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Armin Mehri. (2023). Deep learning based architectures for cross-domain image processing (Angel Sappa, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Human vision is restricted to the visual-optical spectrum. Machine vision is not.
Cameras sensitive to diverse infrared spectral bands can improve the capacities of autonomous systems and provide a comprehensive view. Relevant scene content can be made visible, particularly in situations when sensors of other modalities, such as a visual-optical camera, require a source of illumination. As a result, increasing the level of automation not only avoids human errors but also reduces machine-induced errors. Furthermore, multi-spectral sensor systems with infrared imagery as one modality are a rich source of information and can conceivably increase the robustness of many autonomous systems. Robotics, automobiles, biometrics, security, surveillance, and the military are some examples of fields that can profit from the use of infrared imagery in their respective applications. Although multimodal spectral sensors have come a long way, there are still several bottlenecks that prevent us from combining their output information and using them as comprehensive images. The primary issue with infrared imaging is the lack of potential benefits due to their cost influence on sensor resolution, which grows exponentially with greater resolution. Due to the more costly sensor technology required for their development, their resolutions are substantially lower than thoseof regular digital cameras. This thesis aims to improve beyond-visible-spectrum machine vision by integrating multi-modal spectral sensors. The emphasis is on transforming the produced images to enhance their resolution to match expected human perception, bring the color representation close to human understanding of natural color, and improve machine vision application performance. This research focuses mainly on two tasks, image Colorization and Image Super resolution for both single- and cross-domain problems. We first start with an extensive review of the state of the art in both tasks, point out the shortcomings of existing approaches, and then present our solutions to address their limitations. Our solutions demonstrate that low-cost channel information (i.e., visible image) can be used to improve expensive channel information (i.e., infrared image), resulting in images with higher quality and closer to human perception at a lower cost than a high-cost infrared camera. |
Chenshen Wu. (2023). Going beyond Classification Problems for the Continual Learning of Deep Neural Networks (Joost Van de Weijer, & Bogdan Raducanu, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Deep learning has made tremendous progress in the last decade due to the explosion of training data and computational power. Through end-to-end training on a
large dataset, image representations are more discriminative than the previously used hand-crafted features. However, for many real-world applications, training and testing on a single dataset is not realistic, as the test distribution may change over time. Continuous learning takes this situation into account, where the learner must adapt to a sequence of tasks, each with a different distribution. If you would naively continue training the model with a new task, the performance of the model would drop dramatically for the previously learned data. This phenomenon is known as catastrophic forgetting. Many approaches have been proposed to address this problem, which can be divided into three main categories: regularization-based approaches, rehearsal-based approaches, and parameter isolation-based approaches. However, most of the existing works focus on image classification tasks and many other computer vision tasks have not been well-explored in the continual learning setting. Therefore, in this thesis, we study continual learning for image generation, object re-identification, and object counting. For the image generation problem, since the model can generate images from the previously learned task, it is free to apply rehearsal without any limitation. We developed two methods based on generative replay. The first one uses the generated image for joint training together with the new data. The second one is based on output pixel-wise alignment. We extensively evaluate these methods on several benchmarks. Next, we study continual learning for object Re-Identification (ReID). Although most state-of-the-art methods of ReID and continual ReID use softmax-triplet loss, we found that it is better to solve the ReID problem from a meta-learning perspective because continual learning of reID can benefit a lot from the generalization of metalearning. We also propose a distillation loss and found that the removal of the positive pairs before the distillation loss is critical. Finally, we study continual learning for the counting problem. We study the mainstream method based on density maps and propose a new approach for density map distillation. We found that fixing the counter head is crucial for the continual learning of object counting. To further improve results, we propose an adaptor to adapt the changing feature extractor for the fixed counter head. Extensive evaluation shows that this results in improved continual learning performance. |
Jose Elias Yauri. (2023). Deep Learning Based Data Fusion Approaches for the Assessment of Cognitive States on EEG Signals (Aura Hernandez, & Debora Gil, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: For millennia, the study of the couple brain-mind has fascinated the humanity in order to understand the complex nature of cognitive states. A cognitive state is the state of the mind at a specific time and involves cognition activities to acquire and process information for making a decision, solving a problem, or achieving a goal.
