Hotels-50K: A Global Hotel Recognition Dataset

Recognizing a hotel from an image of a hotel room is important for human trafficking investigations. Images directly link victims to places and can help verify where victims have been trafficked, and where their traffickers might move them or others in the future. Recognizing the hotel from images is challenging because of low image quality, uncommon camera perspectives, large occlusions (often the victim), and the similarity of objects (e.g., furniture, art, bedding) across different hotel rooms. To support efforts towards this hotel recognition task, we have curated a dataset of over 1 million annotated hotel room images from 50,000 hotels. These images include professionally captured photographs from travel websites and crowd-sourced images from a mobile application, which are more similar to the types of images analyzed in real-world investigations. We present a baseline approach based on a standard network architecture and a collection of data-augmentation approaches tuned to this problem domain

Open Set Logo Detection and Retrieval

Current logo retrieval research focuses on closed set scenarios. We argue that the logo domain is too large for this strategy and requires an open set approach. To foster research in this direction, a large-scale logo dataset, called Logos in the Wild, is collected and released to the public. A typical open set logo retrieval application is, for example, assessing the effectiveness of advertisement in sports event broadcasts. Given a query sample in shape of a logo image, the task is to find all further occurrences of this logo in a set of images or videos. Currently, common logo retrieval approaches are unsuitable for this task because of their closed world assumption. Thus, an open set logo retrieval method is proposed in this work which allows searching for previously unseen logos by a single query sample. A two stage concept with separate logo detection and comparison is proposed where both modules are based on task specific CNNs. If trained with the Logos in the Wild data, significant performance improvements are observed, especially compared with state-of-the-art closed set approaches.Comment: accepted at VISAPP 201

Safety of tattoos and permanent make-up State of play and trends in tattoo practices

The European Commission launched the 18-month project "Tattoos and Permanent Make-up" with the aim of collecting data about the use, the ingredients, the EU market and possible health problems associated to tattoo and permanent make-up (PMU) inks. The report on work package 1 (2015, Piccinini P. et al.) is available at http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/safety-of-tattoos-and-permanent-make-up-compilation-of-information-on-legislative-framework-and-analytical-methods-pbLBNA27394/ The present report is the outcome of the work package 2 which aims to describe the status of tattoo and PMU practices like tattoo prevalence in the population, including the removal processes, details on service providers and ink manufacturers, tattoo and PMU market, inks' chemical composition, RAPEX notifications and national market surveillance. The information was gathered through questionnaires sent to 32 national authorities (all EU MS and EFTA countries), plus OECD Secretariat, 38 ink manufacturers/distributors/private labels and 23 tattooists/PMU professionals' associations. Replies were collected from 24 EU/EFTA national authorities, 4 non-EU/EFTA countries, 7 ink manufacturers/ distributors/private labels and 10 associations. In addition, we reviewed thoroughly data available from other sources like scientific literature, RAPEX (Rapid Alert System for dangerous non-food products) notifications and national surveillance reports, as of May 2015. The main findings show that: Tattoo and PMU inks are complex chemical mixtures containing several ingredients. The main ingredients are the colorants, pigments in particular; more than 100 of them have been identified in tattoo and PMU inks. These pigments are not produced specifically for such application and a risk assessment taking into account their injection and permanence into the human body is not carried out. An additional identified risk is the presence of impurities; in fact tattoo and PMU inks' purity is on average around 70-90 %. Azo pigments, group to which most of the organic colorants in use belong, are proved to release potentially carcinogenic aromatic amines when exposed to solar, UV or laser irradiation. It is estimated that around 12 % of the whole European population, all ages comprised, are tattooed (estimation based on available data from 14 Member States) and more than 20 % in the United States. Higher tattoo prevalence was reported in young population, including adolescents. While traditionally men were more tattooed than women, figures show that this trend in Europe, Australia and North America is changing. Nowadays in a number of cases the tattoo prevalence in women is higher than in men, particularly in young generations. Most of the tattoo inks used in Europe are imported from the United States, while PMU inks are mostly produced in Europe. The European manufacturers are mainly based in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Spain. With regards to the tattoo artists performing the tattoos, the number of "non-professional tattooists" might represent up to 10 times the number of "registered/professionals" ones. Around 95 % of the 126 RAPEX alerts notified for tattoo/PMU during the last decade related to chemical risks: hazardous chemicals and/or impurities (such as carcinogenic aromatic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, sensitizers, preservatives and heavy metals). The remaining 5% concerned microbiological risks, which are mainly due to the lack of sterility of the inks before opening and from the use of tap water for their dilution. Two thirds of the RAPEX notifications pertain to products imported, with the highest percentages from the United States.JRC.I.1-Chemical Assessment and Testin

PRIVAFRAME: A Frame-Based Knowledge Graph for Sensitive Personal Data

The pervasiveness of dialogue systems and virtual conversation applications raises an important theme: the potential of sharing sensitive information, and the consequent need for protection. To guarantee the subject’s right to privacy, and avoid the leakage of private content, it is important to treat sensitive information. However, any treatment requires firstly to identify sensitive text, and appropriate techniques to do it automatically. The Sensitive Information Detection (SID) task has been explored in the literature in different domains and languages, but there is no common benchmark. Current approaches are mostly based on artificial neural networks (ANN) or transformers based on them. Our research focuses on identifying categories of personal data in informal English sentences, by adopting a new logical-symbolic approach, and eventually hybridising it with ANN models. We present a frame-based knowledge graph built for personal data categories defined in the Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV). The knowledge graph is designed through the logical composition of already existing frames, and has been evaluated as background knowledge for a SID system against a labeled sensitive information dataset. The accuracy of PRIVAFRAME reached 78%. By comparison, a transformer-based model achieved 12% lower performance on the same dataset. The top-down logical-symbolic frame-based model allows a granular analysis, and does not require a training dataset. These advantages lead us to use it as a layer in a hybrid model, where the logical SID is combined with an ANNs SID tested in a previous study by the authors

The Forensic Analysis of Skin-Safe Stamp Pad Inks

Skin-safe stamp pad inks are currently being used at locations such as clubs, zoos and other events with the purpose of stamping individuals that visit the location. This is done in an attempt to monitor the number and activity of visitors. Ink manufacturing companies generally tend to experiment with a number of different combinations of the different components of ink, in order to obtain desirable properties. The combinations are usually proprietary and that very nature of the inks ends up making them, possibly unique and individual. The analysis, identification and possible individualization of the chemical composition of these inks could play a significant role in providing crucial evidential information to investigators in forensic cases. The aim of this research was to scientifically evaluate these inks by documenting the physical properties of the inks both macroscopically and microscopically and by identifying the optical and chemical properties of the ink components spectroscopically. The application of Ultraviolet-Visible (UV-VIS) Spectroscopy and Fourier-transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR) to the analysis of skin safe stamp pad inks sold for temporary tattooing purposes, has been explored in this project. Results from this study indicated that each step of the analysis and each technique used by itself, was powerful to get us closer and closer to a full discrimination of the ink samples and by combining the steps, all the analyzed samples were successfully discriminated. The results from this research can be used as reference spectra for potential skin-safe stamp pad ink forensic evidence. Furthermore, the use of the Bio-Rad software to make positive correlations with the reference samples listed in the software’s extensive database acted as a key first step towards possibly determining the identity of iii the components in the ink samples. Additional analysis using other techniques such as X-Ray fluorescence or Raman Spectroscopy could reveal more information about the different components of skin-safe inks