Abstract: A crucial part of image classification consists of capturing non-local spatial semantics of image content. This paper describes the multi-scale hybrid vision transformer (MSHViT), an extension of the classical convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone, for multi-label sewer defect classification. To better model spatial semantics in the images, features are aggregated at different scales non-locally through the use of a lightweight vision transformer, and a smaller set of tokens was produced through a novel Sinkhorn clustering-based tokenizer using distinct cluster centers. The proposed MSHViT and Sinkhorn tokenizer were evaluated on the Sewer-ML multi-label sewer defect classification dataset, showing consistent performance improvements of up to 2.53 percentage points.

Abstract: Action recognition is a challenging task that plays an important role in many robotic systems, which highly depend on visual input feeds. However, due to privacy concerns, it is important to find a method which can recognise actions without using visual feed. In this paper, we propose a concept for detecting actions while preserving the test subject’s privacy. Our proposed method relies only on recording the temporal evolution of light pulses scattered back from the scene.
Such data trace to record one action contains a sequence of one-dimensional arrays of voltage values acquired by a single-pixel detector at 1 GHz repetition rate. Information about both the distance to the object and its shape are embedded in the traces. We apply machine learning in the form of recurrent neural networks for data analysis and demonstrate successful action recognition. The experimental results show that our proposed method could achieve on average 96.47% accuracy on the actions walking forward, walking backwards, sitting down, standing up and waving hand, using recurrent
neural network.

Abstract: The oral communication competence is defined on the top of the most relevant skills for one's professional and personal life. Because of the importance of communication in our activities of daily living, it is crucial to study methods to evaluate and provide the necessary feedback that can be used in order to improve these communication capabilities and, therefore, learn how to express ourselves better. In this work, we propose a system capable of evaluating quantitatively the quality of oral presentations in an automatic fashion. The system is based on a multi-modal RGB, depth, and audio data description and a fusion approach in order to recognize behavioral cues and train classifiers able to eventually predict communication quality levels. The performance of the proposed system is tested on a novel dataset containing Bachelor thesis' real defenses, presentations from an 8th semester Bachelor courses, and Master courses' presentations at Universitat de Barcelona. Using as groundtruth the marks assigned by actual instructors, our system achieves high performance categorizing and ranking presentations by their quality, and also making real-valued mark predictions.