GENDER CLASSIFICATION VIA HUMAN JOINTS USING CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORK

With the growing demand for gender-related data on diverse applications, including security systems for ascertaining an individual’s identity for border crossing, as well as marketing purposes of digging the potential customer and tailoring special discounts for them, gender classification has become an essential task within the field of computer vision and deep learning. There has been extensive research conducted on classifying human gender using facial expression, exterior appearance (e.g., hair, clothes), or gait movement. However, within the scope of our research, none have specifically focused gender classification on two-dimensional body joints. Knowing this, we believe that a new prediction pipeline is required to improve the accuracy of gender classification on purely joint images. In this paper, we propose novel yet simple methods for gender recognition. We conducted our experiments on the BBC Pose and Short BBC pose datasets. We preprocess the raw images by filtering out the frame with missing human figures, removing background noise by cropping the images and labeling the joints via the C5 (model applied transfer learning on the RestNet-152) pre- trained model. We implemented both machine learning (SVM) and deep learning (Convolution Neural Network) methods to classify the images into binary genders. The result of the deep learning method outperformed the classic machine learning method with an accuracy of 66.5%

Estimating correspondences of deformable objects "in-the-wild"

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordDuring the past few years we have witnessed the development of many methodologies for building and fitting Statistical Deformable Models (SDMs). The construction of accurate SDMs requires careful annotation of images with regards to a consistent set of landmarks. However, the manual annotation of a large amount of images is a tedious, laborious and expensive procedure. Furthermore, for several deformable objects, e.g. human body, it is difficult to define a consistent set of landmarks, and, thus, it becomes impossible to train humans in order to accurately annotate a collection of images. Nevertheless, for the majority of objects, it is possible to extract the shape by object segmentation or even by shape drawing. In this paper, we show for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that it is possible to construct SDMs by putting object shapes in dense correspondence. Such SDMs can be built with much less effort for a large battery of objects. Additionally, we show that, by sampling the dense model, a part-based SDM can be learned with its parts being in correspondence. We employ our framework to develop SDMs of human arms and legs, which can be used for the segmentation of the outline of the human body, as well as to provide better and more consistent annotations for body joints.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)TekesEuropean Community Horizon 202

Human Attention Detection Using AM-FM Representations

Human activity detection from digital videos presents many challenges to the computer vision and image processing communities. Recently, many methods have been developed to detect human activities with varying degree of success. Yet, the general human activity detection problem remains very challenging, especially when the methods need to work “in the wild” (e.g., without having precise control over the imaging geometry). The thesis explores phase-based solutions for (i) detecting faces, (ii) back of the heads, (iii) joint detection of faces and back of the heads, and (iv) whether the head is looking to the left or the right, using standard video cameras without any control on the imaging geometry. The proposed phase-based approach is based on the development of simple and robust methods that relie on the use of Amplitude Modulation - Frequency Modulation (AM-FM) models. The approach is validated using video frames extracted from the Advancing Outof- school Learning in Mathematics and Engineering (AOLME) project. The dataset consisted of 13,265 images from ten students looking at the camera, and 6,122 images from five students looking away from the camera. For the students facing the camera, the method was able to correctly classify 97.1% of them looking to the left and 95.9% of them looking to the right. For the students facing the back of the camera, the method was able to correctly classify 87.6% of them looking to the left and 93.3% of them looking to the right. The results indicate that AM-FM based methods hold great promise for analyzing human activity videos

Domain adaptation for upper body pose tracking in signed TV broadcasts

The objective of this work is to estimate upper body pose for signers in TV broadcasts. Given suitable training data, the pose is estimated using a random forest body joint detector. However, obtaining such training data can be costly. The novelty of this paper is a method of transfer learning which is able to harness existing training data and use it for new domains. Our contributions are: (i) a method for adapting existing training data to generate new training data by synthesis for signers with different appearances, and (ii) a method for personalising training data. As a case study we show how the appearance of the arms for different clothing, specifically short and long sleeved clothes, can be modelled to obtain person-specific trackers. We demonstrate that the transfer learning and person specific trackers significantly improve pose estimation performance

Domain adaptation for upper body pose tracking in signed TV broadcasts

The objective of this work is to estimate upper body pose for signers in TV broadcasts. Given suitable training data, the pose is estimated using a random forest body joint detector. However, obtaining such training data can be costly. The novelty of this paper is a method of transfer learning which is able to harness existing training data and use it for new domains. Our contributions are: (i) a method for adapting existing training data to generate new training data by synthesis for signers with different appearances, and (ii) a method for personalising training data. As a case study we show how the appearance of the arms for different clothing, specifically short and long sleeved clothes, can be modelled to obtain person-specific trackers. We demonstrate that the transfer learning and person specific trackers significantly improve pose estimation performance