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: Eating habits are learned throughout the early stages of our lives. However, it is not easy to be aware of how our food-related routine affects our healthy living. In this work, we address the unsupervised discovery of nutritional habits from egocentric photo-streams. We build a food-related behavioral pattern discovery model, which discloses nutritional routines from the activities performed throughout the days. To do so, we rely on Dynamic-Time-Warping for the evaluation of similarity among the collected days. Within this framework, we present a simple, but robust and fast novel classification pipeline that outperforms the state-of-the-art on food-related image classification with a weighted accuracy and F-score of 70% and 63%, respectively. Later, we identify days composed of nutritional activities that do not describe the habits of the person as anomalies in the daily life of the user with the Isolation Forest method. Furthermore, we show an application for the identification of food-related scenes when the camera wearer eats in isolation. Results have shown the good performance of the proposed model and its relevance to visualize the nutritional habits of individuals.

Abstract: The advent of artificial intelligence has supposed an evolution on how different daily work tasks are performed. The analysis of cultural content has seen a huge boost by the development of computer-assisted methods that allows easy and transparent data access. In our case, we deal with the automation of the production of live shows, like music concerts, aiming to develop a system that can indicate the producer which camera to show based on what each of them is showing. In this context, we consider that is essential to understand where spectators look and what they are interested in so the computational method can learn from this information. The work that we present here shows the results of a first preliminary study in which we compare areas of interest defined by human beings and those indicated by an automatic system. Our system is based on the extraction of motion textures from dynamic Spatio-Temporal Volumes (STV) and then analyzing the patterns by means of texture analysis techniques. We validate our approach over several video sequences that have been labeled by 16 different experts. Our method is able to match those relevant areas identified by the experts, achieving recall scores higher than 80% when a distance of 80 pixels between method and ground truth is considered. Current performance shows promise when detecting abnormal peaks and movement trends.

Abstract: This book contains the proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) which was organized and sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), endorsed by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), and in cooperation with the ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), the European Association for Computer Graphics (EUROGRAPHICS), the EUROGRAPHICS Portuguese Chapter, the VRVis Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization Forschungs-GmbH, the French Association for Computer Graphics (AFIG), and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). The proceedings here published demonstrate new and innovative solutions and highlight technical problems in each field that are challenging and worthy of being disseminated to the interested research audiences. VISIGRAPP 2021 was organized to promote a discussion forum about the conference’s research topics between researchers, developers, manufacturers and end-users, and to establish guidelines in the development of more advanced solutions. This year VISIGRAPP was, exceptionally, held as a web-based event, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, from 8 – 10 February. We received a high number of paper submissions for this edition of VISIGRAPP, 371 in total, with contributions from 52 countries. This attests to the success and global dimension of VISIGRAPP. To evaluate each submission, we used a hierarchical process of double-blind evaluation where each paper was reviewed by two to six experts from the International Program Committee (IPC). The IPC selected for oral presentation and for publication as full papers 12 papers from GRAPP, 8 from HUCAPP, 11 papers from IVAPP, and 56 papers from VISAPP, which led to a result for the full-paper acceptance ratio of 24% and a high-quality program. Apart from the above full papers, the conference program also features 118 short papers and 67 poster presentations. We hope that these conference proceedings, which are submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index, SCOPUS, DBLP, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, EI and Microsoft Academic, will help the Computer Vision, Imaging, Visualization, Computer Graphics and Human-Computer Interaction communities to find interesting research work. Moreover, we are proud to inform that the program also includes three plenary keynote lectures, given by internationally distinguished researchers, namely Federico Tombari (Google and Technical University of Munich, Germany), Dieter Schmalstieg (Graz University of Technology, Austria) and Nathalie Henry Riche (Microsoft Research, United States), thus contributing to increase the overall quality of the conference and to provide a deeper understanding of the conference’s interest fields. Furthermore, a short list of the presented papers will be selected to be extended into a forthcoming book of VISIGRAPP Selected Papers to be published by Springer during 2021 in the CCIS series. Moreover, a short list of presented papers will be selected for publication of extended and revised versions in a special issue of the Springer Nature Computer Science journal. All papers presented at this conference will be available at the SCITEPRESS Digital Library. Three awards are delivered at the closing session, to recognize the best conference paper, the best student paper and the best poster for each of the four conferences. There is also an award for best industrial paper to be delivered at the closing session for VISAPP. We would like to express our thanks, first of all, to the authors of the technical papers, whose work and dedication made it possible to put together a program that we believe to be very exciting and of high technical quality. Next, we would like to thank the Area Chairs, all the members of the program committee and auxiliary reviewers, who helped us with their expertise and time. We would also like to thank the invited speakers for their invaluable contribution and for sharing their vision in their talks. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the professional support of the INSTICC team for all organizational processes, especially given the need to introduce online streaming, forum management, direct messaging facilitation and other web-based activities in order to make it possible for VISIGRAPP 2021 authors to present their work and share ideas with colleagues in spite of the logistic difficulties caused by the current pandemic situation. We wish you all an exciting conference. We hope to meet you again for the next edition of VISIGRAPP, details of which are available at http://www. visigrapp.org.

