344 research outputs found
Seamless Multimodal Biometrics for Continuous Personalised Wellbeing Monitoring
Artificially intelligent perception is increasingly present in the lives of
every one of us. Vehicles are no exception, (...) In the near future, pattern
recognition will have an even stronger role in vehicles, as self-driving cars
will require automated ways to understand what is happening around (and within)
them and act accordingly. (...) This doctoral work focused on advancing
in-vehicle sensing through the research of novel computer vision and pattern
recognition methodologies for both biometrics and wellbeing monitoring. The
main focus has been on electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics, a trait well-known
for its potential for seamless driver monitoring. Major efforts were devoted to
achieving improved performance in identification and identity verification in
off-the-person scenarios, well-known for increased noise and variability. Here,
end-to-end deep learning ECG biometric solutions were proposed and important
topics were addressed such as cross-database and long-term performance,
waveform relevance through explainability, and interlead conversion. Face
biometrics, a natural complement to the ECG in seamless unconstrained
scenarios, was also studied in this work. The open challenges of masked face
recognition and interpretability in biometrics were tackled in an effort to
evolve towards algorithms that are more transparent, trustworthy, and robust to
significant occlusions. Within the topic of wellbeing monitoring, improved
solutions to multimodal emotion recognition in groups of people and
activity/violence recognition in in-vehicle scenarios were proposed. At last,
we also proposed a novel way to learn template security within end-to-end
models, dismissing additional separate encryption processes, and a
self-supervised learning approach tailored to sequential data, in order to
ensure data security and optimal performance. (...)Comment: Doctoral thesis presented and approved on the 21st of December 2022
to the University of Port
Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology
The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same
psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both
clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an
exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing
psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys
or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed
to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for
continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or
smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were
previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a
cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals.
To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it
will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification.
There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current
technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge --
one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning
techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted.
In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on
digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding
discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure
where relevant, with extensive documentation.
Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results
for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research
datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a
proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.Comment: PhD thesis cop
Visual Place Recognition in Changing Environments Utilising Sequence-Based Filtering and Extremely JPEG Compressed Images
Visual Place Recognition (VPR), part of Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM), is an essential task for the localisation process, where each robotic platform is required to successfully navigate through its environment using visual information gathered from the on-board camera. Despite the recent efforts of the research community, VPR remains an improving process. To this end, a large number of deep-learning-based and handcrafted VPR techniques (also referred as learnt and non-learnt VPR techniques) have been proposed to overcome the challenges in this field, such as viewpoint, illumination and seasonal variations. While Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based VPR techniques have significant computational requirements that may restrict their applicability on resource-constrained platforms, handcrafted VPR techniques struggle with appearance changes. In this thesis, two mainly unexplored avenues of research are investigated, namely sequence-based filtering and JPEG compression.
To overcome the previously mentioned challenges, this thesis proposes a handcrafted VPR technique based on HOG descriptors, paired with an adaptive sequence-based filtering schema to perform VPR in scenarios where the appearance of the environment drastically changes upon different traversals. The technique entitled ConvSequential-SLAM is capable of achieving comparable place matching performance with state-of-the-art VPR techniques at reduced computational costs. The approach utilised for matching sequences of images in the above technique has been employed to investigate the improvement in VPR performance and the computational effort required to execute VPR when utilising a sequence-based filtering approach. As CNNs are computationally demanding, this thesis shows that VPR can be performed more efficiently using lightweight techniques. Furthermore, this thesis also investigates the effects of JPEG compression for VPR applications, where important reductions in both transmission and storage requirements can be achieved. As the VPR performance is drastically reduced, especially for high compression ratios, this thesis shows how a fine-tuned
