Abstract: Class incremental semantic segmentation (CISS) focuses on alleviating catastrophic forgetting to improve discrimination. Previous work mainly exploit regularization (e.g., knowledge distillation) to maintain previous knowledge in the current model. However, distillation alone often yields limited gain to the model since only the representations of old and new models are restricted to be consistent. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to obtain a model with strong memory of old knowledge, named Endpoints Weight Fusion (EWF). In our method, the model containing old knowledge is fused with the model retaining new knowledge in a dynamic fusion manner, strengthening the memory of old classes in ever-changing distributions. In addition, we analyze the relation between our fusion strategy and a popular moving average technique EMA, which reveals why our method is more suitable for class-incremental learning. To facilitate parameter fusion with closer distance in the parameter space, we use distillation to enhance the optimization process. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on two widely used datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.

Abstract: According to the World Health Organization, epilepsy affects more than 50 million people in the world, and specifically, 80% of them live in developing countries. Therefore, epilepsy has become among the major public issue for many governments and deserves to be engaged. Epilepsy is characterized by uncontrollable seizures in the subject due to a sudden abnormal functionality of the brain. Recurrence of epilepsy attacks change people’s lives and interferes with their daily activities. Although epilepsy has no cure, it could be mitigated with an appropriated diagnosis and medication. Usually, epilepsy diagnosis is based on the analysis of an electroencephalogram (EEG) of the patient. However, the process of searching for seizure patterns in a multichannel EEG recording is a visual demanding and time consuming task, even for experienced neurologists. Despite the recent progress in automatic recognition of epilepsy, the multichannel nature of EEG recordings still challenges current methods. In this work, a new method to detect epilepsy in multichannel EEG recordings is proposed. First, the method uses convolutions to perform channel fusion, and next, a self-attention network extracts temporal features to classify between interictal and ictal epilepsy states. The method was validated in the public CHB-MIT dataset using the k-fold cross-validation and achieved 99.74% of specificity and 99.15% of sensitivity, surpassing current approaches.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of near-duplicate image detection techniques in a real-world use case scenario, where a document management company is commissioned to manually annotate a collection of scanned photographs. Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate photographs can reduce the time spent on manual annotation by archivists. This real use case differs from laboratory settings as the deployment dataset is available in advance, allowing the use of transductive learning. We propose a transductive learning approach that leverages state-of-the-art deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Our approach involves pre-training a deep neural network on a large dataset and then fine-tuning the network on the unlabeled target collection with self-supervised learning. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline methods in the task of near-duplicate image detection in the UKBench and an in-house private dataset.

Abstract: Recent advances in single image super-resolution (SISR) explore the power of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to achieve better performance. However, most of the progress has been made by scaling CNN architectures, which usually raise computational demands and memory consumption. This makes modern architectures less applicable in practice. In addition, most CNN-based SR methods do not fully utilize the informative hierarchical features that are helpful for final image recovery. In order to address these issues, we propose a directional variance attention network (DiVANet), a computationally efficient yet accurate network for SISR. Specifically, we introduce a novel directional variance attention (DiVA) mechanism to capture long-range spatial dependencies and exploit inter-channel dependencies simultaneously for more discriminative representations. Furthermore, we propose a residual attention feature group (RAFG) for parallelizing attention and residual block computation. The output of each residual block is linearly fused at the RAFG output to provide access to the whole feature hierarchy. In parallel, DiVA extracts most relevant features from the network for improving the final output and preventing information loss along the successive operations inside the network. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of DiVANet over the state of the art in several datasets, while maintaining relatively low computation and memory footprint. The code is available at https://github.com/pbehjatii/DiVANet.

