Visual Privacy Protection Methods: A Survey

Recent advances in computer vision technologies have made possible the development of intelligent monitoring systems for video surveillance and ambient-assisted living. By using this technology, these systems are able to automatically interpret visual data from the environment and perform tasks that would have been unthinkable years ago. These achievements represent a radical improvement but they also suppose a new threat to individual’s privacy. The new capabilities of such systems give them the ability to collect and index a huge amount of private information about each individual. Next-generation systems have to solve this issue in order to obtain the users’ acceptance. Therefore, there is a need for mechanisms or tools to protect and preserve people’s privacy. This paper seeks to clarify how privacy can be protected in imagery data, so as a main contribution a comprehensive classification of the protection methods for visual privacy as well as an up-to-date review of them are provided. A survey of the existing privacy-aware intelligent monitoring systems and a valuable discussion of important aspects of visual privacy are also provided.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under project “Sistema de visión para la monitorización de la actividad de la vida diaria en el hogar” (TIN2010-20510-C04-02) and by the European Commission under project “caring4U - A study on people activity in private spaces: towards a multisensor network that meets privacy requirements” (PIEF-GA-2010-274649). José Ramón Padilla López and Alexandros Andre Chaaraoui acknowledge financial support by the Conselleria d'Educació, Formació i Ocupació of the Generalitat Valenciana (fellowship ACIF/2012/064 and ACIF/2011/160 respectively)

Image inpainting based on self-organizing maps by using multi-agent implementation

AbstractThe image inpainting is a well-known task of visual editing. However, the efficiency strongly depends on sizes and textural neighborhood of “missing” area. Various methods of image inpainting exist, among which the Kohonen Self-Organizing Map (SOM) network as a mean of unsupervised learning is widely used. The weaknesses of the Kohonen SOM network such as the necessity for tuning of algorithm parameters and the low computational speed caused the application of multi- agent system with a multi-mapping possibility and a parallel processing by the identical agents. During experiments, it was shown that the preliminary image segmentation and the creation of the SOMs for each type of homogeneous textures provide better results in comparison with the classical SOM application. Also the optimal number of inpainting agents was determined. The quality of inpainting was estimated by several metrics, and good results were obtained in complex images

Review on Image Inpainting using Intelligence Mining Techniques

Objective Inpainting is a technique for fixing or removing undesired areas of an image. Methods In present scenario, image plays a vital role in every aspect such as business images, satellite images, and medical images and so on. Results and Conclusion This paper presents a comprehensive review of past traditional image inpainting methods and the present state-of-the-art deep learning methods and also detailed the strengths and weaknesses of each to provide new insights in the field

Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industries: A Review

This paper reviews the current state of the art in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and applications in the context of the creative industries. A brief background of AI, and specifically Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, is provided including Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We categorise creative applications into five groups related to how AI technologies are used: i) content creation, ii) information analysis, iii) content enhancement and post production workflows, iv) information extraction and enhancement, and v) data compression. We critically examine the successes and limitations of this rapidly advancing technology in each of these areas. We further differentiate between the use of AI as a creative tool and its potential as a creator in its own right. We foresee that, in the near future, machine learning-based AI will be adopted widely as a tool or collaborative assistant for creativity. In contrast, we observe that the successes of machine learning in domains with fewer constraints, where AI is the `creator', remain modest. The potential of AI (or its developers) to win awards for its original creations in competition with human creatives is also limited, based on contemporary technologies. We therefore conclude that, in the context of creative industries, maximum benefit from AI will be derived where its focus is human centric -- where it is designed to augment, rather than replace, human creativity

An Approach Of Automatic Reconstruction Of Building Models For Virtual Cities From Open Resources

Along with the ever-increasing popularity of virtual reality technology in recent years, 3D city models have been used in different applications, such as urban planning, disaster management, tourism, entertainment, and video games. Currently, those models are mainly reconstructed from access-restricted data sources such as LiDAR point clouds, airborne images, satellite images, and UAV (uncrewed air vehicle) images with a focus on structural illustration of buildings’ contours and layouts. To help make 3D models closer to their real-life counterparts, this thesis research proposes a new approach for the automatic reconstruction of building models from open resources. In this approach, first, building shapes are reconstructed by using the structural and geographic information retrievable from the open repository of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Later, images available from the street view of Google maps are used to extract information of the exterior appearance of buildings for texture mapping onto their boundaries. The constructed 3D environment is used as prior knowledge for the navigation purposes in a self-driving car. The static objects from the 3D model are compared with the real-time images of static objects to reduce the computation time by eliminating them from the detection proces

