Proceedings of Abstracts, School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference 2022

© 2022 The Author(s). This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For further details please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Plenary by Prof. Timothy Foat, ‘Indoor dispersion at Dstl and its recent application to COVID-19 transmission’ is © Crown copyright (2022), Dstl. This material is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: [email protected] present proceedings record the abstracts submitted and accepted for presentation at SPECS 2022, the second edition of the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference that took place online, the 12th April 2022

Object Recognition

Vision-based object recognition tasks are very familiar in our everyday activities, such as driving our car in the correct lane. We do these tasks effortlessly in real-time. In the last decades, with the advancement of computer technology, researchers and application developers are trying to mimic the human's capability of visually recognising. Such capability will allow machine to free human from boring or dangerous jobs

ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 Calibration, Validation, Science and Applications

Twelve edited original papers on the latest and state-of-art results of topics ranging from calibration, validation, and science to a wide range of applications using ALOS-2/PALSAR-2. We hope you will find them useful for your future research

From pixels to people : recovering location, shape and pose of humans in images

Humans are at the centre of a significant amount of research in computer vision. Endowing machines with the ability to perceive people from visual data is an immense scientific challenge with a high degree of direct practical relevance. Success in automatic perception can be measured at different levels of abstraction, and this will depend on which intelligent behaviour we are trying to replicate: the ability to localise persons in an image or in the environment, understanding how persons are moving at the skeleton and at the surface level, interpreting their interactions with the environment including with other people, and perhaps even anticipating future actions. In this thesis we tackle different sub-problems of the broad research area referred to as "looking at people", aiming to perceive humans in images at different levels of granularity. We start with bounding box-level pedestrian detection: We present a retrospective analysis of methods published in the decade preceding our work, identifying various strands of research that have advanced the state of the art. With quantitative exper- iments, we demonstrate the critical role of developing better feature representations and having the right training distribution. We then contribute two methods based on the insights derived from our analysis: one that combines the strongest aspects of past detectors and another that focuses purely on learning representations. The latter method outperforms more complicated approaches, especially those based on hand- crafted features. We conclude our work on pedestrian detection with a forward-looking analysis that maps out potential avenues for future research. We then turn to pixel-level methods: Perceiving humans requires us to both separate them precisely from the background and identify their surroundings. To this end, we introduce Cityscapes, a large-scale dataset for street scene understanding. This has since established itself as a go-to benchmark for segmentation and detection. We additionally develop methods that relax the requirement for expensive pixel-level