CPLIP: Zero-Shot Learning for Histopathology with Comprehensive Vision-Language Alignment

This paper proposes Comprehensive Pathology Language Image Pre-training (CPLIP), a new unsupervised technique designed to enhance the alignment of images and text in histopathology for tasks such as classification and segmentation. This methodology enriches vision-language models by leveraging extensive data without needing ground truth annotations. CPLIP involves constructing a pathology-specific dictionary, generating textual descriptions for images using language models, and retrieving relevant images for each text snippet via a pre-trained model. The model is then fine-tuned using a many-to-many contrastive learning method to align complex interrelated concepts across both modalities. Evaluated across multiple histopathology tasks, CPLIP shows notable improvements in zero-shot learning scenarios, outperforming existing methods in both interpretability and robustness and setting a higher benchmark for the application of vision-language models in the field. To encourage further research and replication, the code for CPLIP is available on GitHub at https://cplip.github.io/

Video Anomaly Detection in 10 Years: A Survey and Outlook

Video anomaly detection (VAD) holds immense importance across diverse domains such as surveillance, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. While numerous surveys focus on conventional VAD methods, they often lack depth in exploring specific approaches and emerging trends. This survey explores deep learning-based VAD, expanding beyond traditional supervised training paradigms to encompass emerging weakly supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised approaches. A prominent feature of this review is the investigation of core challenges within the VAD paradigms including large-scale datasets, features extraction, learning methods, loss functions, regularization, and anomaly score prediction. Moreover, this review also investigates the vision language models (VLMs) as potent feature extractors for VAD. VLMs integrate visual data with textual descriptions or spoken language from videos, enabling a nuanced understanding of scenes crucial for anomaly detection. By addressing these challenges and proposing future research directions, this review aims to foster the development of robust and efficient VAD systems leveraging the capabilities of VLMs for enhanced anomaly detection in complex real-world scenarios. This comprehensive analysis seeks to bridge existing knowledge gaps, provide researchers with valuable insights, and contribute to shaping the future of VAD research.

RobMOT: Robust 3D Multi-Object Tracking by Observational Noise and State Estimation Drift Mitigation on LiDAR PointCloud

This work addresses the inherited limitations in the current state-of-the-art 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) methods that follow the tracking-by-detection paradigm, notably trajectory estimation drift for long-occluded objects in LiDAR point cloud streams acquired by autonomous cars. In addition, the absence of adequate track legitimacy verification results in ghost track accumulation. To tackle these issues, we introduce a two-fold innovation. Firstly, we propose refinement in Kalman filter that enhances trajectory drift noise mitigation, resulting in more robust state estimation for occluded objects. Secondly, we propose a novel online track validity mechanism to distinguish between legitimate and ghost tracks combined with a multi-stage observational gating process for incoming observations. This mechanism substantially reduces ghost tracks by up to 80\% and improves HOTA by 7\%. Accordingly, we propose an online 3D MOT framework, RobMOT, that demonstrates superior performance over the top-performing state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning approaches, across various detectors with up to 3.28\% margin in MOTA and 2.36\% in HOTA. RobMOT excels under challenging conditions, such as prolonged occlusions and the tracking of distant objects, with up to 59\% enhancement in processing latency.

A Comprehensive Review of Artificial Intelligence Applications in Major Retinal Conditions

This paper provides a systematic survey of retinal diseases that cause visual impairments or blindness, emphasizing the importance of early detection for effective treatment. It covers both clinical and automated approaches for detecting retinal disease, focusing on studies from the past decade. The survey evaluates various algorithms for identifying structural abnormalities and diagnosing retinal diseases, and it identifies future research directions based on a critical analysis of existing literature. This comprehensive study, which reviews both clinical and automated detection methods using different modalities, appears to be unique in its scope. Additionally, the survey serves as a helpful guide for researchers interested in digital retinopathy.

3D-TexSeg: Unsupervised Segmentation of 3D Texture using Mutual Transformer Learning

Analysis of the 3D Texture is indispensable for various tasks, such as retrieval, segmentation, classification, and inspection of sculptures, knitted fabrics, and biological tissues. A 3D texture is a locally repeated surface variation independent of the surface's overall shape and can be determined using the local neighborhood and its characteristics. Existing techniques typically employ computer vision techniques that analyze a 3D mesh globally, derive features, and then utilize the obtained features for retrieval or classification. Several traditional and learning-based methods exist in the literature, however, only a few are on 3D texture, and nothing yet, to the best of our knowledge, on the unsupervised schemes. This paper presents an original framework for the unsupervised segmentation of the 3D texture on the mesh manifold. We approach this problem as binary surface segmentation, partitioning the mesh surface into textured and non-textured regions without prior annotation. We devise a mutual transformer-based system comprising a label generator and a cleaner. The two models take geometric image representations of the surface mesh facets and label them as texture or non-texture across an iterative mutual learning scheme. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets with diverse texture patterns demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms standard and SOTA unsupervised techniques and competes reasonably with supervised methods.

