Xialei Liu, Joost Van de Weijer, & Andrew Bagdanov. (2019). Exploiting Unlabeled Data in CNNs by Self-Supervised Learning to Rank. TPAMI - IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 41(8), 1862–1878.
Abstract: For many applications the collection of labeled data is expensive laborious. Exploitation of unlabeled data during training is thus a long pursued objective of machine learning. Self-supervised learning addresses this by positing an auxiliary task (different, but related to the supervised task) for which data is abundantly available. In this paper, we show how ranking can be used as a proxy task for some regression problems. As another contribution, we propose an efficient backpropagation technique for Siamese networks which prevents the redundant computation introduced by the multi-branch network architecture. We apply our framework to two regression problems: Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and Crowd Counting. For both we show how to automatically generate ranked image sets from unlabeled data. Our results show that networks trained to regress to the ground truth targets for labeled data and to simultaneously learn to rank unlabeled data obtain significantly better, state-of-the-art results for both IQA and crowd counting. In addition, we show that measuring network uncertainty on the self-supervised proxy task is a good measure of informativeness of unlabeled data. This can be used to drive an algorithm for active learning and we show that this reduces labeling effort by up to 50 percent.
Keywords: Task analysis;Training;Image quality;Visualization;Uncertainty;Labeling;Neural networks;Learning from rankings;image quality assessment;crowd counting;active learning
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David Berga, Xose R. Fernandez-Vidal, Xavier Otazu, V. Leboran, & Xose M. Pardo. (2019). Psychophysical evaluation of individual low-level feature influences on visual attention. VR - Vision Research, 154, 60–79.
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.
Keywords: Visual attention; Psychophysics; Saliency; Task; Context; Contrast; Center bias; Low-level; Synthetic; Dataset
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Arnau Baro, Pau Riba, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, & Alicia Fornes. (2019). From Optical Music Recognition to Handwritten Music Recognition: a Baseline. PRL - Pattern Recognition Letters, 123, 1–8.
Abstract: Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is the branch of document image analysis that aims to convert images of musical scores into a computer-readable format. Despite decades of research, the recognition of handwritten music scores, concretely the Western notation, is still an open problem, and the few existing works only focus on a specific stage of OMR. In this work, we propose a full Handwritten Music Recognition (HMR) system based on Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks, data augmentation and transfer learning, that can serve as a baseline for the research community.
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Md. Mostafa Kamal Sarker, Hatem A. Rashwan, Farhan Akram, Estefania Talavera, Syeda Furruka Banu, Petia Radeva, et al. (2019). Recognizing Food Places in Egocentric Photo-Streams Using Multi-Scale Atrous Convolutional Networks and Self-Attention Mechanism. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 7, 39069–39082.
Abstract: Wearable sensors (e.g., lifelogging cameras) represent very useful tools to monitor people's daily habits and lifestyle. Wearable cameras are able to continuously capture different moments of the day of their wearers, their environment, and interactions with objects, people, and places reflecting their personal lifestyle. The food places where people eat, drink, and buy food, such as restaurants, bars, and supermarkets, can directly affect their daily dietary intake and behavior. Consequently, developing an automated monitoring system based on analyzing a person's food habits from daily recorded egocentric photo-streams of the food places can provide valuable means for people to improve their eating habits. This can be done by generating a detailed report of the time spent in specific food places by classifying the captured food place images to different groups. In this paper, we propose a self-attention mechanism with multi-scale atrous convolutional networks to generate discriminative features from image streams to recognize a predetermined set of food place categories. We apply our model on an egocentric food place dataset called “EgoFoodPlaces” that comprises of 43 392 images captured by 16 individuals using a lifelogging camera. The proposed model achieved an overall classification accuracy of 80% on the “EgoFoodPlaces” dataset, respectively, outperforming the baseline methods, such as VGG16, ResNet50, and InceptionV3.
