Abstract: Effective conservation actions require effective population monitoring. However, accurately counting animals in the wild to inform conservation decision-making is difficult. Monitoring populations through image sampling has made data collection cheaper, wide-reaching and less intrusive but created a need to process and analyse this data efficiently. Counting animals from such data is challenging, particularly when densely packed in noisy images. Attempting this manually is slow and expensive, while traditional computer vision methods are limited in their generalisability. Deep learning is the state-of-the-art method for many computer vision tasks, but it has yet to be properly explored to count animals. To this end, we employ deep learning, with a density-based regression approach, to count fish in low-resolution sonar images. We introduce a large dataset of sonar videos, deployed to record wild Lebranche mullet schools (Mugil liza), with a subset of 500 labelled images. We utilise abundant unlabelled data in a self-supervised task to improve the supervised counting task. For the first time in this context, by introducing uncertainty quantification, we improve model training and provide an accompanying measure of prediction uncertainty for more informed biological decision-making. Finally, we demonstrate the generalisability of our proposed counting framework through testing it on a recent benchmark dataset of high-resolution annotated underwater images from varying habitats (DeepFish). From experiments on both contrasting datasets, we demonstrate our network outperforms the few other deep learning models implemented for solving this task. By providing an open-source framework along with training data, our study puts forth an efficient deep learning template for crowd counting aquatic animals thereby contributing effective methods to assess natural populations from the ever-increasing visual data.

Abstract: OBJECTIVES:
The aim of the study was to address the need for quantifying the global cancer time evolution magnitude from a pair of time-consecutive positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) scans. In particular, we focus on the computation of indicators using image-processing techniques that seek to model non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL) progression or response severity.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
A total of 89 pairs of time-consecutive PET-CT scans from NHL patients were stored in a nuclear medicine station for subsequent analysis. These were classified by a consensus of nuclear medicine physicians into progressions, partial responses, mixed responses, complete responses, and relapses. The cases of each group were ordered by magnitude following visual analysis. Thereafter, a set of quantitative indicators designed to model the cancer evolution magnitude within each group were computed using semiautomatic and automatic image-processing techniques. Performance evaluation of the proposed indicators was measured by a correlation analysis with the expert-based visual analysis.
RESULTS:
The set of proposed indicators achieved Pearson's correlation results in each group with respect to the expert-based visual analysis: 80.2% in progressions, 77.1% in partial response, 68.3% in mixed response, 88.5% in complete response, and 100% in relapse. In the progression and mixed response groups, the proposed indicators outperformed the common indicators used in clinical practice [changes in metabolic tumor volume, mean, maximum, peak standardized uptake value (SUV mean, SUV max, SUV peak), and total lesion glycolysis] by more than 40%.
CONCLUSION:
Computing global indicators of NHL response using PET-CT imaging techniques offers a strong correlation with the associated expert-based visual analysis, motivating the future incorporation of such quantitative and highly observer-independent indicators in oncological decision making or treatment response evaluation scenarios.

Abstract: Dominance is referred to the level of influence that a person has in a conversation. Dominance is an important research area in social psychology, but the problem of its automatic estimation is a very recent topic in the contexts of social and wearable computing. In this paper, we focus on the dominance detection of visual cues. We estimate the correlation among observers by categorizing the dominant people in a set of face-to-face conversations. Different dominance indicators from gestural communication are defined, manually annotated, and compared to the observers' opinion. Moreover, these indicators are automatically extracted from video sequences and learnt by using binary classifiers. Results from the three analyses showed a high correlation and allows the categorization of dominant people in public discussion video sequences.