Abstract: Recent works have made significant progress in novelty detection, i.e., the problem of detecting samples of novel classes, never seen during training, while classifying those that belong to known classes. However, the only information this task provides about novel samples is that they are unknown. In this work, we leverage hierarchical taxonomies of classes to provide informative outputs for samples of novel classes. We predict their closest class in the taxonomy, i.e., its parent class. We address this problem, known as hierarchical novelty detection, by proposing a novel loss, namely Hierarchical Cosine Loss that is designed to learn class prototypes along with an embedding of discriminative features consistent with the taxonomy. We apply it to traffic sign recognition, where we predict the parent class semantics for new types of traffic signs. Our model beats state-of-the art approaches on two large scale traffic sign benchmarks, Mapillary Traffic Sign Dataset (MTSD) and Tsinghua-Tencent 100K (TT100K), and performs similarly on natural images benchmarks (AWA2, CUB). For TT100K and MTSD, our approach is able to detect novel samples at the correct nodes of the hierarchy with 81% and 36% of accuracy, respectively, at 80% known class accuracy.

Abstract: Semantic image segmentation is a central and challenging task in autonomous driving, addressed by training deep models. Since this training draws to a curse of human-based image labeling, using synthetic images with automatically generated labels together with unlabeled real-world images is a promising alternative. This implies to address an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem. In this paper, we propose a new co-training procedure for synth-to-real UDA of semantic
segmentation models. It consists of a self-training stage, which provides two domain-adapted models, and a model collaboration loop for the mutual improvement of these two models. These models are then used to provide the final semantic segmentation labels (pseudo-labels) for the real-world images. The overall
procedure treats the deep models as black boxes and drives their collaboration at the level of pseudo-labeled target images, i.e., neither modifying loss functions is required, nor explicit feature alignment. We test our proposal on standard synthetic and real-world datasets for on-board semantic segmentation. Our
procedure shows improvements ranging from ∼13 to ∼26 mIoU points over baselines, so establishing new state-of-the-art results.

Abstract: Smoothing of biomedical images should preserve gray-level transitions between adjacent tissues, while restoring contours consistent with anatomical structures. Anisotropic diffusion operators are based on image appearance discontinuities (either local or contextual) and might fail at weak inter-tissue transitions. Meanwhile, the output of block-wise and morphological operations is prone to present a block structure due to the shape and size of the considered pixel neighborhood. In this contribution, we use differential geometry concepts to define a diffusion operator that restricts to image consistent level-sets. In this manner, the final state is a non-uniform intensity image presenting homogeneous inter-tissue transitions along anatomical structures, while smoothing intra-structure texture. Experiments on different types of medical images (magnetic resonance, computerized tomography) illustrate its benefit on a further process (such as segmentation) of images.

Abstract: The accuracy of object classifiers can significantly drop when the training data (source domain) and the application scenario (target domain) have inherent differences. Therefore, adapting the classifiers to the scenario in which they must operate is of paramount importance. We present novel domain adaptation (DA) methods for object detection. As proof of concept, we focus on adapting the state-of-the-art deformable part-based model (DPM) for pedestrian detection. We introduce an adaptive structural SVM (A-SSVM) that adapts a pre-learned classifier between different domains. By taking into account the inherent structure in feature space (e.g., the parts in a DPM), we propose a structure-aware A-SSVM (SA-SSVM). Neither A-SSVM nor SA-SSVM needs to revisit the source-domain training data to perform the adaptation. Rather, a low number of target-domain training examples (e.g., pedestrians) are used. To address the scenario where there are no target-domain annotated samples, we propose a self-adaptive DPM based on a self-paced learning (SPL) strategy and a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). Two types of adaptation tasks are assessed: from both synthetic pedestrians and general persons (PASCAL VOC) to pedestrians imaged from an on-board camera. Results show that our proposals avoid accuracy drops as high as 15 points when comparing adapted and non-adapted detectors.

Abstract: The Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) framework has gained popularity among the document image analysis community, specifically as a representation of handwritten words for recognition or spotting purposes. Although in the computer vision field the BoVW method has been greatly improved, most of the approaches in the document image analysis domain still rely on the basic implementation of the BoVW method disregarding such latest refinements. In this paper, we present a review of those improvements and its application to the keyword spotting task. We thoroughly evaluate their impact against a baseline system in the well-known George Washington dataset and compare the obtained results against nine state-of-the-art keyword spotting methods. In addition, we also compare both the baseline and improved systems with the methods presented at the Handwritten Keyword Spotting Competition 2014.