News

Nuclei segmentation is a consequential task in biological image analysis, helping in the reading process of histology images. Different attributes, such as shape, population, cluster formation and density play a significant role in clinical practice for cancer diagnosis and its aggressiveness level assessment.  Given that the annotation of this data is carried out by expertized pathologists who reportedly [2] need to spend on average 120-150 hours to annotate 50 image patches (about 12M pixels), one can realize that annotated data are in scarcity. That is a big impediment for supervised methods, particularly for DL-based solutions that need massive annotated data to learn generalizable representations. Moreover, the annotations have a high inter-observer variation which is subject to the experience of the annotator [1]. On top of that, nuclei color and texture variations across images from different laboratories and multiple organs further widen the gap between train and test domains.

Given the aforementioned limitations, a natural way to solve the problem is to pursue an unsupervised line of research. Also, given the limited number of annotated data, our proposed method decouples from the DL paradigm and utilizes conceptually simpler techniques that make the pipeline more transparent in terms of segmentation decision making. It is mainly based on prior knowledge about the nuclei segmentation problem. CBM [3] pipeline starts out with a data-driven Color (C) transform, to highlight the nuclei cell regions over the background, followed by an adaptive Binarization (B) process built on the bi-modal assumption in each local region. That process is being run in a patch-wise manner, to leverage the local distribution assumptions between background and foreground. The final part of the pipeline uses Morphological (M) transformations that refines the segmented output based on certain [...]

Object pose estimation is an important problem in 3D scene understanding. Given a 3D point cloud object, it tries to estimate the 6-DOF pose comprising of rotation and translation with respect to a chosen coordinate system. The pose information can then be used for downstream tasks such as object grasping, obstacle avoidance, path planning, etc. which are commonly encountered in Robotics. In a complete scene understanding system, pose estimation usually comes after a 3D detection algorithm has localized and classified the object.

The pose estimation problem is similar to the problem of point cloud object registration which has been previously studied at MCL. In particular, the R-PointHop [1] method was proposed which successfully registers a source point cloud with a template. In the most recent work, we present a method termed PCRP that modifies R-PointHop for object pose estimation when a similar template object is unavailable. PCRP assumes a gallery set of pre-aligned point cloud objects and reuses the R-PointHop features to retrieve a similar object from the gallery. To do so, the pointwise features obtained using R-PointHop are aggregated into a global feature vector for nearest neighbor retrieval using the Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) [2]. Then, the input object’s pose is estimated by registering it with the retrieved object.

Though point cloud retrieval is extensively studied in contexts like shape retrieval or place recognition, retrieval in presence of different object poses is less talked of. In this work we show how the similar object can be retrieved even in presence of different object poses. This is achieved due to the rotation invariant features learned by R-PointHop. Another improvement over R-PointHop is the replacement of conventional eight octant partitioning based point attributes with more [...]

Blind Video Quality Assessment (BVQA) aims to predict perceptual qualities solely on the received videos. BVQA is essential to applications where source videos are unavailable such as assessing the quality of user-generated content and video conferencing. Early BVQA models were distortion-specific and mainly focused on transmission and compression related artifacts. Recent work tried to consider spatial and temporal distortions jointly and trained a regression model accordingly. Although they can achieve good performance on datasets with synthetic distortions, they do not work well for user-generated content datasets. DL-based BVQA solutions were proposed recently. They outperform all previous BVQA solutions.

We propose to design a lightweight and interpretable BVQA solution that is suitable for mobile and edge devices while its performance is competitive with that of DL models. We need to select a basic processing unit for quality assessment. For a full video sequence, we can decompose it into smaller units in three ways. First, crop out a fixed spatial location to generate a spatial video (sv) patch. Second, crop out a specific temporal duration with full spatial information as a temporal video (tv) patch. Third, crop out a partial spatial region as well as a small number of frames as a spatial-temporal video (stv) patch. They are illustrated in Fig. 1. We will adopt STCs as the basic units for the proposed BVQA method. We will give each STC a BVQA score and then ensemble their individual scores to generate the ultimate score of the full video. The diagram is shown in Fig. 2.

After the STC features are extracted, we will train a classifier to each output response and then ensemble their decision scores to yield the BVQA score for one STC. For the model training, we [...]

Text similarity modeling plays an important role in a variety of applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP), such as information retrieval, text clustering, and plagiarism detection. Moreover, it can work as an automatic evaluation metric in natural language generation, like machine translation and image captioning, so that expensive and time-consuming human labeling can be saved.

Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) [1] is an efficient model to measure the semantic distance of two texts. In WMD, word embedding which learns semantically meaningful representations for words are incorporated in earth mover’s distance. The distance between two texts A and B is the minimum cumulative distance that all words from the text A needs to travel to match exactly the text B.

We try to incorporate syntactic parsing, which brings meaningful structure information, into WMD in our work. There are mainly two parts that can control the flow in WMD. One is the distance matrix and the flow of each word. Firstly, to compute the distance matrix, the original WMD only compares an individual pair of word embeddings to measure the distance between words and doesn’t consider other information in the sentence. To measure the distance between words better, we first form sub-tree structures from the dependency parsing tree. Instead of only comparing the similarity of the word embeddings, we also compare the sub-tree similarity that contains the words. Secondly, A word’s flow can be regarded as the word’s importance. If giving more flow to important words, the most flow will transport between important words. So, the total transportation cost is mainly decided by the similarity of important words. We currently utilize the word’s dependency relation in the parsing tree to assign importance weights for words. In the future, we [...]

2021 has been a fruitful year for MCL. Some members graduated with impressive research work and began a new chapter of life. Some new students joined the MCL family and explored the joy of research. MCL members have made great efforts on their research and published quality research papers on top journals and conferences. We appreciate all efforts to all possibilities! Wish all MCL members a merry Christmas!

Image credits:

Image 1: https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/realistic-christmas-banner-with-branches-red-background_11210304.htm#query=merry%20christmas&position=42&from_view=keyword

Image 2: https://www.backyardcamp.ca/activities/gingerbread-christmas-cookie-trees