Food Ingredients Recognition through Multi-label Learning

The ability to recognize various food-items in a generic food plate is a key determinant for an automated diet assessment system. This study motivates the need for automated diet assessment and proposes a framework to achieve this. Within this framework, we focus on one of the core functionalities to visually recognize various ingredients. To this end, we employed a deep multi-label learning approach and evaluated several state-of-the-art neural networks for their ability to detect an arbitrary number of ingredients in a dish image. The models evaluated in this work follow a definite meta-structure, consisting of an encoder and a decoder component. Two distinct decoding schemes, one based on global average pooling and the other on attention mechanism, are evaluated and benchmarked. Whereas for encoding, several well-known architectures, including DenseNet, EfficientNet, MobileNet, Inception and Xception, were employed. We present promising preliminary results for deep learning-based ingredients detection, using a challenging dataset, Nutrition5K, and establish a strong baseline for future explorations.

Contrastive Representation Learning for Gaze Estimation

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has become prevalent for learning representations in computer vision. Notably, SSL exploits contrastive learning to encourage visual representations to be invariant under various image transformations. The task of gaze estimation, on the other hand, demands not just invariance to various appearances but also equivariance to the geometric transformations. In this work, we propose a simple contrastive representation learning framework for gaze estimation, named Gaze Contrastive Learning (GazeCLR). GazeCLR exploits multi-view data to promote equivariance and relies on selected data augmentation techniques that do not alter gaze directions for invariance learning. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GazeCLR for several settings of the gaze estimation task. Particularly, our results show that GazeCLR improves the performance of cross-domain gaze estimation and yields as high as 17.2% relative improvement. Moreover, the GazeCLR framework is competitive with state-of-the-art representation learning methods for few-shot evaluation. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/jswati31/gazeclr.

Brain Tumor Segmentation using Enhanced U-Net Model with Empirical Analysis

Cancer of the brain is deadly and requires careful surgical segmentation. The brain tumors were segmented using U-Net using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). When looking for overlaps of necrotic, edematous, growing, and healthy tissue, it might be hard to get relevant information from the images. The 2D U-Net network was improved and trained with the BraTS datasets to find these four areas. U-Net can set up many encoder and decoder routes that can be used to get information from images that can be used in different ways. To reduce computational time, we use image segmentation to exclude insignificant background details. Experiments on the BraTS datasets show that our proposed model for segmenting brain tumors from MRI (MRI) works well. In this study, we demonstrate that the BraTS datasets for 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 do not significantly differ from the BraTS 2019 dataset's attained dice scores of 0.8717 (necrotic), 0.9506 (edema), and 0.9427 (enhancing).

Semantic-Aware Latent Space Exploration for Face Image Restoration

For image restoration, most existing deep learning based methods tend to overfit the training data leading to bad results when encountering unseen degradations out of the assumptions for training. To improve the robustness, generative adversarial network (GAN) prior based methods have been proposed, revealing a promising capability to restore photo-realistic and high-quality results. But these methods suffer from semantic confusion, especially on semantically significant images such as face images. In this paper, we propose a semantic-aware latent space exploration method for image restoration (SAIR). By explicitly modeling referenced semantics information, SAIR can consistently restore severely degraded images not only to high-resolution highly-realistic looks but also to correct semantics. Quantitative and qualitative experiments collectively demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SAIR. Our code can be found in https://github.com/Liamkuo/SAIR.

Learning to Relight Portrait Images via a Virtual Light Stage and Synthetic-to-Real Adaptation

Given a portrait image of a person and an environment map of the target lighting, portrait relighting aims to re-illuminate the person in the image as if the person appeared in an environment with the target lighting. To achieve high-quality results, recent methods rely on deep learning. An effective approach is to supervise the training of deep neural networks with a high-fidelity dataset of desired input-output pairs, captured with a light stage. However, acquiring such data requires an expensive special capture rig and time-consuming efforts, limiting access to only a few resourceful laboratories. To address the limitation, we propose a new approach that can perform on par with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) relighting methods without requiring a light stage. Our approach is based on the realization that a successful relighting of a portrait image depends on two conditions. First, the method needs to mimic the behaviors of physically-based relighting. Second, the output has to be photorealistic. To meet the first condition, we propose to train the relighting network with training data generated by a virtual light stage that performs physically-based rendering on various 3D synthetic humans under different environment maps. To meet the second condition, we develop a novel synthetic-to-real approach to bring photorealism to the relighting network output. In addition to achieving SOTA results, our approach offers several advantages over the prior methods, including controllable glares on glasses and more temporally-consistent results for relighting videos.

