Abstract: Colorectal cancer is one of the main causes of cancer death worldwide. Colonoscopy is the gold standard screening tool as it allows lesion detection and removal during the same procedure. During the last decades, several efforts have been made to develop CAD systems to assist clinicians in lesion detection and classification. Regarding the latter, and in order to be used in the exploration room as part of resect and discard or leave-in-situ strategies, these systems must identify correctly all different lesion types. This is a challenging task, as the data used to train these systems presents great inter-class similarity, high class imbalance, and low representation of clinically relevant histology classes such as serrated sessile adenomas.
In this paper, a new polyp segmentation and classification method, Swin-Expand, is introduced. Based on Swin-Transformer, it uses a simple and lightweight decoder. The performance of this method has been assessed on a novel dataset, comprising 1126 high-definition images representing the three main histological classes. Results show a clear improvement in both segmentation and classification performance, also achieving competitive results when tested in public datasets. These results confirm that both the method and the data are important to obtain more accurate polyp representations.

Abstract: Multimodal image fusion allows the combination of information from different modalities, which is useful for tasks such as object detection, edge detection, and tracking, to name a few. Using the fused representation for applications results in better task performance. There are several image fusion approaches, which have been summarized in surveys. However, the existing surveys focus on image fusion approaches where the application on the loop of multimodal image fusion is not considered. On the contrary, this study summarizes deep learning-based multimodal image fusion for computer vision (e.g., object detection) and image processing applications (e.g., semantic segmentation), that is, approaches where the application module leverages the multimodal fusion process to enhance the final result. Firstly, we introduce image fusion and the existing general frameworks for image fusion tasks such as multifocus, multiexposure and multimodal. Then, we describe the multimodal image fusion approaches. Next, we review the state-of-the-art deep learning multimodal image fusion approaches for vision applications. Finally, we conclude our survey with the trends of task-driven multimodal image fusion.

Abstract: Developing arbitrary symbol recognition systems is a challenging endeavour. Even using content-agnostic architectures such as few-shot models, performance can be substantially improved by providing a number of well-annotated examples into training. In some contexts, transcripts of the symbols are available without any position information associated to them, which enables using line-level recognition architectures. A way of providing this position information to detection-based architectures is finding systems that can align the input symbols with the transcription. In this paper we discuss some symbol alignment techniques that are suitable for low-data scenarios and provide an insight on their perceived strengths and weaknesses. In particular, we study the usage of Connectionist Temporal Classification models, Attention-Based Sequence to Sequence models and we compare them with the results obtained on a few-shot recognition system.

Abstract: Text and signs around roads provide crucial information for drivers, vital for safe navigation and situational awareness. Scene text recognition in motion is a challenging problem, while textual cues typically appear for a short time span, and early detection at a distance is necessary. Systems that exploit such information to assist the driver should not only extract and incorporate visual and textual cues from the video stream but also reason over time. To address this issue, we introduce RoadTextVQA, a new dataset for the task of video question answering (VideoQA) in the context of driver assistance. RoadTextVQA consists of 3, 222 driving videos collected from multiple countries, annotated with 10, 500 questions, all based on text or road signs present in the driving videos. We assess the performance of state-of-the-art video question answering models on our RoadTextVQA dataset, highlighting the significant potential for improvement in this domain and the usefulness of the dataset in advancing research on in-vehicle support systems and text-aware multimodal question answering. The dataset is available at http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit-projects/roadtextvqa.

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of near-duplicate image detection techniques in a real-world use case scenario, where a document management company is commissioned to manually annotate a collection of scanned photographs. Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate photographs can reduce the time spent on manual annotation by archivists. This real use case differs from laboratory settings as the deployment dataset is available in advance, allowing the use of transductive learning. We propose a transductive learning approach that leverages state-of-the-art deep learning architectures such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Our approach involves pre-training a deep neural network on a large dataset and then fine-tuning the network on the unlabeled target collection with self-supervised learning. The results show that the proposed approach outperforms the baseline methods in the task of near-duplicate image detection in the UKBench and an in-house private dataset.