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Computational Data Analysis for First Quantization Estimation on JPEG Double Compressed Images

Sebastiano Battiato, Oliver Giudice, Francesco Guarnera, Giovanni Puglisi

Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Discrete Cosine Transform Coefficients for Multimedia Forensics

Abstract Slides Poster

Multimedia Forensics experts work consists in providing answers about integrity of a specific media content and from where it comes from. Exploitation of any traces from JPEG double compressed images is often one of the main investigative path to be used for these purposes. Thus it is fundamental to have tools and algorithms able to safely estimate the first quantization matrix to further proceed with camera model identification and related tasks. In this paper, a technique based on extensive simulation is proposed, with the aim to infer the first quantization for a certain numbers of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients exploiting local image statistics without using any a-priori knowledge. The method provides also a reliable confidence value for the estimation which is of great importance for forensic purposes. Experimental results w.r.t. the state-of-the-art demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique both in terms of precision and overall reliability.

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On the Use of Benford's Law to Detect GAN-Generated Images

Nicolo Bonettini, Paolo Bestagini, Simone Milani, Stefano Tubaro

Auto-TLDR; Using Benford's Law to Detect GAN-generated Images from Natural Images

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The advent of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architectures has given anyone the ability of generating incredibly realistic synthetic imagery. The malicious diffusion of GAN-generated images may lead to serious social and political consequences (e.g., fake news spreading, opinion formation, etc.). It is therefore important to regulate the widespread distribution of synthetic imagery by developing solutions able to detect them. In this paper, we study the possibility of using Benford’s law to discriminate GAN-generated images from natural photographs. Benford’s law describes the distribution of the most significant digit for quantized Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients. Extending and generalizing this property, we show that it is possible to extract a compact feature vector from an image. This feature vector can be fed to an extremely simple classifier for GAN-generated image detection purpose even in data scarcity scenarios where Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures tend to fail.

Video Face Manipulation Detection through Ensemble of CNNs

Nicolo Bonettini, Edoardo Daniele Cannas, Sara Mandelli, Luca Bondi, Paolo Bestagini, Stefano Tubaro

Auto-TLDR; Face Manipulation Detection in Video Sequences Using Convolutional Neural Networks

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In the last few years, several techniques for facial manipulation in videos have been successfully developed and made available to the masses (i.e., FaceSwap, deepfake, etc.). These methods enable anyone to easily edit faces in video sequences with incredibly realistic results and a very little effort. Despite the usefulness of these tools in many fields, if used maliciously, they can have a significantly bad impact on society (e.g., fake news spreading, cyber bullying through fake revenge porn). The ability of objectively detecting whether a face has been manipulated in a video sequence is then a task of utmost importance. In this paper, we tackle the problem of face manipulation detection in video sequences targeting modern facial manipulation techniques. In particular, we study the ensembling of different trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. In the proposed solution, different models are obtained starting from a base network (i.e., EfficientNetB4) making use of two different concepts: (i) attention layers; (ii) siamese training. We show that combining these networks leads to promising face manipulation detection results on two publicly available datasets with more than 119000 videos.

A NoGAN Approach for Image and Video Restoration and Compression Artifact Removal

Mameli Filippo, Marco Bertini, Leonardo Galteri, Alberto Del Bimbo

Auto-TLDR; Deep Neural Network for Image and Video Compression Artifact Removal and Restoration

Abstract Poster Similar

Lossy image and video compression algorithms introduce several different types of visual artifacts that reduce the visual quality of the compressed media, and the higher the compression rate the higher is the strength of these artifacts. In this work, we describe an approach for visual quality improvement of compressed images and videos to be performed at presentation time, so to obtain the benefits of fast data transfer and reduced data storage, while enjoying a visual quality that could be obtained only reducing the compression rate. To obtain this result we propose to use a deep neural network trained using the NoGAN approach, adapting the popular DeOldify architecture used for colorization. We show how the proposed method can be applied both to image and video compression artifact removal and restoration.

Trainable Spectrally Initializable Matrix Transformations in Convolutional Neural Networks

Michele Alberti, Angela Botros, Schuetz Narayan, Rolf Ingold, Marcus Liwicki, Mathias Seuret

Auto-TLDR; Trainable and Spectrally Initializable Matrix Transformations for Neural Networks

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In this work, we introduce a new architectural component to Neural Networks (NN), i.e., trainable and spectrally initializable matrix transformations on feature maps. While previous literature has already demonstrated the possibility of adding static spectral transformations as feature processors, our focus is on more general trainable transforms. We study the transforms in various architectural configurations on four datasets of different nature: from medical (ColorectalHist, HAM10000) and natural (Flowers) images to historical documents (CB55). With rigorous experiments that control for the number of parameters and randomness, we show that networks utilizing the introduced matrix transformations outperform vanilla neural networks. The observed accuracy increases appreciably across all datasets. In addition, we show that the benefit of spectral initialization leads to significantly faster convergence, as opposed to randomly initialized matrix transformations. The transformations are implemented as auto-differentiable PyTorch modules that can be incorporated into any neural network architecture. The entire code base is open-source.

A Systematic Investigation on End-To-End Deep Recognition of Grocery Products in the Wild

Marco Leo, Pierluigi Carcagni, Cosimo Distante

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Recognition of Products on grocery shelf images using Convolutional Neural Networks

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Automatic recognition of products on grocery shelf images is a new and attractive topic in computer vision and machine learning since, it can be exploited in different application areas. This paper introduces a complete end-to-end pipeline (without preliminary radiometric and spatial transformations usually involved while dealing with the considered issue) and it provides a systematic investigation of recent machine learning models based on convolutional neural networks for addressing the product recognition task by exploiting the proposed pipeline on a recent challenging grocery product dataset. The investigated models were never been used in this context: they derive from the successful and more generic object recognition task and have been properly tuned to address this specific issue. Besides, also ensembles of nets built by most advanced theoretical fundaments have been taken into account. Gathered classification results were very encouraging since the recognition accuracy has been improved up to 15\% with respect to the leading approaches in the state of art on the same dataset. A discussion about the pros and cons of the investigated solutions are discussed by paving the path towards new research lines.

Detecting Manipulated Facial Videos: A Time Series Solution

Zhang Zhewei, Ma Can, Gao Meilin, Ding Bowen

Auto-TLDR; Face-Alignment Based Bi-LSTM for Fake Video Detection

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We propose a new method to expose fake videos based on a time series solution. The method is based on bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) backbone architecture with two different types of features: {Face-Alignment} and {Dense-Face-Alignment}, in which both of them are physiological signals that can be distinguished between fake and original videos. We choose 68 landmark points as the feature of {Face-Alignment} and Pose Adaptive Feature (PAF) for {Dense-Face-Alignment}. Based on these two facial features, we designed two deep networks. In addition, we optimize our network by adding an attention mechanism that improves detection precision. Our method is tested over benchmarks of Face Forensics/Face Forensics++ dataset and show a promising performance on inference speed while maintaining accuracy with state-of art solutions that deal against DeepFake.

