ORGAN LOCALIZATION AND DETECTION IN SOW’S USING MACHINE LEARNING AND DEEP LEARNING IN COMPUTER VISION

The objective of computer vision research is to endow computers with human-like perception to enable the capability to detect their surroundings, interpret the data they sense, take appropriate actions, and learn from their experiences to improve future performance. The area has progressed from using traditional pattern recognition and image processing technologies to advanced techniques in image understanding such as model-based and knowledge-based vision. In the past few years there has been a surge of interest in machine learning algorithms for computer vision-based applications. Machine learning technology has the potential to significantly contribute to the development of flexible and robust vision algorithms that will improve the performance of practical vision systems with a higher level of competence and greater generality. Additionally, the development of machine learning-based architectures has the potential to reduce system development time while simultaneously achieving the above-stated performance improvements. This work proposes the utilization of a computer vision-based approach that leverages machine and deep learning systems to aid the detection and identification of sow reproduction cycles by segmentation and object detection techniques. A lightweight machine learning system is proposed for object detection to address dataset collection issues in one of the most crucial and potentially lucrative farming applications. This technique was designed to detect the vulvae region in pre-estrous sows using a single thermal image. In the first experiment, the support vector machine (SVM) classifier was used after extracting features determined by 12 Gabor filters. The features are then concatenated with the features obtained from the Histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) to produce the results of the first experiment. In the second experiment, the number of distinct Gabor filters used was increased from 12 to 96. The system is trained on cropped image windows and uses the Gaussian pyramid technique to look for the vulva in the input image. The resulting process is shown to be lightweight, simple, and robust when applied to and evaluated on a large number of images. The results from extensive qualitative and quantitative testing experiments are included. The experimental results include false detection, missing detection and favorable detection rates. The results indicate state-of-the-art accuracy. Additionally, the project was expanded by utilizing the You Only Look Once (YOLO) deep learning Object Detection models for fast object detection. The results from object detection have been used to label images for segmentation. The bounding box from the detected area was systematically colored to achieve the segmented and labeled images. Then these segmented images are used as custom data to train U-Net segmentation. The first step involves building a machine learning model using Gabor filters and HOG for feature extraction and SVM for classification. The results discovered the deficiency of the model, therefore a second stage was suggested in which the dataset was trained using YOLOv3-dependent deep learning object detection. The resulting segmentation model is found to be the best choice to aid the process of vulva localization. Since the model depends on the original gray-scale image and the mask of the region of interest (ROI), a custom dataset containing these features was obtained, augmented, and used to train a U-Net segmentation model. The results of the final approach shows that the proposed system can segment sow\u27s vulva region even in low rank images and has an excellent performance efficiency. Furthermore, the resulting algorithm can be used to improve the automation of estrous detection by providing reliable ROI identification and segmentation and enabling beneficial temporal change detection and tracking in future efforts

Detection-by-Localization: Maintenance-Free Change Object Detector

Recent researches demonstrate that self-localization performance is a very useful measure of likelihood-of-change (LoC) for change detection. In this paper, this "detection-by-localization" scheme is studied in a novel generalized task of object-level change detection. In our framework, a given query image is segmented into object-level subimages (termed "scene parts"), which are then converted to subimage-level pixel-wise LoC maps via the detection-by-localization scheme. Our approach models a self-localization system as a ranking function, outputting a ranked list of reference images, without requiring relevance score. Thanks to this new setting, we can generalize our approach to a broad class of self-localization systems. Our ranking based self-localization model allows to fuse self-localization results from different modalities via an unsupervised rank fusion derived from a field of multi-modal information retrieval (MMR).Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, Technical repor

Understanding Traffic Density from Large-Scale Web Camera Data

Understanding traffic density from large-scale web camera (webcam) videos is a challenging problem because such videos have low spatial and temporal resolution, high occlusion and large perspective. To deeply understand traffic density, we explore both deep learning based and optimization based methods. To avoid individual vehicle detection and tracking, both methods map the image into vehicle density map, one based on rank constrained regression and the other one based on fully convolution networks (FCN). The regression based method learns different weights for different blocks in the image to increase freedom degrees of weights and embed perspective information. The FCN based method jointly estimates vehicle density map and vehicle count with a residual learning framework to perform end-to-end dense prediction, allowing arbitrary image resolution, and adapting to different vehicle scales and perspectives. We analyze and compare both methods, and get insights from optimization based method to improve deep model. Since existing datasets do not cover all the challenges in our work, we collected and labelled a large-scale traffic video dataset, containing 60 million frames from 212 webcams. Both methods are extensively evaluated and compared on different counting tasks and datasets. FCN based method significantly reduces the mean absolute error from 10.99 to 5.31 on the public dataset TRANCOS compared with the state-of-the-art baseline.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2017. Preprint version was uploaded on http://welcome.isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/publications/understanding-traffic-density-from-large-scale-web-camera-data

Person Re-Identification by Deep Joint Learning of Multi-Loss Classification

Existing person re-identification (re-id) methods rely mostly on either localised or global feature representation alone. This ignores their joint benefit and mutual complementary effects. In this work, we show the advantages of jointly learning local and global features in a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) by aiming to discover correlated local and global features in different context. Specifically, we formulate a method for joint learning of local and global feature selection losses designed to optimise person re-id when using only generic matching metrics such as the L2 distance. We design a novel CNN architecture for Jointly Learning Multi-Loss (JLML) of local and global discriminative feature optimisation subject concurrently to the same re-id labelled information. Extensive comparative evaluations demonstrate the advantages of this new JLML model for person re-id over a wide range of state-of-the-art re-id methods on five benchmarks (VIPeR, GRID, CUHK01, CUHK03, Market-1501).Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 201