Control and Analysis for Sequential Information based on Machine Learning

Sequential information is crucial for real-world applications that are related to time, which is same with time-series being described by sequence data followed by temporal order and regular intervals. In this thesis, we consider four major tasks of sequential information that include sequential trend prediction, control strategy optimisation, visual-temporal interpolation and visual-semantic sequential alignment. We develop machine learning theories and provide state-of-the-art models for various real-world applications that involve sequential processes, including the industrial batch process, sequential video inpainting, and sequential visual-semantic image captioning. The ultimate goal is about designing a hybrid framework that can unify diverse sequential information analysis and control systems For industrial process, control algorithms rely on simulations to find the optimal control strategy. However, few machine learning techniques can control the process using raw data, although some works use ML to predict trends. Most control methods rely on amounts of previous experiences, and cannot execute future information to optimize the control strategy. To improve the effectiveness of the industrial process, we propose improved reinforcement learning approaches that can modify the control strategy. We also propose a hybrid reinforcement virtual learning approach to optimise the long-term control strategy. This approach creates a virtual space that interacts with reinforcement learning to predict a virtual strategy without conducting any real experiments, thereby improving and optimising control efficiency. For sequential visual information analysis, we propose a dual-fusion transformer model to tackle the sequential visual-temporal encoding in video inpainting tasks. Our framework includes a flow-guided transformer with dual attention fusion, and we observe that the sequential information is effectively processed, resulting in promising inpainting videos. Finally, we propose a cycle-based captioning model for the analysis of sequential visual-semantic information. This model augments data from two views to optimise caption generation from an image, overcoming new few-shot and zero-shot settings. The proposed model can generate more accurate and informative captions by leveraging sequential visual-semantic information. Overall, the thesis contributes to analysing and manipulating sequential information in multi-modal real-world applications. Our flexible framework design provides a unified theoretical foundation to deploy sequential information systems in distinctive application domains. Considering the diversity of challenges addressed in this thesis, we believe our technique paves the pathway towards versatile AI in the new era

Datasets, Clues and State-of-the-Arts for Multimedia Forensics: An Extensive Review

With the large chunks of social media data being created daily and the parallel rise of realistic multimedia tampering methods, detecting and localising tampering in images and videos has become essential. This survey focusses on approaches for tampering detection in multimedia data using deep learning models. Specifically, it presents a detailed analysis of benchmark datasets for malicious manipulation detection that are publicly available. It also offers a comprehensive list of tampering clues and commonly used deep learning architectures. Next, it discusses the current state-of-the-art tampering detection methods, categorizing them into meaningful types such as deepfake detection methods, splice tampering detection methods, copy-move tampering detection methods, etc. and discussing their strengths and weaknesses. Top results achieved on benchmark datasets, comparison of deep learning approaches against traditional methods and critical insights from the recent tampering detection methods are also discussed. Lastly, the research gaps, future direction and conclusion are discussed to provide an in-depth understanding of the tampering detection research arena

Neural Gradient Regularizer

Owing to its significant success, the prior imposed on gradient maps has consistently been a subject of great interest in the field of image processing. Total variation (TV), one of the most representative regularizers, is known for its ability to capture the sparsity of gradient maps. Nonetheless, TV and its variants often underestimate the gradient maps, leading to the weakening of edges and details whose gradients should not be zero in the original image. Recently, total deep variation (TDV) has been introduced, assuming the sparsity of feature maps, which provides a flexible regularization learned from large-scale datasets for a specific task. However, TDV requires retraining when the image or task changes, limiting its versatility. In this paper, we propose a neural gradient regularizer (NGR) that expresses the gradient map as the output of a neural network. Unlike existing methods, NGR does not rely on the sparsity assumption, thereby avoiding the underestimation of gradient maps. NGR is applicable to various image types and different image processing tasks, functioning in a zero-shot learning fashion, making it a versatile and plug-and-play regularizer. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of NGR over state-of-the-art counterparts for a range of different tasks, further validating its effectiveness and versatility

Novel Video Completion Approaches and Their Applications

Video completion refers to automatically restoring damaged or removed objects in a video sequence, with applications ranging from sophisticated video removal of undesired static or dynamic objects to correction of missing or corrupted video frames in old movies and synthesis of new video frames to add, modify, or generate a new visual story. The video completion problem can be solved using texture synthesis and/or data interpolation to fill-in the holes of the sequence inward. This thesis makes a distinction between still image completion and video completion. The latter requires visually pleasing consistency by taking into account the temporal information. Based on their applied concepts, video completion techniques are categorized as inpainting and texture synthesis. We present a bandlet transform-based technique for each of these categories of video completion techniques. The proposed inpainting-based technique is a 3D volume regularization scheme that takes advantage of bandlet bases for exploiting the anisotropic regularities to reconstruct a damaged video. The proposed exemplar-based approach, on the other hand, performs video completion using a precise patch fusion in the bandlet domain instead of patch replacement. The video completion task is extended to two important applications in video restoration. First, we develop an automatic video text detection and removal that benefits from the proposed inpainting scheme and a novel video text detector. Second, we propose a novel video super-resolution technique that employs the inpainting algorithm spatially in conjunction with an effective structure tensor, generated using bandlet geometry. The experimental results show a good performance of the proposed video inpainting method and demonstrate the effectiveness of bandlets in video completion tasks. The proposed video text detector and the video super resolution scheme also show a high performance in comparison with existing methods

Neural Radiance Fields: Past, Present, and Future

The various aspects like modeling and interpreting 3D environments and surroundings have enticed humans to progress their research in 3D Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Machine Learning. An attempt made by Mildenhall et al in their paper about NeRFs (Neural Radiance Fields) led to a boom in Computer Graphics, Robotics, Computer Vision, and the possible scope of High-Resolution Low Storage Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality-based 3D models have gained traction from res with more than 1000 preprints related to NeRFs published. This paper serves as a bridge for people starting to study these fields by building on the basics of Mathematics, Geometry, Computer Vision, and Computer Graphics to the difficulties encountered in Implicit Representations at the intersection of all these disciplines. This survey provides the history of rendering, Implicit Learning, and NeRFs, the progression of research on NeRFs, and the potential applications and implications of NeRFs in today's world. In doing so, this survey categorizes all the NeRF-related research in terms of the datasets used, objective functions, applications solved, and evaluation criteria for these applications.Comment: 413 pages, 9 figures, 277 citation