Improving Underwater Visual Tracking With a Large Scale Dataset and Image Enhancement

This paper presents a new dataset and general tracker enhancement method for Underwater Visual Object Tracking (UVOT). Despite its significance, underwater tracking has remained unexplored due to data inaccessibility. It poses distinct challenges; the underwater environment exhibits non-uniform lighting conditions, low visibility, lack of sharpness, low contrast, camouflage, and reflections from suspended particles. Performance of traditional tracking methods designed primarily for terrestrial or open-air scenarios drops in such conditions. We address the problem by proposing a novel underwater image enhancement algorithm designed specifically to boost tracking quality. The method has resulted in a significant performance improvement, of up to 5.0% AUC, of state-of-the-art (SOTA) visual trackers. To develop robust and accurate UVOT methods, large-scale datasets are required. To this end, we introduce a large-scale UVOT benchmark dataset consisting of 400 video segments and 275,000 manually annotated frames enabling underwater training and evaluation of deep trackers. The videos are labelled with several underwater-specific tracking attributes including watercolor variation, target distractors, camouflage, target relative size, and low visibility conditions. The UVOT400 dataset, tracking results, and the code are publicly available on: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/UWVOT400.

EFaR 2023: Efficient Face Recognition Competition

This paper presents the summary of the Efficient Face Recognition Competition (EFaR) held at the 2023 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). The competition received 17 submissions from 6 different teams. To drive further development of efficient face recognition models, the submitted solutions are ranked based on a weighted score of the achieved verification accuracies on a diverse set of benchmarks, as well as the deployability given by the number of floating-point operations and model size. The evaluation of submissions is extended to bias, cross-quality, and large-scale recognition benchmarks. Overall, the paper gives an overview of the achieved performance values of the submitted solutions as well as a diverse set of baselines. The submitted solutions use small, efficient network architectures to reduce the computational cost, some solutions apply model quantization. An outlook on possible techniques that are underrepresented in current solutions is given as well.

Convolutional Transformer for Autonomous Recognition and Grading of Tomatoes Under Various Lighting, Occlusion, and Ripeness Conditions

Harvesting fully ripe tomatoes with mobile robots presents significant challenges in real-world scenarios. These challenges arise from factors such as occlusion caused by leaves and branches, as well as the color similarity between tomatoes and the surrounding foliage during the fruit development stage. The natural environment further compounds these issues with varying light conditions, viewing angles, occlusion factors, and different maturity levels. To overcome these obstacles, this research introduces a novel framework that leverages a convolutional transformer architecture to autonomously recognize and grade tomatoes, irrespective of their occlusion level, lighting conditions, and ripeness. The proposed model is trained and tested using carefully annotated images curated specifically for this purpose. The dataset is prepared under various lighting conditions, viewing perspectives, and employs different mobile camera sensors, distinguishing it from existing datasets such as Laboro Tomato and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato. The effectiveness of the proposed framework in handling cluttered and occluded tomato instances was evaluated using two additional public datasets, Laboro Tomato and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato, as benchmarks. The evaluation results across these three datasets demonstrate the exceptional performance of our proposed framework, surpassing the state-of-the-art by 58.14%, 65.42%, and 66.39% in terms of mean average precision scores for KUTomaData, Laboro Tomato, and Rob2Pheno Annotated Tomato, respectively. The results underscore the superiority of the proposed model in accurately detecting and delineating tomatoes compared to baseline methods and previous approaches. Specifically, the model achieves an F1-score of 80.14%, a Dice coefficient of 73.26%, and a mean IoU of 66.41% on the KUTomaData image dataset.

Unsupervised Mutual Transformer Learning for Multi-Gigapixel Whole Slide Image Classification

Classification of gigapixel Whole Slide Images (WSIs) is an important prediction task in the emerging area of computational pathology. There has been a surge of research in deep learning models for WSI classification with clinical applications such as cancer detection or prediction of molecular mutations from WSIs. Most methods require expensive and labor-intensive manual annotations by expert pathologists. Weakly supervised Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) methods have recently demonstrated excellent performance; however, they still require large slide-level labeled training datasets that need a careful inspection of each slide by an expert pathologist. In this work, we propose a fully unsupervised WSI classification algorithm based on mutual transformer learning. Instances from gigapixel WSI (i.e., image patches) are transformed into a latent space and then inverse-transformed to the original space. Using the transformation loss, pseudo-labels are generated and cleaned using a transformer label-cleaner. The proposed transformer-based pseudo-label generation and cleaning modules mutually train each other iteratively in an unsupervised manner. A discriminative learning mechanism is introduced to improve normal versus cancerous instance labeling. In addition to unsupervised classification, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for weak supervision for cancer subtype classification as downstream analysis. Extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets show excellent performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. We intend to make the source code of our algorithm publicly available soon.

Speaker Identification from emotional and noisy speech data using learned voice segregation and Speech VGG

Speech signals are subjected to more acoustic interference and emotional factors than other signals. Noisy emotion-riddled speech data is a challenge for real-time speech processing applications. It is essential to find an effective way to segregate the dominant signal from other external influences. An ideal system should have the capacity to accurately recognize required auditory events from a complex scene taken in an unfavorable situation. This paper proposes a novel approach to speaker identification in unfavorable conditions such as emotion and interference using a pre-trained Deep Neural Network mask and speech VGG. The proposed model obtained superior performance over the recent literature in English and Arabic emotional speech data and reported an average speaker identification rate of 85.2\%, 87.0\%, and 86.6\% using the Ryerson audio-visual dataset (RAVDESS), speech under simulated and actual stress (SUSAS) dataset and Emirati-accented Speech dataset (ESD) respectively.