Abstract: This chapter reviews state-of-the-art approaches generally present in the pipeline of video analytics on urban scenarios. A typical pipeline is used to cluster approaches in the literature, including image preprocessing, object detection, object classification, and object tracking modules. Then, a review of recent approaches for each module is given. Additionally, applications and datasets generally used for training and evaluating the performance of these approaches are included. This chapter does not pretend to be an exhaustive review of state-of-the-art video analytics in urban environments but rather an illustration of some of the different recent contributions. The chapter concludes by presenting current trends in video analytics in the urban scenario field.

Abstract: Automatic waste recycling has become a very important societal challenge nowadays, raising people’s awareness for a cleaner environment and a more sustainable lifestyle. With the transition to Smart Cities, and thanks to advanced ICT solutions, this problem has received a new impulse. The waste recycling focus has shifted from general waste treating facilities to an individual responsibility, where each person should become aware of selective waste separation. The surge of the mobile devices, accompanied by a significant increase in computation power, has potentiated and facilitated this individual role. An automated image-based waste classification mechanism can help with a more efficient recycling and a reduction of contamination from residuals. Despite the good results achieved with the deep learning methodologies for this task, the Achille’s heel is that they require large neural networks which need significant computational resources for training and therefore are not suitable for mobile devices. To circumvent this apparently intractable problem, we will rely on knowledge distillation in order to transfer the network’s knowledge from a larger network (called ‘teacher’) to a smaller, more compact one, (referred as ‘student’) and thus making it possible the task of image classification on a device with limited resources. For evaluation, we considered as ‘teachers’ large architectures such as InceptionResNet or DenseNet and as ‘students’, several configurations of the MobileNets. We used the publicly available TrashNet dataset to demonstrate that the distillation process does not significantly affect system’s performance (e.g. classification accuracy) of the student network.

Abstract: Pretraining has proven successful in Document Intelligence tasks where deluge of documents are used to pretrain the models only later to be finetuned on downstream tasks. One of the problems of the pretraining approaches is the inconsistent usage of pretraining data with different OCR engines leading to incomparable results between models. In other words, it is not obvious whether the performance gain is coming from diverse usage of amount of data and distinct OCR engines or from the proposed models. To remedy the problem, we make public the OCR annotations for IDL documents using commercial OCR engine given their superior performance over open source OCR models. The contributed dataset (OCR-IDL) has an estimated monetary value over 20K US$. It is our hope that OCR-IDL can be a starting point for future works on Document Intelligence. All of our data and its collection process with the annotations can be found in this https URL.

Abstract: In this paper we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework to enhance the perceptual quality of compressed videos. Our framework includes attention and adaptation to different quantization parameters (QPs) in a single model. The attention module exploits global receptive fields that can capture and align long-range correlations between consecutive frames, which can be beneficial for enhancing perceptual quality of videos. The frame to be enhanced is fed into the deep network together with its neighboring frames, and in the first stage features at different depths are extracted. Then extracted features are fed into attention blocks to explore global temporal correlations, followed by a series of upsampling and convolution layers. Finally, the resulting features are processed by the QP-conditional adaptation module which leverages the corresponding QP information. In this way, a single model can be used to enhance adaptively to various QPs without requiring multiple models specific for every QP value, while having similar performance. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed PeQuENet compared with the state-of-the-art compressed video quality enhancement algorithms.

Abstract: Recent joint embedding-based self-supervised methods have surpassed standard supervised approaches on various image recognition tasks such as image classification. These self-supervised methods aim at maximizing agreement between features extracted from two differently transformed views of the same image, which results in learning an invariant representation with respect to appearance and geometric image transformations. However, the effectiveness of these approaches remains unclear in the context of gaze estimation, a structured regression task that requires equivariance under geometric transformations (e.g., rotations, horizontal flip). In this work, we propose SwAT, an equivariant version of the online clustering-based self-supervised approach SwAV, to learn more informative representations for gaze estimation. We demonstrate that SwAT, with ResNet-50 and supported with uncurated unlabeled face images, outperforms state-of-the-art gaze estimation methods and supervised baselines in various experiments. In particular, we achieve up to 57% and 25% improvements in cross-dataset and within-dataset evaluation tasks on existing benchmarks (ETH-XGaze, Gaze360, and MPIIFaceGaze).

Abstract: We propose a new method for exemplar-free class incremental training of ViTs. The main challenge of exemplar-free continual learning is maintaining plasticity of the learner without causing catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks. This is often achieved via exemplar replay which can help recalibrate previous task classifiers to the feature drift which occurs when learning new tasks. Exemplar replay, however, comes at the cost of retaining samples from previous tasks which for many applications may not be possible. To address the problem of continual ViT training, we first propose gated class-attention to minimize the drift in the final ViT transformer block. This mask-based gating is applied to class-attention mechanism of the last transformer block and strongly regulates the weights crucial for previous tasks. Importantly, gated class-attention does not require the task-ID during inference, which distinguishes it from other parameter isolation methods. Secondly, we propose a new method of feature drift compensation that accommodates feature drift in the backbone when learning new tasks. The combination of gated class-attention and cascaded feature drift compensation allows for plasticity towards new tasks while limiting forgetting of previous ones. Extensive experiments performed on CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet and ImageNet100 demonstrate that our exemplar-free method obtains competitive results when compared to rehearsal based ViT methods.