Object Detection in the DCT Domain: Is Luminance the Solution?

Benjamin Deguerre, Clement Chatelain, Gilles Gasso

Auto-TLDR; Jpeg Deep: Object Detection Using Compressed JPEG Images

Abstract Slides Poster Similar

Object detection in images has reached unprecedented performances. The state-of-the-art methods rely on deep architectures that extract salient features and predict bounding boxes enclosing the objects of interest. These methods essentially run on RGB images. However, the RGB images are often compressed by the acquisition devices for storage purpose and transfer efficiency. Hence, their decompression is required for object detectors. To gain in efficiency, this paper proposes to take advantage of the compressed representation of images to carry out object detection usable in constrained resources conditions. Specifically, we focus on JPEG images and propose a thorough analysis of detection architectures newly designed in regard of the peculiarities of the JPEG norm. This leads to a x1.7 speed up in comparison with a standard RGB-based architecture, while only reducing the detection performance by 5.5%. Additionally, our empirical findings demonstrate that only part of the compressed JPEG information, namely the luminance component, may be required to match detection accuracy of the full input methods. Code is made available at : https://github.com/D3lt4lph4/jpeg_deep.

DCT/IDCT Filter Design for Ultrasound Image Filtering

Barmak Honarvar Shakibaei Asli, Jan Flusser, Yifan Zhao, John Ahmet Erkoyuncu, Rajkumar Roy

Auto-TLDR; Finite impulse response digital filter using DCT-II and inverse DCT

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In this paper, a new recursive structure based on the convolution model of discrete cosine transform (DCT) for designing of a finite impulse response (FIR) digital filter is proposed. In our derivation, we start with the convolution model of DCT-II to use its Z-transform for the proposed filter structure perspective. Moreover, using the same algorithm, a filter base implementation of the inverse DCT (IDCT) for image reconstruction is developed. The computational time experiments of the proposed DCT/IDCT filter(s) demonstrate that the proposed filters achieve faster elapsed CPU time compared to the others. The image filtering and reconstruction performance of the proposed approach on ultrasound images are presented to validate the theoretical framework.

A Heuristic-Based Decision Tree for Connected Components Labeling of 3D Volumes

Maximilian Söchting, Stefano Allegretti, Federico Bolelli, Costantino Grana

Auto-TLDR; Entropy Partitioning Decision Tree for Connected Components Labeling

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Connected Components Labeling represents a fundamental step for many Computer Vision and Image Processing pipelines. Since the first appearance of the task in the sixties, many algorithmic solutions to optimize the computational load needed to label an image have been proposed. Among them, block-based scan approaches and decision trees revealed to be some of the most valuable strategies. However, due to the cost of the manual construction of optimal decision trees and the computational limitations of automatic strategies employed in the past, the application of blocks and decision trees has been restricted to small masks, and thus to 2D algorithms. With this paper we present a novel heuristic algorithm based on decision tree learning methodology, called Entropy Partitioning Decision Tree (EPDT). It allows to compute near-optimal decision trees for large scan masks. Experimental results demonstrate that algorithms based on the generated decision trees outperform state-of-the-art competitors.

DR2S: Deep Regression with Region Selection for Camera Quality Evaluation

Marcelin Tworski, Stéphane Lathuiliere, Salim Belkarfa, Attilio Fiandrotti, Marco Cagnazzo

Auto-TLDR; Texture Quality Estimation Using Deep Learning

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In this work, we tackle the problem of estimating a camera capability to preserve fine texture details at a given lighting condition. Importantly, our texture preservation measurement should coincide with human perception. Consequently, we formulate our problem as a regression one and we introduce a deep convolutional network to estimate texture quality score. At training time, we use ground-truth quality scores provided by expert human annotators in order to obtain a subjective quality measure. In addition, we propose a region selection method to identify the image regions that are better suited at measuring perceptual quality. Finally, our experimental evaluation shows that our learning-based approach outperforms existing methods and that our region selection algorithm consistently improves the quality estimation.

MedZip: 3D Medical Images Lossless Compressor Using Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM)

Omniah Nagoor, Joss Whittle, Jingjing Deng, Benjamin Mora, Mark W. Jones

Auto-TLDR; Recurrent Neural Network for Lossless Medical Image Compression using Long Short-Term Memory

Abstract Poster Similar

As scanners produce higher-resolution and more densely sampled images, this raises the challenge of data storage, transmission and communication within healthcare systems. Since the quality of medical images plays a crucial role in diagnosis accuracy, medical imaging compression techniques are desired to reduce scan bitrate while guaranteeing lossless reconstruction. This paper presents a lossless compression method that integrates a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) as a 3D sequence prediction model. The aim is to learn the long dependencies of the voxel's neighbourhood in 3D using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network then compress the residual error using arithmetic coding. Experiential results reveal that our method obtains a higher compression ratio achieving 15% saving compared to the state-of-the-art lossless compression standards, including JPEG-LS, JPEG2000, JP3D, HEVC, and PPMd. Our evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method generalizes well to unseen modalities CT and MRI for the lossless compression scheme. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first lossless compression method that uses LSTM neural network for 16-bit volumetric medical image compression.

HP2IFS: Head Pose Estimation Exploiting Partitioned Iterated Function Systems

Carmen Bisogni, Michele Nappi, Chiara Pero, Stefano Ricciardi

Auto-TLDR; PIFS based head pose estimation using fractal coding theory and Partitioned Iterated Function Systems

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Estimating the actual head orientation from 2D images, with regard to its three degrees of freedom, is a well known problem that is highly significant for a large number of applications involving head pose knowledge. Consequently, this topic has been tackled by a plethora of methods and algorithms the most part of which exploits neural networks. Machine learning methods, indeed, achieve accurate head rotation values yet require an adequate training stage and, to that aim, a relevant number of positive and negative examples. In this paper we take a different approach to this topic by using fractal coding theory and particularly Partitioned Iterated Function Systems to extract the fractal code from the input head image and to compare this representation to the fractal code of a reference model through Hamming distance. According to experiments conducted on both the BIWI and the AFLW2000 databases, the proposed PIFS based head pose estimation method provides accurate yaw/pitch/roll angular values, with a performance approaching that of state of the art of machine-learning based algorithms and exceeding most of non-training based approaches.

