Domain-informed graph neural networks: a quantum chemistry case study

We explore different strategies to integrate prior domain knowledge into the design of a deep neural network (DNN). We focus on graph neural networks (GNN), with a use case of estimating the potential energy of chemical systems (molecules and crystals) represented as graphs. We integrate two elements of domain knowledge into the design of the GNN to constrain and regularise its learning, towards higher accuracy and generalisation. First, knowledge on the existence of different types of relations (chemical bonds) between atoms is used to modulate the interaction of nodes in the GNN. Second, knowledge of the relevance of some physical quantities is used to constrain the learnt features towards a higher physical relevance using a simple multi-task paradigm. We demonstrate the general applicability of our knowledge integrations by applying them to two architectures that rely on different mechanisms to propagate information between nodes and to update node states.

Detecting Humans in RGB-D Data with CNNs

We address the problem of people detection in RGB-D data where we leverage depth information to develop a region-of-interest (ROI) selection method that provides proposals to two color and depth CNNs. To combine the detections produced by the two CNNs, we propose a novel fusion approach based on the characteristics of depth images. We also present a new depth-encoding scheme, which not only encodes depth images into three channels but also enhances the information for classification. We conduct experiments on a publicly available RGB-D people dataset and show that our approach outperforms the baseline models that only use RGB data.

A DNN Framework for Learning Lagrangian Drift With Uncertainty

Reconstructions of Lagrangian drift, for example for objects lost at sea, are often uncertain due to unresolved physical phenomena within the data. Uncertainty is usually overcome by introducing stochasticity into the drift, but this approach requires specific assumptions for modelling uncertainty. We remove this constraint by presenting a purely data-driven framework for modelling probabilistic drift in flexible environments. We train a CNN to predict the temporal evolution of probability density maps of particle locations from $t$ to $t+1$ given an input velocity field. We generate groundtruth density maps on the basis of ocean circulation model simulations by simulating uncertainty in the initial position of particle trajectories. Several loss functions for regressing the predicted density maps are tested. Through evaluating our model on unseen velocities from a different year, we find its outputs to be in good agreement with numerical simulations, suggesting satisfactory generalisation to different dynamical situations.

Adaptive Neighbourhoods for the Discovery of Adversarial Examples

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have often supplied state-of-the-art results in pattern recognition tasks. Despite their advances, however, the existence of adversarial examples have caught the attention of the community. Many existing works have proposed methods for searching for adversarial examples within fixed-sized regions around training points. Our work complements and improves these existing approaches by adapting the size of these regions based on the problem complexity and data sampling density. This makes such approaches more appropriate for other types of data and may further improve adversarial training methods by increasing the region sizes without creating incorrect labels.

Learnable Gabor modulated complex-valued networks for orientation robustness

Robustness to transformation is desirable in many computer vision tasks, given that input data often exhibits pose variance within classes. While translation invariance and equivariance is a documented phenomenon of CNNs, sensitivity to other transformations is typically encouraged through data augmentation. We investigate the modulation of complex valued convolutional weights with learned Gabor filters to enable orientation robustness. With Gabor modulation, the designed network is able to generate orientation dependent features free of interpolation with a single set of rotation-governing parameters. Moreover, by learning rotation parameters alongside traditional convolutional weights, the representation space is not constrained and may adapt to the exact input transformation. We present Learnable Convolutional Gabor Networks (LCGNs), that are parameter-efficient and offer increased model complexity while keeping backpropagation simple. We demonstrate that learned Gabor modulation utilising an end-to-end complex architecture enables rotation invariance and equivariance on MNIST and a new dataset of simulated images of galactic cirri.

VI-Net: View-Invariant Quality of Human Movement Assessment

We propose a view-invariant method towards the assessment of the quality of human movements which does not rely on skeleton data. Our end-to-end convolutional neural network consists of two stages, where at first a view-invariant trajectory descriptor for each body joint is generated from RGB images, and then the collection of trajectories for all joints are processed by an adapted, pre-trained 2D CNN (e.g. VGG-19 or ResNeXt-50) to learn the relationship amongst the different body parts and deliver a score for the movement quality. We release the only publicly-available, multi-view, non-skeleton, non-mocap, rehabilitation movement dataset (QMAR), and provide results for both cross-subject and cross-view scenarios on this dataset. We show that VI-Net achieves average rank correlation of 0.66 on cross-subject and 0.65 on unseen views when trained on only two views. We also evaluate the proposed method on the single-view rehabilitation dataset KIMORE and obtain 0.66 rank correlation against a baseline of 0.62.

Calorie Counter: RGB-Depth Visual Estimation of Energy Expenditure at Home

We present a new framework for vision-based estimation of calorific expenditure from RGB-D data - the first that is validated on physical gas exchange measurements and applied to daily living scenarios. Deriving a person's energy expenditure from sensors is an important tool in tracking physical activity levels for health and lifestyle monitoring. Most existing methods use metabolic lookup tables (METs) for a manual estimate or systems with inertial sensors which ultimately require users to wear devices. In contrast, the proposed pose-invariant and individual-independent vision framework allows for a remote estimation of calorific expenditure. We introduce, and evaluate our approach on, a new dataset called SPHERE-calorie, for which visual estimates can be compared against simultaneously obtained, indirect calorimetry measures based on gas exchange. % based on per breath gas exchange. We conclude from our experiments that the proposed vision pipeline is suitable for home monitoring in a controlled environment, with calorific expenditure estimates above accuracy levels of commonly used manual estimations via METs. With the dataset released, our work establishes a baseline for future research for this little-explored area of computer vision.

Multiple Human Tracking in RGB-D Data: A Survey

Multiple human tracking (MHT) is a fundamental task in many computer vision applications. Appearance-based approaches, primarily formulated on RGB data, are constrained and affected by problems arising from occlusions and/or illumination variations. In recent years, the arrival of cheap RGB-Depth (RGB-D) devices has {led} to many new approaches to MHT, and many of these integrate color and depth cues to improve each and every stage of the process. In this survey, we present the common processing pipeline of these methods and review their methodology based (a) on how they implement this pipeline and (b) on what role depth plays within each stage of it. We identify and introduce existing, publicly available, benchmark datasets and software resources that fuse color and depth data for MHT. Finally, we present a brief comparative evaluation of the performance of those works that have applied their methods to these datasets.