Some like it hot - visual guidance for preference prediction

For people first impressions of someone are of determining importance. They are hard to alter through further information. This begs the question if a computer can reach the same judgement. Earlier research has already pointed out that age, gender, and average attractiveness can be estimated with reasonable precision. We improve the state-of-the-art, but also predict - based on someone's known preferences - how much that particular person is attracted to a novel face. Our computational pipeline comprises a face detector, convolutional neural networks for the extraction of deep features, standard support vector regression for gender, age and facial beauty, and - as the main novelties - visual regularized collaborative filtering to infer inter-person preferences as well as a novel regression technique for handling visual queries without rating history. We validate the method using a very large dataset from a dating site as well as images from celebrities. Our experiments yield convincing results, i.e. we predict 76% of the ratings correctly solely based on an image, and reveal some sociologically relevant conclusions. We also validate our collaborative filtering solution on the standard MovieLens rating dataset, augmented with movie posters, to predict an individual's movie rating. We demonstrate our algorithms on howhot.io which went viral around the Internet with more than 50 million pictures evaluated in the first month.Comment: accepted for publication at CVPR 201

People detection, tracking and biometric data extraction using a single camera for retail usage

Tato práce se zabývá návrhem frameworku, který slouží k analýze video sekvencí z RGB kamery. Framework využívá technik sledování osob a následné extrakce biometrických dat. Biometrická data jsou sbírána za účelem využití v malobochodním prostředí. Navržený framework lze rozdělit do třech menších komponent, tj. detektor osob, sledovač osob a extraktor biometrických dat. Navržený detektor osob využívá různé architektury sítí hlubokého učení k určení polohy osob. Řešení pro sledování osob se řídí známým postupem \uv{online tracking-by-detection} a je navrženo tak, aby bylo robustní vůči zalidněným scénám. Toho je dosaženo začleněním dvou metrik týkající se vzhledu a stavu objektu v asociační fázi. Kromě výpočtu těchto deskriptorů, jsme schopni získat další informace o jednotlivcích jako je věk, pohlaví, emoce, výška a trajektorie. Návržené řešení je ověřeno na datasetu, který je vytvořen speciálně pro tuto úlohu.This thesis proposes a framework that analyzes video sequences from a single RGB camera by extracting useful soft-biometric data about tracked people. The aim is to focus on data that could be utilized in a retail environment. The designed framework can be broken down into the smaller components, i.e., people detector, people tracker, and soft-biometrics extractor. The people detector employs various deep learning architectures that estimate bounding boxes of individuals. The tracking solution follows the well-known online tracking-by-detection approach, while the proposed solution is built to be robust regarding the crowded scenes by incorporating appearance and state features in the matching phase. Apart from calculating appearance descriptors only for matching, we extract additional information of each person in the form of age, gender, emotion, height, and trajectory when possible. The whole framework is validated against the dataset which was created for this propose

T2D2: A Time Series Tester, Transformer, and Decomposer Framework for Outlier Detection

The automatic detection of outliers in time series datasets has captured much amount of attention in the data science community. It is not a simple task as the data may have several perspectives, such as sessional, trendy, or a combination of the two. Furthermore, to obtain a reliable and untrustworthy knowledge from the data, the data itself should be understandable. To cope with these challenges, in this paper, we introduce a new framework that can first test the stationarity and seasonality of dataset, then apply a set of Fourier transforms to get the Fourier sample frequencies, which can be used as a support of a decomposer component. The proposed framework, namely TTDD (Test, Transform, Decompose, and Detection), implements the decomposer component that split the dataset into three parts: trend, seasonal, and residual. Finally, the frequency difference detector compares the frequency of the test set to the frequency of the training set determining the periods of discrepancy in the frequency considering them as outlier periods

