A Concept for Deployment and Evaluation of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Cognitive Perception Systems

Jüngste Entwicklungen im Bereich des tiefen Lernens ermöglichen Perzeptionssystemen datengetrieben Wissen über einen vordefinierten Betriebsbereich, eine sogenannte Domäne, zu gewinnen. Diese Verfahren des überwachten Lernens werden durch das Aufkommen groß angelegter annotierter Datensätze und immer leistungsfähigerer Prozessoren vorangetrieben und zeigen unübertroffene Performanz bei Perzeptionsaufgaben in einer Vielzahl von Anwendungsbereichen.Jedoch sind überwacht-trainierte neuronale Netze durch die Menge an verfügbaren annotierten Daten limitiert und dies wiederum findet in einem begrenzten Betriebsbereich Ausdruck. Dabei beruht überwachtes Lernen stark auf manuell durchzuführender Datenannotation. Insbesondere durch die ständig steigende Verfügbarkeit von nicht annotierten großen Datenmengen ist der Gebrauch von unüberwachter Domänenanpassung entscheidend. Verfahren zur unüberwachten Domänenanpassung sind meist nicht geeignet, um eine notwendige Inbetriebnahme des neuronalen Netzes in einer zusätzlichen Domäne zu gewährleisten. Darüber hinaus sind vorhandene Metriken häufig unzureichend für eine auf die Anwendung der domänenangepassten neuronalen Netzen ausgerichtete Validierung. Der Hauptbeitrag der vorliegenden Dissertation besteht aus neuen Konzepten zur unüberwachten Domänenanpassung. Basierend auf einer Kategorisierung von Domänenübergängen und a priori verfügbaren Wissensrepräsentationen durch ein überwacht-trainiertes neuronales Netz wird eine unüberwachte Domänenanpassung auf nicht annotierten Daten ermöglicht. Um die kontinuierliche Bereitstellung von neuronalen Netzen für die Anwendung in der Perzeption zu adressieren, wurden neuartige Verfahren speziell für die unüberwachte Erweiterung des Betriebsbereichs eines neuronalen Netzes entwickelt. Beispielhafte Anwendungsfälle des Fahrzeugsehens zeigen, wie die neuartigen Verfahren kombiniert mit neu entwickelten Metriken zur kontinuierlichen Inbetriebnahme von neuronalen Netzen auf nicht annotierten Daten beitragen. Außerdem werden die Implementierungen aller entwickelten Verfahren und Algorithmen dargestellt und öffentlich zugänglich gemacht. Insbesondere wurden die neuartigen Verfahren erfolgreich auf die unüberwachte Domänenanpassung, ausgehend von der Tag- auf die Nachtobjekterkennung im Bereich des Fahrzeugsehens angewendet

