Leveraging CAM Algorithms for Explaining Medical Semantic Segmentation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve prevailing results in segmentation tasks nowadays and represent the state-of-the-art for image-based analysis. However, the understanding of the accurate decision-making process of a CNN is rather unknown. The research area of explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) primarily revolves around understanding and interpreting this black-box behavior. One way of interpreting a CNN is the use of class activation maps (CAMs) that represent heatmaps to indicate the importance of image areas for the prediction of the CNN. For classification tasks, a variety of CAM algorithms exist. But for segmentation tasks, only one CAM algorithm for the interpretation of the output of a CNN exist. We propose a transfer between existing classification- and segmentation-based methods for more detailed, explainable, and consistent results which show salient pixels in semantic segmentation tasks. The resulting Seg-HiRes-Grad CAM is an extension of the segmentation-based Seg-Grad CAM with the transfer to the classification-based HiRes CAM. Our method improves the previously-mentioned existing segmentation-based method by adjusting it to recently published classification-based methods. Especially for medical image segmentation, this transfer solves existing explainability disadvantages.

End-to-End Probabilistic Geometry-Guided Regression for 6DoF Object Pose Estimation

6D object pose estimation is the problem of identifying the position and orientation of an object relative to a chosen coordinate system, which is a core technology for modern XR applications. State-of-the-art 6D object pose estimators directly predict an object pose given an object observation. Due to the ill-posed nature of the pose estimation problem, where multiple different poses can correspond to a single observation, generating additional plausible estimates per observation can be valuable. To address this, we reformulate the state-of-the-art algorithm GDRNPP and introduce EPRO-GDR (End-to-End Probabilistic Geometry-Guided Regression). Instead of predicting a single pose per detection, we estimate a probability density distribution of the pose. Using the evaluation procedure defined by the BOP (Benchmark for 6D Object Pose Estimation) Challenge, we test our approach on four of its core datasets and demonstrate superior quantitative results for EPRO-GDR on LM-O, YCB-V, and ITODD. Our probabilistic solution shows that predicting a pose distribution instead of a single pose can improve state-of-the-art single-view pose estimation while providing the additional benefit of being able to sample multiple meaningful pose candidates.

Influence of Water Droplet Contamination for Transparency Segmentation

Computer vision techniques are on the rise for industrial applications, like process supervision and autonomous agents, e.g., in the healthcare domain and dangerous environments. While the general usability of these techniques is high, there are still challenging real-world use-cases. Especially transparent structures, which can appear in the form of glass doors, protective casings or everyday objects like glasses, pose a challenge for computer vision methods. This paper evaluates the combination of transparent objects in conjunction with (naturally occurring) contamination through environmental effects like hazing. We introduce a novel publicly available dataset containing 489 images incorporating three grades of water droplet contamination on transparent structures and examine the resulting influence on transparency handling. Our findings show, that contaminated transparent objects are easier to segment and that we are able to distinguish between different severity levels of contamination with a current state-of-the art machine-learning model. This in turn opens up the possibility to enhance computer vision systems regarding resilience against, e.g., datashifts through contaminated protection casings or implement an automated cleaning alert.

Transparency Distortion Robustness for SOTA Image Segmentation Tasks

Semantic Image Segmentation facilitates a multitude of real-world applications ranging from autonomous driving over industrial process supervision to vision aids for human beings. These models are usually trained in a supervised fashion using example inputs. Distribution Shifts between these examples and the inputs in operation may cause erroneous segmentations. The robustness of semantic segmentation models against distribution shifts caused by differing camera or lighting setups, lens distortions, adversarial inputs and image corruptions has been topic of recent research. However, robustness against spatially varying radial distortion effects that can be caused by uneven glass structures (e.g. windows) or the chaotic refraction in heated air has not been addressed by the research community yet. We propose a method to synthetically augment existing datasets with spatially varying distortions. Our experiments show, that these distortion effects degrade the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation models. Pretraining and enlarged model capacities proof to be suitable strategies for mitigating performance degradation to some degree, while fine-tuning on distorted images only leads to marginal performance improvements.