Joint Compressive Autoencoders for Full-Image-To-Image Hiding

Xiyao Liu, Ziping Ma, Xingbei Guo, Jialu Hou, Lei Wang, Gerald Schaefer, Hui Fang

Auto-TLDR; J-CAE: Joint Compressive Autoencoder for Image Hiding

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Image hiding has received significant attention due to the need of enhanced multimedia services, such as multimedia security and meta-information embedding for multimedia augmentation. Recently, deep learning-based methods have been introduced that are capable of significantly increasing the hidden capacity and supporting full size image hiding. However, these methods suffer from the necessity to balance the errors of the modified cover image and the recovered hidden image. In this paper, we propose a novel joint compressive autoencoder (J-CAE) framework to design an image hiding algorithm that achieves full-size image hidden capacity with small reconstruction errors of the hidden image. More importantly, it addresses the trade-off problem of previous deep learning-based methods by mapping the image representations in the latent spaces of the joint CAE models. Thus, both visual quality of the container image and recovery quality of the hidden image can be simultaneously improved. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms several state-of-the-art deep learning-based image hiding methods in terms of imperceptibility and recovery quality of the hidden images while maintaining full-size image hidden capacity.

Are Multiple Cross-Correlation Identities Better Than Just Two? Improving the Estimate of Time Differences-Of-Arrivals from Blind Audio Signals

Danilo Greco, Jacopo Cavazza, Alessio Del Bue

Auto-TLDR; Improving Blind Channel Identification Using Cross-Correlation Identity for Time Differences-of-Arrivals Estimation

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Given an unknown audio source, the estimation of time differences-of-arrivals (TDOAs) can be efficiently and robustly solved using blind channel identification and exploiting the cross-correlation identity (CCI). Prior "blind" works have improved the estimate of TDOAs by means of different algorithmic solutions and optimization strategies, while always sticking to the case N = 2 microphones. But what if we can obtain a direct improvement in performance by just increasing N? In this paper we try to investigate this direction, showing that, despite the arguable simplicity, this is capable of (sharply) improving upon state-of-the-art blind channel identification methods based on CCI, without modifying the computational pipeline. Inspired by our results, we seek to warm up the community and the practitioners by paving the way (with two concrete, yet preliminary, examples) towards joint approaches in which advances in the optimization are combined with an increased number of microphones, in order to achieve further improvements.

2D Discrete Mirror Transform for Image Non-Linear Approximation

Alessandro Gnutti, Fabrizio Guerrini, Riccardo Leonardi

Auto-TLDR; Discrete Mirror Transform (DMT)

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In this paper, a new 2D transform named Discrete Mirror Transform (DMT) is presented. The DMT is computed by decomposing a signal into its even and odd parts around an optimal location in a given direction so that the signal energy is maximally split between the two components. After minimizing the information required to regenerate the original signal by removing redundant structures, the process is iterated leading the signal energy to distribute into a continuously smaller set of coefficients. The DMT can be displayed as a binary tree, where each node represents the single (even or odd) signal derived from the decomposition in the previous level. An optimized version of the DMT (ODMT) is also introduced, by exploiting the possibility to choose different directions at which performing the decomposition. Experimental simulations have been carried out in order to test the sparsity properties of the DMT and ODMT when applied on images: referring to both transforms, the results show a superior performance with respect to the popular Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) in terms of non-linear approximation.

Deep Homography-Based Video Stabilization

Maria Silvia Ito, Ebroul Izquierdo

Auto-TLDR; Video Stabilization using Deep Learning and Spatial Transformer Networks

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Video stabilization is fundamental for providing good Quality of Experience for viewers and generating suitable content for video applications. In this scenario, Digital Video Stabilization (DVS) is convenient and economical for casual or amateur recording because it neither requires specific equipment nor demands knowledge of the device used for recording. Although DVS has been a research topic for decades, with a number of proposals from industry and academia, traditional methods tend to fail in a number of scenarios, e.g. with occlusion, textureless areas, parallax, dark areas, amongst others. On the other hand, defining a smooth camera path is a hard task in Deep Learning scenarios. This paper proposes a video stabilization system based on traditional and Deep Learning methods. First, we leverage Spatial Transformer Networks (STNs) to learn transformation parameters between image pairs, then utilize this knowledge to stabilize videos: we obtain the motion parameters between frame pairs and then smooth the camera path using moving averages. Our approach aims at combining the strengths of both Deep Learning and traditional methods: the ability of STNs to estimate motion parameters between two frames and the effectiveness of moving averages to smooth camera paths. Experimental results show that our system outperforms state-of-the-art proposals and a commercial solution.

One Step Clustering Based on A-Contrario Framework for Detection of Alterations in Historical Violins

Alireza Rezaei, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Emanuel Aldea, Piercarlo Dondi, Marco Malagodi

Auto-TLDR; A-Contrario Clustering for the Detection of Altered Violins using UVIFL Images

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Preventive conservation is an important practice in Cultural Heritage. The constant monitoring of the state of conservation of an artwork helps us reduce the risk of damage and number of interventions necessary. In this work, we propose a probabilistic approach for the detection of alterations on the surface of historical violins based on an a-contrario framework. Our method is a one step NFA clustering solution which considers grey-level and spatial density information in one background model. The proposed method is robust to noise and avoids parameter tuning and any assumption about the quantity of the worn out areas. We have used as input UV induced fluorescence (UVIFL) images for considering details not perceivable with visible light. Tests were conducted on image sequences included in the ``Violins UVIFL imagery'' dataset. Results illustrate the ability of the algorithm to distinguish the worn area from the surrounding regions. Comparisons with the state of the art clustering methods shows improved overall precision and recall.

Weight Estimation from an RGB-D Camera in Top-View Configuration

Marco Mameli, Marina Paolanti, Nicola Conci, Filippo Tessaro, Emanuele Frontoni, Primo Zingaretti

Auto-TLDR; Top-View Weight Estimation using Deep Neural Networks

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The development of so-called soft-biometrics aims at providing information related to the physical and behavioural characteristics of a person. This paper focuses on bodyweight estimation based on the observation from a top-view RGB-D camera. In fact, the capability to estimate the weight of a person can be of help in many different applications, from health-related scenarios to business intelligence and retail analytics. To deal with this issue, a TVWE (Top-View Weight Estimation) framework is proposed with the aim of predicting the weight. The approach relies on the adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that have been trained on depth data. Each network has also been modified in its top section to replace classification with prediction inference. The performance of five state-of-art DNNs has been compared, namely VGG16, ResNet, Inception, DenseNet and Efficient-Net. In addition, a convolutional auto-encoder has also been included for completeness. Considering the limited literature in this domain, the TVWE framework has been evaluated on a new publicly available dataset: “VRAI Weight estimation Dataset”, which also collects, for each subject, labels related to weight, gender, and height. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed methods are suitable for this task, bringing different and significant insights for the application of the solution in different domains.

