This paper presents estimation of deterioration levels of transmission towers via deep learning maximizing the canonical correlation between heterogeneous features. In the proposed method, we newly construct a correlation-maximizing deep extreme learning machine based on a local receptive field (CMDELM-LRF). For accurate deterioration level estimation, it is necessary to obtain semantic information that effectively represents deterioration levels. However, since the amount of training data for transmission towers is small, it is difficult to perform feature transformation by using many hidden layers such as general deep learning methods. In CMDELM-LRF, one hidden layer, which maximizes the canonical correlation between visual features and text features obtained from inspection text data, is newly inserted. Specifically, by using projections obtained by maximizing the canonical correlation as weight parameters of the hidden layer, feature transformation for extracting semantic information is realized without designing many hidden layers. This is the main contribution of this paper. Consequently, CMDELM-LRF realizes accurate deterioration level estimation from a small amount of training data.

A few-shot personalized saliency prediction based on adaptive image selection considering object and visual attention is presented in this paper. Since general methods predicting personalized saliency maps (PSMs) need a large number of training images, the establishment of a theory using a small number of training images is needed. To tackle this problem, although finding persons who have visual attention similar to that of a target person is effective, all persons have to commonly gaze at many images. Thus, it becomes difficult and unrealistic when considering their burden. On the other hand, this paper introduces a novel adaptive image selection (AIS) scheme that focuses on the relationship between human visual attention and objects in images. AIS focuses on both a diversity of objects in images and a variance of PSMs for the objects. Specifically, AIS selects images so that selected images have various kinds of objects to maintain their diversity. Moreover, AIS guarantees the high variance of PSMs for persons since it represents the regions that many persons commonly gaze at or do not gaze at. The proposed method enables selecting similar users from a small number of images by selecting images that have high diversities and variances. This is the technical contribution of this paper. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our personalized saliency prediction including the new image selection scheme.

This paper proposes a multimodal Transformer model that uses time-series data to detect and predict winter road surface conditions. For detecting or predicting road surface conditions, the previous approach focuses on the cooperative use of multiple modalities as inputs, e.g., images captured by fixed-point cameras (road surface images) and auxiliary data related to road surface conditions under simple modality integration. Although such an approach achieves performance improvement compared to the method using only images or auxiliary data, there is a demand for further consideration of the way to integrate heterogeneous modalities. The proposed method realizes a more effective modality integration using a cross-attention mechanism and time-series processing. Concretely, when integrating multiple modalities, feature compensation through mutual complementation between modalities is realized through a feature integration technique based on a cross-attention mechanism, and the representational ability of the integrated features is enhanced. In addition, by introducing time-series processing for the input data across several timesteps, it is possible to consider the temporal changes in the road surface conditions. Experiments are conducted for both detection and prediction tasks using data corresponding to the current winter condition and data corresponding to a few hours after the current winter condition, respectively. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for both tasks. In addition to the construction of the classification model for winter road surface conditions, we first attempt to visualize the classification results, especially the prediction results, through the image style transfer model as supplemental extended experiments on image generation at the end of the paper.

This paper presents an accurate distress classification method via adaptive Bayesian network model selection for maintenance inspection of road structures. The main contribution of this paper is adaptive selection of two Bayesian network models concerning classification performance. The proposed method trains a tag-based Bayesian network model based on inspection items and estimates its classification performance. Furthermore, for distresses that degrade the classification performance of the tag-based Bayesian network model, the proposed method trains another multifeature Bayesian network model based on inspection items and distress images. Consequently, the proposed method can adaptively select optimal Bayesian network models according to the estimated performance of the tag-based Bayesian network model. In actual maintenance inspection, distresses are generally classified either from inspection items alone or from both inspection items and visual information of distress images—i.e., distress classification has two patterns. Therefore the adaptive model selection approach is suitable for this classification scheme. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several comparative methods and is suitable for actual maintenance inspection due to its low computation costs.

Traffic sign recognition is a complex and challenging yet popular problem that can assist drivers on the road and reduce traffic accidents. Most existing methods for traffic sign recognition use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and can achieve high recognition accuracy. However, these methods first require a large number of carefully crafted traffic sign datasets for the training process. Moreover, since traffic signs differ in each country and there is a variety of traffic signs, these methods need to be fine-tuned when recognizing new traffic sign categories. To address these issues, we propose a traffic sign matching method for zero-shot recognition. Our proposed method can perform traffic sign recognition without training data by directly matching the similarity of target and template traffic sign images. Our method uses the midlevel features of CNNs to obtain robust feature representations of traffic signs without additional training or fine-tuning. We discovered that midlevel features improve the accuracy of zero-shot traffic sign recognition. The proposed method achieves promising recognition results on the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark open dataset and a real-world dataset taken from Sapporo City, Japan.

In soccer, quantitatively evaluating the performance of players and teams is essential to improve tactical coaching and players’ decision-making abilities. To achieve this, some methods use predicted probabilities of shoot event occurrences to quantify player performances, but conventional shoot prediction models have not performed well and have failed to consider the reliability of the event probability. This paper proposes a novel method that effectively utilizes players’ spatio-temporal relations and prediction uncertainty to predict shoot event occurrences with greater accuracy and robustness. Specifically, we represent players’ relations as a complete bipartite graph, which effectively incorporates soccer domain knowledge, and capture latent features by applying a graph convolutional recurrent neural network (GCRNN) to the constructed graph. Our model utilizes a Bayesian neural network to predict the probability of shoot event occurrence, considering spatio-temporal relations between players and prediction uncertainty. In our experiments, we confirmed that the proposed method outperformed several other methods in terms of prediction performance, and we found that considering players’ distances significantly affects the prediction accuracy.