Image-free multi-character recognition

The recently developed image-free sensing technique maintains the advantages of both the light hardware and software, which has been applied in simple target classification and motion tracking. In practical applications, however, there usually exist multiple targets in the field of view, where existing trials fail to produce multi-semantic information. In this letter, we report a novel image-free sensing technique to tackle the multi-target recognition challenge for the first time. Different from the convolutional layer stack of image-free single-pixel networks, the reported CRNN network utilities the bidirectional LSTM architecture to predict the distribution of multiple characters simultaneously. The framework enables to capture the long-range dependencies, providing a high recognition accuracy of multiple characters. We demonstrated the technique's effectiveness in license plate detection, which achieved 87.60% recognition accuracy at a 5% sampling rate with a higher than 100 FPS refresh rate.

PressureVision: Estimating Hand Pressure from a Single RGB Image

People often interact with their surroundings by applying pressure with their hands. Machine perception of hand pressure has been limited by the challenges of placing sensors between the hand and the contact surface. We explore the possibility of using a conventional RGB camera to infer hand pressure. The central insight is that the application of pressure by a hand results in informative appearance changes. Hands share biomechanical properties that result in similar observable phenomena, such as soft-tissue deformation, blood distribution, hand pose, and cast shadows. We collected videos of 36 participants with diverse skin tone applying pressure to an instrumented planar surface. We then trained a deep model (PressureVisionNet) to infer a pressure image from a single RGB image. Our model infers pressure for participants outside of the training data and outperforms baselines. We also show that the output of our model depends on the appearance of the hand and cast shadows near contact regions. Overall, our results suggest the appearance of a previously unobserved human hand can be used to accurately infer applied pressure.

A two-stage approach for table extraction in invoices

The automated analysis of administrative documents is an important field in document recognition that is studied for decades. Invoices are key documents among these huge amounts of documents available in companies and public services. Invoices contain most of the time data that are presented in tables that should be clearly identified to extract suitable information. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines an image processing based estimation of the shape of the tables with a graph-based representation of the document, which is used to identify complex tables precisely. We propose an experimental evaluation using a real case application.

Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow

We present rectified flow, a surprisingly simple approach to learning (neural) ordinary differential equation (ODE) models to transport between two empirically observed distributions \pi_0 and \pi_1, hence providing a unified solution to generative modeling and domain transfer, among various other tasks involving distribution transport. The idea of rectified flow is to learn the ODE to follow the straight paths connecting the points drawn from \pi_0 and \pi_1 as much as possible. This is achieved by solving a straightforward nonlinear least squares optimization problem, which can be easily scaled to large models without introducing extra parameters beyond standard supervised learning. The straight paths are special and preferred because they are the shortest paths between two points, and can be simulated exactly without time discretization and hence yield computationally efficient models. We show that the procedure of learning a rectified flow from data, called rectification, turns an arbitrary coupling of \pi_0 and \pi_1 to a new deterministic coupling with provably non-increasing convex transport costs. In addition, recursively applying rectification allows us to obtain a sequence of flows with increasingly straight paths, which can be simulated accurately with coarse time discretization in the inference phase. In empirical studies, we show that rectified flow performs superbly on image generation, image-to-image translation, and domain adaptation. In particular, on image generation and translation, our method yields nearly straight flows that give high quality results even with a single Euler discretization step.

Space-time design for deep joint source channel coding of images Over MIMO channels

We propose novel deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) algorithms for wireless image transmission over multi-input multi-output (MIMO) Rayleigh fading channels, when channel state information (CSI) is available only at the receiver. We consider two different transmission schemes; one exploiting spatial diversity and the other one exploiting spatial multiplexing of the MIMO channel. In the diversity scheme, we utilize an orthogonal space-time block code (OSTBC) to achieve full diversity which increases the robustness of transmission against channel variations. The multiplexing scheme, on the other hand, allows the user to directly map the codeword to the antennas, where the additional degree-of-freedom is used to send more information about the source signal. Simulation results show that the diversity scheme outperforms the multiplexing scheme at lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values and smaller number of receive antennas at the AP. When the number of transmit antennas is greater than two, however, the full-diversity scheme becomes less beneficial. We also show that both the diversity and multiplexing scheme can achieve comparable performance with the state-of-the-art BPG algorithm delivered at the MIMO capacity in the considered scenarios.