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J.C. van Gemert

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Journal article (2026) - P. Benschop, J.C. van Gemert, J.P. Mense, J.H.G. Dauwels
Video captured for action recognition often contains sensitive appearance cues such as faces, skin color, and clothing. Models trained on such data may exploit these cues rather than the underlying motion, raising privacy concerns in real-world deployment. In this work, we study action recognition under a motion-focused constraint: the model receives only motion representations that capture pixel displacement over time, while reducing appearance cues that expose identity or scene context. We focus on motion-history images and optical flow as learning-free representations that reduce identifiable appearance information while retaining action recognition accuracy. Our motion I3D model achieves approximately 31% and 52% zero-shot top-1 accuracy on HMDB-51 and UCF-101, respectively, outperforming non-CLIP direct-transfer baselines trained on Kinetics-400 despite operating without any appearance input. In 16-shot adaptation, the same model reaches 52% and 83% top-1 accuracy. In the domain adaptation setting on TP-HMDB↔TP-UCF, our motion-focused models achieve higher action recognition accuracy than prior privacy-preserving methods. Sensitive attribute predictability is reduced relative to RGB by a comparable margin, without requiring a learned privacy filter. On PA-HMDB51, optical flow is the strongest motion representation for privacy preservation, approaching chance level for skin-color prediction and remaining below RGB on most privacy attributes, indicating that motion representations retain useful action information while exposing less personal information. ...

Hierarchical Stochastic Neighbor Embedding for Accelerated Video ANnotAtions

Conference paper (2025) - Alexandru Bobe, Jan C. van Gemert
Video annotation is a critical and time-consuming task in computer vision research and applications. This paper presents a novel annotation pipeline that uses pre-extracted features and dimensionality reduction to accelerate the temporal video annotation process. Our approach uses Hierarchical Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (HSNE) to create a multi-scale representation of video features, allowing annotators to efficiently explore and label large video datasets. We demonstrate significant improvements in annotation effort compared to traditional linear methods, achieving more than a 10x reduction in clicks required for annotating over 12 h of video. Our experiments on multiple datasets show the effectiveness and robustness of our pipeline across various scenarios. Moreover, we investigate the optimal configuration of HSNE parameters for different datasets. Our work provides a promising direction for scaling up video annotation efforts in the era of video understanding. ...
Conference paper (2025) - Hesam Aragh, Jan van Gemert, Nergis Tomen
Event cameras offer low-power visual sensing capabilities ideal for edge-device applications. However, their high event rate, driven by high temporal details, can be restrictive in terms of bandwidth and computational resources. In edge AI applications, determining the minimum amount of events for specific tasks can allow reducing the event rate to improve bandwidth, memory, and processing efficiency. In this paper, we study the effect of event subsampling on the accuracy of event data classification using convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Surprisingly, across various datasets, the number of events per video can be reduced by an order of magnitude with little drop in accuracy, revealing the extent to which we can push the boundaries in accuracy vs. event rate trade-off. Additionally, we also find that lower classification accuracy in high subsampling rates is not solely attributable to information loss due to the subsampling of the events, but that the training of CNNs can be challenging in highly subsampled scenarios, where the sensitivity to hyperparameters increases. We quantify training instability across multiple event-based classification datasets using a novel metric for evaluating the hyperparameter sensitivity of CNNs in different subsampling settings. Finally, we analyze the weight gradients of the network to gain insight into this instability. The code and additional resources for this paper can be found at: https://github.com/hesamaraghi/pushing-boundaries-event-subsampling. ...

