Abstract: CoRR abs/1905.04093
Nowadays, there is an upsurge of interest in using lifelogging devices. Such devices generate huge amounts of image data; consequently, the need for automatic methods for analyzing and summarizing these data is drastically increasing. We present a new method for familiar scene recognition in egocentric videos, based on background pattern detection through automatically configurable COSFIRE filters. We present some experiments over egocentric data acquired with the Narrative Clip.

Abstract: CoRR abs/1906.00634
Sounds are an important source of information on our daily interactions with objects. For instance, a significant amount of people can discern the temperature of water that it is being poured just by using the sense of hearing. However, only a few works have explored the use of audio for the classification of object interactions in conjunction with vision or as single modality. In this preliminary work, we propose an audio model for egocentric action recognition and explore its usefulness on the parts of the problem (noun, verb, and action classification). Our model achieves a competitive result in terms of verb classification (34.26% accuracy) on a standard benchmark with respect to vision-based state of the art systems, using a comparatively lighter architecture.

Abstract: Offline signature verification is one of the most challenging tasks in biometrics and document forensics. Unlike other verification problems, it needs to model minute but critical details between genuine and forged signatures, because a skilled falsification might often resembles the real signature with small deformation. This verification task is even harder in writer independent scenarios which is undeniably fiscal for realistic cases. In this paper, we model an offline writer independent signature verification task with a convolutional Siamese network. Siamese networks are twin networks with shared weights, which can be trained to learn a feature space where similar observations are placed in proximity. This is achieved by exposing the network to a pair of similar and dissimilar observations and minimizing the Euclidean distance between similar pairs while simultaneously maximizing it between dissimilar pairs. Experiments conducted on cross-domain datasets emphasize the capability of our network to model forgery in different languages (scripts) and handwriting styles. Moreover, our designed Siamese network, named SigNet, exceeds the state-of-the-art results on most of the benchmark signature datasets, which paves the way for further research in this direction.

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 10 persons. Experimental results demonstrate better user satisfaction with respect to state of the art solutions in terms of organization.

Abstract: Event boundaries play a crucial role as a pre-processing step for detection, localization, and recognition tasks of human activities in videos. Typically, although their intrinsic subjectiveness, temporal bounds are provided manually as input for training action recognition algorithms. However, their role for activity recognition in the domain of egocentric photostreams has been so far neglected. In this paper, we provide insights of how automatically computed boundaries can impact activity recognition results in the emerging domain of egocentric photostreams. Furthermore, we collected a new annotated dataset acquired by 15 people by a wearable photo-camera and we used it to show the generalization capabilities of several deep learning based architectures to unseen users.

Abstract: A family of recent successful approaches to few-shot learning relies on learning an embedding space in which predictions are made by computing similarities between examples. This corresponds to combining information between support and query examples at a very late stage of the prediction pipeline. Inspired by this observation, we hypothesize that there may be benefits to combining the information at various levels of abstraction along the pipeline. We present an architecture called Cross-Modulation Networks which allows support and query examples to interact throughout the feature extraction process via a feature-wise modulation mechanism. We adapt the Matching Networks architecture to take advantage of these interactions and show encouraging initial results on miniImageNet in the 5-way, 1-shot setting, where we close the gap with state-of-the-art.

Abstract: Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneous histologic sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edematous/invaded tissue, necrotic core, active and non-enhancing core. This intrinsic heterogeneity is also portrayed in their radio-phenotype, as their sub-regions are depicted by varying intensity profiles disseminated across multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans, reflecting varying biological properties. Their heterogeneous shape, extent, and location are some of the factors that make these tumors difficult to resect, and in some cases inoperable. The amount of resected tumor is a factor also considered in longitudinal scans, when evaluating the apparent tumor for potential diagnosis of progression. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that accurate segmentation of the various tumor sub-regions can offer the basis for quantitative image analysis towards prediction of patient overall survival. This study assesses the state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods used for brain tumor image analysis in mpMRI scans, during the last seven instances of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge, i.e. 2012-2018. Specifically, we focus on i) evaluating segmentations of the various glioma sub-regions in preoperative mpMRI scans, ii) assessing potential tumor progression by virtue of longitudinal growth of tumor sub-regions, beyond use of the RECIST criteria, and iii) predicting the overall survival from pre-operative mpMRI scans of patients that undergone gross total resection. Finally, we investigate the challenge of identifying the best ML algorithms for each of these tasks, considering that apart from being diverse on each instance of the challenge, the multi-institutional mpMRI BraTS dataset has also been a continuously evolving/growing dataset.