Abstract
The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obtained by our proposed method show improvements in a detailed step-wise ablation study. The conducted study showed significant performance gains induced by our proposed training paradigm and modified triplet loss on two evaluation databases.

Abstract
As technology and artificial intelligence conquer a place under the spotlight in the automotive world, driver drowsiness monitoring systems have sparked much interest as a way to increase safety and avoid sleepiness-related accidents. Such technologies, however, stumble upon the observation that each driver presents a distinct set of behavioral and physiological manifestations of drowsiness, thus rendering its objective assessment a non-trivial process. The AUTOMOTIVE project studied the application of signal processing and machine learning techniques for driver-specific drowsiness detection in smart vehicles, enabled by immersive driving simulators. More broadly, comprehensive research on biometrics using the electrocardiogram (ECG) and face enables the continuous learning of subject-specific models of drowsiness for more efficient monitoring. This paper aims to offer a holistic but comprehensive view of the research and development work conducted for the AUTOMOTIVE project across the various addressed topics and how it ultimately brings us closer to the target of improved driver drowsiness monitoring.

Abstract
Although Deep Learning models have achieved incredible results in medical image classification tasks, their lack of interpretability hinders their deployment in the clinical context. Case-based interpretability provides intuitive explanations, as it is a much more human-like approach than saliency-map-based interpretability. Nonetheless, since one is dealing with sensitive visual data, there is a high risk of exposing personal identity, threatening the individuals' privacy. In this work, we propose a privacy-preserving generative adversarial network for the privatization of case-based explanations. We address the weaknesses of current privacy-preserving methods for visual data from three perspectives: realism, privacy, and explanatory value. We also introduce a counterfactual module in our Generative Adversarial Network that provides counterfactual case-based explanations in addition to standard factual explanations. Experiments were performed in a biometric and medical dataset, demonstrating the network's potential to preserve the privacy of all subjects and keep its explanatory evidence while also maintaining a decent level of intelligibility.

Abstract
With the appearance of Shared Autonomous Vehicles there will no longer be a driver responsible for maintaining the car interior and well-being of passengers. To counter this, it is imperative to have a system that is able to detect any abnormal behaviors, more specifically, violence between passengers. Traditional action recognition algorithms build models around known interactions but activities can be so diverse, that having a dataset that incorporates most use cases is unattainable. While action recognition models are normally trained on all the defined activities and directly output a score that classifies the likelihood of violence, video anomaly detection algorithms present themselves as an alternative approach to build a good discriminative model since usually only non-violent examples are needed. This work focuses on anomaly detection and action recognition algorithms trained, validated and tested on a subset of human behavior video sequences from Bosch's internal datasets. The anomaly detection network architecture defines how to properly reconstruct normal frame sequences so that during testing, each sequence can be classified as normal or abnormal based on its reconstruction error. With these errors, regularity scores are inferred showing the predicted regularity of each frame. The resulting framework is a viable addition to traditional action recognition algorithms since it can work as a tool for detecting unknown actions, strange/violent behaviors and aid in understanding the meaning of such human interactions.

Abstract
The task of person re-identification has important applications in security and surveillance systems. It is a challenging problem since there can be a lot of differences between pictures belonging to the same person, such as lighting, camera position, variation in poses and occlusions. The use of Deep Learning has contributed greatly towards more effective and accurate systems. Many works use attention mechanisms to force the models to focus on less distinctive areas, in order to improve performance in situations where important information may be missing. This paper proposes a new, more flexible method for calculating these masks, using a U-Net which receives a picture and outputs a mask representing the most distinctive areas of the picture. Results show that the method achieves an accuracy comparable or superior to those in state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract
Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide. The detection and diagnosis of most cancers are confirmed by a tissue biopsy that is analyzed via the optic microscope. These samples are then scanned to giga-pixel sized images for further digital processing by pathologists. An automated method to segment the malignant regions of these images could be of great interest to detect cancer earlier and increase the agreement between specialists. However, annotating these giga-pixel images is very expensive, time-consuming and error-prone. We evaluate 4 existing annotation efficient methods, including transfer learning and self-supervised learning approaches. The best performing approach was to pretrain a model to colourize a grayscale histopathological image and then finetune that model on a dataset with manually annotated examples. This method was able to improve the Intersection over Union from 0.2702 to 0.3702.