CNN can achieve more consistent VPR performance on highly JPEG compressed data (i.e. above 90% JPEG compression). Sequence-based filtering is introduced to overcome the performance loss due to JPEG compression. This thesis shows that the size of a JPEG compressed image is often smaller than the size of the image descriptor, and therefore should be transferred instead. Furthermore, our experiments also show that the amount of data required for transfer is reduced with an increase in JPEG compression, even when requiring an increased number of images in a sequence. This thesis also analyses the effects of image resolution on the performance of handcrafted techniques, to enable efficient deployment of VPR solutions
on commercial products. The analysis performed in this thesis confirms that local feature descriptors are unable to operate on low-resolution images, as no keypoints (salient information) are detected. Moreover, this thesis also shows that the time required to perform VPR is reduced with a decrease in image resolution
Undergraduate and Graduate Course Descriptions, 2023 Spring
Wright State University undergraduate and graduate course descriptions from Spring 2023
A survey, review, and future trends of skin lesion segmentation and classification
The Computer-aided Diagnosis or Detection (CAD) approach for skin lesion analysis is an emerging field of research that has the potential to alleviate the burden and cost of skin cancer screening. Researchers have recently indicated increasing interest in developing such CAD systems, with the intention of providing a user-friendly tool to dermatologists to reduce the challenges encountered or associated with manual inspection. This article aims to provide a comprehensive literature survey and review of a total of 594 publications (356 for skin lesion segmentation and 238 for skin lesion classification) published between 2011 and 2022. These articles are analyzed and summarized in a number of different ways to contribute vital information regarding the methods for the development of CAD systems. These ways include: relevant and essential definitions and theories, input data (dataset utilization, preprocessing, augmentations, and fixing imbalance problems), method configuration (techniques, architectures, module frameworks, and losses), training tactics (hyperparameter settings), and evaluation criteria. We intend to investigate a variety of performance-enhancing approaches, including ensemble and post-processing. We also discuss these dimensions to reveal their current trends based on utilization frequencies. In addition, we highlight the primary difficulties associated with evaluating skin lesion segmentation and classification systems using minimal datasets, as well as the potential solutions to these difficulties. Findings, recommendations, and trends are disclosed to inform future research on developing an automated and robust CAD system for skin lesion analysis
An ensemble architecture for forgery detection and localization in digital images
Questa tesi presenta un approccio d'insieme unificato - "ensemble" - per il rilevamento e la localizzazione di contraffazioni in immagini digitali. Il focus della ricerca è su due delle più comuni ma efficaci tecniche di contraffazione: "copy-move" e "splicing". L'architettura proposta combina una serie di metodi di rilevamento e localizzazione di manipolazioni per ottenere prestazioni migliori rispetto a metodi utilizzati in modalità "standalone". I principali contributi di questo lavoro sono elencati di seguito.
In primo luogo, nel Capitolo 1 e 2 viene presentata un'ampia rassegna dell'attuale stato dell'arte nel rilevamento di manipolazioni ("forgery"), con particolare attenzione agli approcci basati sul deep learning. Un'importante intuizione che ne deriva è la seguente: questi approcci, sebbene promettenti, non possono essere facilmente confrontati in termini di performance perché tipicamente vengono valutati su dataset personalizzati a causa della mancanza di dati annotati con precisione. Inoltre, spesso questi dati non sono resi disponibili pubblicamente.
Abbiamo poi progettato un algoritmo di rilevamento di manipolazioni copy-move basato su "keypoint", descritto nel capitolo 3. Rispetto a esistenti approcci simili, abbiamo aggiunto una fase di clustering basato su densitĂ spaziale per filtrare le corrispondenze rumorose dei keypoint. I risultati hanno dimostrato che questo metodo funziona bene su due dataset di riferimento e supera uno dei metodi piĂą citati in letteratura.
Nel Capitolo 4 viene proposta una nuova architettura per predire la direzione della luce 3D in una data immagine. Questo approccio sfrutta l'idea di combinare un metodo "data-driven" con un modello di illuminazione fisica, consentendo così di ottenere prestazioni migliori. Al fine di sopperire al problema della scarsità di dati per l'addestramento di architetture di deep learning altamente parametrizzate, in particolare per il compito di scomposizione intrinseca delle immagini, abbiamo sviluppato due algoritmi di generazione dei dati. Questi sono stati utilizzati per produrre due dataset - uno sintetico e uno di immagini reali - con lo scopo di addestrare e valutare il nostro approccio.