Abstract: This book contains the proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2021) which was organized and sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), endorsed by the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), and in cooperation with the ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), the European Association for Computer Graphics (EUROGRAPHICS), the EUROGRAPHICS Portuguese Chapter, the VRVis Center for Virtual Reality and Visualization Forschungs-GmbH, the French Association for Computer Graphics (AFIG), and the Society for Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T). The proceedings here published demonstrate new and innovative solutions and highlight technical problems in each field that are challenging and worthy of being disseminated to the interested research audiences. VISIGRAPP 2021 was organized to promote a discussion forum about the conference’s research topics between researchers, developers, manufacturers and end-users, and to establish guidelines in the development of more advanced solutions. This year VISIGRAPP was, exceptionally, held as a web-based event, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, from 8 – 10 February. We received a high number of paper submissions for this edition of VISIGRAPP, 371 in total, with contributions from 52 countries. This attests to the success and global dimension of VISIGRAPP. To evaluate each submission, we used a hierarchical process of double-blind evaluation where each paper was reviewed by two to six experts from the International Program Committee (IPC). The IPC selected for oral presentation and for publication as full papers 12 papers from GRAPP, 8 from HUCAPP, 11 papers from IVAPP, and 56 papers from VISAPP, which led to a result for the full-paper acceptance ratio of 24% and a high-quality program. Apart from the above full papers, the conference program also features 118 short papers and 67 poster presentations. We hope that these conference proceedings, which are submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index, SCOPUS, DBLP, Semantic Scholar, Google Scholar, EI and Microsoft Academic, will help the Computer Vision, Imaging, Visualization, Computer Graphics and Human-Computer Interaction communities to find interesting research work. Moreover, we are proud to inform that the program also includes three plenary keynote lectures, given by internationally distinguished researchers, namely Federico Tombari (Google and Technical University of Munich, Germany), Dieter Schmalstieg (Graz University of Technology, Austria) and Nathalie Henry Riche (Microsoft Research, United States), thus contributing to increase the overall quality of the conference and to provide a deeper understanding of the conference’s interest fields. Furthermore, a short list of the presented papers will be selected to be extended into a forthcoming book of VISIGRAPP Selected Papers to be published by Springer during 2021 in the CCIS series. Moreover, a short list of presented papers will be selected for publication of extended and revised versions in a special issue of the Springer Nature Computer Science journal. All papers presented at this conference will be available at the SCITEPRESS Digital Library. Three awards are delivered at the closing session, to recognize the best conference paper, the best student paper and the best poster for each of the four conferences. There is also an award for best industrial paper to be delivered at the closing session for VISAPP. We would like to express our thanks, first of all, to the authors of the technical papers, whose work and dedication made it possible to put together a program that we believe to be very exciting and of high technical quality. Next, we would like to thank the Area Chairs, all the members of the program committee and auxiliary reviewers, who helped us with their expertise and time. We would also like to thank the invited speakers for their invaluable contribution and for sharing their vision in their talks. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the professional support of the INSTICC team for all organizational processes, especially given the need to introduce online streaming, forum management, direct messaging facilitation and other web-based activities in order to make it possible for VISIGRAPP 2021 authors to present their work and share ideas with colleagues in spite of the logistic difficulties caused by the current pandemic situation. We wish you all an exciting conference. We hope to meet you again for the next edition of VISIGRAPP, details of which are available at http://www. visigrapp.org