Unsupervised Physical Parameter Estimation for Continuous Dynamical Systems

Extracting physical dynamical system parameters from recorded observations is key in natural science. Current methods for automatic parameter estimation from video train supervised deep networks on large datasets. Such datasets require labels, which are difficult to acquire. While some unsupervised techniques-which depend on frame prediction-exist, they suffer from long training times, initialization in-stabilities, only consider motion-based dynamical systems, and are evaluated mainly on synthetic data. In this work, we propose an unsupervised method to estimate the physical parameters of known, continuous governing equations from single videos suitable for different dynamical systems beyond motion and robust to initialization. Moreover, we remove the need for frame prediction by implementing a KL-divergence-based loss function in the latent space, which avoids convergence to trivial solutions and reduces model size and compute. We first evaluate our model on synthetic data, as commonly done. After which, we take the field closer to reality by recording Delfys75: our own real-world dataset of 75 videos for five different types of dynamical systems to evaluate our method and others. Our method compares favorably to others. Code and data are available online: https://github.com/Alejandro-neuro/Learning_physics_from_video. ...
Conference paper (2025) - Ombretta Strafforello, Osman Semih Kayhan, Oana Inel, Klamer Schutte, Jan van Gemert
Previous work shows that humans tend to prefer large bounding boxes over small bounding boxes with the same IoU. However, we show here that commonly used object detectors predict large and small boxes equally often. In this work, we investigate how to align automatically detected object boxes with human preference and study whether this improves human quality perception. We evaluate the performance of three commonly used object detectors through a user study (N = 123). We find that humans prefer object detections that are upscaled with factors of 1.5 or 2, even if the corresponding AP is close to 0. Motivated by this result, we propose an asymmetric bounding box regression loss that encourages large over small predicted bounding boxes. Our evaluation study shows that object detectors fine-tuned with the asymmetric loss are better aligned with human preference and are preferred over fixed scaling factors. A qualitative evaluation shows that human preference might be influenced by some object characteristics, like object shape. ...

A Benchmark Dataset for Floor Plan Generation of Building Complexes

Conference paper (2025) - Casper van Engelenburg, Fatemeh Mostafavi, Emanuel Kuhn, Yuntae Jeon, Michael Franzen, Matthias Standfest, Jan van Gemert, Seyran Khademi
Diverse and realistic floor plan data are essential for the development of useful computer-aided methods in architectural design. Today’s large-scale floor plan datasets predominantly feature simple floor plan layouts, typically representing single-apartment dwellings only. To compensate for the mismatch between current datasets and the real world, we develop Modified Swiss Dwellings (MSD) – the first large-scale floor plan dataset that contains a significant share of layouts of multi-apartment dwellings. MSD features over 5.3K floor plans of medium- to large-scale building complexes, covering over 18.9K distinct apartments. We validate that existing approaches for floor plan generation, while effective in simpler scenarios, cannot yet seamlessly address the challenges posed by MSD. Our benchmark calls for new research in floor plan machine understanding. Code and data are open. ...
In this paper, we jointly combine image classification and image denoising, aiming to enhance human perception of noisy images captured by edge devices, like low-light security cameras. In such settings, it is important to retain the ability of humans to verify the automatic classification decision and thus jointly denoise the image to enhance human perception. Since edge devices have little computational power, we explicitly optimize for efficiency by proposing a novel architecture that integrates the two tasks. Additionally, we alter a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method, which searches for classifiers to search for the integrated model while optimizing for a target latency, classification accuracy, and denoising performance. The NAS architectures outperform our manually designed alternatives in both denoising and classification, offering a significant improvement to human perception. Our approach empowers users to construct architectures tailored to domains like medical imaging, surveillance systems, and industrial inspections. ...