Il modello di stima della direzione della luce proposto è stato sfruttato in un nuovo approccio di rilevamento di manipolazioni di tipo splicing, discusso nel Capitolo 5, in cui le incoerenze nella direzione della luce tra le diverse regioni dell'immagine vengono utilizzate per evidenziare potenziali attacchi splicing.
L'approccio ensemble proposto è descritto nell'ultimo capitolo. Questo include un modulo "FusionForgery" che combina gli output dei metodi "base" proposti in precedenza e assegna un'etichetta binaria (forged vs. original). Nel caso l'immagine sia identificata come contraffatta, il nostro metodo cerca anche di specializzare ulteriormente la decisione tra attacchi splicing o copy-move. In questo secondo caso, viene eseguito anche un tentativo di ricostruire le regioni "sorgente" utilizzate nell'attacco copy-move. Le prestazioni dell'approccio proposto sono state valutate addestrandolo e testandolo su un dataset sintetico, generato da noi, comprendente sia attacchi copy-move che di tipo splicing. L'approccio ensemble supera tutti i singoli metodi "base" in termini di prestazioni, dimostrando la validità della strategia proposta.This thesis presents a unified ensemble approach for forgery detection and localization in digital images. The focus of the research is on two of the most common but effective forgery techniques: copy-move and splicing. The ensemble architecture combines a set of forgery detection and localization methods in order to achieve improved performance with respect to standalone approaches. The main contributions of this work are listed in the following.
First, an extensive review of the current state of the art in forgery detection, with a focus on deep learning-based approaches is presented in Chapter 1 and 2. An important insight that is derived is the following: these approaches, although promising, cannot be easily compared in terms of performance because they are typically evaluated on custom datasets due to the lack of precisely annotated data. Also, they are often not publicly available.
We then designed a keypoint-based copy-move detection algorithm, which is described in Chapter 3. Compared to previous existing keypoints-based approaches, we added a density-based clustering step to filter out noisy keypoints matches. This method has been demonstrated to perform well on two benchmark datasets and outperforms one of the most cited state-of-the-art methods.
In Chapter 4 a novel architecture is proposed to predict the 3D light direction of the light in a given image. This approach leverages the idea of combining, in a data-driven method, a physical illumination model that allows for improved regression performance. In order to fill in the gap of data scarcity for training highly-parameterized deep learning architectures, especially for the task of intrinsic image decomposition, we developed two data generation algorithms that were used to produce two datasets - one synthetic and one of real images - to train and evaluate our approach.
The proposed light direction estimation model has then been employed to design a novel splicing detection approach, discussed in Chapter 5, in which light direction inconsistencies between different regions in the image are used to highlight potential splicing attacks.
The proposed ensemble scheme for forgery detection is described in the last chapter. It includes a "FusionForgery" module that combines the outputs of the different previously proposed "base" methods and assigns a binary label (forged vs. pristine) to the input image. In the case of forgery prediction, our method also tries to further specialize the decision between splicing and copy-move attacks. If the image is predicted as copy-moved, an attempt to reconstruct the source regions used in the copy-move attack is also done. The performance of the proposed approach has been assessed by training and testing it on a synthetic dataset, generated by us, comprising both copy-move and splicing attacks. The ensemble approach outperforms all of the individual "base" methods, demonstrating the validity of the proposed strategy
Deep learning in food category recognition
Integrating artificial intelligence with food category recognition has been a field of interest for research for the
past few decades. It is potentially one of the next steps in revolutionizing human interaction with food. The
modern advent of big data and the development of data-oriented fields like deep learning have provided advancements
in food category recognition. With increasing computational power and ever-larger food datasets,
the approach’s potential has yet to be realized. This survey provides an overview of methods that can be applied
to various food category recognition tasks, including detecting type, ingredients, quality, and quantity. We
survey the core components for constructing a machine learning system for food category recognition, including
datasets, data augmentation, hand-crafted feature extraction, and machine learning algorithms. We place a
particular focus on the field of deep learning, including the utilization of convolutional neural networks, transfer
learning, and semi-supervised learning. We provide an overview of relevant studies to promote further developments
