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Vassilis Athitsos

Vassilis Athitsos appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

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Computer VisionArtificial IntelligenceDatabasesMachine LearningComputation and Languageeess.IVHuman-Computer Interaction

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Published work

10 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Making AI Drafts Count: A Quality Threshold in Audio Description Workflows

Audio description (AD) narrates visual elements in video for blind and low-vision audiences. Recent work has shown that giving novice describers an AI-generated draft to start from helps produce higher-quality AD and lowers the barrier to entry. What remains an open question is how draft quality shapes the editing process. We investigate this through GenAD, an AD generation pipeline that incorporates accessibility guidelines and contextual video information, and RefineAD, an editing interface for human revisions. Human-AI contributions are measured across text, timing, and delivery. In a within-subjects study, we compared authoring from scratch against editing AI drafts of varying quality. GenAD drafts cut completion time by more than half and significantly reduced cognitive load. In contrast, baseline drafts generated from simple, unguided prompts offered only modest benefits, pointing to a minimum quality threshold for effectiveness. Qualitative findings suggest this threshold is content-dependent; as visual complexity increases, so does the quality needed from AI drafts. We propose this as a design principle: effective AI assistance should clear a quality threshold suited to the target content, rather than simply be present.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

A Survey on Deep learning based Document Image Enhancement

Digitized documents such as scientific articles, tax forms, invoices, contract papers, historic texts are widely used nowadays. These document images could be degraded or damaged due to various reasons including poor lighting conditions, shadow, distortions like noise and blur, aging, ink stain, bleed-through, watermark, stamp, etc. Document image enhancement plays a crucial role as a pre-processing step in many automated document analysis and recognition tasks such as character recognition. With recent advances in deep learning, many methods are proposed to enhance the quality of these document images. In this paper, we review deep learning-based methods, datasets, and metrics for six main document image enhancement tasks, including binarization, debluring, denoising, defading, watermark removal, and shadow removal. We summarize the recent works for each task and discuss their features, challenges, and limitations. We introduce multiple document image enhancement tasks that have received little to no attention, including over and under exposure correction, super resolution, and bleed-through removal. We identify several promising research directions and opportunities for future research.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

All You Need In Sign Language Production

Sign Language is the dominant form of communication language used in the deaf and hearing-impaired community. To make an easy and mutual communication between the hearing-impaired and the hearing communities, building a robust system capable of translating the spoken language into sign language and vice versa is fundamental. To this end, sign language recognition and production are two necessary parts for making such a two-way system. Sign language recognition and production need to cope with some critical challenges. In this survey, we review recent advances in Sign Language Production (SLP) and related areas using deep learning. To have more realistic perspectives to sign language, we present an introduction to the Deaf culture, Deaf centers, psychological perspective of sign language, the main differences between spoken language and sign language. Furthermore, we present the fundamental components of a bi-directional sign language translation system, discussing the main challenges in this area. Also, the backbone architectures and methods in SLP are briefly introduced and the proposed taxonomy on SLP is presented. Finally, a general framework for SLP and performance evaluation, and also a discussion on the recent developments, advantages, and limitations in SLP, commenting on possible lines for future research are presented.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

TriHorn-Net: A Model for Accurate Depth-Based 3D Hand Pose Estimation

3D hand pose estimation methods have made significant progress recently. However, the estimation accuracy is often far from sufficient for specific real-world applications, and thus there is significant room for improvement. This paper proposes TriHorn-Net, a novel model that uses specific innovations to improve hand pose estimation accuracy on depth images. The first innovation is the decomposition of the 3D hand pose estimation into the estimation of 2D joint locations in the depth image space (UV), and the estimation of their corresponding depths aided by two complementary attention maps. This decomposition prevents depth estimation, which is a more difficult task, from interfering with the UV estimations at both the prediction and feature levels. The second innovation is PixDropout, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first appearance-based data augmentation method for hand depth images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three public benchmark datasets. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/mrezaei92/TriHorn-Net.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Dehaze-GLCGAN: Unpaired Single Image De-hazing via Adversarial Training

Single image de-hazing is a challenging problem, and it is far from solved. Most current solutions require paired image datasets that include both hazy images and their corresponding haze-free ground-truth images. However, in reality, lighting conditions and other factors can produce a range of haze-free images that can serve as ground truth for a hazy image, and a single ground truth image cannot capture that range. This limits the scalability and practicality of paired image datasets in real-world applications. In this paper, we focus on unpaired single image de-hazing and we do not rely on the ground truth image or physical scattering model. We reduce the image de-hazing problem to an image-to-image translation problem and propose a dehazing Global-Local Cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Network (Dehaze-GLCGAN). Generator network of Dehaze-GLCGAN combines an encoder-decoder architecture with residual blocks to better recover the haze free scene. We also employ a global-local discriminator structure to deal with spatially varying haze. Through ablation study, we demonstrate the effectiveness of different factors in the performance of the proposed network. Our extensive experiments over three benchmark datasets show that our network outperforms previous work in terms of PSNR and SSIM while being trained on smaller amount of data compared to other methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Evaluating Single Image Dehazing Methods Under Realistic Sunlight Haze