Sensing, interpreting, and anticipating human social behaviour in the real world

Low-level nonverbal social signals like glances, utterances, facial expressions and body language are central to human communicative situations and have been shown to be connected to important high-level constructs, such as emotions, turn-taking, rapport, or leadership. A prerequisite for the creation of social machines that are able to support humans in e.g. education, psychotherapy, or human resources is the ability to automatically sense, interpret, and anticipate human nonverbal behaviour. While promising results have been shown in controlled settings, automatically analysing unconstrained situations, e.g. in daily-life settings, remains challenging. Furthermore, anticipation of nonverbal behaviour in social situations is still largely unexplored. The goal of this thesis is to move closer to the vision of social machines in the real world. It makes fundamental contributions along the three dimensions of sensing, interpreting and anticipating nonverbal behaviour in social interactions. First, robust recognition of low-level nonverbal behaviour lays the groundwork for all further analysis steps. Advancing human visual behaviour sensing is especially relevant as the current state of the art is still not satisfactory in many daily-life situations. While many social interactions take place in groups, current methods for unsupervised eye contact detection can only handle dyadic interactions. We propose a novel unsupervised method for multi-person eye contact detection by exploiting the connection between gaze and speaking turns. Furthermore, we make use of mobile device engagement to address the problem of calibration drift that occurs in daily-life usage of mobile eye trackers. Second, we improve the interpretation of social signals in terms of higher level social behaviours. In particular, we propose the first dataset and method for emotion recognition from bodily expressions of freely moving, unaugmented dyads. Furthermore, we are the first to study low rapport detection in group interactions, as well as investigating a cross-dataset evaluation setting for the emergent leadership detection task. Third, human visual behaviour is special because it functions as a social signal and also determines what a person is seeing at a given moment in time. Being able to anticipate human gaze opens up the possibility for machines to more seamlessly share attention with humans, or to intervene in a timely manner if humans are about to overlook important aspects of the environment. We are the first to propose methods for the anticipation of eye contact in dyadic conversations, as well as in the context of mobile device interactions during daily life, thereby paving the way for interfaces that are able to proactively intervene and support interacting humans.Blick, Gesichtsausdrücke, Körpersprache, oder Prosodie spielen als nonverbale Signale eine zentrale Rolle in menschlicher Kommunikation. Sie wurden durch vielzählige Studien mit wichtigen Konzepten wie Emotionen, Sprecherwechsel, Führung, oder der Qualität des Verhältnisses zwischen zwei Personen in Verbindung gebracht. Damit Menschen effektiv während ihres täglichen sozialen Lebens von Maschinen unterstützt werden können, sind automatische Methoden zur Erkennung, Interpretation, und Antizipation von nonverbalem Verhalten notwendig. Obwohl die bisherige Forschung in kontrollierten Studien zu ermutigenden Ergebnissen gekommen ist, bleibt die automatische Analyse nonverbalen Verhaltens in weniger kontrollierten Situationen eine Herausforderung. Darüber hinaus existieren kaum Untersuchungen zur Antizipation von nonverbalem Verhalten in sozialen Situationen. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, die Vision vom automatischen Verstehen sozialer Situationen ein Stück weit mehr Realität werden zu lassen. Diese Arbeit liefert wichtige Beiträge zur autmatischen Erkennung menschlichen Blickverhaltens in alltäglichen Situationen. Obwohl viele soziale Interaktionen in Gruppen stattfinden, existieren unüberwachte Methoden zur Augenkontakterkennung bisher lediglich für dyadische Interaktionen. Wir stellen einen neuen Ansatz zur Augenkontakterkennung in Gruppen vor, welcher ohne manuelle Annotationen auskommt, indem er sich den statistischen Zusammenhang zwischen Blick- und Sprechverhalten zu Nutze macht. Tägliche Aktivitäten sind eine Herausforderung für Geräte zur mobile Augenbewegungsmessung, da Verschiebungen dieser Geräte zur Verschlechterung ihrer Kalibrierung führen können. In dieser Arbeit verwenden wir Nutzerverhalten an mobilen Endgeräten, um den Effekt solcher Verschiebungen zu korrigieren. Neben der Erkennung verbessert diese Arbeit auch die Interpretation sozialer Signale. Wir veröffentlichen den ersten Datensatz sowie die erste Methode zur Emotionserkennung in dyadischen Interaktionen ohne den Einsatz spezialisierter Ausrüstung. Außerdem stellen wir die erste Studie zur automatischen Erkennung mangelnder Verbundenheit in Gruppeninteraktionen vor, und führen die erste datensatzübergreifende Evaluierung zur Detektion von sich entwickelndem Führungsverhalten durch. Zum Abschluss der Arbeit präsentieren wir die ersten Ansätze zur Antizipation von Blickverhalten in sozialen Interaktionen. Blickverhalten hat die besondere Eigenschaft, dass es sowohl als soziales Signal als auch der Ausrichtung der visuellen Wahrnehmung dient. Somit eröffnet die Fähigkeit zur Antizipation von Blickverhalten Maschinen die Möglichkeit, sich sowohl nahtloser in soziale Interaktionen einzufügen, als auch Menschen zu warnen, wenn diese Gefahr laufen wichtige Aspekte der Umgebung zu übersehen. Wir präsentieren Methoden zur Antizipation von Blickverhalten im Kontext der Interaktion mit mobilen Endgeräten während täglicher Aktivitäten, als auch während dyadischer Interaktionen mittels Videotelefonie

Detecting COVID-19 Outbreak with Anomalous Term Frequency

Previously many studies have aimed at predicting the trend of a disease through time series forecasting using machine learning methods. However, data extracted from the real world is often noisy, which can pose numerous challenges for directly predicting the trend, and therefore leading to suboptimal prediction results. Furthermore, real-world data is usually very large, that is, having very long time periods. When it comes to data of such scale, trend forecasting becomes intractable even to state-of-the-art forecasting algorithms such as RNN-LSTM. In the past, not much research has been conducted in applying anomaly detection for disease outbreak detection, including the most recent COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, in this research, we propose redefining the problem into outbreak detection, which aims to predict whether a future point is or is not a sign of a large scaled COVID-19 outbreak. Through simplifying a complex regression problem into a binary classification problem, the requirements of the learning model may be decreased and therefore the learning performance may be enhanced

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Computational Aesthetics for Fashion

The online fashion industry is growing fast and with it, the need for advanced systems able to automatically solve different tasks in an accurate way. With the rapid advance of digital technologies, Deep Learning has played an important role in Computational Aesthetics, an interdisciplinary area that tries to bridge fine art, design, and computer science. Specifically, Computational Aesthetics aims to automatize human aesthetic judgments with computational methods. In this thesis, we focus on three applications of computer vision in fashion, and we discuss how Computational Aesthetics helps solve them accurately