annotations, focusing on the task of boundary detection, i.e. identifying the outlines of relevant objects and surfaces. Next, we make the jump from pixels to 3D surfaces, from localising and labelling to fine-grained spatial understanding. We contribute a method for recovering 3D human shape and pose, which marries the advantages of learning-based and model- based approaches. We conclude the thesis with a detailed discussion of benchmarking practices in computer vision. Among other things, we argue that the design of future datasets should be driven by the general goal of combinatorial robustness besides task-specific considerations.Der Mensch steht im Zentrum vieler Forschungsanstrengungen im Bereich des maschinellen Sehens. Es ist eine immense wissenschaftliche Herausforderung mit hohem unmittelbarem Praxisbezug, Maschinen mit der Fähigkeit auszustatten, Menschen auf der Grundlage von visuellen Daten wahrzunehmen. Die automatische Wahrnehmung kann auf verschiedenen Abstraktionsebenen erfolgen. Dies hängt davon ab, welches intelligente Verhalten wir nachbilden wollen: die Fähigkeit, Personen auf der Bildfläche oder im 3D-Raum zu lokalisieren, die Bewegungen von Körperteilen und Körperoberflächen zu erfassen, Interaktionen einer Person mit ihrer Umgebung einschließlich mit anderen Menschen zu deuten, und vielleicht sogar zukünftige Handlungen zu antizipieren. In dieser Arbeit beschäftigen wir uns mit verschiedenen Teilproblemen die dem breiten Forschungsgebiet "Betrachten von Menschen" gehören. Beginnend mit der Fußgängererkennung präsentieren wir eine Analyse von Methoden, die im Jahrzehnt vor unserem Ausgangspunkt veröffentlicht wurden, und identifizieren dabei verschiedene Forschungsstränge, die den Stand der Technik vorangetrieben haben. Unsere quantitativen Experimente zeigen die entscheidende Rolle sowohl der Entwicklung besserer Bildmerkmale als auch der Trainingsdatenverteilung. Anschließend tragen wir zwei Methoden bei, die auf den Erkenntnissen unserer Analyse basieren: eine Methode, die die stärksten Aspekte vergangener Detektoren kombiniert, eine andere, die sich im Wesentlichen auf das Lernen von Bildmerkmalen konzentriert. Letztere übertrifft kompliziertere Methoden, insbesondere solche, die auf handgefertigten Bildmerkmalen basieren. Wir schließen unsere Arbeit zur Fußgängererkennung mit einer vorausschauenden Analyse ab, die mögliche Wege für die zukünftige Forschung aufzeigt. Anschließend wenden wir uns Methoden zu, die Entscheidungen auf Pixelebene betreffen. Um Menschen wahrzunehmen, müssen wir diese sowohl praezise vom Hintergrund trennen als auch ihre Umgebung verstehen. Zu diesem Zweck führen wir Cityscapes ein, einen umfangreichen Datensatz zum Verständnis von Straßenszenen. Dieser hat sich seitdem als Standardbenchmark für Segmentierung und Erkennung etabliert. Darüber hinaus entwickeln wir Methoden, die die Notwendigkeit teurer Annotationen auf Pixelebene reduzieren. Wir konzentrieren uns hierbei auf die Aufgabe der Umgrenzungserkennung, d. h. das Erkennen der Umrisse relevanter Objekte und Oberflächen. Als nächstes machen wir den Sprung von Pixeln zu 3D-Oberflächen, vom Lokalisieren und Beschriften zum präzisen räumlichen Verständnis. Wir tragen eine Methode zur Schätzung der 3D-Körperoberfläche sowie der 3D-Körperpose bei, die die Vorteile von lernbasierten und modellbasierten Ansätzen vereint. Wir schließen die Arbeit mit einer ausführlichen Diskussion von Evaluationspraktiken im maschinellen Sehen ab. Unter anderem argumentieren wir, dass der Entwurf zukünftiger Datensätze neben aufgabenspezifischen Überlegungen vom allgemeinen Ziel der kombinatorischen Robustheit bestimmt werden sollte

