Deep Neural Network as an alternative to Boosted Decision Trees for PID

In this paper we recreate, and improve, the binary classification method for particles proposed in Roe et al. (2005) paper "Boosted decision trees as an alternative to artificial neural networks for particle identification". Such particles are tau neutrinos, which we will refer to as background, and electronic neutrinos: the signal we are interested in. In the original paper the preferred algorithm is a Boosted decision tree. This is due to its low effort tuning and good overall performance at the time. Our choice for implementation is a deep neural network, faster and more promising in performance. We will show how, using modern techniques, we are able to improve on the original result, both in accuracy and in training time.

Illumination Estimation Challenge: experience of past two years

Illumination estimation is the essential step of computational color constancy, one of the core parts of various image processing pipelines of modern digital cameras. Having an accurate and reliable illumination estimation is important for reducing the illumination influence on the image colors. To motivate the generation of new ideas and the development of new algorithms in this field, the 2nd Illumination estimation challenge~(IEC\#2) was conducted. The main advantage of testing a method on a challenge over testing in on some of the known datasets is the fact that the ground-truth illuminations for the challenge test images are unknown up until the results have been submitted, which prevents any potential hyperparameter tuning that may be biased. The challenge had several tracks: general, indoor, and two-illuminant with each of them focusing on different parameters of the scenes. Other main features of it are a new large dataset of images (about 5000) taken with the same camera sensor model, a manual markup accompanying each image, diverse content with scenes taken in numerous countries under a huge variety of illuminations extracted by using the SpyderCube calibration object, and a contest-like markup for the images from the Cube+ dataset that was used in IEC\#1. This paper focuses on the description of the past two challenges, algorithms which won in each track, and the conclusions that were drawn based on the results obtained during the 1st and 2nd challenge that can be useful for similar future developments.