A Compact Mamba Network for Speech Denoising using Channel Pruning

Conference paper (2025) - Sjoerd Groot, Qinyu Chen, Jan C. Van Gemert, Chang Gao
This paper presents CleanUMamba, a time-domain neural network architecture designed for real-time causal audio denoising directly applied to raw waveforms. CleanUMamba leverages a U-Net encoder-decoder structure, incorporating the Mamba state-space model in the bottleneck layer. By replacing conventional self-attention and LSTM mechanisms with Mamba, our architecture offers superior denoising performance while maintaining a constant memory footprint, enabling streaming operation. To enhance efficiency, we applied structured channel pruning, achieving an 8X reduction in model size without compromising audio quality. Our model demonstrates strong results in the Interspeech 2020 Deep Noise Suppression challenge. Specifically, CleanUMamba achieves a PESQ score of 2.42 and STOI of 95.1% with only 442K parameters and 468M MACs, matching or outperforming larger models in real-time performance. Code will be available at: https://github.com/lab-emi/CleanUMamba ...
Journal article (2025) - Alexander Gielisse, Jan Van Gemert
Implicit neural representations (INRs) such as NeRF and SIREN encode a signal in neural network parameters and show excellent results for signal reconstruction. Using INRs for downstream tasks, such as classification, is however not straightforward. Inherent symmetries in the parameters pose challenges and current works primarily focus on designing architectures that are equivariant to these symmetries. However, INR-based classification still significantly under-performs compared to pixel-based methods like CNNs. This work presents an end-to-end strategy for initializing SIRENs together with a learned learning-rate scheme, to yield representations that improve classification accuracy. We show that a simple, straightforward, Transformer model applied to a meta-learned SIREN, without incorporating explicit symmetry equivariances, outperforms the current state-of-the-art. On the CIFAR-10 SIREN classification task, we improve the state-of-the-art without augmentations from 38.8% to 59.6%, and from 63.4% to 64.7% with augmentations. We demonstrate scalability on the high-resolution Imagenette dataset achieving reasonable reconstruction quality with a classification accuracy of 60.8% and are the first to do INR classification on the full ImageNet-1K dataset where we achieve a SIREN classification performance of 23.6%. To the best of our knowledge, no other SIREN classification approach has managed to set a classification baseline for any high-resolution image dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/SanderGielisse/MWT. ...

Balancing Data Efficiency and Accuracy in Event Camera Subsampling

Conference paper (2025) - Hesam Araghi, Jan Van Gemert, Nergis Tomen
Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and power efficiency, making them well-suited for edge AI applications. However, their high event rates present challenges for data transmission and processing. Subsampling methods provide a practical solution, but their effect on downstream visual tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we systematically evaluate six hardware-friendly subsampling methods using convolutional neural networks for event video classification on various benchmark datasets. We hypothesize that events from high-density regions carry more task-relevant information and are therefore better suited for subsampling. To test this, we introduce a simple causal density-based subsampling method, demonstrating improved classification accuracy in sparse regimes. Our analysis further highlights key factors affecting subsampling performance, including sensitivity to hyperparameters and failure cases in scenarios with large event count variance. These findings provide insights for utilization of hardware-efficient subsampling strategies that balance data efficiency and task accuracy. The code for this paper will be released at: https://github.com/hesamaraghi/event-camera-subsampling-methods. ...

Fast learning of cnns based on layer dropping

Journal article (2024) - Giorgio Cruciata, Luca Cruciata, Liliana Lo Presti, Jan van Gemert, Marco La Cascia
This paper proposes a new method to improve the training efficiency of deep convolutional neural networks. During training, the method evaluates scores to measure how much each layer’s parameters change and whether the layer will continue learning or not. Based on these scores, the network is scaled down such that the number of parameters to be learned is reduced, yielding a speed-up in training. Unlike state-of-the-art methods that try to compress the network to be used in the inference phase or to limit the number of operations performed in the back-propagation phase, the proposed method is novel in that it focuses on reducing the number of operations performed by the network in the forward propagation during training. The proposed training strategy has been validated on two widely used architecture families: VGG and ResNet. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and Imagenette show that, with the proposed method, the training time of the models is more than halved without significantly impacting accuracy. The FLOPs reduction in the forward propagation during training ranges from 17.83% for VGG-11 to 83.74% for ResNet-152. As for the accuracy, the impact depends on the depth of the model and the decrease is between 0.26% and 2.38% for VGGs and between 0.4 and 3.2% for ResNets. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in speeding up learning of CNNs. The technique will be especially useful in applications where fine-tuning or online training of convolutional models is required, for instance because data arrive sequentially. ...
Journal article (2024) - Mark Basting, Robert Jan Bruintjes, Thaddäus Wiedemer, Matthias Kümmerer, Matthias Bethge, Jan van Gemert
Objects can take up an arbitrary number of pixels in an image: Objects come in different sizes, and, photographs of these objects may be taken at various distances to the camera. These pixel size variations are problematic for CNNs, causing them to learn separate filters for scaled variants of the same objects which prevents learning across scales. This is addressed by scale-equivariant approaches that share features across a set of pre-determined fixed internal scales. These works, however, give little information about how to best choose the internal scales when the underlying distribution of sizes, or scale distribution, in the dataset, is unknown. In this work we investigate learning the internal scales distribution in scale-equivariant CNNs, allowing them to adapt to unknown data scale distributions. We show that our method can learn the internal scales on various data scale distributions and can adapt the internal scales in current scale-equivariant approaches. ...
Conference paper (2024) - Xinqi Li, Yi Zhang, Yidong Zhao, Jan van Gemert, Qian Tao
Quantitative cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an increasingly important diagnostic tool for cardiovascular diseases. Yet, co-registration of all baseline images within the quantitative MRI sequence is essential for the accuracy and precision of quantitative maps. However, co-registering all baseline images from a quantitative cardiac MRI sequence remains a nontrivial task because of the simultaneous changes in intensity and contrast, in combination with cardiac and respiratory motion. To address the challenge, we propose a novel motion correction framework based on robust principle component analysis (rPCA) that decomposes quantitative cardiac MRI into low-rank and sparse components, and we integrate the groupwise CNN-based registration backbone within the rPCA framework. The low-rank component of rPCA corresponds to the quantitative mapping (i.e. limited degree of freedom in variation), while the sparse component corresponds to the residual motion, making it easier to formulate and solve the groupwise registration problem. We evaluated our proposed method on cardiac T1 mapping by the modified Look-Locker inversion recovery (MOLLI) sequence, both before and after the Gadolinium contrast agent administration. Our experiments showed that our method effectively improved registration performance over baseline methods without introducing rPCA, and reduced quantitative mapping error in both in-domain (pre-contrast MOLLI) and out-of-domain (post-contrast MOLLI) inference. The proposed rPCA framework is generic and can be integrated with other registration backbones. ...

