Pavement Distress Detection and Segmentation using YOLOv4 and DeepLabv3 on Pavements in the Philippines

Road transport infrastructure is critical for safe, fast, economical, and reliable mobility within the whole country that is conducive to a productive society. However, roads tend to deteriorate over time due to natural causes in the environment and repeated traffic loads. Pavement Distress (PD) detection is essential in monitoring the current conditions of the public roads to enable targeted rehabilitation and preventive maintenance. Nonetheless, distress detection surveys are still done via manual inspection for developing countries such as the Philippines. This study proposed the use of deep learning for two ways of recording pavement distresses from 2D RGB images - detection and segmentation. YOLOv4 is used for pavement distress detection while DeepLabv3 is employed for pavement distress segmentation on a small dataset of pavement images in the Philippines. This study aims to provide a basis to potentially spark solutions in building a cheap, scalable, and automated end-to-end solution for PD detection in the country.

Exploiting Latent Codes: Interactive Fashion Product Generation, Similar Image Retrieval, and Cross-Category Recommendation using Variational Autoencoders

The rise of deep learning applications in the fashion industry has fueled advances in curating large-scale datasets to build applications for product design, image retrieval, and recommender systems. In this paper, the author proposes using Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to build an interactive fashion product application framework that allows the users to generate products with attributes according to their liking, retrieve similar styles for the same product category, and receive content-based recommendations from other categories. Fashion product images dataset containing eyewear, footwear, and bags are appropriate to illustrate that this pipeline is applicable in the booming industry of e-commerce enabling direct user interaction in specifying desired products paired with new methods for data matching, and recommendation systems by using VAE and exploiting its generated latent codes.