Compression Strategies and Space-Conscious Representations for Deep Neural Networks

Giosuè Marinò, Gregorio Ghidoli, Marco Frasca, Dario Malchiodi

Auto-TLDR; Compression of Large Convolutional Neural Networks by Weight Pruning and Quantization

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Recent advances in deep learning have made available large, powerful convolutional neural networks (CNN) with state-of-the-art performance in several real-world applications. Unfortunately, these large-sized models have millions of parameters, thus they are not deployable on resource-limited platforms (e.g. where RAM is limited). Compression of CNNs thereby becomes a critical problem to achieve memory-efficient and possibly computationally faster model representations. In this paper, we investigate the impact of lossy compression of CNNs by weight pruning and quantization, and lossless weight matrix representations based on source coding. We tested several combinations of these techniques on four benchmark datasets for classification and regression problems, achieving compression rates up to 165 times, while preserving or improving the model performance.

Semi-Supervised Deep Learning Techniques for Spectrum Reconstruction

Adriano Simonetto, Vincent Parret, Alexander Gatto, Piergiorgio Sartor, Pietro Zanuttigh

Auto-TLDR; hyperspectral data estimation from RGB data using semi-supervised learning

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State-of-the-art approaches for the estimation of hyperspectral images (HSI) from RGB data are mostly based on deep learning techniques but due to the lack of training data their performances are limited to uncommon scenarios where a large hyperspectral database is available. In this work we present a family of novel deep learning schemes for hyperspectral data estimation able to work when the hyperspectral information at our disposal is limited. Firstly, we introduce a learning scheme exploiting a physical model based on the backward mapping to the RGB space and total variation regularization that can be trained with a limited amount of HSI images. Then, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning scheme able to work even with just a few pixels labeled with hyperspectral information. Finally, we show that the approach can be extended to a transfer learning scenario. The proposed techniques allow to reach impressive performances while requiring only some HSI images or just a few pixels for the training.

On the Impact of Lossy Image and Video Compression on the Performance of Deep Convolutional Neural Network Architectures

Matt Poyser, Toby Breckon, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei

Auto-TLDR; The Impact of Lossy Image Compression on Deep Neural Networks for Image-based Detection and Classification

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Recent advances in generalized image understanding have seen a surge in the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) across a broad range of image-based detection, classification and prediction tasks. Whilst the reported performance of these approaches is impressive, this paper investigates the hitherto unapproached question of the impact of commonplace image and video compression techniques on the performance of such deep learning architectures. Focusing on the JPEG and H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) as a representative proxy for contemporary lossy image/video compression techniques that are in common use within network-connected image/video devices and infrastructure, we examine the impact performance across five discrete tasks: human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, object detection, action recognition, and monocular depth estimation. As such, within this study we include a variety of network architectures and genres spanning end-to-end convolution, encoder-decoder, region-based CNN (R-CNN), dual-stream, and generative adversarial networks (GAN). Our results show a non-linear and non-uniform relationship between network performance and the level of lossy compression applied. Notably, performance decreases significantly below a JPEG quality (quantization) level of 15% and a H.264 Constant Rate Factor (CRF) of 40. However, re-training said architectures on pre-compressed imagery conversely recovers network performance by up to 78.4% in some cases. Furthermore, there is a correlation between architectures employing an encoder-decoder pipeline and those that demonstrate resilience to lossy image compression. The characteristics of this input compression to output performance impact can be used to inform design decisions within future image/video devices and infrastructure.

A Systematic Investigation on Deep Architectures for Automatic Skin Lesions Classification

Pierluigi Carcagni, Marco Leo, Andrea Cuna, Giuseppe Celeste, Cosimo Distante

Auto-TLDR; RegNet: Deep Investigation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Classification of Skin Lesions

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Computer vision-based techniques are more and more employed in healthcare and medical fields nowadays in order, principally, to be as a support to the experienced medical staff to help them to make a quick and correct diagnosis. One of the hot topics in this arena concerns the automatic classification of skin lesions. Several promising works exist about it, mainly leveraging Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), but proposed pipeline mainly rely on complex data preprocessing and there is no systematic investigation about how available deep models can actually reach the accuracy needed for real applications. In order to overcome these drawbacks, in this work, an end-to-end pipeline is introduced and some of the most recent Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures are included in it and compared on the largest common benchmark dataset recently introduced. To this aim, for the first time in this application context, a new network design paradigm, namely RegNet, has been exploited to get the best models among a population of configurations. The paper introduces a threefold level of contribution and novelty with respect the previous literature: the deep investigation of several CNN architectures driving to a consistent improvement of the lesions recognition accuracy, the exploitation of a new network design paradigm able to study the behavior of populations of models and a deep discussion about pro and cons of each analyzed method paving the path towards new research lines.

RobusterNet: Improving Copy-Move Forgery Detection with Volterra-Based Convolutions

Efthimia Kafali, Nicholas Vretos, Theodoros Semertzidis, Petros Daras

Auto-TLDR; Convolutional Neural Networks with Nonlinear Inception for Copy-Move Forgery Detection

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Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have recently been introduced for addressing copy-move forgery detection (CMFD). However, current CMFD CNN-based approaches have insufficient performance commitment regarding the localization of the positive class. In this paper, this issue is explored by considering both linear and nonlinear interactions between pixels. A nonlinear Inception module based on second-order Volterra kernels is proposed, in order to ameliorate the results of a state-of-the-art CMFD architecture. The outcome of this work shows that a combination of linear and nonlinear convolution kernels can make the input foreground and background pixels more separable. The proposed approach is evaluated on CASIA and CoMoFoD, two publicly available CMFD datasets, and results to an improved positive class localization performance. Moreover, the findings of the proposed method imply that the nonlinear Inception module stimulates immense robustness against miscellaneous post processing attacks.

Robust Image Coding on Synthetic DNA: Reducing Sequencing Noise with Inpainting

Eva Gil San Antonio, Mattia Piretti, Melpomeni Dimopoulou, Marc Antonini

Auto-TLDR; Noise Resilience for DNA Storage

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The aggressive growth of digital data threatens to exceed the capacity of conventional storage devices. The need for new means to store digital information has brought great interest in novel solutions as it is DNA, whose biological properties allow the storage of information at a high density and preserve it without any information loss for hundreds of years when stored under specific conditions. Despite being a promising solution, DNA storage faces two major obstacles: the large cost of synthesis and the high error rate introduced during sequencing. While most of the works focus on adding redundancy aiming for effective error correction, this work combines noise resistance to minimize the impact of the errors in the decoded data and post-processing to further improve the quality of the decoding.

