Italy

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neuro- developmental disorder, which causes deficits in social lives. Early screening of ASD for young children is important to reduce the impact of ASD on people’s lives. Traditional screening methods mainly rely on protocol-based interviews and subjective evaluations from clinicians and domain experts, which requires advanced expertise and intensive labor. To standardize the process of ASD screening, we design a ”Responsive Social Smile” protocol and the associated experimental setup. Moreover, we propose a machine learning based assessment framework for early ASD screening. By integrating speech recognition and computer vision technologies, the proposed framework can quantitatively analyze children’s behaviors under well-designed protocols. We collect 196 stimulus samples from 41 children with an average age of 23.34 months, and the proposed method obtains 85.20% accuracy for predicting stimulus scores and 80.49% accuracy for the final ASD prediction. This result indicates that our model approaches the average level of domain experts in this ”Responsive Social Smile” protocol.

ICPR 2020

Responsive Social Smile: A Machine Learning based Multimodal Behavior Assessment Framework towards Early Stage Autism Screening

multimodal behavior analysis

autism screening

facial expression recognition

machine learning

The University Big Data Challenge (IUBDC) successfully concluded its latest edition, bringing together national health industry leaders, policymakers, and dignitaries for a conference centered on mental health research and innovation. Participants had the opportunity to showcase their projects in a poster session, engaging with representatives from industry and academia. The event provided a rich network of industry and academic professionals, offering pathways for scholarly publication, access to curated datasets, learning materials materials, and workshops.

Held at the Microsoft Headquarters in Toronto on July 26, 2024, the challenge featured hands-on data science and AI research projects focused on mental health. For over seven years, IUBDC has fostered collaboration between data science and health professionals and motivated university students. This year’s projects, which spanned topics from dementia to addictions, aimed to enhance our understanding of mental health, improve patient lifestyles, and reduce disease risk. Abstracts from teams were published in the NRC Research Press STEM Fellowship Journal, with all team's works featured by Underline publications.

Leveraging Open Data Analytics and Machine Learning to Improve Mental Health Research and Innovation

2024 Inter-University Big Data And AI Challenge -

Thee challenge featured hands-on data science and AI research projects focused on mental health. 

poster

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 



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.


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


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, as 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.

A NoGAN approach for image and video restoration and compression artifact removal

Person re-identification (re-ID) which aims to recognize a pedestrian observed by non-overlapping cameras is a challenging task due to high variance between images from different viewpoints. Although remarkable progresses on research of re-ID had been obtained via leveraging the merits of deep learning framework through sufficient quantity training on a large amount of well labeled data, whereas, in real scenarios, re-ID generally suffers from lacking of well labeled training data. In this paper, we propose an attention-based model with attribute classification (AMAC) to facilitate a well trained model transferring across different data domains, which further enables an efficient cross-domain video-based person re-ID. Specifically, an attention-based sub-network is proposed for deep insight into the quality variations of local parts, hence, different local parts are cooperated with different weights to avoid the heavy occlusions or the cluttered background in datasets. Moreover, we introduce a transferred attribute classification sub-network to extract attribute-semantic features of any new target datasets without the requirement for new training attribute labels which are costly to annotate. Attribute-semantic features can be considered as valuable complementary information for person re-identification since they are robust to illumination varieties and different viewpoints across cameras. Due to the large gap between different datasets, we fine-tune each sub-network with pseudo labels on the target datasets respectively to strengthen the original model trained on other labeled datasets. Extensive comparable evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our AMAC in solving cross-domain person re-ID task on two benchmarks including PRID-2011 and iLIDS-VID.

Attention-based Model with Attribute Classification for Cross-domain Person Re-identification


This paper studies the problem of Person Re-Identification (ReID)
for large-scale applications. Recent research efforts have been devoted
to building complicated part models, which introduce considerably
high computational cost and memory consumption, inhibiting its practicability
in large-scale applications. This paper aims to develop a novel learning
strategy to find efficient feature embeddings while maintaining the
balance of accuracy and model complexity. More specifically, we find
by enhancing the classical triplet loss together with cross-entropy
loss, our method can explore the hard examples and build a discriminant
feature embedding yet compact enough for large-scale applications.
Our method is carried out progressively using Bayesian optimization,
and we call it the Progressive Learning Algorithm (PLA). Extensive
experiments on three large-scale datasets show that our PLA is comparable
or better than the state-of-the-arts. Especially, on the challenging
Market-1501 dataset, we achieve Rank-1=94.7%/mAP=89.4% while saving
at least 30\% parameters than strong part models.

Efficient Shadow Detection and Removal using Synthetic Data with Domain Adaptation

3D point cloud completion has been a long-standing challenge at scale, and corresponding per-point supervised training strategies suffered from cumbersome annotations. 2D supervision has recently emerged as a promising alternative for 3D tasks, but specific approaches for 3D point cloud completion still remain to be explored. To overcome these limitations, we propose an end-to-end method that directly lifts a single depth map to a completed point cloud. With one depth map as input, a multi-way novel depth view synthesis network (NDVNet) is designed to infer coarsely completed depth maps under various viewpoints. Meanwhile, a geometric depth perspective rendering module is introduced to utilize the raw input depth map to generate a re-projected depth map for each view. Therefore, the two parallelly generated depth maps for each view are further concatenated and refined by a depth completion network (DCNet). The final completed point cloud is fused from all refined depth views. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach composed of the aforementioned components, to produce high-quality, state-of-the-art results on the popular SUNCG benchmark.