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Stefan Lonn, Petia Radeva, & Mariella Dimiccoli. (2019). Smartphone picture organization: A hierarchical approach. CVIU - Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 187, 102789.
Abstract: We live in a society where the large majority of the population has a camera-equipped smartphone. In addition, hard drives and cloud storage are getting cheaper and cheaper, leading to a tremendous growth in stored personal photos. Unlike photo collections captured by a digital camera, which typically are pre-processed by the user who organizes them into event-related folders, smartphone pictures are automatically stored in the cloud. As a consequence, photo collections captured by a smartphone are highly unstructured and because smartphones are ubiquitous, they present a larger variability compared to pictures captured by a digital camera. To solve the need of organizing large smartphone photo collections automatically, we propose here a new methodology for hierarchical photo organization into topics and topic-related categories. Our approach successfully estimates latent topics in the pictures by applying probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, and automatically assigns a name to each topic by relying on a lexical database. Topic-related categories are then estimated by using a set of topic-specific Convolutional Neuronal Networks. To validate our approach, we ensemble and make public a large dataset of more than 8,000 smartphone pictures from 40 persons. Experimental results demonstrate major user satisfaction with respect to state of the art solutions in terms of organization.
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Eduardo Aguilar, Marc Bolaños, & Petia Radeva. (2019). Regularized uncertainty-based multi-task learning model for food analysis. JVCIR - Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 60, 360–370.
Abstract: Food plays an important role in several aspects of our daily life. Several computer vision approaches have been proposed for tackling food analysis problems, but very little effort has been done in developing methodologies that could take profit of the existent correlation between tasks. In this paper, we propose a new multi-task model that is able to simultaneously predict different food-related tasks, e.g. dish, cuisine and food categories. Here, we extend the homoscedastic uncertainty modeling to allow single-label and multi-label classification and propose a regularization term, which jointly weighs the tasks as well as their correlations. Furthermore, we propose a new Multi-Attribute Food dataset and a new metric, Multi-Task Accuracy. We prove that using both our uncertainty-based loss and the class regularization term, we are able to improve the coherence of outputs between different tasks. Moreover, we outperform the use of task-specific models on classical measures like accuracy or .
Keywords: Multi-task models; Uncertainty modeling; Convolutional neural networks; Food image analysis; Food recognition; Food group recognition; Ingredients recognition; Cuisine recognition
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Aitor Alvarez-Gila, Adrian Galdran, Estibaliz Garrote, & Joost Van de Weijer. (2019). Self-supervised blur detection from synthetically blurred scenes. IMAVIS - Image and Vision Computing, 92, 103804.
Abstract: Blur detection aims at segmenting the blurred areas of a given image. Recent deep learning-based methods approach this problem by learning an end-to-end mapping between the blurred input and a binary mask representing the localization of its blurred areas. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of such deep models is limited due to the scarcity of datasets annotated in terms of blur segmentation, as blur annotation is labor intensive. In this work, we bypass the need for such annotated datasets for end-to-end learning, and instead rely on object proposals and a model for blur generation in order to produce a dataset of synthetically blurred images. This allows us to perform self-supervised learning over the generated image and ground truth blur mask pairs using CNNs, defining a framework that can be employed in purely self-supervised, weakly supervised or semi-supervised configurations. Interestingly, experimental results of such setups over the largest blur segmentation datasets available show that this approach achieves state of the art results in blur segmentation, even without ever observing any real blurred image.
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Jiaolong Xu, Liang Xiao, & Antonio Lopez. (2019). Self-supervised Domain Adaptation for Computer Vision Tasks. ACCESS - IEEE Access, 7, 156694–156706.