While normal cognitive states assist in the successful accomplishment of tasks; on the contrary, abnormal states of the mind can lead to task failures due to a reduced cognition capability. In this thesis, we focus on the assessment of cognitive states by means of the analysis of ElectroEncephaloGrams (EEG) signals using deep learning methods. EEG records the electrical activity of the brain using a set of electrodes placed on the scalp that output a set of spatiotemporal signals that are expected to be correlated to a specific mental process. From the point of view of artificial intelligence, any method for the assessment of cognitive states using EEG signals as input should face several challenges. On the one hand, one should determine which is the most suitable approach for the optimal combination of the multiple signals recorded by EEG electrodes. On the other hand, one should have a protocol for the collection of good quality unambiguous annotated data, and an experimental design for the assessment of the generalization and transfer of models. In order to tackle them, first, we propose several convolutional neural architectures to perform data fusion of the signals recorded by EEG electrodes, at raw signal and feature levels. Four channel fusion methods, easy to incorporate into any neural network architecture, are proposed and assessed. Second, we present a method to create an unambiguous dataset for the prediction of cognitive mental workload using serious games and an Airbus-320 flight simulator. Third, we present a validation protocol that takes into account the levels of generalization of models based on the source and amount of test data. Finally, the approaches for the assessment of cognitive states are applied to two use cases of high social impact: the assessment of mental workload for personalized support systems in the cockpit and the detection of epileptic seizures. The results obtained from the first use case show the feasibility of task transfer of models trained to detect workload in serious games to real flight scenarios. The results from the second use case show the generalization capability of our EEG channel fusion methods at k-fold cross-validation, patient-specific, and population levels. |
Shiqi Yang. (2023). Towards Source-Free Domain Adaption of Neural Networks in an Open World (Joost, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Though they achieve great success, deep neural networks typically require a huge
amount of labeled data for training. However, collecting labeled data is often laborious and expensive. It would, therefore, be ideal if the knowledge obtained from label-rich datasets could be transferred to unlabeled data. However, deep networks are weak at generalizing to unseen domains, even when the differences are only subtle between the datasets. In real-world situations, a typical factor impairing the model generalization ability is the distribution shift between data from different domains, which is a long-standing problem usually termed as (unsupervised) domain adaptation. A crucial requirement in the methodology of these domain adaptation methods is that they require access to source domain data during the adaptation process to the target domain. Accessibility to the source data of a trained source model is often impossible in real-world applications, for example, when deploying domain adaptation algorithms on mobile devices where the computational capacity is limited or in situations where data privacy rules limit access to the source domain data. Without access to the source domain data, existing methods suffer from inferior performance. Thus, in this thesis, we investigate domain adaptation without source data (termed as source-free domain adaptation) in multiple different scenarios that focus on image classification tasks. We first study the source-free domain adaptation problem in a closed-set setting, where the label space of different domains is identical. Only accessing the pretrained source model, we propose to address source-free domain adaptation from the perspective of unsupervised clustering. We achieve this based on nearest neighborhood clustering. In this way, we can transfer the challenging source-free domain adaptation task to a type of clustering problem. The final optimization objective is an upper bound containing only two simple terms, which can be explained as discriminability and diversity. We show that this allows us to relate several other methods in domain adaptation, unsupervised clustering and contrastive learning via the perspective of discriminability and diversity. |
Yi Xiao. (2023). Advancing Vision-based End-to-End Autonomous Driving (Antonio Lopez, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: In autonomous driving, artificial intelligence (AI) processes the traffic environment to drive the vehicle to a desired destination. Currently, there are different paradigms that address the development of AI-enabled drivers. On the one hand, we find modular pipelines, which divide the driving task into sub-tasks such as perception, maneuver planning, and control. On the other hand, we find end-to-end driving approaches that attempt to learn the direct mapping of raw data from input sensors to vehicle control signals. The latter are relatively less studied but are gaining popularity as they are less demanding in terms of data labeling. Therefore, in this thesis, our goal is to investigate end-to-end autonomous driving.