Modelling of Floods in Urban Areas

This Special Issue publishes the latest advances and developments concerning the modelling of flooding in urban areas and contributes to our scientific understanding of the flooding processes and the appropriate evaluation of flood impacts. This issue contains contributions of novel methodologies including flood forecasting methods, data acquisition techniques, experimental research in urban drainage systems and/or sustainable drainage systems, and new numerical and simulation approaches in nine papers with contributions from over forty authors

Understanding human-centric images : from geometry to fashion

Understanding humans from photographs has always been a fundamental goal of computer vision. Early works focused on simple tasks such as detecting the location of individuals by means of bounding boxes. As the field progressed, harder and more higher level tasks have been undertaken. For example, from human detection came the 2D and 3D human pose estimation in which the task consisted of identifying the location in the image or space of all different body parts, e.g., head, torso, knees, arms, etc. Human attributes also became a great source of interest as they allow recognizing individuals and other properties such as gender or age. Later, the attention turned to the recognition of the action being performed. This, in general, relies on the previous works on pose estimation and attribute classification. Currently, even higher level tasks are being conducted such as predicting the motivations of human behavior or identifying the fashionability of an individual from a photograph. In this thesis we have developed a hierarchy of tools that cover all these range of problems, from low level feature point descriptors to high level fashion-aware conditional random fields models, all with the objective of understanding humans from monocular, RGB images. In order to build these high level models it is paramount to have a battery of robust and reliable low and mid level cues. Along these lines, we have proposed two low-level keypoint descriptors: one based on the theory of the heat diffusion on images, and the other that uses a convolutional neural network to learn discriminative image patch representations. We also introduce distinct low-level generative models for representing human pose: in particular we present a discrete model based on a directed acyclic graph and a continuous model that consists of poses clustered on a Riemannian manifold. As mid level cues we propose two 3D human pose estimation algorithms: one that estimates the 3D pose given a noisy 2D estimation, and an approach that simultaneously estimates both the 2D and 3D pose. Finally, we formulate higher level models built upon low and mid level cues for human understanding. Concretely, we focus on two different tasks in the context of fashion: semantic segmentation of clothing, and predicting the fashionability from images with metadata to ultimately provide fashion advice to the user. In summary, to robustly extract knowledge from images with the presence of humans it is necessary to build high level models that integrate low and mid level cues. In general, using and understanding strong features is critical for obtaining reliable performance. The main contribution of this thesis is in proposing a variety of low, mid and high level algorithms for human-centric images that can be integrated into higher level models for comprehending humans from photographs, as well as tackling novel fashion-oriented problems.Siempre ha sido una meta fundamental de la visión por computador la comprensión de los seres humanos. Los primeros trabajos se fijaron en objetivos sencillos tales como la detección en imágenes de la posición de los individuos. A medida que la investigación progresó se emprendieron tareas mucho más complejas. Por ejemplo, a partir de la detección de los humanos se pasó a la estimación en dos y tres dimensiones de su postura por lo que la tarea consistía en identificar la localización en la imagen o el espacio de las diferentes partes del cuerpo, por ejemplo cabeza, torso, rodillas, brazos, etc...También los atributos humanos se convirtieron en una gran fuente de interés ya que permiten el reconocimiento de los individuos y de sus propiedades como el género o la edad. Más tarde, la atención se centró en el reconocimiento de la acción realizada. Todos estos trabajos reposan en las investigaciones previas sobre la estimación de las posturas y la clasificación de los atributos. En la actualidad, se llevan a cabo investigaciones de un nivel aún superior sobre cuestiones tales como la predicción de las motivaciones del comportamiento humano o la identificación del tallaje de un individuo a partir de una fotografía. En esta tesis desarrollamos una jerarquía de herramientas que cubre toda esta gama de problemas, desde descriptores de rasgos de bajo nivel a modelos probabilísticos de campos condicionales de alto nivel reconocedores de la moda, todos ellos con el objetivo de mejorar la comprensión de los humanos a partir de imágenes RGB monoculares. Para construir estos modelos de alto nivel es decisivo disponer de una batería de datos robustos y fiables de nivel bajo y medio. En este sentido, proponemos dos descriptores novedosos de bajo nivel: uno se basa en la teoría de la difusión de calor en las imágenes y otro utiliza una red neural convolucional para aprender representaciones discriminativas de trozos de imagen. También introducimos diferentes modelos de bajo nivel generativos para representar la postura humana: en particular presentamos un modelo discreto basado en un gráfico acíclico dirigido y un modelo continuo que consiste en agrupaciones de posturas en una variedad de Riemann. Como señales de nivel medio proponemos dos algoritmos estimadores de la postura humana: uno que estima la postura en tres dimensiones a partir de una estimación imprecisa en el plano de la imagen y otro que estima simultáneamente la postura en dos y tres dimensiones. Finalmente construimos modelos de alto nivel a partir de señales de nivel bajo y medio para la comprensión de la persona a partir de imágenes. En concreto, nos centramos en dos diferentes tareas en el ámbito de la moda: la segmentación semántica del vestido y la predicción del buen ajuste de la prenda a partir de imágenes con meta-datos con la finalidad de aconsejar al usuario sobre moda. En resumen, para extraer conocimiento a partir de imágenes con presencia de seres humanos es preciso construir modelos de alto nivel que integren señales de nivel medio y bajo. En general, el punto crítico para obtener resultados fiables es el empleo y la comprensión de rasgos fuertes. La aportación fundamental de esta tesis es la propuesta de una variedad de algoritmos de nivel bajo, medio y alto para el tratamiento de imágenes centradas en seres humanos que pueden integrarse en modelos de alto nivel, para mejor comprensión de los seres humanos a partir de fotografías, así como abordar problemas planteados por el buen ajuste de las prendas