Abstract: Recent progress of self-supervised visual representation learning has achieved remarkable success on many challenging computer vision benchmarks. However, whether these techniques can be used for domain adaptation has not been explored. In this work, we propose a generic method for self-supervised domain adaptation, using object recognition and semantic segmentation of urban scenes as use cases. Focusing on simple pretext/auxiliary tasks (e.g. image rotation prediction), we assess different learning strategies to improve domain adaptation effectiveness by self-supervision. Additionally, we propose two complementary strategies to further boost the domain adaptation accuracy on semantic segmentation within our method, consisting of prediction layer alignment and batch normalization calibration. The experimental results show adaptation levels comparable to most studied domain adaptation methods, thus, bringing self-supervision as a new alternative for reaching domain adaptation. The code is available at this link. https://github.com/Jiaolong/self-supervised-da.
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Daniel Hernandez, Lukas Schneider, P. Cebrian, A. Espinosa, David Vazquez, Antonio Lopez, et al. (2019). Slanted Stixels: A way to represent steep streets. IJCV - International Journal of Computer Vision, 127, 1643–1658.
Abstract: This work presents and evaluates a novel compact scene representation based on Stixels that infers geometric and semantic information. Our approach overcomes the previous rather restrictive geometric assumptions for Stixels by introducing a novel depth model to account for non-flat roads and slanted objects. Both semantic and depth cues are used jointly to infer the scene representation in a sound global energy minimization formulation. Furthermore, a novel approximation scheme is introduced in order to significantly reduce the computational complexity of the Stixel algorithm, and then achieve real-time computation capabilities. The idea is to first perform an over-segmentation of the image, discarding the unlikely Stixel cuts, and apply the algorithm only on the remaining Stixel cuts. This work presents a novel over-segmentation strategy based on a fully convolutional network, which outperforms an approach based on using local extrema of the disparity map. We evaluate the proposed methods in terms of semantic and geometric accuracy as well as run-time on four publicly available benchmark datasets. Our approach maintains accuracy on flat road scene datasets while improving substantially on a novel non-flat road dataset.
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Zhijie Fang, & Antonio Lopez. (2019). Intention Recognition of Pedestrians and Cyclists by 2D Pose Estimation. TITS - IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 21(11), 4773–4783.
Abstract: Anticipating the intentions of vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians and cyclists is critical for performing safe and comfortable driving maneuvers. This is the case for human driving and, thus, should be taken into account by systems providing any level of driving assistance, from advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) to fully autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this paper, we show how the latest advances on monocular vision-based human pose estimation, i.e. those relying on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), enable to recognize the intentions of such VRUs. In the case of cyclists, we assume that they follow traffic rules to indicate future maneuvers with arm signals. In the case of pedestrians, no indications can be assumed. Instead, we hypothesize that the walking pattern of a pedestrian allows to determine if he/she has the intention of crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, so that the ego-vehicle must maneuver accordingly (e.g. slowing down or stopping). In this paper, we show how the same methodology can be used for recognizing pedestrians and cyclists' intentions. For pedestrians, we perform experiments on the JAAD dataset. For cyclists, we did not found an analogous dataset, thus, we created our own one by acquiring and annotating videos which we share with the research community. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-of-the-art results on the intention recognition of VRUs.
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Debora Gil, Antonio Esteban Lansaque, Agnes Borras, & Carles Sanchez. (2019). Enhancing virtual bronchoscopy with intra-operative data using a multi-objective GAN. IJCAR - International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, 7(1).
Abstract: This manuscript has been withdrawn by bioRxiv due to upload of an incorrect version of the manuscript by the authors. Therefore, this manuscript should not be cited as reference for this project.
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David Berga, C. Wloka, & JK. Tsotsos. (2019). Modeling task influences for saccade sequence and visual relevance prediction. JV - Journal of Vision, 19(10), 106c.
