Meta-Learning with Context-Agnostic Initialisations

Meta-learning approaches have addressed few-shot problems by finding initialisations suited for fine-tuning to target tasks. Often there are additional properties within training data (which we refer to as context), not relevant to the target task, which act as a distractor to meta-learning, particularly when the target task contains examples from a novel context not seen during training. We address this oversight by incorporating a context-adversarial component into the meta-learning process. This produces an initialisation for fine-tuning to target which is both context-agnostic and task-generalised. We evaluate our approach on three commonly used meta-learning algorithms and two problems. We demonstrate our context-agnostic meta-learning improves results in each case. First, we report on Omniglot few-shot character classification, using alphabets as context. An average improvement of 4.3% is observed across methods and tasks when classifying characters from an unseen alphabet. Second, we evaluate on a dataset for personalised energy expenditure predictions from video, using participant knowledge as context. We demonstrate that context-agnostic meta-learning decreases the average mean square error by 30%.

Visual Identification of Individual Holstein-Friesian Cattle via Deep Metric Learning

Holstein-Friesian cattle exhibit individually-characteristic black and white coat patterns visually akin to those arising from Turing's reaction-diffusion systems. This work takes advantage of these natural markings in order to automate visual detection and biometric identification of individual Holstein-Friesians via convolutional neural networks and deep metric learning techniques. Existing approaches rely on markings, tags or wearables with a variety of maintenance requirements, whereas we present a totally hands-off method for the automated detection, localisation, and identification of individual animals from overhead imaging in an open herd setting, i.e. where new additions to the herd are identified without re-training. We propose the use of SoftMax-based reciprocal triplet loss to address the identification problem and evaluate the techniques in detail against fixed herd paradigms. We find that deep metric learning systems show strong performance even when many cattle unseen during system training are to be identified and re-identified - achieving 98.2% accuracy when trained on just half of the population. This work paves the way for facilitating the non-intrusive monitoring of cattle applicable to precision farming and surveillance for automated productivity, health and welfare monitoring, and to veterinary research such as behavioural analysis, disease outbreak tracing, and more. Key parts of the source code, network weights and underpinning datasets are available publicly.

Sit-to-Stand Analysis in the Wild using Silhouettes for Longitudinal Health Monitoring

We present the first fully automated Sit-to-Stand or Stand-to-Sit (StS) analysis framework for long-term monitoring of patients in free-living environments using video silhouettes. Our method adopts a coarse-to-fine time localisation approach, where a deep learning classifier identifies possible StS sequences from silhouettes, and a smart peak detection stage provides fine localisation based on 3D bounding boxes. We tested our method on data from real homes of participants and monitored patients undergoing total hip or knee replacement. Our results show 94.4% overall accuracy in the coarse localisation and an error of 0.026 m/s in the speed of ascent measurement, highlighting important trends in the recuperation of patients who underwent surgery.

Great Ape Detection in Challenging Jungle Camera Trap Footage via Attention-Based Spatial and Temporal Feature Blending

We propose the first multi-frame video object detection framework trained to detect great apes. It is applicable to challenging camera trap footage in complex jungle environments and extends a traditional feature pyramid architecture by adding self-attention driven feature blending in both the spatial as well as the temporal domain. We demonstrate that this extension can detect distinctive species appearance and motion signatures despite significant partial occlusion. We evaluate the framework using 500 camera trap videos of great apes from the Pan African Programme containing 180K frames, which we manually annotated with accurate per-frame animal bounding boxes. These clips contain significant partial occlusions, challenging lighting, dynamic backgrounds, and natural camouflage effects. We show that our approach performs highly robustly and significantly outperforms frame-based detectors. We also perform detailed ablation studies and validation on the full ILSVRC 2015 VID data corpus to demonstrate wider applicability at adequate performance levels. We conclude that the framework is ready to assist human camera trap inspection efforts. We publish code, weights, and ground truth annotations with this paper.