Mixed methods for linking research in the humanities and in information technology (ArchiMediaL)

Book chapter (2023) - Tino Mager, Seyran Khademi, Ronald Siebes, Jan van Gemert, Victor de Boer, Beate Löffler, Carola Hein
Information on the history of architecture is embedded in our daily surroundings, in vernacular and heritage buildings and in physical objects, photographs and plans. Historians study these tangible and intangible artefacts and the communities that built and used them. Thus valuable insights are gained into the past and the present as they also provide a foundation for designing the future. Given that our understanding of the past is limited by the inadequate availability of data, the article demonstrates that advanced computer tools can help gain more and well-linked data from the past. Computer vision can make a decisive contribution to the identification of image content in historical photographs. This application is particularly interesting for architectural history, where visual sources play an essential role in understanding the built environment of the past, yet lack of reliable metadata often hinders the use of materials. The automated recognition contributes to making a variety of image sources usable for research. ...
Conference paper (2023) - Yunqiang Li, Jan C. van Gemert, Torsten Hoefler, Bert Moons, Evangelos Eleftheriou, Bram-Ernst Verhoef
Deep learning algorithms are increasingly employed at the edge. However, edge devices are resource constrained and thus require efficient deployment of deep neural networks. Pruning methods are a key tool for edge deployment as they can improve storage, compute, memory bandwidth, and energy usage. In this paper we propose a novel accurate pruning technique that allows precise control over the output network size. Our method uses an efficient optimal transportation scheme which we make end-to-end differentiable and which automatically tunes the exploration-exploitation behavior of the algorithm to find accurate sparse sub-networks. We show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous pruning methods on 3 different datasets, using 5 different models, across a wide range of pruning ratios, and with two types of sparsity budgets and pruning granularities. ...
Conference paper (2023) - Ombretta Strafforello, Klamer Schutte, Jan van Gemert
Many real-world applications, from sport analysis to surveillance, benefit from automatic long-term action recognition. In the current deep learning paradigm for automatic action recognition, it is imperative that models are trained and tested on datasets and tasks that evaluate if such models actually learn and reason over long-term information. In this work, we propose a method to evaluate how suitable a video dataset is to evaluate models for long-term action recognition. To this end, we define a long-term action as excluding all the videos that can be correctly recognized using solely short-term information. We test this definition on existing long-term classification tasks on three popular real-world datasets, namely Breakfast, CrossTask and LVU, to determine if these datasets are truly evaluating long-term recognition. Our study reveals that these datasets can be effectively solved using shortcuts based on short-term information. Following this finding, we encourage long-term action recognition researchers to make use of datasets that need long-term information to be solved. ...
Conference paper (2023) - T.F. Edixhoven, A. Lengyel, J.C. van Gemert
In this paper we show how Group Equivariant Convolutional Neural Networks use subsampling to learn to break equivariance to the rotation and reflection symmetries. We focus on the 2D rotations and reflections and investigate the impact of the broken equivariance on network performance. We show that a change in the input dimension of a network as small as a single pixel can be enough for commonly used architectures to become approximately equivariant, rather than exactly. We investigate the impact of networks not being exactly equivariant and find that approximately equivariant networks generalise significantly worse to unseen symmetries compared to their exactly equivariant counterparts. However, when the symmetries in the training data are not identical to the symmetries of the network, we find that approximately equivariant networks can relax their equivariance constraints, matching or outperforming exactly equivariant networks on common benchmarks. ...