Abstract: Previous work from Wloka et al. (2017) presented the Selective Tuning Attentive Reference model Fixation Controller (STAR-FC), an active vision model for saccade prediction. Although the model is able to efficiently predict saccades during free-viewing, it is well known that stimulus and task instructions can strongly affect eye movement patterns (Yarbus, 1967). These factors are considered in previous Selective Tuning architectures (Tsotsos and Kruijne, 2014)(Tsotsos, Kotseruba and Wloka, 2016)(Rosenfeld, Biparva & Tsotsos 2017), proposing a way to combine bottom-up and top-down contributions to fixation and saccade programming. In particular, task priming has been shown to be crucial to the deployment of eye movements, involving interactions between brain areas related to goal-directed behavior, working and long-term memory in combination with stimulus-driven eye movement neuronal correlates. Initial theories and models of these influences include (Rao, Zelinsky, Hayhoe and Ballard, 2002)(Navalpakkam and Itti, 2005)(Huang and Pashler, 2007) and show distinct ways to process the task requirements in combination with bottom-up attention. In this study we extend the STAR-FC with novel computational definitions of Long-Term Memory, Visual Task Executive and a Task Relevance Map. With these modules we are able to use textual instructions in order to guide the model to attend to specific categories of objects and/or places in the scene. We have designed our memory model by processing a hierarchy of visual features learned from salient object detection datasets. The relationship between the executive task instructions and the memory representations has been specified using a tree of semantic similarities between the learned features and the object category labels. Results reveal that by using this model, the resulting relevance maps and predicted saccades have a higher probability to fall inside the salient regions depending on the distinct task instructions.
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David Berga, Xavier Otazu, Xose R. Fernandez-Vidal, Victor Leboran, & Xose M. Pardo. (2019). Generating Synthetic Images for Visual Attention Modeling. PER - Perception, 48, 99.
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Mohammad N. S. Jahromi, Pau Buch Cardona, Egils Avots, Kamal Nasrollahi, Sergio Escalera, Thomas B. Moeslund, et al. (2019). Privacy-Constrained Biometric System for Non-cooperative Users. ENTROPY - Entropy, 21(11), 1033.
Abstract: With the consolidation of the new data protection regulation paradigm for each individual within the European Union (EU), major biometric technologies are now confronted with many concerns related to user privacy in biometric deployments. When individual biometrics are disclosed, the sensitive information about his/her personal data such as financial or health are at high risk of being misused or compromised. This issue can be escalated considerably over scenarios of non-cooperative users, such as elderly people residing in care homes, with their inability to interact conveniently and securely with the biometric system. The primary goal of this study is to design a novel database to investigate the problem of automatic people recognition under privacy constraints. To do so, the collected data-set contains the subject’s hand and foot traits and excludes the face biometrics of individuals in order to protect their privacy. We carried out extensive simulations using different baseline methods, including deep learning. Simulation results show that, with the spatial features extracted from the subject sequence in both individual hand or foot videos, state-of-the-art deep models provide promising recognition performance.
Keywords: biometric recognition; multimodal-based human identification; privacy; deep learning
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Juan Jose Rubio, Takahiro Kashiwa, Teera Laiteerapong, Wenlong Deng, Kohei Nagai, Sergio Escalera, et al. (2019). Multi-class structural damage segmentation using fully convolutional networks. COMPUTIND - Computers in Industry, 112, 103121.
Abstract: Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has benefited from computer vision and more recently, Deep Learning approaches, to accurately estimate the state of deterioration of infrastructure. In our work, we test Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) with a dataset of deck areas of bridges for damage segmentation. We create a dataset for delamination and rebar exposure that has been collected from inspection records of bridges in Niigata Prefecture, Japan. The dataset consists of 734 images with three labels per image, which makes it the largest dataset of images of bridge deck damage. This data allows us to estimate the performance of our method based on regions of agreement, which emulates the uncertainty of in-field inspections. We demonstrate the practicality of FCNs to perform automated semantic segmentation of surface damages. Our model achieves a mean accuracy of 89.7% for delamination and 78.4% for rebar exposure, and a weighted F1 score of 81.9%.
Keywords: Bridge damage detection; Deep learning; Semantic segmentation
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