Contributions on Automatic Recognition of Faces using Local Texture Features

Uno de los temas más destacados del área de visión artifical se deriva del análisis facial automático. En particular, la detección precisa de caras humanas y el análisis biométrico de las mismas son problemas que han generado especial interés debido a la gran cantidad de aplicaciones que actualmente hacen uso de estos mecnismos. En esta Tesis Doctoral se analizan por separado los problemas relacionados con detección precisa de caras basada en la localización de los ojos y el reconomcimiento facial a partir de la extracción de características locales de textura. Los algoritmos desarrollados abordan el problema de la extracción de la identidad a partir de una imagen de cara ( en vista frontal o semi-frontal), para escenarios parcialmente controlados. El objetivo es desarrollar algoritmos robustos y que puedan incorpararse fácilmente a aplicaciones reales, tales como seguridad avanzada en banca o la definición de estrategias comerciales aplicadas al sector de retail. Respecto a la extracción de texturas locales, se ha realizado un análisis exhaustivo de los descriptores más extendidos; se ha puesto especial énfasis en el estudio de los Histogramas de Grandientes Orientados (HOG features). En representaciones normalizadas de la cara, estos descriptores ofrecen información discriminativa de los elementos faciales (ojos, boca, etc.), siendo robustas a variaciones en la iluminación y pequeños desplazamientos. Se han elegido diferentes algoritmos de clasificación para realizar la detección y el reconocimiento de caras, todos basados en una estrategia de sistemas supervisados. En particular, para la localización de ojos se ha utilizado clasificadores boosting y Máquinas de Soporte Vectorial (SVM) sobre descriptores HOG. En el caso de reconocimiento de caras, se ha desarrollado un nuevo algoritmo, HOG-EBGM (HOG sobre Elastic Bunch Graph Matching). Dada la imagen de una cara, el esquema seguido por este algoritmo se puede resumir en pocos pasos: en una primera etapa se extMonzó Ferrer, D. (2012). Contributions on Automatic Recognition of Faces using Local Texture Features [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/16698Palanci

Evaluation and analysis of hybrid intelligent pattern recognition techniques for speaker identification

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The rapid momentum of the technology progress in the recent years has led to a tremendous rise in the use of biometric authentication systems. The objective of this research is to investigate the problem of identifying a speaker from its voice regardless of the content (i.e. text-independent), and to design efficient methods of combining face and voice in producing a robust authentication system. A novel approach towards speaker identification is developed using wavelet analysis, and multiple neural networks including Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN), General Regressive Neural Network (GRNN)and Radial Basis Function-Neural Network (RBF NN) with the AND voting scheme. This approach is tested on GRID and VidTIMIT cor-pora and comprehensive test results have been validated with state- of-the-art approaches. The system was found to be competitive and it improved the recognition rate by 15% as compared to the classical Mel-frequency Cepstral Coe±cients (MFCC), and reduced the recognition time by 40% compared to Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN), Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Another novel approach using vowel formant analysis is implemented using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). Vowel formant based speaker identification is best suitable for real-time implementation and requires only a few bytes of information to be stored for each speaker, making it both storage and time efficient. Tested on GRID and Vid-TIMIT, the proposed scheme was found to be 85.05% accurate when Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) is used to extract the vowel formants, which is much higher than the accuracy of BPNN and GMM. Since the proposed scheme does not require any training time other than creating a small database of vowel formants, it is faster as well. Furthermore, an increasing number of speakers makes it di±cult for BPNN and GMM to sustain their accuracy, but the proposed score-based methodology stays almost linear. Finally, a novel audio-visual fusion based identification system is implemented using GMM and MFCC for speaker identi¯cation and PCA for face recognition. The results of speaker identification and face recognition are fused at different levels, namely the feature, score and decision levels. Both the score-level and decision-level (with OR voting) fusions were shown to outperform the feature-level fusion in terms of accuracy and error resilience. The result is in line with the distinct nature of the two modalities which lose themselves when combined at the feature-level. The GRID and VidTIMIT test results validate that the proposed scheme is one of the best candidates for the fusion of face and voice due to its low computational time and high recognition accuracy

Singing speaker clustering based on subspace learning in the GMM mean supervector space

