworks. Together with consistently decreasing costs for infrared cameras, new fields of application appear and make computer vision in the infrared spectrum a great opportunity to face nowadays scientific and engineering challenges.

Abstract: More than half of all commercial aircraft operation accidents could have been prevented by executing a go-around. Making timely decision to execute a go-around manoeuvre can potentially reduce overall aviation industry accident rate. In this paper, we describe a cockpit-deployable machine learning system to support flight crew go-around decision-making based on the prediction of a hard landing event.
This work presents a hybrid approach for hard landing prediction that uses features modelling temporal dependencies of aircraft variables as inputs to a neural network. Based on a large dataset of 58177 commercial flights, the results show that our approach has 85% of average sensitivity with 74% of average specificity at the go-around point. It follows that our approach is a cockpit-deployable recommendation system that outperforms existing approaches.

Abstract: On the road to making self-driving cars a reality, academic and industrial researchers are working hard to continue to increase safety while meeting technical and regulatory constraints Understanding the surrounding environment is a fundamental task in self-driving cars. It requires combining complex computer vision algorithms. Although state-of-the-art algorithms achieve good accuracy, their implementations often require powerful computing platforms with high power consumption. In some cases, the processing speed does not meet real-time constraints. FPGA platforms are often used to implement a category of latency-critical algorithms that demand maximum performance and energy efficiency. Since self-driving car computer vision functions fall into this category, one could expect to see a wide adoption of FPGAs in autonomous cars. In this paper, we survey the computer vision FPGA-based works from the literature targeting automotive applications over the last decade. Based on the survey, we identify the strengths and weaknesses of FPGAs in this domain and future research opportunities and challenges.