Audio-Visual Speaker Identification using the CUAVE Database

The freely available nature of the CUAVE database allows it to provide a valuable platform to form benchmarks and compare research. This paper shows that the CUAVE database can successfully be used to test speaker identifications systems, with performance comparable to existing systems implemented on other databases. Additionally, this research shows that the optimal configuration for decisionfusion of an audio-visual speaker identification system relies heavily on the video modality in all but clean speech conditions

CCTV Surveillance System, Attacks and Design Goals

Closed Circuit Tele-Vision surveillance systems are frequently the subject of debate. Some parties seek to promote their benefits such as their use in criminal investigations and providing a feeling of safety to the public. They have also been on the receiving end of bad press when some consider intrusiveness has outweighed the benefits. The correct design and use of such systems is paramount to ensure a CCTV surveillance system meets the needs of the user, provides a tangible benefit and provides safety and security for the wider law-abiding public. In focusing on the normative aspects of CCTV, the paper raises questions concerning the efficiency of understanding contemporary forms of ‘social ordering practices’ primarily in terms of technical rationalities while neglecting other, more material and ideological processes involved in the construction of social order. In this paper, a 360-degree view presented on the assessment of the diverse CCTV video surveillance systems (VSS) of recent past and present in accordance with technology. Further, an attempt been made to compare different VSS with their operational strengths and their attacks. Finally, the paper concludes with a number of future research directions in the design and implementation of VSS

VIDEO PREPROCESSING BASED ON HUMAN PERCEPTION FOR TELESURGERY

Video transmission plays a critical role in robotic telesurgery because of the high bandwidth and high quality requirement. The goal of this dissertation is to find a preprocessing method based on human visual perception for telesurgical video, so that when preprocessed image sequences are passed to the video encoder, the bandwidth can be reallocated from non-essential surrounding regions to the region of interest, ensuring excellent image quality of critical regions (e.g. surgical region). It can also be considered as a quality control scheme that will gracefully degrade the video quality in the presence of network congestion. The proposed preprocessing method can be separated into two major parts. First, we propose a time-varying attention map whose value is highest at the gazing point and falls off progressively towards the periphery. Second, we propose adaptive spatial filtering and the parameters of which are adjusted according to the attention map. By adding visual adaptation to the spatial filtering, telesurgical video data can be compressed efficiently because of the high degree of visual redundancy removal by our algorithm. Our experimental results have shown that with the proposed preprocessing method, over half of the bandwidth can be reduced while there is no significant visual effect for the observer. We have also developed an optimal parameter selecting algorithm, so that when the network bandwidth is limited, the overall visual distortion after preprocessing is minimized

"Looking at What One Believies". Indagine sulla Relazione tra Movimenti Oculari e Associazioni Implicite

Social information processing involves embodiment, i.e. thoughts comprise mental simulations of bodily experiences, and, at the same time, cognition directly affects the content of sensory-motor systems. We investigate whether it is possible to observe a top-down effect of implicit association on eye gaze behaviour by means of eye-tracking methods and techniques. We assume that if attitudes, social perception, and emotion are the outcome of embodied processes, then people with different kinds of mental attributes (e.g. racial prejudices) must perform different kinds of eye gaze movements when they explore the visual content of implicit association tasks. The relationship between the eye movements –recorded by the open-source ITU Gaze Tracker eye tracking system– and implicit associations occurring during an Implicit Association Test (IAT) on hidden ethnic biases of about 80 Caucasian participants was investigated in two experiments with the same experimental paradigm. Both total times of fixations and total number of fixations emerged as significant predictors of IAT scores. The analysis carried out on the number of fixations showed that subjects implicitly watch what they believe, i.e. the association according to their psychological attributes. Eye-tracking methodology hence seems to be a promising approach to obtain objective measures to investigate the unintended characteristics underlying behaviour in ecological settings and could be applicable to different research contexts such as studies on stereotypes, implicit attitudes, self-esteem, and self-concept