A survey on heterogeneous face recognition: Sketch, infra-red, 3D and low-resolution

Heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) refers to matching face imagery across different domains. It has received much interest from the research community as a result of its profound implications in law enforcement. A wide variety of new invariant features, cross-modality matching models and heterogeneous datasets are being established in recent years. This survey provides a comprehensive review of established techniques and recent developments in HFR. Moreover, we offer a detailed account of datasets and benchmarks commonly used for evaluation. We finish by assessing the state of the field and discussing promising directions for future research

Sparse Methods for Robust and Efficient Visual Recognition

Visual recognition has been a subject of extensive research in computer vision. A vast literature exists on feature extraction and learning methods for recognition. However, due to large variations in visual data, robust visual recognition is still an open problem. In recent years, sparse representation-based methods have become popular for visual recognition. By learning a compact dictionary of data and exploiting the notion of sparsity, start-of-the-art results have been obtained on many recognition tasks. However, existing data-driven sparse model techniques may not be optimal for some challenging recognition problems. In this dissertation, we consider some of these recognition tasks and present approaches based on sparse coding for robust and efficient recognition in such cases. First we study the problem of low-resolution face recognition. This is a challenging problem, and methods have been proposed using super-resolution and machine learning based techniques. However, these methods cannot handle variations like illumination changes which can happen at low resolutions, and degrade the performance. We propose a generative approach for classifying low resolution faces, by exploiting 3D face models. Further, we propose a joint sparse coding framework for robust classification at low resolutions. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated on different face datasets. In the second part, we study a robust feature-level fusion method for multimodal biometric recognition. Although score-level and decision-level fusion methods exist in biometric literature, feature-level fusion is challenging due to different output formats of biometric modalities. In this work, we propose a novel sparse representation-based method for multimodal fusion, and present experimental results for a large multimodal dataset. Robustness to noise and occlusion are demonstrated. In the third part, we consider the problem of domain adaptation, where we want to learn effective classifiers for cases where the test images come from a different distribution than the training data. Typically, due to high cost of human annotation, very few labeled samples are available for images in the test domain. Specifically, we study the problem of adapting sparse dictionary-based classification methods for such cases. We describe a technique which jointly learns projections of data in the two domains, and a latent dictionary which can succinctly represent both domains in the projected low dimensional space. The proposed method is efficient and performs on par or better than many competing state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we study an emerging analysis framework of sparse coding for image classification. We show that the analysis sparse coding can give similar performance as the typical synthesis sparse coding methods, while being much faster at sparse encoding. In the end, we conclude the dissertation with discussions and possible future directions

State of the Art in Face Recognition

Notwithstanding the tremendous effort to solve the face recognition problem, it is not possible yet to design a face recognition system with a potential close to human performance. New computer vision and pattern recognition approaches need to be investigated. Even new knowledge and perspectives from different fields like, psychology and neuroscience must be incorporated into the current field of face recognition to design a robust face recognition system. Indeed, many more efforts are required to end up with a human like face recognition system. This book tries to make an effort to reduce the gap between the previous face recognition research state and the future state

Radial Basis Function Neural Network in Identifying The Types of Mangoes

Mango (Mangifera Indica L) is part of a fruit plant species that have different color and texture characteristics to indicate its type. The identification of the types of mangoes uses the manual method through direct visual observation of mangoes to be classified. At the same time, the more subjective way humans work causes differences in their determination. Therefore in the use of information technology, it is possible to classify mangoes based on their texture using a computerized system. In its completion, the acquisition process is using the camera as an image processing instrument of the recorded images. To determine the pattern of mango data taken from several samples of texture features using Gabor filters from various types of mangoes and the value of the feature extraction results through artificial neural networks (ANN). Using the Radial Base Function method, which produces weight values, is then used as a process for classifying types of mangoes. The accuracy of the test results obtained from the use of extraction methods and existing learning methods is 100%

IMAGE RETRIEVAL BASED ON COMPLEX DESCRIPTIVE QUERIES

The amount of visual data such as images and videos available over web has increased exponentially over the last few years. In order to efficiently organize and exploit these massive collections, a system, apart from being able to answer simple classification based questions such as whether a specific object is present (or absent) in an image, should also be capable of searching images and videos based on more complex descriptive questions. There is also a considerable amount of structure present in the visual world which, if effectively utilized, can help achieve this goal. To this end, we first present an approach for image ranking and retrieval based on queries consisting of multiple semantic attributes. We further show that there are significant correlations present between these attributes and accounting for them can lead to superior performance. Next, we extend this by proposing an image retrieval framework for descriptive queries composed of object categories, semantic attributes and spatial relationships. The proposed framework also includes a unique multi-view hashing technique, which enables query specification in three different modalities - image, sketch and text. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging contextual information to reduce the supervision requirements for learning object and scene recognition models. We present an active learning framework to simultaneously learn appearance and contextual models for scene understanding. Within this framework we introduce new kinds of labeling questions that are designed to collect appearance as well as contextual information and which mimic the way in which humans actively learn about their environment. Furthermore we explicitly model the contextual interactions between the regions within an image and select the question which leads to the maximum reduction in the combined entropy of all the regions in the image (image entropy)