Object detection, recognition and re-identification in video footage

There has been a significant number of security concerns in recent times; as a result, security cameras have been installed to monitor activities and to prevent crimes in most public places. These analysis are done either through video analytic or forensic analysis operations on human observations. To this end, within the research context of this thesis, a proactive machine vision based military recognition system has been developed to help monitor activities in the military environment. The proposed object detection, recognition and re-identification systems have been presented in this thesis. A novel technique for military personnel recognition is presented in this thesis. Initially the detected camouflaged personnel are segmented using a grabcut segmentation algorithm. Since in general a camouflaged personnel's uniform appears to be similar both at the top and the bottom of the body, an image patch is initially extracted from the segmented foreground image and used as the region of interest. Subsequently the colour and texture features are extracted from each patch and used for classification. A second approach for personnel recognition is proposed through the recognition of the badge on the cap of a military person. A feature matching metric based on the extracted Speed Up Robust Features (SURF) from the badge on a personnel's cap enabled the recognition of the personnel's arm of service. A state-of-the-art technique for recognising vehicle types irrespective of their view angle is also presented in this thesis. Vehicles are initially detected and segmented using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) based foreground/background segmentation algorithm. A Canny Edge Detection (CED) stage, followed by morphological operations are used as pre-processing stage to help enhance foreground vehicular object detection and segmentation. Subsequently, Region, Histogram Oriented Gradient (HOG) and Local Binary Pattern (LBP) features are extracted from the refined foreground vehicle object and used as features for vehicle type recognition. Two different datasets with variant views of front/rear and angle are used and combined for testing the proposed technique. For night-time video analytics and forensics, the thesis presents a novel approach to pedestrian detection and vehicle type recognition. A novel feature acquisition technique named, CENTROG, is proposed for pedestrian detection and vehicle type recognition in this thesis. Thermal images containing pedestrians and vehicular objects are used to analyse the performance of the proposed algorithms. The video is initially segmented using a GMM based foreground object segmentation algorithm. A CED based pre-processing step is used to enhance segmentation accuracy prior using Census Transforms for initial feature extraction. HOG features are then extracted from the Census transformed images and used for detection and recognition respectively of human and vehicular objects in thermal images. Finally, a novel technique for people re-identification is proposed in this thesis based on using low-level colour features and mid-level attributes. The low-level colour histogram bin values were normalised to 0 and 1. A publicly available dataset (VIPeR) and a self constructed dataset have been used in the experiments conducted with 7 clothing attributes and low-level colour histogram features. These 7 attributes are detected using features extracted from 5 different regions of a detected human object using an SVM classifier. The low-level colour features were extracted from the regions of a detected human object. These 5 regions are obtained by human object segmentation and subsequent body part sub-division. People are re-identified by computing the Euclidean distance between a probe and the gallery image sets. The experiments conducted using SVM classifier and Euclidean distance has proven that the proposed techniques attained all of the aforementioned goals. The colour and texture features proposed for camouflage military personnel recognition surpasses the state-of-the-art methods. Similarly, experiments prove that combining features performed best when recognising vehicles in different views subsequent to initial training based on multi-views. In the same vein, the proposed CENTROG technique performed better than the state-of-the-art CENTRIST technique for both pedestrian detection and vehicle type recognition at night-time using thermal images. Finally, we show that the proposed 7 mid-level attributes and the low-level features results in improved performance accuracy for people re-identification

Hyperspectral Imaging for Landmine Detection

This PhD thesis aims at investigating the possibility to detect landmines using hyperspectral imaging. Using this technology, we are able to acquire at each pixel of the image spectral data in hundreds of wavelengths. So, at each pixel we obtain a reflectance spectrum that is used as fingerprint to identify the materials in each pixel, and mainly in our project help us to detect the presence of landmines. The proposed process works as follows: a preconfigured drone (hexarotor or octorotor) will carry the hyperspectral camera. This programmed drone is responsible of flying over the contaminated area in order to take images from a safe distance. Various image processing techniques will be used to treat the image in order to isolate the landmine from the surrounding. Once the presence of a mine or explosives is suspected, an alarm signal is sent to the base station giving information about the type of the mine, its location and the clear path that could be taken by the mine removal team in order to disarm the mine. This technology has advantages over the actually used techniques: • It is safer because it limits the need of humans in the searching process and gives the opportunity to the demining team to detect the mines while they are in a safe region. • It is faster. A larger area could be cleared in a single day by comparison with demining techniques • This technique can be used to detect at the same time objects other than mines such oil or minerals. First, a presentation of the problem of landmines that is expanding worldwide referring to some statistics from the UN organizations is provided. In addition, a brief presentation of different types of landmines is shown. Unfortunately, new landmines are well camouflaged and are mainly made of plastic in order to make their detection using metal detectors harder. A summary of all landmine detection techniques is shown to give an idea about the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. In this work, we give an overview of different projects that worked on the detection of landmines using hyperspectral imaging. We will show the main results achieved in this field and future work to be done in order to make this technology effective. Moreover, we worked on different target detection algorithms in order to achieve high probability of detection with low false alarm rate. We tested different statistical and linear unmixing based methods. In addition, we introduced the use of radial basis function neural networks in order to detect landmines at subpixel level. A comparative study between different detection methods will be shown in the thesis. A study of the effect of dimensionality reduction using principal component analysis prior to classification is also provided. The study shows the dependency between the two steps (feature extraction and target detection). The selection of target detection algorithm will define if feature extraction in previous phase is necessary. A field experiment has been done in order to study how the spectral signature of landmine will change depending on the environment in which the mine is planted. For this, we acquired the spectral signature of 6 types of landmines in different conditions: in Lab where specific source of light is used; in field where mines are covered by grass; and when mines are buried in soil. The results of this experiment are very interesting. The signature of two types of landmines are used in the simulations. They are a database necessary for supervised detection of landmines. Also we extracted some spectral characteristics of landmines that would help us to distinguish mines from background

