WatchNet plus plus : efficient and accurate depth-based network for detecting people attacks and intrusion

We present an efficient and accurate people detection approach based on deep learning to detect people attacks and intrusion in video surveillance scenarios Unlike other approaches using background segmentation and pre-processing techniques, which are not able to distinguish people from other elements in the scene, we propose WatchNet++ that is a depth-based and sequential network that localizes people in top-view depth images by predicting human body joints and pairwise connections (links) such as head and shoulders. WatchNet++ comprises a set of prediction stages and up-sampling operations that progressively refine the predictions of joints and links, leading to more accurate localization results. In order to train the network with varied and abundant data, we also present a large synthetic dataset of depth images with human models that is used to pre-train the network model. Subsequently, domain adaptation to real data is done via fine-tuning using a real dataset of depth images with people performing attacks and intrusion. An extensive evaluation of the proposed approach is conducted for the detection of attacks in airlocks and the counting of people in indoors and outdoors, showing high detection scores and efficiency. The network runs at 10 and 28 FPS using CPU and GPU, respectively.

Learning Approach to Delineation of Curvilinear Structures in 2D and 3D Images

Agata Justyna Mosinska

Detection of curvilinear structures has long been of interest due to its wide range of applications. Large amounts of imaging data could be readily used in many fields, but it is practically not possible to analyze them manually. Hence, the need for automated delineation approaches. In the recent years Computer Vision witnessed a paradigm shift from mathematical modelling to data-driven methods based on Machine Learning. This led to improvements in performance and robustness of the detection algorithms. Nonetheless, most Machine Learning methods are general-purpose and they do not exploit the specificity of the delineation problem. In this thesis, we present learning methods suited for this task and we apply them to various kinds of microscopic and natural images, proving the general applicability of the presented solutions. First, we introduce a topology loss - a new training loss term, which captures higher-level features of curvilinear networks such as smoothness, connectivity and continuity. This is in contrast to most Deep Learning segmentation methods that do not take into account the geometry of the resulting prediction. In order to compute the new loss term, we extract topology features of prediction and ground-truth using a pre-trained network, whose filters are activated by structures at different scales and orientations. We show that this approach yields better results in terms of conventional segmentation metrics and overall topology of the resulting delineation. Although segmentation of curvilinear structures provides useful information, it is not always sufficient. In many cases, such as neuroscience and cartography, it is crucial to estimate the network connectivity. In order to find the graph representation of the structure depicted in the image, we propose an approach for joint segmentation and connection classification. Apart from pixel probabilities, this approach also returns the likelihood of a proposed path being a part of the reconstructed network. We show that segmentation and path classification are closely related tasks and can benefit from the synergy. The aforementioned methods rely on Machine Learning, which requires significant amounts of annotated ground-truth data to train models. The labelling process often requires expertise, it is costly and tiresome. To alleviate this problem, we introduce an Active Learning method that significantly decreases the time spent on annotating images. It queries the annotator only about the most informative examples, in this case the hypothetical paths belonging to the structure of interest. Contrary to conventional Active Learning methods, our approach exploits local consistency of linear paths to pick the ones that stand out from their neighborhood. Our final contribution is a method suited for both Active Learning and proofreading the result, which often requires more time than the automated delineation itself. It investigates edges of the delineation graph and determines the ones that are especially significant for the global reconstruction by perturbing their weights. Our Active Learning and proofreading strategies are combined with a new efficient formulation of an optimal subgraph computation and reduce the annotation effort by up to 80%.

EPFL2019

Evaluating and Interpreting Deep Convolutional Neural Networks via Non-negative Matrix Factorization

Edo Collins

With ever greater computational resources and more accessible software, deep neural networks have become ubiquitous across industry and academia. Their remarkable ability to generalize to new samples defies the conventional view, which holds that complex, over-parameterized networks would be prone to overfitting. This apparent discrepancy is exacerbated by our inability to inspect and interpret the high-dimensional, non-linear, latent representations they learn, which has led many to refer to neural networks as black-boxes''. The Law of Parsimony states that simpler solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones''. Since they perform quite well in practice, a natural question to ask, then, is in what way are neural networks simple? We propose that compression is the answer. Since good generalization requires invariance to irrelevant variations in the input, it is necessary for a network to discard this irrelevant information. As a result, semantically similar samples are mapped to similar representations in neural network deep feature space, where they form simple, low-dimensional structures. Conversely, a network that overfits relies on memorizing individual samples. Such a network cannot discard information as easily. In this thesis we characterize the difference between such networks using the non-negative rank of activation matrices. Relying on the non-negativity of rectified-linear units, the non-negative rank is the smallest number that admits an exact non-negative matrix factorization. We derive an upper bound on the amount of memorization in terms of the non-negative rank, and show it is a natural complexity measure for rectified-linear units. With a focus on deep convolutional neural networks trained to perform object recognition, we show that the two non-negative factors derived from deep network layers decompose the information held therein in an interpretable way. The first of these factors provides heatmaps which highlight similarly encoded regions within an input image or image set. We find that these networks learn to detect semantic parts and form a hierarchy, such that parts are further broken down into sub-parts. We quantitatively evaluate the semantic quality of these heatmaps by using them to perform semantic co-segmentation and co-localization. In spite of the convolutional network we use being trained solely with image-level labels, we achieve results comparable or better than domain-specific state-of-the-art methods for these tasks. The second non-negative factor provides a bag-of-concepts representation for an image or image set. We use this representation to derive global image descriptors for images in a large collection. With these descriptors in hand, we perform two variations content-based image retrieval, i.e. reverse image search. Using information from one of the non-negative matrix factors we obtain descriptors which are suitable for finding semantically related images, i.e., belonging to the same semantic category as the query image. Combining information from both non-negative factors, however, yields descriptors that are suitable for finding other images of the specific instance depicted in the query image, where we again achieve state-of-the-art performance.

EPFL2019

A Stepwise Domain Adaptive Segmentation Network With Covariate Shift Alleviation for Remote Sensing Imagery

Yinlin Hu, Yunpeng Li, Rui Song

Semantic segmentation for remote sensing images (RSI) is critical for the Earth monitoring system. However, the covariate shift between RSI datasets under different capture conditions cannot be alleviated by directly using the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method, which negatively affects the segmentation accuracy in RSI. We propose a stepwise domain adaptive segmentation network with covariate shift alleviation (Cov-DA) for RSI parsing to solve this issue. Specifically, to alleviate domain shift generated by different sensors, both the source and target domains are projected into a colorspace with normalized distribution through an elaborate colorspace mapping unified module (CMUM). The color distributions of these two domains tend to be more uniform. Furthermore, in the target domain, the multistatistics joint evaluation module (MJEM) is proposed to capture different statistical characteristics of subscenarios for selecting plain scenarios regarded as high-confidence segmentation results to assist the further improvement of segmentation performance. In addition, a pyramid perceptual attention module (PPAM) containing omnidirectional features without computational burdens is added to our network for effectively enhancing the multiscale feature capture ability. In the cross-city DA experiments based on the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) and aerial benchmarks, the superiority of our algorithm is significantly demonstrated. Furthermore, we release a large-scale Martian terrain dataset noted as "Mars-Seg" containing 5 K images with pixel-level accurate annotations regarding issues, such as the lack of semantic segmentation datasets for unknown scenes.

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Learning Approach to Delineation of Curvilinear Structures in 2D and 3D Images

Agata Justyna Mosinska

EPFL2019

Evaluating and Interpreting Deep Convolutional Neural Networks via Non-negative Matrix Factorization

Edo Collins

EPFL2019