Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The proliferation of inexpensive sensors are paving the way for innovative AI technologies and applications. For instance, data from distributed RGB, IR, LiDAR and depth sensors are often integrated in, e.g., mobile robotics, autonomous driving, and video surveillance applications, to enhance perception. In such applications, cost-effective systems are required to recognize individuals, objects, and their behaviours from the massive amounts of data captured over multiple different sensors. Beyond the computational complexity, video recognition across multiple different domains (sensor modalities and operational conditions) may be degraded in real-world scenarios, due to cross-domain shifts, background clutter, variations in illumination, occlusion, etc. Deep learning (DL) models based on convolutional neural networks provide state-of-the-art performance in many visual recognition applications, yet their performance can decline in real-world applications when training on noisy data with limited or no annotations, and in the presence of domain shift between source and target (operational) data. The main long-term objective of this research program is to investigate and develop DL models for accurate video recognition and localization across multiple diverse domains with limited supervision. Given the high cost of collection and annotation of target data for training, these models will rely on weakly-supervised learning (WSL) to sustain a high level of performance. The specific objective consists in developing deep metric learning (DML) models based on weakly-labeled videos according to two main axes two main axes - (1) cross-domain adaptation and recognition, and (2) spatio-temporal object localization for interpretation. In Axis 1, knowledge distillation and multi-head methods are proposed to train DML models for weakly-supervised domain adaptation across different source and target domains. In Axis 2, methods for full-resolution class activation mapping methods and vision transformers are proposed to train DML models for weakly-supervised object localization and interpretation. Each axis will mainly be examined from a perspective of video re-identification applications using multiple distributed RGB and/or IR cameras, where video sequences are associated across different domains. This program will address concrete research problems related to the engineering of AI, and develop innovative methods that contribute to the state-of-art in several fields, most notably in DL and computer vision. Although this program will mostly focus on video-based recognition, these models are relevant in a wide range of tasks and applications. Given the recent popularity of DL, and it numerous commercial applications, this program will offer excellent opportunities for collaboration with academics, partnering with Canadian companies, training HQP, producing high impact publications, and initiating projects funded through other granting mechanisms.