We propose to evaluate three approaches to tackle the challenge of end-to-end autonomous driving. First, we focus on the input, considering adding depth information as complementary to RGB data, in order to mimic the human being’s ability to estimate the distance to obstacles. Notice that, in the real world, these depth maps can be obtained either from a LiDAR sensor, or a trained monocular depth estimation module, where human labeling is not needed. Then, based on the intuition that the latent space of end-to-end driving models encodes relevant information for driving, we use it as prior knowledge for training an affordancebased driving model. In this case, the trained affordance-based model can achieve good performance while requiring less human-labeled data, and it can provide interpretability regarding driving actions. Finally, we present a new pure vision-based end-to-end driving model termed CIL++, which is trained by imitation learning. CIL++ leverages modern best practices, such as a large horizontal field of view and a self-attention mechanism, which are contributing to the agent’s understanding of the driving scene and bringing a better imitation of human drivers. Using training data without any human labeling, our model yields almost expert performance in the CARLA NoCrash benchmark and could rival SOTA models that require large amounts of human-labeled data. |
Diego Velazquez. (2023). Towards Robustness in Computer-based Image Understanding (Jordi Gonzalez, Josep M. Gonfaus, & Pau Rodriguez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: This thesis embarks on an exploratory journey into robustness in deep learning,
with a keen focus on the intertwining facets of generalization, explainability, and edge cases within the realm of computer vision. In deep learning, robustness epitomizes a model’s resilience and flexibility, grounded on its capacity to generalize across diverse data distributions, explain its predictions transparently, and navigate the intricacies of edge cases effectively. The challenges associated with robust generalization are multifaceted, encompassing the model’s performance on unseen data and its defense against out-of-distribution data and adversarial attacks. Bridging this gap, the potential of Embedding Propagation (EP) for improving out-of-distribution generalization is explored. EP is depicted as a powerful tool facilitating manifold smoothing, which in turn fortifies the model’s robustness against adversarial onslaughts and bolsters performance in few-shot and self-/semi-supervised learning scenarios. In the labyrinth of deep learning models, the path to robustness often intersects with explainability. As model complexity increases, so does the urgency to decipher their decision-making processes. Acknowledging this, the thesis introduces a robust framework for evaluating and comparing various counterfactual explanation methods, echoing the imperative of explanation quality over quantity and spotlighting the intricacies of diversifying explanations. Simultaneously, the deep learning landscape is fraught with edge cases – anomalies in the form of small objects or rare instances in object detection tasks that defy the norm. Confronting this, the thesis presents an extension of the DETR (DEtection TRansformer) model to enhance small object detection. The devised DETR-FP, embedding the Feature Pyramid technique, demonstrating improvement in small objects detection accuracy, albeit facing challenges like high computational costs. With emergence of foundation models in mind, the thesis unveils EarthView, the largest scale remote sensing dataset to date, built for the self-supervised learning of a robust foundational model for remote sensing. Collectively, these studies contribute to the grand narrative of robustness in deep learning, weaving together the strands of generalization, explainability, and edge case performance. Through these methodological advancements and novel datasets, the thesis calls for continued exploration, innovation, and refinement to fortify the bastion of robust computer vision. |
Bonifaz Stuhr. (2023). Towards Unsupervised Representation Learning: Learning, Evaluating and Transferring Visual Representations (Jordi Gonzalez, & Jurgen Brauer, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIA, .
Abstract: Unsupervised representation learning aims at finding methods that learn representations from data without annotation-based signals. Abstaining from annotations not only leads to economic benefits but may – and to some extent already does – result in advantages regarding the representation’s structure, robustness, and generalizability to different tasks. In the long run, unsupervised methods are expected to surpass their supervised counterparts due to the reduction of human intervention and the inherently more general setup that does not bias the optimization towards an objective originating from specific annotation-based signals. While major advantages of unsupervised representation learning have been recently observed in natural language processing, supervised methods still dominate in vision domains for most tasks. In this dissertation, we contribute to the field of unsupervised (visual) representation learning from three perspectives: (i) Learning representations: We design unsupervised, backpropagation-free Convolutional Self-Organizing Neural Networks (CSNNs) that utilize self-organization- and Hebbian-based learning rules to learn convolutional kernels and masks to achieve deeper backpropagation-free models. Thereby, we observe that backpropagation-based and -free methods can suffer from an objective function mismatch between the unsupervised pretext task and the target task. This mismatch can lead to performance decreases for the target task. (ii) Evaluating representations: We build upon the widely used (non-)linear evaluation protocol to define pretext- and target-objective-independent metrics for measuring the objective function mismatch. With these metrics, we evaluate various pretext and target tasks and disclose dependencies of the objective function mismatch concerning different parts of the training and model setup. (iii) Transferring representations: We contribute CARLANE, the first 3-way sim-to-real domain adaptation benchmark for 2D lane detection. We adopt several well-known unsupervised domain adaptation methods as baselines and propose a method based on prototypical cross-domain self-supervised learning. Finally, we focus on pixel-based unsupervised domain adaptation and contribute a content-consistent unpaired image-to-image translation method that utilizes masks, global and local discriminators, and similarity sampling to mitigate content inconsistencies, as well as feature-attentive denormalization to fuse content-based statistics into the generator stream. In addition, we propose the cKVD metric to incorporate class-specific content inconsistencies into perceptual metrics for measuring translation quality.