Estimating the concentration of physico chemical parameters in hydroelectric power plant reservoir

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines the amazon region and adjacent areas, such as the Pantanal, as world heritage territories, since they possess unique flora and fauna and great biodiversity. Unfortunately, these regions have increasingly been suffering from anthropogenic impacts. One of the main anthropogenic impacts in the last decades has been the construction of hydroelectric power plants. As a result, dramatic altering of these ecosystems has been observed, including changes in water levels, decreased oxygenation and loss of downstream organic matter, with consequent intense land use and population influxes after the filling and operation of these reservoirs. This, in turn, leads to extreme loss of biodiversity in these areas, due to the large-scale deforestation. The fishing industry in place before construction of dams and reservoirs, for example, has become much more intense, attracting large populations in search of work, employment and income. Environmental monitoring is fundamental for reservoir management, and several studies around the world have been performed in order to evaluate the water quality of these ecosystems. The Brazilian Amazon, in particular, goes through well defined annual hydrological cycles, which are very importante since their study aids in monitoring anthropogenic environmental impacts and can lead to policy and decision making with regard to environmental management of this area. The water quality of amazon reservoirs is greatly influenced by this defined hydrological cycle, which, in turn, causes variations of microbiological, physical and chemical characteristics. Eutrophication, one of the main processes leading to water deterioration in lentic environments, is mostly caused by anthropogenic activities, such as the releases of industrial and domestic effluents into water bodies. Physico-chemical water parameters typically related to eutrophication are, among others, chlorophyll-a levels, transparency and total suspended solids, which can, thus, be used to assess the eutrophic state of water bodies. Usually, these parameters must be investigated by going out to the field and manually measuring water transparency with the use of a Secchi disk, and taking water samples to the laboratory in order to obtain chlorophyll-a and total suspended solid concentrations. These processes are time- consuming and require trained personnel. However, we have proposed other techniques to environmental monitoring studies which do not require fieldwork, such as remote sensing and computational intelligence. Simulations in different reservoirs were performed to determine a relationship between these physico-chemical parameters and the spectral response. Based on the in situ measurements, empirical models were established to relate the reflectance of the reservoir measured by the satellites. The images were calibrated and corrected atmospherically. Statistical analysis using error estimation was used to evaluate the most accurate methodology. The Neural Networks were trained by hydrological cycle, and were useful to estimate the physicalchemical parameters of the water from the reflectance of visible bands and NIR of satellite images, with better results for the period with few clouds in the regions analyzed. The present study shows the application of wavelet neural network to estimate water quality parameters using concentration of the water samples collected in the Amazon reservoir and Cefni reservoir, UK. Sattelite imagens from Landsats and Sentinel-2 were used to train the ANN by hydrological cycle. The trained ANNs demonstrated good results between observed and estimated after Atmospheric corrections in satellites images. The ANNs showed in the results are useful to estimate these concentrations using remote sensing and wavelet transform for image processing. Therefore, the techniques proposed and applied in the present study are noteworthy since they can aid in evaluating important physico-chemical parameters, which, in turn, allows for identification of possible anthropogenic impacts, being relevant in environmental management and policy decision-making processes. The tests results showed that the predicted values have good accurate. Improving efficiency to monitor water quality parameters and confirm the reliability and accuracy of the approaches proposed for monitoring water reservoirs. This thesis contributes to the evaluation of the accuracy of different methods in the estimation of physical-chemical parameters, from satellite images and artificial neural networks. For future work, the accuracy of the results can be improved by adding more satellite images and testing new neural networks with applications in new water reservoirs