Abstract In this study, we propose algorithms based on subspace learning in the GMM mean supervector space to improve performance of speaker clustering with speech from both reading and singing. As a speaking style, singing introduces changes in the time-frequency structure of a speaker's voice. The purpose of this study is to introduce advancements for speech systems such as speech indexing and retrieval which improve robustness to intrinsic variations in speech production. Speaker clustering techniques such as k-means and hierarchical are explored for analysis of acoustic space differences of a corpus consisting of reading and singing of lyrics for each speaker. Furthermore, a distance based on fuzzy c-means membership degrees is proposed to more accurately measure clustering difficulty or speaker confusability. Two categories of subspace learning methods are studied: unsupervised based on LPP, and supervised based on PLDA. Our proposed clustering method based on PLDA is a two stage algorithm: where first, initial clusters are obtained using full dimension supervectors, and next, each cluster is refined in a PLDA subspace resulting in a more speaker dependent representation that is less sensitive to speaking style. It is shown that LPP improves average clustering accuracy by 5.1% absolute versus a hierarchical baseline for a mixture of reading and singing, and PLDA based clustering increases accuracy by 9.6% absolute versus a k-means baseline. The advancements offer novel techniques to improve model formulation for speech applications including speaker ID, audio search, and audio content analysis

Interactive game for the training of portuguese vowels

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Scalable learning for geostatistics and speaker recognition

With improved data acquisition methods, the amount of data that is being collected has increased severalfold. One of the objectives in data collection is to learn useful underlying patterns. In order to work with data at this scale, the methods not only need to be effective with the underlying data, but also have to be scalable to handle larger data collections. This thesis focuses on developing scalable and effective methods targeted towards different domains, geostatistics and speaker recognition in particular. Initially we focus on kernel based learning methods and develop a GPU based parallel framework for this class of problems. An improved numerical algorithm that utilizes the GPU parallelization to further enhance the computational performance of kernel regression is proposed. These methods are then demonstrated on problems arising in geostatistics and speaker recognition. In geostatistics, data is often collected at scattered locations and factors like instrument malfunctioning lead to missing observations. Applications often require the ability interpolate this scattered spatiotemporal data on to a regular grid continuously over time. This problem can be formulated as a regression problem, and one of the most popular geostatistical interpolation techniques, kriging is analogous to a standard kernel method: Gaussian process regression. Kriging is computationally expensive and needs major modifications and accelerations in order to be used practically. The GPU framework developed for kernel methods is extended to kriging and further the GPU's texture memory is better utilized for enhanced computational performance. Speaker recognition deals with the task of verifying a person's identity based on samples of his/her speech - "utterances". This thesis focuses on text-independent framework and three new recognition frameworks were developed for this problem. We proposed a kernelized Renyi distance based similarity scoring for speaker recognition. While its performance is promising, it does not generalize well for limited training data and therefore does not compare well to state-of-the-art recognition systems. These systems compensate for the variability in the speech data due to the message, channel variability, noise and reverberation. State-of-the-art systems model each speaker as a mixture of Gaussians (GMM) and compensate for the variability (termed "nuisance"). We propose a novel discriminative framework using a latent variable technique, partial least squares (PLS), for improved recognition. The kernelized version of this algorithm is used to achieve a state of the art speaker ID system, that shows results competitive with the best systems reported on in NIST's 2010 Speaker Recognition Evaluation

Advanced Biometrics with Deep Learning

Biometrics, such as fingerprint, iris, face, hand print, hand vein, speech and gait recognition, etc., as a means of identity management have become commonplace nowadays for various applications. Biometric systems follow a typical pipeline, that is composed of separate preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. Deep learning as a data-driven representation learning approach has been shown to be a promising alternative to conventional data-agnostic and handcrafted pre-processing and feature extraction for biometric systems. Furthermore, deep learning offers an end-to-end learning paradigm to unify preprocessing, feature extraction, and recognition, based solely on biometric data. This Special Issue has collected 12 high-quality, state-of-the-art research papers that deal with challenging issues in advanced biometric systems based on deep learning. The 12 papers can be divided into 4 categories according to biometric modality; namely, face biometrics, medical electronic signals (EEG and ECG), voice print, and others