Abstract: Super-resolution (SR) has achieved great success due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, as the depth and width of the networks increase, CNN-based SR methods have been faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. More- over, most SR methods train a dedicated model for each target resolution, losing generality and increasing memory requirements. To address these limitations we introduce OverNet, a deep but lightweight convolutional network to solve SISR at arbitrary scale factors with a single model. We make the following contributions: first, we introduce a lightweight feature extractor that enforces efficient reuse of information through a novel recursive structure of skip and dense connections. Second, to maximize the performance of the feature extractor, we propose a model agnostic reconstruction module that generates accurate high-resolution images from overscaled feature maps obtained from any SR architecture. Third, we introduce a multi-scale loss function to achieve generalization across scales. Experiments show that our proposal outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches in standard benchmarks, while maintaining relatively low computation and memory requirements.

Abstract: For humans, the recognition of objects is an almost instantaneous, precise and
extremely adaptable process. Furthermore, we have the innate capability to learn
new object classes from only few examples. The human brain lowers the complexity
of the incoming data by filtering out part of the information and only processing
those things that capture our attention. This, mixed with our biological predisposition to respond to certain shapes or colors, allows us to recognize in a simple
glance the most important or salient regions from an image. This mechanism can
be observed by analyzing on which parts of images subjects place attention; where
they fix their eyes when an image is shown to them. The most accurate way to
record this behavior is to track eye movements while displaying images.
Computational saliency estimation aims to identify to what extent regions or
objects stand out with respect to their surroundings to human observers. Saliency
maps can be used in a wide range of applications including object detection, image
and video compression, and visual tracking. The majority of research in the field has
focused on automatically estimating saliency maps given an input image. Instead, in
this thesis, we set out to incorporate saliency maps in an object recognition pipeline:
we want to investigate whether saliency maps can improve object recognition
results.
In this thesis, we identify several problems related to visual saliency estimation.
First, to what extent the estimation of saliency can be exploited to improve the
training of an object recognition model when scarce training data is available. To
solve this problem, we design an image classification network that incorporates
saliency information as input. This network processes the saliency map through a
dedicated network branch and uses the resulting characteristics to modulate the
standard bottom-up visual characteristics of the original image input. We will refer to this technique as saliency-modulated image classification (SMIC). In extensive
experiments on standard benchmark datasets for fine-grained object recognition,
we show that our proposed architecture can significantly improve performance,
especially on dataset with scarce training data.
Next, we address the main drawback of the above pipeline: SMIC requires an
explicit saliency algorithm that must be trained on a saliency dataset. To solve this,
we implement a hallucination mechanism that allows us to incorporate the saliency
estimation branch in an end-to-end trained neural network architecture that only
needs the RGB image as an input. A side-effect of this architecture is the estimation
of saliency maps. In experiments, we show that this architecture can obtain similar
results on object recognition as SMIC but without the requirement of ground truth
saliency maps to train the system.
Finally, we evaluated the accuracy of the saliency maps that occur as a sideeffect of object recognition. For this purpose, we use a set of benchmark datasets
for saliency evaluation based on eye-tracking experiments. Surprisingly, the estimated saliency maps are very similar to the maps that are computed from human
eye-tracking experiments. Our results show that these saliency maps can obtain
competitive results on benchmark saliency maps. On one synthetic saliency dataset
this method even obtains the state-of-the-art without the need of ever having seen
an actual saliency image for training.