Confidence Calibration for Deep Renal Biopsy Immunofluorescence Image Classification

Federico Pollastri, Juan Maroñas, Federico Bolelli, Giulia Ligabue, Roberto Paredes, Riccardo Magistroni, Costantino Grana

Auto-TLDR; A Probabilistic Convolutional Neural Network for Immunofluorescence Classification in Renal Biopsy

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With this work we tackle immunofluorescence classification in renal biopsy, employing state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks. In this setting, the aim of the probabilistic model is to assist an expert practitioner towards identifying the location pattern of antibody deposits within a glomerulus. Since modern neural networks often provide overconfident outputs, we stress the importance of having a reliable prediction, demonstrating that Temperature Scaling, a recently introduced re-calibration technique, can be successfully applied to immunofluorescence classification in renal biopsy. Experimental results demonstrate that the designed model yields good accuracy on the specific task, and that Temperature Scaling is able to provide reliable probabilities, which are highly valuable for such a task given the low inter-rater agreement.

Adaptive Image Compression Using GAN Based Semantic-Perceptual Residual Compensation

Ruojing Wang, Zitang Sun, Sei-Ichiro Kamata, Weili Chen

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Image Compression using GAN based Semantic-Perceptual Residual Compensation

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Image compression is a basic task in image processing. In this paper, We present an adaptive image compression algorithm that relies on GAN based semantic-perceptual residual compensation, which is available to offer visually pleasing reconstruction at a low bitrate. Our method adopt an U-shaped encoding and decoding structure accompanied by a well-designed dense residual connection with strip pooling module to improve the original auto-encoder. Besides, we introduce the idea of adversarial learning by introducing a discriminator thus constructed a complete GAN. To improve the coding efficiency, we creatively designed an adaptive semantic-perception residual compensation block based on Grad-CAM algorithm. In the improvement of the quantizer, we embed the method of soft-quantization so as to solve the problem to some extent that back propagation process is irreversible. Simultaneously, we use the latest FLIF lossless compression algorithm and BPG vector compression algorithm to perform deeper compression on the image. More importantly experimental results including PSNR, MS-SSIM demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art image compression methods.

Deep Convolutional Embedding for Digitized Painting Clustering

Giovanna Castellano, Gennaro Vessio

Auto-TLDR; A Deep Convolutional Embedding Model for Clustering Artworks

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Clustering artworks is difficult because of several reasons. On one hand, recognizing meaningful patterns in accordance with domain knowledge and visual perception is extremely hard. On the other hand, the application of traditional clustering and feature reduction techniques to the highly dimensional pixel space can be ineffective. To address these issues, we propose to use a deep convolutional embedding model for digitized painting clustering, in which the task of mapping the input raw data to an abstract, latent space is jointly optimized with the task of finding a set of cluster centroids in this latent feature space. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The model is also able to outperform other state-of-the-art deep clustering approaches to the same problem. The proposed method may be beneficial to several art-related tasks, particularly visual link retrieval and historical knowledge discovery in painting datasets.

Boosting High-Level Vision with Joint Compression Artifacts Reduction and Super-Resolution

Xiaoyu Xiang, Qian Lin, Jan Allebach

Auto-TLDR; A Context-Aware Joint CAR and SR Neural Network for High-Resolution Text Recognition and Face Detection

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Due to the limits of bandwidth and storage space, digital images are usually down-scaled and compressed when transmitted over networks, resulting in loss of details and jarring artifacts that can lower the performance of high-level visual tasks. In this paper, we aim to generate an artifact-free high-resolution image from a low-resolution one compressed with an arbitrary quality factor by exploring joint compression artifacts reduction (CAR) and super-resolution (SR) tasks. First, we propose a context-aware joint CAR and SR neural network (CAJNN) that integrates both local and non-local features to solve CAR and SR in one-stage. Finally, a deep reconstruction network is adopted to predict high quality and high-resolution images. Evaluation on CAR and SR benchmark datasets shows that our CAJNN model outperforms previous methods and also takes 26.2% less runtime. Based on this model, we explore addressing two critical challenges in high-level computer vision: optical character recognition of low-resolution texts, and extremely tiny face detection. We demonstrate that CAJNN can serve as an effective image preprocessing method and improve the accuracy for real-scene text recognition (from 85.30% to 85.75%) and the average precision for tiny face detection (from 0.317 to 0.611).

Electroencephalography Signal Processing Based on Textural Features for Monitoring the Driver’s State by a Brain-Computer Interface

Giulia Orrù, Marco Micheletto, Fabio Terranova, Gian Luca Marcialis

Auto-TLDR; One-dimensional Local Binary Pattern Algorithm for Estimating Driver Vigilance in a Brain-Computer Interface System

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In this study we investigate a textural processing method of electroencephalography (EEG) signal as an indicator to estimate the driver's vigilance in a hypothetical Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system. The novelty of the solution proposed relies on employing the one-dimensional Local Binary Pattern (1D-LBP) algorithm for feature extraction from pre-processed EEG data. From the resulting feature vector, the classification is done according to three vigilance classes: awake, tired and drowsy. The claim is that the class transitions can be detected by describing the variations of the micro-patterns' occurrences along the EEG signal. The 1D-LBP is able to describe them by detecting mutual variations of the signal temporarily "close" as a short bit-code. Our analysis allows to conclude that the 1D-LBP adoption has led to significant performance improvement. Moreover, capturing the class transitions from the EEG signal is effective, although the overall performance is not yet good enough to develop a BCI for assessing the driver's vigilance in real environments.

Digit Recognition Applied to Reconstructed Audio Signals Using Deep Learning

Anastasia-Sotiria Toufa, Constantine Kotropoulos

Auto-TLDR; Compressed Sensing for Digit Recognition in Audio Reconstruction

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Compressed sensing allows signal reconstruction from a few measurements. This work proposes a complete pipeline for digit recognition applied to audio reconstructed signals. The reconstruction procedure exploits the assumption that the original signal lies in the range of a generator. A pretrained generator of a Generative Adversarial Network generates audio digits. A new method for reconstruction is proposed, using only the most active segment of the signal, i.e., the segment with the highest energy. The underlying assumption is that such segment offers a more compact representation, preserving the meaningful content of signal. Cases when the reconstruction produces noise, instead of digit, are treated as outliers. In order to detect and reject them, three unsupervised indicators are used, namely, the total energy of reconstructed signal, the predictions of an one-class Support Vector Machine, and the confidence of a pretrained classifier used for recognition. This classifier is based on neural networks architectures and is pretrained on original audio recordings, employing three input representations, i.e., raw audio, spectrogram, and gammatonegram. Experiments are conducted, analyzing both the quality of reconstruction and the performance of classifiers in digit recognition, demonstrating that the proposed method yields higher performance in both the quality of reconstruction and digit recognition accuracy.

