A Survey on African Computer Vision Datasets, Topics and Researchers

Computer vision encompasses a range of tasks such as object detection, semantic segmentation, and 3D reconstruction. Despite its relevance to African communities, research in this field within Africa represents only 0.06% of top-tier publications over the past decade. This study undertakes a thorough analysis of 63,000 Scopus-indexed computer vision publications from Africa, spanning from 2012 to 2022. The aim is to provide a survey of African computer vision topics, datasets and researchers. A key aspect of our study is the identification and categorization of African Computer Vision datasets using large language models that automatically parse abstracts of these publications. We also provide a compilation of unofficial African Computer Vision datasets distributed through challenges or data hosting platforms, and provide a full taxonomy of dataset categories. Our survey also pinpoints computer vision topics trends specific to different African regions, indicating their unique focus areas. Additionally, we carried out an extensive survey to capture the views of African researchers on the current state of computer vision research in the continent and the structural barriers they believe need urgent attention. In conclusion, this study catalogs and categorizes Computer Vision datasets and topics contributed or initiated by African institutions and identifies barriers to publishing in top-tier Computer Vision venues. This survey underscores the importance of encouraging African researchers and institutions in advancing computer vision research in the continent. It also stresses on the need for research topics to be more aligned with the needs of African communities.

Mirror-Aware Neural Humans

Human motion capture either requires multi-camera systems or is unreliable using single-view input due to depth ambiguities. Meanwhile, mirrors are readily available in urban environments and form an affordable alternative by recording two views with only a single camera. However, the mirror setting poses the additional challenge of handling occlusions of real and mirror image. Going beyond existing mirror approaches for 3D human pose estimation, we utilize mirrors for learning a complete body model, including shape and dense appearance. Our main contributions are extending articulated neural radiance fields to include a notion of a mirror, making it sample-efficient over potential occlusion regions. Together, our contributions realize a consumer-level 3D motion capture system that starts from off-the-shelf 2D poses by automatically calibrating the camera, estimating mirror orientation, and subsequently lifting 2D keypoint detections to 3D skeleton pose that is used to condition the mirror-aware NeRF. We empirically demonstrate the benefit of learning a body model and accounting for occlusion in challenging mirror scenes.

Towards End-to-End Training of Automatic Speech Recognition for Nigerian Pidgin

Nigerian Pidgin remains one of the most popular languages in West Africa. With at least 75 million speakers along the West African coast, the language has spread to diasporic communities through Nigerian immigrants in England, Canada, and America, amongst others. In contrast, the language remains an under-resourced one in the field of natural language processing, particularly on speech recognition and translation tasks. In this work, we present the first parallel (speech-to-text) data on Nigerian pidgin. We also trained the first end-to-end speech recognition system (QuartzNet and Jasper model) on this language which were both optimized using Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. With baseline results, we were able to achieve a low word error rate (WER) of 0.77% using a greedy decoder on our dataset. Finally, we open-source the data and code along with this publication in order to encourage future research in this direction.