Person Search with Natural Language Description

Searching persons in large-scale image databases with the query of natural language description has important applications in video surveillance. Existing methods mainly focused on searching persons with image-based or attribute-based queries, which have major limitations for a practical usage. In this paper, we study the problem of person search with natural language description. Given the textual description of a person, the algorithm of the person search is required to rank all the samples in the person database then retrieve the most relevant sample corresponding to the queried description. Since there is no person dataset or benchmark with textual description available, we collect a large-scale person description dataset with detailed natural language annotations and person samples from various sources, termed as CUHK Person Description Dataset (CUHK-PEDES). A wide range of possible models and baselines have been evaluated and compared on the person search benchmark. An Recurrent Neural Network with Gated Neural Attention mechanism (GNA-RNN) is proposed to establish the state-of-the art performance on person search

The Profiling Potential of Computer Vision and the Challenge of Computational Empiricism

Computer vision and other biometrics data science applications have commenced a new project of profiling people. Rather than using 'transaction generated information', these systems measure the 'real world' and produce an assessment of the 'world state' - in this case an assessment of some individual trait. Instead of using proxies or scores to evaluate people, they increasingly deploy a logic of revealing the truth about reality and the people within it. While these profiling knowledge claims are sometimes tentative, they increasingly suggest that only through computation can these excesses of reality be captured and understood. This article explores the bases of those claims in the systems of measurement, representation, and classification deployed in computer vision. It asks if there is something new in this type of knowledge claim, sketches an account of a new form of computational empiricism being operationalised, and questions what kind of human subject is being constructed by these technological systems and practices. Finally, the article explores legal mechanisms for contesting the emergence of computational empiricism as the dominant knowledge platform for understanding the world and the people within it

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition: A Survey

Recognizing pedestrian attributes is an important task in computer vision community due to it plays an important role in video surveillance. Many algorithms has been proposed to handle this task. The goal of this paper is to review existing works using traditional methods or based on deep learning networks. Firstly, we introduce the background of pedestrian attributes recognition (PAR, for short), including the fundamental concepts of pedestrian attributes and corresponding challenges. Secondly, we introduce existing benchmarks, including popular datasets and evaluation criterion. Thirdly, we analyse the concept of multi-task learning and multi-label learning, and also explain the relations between these two learning algorithms and pedestrian attribute recognition. We also review some popular network architectures which have widely applied in the deep learning community. Fourthly, we analyse popular solutions for this task, such as attributes group, part-based, \emph{etc}. Fifthly, we shown some applications which takes pedestrian attributes into consideration and achieve better performance. Finally, we summarized this paper and give several possible research directions for pedestrian attributes recognition. The project page of this paper can be found from the following website: \url{https://sites.google.com/view/ahu-pedestrianattributes/}.Comment: Check our project page for High Resolution version of this survey: https://sites.google.com/view/ahu-pedestrianattributes

Public Key Infrastructure based on Authentication of Media Attestments

Many users would prefer the privacy of end-to-end encryption in their online communications if it can be done without significant inconvenience. However, because existing key distribution methods cannot be fully trusted enough for automatic use, key management has remained a user problem. We propose a fundamentally new approach to the key distribution problem by empowering end-users with the capacity to independently verify the authenticity of public keys using an additional media attestment. This permits client software to automatically lookup public keys from a keyserver without trusting the keyserver, because any attempted MITM attacks can be detected by end-users. Thus, our protocol is designed to enable a new breed of messaging clients with true end-to-end encryption built in, without the hassle of requiring users to manually manage the public keys, that is verifiably secure against MITM attacks, and does not require trusting any third parties

Attention Allocation Aid for Visual Search

This paper outlines the development and testing of a novel, feedback-enabled attention allocation aid (AAAD), which uses real-time physiological data to improve human performance in a realistic sequential visual search task. Indeed, by optimizing over search duration, the aid improves efficiency, while preserving decision accuracy, as the operator identifies and classifies targets within simulated aerial imagery. Specifically, using experimental eye-tracking data and measurements about target detectability across the human visual field, we develop functional models of detection accuracy as a function of search time, number of eye movements, scan path, and image clutter. These models are then used by the AAAD in conjunction with real time eye position data to make probabilistic estimations of attained search accuracy and to recommend that the observer either move on to the next image or continue exploring the present image. An experimental evaluation in a scenario motivated from human supervisory control in surveillance missions confirms the benefits of the AAAD.Comment: To be presented at the ACM CHI conference in Denver, Colorado in May 201