Inner Eye Canthus Localization for Human Body Temperature Screening

Claudio Ferrari, Lorenzo Berlincioni, Marco Bertini, Alberto Del Bimbo

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Localization of the Inner Eye Canthus in Thermal Face Images using 3D Morphable Face Model

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In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for localizing the inner eye canthus in thermal face images. We first coarsely detect 5 facial keypoints corresponding to the center of the eyes, the nosetip and the ears. Then we compute a sparse 2D-3D points correspondence using a 3D Morphable Face Model (3DMM). This correspondence is used to project the entire 3D face onto the image, and subsequently locate the inner eye canthus. Detecting this location allows to obtain the most precise body temperature measurement for a person using a thermal camera. We evaluated the approach on a thermal face dataset provided with manually annotated landmarks. However, such manual annotations are normally conceived to identify facial parts such as eyes, nose and mouth, and are not specifically tailored for localizing the eye canthus region. As additional contribution, we enrich the original dataset by using the annotated landmarks to deform and project the 3DMM onto the images. Then, by manually selecting a small region corresponding to the eye canthus, we enrich the dataset with additional annotations. By using the manual landmarks, we ensure the correctness of the 3DMM projection, which can be used as ground-truth for future evaluations. Moreover, we supply the dataset with the 3D head poses and per-point visibility masks for detecting self-occlusions. The data will be publicly released.

A Quantitative Evaluation Framework of Video De-Identification Methods

Sathya Bursic, Alessandro D'Amelio, Marco Granato, Giuliano Grossi, Raffaella Lanzarotti

Auto-TLDR; Face de-identification using photo-reality and facial expressions

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We live in an era of privacy concerns, motivating a large research effort in face de-identification. As in other fields, we are observing a general movement from hand-crafted methods to deep learning methods, mainly involving generative models. Although these methods produce more natural de-identified images or videos, we claim that the mere evaluation of the de-identification is not sufficient, especially when it comes to processing the images/videos further. In this note, we take into account the issue of preserving privacy, facial expressions, and photo-reality simultaneously, proposing a general testing framework. The method is applied to four open-source tools, producing a baseline for future de-identification methods.

Which are the factors affecting the performance of audio surveillance systems?

Antonio Greco, Antonio Roberto, Alessia Saggese, Mario Vento

Auto-TLDR; Sound Event Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Visual Representations on MIVIA Audio Events

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Sound event recognition systems are rapidly becoming part of our life, since they can be profitably used in several vertical markets, ranging from audio security applications to scene classification and multi-modal analysis in social robotics. In the last years, a not negligible part of the scientific community started to apply Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to image-based representations of the audio stream, due to their successful adoption in almost all the computer vision tasks. In this paper, we carry out a detailed benchmark of various widely used CNN architectures and visual representations on a popular dataset, namely the MIVIA Audio Events database. Our analysis is aimed at understanding how these factors affect the sound event recognition performance with a particular focus on the false positive rate, very relevant in audio surveillance solutions. In fact, although most of the proposed solutions achieve a high recognition rate, the capability of distinguishing the events-of-interest from the background is often not yet sufficient for real systems, and prevent its usage in real applications. Our comprehensive experimental analysis investigates this aspect and allows to identify useful design guidelines for increasing the specificity of sound event recognition systems.

Countering Anti-Forensics of SIFT-Based Copy-Move Detection

Muhammad Salman, Andreas Uhl

Auto-TLDR; Countering SIFT Keypoint Removal for Image Forgery Detection by Changing to a Different Type of Keypoints

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Forensic analysis is used to detect image forgeries e.g. the copy move forgery and the object removal forgery, respectively. Counter forensic techniques (aka anti-forensic methods to fool the forensic analyst by concealing traces of manipulation) have become popular in the game of cat and mouse between the analyst and the attacker. Classical anti-forensic techniques targeting on SIFT keypoints have been established with particular emphasis on keypoint removal in the context of copy move forgery detection. In this paper we propose a forensic approach countering SIFT keypoint removal by changing to a different type of keypoints in forensic analysis, clearly demonstrating benefits over traditional SIFT keypoint oriented techniques.

Generic Merging of Structure from Motion Maps with a Low Memory Footprint

Gabrielle Flood, David Gillsjö, Patrik Persson, Anders Heyden, Kalle Åström

Auto-TLDR; A Low-Memory Footprint Representation for Robust Map Merge

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With the development of cheap image sensors, the amount of available image data have increased enormously, and the possibility of using crowdsourced collection methods has emerged. This calls for development of ways to handle all these data. In this paper, we present new tools that will enable efficient, flexible and robust map merging. Assuming that separate optimisations have been performed for the individual maps, we show how only relevant data can be stored in a low memory footprint representation. We use these representations to perform map merging so that the algorithm is invariant to the merging order and independent of the choice of coordinate system. The result is a robust algorithm that can be applied to several maps simultaneously. The result of a merge can also be represented with the same type of low-memory footprint format, which enables further merging and updating of the map in a hierarchical way. Furthermore, the method can perform loop closing and also detect changes in the scene between the capture of the different image sequences. Using both simulated and real data — from both a hand held mobile phone and from a drone — we verify the performance of the proposed method.

Attribute-Based Quality Assessment for Demographic Estimation in Face Videos

Fabiola Becerra-Riera, Annette Morales-González, Heydi Mendez-Vazquez, Jean-Luc Dugelay

Auto-TLDR; Facial Demographic Estimation in Video Scenarios Using Quality Assessment

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Most existing works regarding facial demographic estimation are focused on still image datasets, although nowadays the need to analyze video content in real applications is increasing. We propose to tackle gender, age and ethnicity estimation in the context of video scenarios. Our main contribution is to use an attribute-specific quality assessment procedure to select best quality frames from a video sequence for each of the three demographic modalities. Best quality frames are classified with fine-tuned MobileNet models and a final video prediction is obtained with a majority voting strategy among the best selected frames. Our validation on three different datasets and our comparison with state-of-the-art models, show the effectiveness of the proposed demographic classifiers and the quality pipeline, which allows to reduce both: the number of frames to be classified and the processing time in practical applications; and improves the soft biometrics prediction accuracy.

ID Documents Matching and Localization with Multi-Hypothesis Constraints

Guillaume Chiron, Nabil Ghanmi, Ahmad Montaser Awal

Auto-TLDR; Identity Document Localization in the Wild Using Multi-hypothesis Exploration

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This paper presents an approach for spotting and accurately localizing identity documents in the wild. Contrary to blind solutions that often rely on borders and corners detection, the proposed approach requires a classification a priori along with a list of predefined models. The matching and accurate localization are performed using specific ID document features. This process is especially difficult due to the intrinsic variable nature of ID models (text fields, multi-pass printing with offset, unstable layouts, added artifacts, blinking security elements, non-rigid materials). We tackle the problem by putting different combinations of features in competition within a multi-hypothesis exploration where only the best document quadrilateral candidate is retained thanks to a custom visual similarity metric. The idea is to find, in a given context, at least one feature able to correctly crop the document. The proposed solution has been tested and has shown its benefits on both the MIDV-500 academic dataset and an industrial one supposedly more representative of a real-life application.