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Ruben Perez Tito. (2023). Exploring the role of Text in Visual Question Answering on Natural Scenes and Documents (Ernest Valveny, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task where given an image and a natural language question, the objective is to generate a natural language answer. At the intersection between computer vision and natural language processing, this task can be seen as a measure of image understanding capabilities, as it requires to reason about objects, actions, colors, positions, the relations between the different elements as well as commonsense reasoning, world knowledge, arithmetic skills and natural language understanding. However, even though the text present in the images conveys important semantically rich information that is explicit and not available in any other form, most VQA methods remained illiterate, largely
ignoring the text despite its potential significance. In this thesis, we set out on a journey to bring reading capabilities to computer vision models applied to the VQA task, creating new datasets and methods that can read, reason and integrate the text with other visual cues in natural scene images and documents. In Chapter 3, we address the combination of scene text with visual information to fully understand all the nuances of natural scene images. To achieve this objective, we define a new sub-task of VQA that requires reading the text in the image, and highlight the limitations of the current methods. In addition, we propose a new architecture that integrates both modalities and jointly reasons about textual and visual features. In Chapter 5, we shift the domain of VQA with reading capabilities and apply it on scanned industry document images, providing a high-level end-purpose perspective to Document Understanding, which has been primarily focused on digitizing the document’s contents and extracting key values without considering the ultimate purpose of the extracted information. For this, we create a dataset which requires methods to reason about the unique and challenging elements of documents, such as text, images, tables, graphs and complex layouts, to provide accurate answers in natural language. However, we observed that explicit visual features provide a slight contribution in the overall performance, since the main information is usually conveyed within the text and its position. In consequence, in Chapter 6, we propose VQA on infographic images, seeking for document images with more visually rich elements that require to fully exploit visual information in order to answer the questions. We show the performance gap of different methods when used over industry scanned and infographic images, and propose a new method that integrates the visual features in early stages, which allows the transformer architecture to exploit the visual features during the self-attention operation. Instead, in Chapter 7, we apply VQA on a big collection of single-page documents, where the methods must find which documents are relevant to answer the question, and provide the answer itself. Finally, in Chapter 8, mimicking real-world application problems where systems must process documents with multiple pages, we address the multipage document visual question answering task. We demonstrate the limitations of existing methods, including models specifically designed to process long sequences. To overcome these limitations, we propose a hierarchical architecture that can process long documents, answer questions, and provide the index of the page where the information to answer the question is located as an explainability measure. |
Vacit Oguz Yazici. (2022). Towards Smart Fashion: Visual Recognition of Products and Attributes (Joost Van de Weijer, & Arnau Ramisa, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is innovating the fashion industry by proposing new applications and solutions to the problems encountered by researchers and engineers working in the industry. In this thesis, we address three of these problems. In the first part of the thesis, we tackle the problem of multi-label image classification which is very related to fashion attribute recognition. In the second part of the thesis, we address two problems that are specific to fashion. Firstly, we address the problem of main product detection which is the task of associating correct image parts (e.g. bounding boxes) with the fashion product being sold. Secondly, we address the problem of color naming for multicolored fashion items. The task of multi-label image classification consists in assigning various concepts such as objects or attributes to images. Usually, there are dependencies that can be learned between the concepts to capture label correlations (chair and table classes are more likely to co-exist than chair and giraffe).