Towards Efficient 3D Point Cloud Scene Completion via Novel Depth View Synthesis

Transferring the sentiment of an image is an unexplored research topic in the area of computer vision. This work proposes a novel framework consisting of a reference image retrieval step and a global sentiment transfer step to transfer sentiments of images according to a given sentiment tag. The proposed image retrieval algorithm is based on the SSIM index. The retrieved reference images by the proposed algorithm is more content-related against the algorithm based on the perceptual loss. Therefore can lead to a better image sentiment transfer result. In addition, we propose a global sentiment transfer step, which employs an optimization algorithm to iteratively transfer sentiment of images based on feature maps produced by the Densenet121 architecture. The proposed sentiment transfer algorithm can transfer the sentiment of images while ensuring the content structure of the input image intact. The qualitative and quantitative experiment demonstrates that the proposed sentiment transfer framework outperforms existing artistic and photorealistic style transfer algorithms in making reliable sentiment transfer results with rich, ﬁne, and exact details.

Global Image Sentiment Transfer


To understand human behavior we must not just recognize individual actions but model possibly complex group activity and interactions. Hierarchical models obtain the best results in group activity recognition but require fine grained individual action annotations at the actor level. We show that, considering only skeletal data, we can train a state-of-the art end-to-end system using only group activity labels at the sequence level.

Learning Group Activities from Skeletons without Individual Action Labels

This paper proposes the first object counting method for omnidirectional images. Because conventional object counting methods cannot handle the distortion of omnidirectional images, we propose to process them using stereographic projection,
which enables conventional methods to obtain a good approximation of the density function. However, the images obtained by stereographic projection are still distorted. Hence, to manage this distortion, we propose two methods. One is a new data augmentation method designed for the stereographic projection of omnidirectional images. The other is a distortion-adaptive Gaussian kernel that generates a density map ground truth while taking into account the distortion of stereographic projection. Using the counting of grape bunches as a case study, we
constructed an original grape-bunch image dataset consisting of omnidirectional images and conducted experiments to evaluate the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method performs better than a direct application of the conventional method, improving mean absolute error by 14.7% and mean squared error by 10.5%.

Distortion-Adaptive Grape Bunch Counting for Omnidirectional Images

Given a face image of a recovered child at probe-age, we
search a gallery of missing children with known identities
and gallery-ages at which they were either lost or stolen
in an attempt to unite the recovered child with his family.
We propose a feature aging module that can age-progress
deep face features output by a face matcher to improve the
recognition accuracy of age-separated child face images. In
addition, the feature aging module guides age-progression
in the image space such that synthesized aged gallery faces
can be utilized to further enhance cross-age face matching
accuracy of any commodity face matcher. For time lapses
larger than 10 years (the missing child is recovered after
10 or more years), the proposed age-progression module
improves the rank-1 open-set identification accuracy of
CosFace from 22.91% to 25.04% on a child celebrity dataset,
namely ITWCC. The proposed method also outperforms
state-of-the-art approaches with a rank-1 identification
rate of 95.91%, compared to 94.91%, on a public aging
dataset, FG-NET, and 99.58%, compared to 99.50%, on
CACD-VS. These results suggest that aging face features
enhances the ability to identify young children who are
possible victims of child trafficking or abduction.

Identifying Missing Children: Face Age Progression via Deep Feature Aging

Recent advances in computer vision and machine learning, most notably deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are exploited to identify and localize various plant species in salt marsh images. Three different approaches are explored that provide estimations of abundance and spatial distribution at varying levels of granularity defined by spatial resolution. In the coarsest-grained approach, CNNs are tasked with identifying which of six plant species are present/absent in large patches within the salt marsh images. CNNs with diverse topological properties and attention mechanisms are shown capable of providing accurate estimations with > 90% precision and recall for the more abundant plant species and reduced performance for less common plant species. Estimation of percent cover of each plant species is performed at a finer spatial resolution, where smaller image patches are extracted and the CNNs tasked with identifying the plant species or substrate at the center of the image patch. For the percent cover estimation task, the CNNs are observed to exhibit a performance profile similar to that for the presence/absence estimation task, but with a 5%-10% reduction in precision and recall. Finally, fine-grained estimation of the spatial distribution of the various plant species is performed via semantic segmentation. The DeepLab-V3 semantic segmentation architecture is observed to provide very accurate estimations for abundant plant species, but with significant performance degradation for less abundant plant species; in extreme cases, rare plant classes are seen to be ignored entirely. Overall, a clear trade-off is observed between the CNN estimation quality and the spatial resolution of the underlying estimation thereby offering guidance for ecological applications of CNN-based approaches to automated plant identification and localization in salt marsh images.

Premium content

Downloads

Next from ICPR 2020

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

Similar lecture

Exploring the Intersection of Autism Spectrum Disorder and Mental Health Through a Mixed-Method Analysis