Abstract: Lateral connections in the primary visual cortex (V1) have long been hypothesized to be responsible for several visual processing mechanisms such as brightness induction, chromatic induction, visual discomfort, and bottom-up visual attention (also named saliency). Many computational models have been developed to independently predict these and other visual processes, but no computational model has been able to reproduce all of them simultaneously. In this work, we show that a biologically plausible computational model of lateral interactions of V1 is able to simultaneously predict saliency and all the aforementioned visual processes. Our model's architecture (NSWAM) is based on Penacchio's neurodynamic model of lateral connections of V1. It is defined as a network of firing rate neurons, sensitive to visual features such as brightness, color, orientation, and scale. We tested NSWAM saliency predictions using images from several eye tracking data sets. We show that the accuracy of predictions obtained by our architecture, using shuffled metrics, is similar to other state-of-the-art computational methods, particularly with synthetic images (CAT2000-Pattern and SID4VAM) that mainly contain low-level features. Moreover, we outperform other biologically inspired saliency models that are specifically designed to exclusively reproduce saliency. We show that our biologically plausible model of lateral connections can simultaneously explain different visual processes present in V1 (without applying any type of training or optimization and keeping the same parameterization for all the visual processes). This can be useful for the definition of a unified architecture of the primary visual cortex.

Abstract: Sign Language is the dominant form of communication language used in the deaf and hearing-impaired community. To make an easy and mutual communication between the hearing-impaired and the hearing communities, building a robust system capable of translating the spoken language into sign language and vice versa is fundamental.
To this end, sign language recognition and production are two necessary parts for making such a two-way system. Signlanguage recognition and production need to cope with some critical challenges. In this survey, we review recent advances in
Sign Language Production (SLP) and related areas using deep learning. To have more realistic perspectives to sign language, we present an introduction to the Deaf culture, Deaf centers, psychological perspective of sign language, the main differences between spoken language and sign language. Furthermore, we present the fundamental components of a bi-directional sign language translation system, discussing the main challenges in this area. Also, the backbone architectures and methods in SLP are briefly introduced and the proposed taxonomy on SLP is presented. Finally, a general framework for SLP and performance evaluation, and also a discussion on the recent developments, advantages, and limitations in SLP, commenting on possible lines for future research are presented.

Abstract: Most popular metric learning losses have no direct relation with the evaluation metrics that are subsequently applied to evaluate their performance. We hypothesize that training a metric learning model by maximizing the area under the ROC curve (which is a typical performance measure of recognition systems) can induce an implicit ranking suitable for retrieval problems. This hypothesis is supported by previous work that proved that a curve dominates in ROC space if and only if it dominates in Precision-Recall space. To test this hypothesis, we design and maximize an approximated, derivable relaxation of the area under the ROC curve. The proposed AUC loss achieves state-of-the-art results on two large scale retrieval benchmark datasets (Stanford Online Products and DeepFashion In-Shop). Moreover, the AUC loss achieves comparable performance to more complex, domain specific, state-of-the-art methods for vehicle re-identification.

Abstract: Active learning aims to reduce the labeling effort that is required to train algorithms by learning an acquisition function selecting the most relevant data for which a label should be requested from a large unlabeled data pool. Active learning is generally studied on balanced datasets where an equal amount of images per class is available. However, real-world datasets suffer from severe imbalanced classes, the so called long-tail distribution. We argue that this further complicates the active learning process, since the imbalanced data pool can result in suboptimal classifiers. To address this problem in the context of active learning, we proposed a general optimization framework that explicitly takes class-balancing into account. Results on three datasets showed that the method is general (it can be combined with most existing active learning algorithms) and can be effectively applied to boost the performance of both informative and representative-based active learning methods. In addition, we showed that also on balanced datasets
our method 1 generally results in a performance gain.

Abstract: Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.

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.

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.

Abstract: Outlier detection is essential for optimal performance of machine learning methods and statistical predictive models. Their detection is especially determinant in small sample size unbalanced problems, since in such settings outliers become highly influential and significantly bias models. This particular experimental settings are usual in medical applications, like diagnosis of rare pathologies, outcome of experimental personalized treatments or pandemic emergencies. In contrast to population-based methods, neighborhood based local approaches compute an outlier score from the neighbors of each sample, are simple flexible methods that have the potential to perform well in small sample size unbalanced problems. A main concern of local approaches is the impact that the computation of each sample neighborhood has on the method performance. Most approaches use a distance in the feature space to define a single neighborhood that requires careful selection of several parameters, like the number of neighbors.
This work presents a local approach based on a local measure of the heterogeneity of sample labels in the feature space considered as a topological manifold. Topology is computed using the communities of a weighted graph codifying mutual nearest neighbors in the feature space. This way, we provide with a set of multiple neighborhoods able to describe the structure of complex spaces without parameter fine tuning. The extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic data sets show that our approach outperforms, both, local and global strategies in multi and single view settings.