If we treat the multi-label image classification problem as an orderless set prediction problem, we can exploit recurrent neural networks (RNN) to capture label correlations. However, RNNs are trained to predict ordered sequences of tokens, so if the order of the predicted sequence is different than the order of the ground truth sequence, there will be penalization although the predictions are correct. Therefore, in the first part of the thesis, we propose an orderless loss function which will order the labels in the ground truth sequence dynamically in a way that the minimum loss is achieved. This results in a significant improvement of RNN models on multi-label image classification over the previous methods. However, RNNs suffer from long term dependencies when the cardinality of set grows bigger. The decoding process might stop early if the current hidden state cannot find any object and outputs the termination token. This would cause the remaining classes not to be predicted and lower recall metric. Transformers can be used to avoid the long term dependency problem exploiting their selfattention modules that process sequential data simultaneously. Consequently, we propose a novel transformer model for multi-label image classification which surpasses the state-of-the-art results by a large margin. In the second part of thesis, we focus on two fashion-specific problems. Main product detection is the task of associating image parts with the fashion product that is being sold, generally using associated textual metadata (product title or description). Normally, in fashion e-commerces, products are represented by multiple images where a person wears the product along with other fashion items. If all the fashion items in the images are marked with bounding boxes, we can use the textual metadata to decide which item is the main product. The initial work treated each of these images independently, discarding the fact that they all belong to the same product. In this thesis, we represent the bounding boxes from all the images as nodes in a fully connected graph. This allows the algorithm to learn relations between the nodes during training and take the entire context into account for the final decision. Our algorithm results in a significant improvement of the state-ofthe-art. Moreover, we address the problem of color naming for multicolored fashion items, which is a challenging task due to the external factors such as illumination changes or objects that act as clutter. In the context of multi-label classification, the vaguely defined lines between the classes in the color space cause ambiguity. For example, a shade of blue which is very close to green might cause the model to incorrectly predict the color blue and green at the same time. Based on this, models trained for color naming are expected to recognize the colors and their quantities in both single colored and multicolored fashion items. Therefore, in this thesis, we propose a novel architecture with an additional head that explicitly estimates the number of colors in fashion items. This removes the ambiguity problem and results in better color naming performance. |
Akhil Gurram. (2022). Monocular Depth Estimation for Autonomous Driving (Antonio Lopez, & Onay Urfalioglu, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: 3D geometric information is essential for on-board perception in autonomous driving and driver assistance. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are equipped with calibrated sensor suites. As part of these suites, we can find LiDARs, which are expensive active sensors in charge of providing the 3D geometric information. Depending on the operational conditions for the AV, calibrated stereo rigs may be also sufficient for obtaining 3D geometric information, being these rigs less expensive and easier to install than LiDARs. However, ensuring a proper maintenance and calibration of these types of sensors is not trivial. Accordingly, there is an increasing interest on performing monocular depth estimation (MDE) to obtain 3D geometric information on-board. MDE is very appealing since it allows for appearance and depth being on direct pixelwise correspondence without further calibration. Moreover, a set of single cameras with MDE capabilities would still be a cheap solution for on-board perception, relatively easy to integrate and maintain in an AV.
