Abstract: We present the design and baseline results for a new challenge in the ChaLearn meta-learning series, accepted at NeurIPS'22, focusing on “cross-domain” meta-learning. Meta-learning aims to leverage experience gained from previous tasks to solve new tasks efficiently (i.e., with better performance, little training data, and/or modest computational resources). While previous challenges in the series focused on within-domain few-shot learning problems, with the aim of learning efficiently N-way k-shot tasks (i.e., N class classification problems with k training examples), this competition challenges the participants to solve “any-way” and “any-shot” problems drawn from various domains (healthcare, ecology, biology, manufacturing, and others), chosen for their humanitarian and societal impact. To that end, we created Meta-Album, a meta-dataset of 40 image classification datasets from 10 domains, from which we carve out tasks with any number of “ways” (within the range 2-20) and any number of “shots” (within the range 1-20). The competition is with code submission, fully blind-tested on the CodaLab challenge platform. The code of the winners will be open-sourced, enabling the deployment of automated machine learning solutions for few-shot image classification across several domains.

Abstract: This manuscript presents a comprehensive survey on recent computer vision based food grain classification techniques. It includes state-of-the-art approaches intended for different grain varieties. The approaches proposed in the literature are analyzed according to the processing stages considered in the classification pipeline, making it easier to identify common techniques and comparisons. Additionally, the type of images considered by each approach (i.e., images from the: visible, infrared, multispectral, hyperspectral bands) together with the strategy used to generate ground truth data (i.e., real and synthetic images) are reviewed. Finally, conclusions highlighting future needs and challenges are presented.

Abstract: The determination of precise skin lesion boundaries in dermoscopic images using automated methods faces many challenges, most importantly, the presence of hair, inconspicuous lesion edges and low contrast in dermoscopic images, and variability in the color, texture and shapes of skin lesions. Existing deep learning-based skin lesion segmentation algorithms are expensive in terms of computational time and memory. Consequently, running such segmentation algorithms requires a powerful GPU and high bandwidth memory, which are not available in dermoscopy devices. Thus, this article aims to achieve precise skin lesion segmentation with minimum resources: a lightweight, efficient generative adversarial network (GAN) model called SLSNet, which combines 1-D kernel factorized networks, position and channel attention, and multiscale aggregation mechanisms with a GAN model. The 1-D kernel factorized network reduces the computational cost of 2D filtering. The position and channel attention modules enhance the discriminative ability between the lesion and non-lesion feature representations in spatial and channel dimensions, respectively. A multiscale block is also used to aggregate the coarse-to-fine features of input skin images and reduce the effect of the artifacts. SLSNet is evaluated on two publicly available datasets: ISBI 2017 and the ISIC 2018. Although SLSNet has only 2.35 million parameters, the experimental results demonstrate that it achieves segmentation results on a par with the state-of-the-art skin lesion segmentation methods with an accuracy of 97.61%, and Dice and Jaccard similarity coefficients of 90.63% and 81.98%, respectively. SLSNet can run at more than 110 frames per second (FPS) in a single GTX1080Ti GPU, which is faster than well-known deep learning-based image segmentation models, such as FCN. Therefore, SLSNet can be used for practical dermoscopic applications.

Abstract: Intrinsic image decomposition is a challenging problem that consists in separating an image into its physical characteristics: reflectance and shading. This problem can be solved in different ways, but most methods have combined information from several visual cues. In this work we describe an extension of an existing method proposed by Serra et al. which considers two color descriptors and combines them by means of a Markov Random Field. We analyze in depth the weak points of the method and we explore more possibilities to use in both descriptors. The proposed extension depends on the combination of the cues considered to overcome some of the limitations of the original method. Our approach is tested on the MIT dataset and Beigpour et al. dataset, which contain images of real objects acquired under controlled conditions and synthetic images respectively, with their corresponding ground truth.

Abstract: During face-to-face human interaction, nonverbal communication plays a fundamental role. A relevant aspect that takes part during social interactions is represented by mirroring, in which a person tends to mimic the non-verbal behavior (head and body gestures, vocal prosody, etc.) of the counterpart. In this paper, we introduce a computer vision-based system to detect mirroring in dyadic social interactions with the use of a wearable platform. In our context, mirroring is inferred as simultaneous head noddings displayed by the interlocutors. Our approach consists of the following steps: (1) facial features extraction; (2) facial features stabilization; (3) head nodding recognition; and (4) mirroring detection. Our system achieves a mirroring detection accuracy of 72% on a custom mirroring dataset.

Abstract: One of the fundamental properties of a salient object region is its contrast
with the immediate context. The problem is that numerous object regions
exist which potentially can all be salient. One way to prevent an exhaustive
search over all object regions is by using object proposal algorithms. These
return a limited set of regions which are most likely to contain an object. Several saliency estimation methods have used object proposals. However, they focus on the saliency of the proposal only, and the importance of its immediate context has not been evaluated.
In this paper, we aim to improve salient object detection. Therefore, we extend object proposal methods with context proposals, which allow to incorporate the immediate context in the saliency computation. We propose several saliency features which are computed from the context proposals. In the experiments, we evaluate five object proposal methods for the task of saliency segmentation, and find that Multiscale Combinatorial Grouping outperforms the others. Furthermore, experiments show that the proposed context features improve performance, and that our method matches results on the FT datasets and obtains competitive results on three other datasets (PASCAL-S, MSRA-B and ECSSD).

Abstract: Non-verbal social human behavior forecasting has increasingly attracted the interest of the research community in recent years. Its direct applications to human-robot interaction and socially-aware human motion generation make it a very attractive field. In this survey, we define the behavior forecasting problem for multiple interactive agents in a generic way that aims at unifying the fields of social signals prediction and human motion forecasting, traditionally separated. We hold that both problem formulations refer to the same conceptual problem, and identify many shared fundamental challenges: future stochasticity, context awareness, history exploitation, etc. We also propose a taxonomy that comprises
methods published in the last 5 years in a very informative way and describes the current main concerns of the community with regard to this problem. In order to promote further research on this field, we also provide a summarized and friendly overview of audiovisual datasets featuring non-acted social interactions. Finally, we describe the most common metrics used in this task and their particular issues.