Abstract
As a key technology to help bridging the gap between deaf and hearing people, sign language recognition (SLR) has become one of the most active research topics in the human-computer interaction field. Although several SLR methodologies have been proposed, the development of a real-world SLR system is still a very challenging task. One of the main challenges is related to the large intersigner variability that exists in the manual signing process of sign languages. To address this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end deep neural network that explicitly models highly discriminative signer-independent latent representations from the input data. The key idea of our model is to learn a distribution over latent representations, conditionally independent of signer identity. Accordingly, the learned latent representations will preserve as much information as possible about the signs, and discard signer-specific traits that are irrelevant for recognition. By imposing such regularization in the representation space, the result is a truly signer-independent model which is robust to different and new test signers. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in several SLR databases.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
In recent years, deep neural networks have shown significant progress in computer vision due to their large generalization capacity; however, the overfitting problem ubiquitously threatens the learning process of these highly nonlinear architectures. Dropout is a recent solution to mitigate overfitting that has witnessed significant success in various classification applications. Recently, many efforts have been made to improve the Standard dropout using an unsupervised merit-based semantic selection of neurons in the latent space. However, these studies do not consider the task-relevant information quality and quantity and the diversity of the latent kernels. To solve the challenge of dropping less informative neurons in deep learning, we propose an efficient end-to-end dropout algorithm that selects the most informative neurons with the highest correlation with the target output considering the sparsity in its selection procedure. First, to promote activation diversity, we devise an approach to select the most diverse set of neurons by making use of determinantal point process (DPP) sampling. Furthermore, to incorporate task specificity into deep latent features, a mutual information (MI)-based merit function is developed. Leveraging the proposed MI with DPP sampling, we introduce the novel DPPMI dropout that adaptively adjusts the retention rate of neurons based on their contribution to the neural network task. Empirical studies on real-world classification benchmarks including, MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over recent state-of-the-art dropout algorithms in the literature.

Abstract
Face Recognition (FR) is a challenging task, especially when dealing with unknown identities. While Open-Set Face Recognition (OSFR) assigns a single class to all unfamiliar subjects, Open-World Face Recognition (OWFR) employs an incremental approach, creating a new class for each unknown individual. Current OWFR approaches still present limitations, mainly regarding the accuracy gap to standard closed-set approaches and execution time. This paper proposes a fast and simple mixture-based OWFR algorithm that tackles the execution time issue while avoiding accuracy decay. The proposed method uses data curve representations and Universal Background Models based on Gaussian Mixture Models. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance, considering accuracy and execution time, in both closed-set and open-world scenarios. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Current state-of-the-art medical image segmentation methods require high quality datasets to obtain good performance. However, medical specialists often disagree on diagnosis, hence, datasets contain contradictory annotations. This, in turn, leads to difficulties in the optimization process of Deep Learning models and hinder performance. We propose a method to estimate uncertainty in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) segmentation models, that makes the training of CNNs more robust to contradictory annotations. In this work, we model two types of uncertainty, heteroscedastic and epistemic, without adding any additional supervisory signal other than the ground-truth segmentation mask. As expected, the uncertainty is higher closer to vessel boundaries, and on top of thinner and less visible vessels where it is more likely for medical specialists to disagree. Therefore, our method is more suitable to learn from datasets created with heterogeneous annotators. We show that there is a correlation between the uncertainty estimated by our method and the disagreement in the segmentation provided by two different medical specialists. Furthermore, by explicitly modeling the uncertainty, the Intersection over Union of the segmentation network improves 5.7 percentage points.