Abstract: In this study we provide the analysis of eye movement behavior elicited by low-level feature distinctiveness with a dataset of synthetically-generated image patterns. Design of visual stimuli was inspired by the ones used in previous psychophysical experiments, namely in free-viewing and visual searching tasks, to provide a total of 15 types of stimuli, divided according to the task and feature to be analyzed. Our interest is to analyze the influences of low-level feature contrast between a salient region and the rest of distractors, providing fixation localization characteristics and reaction time of landing inside the salient region. Eye-tracking data was collected from 34 participants during the viewing of a 230 images dataset. Results show that saliency is predominantly and distinctively influenced by: 1. feature type, 2. feature contrast, 3. temporality of fixations, 4. task difficulty and 5. center bias. This experimentation proposes a new psychophysical basis for saliency model evaluation using synthetic images.

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks have been proposed as suitable frameworks to model biological vision. Some of these artificial networks showed representational properties that rival primate performances in object recognition. In this paper we explore how color is encoded in a trained artificial network. It is performed by estimating a color selectivity index for each neuron, which allows us to describe the neuron activity to a color input stimuli. The index allows us to classify whether they are color selective or not and if they are of a single or double color. We have determined that all five convolutional layers of the network have a large number of color selective neurons. Color opponency clearly emerges in the first layer, presenting 4 main axes (Black-White, Red-Cyan, Blue-Yellow and Magenta-Green), but this is reduced and rotated as we go deeper into the network. In layer 2 we find a denser hue sampling of color neurons and opponency is reduced almost to one new main axis, the Bluish-Orangish coinciding with the dataset bias. In layers 3, 4 and 5 color neurons are similar amongst themselves, presenting different type of neurons that detect specific colored objects (e.g., orangish faces), specific surrounds (e.g., blue sky) or specific colored or contrasted object-surround configurations (e.g. blue blob in a green surround). Overall, our work concludes that color and shape representation are successively entangled through all the layers of the studied network, revealing certain parallelisms with the reported evidences in primate brains that can provide useful insight into intermediate hierarchical spatio-chromatic representations.

Abstract: This paper presents and evaluates a framework to improve the performance of visual object classification methods, which are based on the usage of image feature descriptors as inputs. The goal of the proposed framework is to learn the best descriptor for each image in a given database. This goal is reached by means of a reinforcement learning process using the minimum information. The visual classification system used to demonstrate the proposed framework is based on a bag of features scheme, and the reinforcement learning technique is implemented through the Q-learning approach. The behavior of the reinforcement learning with different state definitions is evaluated. Additionally, a method that combines all these states is formulated in order to select the optimal state. Finally, the chosen actions are obtained from the best set of image descriptors in the literature: PHOW, SIFT, C-SIFT, SURF and Spin. Experimental results using two public databases (ETH and COIL) are provided showing both the validity of the proposed approach and comparisons with state of the art. In all the cases the best results are obtained with the proposed approach.

Abstract: Human multi-limb segmentation in RGB images has attracted a lot of interest in the research community because of the huge amount of possible applications in fields like Human-Computer Interaction, Surveillance, eHealth, or Gaming. Nevertheless, human multi-limb segmentation is a very hard task because of the changes in appearance produced by different points of view, clothing, lighting conditions, occlusions, and number of articulations of the human body. Furthermore, this huge pose variability makes the availability of large annotated datasets difficult. In this paper, we introduce the HuPBA8k+ dataset. The dataset contains more than 8000 labeled frames at pixel precision, including more than 120000 manually labeled samples of 14 different limbs. For completeness, the dataset is also labeled at frame-level with action annotations drawn from an 11 action dictionary which includes both single person actions and person-person interactive actions. Furthermore, we also propose a two-stage approach for the segmentation of human limbs. In a first stage, human limbs are trained using cascades of classifiers to be split in a tree-structure way, which is included in an Error-Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) framework to define a body-like probability map. This map is used to obtain a binary mask of the subject by means of GMM color modelling and GraphCuts theory. In a second stage, we embed a similar tree-structure in an ECOC framework to build a more accurate set of limb-like probability maps within the segmented user mask, that are fed to a multi-label GraphCut procedure to obtain final multi-limb segmentation. The methodology is tested on the novel HuPBA8k+ dataset, showing performance improvements in comparison to state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, a baseline of standard action recognition methods for the 11 actions categories of the novel dataset is also provided.

Abstract: Hand sign language recognition from video is a challenging research area in computer vision, which performance is affected by hand occlusion, fast hand movement, illumination changes, or background complexity, just to mention a few. In recent years, deep learning approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results in the field, though previous challenges are not completely solved. In this work, we propose a novel deep learning-based pipeline architecture for efficient automatic hand sign language recognition using Single Shot Detector (SSD), 2D Convolutional Neural Network (2DCNN), 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) from RGB input videos. We use a CNN-based model which estimates the 3D hand keypoints from 2D input frames. After that, we connect these estimated keypoints to build the hand skeleton by using midpoint algorithm. In order to obtain a more discriminative representation of hands, we project 3D hand skeleton into three views surface images. We further employ the heatmap image of detected keypoints as input for refinement in a stacked fashion. We apply 3DCNNs on the stacked features of hand, including pixel level, multi-view hand skeleton, and heatmap features, to extract discriminant local spatio-temporal features from these stacked inputs. The outputs of the 3DCNNs are fused and fed to a LSTM to model long-term dynamics of hand sign gestures. Analyzing 2DCNN vs. 3DCNN using different number of stacked inputs into the network, we demonstrate that 3DCNN better capture spatio-temporal dynamics of hands. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that this multi-modal and multi-view set of hand skeleton features are applied for hand sign language recognition. Furthermore, we present a new large-scale hand sign language dataset, namely RKS-PERSIANSIGN, including 10′000 RGB videos of 100 Persian sign words. Evaluation results of the proposed model on three datasets, NYU, First-Person, and RKS-PERSIANSIGN, indicate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in hand sign language recognition, hand pose estimation, and hand action recognition.

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.