Bilattice based Logical Reasoning for Automated Visual Surveillance and other Applications

The primary objective of an automated visual surveillance system is to observe and understand human behavior and report unusual or potentially dangerous activities/events in a timely manner. Automatically understanding human behavior from visual input, however, is a challenging task. The research presented in this thesis focuses on designing a reasoning framework that can combine, in a principled manner, high level contextual information with low level image processing primitives to interpret visual information. The primary motivation for this work has been to design a reasoning framework that draws heavily upon human like reasoning and reasons explicitly about visual as well as non-visual information to solve classification problems. Humans are adept at performing inference under uncertainty by combining evidence from multiple, noisy and often contradictory sources. This thesis describes a logical reasoning approach in which logical rules encode high level knowledge about the world and logical facts serve as input to the system from real world observations. The reasoning framework supports encoding of multiple rules for the same proposition, representing multiple lines of reasoning and also supports encoding of rules that infer explicit negation and thereby potentially contradictory information. Uncertainties are associated with both the logical rules that guide reasoning as well as with the input facts. This framework has been applied to visual surveillance problems such as human activity recognition, identity maintenance, and human detection. Finally, we have also applied it to the problem of collaborative filtering to predict movie ratings by explicitly reasoning about users preferences

Access control via belnap logic: intuitive, expressive, and analyzable policy composition

Access control to IT systems increasingly relies on the ability to compose policies. There is thus bene t in any framework for policy composition that is intuitive, formal (and so \an- alyzable" and \implementable"), expressive, independent of speci c application domains, and yet able to be extended to create domain-speci c instances. Here we develop such a framework based on Belnap logic. An access-control policy is interpreted as a four-valued predicate that maps access requests to either grant, deny, con ict, or unspeci ed { the four values of the Bel- nap bilattice. We de ne an expressive access-control policy language PBel, having composition operators based on the operators of Belnap logic. Natural orderings on policies are obtained by lifting the truth and information orderings of the Belnap bilattice. These orderings lead to a query language in which policy analyses, e.g. con ict freedom, can be speci ed. Policy analysis is supported through a reduction of the validity of policy queries to the validity of propositional formulas on predicates over access requests. We evaluate our approach through rewall policy and RBAC policy examples, and discuss domain-speci c and generic extensions of our policy language

A Probabilistic Logic Programming Event Calculus

We present a system for recognising human activity given a symbolic representation of video content. The input of our system is a set of time-stamped short-term activities (STA) detected on video frames. The output is a set of recognised long-term activities (LTA), which are pre-defined temporal combinations of STA. The constraints on the STA that, if satisfied, lead to the recognition of a LTA, have been expressed using a dialect of the Event Calculus. In order to handle the uncertainty that naturally occurs in human activity recognition, we adapted this dialect to a state-of-the-art probabilistic logic programming framework. We present a detailed evaluation and comparison of the crisp and probabilistic approaches through experimentation on a benchmark dataset of human surveillance videos.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP) journa

Three-dimensional model-based human detection in crowded scenes

In this paper, the problem of human detection in crowded scenes is formulated as a maximum a posteriori problem, in which, given a set of candidates, predefined 3-D human shape models are matched with image evidence, provided by foreground extraction and probability of boundary, to estimate the human configuration. The optimal solution is obtained by decomposing the mutually related candidates into unoccluded and occluded ones in each iteration according to a graph description of the candidate relations and then only matching models for the unoccluded candidates. A candidate validation and rejection process based on minimum description length and local occlusion reasoning is carried out after each iteration of model matching. The advantage of the proposed optimization procedure is that its computational cost is much smaller than that of global optimization methods, while its performance is comparable to them. The proposed method achieves a detection rate of about 2% higher on a subset of images of the Caviar data set than the best result reported by previous works. We also demonstrate the performance of the proposed method using another challenging data set. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Математичні методи розпізнавання надзвичайних ситуацій в умовах невизначеності

It has been shown that emergency events recognition systems exhibit various types of uncertainty: incomplete data streams, data stream errors, and inappropriate patterns of complex events. There were presented an overview of existing approaches for complex event recognition under uncertainty. It was noticed that the field of complex event recognition under uncertainty is relatively new and proposed to adopt methods of targeting activity recognition. It was shown that the streams of time-stamped derived events arriving at a complex event recognition system carry a certain degree of uncertainty and ambiguity. Information sources have to be heterogeneous, with data of different structures schemas and procedures of respond to corrupted data. Even for perfectly accurate sensors, the domain might be difficult to model precisely, thereby leading to another type of uncertainty. Thus, it is noted that it is important to consider methods for recognizing complex events that can be classified as uncertain, for this purpose, appropriate model objects were proposed. The analysis of key moments in the construction of complex recognition systems that are capable of working effectively under uncertainty included stochastic modeling, time representation models, and relational models. There were considered techniques based on automata, probabilistic graphical models, first-order logic, Petri Networks and Hidden Petri Networks. It is specified that the intermediate stage of the work of the corresponding algorithms should be the creation of a hierarchy of complex objects that are not always clearly defined. A number of limitations have been found regarding the syntax, models and performance used, which were compared with the specific variants of their implementation. An approach was proposed for the transition from a deterministic mathematical apparatus to a system of recognition of complex events under uncertainty conditions, through the introduction of the probability function of an event. The developed methodology allowed highlighting directions for investigation and estimating efficiency of the mathematical methods to be used.Показано, що системи розпізнавання надзвичайних подій виявляють різні типи невизначеності: неповні потоки даних, помилки в потоках даних і невідповідні шаблони складних подій. Показано, що потоки подій, що потрапляють на вхід системи розпізнавання складних подій, характеризуються певним ступенем невизначеності. Джерела даних є неоднорідними і характеризуються різною структуризацією даних і відповідними процедурами реагування на пошкоджені блоки даних. Навіть для даних, визначених достатньо точно, система може некоректно моделювати складні події, що призводить до подальшого типу невизначеності. Отже, зазначено, що важливо розглянути методи розпізнавання складних подій, які можна віднести до невизначених. З цією метою було запропоновано відповідні модельні об'єкти. Проведений аналіз ключових моментів побудови систем розпізнавання складних подій, які здатні ефективно працювати в умовах невизначеності, охоплював          методи стохастичного моделювання, моделі часового представлення та реляційні моделі. Розглянуто методики, що базуються на абстрактних автоматах, імовірнісних моделях графів, системах логіки першого порядку, мережах Петрі та прихованих мережах Петрі. Зазначено, що проміжним етапом роботи відповідних алгоритмів має бути створення ієрархії складних об'єктів, що не завжди піддаються чіткому визначенню. Виявлено низку обмежень щодо використовуваного синтаксису, моделей і ефективності, які були зіставлені з конкретними варіантами їх реалізації. Запропоновано підхід щодо переходу від детерміністичного математичного апарату до системи розпізнавання складних подій в умовах невизначеності, через введення функції вірогідності події. Розроблена методологія дала змогу виділити напрями досліджень і оцінити продуктивність використовуваних математичних методів