Video object detection by single-frame object location anticipation

Conference paper (2023) - Xin Liu, Jan C. van Gemert, Fatemeh Karimi Nejadasl, Olaf Booij, Silvia L. Pintea
Objects in videos are typically characterized by continuous smooth motion. We exploit continuous smooth motion in three ways. 1) Improved accuracy by using object motion as an additional source of supervision, which we obtain by anticipating object locations from a static keyframe. 2) Improved efficiency by only doing the expensive feature computations on a small subset of all frames. Because neighboring video frames are often redundant, we only compute features for a single static keyframe and predict object locations in subsequent frames. 3) Reduced annotation cost, where we only annotate the keyframe and use smooth pseudo-motion between keyframes. We demonstrate computational efficiency, annotation efficiency, and improved mean average precision compared to the state-of-the-art on four datasets: ImageNet VID, EPIC KITCHENS-55, YouTube-BoundingBoxes and Waymo Open dataset. Our source code is available at https://github.com/L-KID/Video-object-detection-by-location-anticipation. ...

A Visually-Guided Graph Edit Distance for Floor Plan Similarity

We propose a simple yet effective metric that measures structural similarity between visual instances of architectural floor plans, without the need for learning. Qualitatively, our experiments show that the retrieval results are similar to deeply learned methods. Effectively comparing instances of floor plan data is paramount to the success of machine understanding of floor plan data, including the assessment of floor plan generative models and floor plan recommendation systems. Comparing visual floor plan images goes beyond a sole pixel-wise visual examination and is crucially about similarities and differences in the shapes and relations between subdivisions that compose the layout. Currently, deep metric learning approaches are used to learn a pair-wise vector representation space that closely mimics the structural similarity, in which the models are trained on similarity labels that are obtained by Intersection-over-Union (IoU). To compensate for the lack of structural awareness in IoU, graph-based approaches such as Graph Matching Networks (GMNs) are used, which require pairwise inference for comparing data instances, making GMNs less practical for retrieval applications. In this paper, an effective evaluation metric for judging the structural similarity of floor plans, coined SSIG (Structural Similarity by IoU and GED), is proposed based on both image and graph distances. In addition, an efficient algorithm is developed that uses SSIG to rank a large-scale floor plan database. Code will be openly available. ...
Conference paper (2023) - Silvia L. Pintea, Yancong Lin, Jouke Dijkstra, Jan C. van Gemert
A number of computer vision deep regression approaches report improved results when adding a classification loss to the regression loss. Here, we explore why this is useful in practice and when it is beneficial. To do so, we start from precisely controlled dataset variations and data samplings and find that the effect of adding a classification loss is the most pronounced for regression with imbalanced data. We explain these empirical findings by formalizing the relation between the balanced and imbalanced regression losses. Finally, we show that our findings hold on two real imbalanced image datasets for depth estimation (NYUD2-DIR), and age estimation (IMDB-WIKI-DIR), and on the problem of imbalanced video progress prediction (Breakfast). Our main takeaway is: for a regression task, if the data sampling is imbalanced, then add a classification loss. ...