Best MDE models are based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained in a supervised manner, i.e., assuming pixelwise ground truth (GT). Accordingly, the overall goal of this PhD is to study methods for improving CNN-based MDE accuracy under different training settings. More specifically, this PhD addresses different research questions that are described below. When we started to work in this PhD, state-of-theart methods for MDE were already based on CNNs. In fact, a promising line of work consisted in using image-based semantic supervision (i.e., pixel-level class labels) while training CNNs for MDE using LiDAR-based supervision (i.e., depth). It was common practice to assume that the same raw training data are complemented by both types of supervision, i.e., with depth and semantic labels. However, in practice, it was more common to find heterogeneous datasets with either only depth supervision or only semantic supervision. Therefore, our first work was to research if we could train CNNs for MDE by leveraging depth and semantic information from heterogeneous datasets. We show that this is indeed possible, and we surpassed the state-of-the-art results on MDE at the time we did this research. To achieve our results, we proposed a particular CNN architecture and a new training protocol. After this research, it was clear that the upper-bound setting to train CNN-based MDE models consists in using LiDAR data as supervision. However, it would be cheaper and more scalable if we would be able to train such models from monocular sequences. Obviously, this is far more challenging, but worth to research. Training MDE models using monocular sequences is possible by relying on structure-from-motion (SfM) principles to generate self-supervision. Nevertheless, problems of camouflaged objects, visibility changes, static-camera intervals, textureless areas, and scale ambiguity, diminish the usefulness of such self-supervision. To alleviate these problems, we perform MDE by virtual-world supervision and real-world SfM self-supervision. We call our proposalMonoDEVSNet. We compensate the SfM self-supervision limitations by leveraging virtual-world images with accurate semantic and depth supervision, as well as addressing the virtual-to-real domain gap. MonoDEVSNet outperformed previous MDE CNNs trained on monocular and even stereo sequences. We have publicly released MonoDEVSNet at <https://github.com/HMRC-AEL/MonoDEVSNet>. Finally, since MDE is performed to produce 3D information for being used in downstream tasks related to on-board perception. We also address the question of whether the standard metrics for MDE assessment are a good indicator for future MDE-based driving-related perception tasks. By using 3D object detection on point clouds as proxy of on-board perception, we conclude that, indeed, MDE evaluation metrics give rise to a ranking of methods which reflects relatively well the 3D object detection results we may expect. |
Parichehr Behjati Ardakani. (2022). Towards Efficient and Robust Convolutional Neural Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution (Jordi Gonzalez, Xavier Roca, & Pau Rodriguez, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: Single image super-resolution (SISR) is an important task in image processing which aims to enhance the resolution of imaging systems. Recently, SISR has witnessed great strides with the rapid development of deep learning. Recent advances in SISR are mostly devoted to designing deeper and wider networks to enhance their representation learning capacity. However, as the depth of networks increases, deep learning-based methods are faced with the challenge of computational complexity in practice. Moreover, most existing methods rarely leverage the intermediate features and also do not discriminate the computation of features by their frequencial components, thereby achieving relatively low performance. Aside from the aforementioned problems, another desired ability is to upsample images to arbitrary scales using a single model. Most current SISR methods train a dedicated model for each target resolution, losing generality and increasing memory requirements. In this thesis, we address the aforementioned issues and propose solutions to them: i) We present a novel frequency-based enhancement block which treats different frequencies in a heterogeneous way and also models inter-channel dependencies, which consequently enrich the output feature. Thus it helps the network generate more discriminative representations by explicitly recovering finer details. ii) We introduce OverNet which contains two main parts: a lightweight feature extractor that follows a novel recursive framework of skip and dense connections to reduce low-level feature degradation, and an overscaling module that generates an accurate SR image by internally constructing an overscaled intermediate representation of the output features. Then, to solve the problem of reconstruction at arbitrary scale factors, we introduce a novel multi-scale loss, that allows the simultaneous training of all scale factors using a single model. iii) We propose a directional variance attention network which leverages a novel attention mechanism to enhance features in different channels and spatial regions. Moreover, we introduce a novel procedure for using attention mechanisms together with residual blocks to facilitate the preservation of finer details. Finally, we demonstrate that our approaches achieve considerably better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both quantitative and visual quality.