Haze can degrade the visibility and the image quality drastically, thus degrading the performance of computer vision tasks such as object detection. Single image dehazing is a challenging and ill-posed problem, despite being widely studied. Most existing methods assume that haze has a uniform/homogeneous distribution and haze can have a single color, i.e. grayish white color similar to smoke, while in reality haze can be distributed non-uniformly with different patterns and colors. In this paper, we focus on haze created by sunlight as it is one of the most prevalent type of haze in the wild. Sunlight can generate non-uniformly distributed haze with drastic density changes due to sun rays and also a spectrum of haze color due to sunlight color changes during the day. This presents a new challenge to image dehazing methods. For these methods to be practical, this problem needs to be addressed. To quantify the challenges and assess the performance of these methods, we present a sunlight haze benchmark dataset, Sun-Haze, containing 107 hazy images with different types of haze created by sunlight having a variety of intensity and color. We evaluate a representative set of state-of-the-art image dehazing methods on this benchmark dataset in terms of standard metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, CIEDE2000, PI and NIQE. This uncovers the limitation of the current methods, and questions their underlying assumptions as well as their practicality.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Evaluation of Deep Learning based Pose Estimation for Sign Language Recognition

Human body pose estimation and hand detection are two important tasks for systems that perform computer vision-based sign language recognition(SLR). However, both tasks are challenging, especially when the input is color videos, with no depth information. Many algorithms have been proposed in the literature for these tasks, and some of the most successful recent algorithms are based on deep learning. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for human pose estimation for SLR domain. We evaluate the performance of two deep learning based pose estimation methods, by performing user-independent experiments on our dataset. We also perform transfer learning, and we obtain results that demonstrate that transfer learning can improve pose estimation accuracy. The dataset and results from these methods can create a useful baseline for future works.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2016arXiv

Orion: Enabling Suggestions in a Visual Query Builder for Ultra-Heterogeneous Graphs

The database community has long recognized the importance of graphical query interface to the usability of data management systems. Yet, relatively less has been done. We present Orion, a visual interface for querying ultra-heterogeneous graphs. It iteratively assists users in query graph construction by making suggestions via machine learning methods. In its active mode, Orion automatically suggests top-k edges to be added to a query graph. In its passive mode, the user adds a new edge manually, and Orion suggests a ranked list of labels for the edge. Orion's edge ranking algorithm, Random Decision Paths (RDP), makes use of a query log to rank candidate edges by how likely they will match the user's query intent. Extensive user studies using Freebase demonstrated that Orion users have a 70% success rate in constructing complex query graphs, a significant improvement over the 58% success rate by the users of a baseline system that resembles existing visual query builders. Furthermore, using active mode only, the RDP algorithm was compared with several methods adapting other machine learning algorithms such as random forests and naive Bayes classifier, as well as class association rules and recommendation systems based on singular value decomposition. On average, RDP required 40 suggestions to correctly reach a target query graph (using only its active mode of suggestion) while other methods required 1.5--4 times as many suggestions.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2014arXiv

Principal motion components for gesture recognition using a single-example

This paper introduces principal motion components (PMC), a new method for one-shot gesture recognition. In the considered scenario a single training-video is available for each gesture to be recognized, which limits the application of traditional techniques (e.g., HMMs). In PMC, a 2D map of motion energy is obtained per each pair of consecutive frames in a video. Motion maps associated to a video are processed to obtain a PCA model, which is used for recognition under a reconstruction-error approach. The main benefits of the proposed approach are its simplicity, easiness of implementation, competitive performance and efficiency. We report experimental results in one-shot gesture recognition using the ChaLearn Gesture Dataset; a benchmark comprising more than 50,000 gestures, recorded as both RGB and depth video with a Kinect camera. Results obtained with PMC are competitive with alternative methods proposed for the same data set.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2012arXiv

A Generic Framework for Efficient and Effective Subsequence Retrieval

This paper proposes a general framework for matching similar subsequences in both time series and string databases. The matching results are pairs of query subsequences and database subsequences. The framework finds all possible pairs of similar subsequences if the distance measure satisfies the "consistency" property, which is a property introduced in this paper. We show that most popular distance functions, such as the Euclidean distance, DTW, ERP, the Frechet distance for time series, and the Hamming distance and Levenshtein distance for strings, are all "consistent". We also propose a generic index structure for metric spaces named "reference net". The reference net occupies O(n) space, where n is the size of the dataset and is optimized to work well with our framework. The experiments demonstrate the ability of our method to improve retrieval performance when combined with diverse distance measures. The experiments also illustrate that the reference net scales well in terms of space overhead and query time.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access