Recent Developments in Smart Healthcare

Medicine is undergoing a sector-wide transformation thanks to the advances in computing and networking technologies. Healthcare is changing from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive and personalized, from disease focused to well-being centered. In essence, the healthcare systems, as well as fundamental medicine research, are becoming smarter. We anticipate significant improvements in areas ranging from molecular genomics and proteomics to decision support for healthcare professionals through big data analytics, to support behavior changes through technology-enabled self-management, and social and motivational support. Furthermore, with smart technologies, healthcare delivery could also be made more efficient, higher quality, and lower cost. In this special issue, we received a total 45 submissions and accepted 19 outstanding papers that roughly span across several interesting topics on smart healthcare, including public health, health information technology (Health IT), and smart medicine

Multimodal Approaches to Computer Vision Problems

The goal of computer vision research is to automatically extract high-level information from images and videos. The vast majority of this research focuses specifically on visible light imagery. In this dissertation, we present approaches to computer vision problems that incorporate data obtained from alternative modalities including thermal infrared imagery, near-infrared imagery, and text. We consider approaches where other modalities are used in place of visible imagery as well as approaches that use other modalities to improve the performance of traditional computer vision algorithms. The bulk of this dissertation focuses on Heterogeneous Face Recognition (HFR). HFR is a variant of face recognition where the probe and gallery face images are obtained with different sensing modalities. We also present a method to incorporate text information into human activity recognition algorithms. We first present a kernel task-driven coupled dictionary model to represent the data across multiple domains for thermal infrared HFR. We extend a linear coupled dictionary model to use the kernel method to process the signals in a high dimensional space; this effectively enables the dictionaries to represent the data non-linearly in the original feature space. We further improve the model by making the dictionaries task-driven. This allows us to tune the dictionaries to perform well on the classification task at hand rather than the standard reconstruction task. We show that our algorithms outperform algorithms based on standard coupled dictionaries on three datasets for thermal infrared to visible face recognition. Next, we present a deep learning-based approach to near-infrared (NIR) HFR. Most approaches to HFR involve modeling the relationship between corresponding images from the visible and sensing domains. Due to data constraints, this is typically done at the patch level and/or with shallow models to prevent overfitting. In this approach, rather than modeling local patches or using a simple model, we use a complex, deep model to learn the relationship between the entirety of cross-modal face images. We describe a deep convolutional neural network-based method that leverages a large visible image face dataset to prevent overfitting. We present experimental results on two benchmark data sets showing its effectiveness. Third, we present a model order selection algorithm for deep neural networks. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a dominant methodology in machine learning. While it has been shown to produce state-of-the-art results for a variety of applications, one aspect of deep networks that has not been extensively researched is how to determine the optimal network structure. This problem is generally solved by ad hoc methods. In this work we address a sub-problem of this task: determining the breadth (number of nodes) of each layer. We show how to use group-sparsity-inducing regularization to automatically select these hyper-parameters. We demonstrate the proposed method by using it to reduce the size of networks while maintaining performance for our NIR HFR deep-learning algorithm. Additionally, we demonstrate the generality of our algorithm by applying it to image classification tasks. Finally, we present a method to improve activity recognition algorithms through the use of multitask learning and information extracted from a large text corpora. Current state-of-the-art deep learning approaches are limited by the size and scope of the data set they use to train the networks. We present a multitask learning approach to expand the training data set. Specifically, we train the neural networks to recognize objects in addition to activities. This allows us to expand our training set with large, publicly available object recognition data sets and thus use deeper, state-of-the-art network architectures. Additionally, when learning about the target activities, the algorithms are limited to the information contained in the training set. It is virtually impossible to capture all variations of the target activities in a training set. In this work, we extract information about the target activities from a large text corpora. We incorporate this information into the training algorithm by using it to select relevant object recognition classes for the multitask learning approach. We present experimental results on a benchmark activity recognition data set showing the effectiveness of our approach