Are Spoofs from Latent Fingerprints a Real Threat for the Best State-Of-Art Liveness Detectors?

Roberto Casula, Giulia Orrù, Daniele Angioni, Xiaoyi Feng, Gian Luca Marcialis, Fabio Roli

Auto-TLDR; ScreenSpoof: Attacks using latent fingerprints against state-of-art fingerprint liveness detectors and verification systems

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We investigated the threat level of realistic attacks using latent fingerprints against sensors equipped with state-of-art liveness detectors and fingerprint verification systems which integrate such liveness algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, only a previous investigation was done with spoofs from latent prints. In this paper, we focus on using snapshot pictures of latent fingerprints. These pictures provide molds, that allows, after some digital processing, to fabricate high-quality spoofs. Taking a snapshot picture is much simpler than developing fingerprints left on a surface by magnetic powders and lifting the trace by a tape. What we are interested here is to evaluate preliminary at which extent attacks of the kind can be considered a real threat for state-of-art fingerprint liveness detectors and verification systems. To this aim, we collected a novel data set of live and spoof images fabricated with snapshot pictures of latent fingerprints. This data set provide a set of attacks at the most favourable conditions. We refer to this method and the related data set as "ScreenSpoof". Then, we tested with it the performances of the best liveness detection algorithms, namely, the three winners of the LivDet competition. Reported results point out that the ScreenSpoof method is a threat of the same level, in terms of detection and verification errors, than that of attacks using spoofs fabricated with the full consensus of the victim. We think that this is a notable result, never reported in previous work.

The HisClima Database: Historical Weather Logs for Automatic Transcription and Information Extraction

Verónica Romero, Joan Andreu Sánchez

Auto-TLDR; Automatic Handwritten Text Recognition and Information Extraction from Historical Weather Logs

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Knowing the weather and atmospheric conditions from the past can help weather researchers to generate models like the ones used to predict how weather conditions are likely to change as global temperatures continue to rise. Many historical weather records are available from the past registered on a systemic basis. Historical weather logs were registered in ships, when they were on the high seas, recording daily weather conditions such as: wind speed, temperature, coordinates, etc. These historical documents represent an important source of knowledge with valuable information to extract climatic information of several centuries ago. Such information is usually collected by experts that devote a lot of time. This paper presents a new database, compiled from a ship log mainly composed by handwritten tables that contain mainly numerical information, to support research in automatic handwriting recognition and information extraction. In addition, a study is presented about the capability of state-of-the-art handwritten text recognition systems and information extraction techniques, when applied to the presented database. Baseline results are reported for reference in future studies.

Personalized Models in Human Activity Recognition Using Deep Learning

Hamza Amrani, Daniela Micucci, Paolo Napoletano

Auto-TLDR; Incremental Learning for Personalized Human Activity Recognition

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Current sensor-based human activity recognition techniques that rely on a user-independent model struggle to generalize to new users and on to changes that a person may make over time to his or her way of carrying out activities. Incremental learning is a technique that allows to obtain personalized models which may improve the performance on the classifiers thanks to a continuous learning based on user data. Finally, deep learning techniques have been proven to be more effective with respect to traditional ones in the generation of user-independent models. The aim of our work is therefore to put together deep learning techniques with incremental learning in order to obtain personalized models that perform better with respect to user-independent model and personalized model obtained using traditional machine learning techniques. The experimentation was done by comparing the results obtained by a technique in the state of the art with those obtained by two neural networks (ResNet and a simplified CNN) on three datasets. The experimentation showed that neural networks adapt faster to a new user than the baseline.

How to Define a Rejection Class Based on Model Learning?

Sarah Laroui, Xavier Descombes, Aurelia Vernay, Florent Villiers, Francois Villalba, Eric Debreuve

Auto-TLDR; An innovative learning strategy for supervised classification that is able, by design, to reject a sample as not belonging to any of the known classes

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In supervised classification, the learning process typically trains a classifier to optimize the accuracy of classifying data into the classes that appear in the learning set, and only them. While this framework fits many use cases, there are situations where the learning process is knowingly performed using a learning set that only represents the data that have been observed so far among a virtually unconstrained variety of possible samples. It is then crucial to define a classifier which has the ability to reject a sample, i.e., to classify it into a rejection class that has not been yet defined. Although obvious solutions can add this ability a posteriori to a classifier that has been learned classically, a better approach seems to directly account for this requirement in the classifier design. In this paper, we propose an innovative learning strategy for supervised classification that is able, by design, to reject a sample as not belonging to any of the known classes. For that, we rely on modeling each class as the combination of a probability density function (PDF) and a threshold that is computed with respect to the other classes. Several alternatives are proposed and compared in this framework. A comparison with straightforward approaches is also provided.

A Comparison of Neural Network Approaches for Melanoma Classification

Maria Frasca, Michele Nappi, Michele Risi, Genoveffa Tortora, Alessia Auriemma Citarella

Auto-TLDR; Classification of Melanoma Using Deep Neural Network Methodologies

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Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer and it is diagnosed mainly visually, starting from initial clinical screening and followed by dermoscopic analysis, biopsy and histopathological examination. A dermatologist’s recognition of melanoma may be subject to errors and may take some time to diagnose it. In this regard, deep learning can be useful in the study and classification of skin cancer. In particular, by classifying images with Deep Neural Network methodologies, it is possible to obtain comparable or even superior results compared to those of dermatologists. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the classification of melanoma by adopting different deep learning techniques applied to a common dataset, composed of images from the ISIC dataset and consisting of different types of skin diseases, including melanoma on which we applied a specific pre-processing phase. In particular, a comparison of the results is performed in order to select the best effective neural network to be applied to the problem of recognition and classification of melanoma. Moreover, we also evaluate the impact of the pre- processing phase on the final classification. Different metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity have been selected to assess the goodness of the adopted neural networks and compare them also with the manual classification of dermatologists.

Approach for Document Detection by Contours and Contrasts

Daniil Tropin, Sergey Ilyuhin, Dmitry Nikolaev, Vladimir V. Arlazarov

Auto-TLDR; A countor-based method for arbitrary document detection on a mobile device

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This paper considers the task of arbitrary document detection performed on a mobile device. The classical contour-based approach often mishandles cases with occlusion, complex background, or blur. Region-based approach, which relies on the contrast between object and background, does not have limitations, however its known implementations are highly resource-consuming. We propose a modification of a countor-based method, in which the competing hypotheses of the contour location are ranked according to the contrast between the areas inside and outside the border. In the performed experiments such modification leads to the 40% decrease of alternatives ordering errors and 10% decrease of the overall number of detection errors. We updated state-of-the-art performance on the open MIDV-500 dataset and demonstrated competitive results with the state-of-the-art on the SmartDoc dataset.

