Optimization of common computer vision algorithms : beating OpenCV face detector

In this Master Thesis one of the most common problems related to face detection is presented: fast and accurate unconstrained face detection. To deal with this problem a new general learning method is presented. The proposed method introduces a set of upgrades and modifications on key concepts and ideas of Decision Trees, AdaBoost and Soft Cascade learning techniques. Firstly, a new variation of Decision Trees with quadratic thresholds able to maximize the margin distance between classes is introduced. Considering a training set independent of face orientation and viewpoints information, the proposed algorithm is able to learn a combination of features to cluster faces under unconstrained face position and orientation. Next, a new definition of the Soft Cascade thresholds training principles is provided. Hence, this modification leads to a better formulation of the loss function associated to the AdaBoost algorithm. The trained face detector has been tested over the Face Detection Data Set and Benchmark (FDDB) and compared against the current state of the art classifiers. The obtained results show that the proposed face detector (i) is able to detect faces with unconstrained position, and (ii) it works faster than the current state of the art method

Classification of Humans into Ayurvedic Prakruti Types using Computer Vision

Ayurveda, a 5000 years old Indian medical science, believes that the universe and hence humans are made up of five elements namely ether, fire, water, earth, and air. The three Doshas (Tridosha) Vata, Pitta, and Kapha originated from the combinations of these elements. Every person has a unique combination of Tridosha elements contributing to a person’s ‘Prakruti’. Prakruti governs the physiological and psychological tendencies in all living beings as well as the way they interact with the environment. This balance influences their physiological features like the texture and colour of skin, hair, eyes, length of fingers, the shape of the palm, body frame, strength of digestion and many more as well as the psychological features like their nature (introverted, extroverted, calm, excitable, intense, laidback), and their reaction to stress and diseases. All these features are coded in the constituents at the time of a person’s creation and do not change throughout their lifetime. Ayurvedic doctors analyze the Prakruti of a person either by assessing the physical features manually and/or by examining the nature of their heartbeat (pulse). Based on this analysis, they diagnose, prevent and cure the disease in patients by prescribing precision medicine. This project focuses on identifying Prakruti of a person by analysing his facial features like hair, eyes, nose, lips and skin colour using facial recognition techniques in computer vision. This is the first of its kind research in this problem area that attempts to bring image processing into the domain of Ayurveda

Design of a gesture detection system at real time

The project I have realized consist in developing a gesture detection system to work at real time situations. In particular, it has the aim to detect a wink of an eye and activate a flag when that happens. There are some actual projects and systems that already do that, but they are focused on voice detection. This project follows the same principles but it uses an input of video instead of a sound. The creation of the pipeline was made in different parts. First of all, a convolutional neural network was created to detect the gesture in a sequence of images and it had to be trained to do so. Secondly, a convolutional neural network for face detection was used as background subtraction, in order to select the main part of the image. Finally, different methods of optimization were taken into account, so as to make the processing operations work faster. A code was implemented to prove the background susbstraction of the image in order to reduce the processing time. Using this code, results were obtained about the accuracy and the processing time using Python. However we only obtained results from the part of background subtraction because the part of detecting the gesture was finally proposed as future work according to the lack of time and resources. All in all, the results obtained were about the simplification of the image doing the background subtraction using a face detection method. We obtained that the time to detect the zone of the face took an average of 0.65 second. Knowing that the system needs to take an image with the camera, do the background subtraction and process a convolutional neural network several times to detect a gesture, we deduce that the time that lasts the face detection makes that imposible. It is needed to improve it more to make it work at real time

Multi-View Face Recognition From Single RGBD Models of the Faces

This work takes important steps towards solving the following problem of current interest: Assuming that each individual in a population can be modeled by a single frontal RGBD face image, is it possible to carry out face recognition for such a population using multiple 2D images captured from arbitrary viewpoints? Although the general problem as stated above is extremely challenging, it encompasses subproblems that can be addressed today. The subproblems addressed in this work relate to: (1) Generating a large set of viewpoint dependent face images from a single RGBD frontal image for each individual; (2) using hierarchical approaches based on view-partitioned subspaces to represent the training data; and (3) based on these hierarchical approaches, using a weighted voting algorithm to integrate the evidence collected from multiple images of the same face as recorded from different viewpoints. We evaluate our methods on three datasets: a dataset of 10 people that we created and two publicly available datasets which include a total of 48 people. In addition to providing important insights into the nature of this problem, our results show that we are able to successfully recognize faces with accuracies of 95% or higher, outperforming existing state-of-the-art face recognition approaches based on deep convolutional neural networks

Unconstrained face mask and face-hand interaction datasets: building a computer vision system to help prevent the transmission of COVID-19

Health organizations advise social distancing, wearing face mask, and avoiding touching face to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Based on these protective measures, we developed a computer vision system to help prevent the transmission of COVID-19. Specifically, the developed system performs face mask detection, face-hand interaction detection, and measures social distance. To train and evaluate the developed system, we collected and annotated images that represent face mask usage and face-hand interaction in the real world. Besides assessing the performance of the developed system on our own datasets, we also tested it on existing datasets in the literature without performing any adaptation on them. In addition, we proposed a module to track social distance between people. Experimental results indicate that our datasets represent the real-world’s diversity well. The proposed system achieved very high performance and generalization capacity for face mask usage detection, face-hand interaction detection, and measuring social distance in a real-world scenario on unseen data. The datasets are available at https://github.com/iremeyiokur/COVID-19-Preventions-Control-System

Discovery of high-entropy ceramics via machine learning

AbstractAlthough high-entropy materials are attracting considerable interest due to a combination of useful properties and promising applications, predicting their formation remains a hindrance for rational discovery of new systems. Experimental approaches are based on physical intuition and/or expensive trial and error strategies. Most computational methods rely on the availability of sufficient experimental data and computational power. Machine learning (ML) applied to materials science can accelerate development and reduce costs. In this study, we propose an ML method, leveraging thermodynamic and compositional attributes of a given material for predicting the synthesizability (i.e., entropy-forming ability) of disordered metal carbides. The relative importance of the thermodynamic and compositional features for the predictions are then explored. The approach’s suitability is demonstrated by comparing values calculated with density functional theory to ML predictions. Finally, the model is employed to predict the entropy-forming ability of 70 new compositions; several predictions are validated by additional density functional theory calculations and experimental synthesis, corroborating the effectiveness in exploring vast compositional spaces in a high-throughput manner. Importantly, seven compositions are selected specifically, because they contain all three of the Group VI elements (Cr, Mo, and W), which do not form room temperature-stable rock-salt monocarbides. Incorporating the Group VI elements into the rock-salt structure provides further opportunity for tuning the electronic structure and potentially material performance