Aerial Animal Biometrics: Individual Friesian Cattle Recovery and Visual Identification via an Autonomous UAV with Onboard Deep Inference

This paper describes a computationally-enhanced M100 UAV platform with an onboard deep learning inference system for integrated computer vision and navigation able to autonomously find and visually identify by coat pattern individual Holstein Friesian cattle in freely moving herds. We propose an approach that utilises three deep convolutional neural network architectures running live onboard the aircraft; that is, a YoloV2-based species detector, a dual-stream CNN delivering exploratory agency and an InceptionV3-based biometric LRCN for individual animal identification. We evaluate the performance of each of the components offline, and also online via real-world field tests comprising 146.7 minutes of autonomous low altitude flight in a farm environment over a dispersed herd of 17 heifer dairy cows. We report error-free identification performance on this online experiment. The presented proof-of-concept system is the first of its kind and a successful step towards autonomous biometric identification of individual animals from the air in open pasture environments for tag-less AI support in farming and ecology.

DeepKey: Towards End-to-End Physical Key Replication From a Single Photograph

This paper describes DeepKey, an end-to-end deep neural architecture capable of taking a digital RGB image of an 'everyday' scene containing a pin tumbler key (e.g. lying on a table or carpet) and fully automatically inferring a printable 3D key model. We report on the key detection performance and describe how candidates can be transformed into physical prints. We show an example opening a real-world lock. Our system is described in detail, providing a breakdown of all components including key detection, pose normalisation, bitting segmentation and 3D model inference. We provide an in-depth evaluation and conclude by reflecting on limitations, applications, potential security risks and societal impact. We contribute the DeepKey Datasets of 5, 300+ images covering a few test keys with bounding boxes, pose and unaligned mask data.

CaloriNet: From silhouettes to calorie estimation in private environments

We propose a novel deep fusion architecture, CaloriNet, for the online estimation of energy expenditure for free living monitoring in private environments, where RGB data is discarded and replaced by silhouettes. Our fused convolutional neural network architecture is trainable end-to-end, to estimate calorie expenditure, using temporal foreground silhouettes alongside accelerometer data. The network is trained and cross-validated on a publicly available dataset, SPHERE_RGBD + Inertial_calorie. Results show state-of-the-art minimum error on the estimation of energy expenditure (calories per minute), outperforming alternative, standard and single-modal techniques.

Semantically Selective Augmentation for Deep Compact Person Re-Identification

We present a deep person re-identification approach that combines semantically selective, deep data augmentation with clustering-based network compression to generate high performance, light and fast inference networks. In particular, we propose to augment limited training data via sampling from a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN), whose discriminator is constrained by a semantic classifier to explicitly control the domain specificity of the generation process. Thereby, we encode information in the classifier network which can be utilized to steer adversarial synthesis, and which fuels our CondenseNet ID-network training. We provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the approach and its variants on a number of datasets, obtaining results that outperform the state-of-the-art on the LIMA dataset for long-term monitoring in indoor living spaces.

Automated Visual Fin Identification of Individual Great White Sharks

This paper discusses the automated visual identification of individual great white sharks from dorsal fin imagery. We propose a computer vision photo ID system and report recognition results over a database of thousands of unconstrained fin images. To the best of our knowledge this line of work establishes the first fully automated contour-based visual ID system in the field of animal biometrics. The approach put forward appreciates shark fins as textureless, flexible and partially occluded objects with an individually characteristic shape. In order to recover animal identities from an image we first introduce an open contour stroke model, which extends multi-scale region segmentation to achieve robust fin detection. Secondly, we show that combinatorial, scale-space selective fingerprinting can successfully encode fin individuality. We then measure the species-specific distribution of visual individuality along the fin contour via an embedding into a global `fin space'. Exploiting this domain, we finally propose a non-linear model for individual animal recognition and combine all approaches into a fine-grained multi-instance framework. We provide a system evaluation, compare results to prior work, and report performance and properties in detail.

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.