Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) have long been considered an ideal, yet unscalable solution for improving the robustness and the predictive uncertainty of deep neural networks. While they could capture more accurately the posterior distribution of the network parameters, most BNN approaches are either limited to small networks or rely on constraining assumptions, e.g., parameter independence. These drawbacks have enabled prominence of simple, but computationally heavy approaches such as Deep Ensembles, whose training and testing costs increase linearly with the number of networks. In this work we aim for efficient deep BNNs amenable to complex computer vision architectures, e.g., ResNet-50 DeepLabv3+, and tasks, e.g., semantic segmentation and image classification, with fewer assumptions on the parameters. We achieve this by leveraging variational autoencoders (VAEs) to learn the interaction and the latent distribution of the parameters at each network layer. Our approach, called Latent-Posterior BNN (LP-BNN), is compatible with the recent BatchEnsemble method, leading to highly efficient (in terms of computation and memory during both training and testing) ensembles. LP-BNNs attain competitive results across multiple metrics in several challenging benchmarks for image classification, semantic segmentation, and out-of-distribution detection.

This paper studies the problem of crack detection in images characterized by high gradient backgrounds. We propose an extension of a Marked Point Process model which has been successfully used for wrinkle detection. We show that our method exhibits state of the art results on a difficult image dataset, by proposing a robust trade-off between local analysis approaches, which exploit a limited amount of information around the area of interest, and global reconnection strategies, which aim to detect the crack at image level. Additional tests on a standard dataset show that the proposed method exhibits excellent performance on images with a more uniform background as well, underlining its usefulness in varying contexts.

Monocular depth is important in many tasks, such as 3D reconstruction and autonomous driving. Deep learning based models achieve state-of-the-art performance in this field. A set of novel approaches for estimating monocular depth consists of transforming the regression task into a classification one. However, there is a lack of detailed descriptions and comparisons for Classification Approaches for Regression (CAR) in the community and no in-depth exploration of their potential for uncertainty estimation. To this end, this paper will introduce a taxonomy and summary of CAR approaches, a new uncertainty estimation solution for CAR, and a set of experiments on depth accuracy and uncertainty quantification for CAR-based models on KITTI dataset. The experiments reflect the differences in the portability of various CAR methods on two backbones. Meanwhile, the newly proposed method for uncertainty estimation can outperform the ensembling method with only one forward propagation.