Fast Training Data Acquisition for Object Detection and Segmentation using Black Screen Luminance Keying

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) require large amounts of annotated training data for a good performance. Often this data is generated using manual labeling (error-prone and time-consuming) or rendering (requiring geometry and material information). Both approaches make it difficult or uneconomic to apply them to many small-scale applications. A fast and straightforward approach of acquiring the necessary training data would allow the adoption of deep learning to even the smallest of applications. Chroma keying is the process of replacing a color (usually blue or green) with another background. Instead of chroma keying, we propose luminance keying for fast and straightforward training image acquisition. We deploy a black screen with high light absorption (99.99\%) to record roughly 1-minute long videos of our target objects, circumventing typical problems of chroma keying, such as color bleeding or color overlap between background color and object color. Next we automatically mask our objects using simple brightness thresholding, saving the need for manual annotation. Finally, we automatically place the objects on random backgrounds and train a 2D object detector. We do extensive evaluation of the performance on the widely-used YCB-V object set and compare favourably to other conventional techniques such as rendering, without needing 3D meshes, materials or any other information of our target objects and in a fraction of the time needed for other approaches. Our work demonstrates highly accurate training data acquisition allowing to start training state-of-the-art networks within minutes.

One-to-many Reconstruction of 3D Geometry of cultural Artifacts using a synthetically trained Generative Model

Estimating the 3D shape of an object using a single image is a difficult problem. Modern approaches achieve good results for general objects, based on real photographs, but worse results on less expressive representations such as historic sketches. Our automated approach generates a variety of detailed 3D representation from a single sketch, depicting a medieval statue, and can be guided by multi-modal inputs, such as text prompts. It relies solely on synthetic data for training, making it adoptable even in cases of only small numbers of training examples. Our solution allows domain experts such as a curators to interactively reconstruct potential appearances of lost artifacts.

Extending 6D Object Pose Estimators for Stereo Vision

Estimating the 6D pose of objects accurately, quickly, and robustly remains a difficult task. However, recent methods for directly regressing poses from RGB images using dense features have achieved state-of-the-art results. Stereo vision, which provides an additional perspective on the object, can help reduce pose ambiguity and occlusion. Moreover, stereo can directly infer the distance of an object, while mono-vision requires internalized knowledge of the object's size. To extend the state-of-the-art in 6D object pose estimation to stereo, we created a BOP compatible stereo version of the YCB-V dataset. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art 6D pose estimation algorithms by utilizing stereo vision and can easily be adopted for other dense feature-based algorithms.

An Empirical Study of Uncertainty Estimation Techniques for Detecting Drift in Data Streams

In safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis, the reliability of machine learning models is crucial. One significant challenge to reliability is concept drift, which can cause model deterioration over time. Traditionally, drift detectors rely on true labels, which are often scarce and costly. This study conducts a comprehensive empirical evaluation of using uncertainty values as substitutes for error rates in detecting drifts, aiming to alleviate the reliance on labeled post-deployment data. We examine five uncertainty estimation methods in conjunction with the ADWIN detector across seven real-world datasets. Our results reveal that while the SWAG method exhibits superior calibration, the overall accuracy in detecting drifts is not notably impacted by the choice of uncertainty estimation method, with even the most basic method demonstrating competitive performance. These findings offer valuable insights into the practical applicability of uncertainty-based drift detection in real-world, safety-critical applications.

Generalization of Fitness Exercise Recognition from Doppler Measurements by Domain-adaption and Few-Shot Learning

In previous works, a mobile application was developed using an unmodified commercial off-the-shelf smartphone to recognize whole-body exercises. The working principle was based on the ultrasound Doppler sensing with the device built-in hardware. Applying such a lab-environment trained model on realistic application variations causes a significant drop in performance, and thus decimate its applicability. The reason of the reduced performance can be manifold. It could be induced by the user, environment, and device variations in realistic scenarios. Such scenarios are often more complex and diverse, which can be challenging to anticipate in the initial training data. To study and overcome this issue, this paper presents a database with controlled and uncontrolled subsets of fitness exercises. We propose two concepts to utilize small adaption data to successfully improve model generalization in an uncontrolled environment, increasing the recognition accuracy by two to six folds compared to the baseline for different users.

Bias and Diversity in Synthetic-based Face Recognition

Synthetic data is emerging as a substitute for authentic data to solve ethical and legal challenges in handling authentic face data. The current models can create real-looking face images of people who do not exist. However, it is a known and sensitive problem that face recognition systems are susceptible to bias, i.e. performance differences between different demographic and non-demographics attributes, which can lead to unfair decisions. In this work, we investigate how the diversity of synthetic face recognition datasets compares to authentic datasets, and how the distribution of the training data of the generative models affects the distribution of the synthetic data. To do this, we looked at the distribution of gender, ethnicity, age, and head position. Furthermore, we investigated the concrete bias of three recent synthetic-based face recognition models on the studied attributes in comparison to a baseline model trained on authentic data. Our results show that the generator generate a similar distribution as the used training data in terms of the different attributes. With regard to bias, it can be seen that the synthetic-based models share a similar bias behavior with the authentic-based models. However, with the uncovered lower intra-identity attribute consistency seems to be beneficial in reducing bias.