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Kai Wang. (2022). Continual learning for hierarchical classification, few-shot recognition, and multi-modal learning (Luis Herranz, & Joost Van de Weijer, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: Deep learning has drastically changed computer vision in the past decades and achieved great success in many applications, such as image classification, retrieval, detection, and segmentation thanks to the emergence of neural networks. Typically, for most applications, these networks are presented with examples from all tasks they are expected to perform. However, for many applications, this is not a realistic
scenario, and an algorithm is required to learn tasks sequentially. Continual learning proposes theory and methods for this scenario. The main challenge for continual learning systems is called catastrophic forgetting and refers to a significant drop in performance on previous tasks. To tackle this problem, three main branches of methods have been explored to alleviate the forgetting in continual learning. They are regularization-based methods, rehearsalbased methods, and parameter isolation-based methods. However, most of them are focused on image classification tasks. Continual learning of many computer vision fields has still not been well-explored. Thus, in this thesis, we extend the continual learning knowledge to meta learning, we propose a method for the incremental learning of hierarchical relations for image classification, we explore image recognition in online continual learning, and study continual learning for cross-modal learning. In this thesis, we explore the usage of image rehearsal when addressing the incremental meta learning problem. Observing that existingmethods fail to improve performance with saved exemplars, we propose to mix exemplars with current task data and episode-level distillation to overcome forgetting in incremental meta learning. Next, we study a more realistic image classification scenario where each class has multiple granularity levels. Only one label is present at any time, which requires the model to infer if the provided label has a hierarchical relation with any already known label. In experiments, we show that the estimated hierarchy information can be beneficial in both the training and inference stage. For the online continual learning setting, we investigate the usage of intermediate feature replay. In this case, the training samples are only observed by the model only one time. Here we fix thememory buffer for feature replay and compare the effectiveness of saving features from different layers. Finally, we investigate multi-modal continual learning, where an image encoder is cooperating with a semantic branch. We consider the continual learning of both zero-shot learning and cross-modal retrieval problems. |
Aitor Alvarez-Gila. (2022). Self-supervised learning for image-to-image translation in the small data regime (Joost Van de Weijer, & Estibaliz Garrote, Eds.). Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: The mass irruption of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in computer vision since 2012 led to a dominance of the image understanding paradigm consisting in an end-to-end fully supervised learning workflow over large-scale annotated datasets. This approach proved to be extremely useful at solving a myriad of classic and new computer vision tasks with unprecedented performance —often, surpassing that of humans—, at the expense of vast amounts of human-labeled data, extensive computational resources and the disposal of all of our prior knowledge on the task at hand. Even though simple transfer learning methods, such as fine-tuning, have achieved remarkable impact, their success when the amount of labeled data in the target domain is small is limited. Furthermore, the non-static nature of data generation sources will often derive in data distribution shifts that degrade the performance of deployed models. As a consequence, there is a growing demand for methods that can exploit elements of prior knowledge and sources of information other than the manually generated ground truth annotations of the images during the network training process, so that they can adapt to new domains that constitute, if not a small data regime, at least a small labeled data regime. This thesis targets such few or no labeled data scenario in three distinct image-to-image mapping learning problems. It contributes with various approaches that leverage our previous knowledge of different elements of the image formation process: We first present a data-efficient framework for both defocus and motion blur detection, based on a model able to produce realistic synthetic local degradations. The framework comprises a self-supervised, a weakly-supervised and a semi-supervised instantiation, depending on the absence or availability and the nature of human annotations, and outperforms fully-supervised counterparts in a variety of settings. Our knowledge on color image formation is then used to gather input and target ground truth image pairs for the RGB to hyperspectral image reconstruction task. We make use of a CNN to tackle this problem, which, for the first time, allows us to exploit spatial context and achieve state-of-the-art results given a limited hyperspectral image set. In our last contribution to the subfield of data-efficient image-to-image transformation problems, we present the novel semi-supervised task of zero-pair cross-view semantic segmentation: we consider the case of relocation of the camera in an end-to-end trained and deployed monocular, fixed-view semantic segmentation system often found in industry. Under the assumption that we are allowed to obtain an additional set of synchronized but unlabeled image pairs of new scenes from both original and new camera poses, we present ZPCVNet, a model and training procedure that enables the production of dense semantic predictions in either source or target views at inference time. The lack of existing suitable public datasets to develop this approach led us to the creation of MVMO, a large-scale Multi-View, Multi-Object path-traced dataset with per-view semantic segmentation annotations. We expect MVMO to propel future research in the exciting under-developed fields of cross-view and multi-view semantic segmentation. Last, in a piece of applied research of direct application in the context of process monitoring of an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) in a steelmaking plant, we also consider the problem of simultaneously estimating the temperature and spectral emissivity of distant hot emissive samples. To that end, we design our own capturing device, which integrates three point spectrometers covering a wide range of the Ultra-Violet, visible, and Infra-Red spectra and is capable of registering the radiance signal incoming from an 8cm diameter spot located up to 20m away. We then define a physically accurate radiative transfer model that comprises the effects of atmospheric absorbance, of the optical system transfer function, and of the sample temperature and spectral emissivity themselves. We solve this inverse problem without the need for annotated data using a probabilistic programming-based Bayesian approach, which yields full posterior distribution estimates of the involved variables that are consistent with laboratory-grade measurements.
