Abstract
Most oncological cases can be detected by imaging techniques, but diagnosis is based on pathological assessment of tissue samples. In recent years, the pathology field has evolved to a digital era where tissue samples are digitised and evaluated on screen. As a result, digital pathology opened up many research opportunities, allowing the development of more advanced image processing techniques, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies. Nevertheless, despite colorectal cancer (CRC) being the second deadliest cancer type worldwide, with increasing incidence rates, the application of AI for CRC diagnosis, particularly on whole-slide images (WSI), is still a young field. In this review, we analyse some relevant works published on this particular task and highlight the limitations that hinder the application of these works in clinical practice. We also empirically investigate the feasibility of using weakly annotated datasets to support the development of computer-aided diagnosis systems for CRC from WSI. Our study underscores the need for large datasets in this field and the use of an appropriate learning methodology to gain the most benefit from partially annotated datasets. The CRC WSI dataset used in this study, containing 1,133 colorectal biopsy and polypectomy samples, is available upon reasonable request.

Abstract
This paper presents a summary of the Masked Face Recognition Competitions (MFR) held within the 2021 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2021). The competition attracted a total of 10 participating teams with valid submissions. The affiliations of these teams are diverse and associated with academia and industry in nine different countries. These teams successfully submitted 18 valid solutions. The competition is designed to motivate solutions aiming at enhancing the face recognition accuracy of masked faces. Moreover, the competition considered the deployability of the proposed solutions by taking the compactness of the face recognition models into account. A private dataset representing a collaborative, multi-session, real masked, capture scenario is used to evaluate the submitted solutions. In comparison to one of the top-performing academic face recognition solutions, 10 out of the 18 submitted solutions did score higher masked face verification accuracy.

Abstract
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most commonly used exam for diagnosis and follow-up of neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is a neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative disease characterized by demyelination of neuron axon. This demyelination process causes lesions in white matter that can be observed in vivo by MRI. Such lesions may provide quantitative assessments of the inflammatory activity of the disease. Quantitative measures based on various features of lesions have been shown to be useful in clinical trials for evaluating therapies. Although manual segmentations are considered as the gold standard, this process is time consuming and error prone. Therefore, automated lesion identification and quantification of the MRI are active areas in MS research. The purpose of this study was to perform the brain lesions volumetric quantification in MS patients, after segmentation via a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. Initially, MRI was rigidly registered, skullstripped and bias corrected. After, we use the CNN for brain lesions segmentation, which used training data to identify lesions within new test subjects. Finally, volume quantification was performed with a count of segmented voxels and represented by mm(3). We did not observe a statistical difference between the volume of brain lesion automatically identified and the volume manually segmented. The use of deep learning techniques in health is constantly developing. We observed that the use of these computational method for segmentation and quantification of brain lesions can be applied to aid in diagnosis and follow-up of MS.

Abstract
Convolutional neural networks are shown to be vulnerable to changes in the background. The proposed method is an end-to-end method that augments the training set by introducing new backgrounds during the training process. These backgrounds are created by a generative network that is trained as an adversary to the model. A case study is explored based on overhead power line insulators detection using a drone - a training set is prepared from photographs taken inside a laboratory and then evaluated using photographs that are harder to collect from outside the laboratory. The proposed method improves performance by over 20% for this case study.

Abstract
The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obtained by our proposed method show improvements in a detailed step-wise ablation study. The conducted study showed significant performance gains induced by our proposed training paradigm and modified triplet loss on two evaluation databases.

Abstract
As technology and artificial intelligence conquer a place under the spotlight in the automotive world, driver drowsiness monitoring systems have sparked much interest as a way to increase safety and avoid sleepiness-related accidents. Such technologies, however, stumble upon the observation that each driver presents a distinct set of behavioral and physiological manifestations of drowsiness, thus rendering its objective assessment a non-trivial process. The AUTOMOTIVE project studied the application of signal processing and machine learning techniques for driver-specific drowsiness detection in smart vehicles, enabled by immersive driving simulators. More broadly, comprehensive research on biometrics using the electrocardiogram (ECG) and face enables the continuous learning of subject-specific models of drowsiness for more efficient monitoring. This paper aims to offer a holistic but comprehensive view of the research and development work conducted for the AUTOMOTIVE project across the various addressed topics and how it ultimately brings us closer to the target of improved driver drowsiness monitoring.