Writer Identification Using Deep Neural Networks: Impact of Patch Size and Number of Patches

Akshay Punjabi, José Ramón Prieto Fontcuberta, Enrique Vidal

Auto-TLDR; Writer Recognition Using Deep Neural Networks for Handwritten Text Images

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Traditional approaches for the recognition or identification of the writer of a handwritten text image used to relay on heuristic knowledge about the shape and other features of the strokes of previously segmented characters. However, recent works have done significantly advances on the state of the art thanks to the use of various types of deep neural networks. In most of all of these works, text images are decomposed into patches, which are processed by the networks without any previous character or word segmentation. In this paper, we study how the way images are decomposed into patches impact recognition accuracy, using three publicly available datasets. The study also includes a simpler architecture where no patches are used at all - a single deep neural network inputs a whole text image and directly provides a writer recognition hypothesis. Results show that bigger patches generally lead to improved accuracy, achieving in one of the datasets a significant improvement over the best results reported so far.

On Identification and Retrieval of Near-Duplicate Biological Images: A New Dataset and Protocol

Thomas E. Koker, Sai Spandana Chintapalli, San Wang, Blake A. Talbot, Daniel Wainstock, Marcelo Cicconet, Mary C. Walsh

Auto-TLDR; BINDER: Bio-Image Near-Duplicate Examples Repository for Image Identification and Retrieval

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Manipulation and re-use of images in scientific publications is a growing issue, not only for biomedical publishers, but also for the research community in general. In this work we introduce BINDER -- Bio-Image Near-Duplicate Examples Repository, a novel dataset to help researchers develop, train, and test models to detect same-source biomedical images. BINDER contains 7,490 unique image patches for model training, 1,821 same-size patch duplicates for validation and testing, and 868 different-size image/patch pairs for image retrieval validation and testing. Except for the training set, patches already contain manipulations including rotation, translation, scale, perspective transform, contrast adjustment and/or compression artifacts. We further use the dataset to demonstrate how novel adaptations of existing image retrieval and metric learning models can be applied to achieve high-accuracy inference results, creating a baseline for future work. In aggregate, we thus present a supervised protocol for near-duplicate image identification and retrieval without any "real-world" training example. Our dataset and source code are available at hms-idac.github.io/BINDER.

The DeepHealth Toolkit: A Unified Framework to Boost Biomedical Applications

Michele Cancilla, Laura Canalini, Federico Bolelli, Stefano Allegretti, Salvador Carrión, Roberto Paredes, Jon Ander Gómez, Simone Leo, Marco Enrico Piras, Luca Pireddu, Asaf Badouh, Santiago Marco-Sola, Lluc Alvarez, Miquel Moreto, Costantino Grana

Auto-TLDR; DeepHealth Toolkit: An Open Source Deep Learning Toolkit for Cloud Computing and HPC

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Given the overwhelming impact of machine learning on the last decade, several libraries and frameworks have been developed in recent years to simplify the design and training of neural networks, providing array-based programming, automatic differentiation and user-friendly access to hardware accelerators. None of those tools, however, was designed with native and transparent support for Cloud Computing or heterogeneous High-Performance Computing (HPC). The DeepHealth Toolkit is an open source deep learning toolkit aimed at boosting productivity of data scientists operating in the medical field by providing a unified framework for the distributed training of neural networks, that is able to leverage hybrid HPC and Cloud environments in a way transparent to the user. The toolkit is composed of a computer vision library, a deep learning library, and a front-end for non-expert users; all of the components are focused on the medical domain, but they are general purpose and can be applied to any other field. In this paper, the principles driving the design of the DeepHealth libraries are described, along with details about the implementation and the interaction between the different elements composing the toolkit. Finally, experiments on common benchmarks prove the efficiency of each separate component, and of the DeepHealth Toolkit overall.

Neural Compression and Filtering for Edge-assisted Real-time Object Detection in Challenged Networks

Yoshitomo Matsubara, Marco Levorato

Auto-TLDR; Deep Neural Networks for Remote Object Detection Using Edge Computing

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The edge computing paradigm places compute-capable devices - edge servers - at the network edge to assist mobile devices in executing data analysis tasks. Intuitively, offloading compute-intense tasks to edge servers can reduce their execution time. However, poor conditions of the wireless channel connecting the mobile devices to the edge servers may degrade the overall capture-to-output delay achieved by edge offloading. Herein, we focus on edge computing supporting remote object detection by means of Deep Neural Networks (DNN), and develop a framework to reduce the amount of data transmitted over the wireless link. The core idea we propose builds on recent approaches splitting DNNs into sections - namely head and tail models - executed by the mobile device and edge server, respectively. The wireless link, then, is used to transport the output of the last layer of the head model to the edge server, instead of the DNN input. Most prior work focuses on classification tasks and leaves the DNN structure unaltered. Herein, we focus on DNNs for three different object detection tasks, which present a much more convoluted structure, and modify the architecture of the network to: (i) achieve in-network compression by introducing a bottleneck layer in the early layers on the head model, and (ii) prefilter pictures that do not contain objects of interest using a convolutional neural network. Results show that the proposed technique represents an effective intermediate option between local and edge computing in a parameter region where these extreme point solutions fail to provide satisfactory performance.

Comparison of Deep Learning and Hand Crafted Features for Mining Simulation Data

Theodoros Georgiou, Sebastian Schmitt, Thomas Baeck, Nan Pu, Wei Chen, Michael Lew

Auto-TLDR; Automated Data Analysis of Flow Fields in Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations

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Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a very important tool for many industrial applications, such as aerodynamic optimization of engineering designs like cars shapes, airplanes parts etc. The output of such simulations, in particular the calculated flow fields, are usually very complex and hard to interpret for realistic three-dimensional real-world applications, especially if time-dependent simulations are investigated. Automated data analysis methods are warranted but a non-trivial obstacle is given by the very large dimensionality of the data. A flow field typically consists of six measurement values for each point of the computational grid in 3D space and time (velocity vector values, turbulent kinetic energy, pressure and viscosity). In this paper we address the task of extracting meaningful results in an automated manner from such high dimensional data sets. We propose deep learning methods which are capable of processing such data and which can be trained to solve relevant tasks on simulation data, i.e. predicting drag and lift forces applied on an airfoil. We also propose an adaptation of the classical hand crafted features known from computer vision to address the same problem and compare a large variety of descriptors and detectors. Finally, we compile a large dataset of 2D simulations of the flow field around airfoils which contains 16000 flow fields with which we tested and compared approaches. Our results show that the deep learning-based methods, as well as hand crafted feature based approaches, are well-capable to accurately describe the content of the CFD simulation output on the proposed dataset.