Keywords: Computer vision; Neural networks; Self-supervised learning; Image-to-image mapping; Probabilistic programming
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Idoia Ruiz. (2022). Deep Metric Learning for re-identification, tracking and hierarchical novelty detection (Joan Serrat, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, , .
Abstract: Metric learning refers to the problem in machine learning of learning a distance or similarity measurement to compare data. In particular, deep metric learning involves learning a representation, also referred to as embedding, such that in the embedding space data samples can be compared based on the distance, directly providing a similarity measure. This step is necessary to perform several tasks in computer vision. It allows to perform the classification of images, regions or pixels, re-identification, out-of-distribution detection, object tracking in image sequences and any other task that requires computing a similarity score for their solution. This thesis addresses three specific problems that share this common requirement. The first one is person re-identification. Essentially, it is an image retrieval task that aims at finding instances of the same person according to a similarity measure. We first compare in terms of accuracy and efficiency, classical metric learning to basic deep learning based methods for this problem. In this context, we also study network distillation as a strategy to optimize the trade-off between accuracy and speed at inference time. The second problem we contribute to is novelty detection in image classification. It consists in detecting samples of novel classes, i.e. never seen during training. However, standard novelty detection does not provide any information about the novel samples besides they are unknown. Aiming at more informative outputs, we take advantage from the hierarchical taxonomies that are intrinsic to the classes. We propose a metric learning based approach that leverages the hierarchical relationships among classes during training, being able to predict the parent class for a novel sample in such hierarchical taxonomy. Our third contribution is in multi-object tracking and segmentation. This joint task comprises classification, detection, instance segmentation and tracking. Tracking can be formulated as a retrieval problem to be addressed with metric learning approaches. We tackle the existing difficulty in academic research that is the lack of annotated benchmarks for this task. To this matter, we introduce the problem of weakly supervised multi-object tracking and segmentation, facing the challenge of not having available ground truth for instance segmentation. We propose a synergistic training strategy that benefits from the knowledge of the supervised tasks that are being learnt simultaneously.
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Arnau Baro. (2022). Reading Music Systems: From Deep Optical Music Recognition to Contextual Methods (Alicia Fornes, Ed.). Ph.D. thesis, IMPRIMA, .
Abstract: The transcription of sheet music into some machine-readable format can be carried out manually. However, the complexity of music notation inevitably leads to burdensome software for music score editing, which makes the whole process
very time-consuming and prone to errors. Consequently, automatic transcription systems for musical documents represent interesting tools. Document analysis is the subject that deals with the extraction and processing of documents through image and pattern recognition. It is a branch of computer vision. Taking music scores as source, the field devoted to address this task is known as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). Typically, an OMR system takes an image of a music score and automatically extracts its content into some symbolic structure such as MEI or MusicXML. In this dissertation, we have investigated different methods for recognizing a single staff section (e.g. scores for violin, flute, etc.), much in the same way as most text recognition research focuses on recognizing words appearing in a given line image. These methods are based in two different methodologies. On the one hand, we present two methods based on Recurrent Neural Networks, in particular, the Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network. On the other hand, a method based on Sequence to Sequence models is detailed. Music context is needed to improve the OMR results, just like language models and dictionaries help in handwriting recognition. For example, syntactical rules and grammars could be easily defined to cope with the ambiguities in the rhythm. In music theory, for example, the time signature defines the amount of beats per bar unit. Thus, in the second part of this dissertation, different methodologies have been investigated to improve the OMR recognition. We have explored three different methods: (a) a graphic tree-structure representation, Dendrograms, that joins, at each level, its primitives following a set of rules, (b) the incorporation of Language Models to model the probability of a sequence of tokens, and (c) graph neural networks to analyze the music scores to avoid meaningless relationships between music primitives. Finally, to train all these methodologies, and given the method-specificity of the datasets in the literature, we have created four different music datasets. Two of them are synthetic with a modern or old handwritten appearance, whereas the other two are real handwritten scores, being one of them modern and the other old. |