Abstract: A common goal of unpaired image-to-image translation is to preserve content consistency between source images and translated images while mimicking the style of the target domain. Due to biases between the datasets of both domains, many methods suffer from inconsistencies caused by the translation process. Most approaches introduced to mitigate these inconsistencies do not constrain the discriminator, leading to an even more ill-posed training setup. Moreover, none of these approaches is designed for larger crop sizes. In this work, we show that masking the inputs of a global discriminator for both domains with a content-based mask is sufficient to reduce content inconsistencies significantly. However, this strategy leads to artifacts that can be traced back to the masking process. To reduce these artifacts, we introduce a local discriminator that operates on pairs of small crops selected with a similarity sampling strategy. Furthermore, we apply this sampling strategy to sample global input crops from the source and target dataset. In addition, we propose feature-attentive denormalization to selectively incorporate content-based statistics into the generator stream. In our experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in photorealistic sim-to-real translation and weather translation and also performs well in day-to-night translation. Additionally, we propose the cKVD metric, which builds on the sKVD metric and enables the examination of translation quality at the class or category level.

Abstract: Abstract
Purpose:
Carotid revascularization can be associated with modifications of the vascular geometry, which may lead to complications. The changes on the vessel angulation before and after a carotid WallStent (WS) implantation are compared against 2 new dual-layer devices, CGuard (CG) and RoadSaver (RS).
Materials and Methods:
The study prospectively recruited 217 consecutive patients (112 GC, 73 WS, and 32 RS, respectively). Angiography projections were explored and the one having a higher arterial angle was selected as a basal view. After stent implantation, a stent control angiography was performed selecting the projection having the maximal angle. The same procedure is followed in all the 3 stent types to guarantee comparable conditions. The angulation changes on the stented segments were quantified from both angiographies. The statistical analysis quantitatively compared the pre-and post-angles for the 3 stent types. The results are qualitatively illustrated using boxplots. Finally, the relation between pre- and post-angles measurements is analyzed using linear regression.
Results:
For CG, no statistical difference in the axial vessel geometry between the basal and postprocedural angles was found. For WS and RS, statistical difference was found between pre- and post-angles. The regression analysis shows that CG induces lower changes from the original curvature with respect to WS and RS.
Conclusion:
Based on our results, CG determines minor changes over the basal morphology than WS and RS stents. Hence, CG respects better the native vessel anatomy than the other stents.
Level of Evidence: Level 4, Case Series.

Abstract: Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) is performed to produce 3D information that can be used in downstream tasks such as those related to on-board perception for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) or driver assistance. Therefore, a relevant arising question is whether the standard metrics for MDE assessment are a good indicator of the accuracy of future MDE-based driving-related perception tasks. We address this question in this paper. In particular, we take the task of 3D object detection on point clouds as a proxy of on-board perception. We train and test state-of-the-art 3D object detectors using 3D point clouds coming from MDE models. We confront the ranking of object detection results with the ranking given by the depth estimation metrics of the MDE models. We conclude that, indeed, MDE evaluation metrics give rise to a ranking of methods that reflects relatively well the 3D object detection results we may expect. Among the different metrics, the absolute relative (abs-rel) error seems to be the best for that purpose.

Abstract: Face Anti-spoofing (FAS) is essential to secure face recognition systems from various physical attacks. However, recent research generally focuses on short-distance applications (i.e., phone unlocking) while lacking consideration of long-distance scenes (i.e., surveillance security checks). In order to promote relevant research and fill this gap in the community, we collect a large-scale Surveillance High-Fidelity Mask (SuHiFiMask) dataset captured under 40 surveillance scenes, which has 101 subjects from different age groups with 232 3D attacks (high-fidelity masks), 200 2D attacks (posters, portraits, and screens), and 2 adversarial attacks. In this scene, low image resolution and noise interference are new challenges faced in surveillance FAS. Together with the SuHiFiMask dataset, we propose a Contrastive Quality-Invariance Learning (CQIL) network to alleviate the performance degradation caused by image quality from three aspects: (1) An Image Quality Variable module (IQV) is introduced to recover image information associated with discrimination by combining the super-resolution network. (2) Using generated sample pairs to simulate quality variance distributions to help contrastive learning strategies obtain robust feature representation under quality variation. (3) A Separate Quality Network (SQN) is designed to learn discriminative features independent of image quality. Finally, a large number of experiments verify the quality of the SuHiFiMask dataset and the superiority of the proposed CQIL.