Computational Intelligence and Human- Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications

The present book contains all of the articles that were accepted and published in the Special Issue of MDPI’s journal Mathematics titled "Computational Intelligence and Human–Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications". This Special Issue covered a wide range of topics connected to the theory and application of different computational intelligence techniques to the domain of human–computer interaction, such as automatic speech recognition, speech processing and analysis, virtual reality, emotion-aware applications, digital storytelling, natural language processing, smart cars and devices, and online learning. We hope that this book will be interesting and useful for those working in various areas of artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, and software engineering as well as for those who are interested in how these domains are connected in real-life situations

Application of Multi-Sensor Fusion Technology in Target Detection and Recognition

Application of multi-sensor fusion technology has drawn a lot of industrial and academic interest in recent years. The multi-sensor fusion methods are widely used in many applications, such as autonomous systems, remote sensing, video surveillance, and the military. These methods can obtain the complementary properties of targets by considering multiple sensors. On the other hand, they can achieve a detailed environment description and accurate detection of interest targets based on the information from different sensors.This book collects novel developments in the field of multi-sensor, multi-source, and multi-process information fusion. Articles are expected to emphasize one or more of the three facets: architectures, algorithms, and applications. Published papers dealing with fundamental theoretical analyses, as well as those demonstrating their application to real-world problems

Transformers in Small Object Detection: A Benchmark and Survey of State-of-the-Art

Transformers have rapidly gained popularity in computer vision, especially in the field of object recognition and detection. Upon examining the outcomes of state-of-the-art object detection methods, we noticed that transformers consistently outperformed well-established CNN-based detectors in almost every video or image dataset. While transformer-based approaches remain at the forefront of small object detection (SOD) techniques, this paper aims to explore the performance benefits offered by such extensive networks and identify potential reasons for their SOD superiority. Small objects have been identified as one of the most challenging object types in detection frameworks due to their low visibility. We aim to investigate potential strategies that could enhance transformers' performance in SOD. This survey presents a taxonomy of over 60 research studies on developed transformers for the task of SOD, spanning the years 2020 to 2023. These studies encompass a variety of detection applications, including small object detection in generic images, aerial images, medical images, active millimeter images, underwater images, and videos. We also compile and present a list of 12 large-scale datasets suitable for SOD that were overlooked in previous studies and compare the performance of the reviewed studies using popular metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP), Frames Per Second (FPS), number of parameters, and more. Researchers can keep track of newer studies on our web page, which is available at \url{https://github.com/arekavandi/Transformer-SOD}

Gaze-Based Human-Robot Interaction by the Brunswick Model

We present a new paradigm for human-robot interaction based on social signal processing, and in particular on the Brunswick model. Originally, the Brunswick model copes with face-to-face dyadic interaction, assuming that the interactants are communicating through a continuous exchange of non verbal social signals, in addition to the spoken messages. Social signals have to be interpreted, thanks to a proper recognition phase that considers visual and audio information. The Brunswick model allows to quantitatively evaluate the quality of the interaction using statistical tools which measure how effective is the recognition phase. In this paper we cast this theory when one of the interactants is a robot; in this case, the recognition phase performed by the robot and the human have to be revised w.r.t. the original model. The model is applied to Berrick, a recent open-source low-cost robotic head platform, where the gazing is the social signal to be considered