in food category recognition for research and industrial applicationsMRC (MC_PC_17171)Royal Society (RP202G0230)BHF (AA/18/3/34220)Hope Foundation for Cancer Research (RM60G0680)GCRF (P202PF11)Sino-UK Industrial
Fund (RP202G0289)LIAS (P202ED10Data Science
Enhancement Fund (P202RE237)Fight for Sight (24NN201);Sino-UK
Education Fund (OP202006)BBSRC (RM32G0178B8
Novel deep learning architectures for marine and aquaculture applications
Alzayat Saleh's research was in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning to autonomously recognise fish and their morphological features from digital images. Here he created new deep learning architectures that solved various computer vision problems specific to the marine and aquaculture context. He found that these techniques can facilitate aquaculture management and environmental protection. Fisheries and conservation agencies can use his results for better monitoring strategies and sustainable fishing practices
Medical image retrieval for augmenting diagnostic radiology
Even though the use of medical imaging to diagnose patients is ubiquitous in clinical settings, their interpretations are still challenging for radiologists. Many factors make this interpretation task difficult, one of which is that medical images sometimes present subtle clues yet are crucial for diagnosis. Even worse, on the other hand, similar clues could indicate multiple diseases, making it challenging to figure out the definitive diagnoses. To help radiologists quickly and accurately interpret medical images, there is a need for a tool that can augment their diagnostic procedures and increase efficiency in their daily workflow. A general-purpose medical image retrieval system can be such a
tool as it allows them to search and retrieve similar cases that are already diagnosed to make comparative analyses that would complement their diagnostic decisions. In this thesis, we contribute to developing such a system by proposing approaches to be integrated as modules of a single system, enabling it to handle various information needs of radiologists and thus augment their diagnostic processes during the interpretation of medical images.
We have mainly studied the following retrieval approaches to handle radiologists’different information needs; i) Retrieval Based on Contents, ii) Retrieval Based on Contents, Patients’ Demographics, and Disease Predictions, and iii) Retrieval Based on Contents and Radiologists’ Text Descriptions. For the first study, we aimed to find an effective feature representation method to distinguish medical images considering their semantics and modalities. To do that, we have experimented different representation techniques based on handcrafted methods (mainly texture features) and deep learning (deep features). Based on the experimental results, we propose an effective feature representation approach and deep learning architectures for learning and extracting medical image contents. For the second study, we present a multi-faceted method that complements image contents with patients’ demographics and deep learning-based disease predictions, making it able to identify similar cases accurately considering the clinical context the radiologists seek.
For the last study, we propose a guided search method that integrates an image with a radiologist’s text description to guide the retrieval process. This method guarantees that the retrieved images are suitable for the comparative analysis to confirm or rule
out initial diagnoses (the differential diagnosis procedure). Furthermore, our method is based on a deep metric learning technique and is better than traditional content-based approaches that rely on only image features and, thus, sometimes retrieve insignificant random images
Survey on video anomaly detection in dynamic scenes with moving cameras
The increasing popularity of compact and inexpensive cameras, e.g.~dash
cameras, body cameras, and cameras equipped on robots, has sparked a growing
interest in detecting anomalies within dynamic scenes recorded by moving
cameras. However, existing reviews primarily concentrate on Video Anomaly
Detection (VAD) methods assuming static cameras. The VAD literature with moving
cameras remains fragmented, lacking comprehensive reviews to date. To address
this gap, we endeavor to present the first comprehensive survey on Moving
Camera Video Anomaly Detection (MC-VAD). We delve into the research papers
related to MC-VAD, critically assessing their limitations and highlighting
associated challenges. Our exploration encompasses three application domains:
security, urban transportation, and marine environments, which in turn cover
six specific tasks. We compile an extensive list of 25 publicly-available
datasets spanning four distinct environments: underwater, water surface,
ground, and aerial. We summarize the types of anomalies these datasets
correspond to or contain, and present five main categories of approaches for
detecting such anomalies. Lastly, we identify future research directions and
discuss novel contributions that could advance the field of MC-VAD. With this
survey, we aim to offer a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners
striving to develop and advance state-of-the-art MC-VAD methods.Comment: Under revie
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