Asynchronous spiking neurons, the natural key to exploit temporal sparsity

Inference of Deep Neural Networks for stream signal (Video/Audio) processing in edge devices is still challenging. Unlike the most state of the art inference engines which are efficient for static signals, our brain is optimized for real-time dynamic signal processing. We believe one important feature of the brain (asynchronous state-full processing) is the key to its excellence in this domain. In this work, we show how asynchronous processing with state-full neurons allows exploitation of the existing sparsity in natural signals. This paper explains three different types of sparsity and proposes an inference algorithm which exploits all types of sparsities in the execution of already trained networks. Our experiments in three different applications (Handwritten digit recognition, Autonomous Steering and Hand-Gesture recognition) show that this model of inference reduces the number of required operations for sparse input data by a factor of one to two orders of magnitudes. Additionally, due to fully asynchronous processing this type of inference can be run on fully distributed and scalable neuromorphic hardware platforms

An original framework for understanding human actions and body language by using deep neural networks

The evolution of both fields of Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) has allowed the development of efficient automatic systems for the analysis of people's behaviour. By studying hand movements it is possible to recognize gestures, often used by people to communicate information in a non-verbal way. These gestures can also be used to control or interact with devices without physically touching them. In particular, sign language and semaphoric hand gestures are the two foremost areas of interest due to their importance in Human-Human Communication (HHC) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), respectively. While the processing of body movements play a key role in the action recognition and affective computing fields. The former is essential to understand how people act in an environment, while the latter tries to interpret people's emotions based on their poses and movements; both are essential tasks in many computer vision applications, including event recognition, and video surveillance. In this Ph.D. thesis, an original framework for understanding Actions and body language is presented. The framework is composed of three main modules: in the first one, a Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNNs) based method for the Recognition of Sign Language and Semaphoric Hand Gestures is proposed; the second module presents a solution based on 2D skeleton and two-branch stacked LSTM-RNNs for action recognition in video sequences; finally, in the last module, a solution for basic non-acted emotion recognition by using 3D skeleton and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is provided. The performances of RNN-LSTMs are explored in depth, due to their ability to model the long term contextual information of temporal sequences, making them suitable for analysing body movements. All the modules were tested by using challenging datasets, well known in the state of the art, showing remarkable results compared to the current literature methods

Automatic emotional state detection using facial expression dynamic in videos

In this paper, an automatic emotion detection system is built for a computer or machine to detect the emotional state from facial expressions in human computer communication. Firstly, dynamic motion features are extracted from facial expression videos and then advanced machine learning methods for classification and regression are used to predict the emotional states. The system is evaluated on two publicly available datasets, i.e. GEMEP_FERA and AVEC2013, and satisfied performances are achieved in comparison with the baseline results provided. With this emotional state detection capability, a machine can read the facial expression of its user automatically. This technique can be integrated into applications such as smart robots, interactive games and smart surveillance systems

Machine Analysis of Facial Expressions

No abstract

A dynamic texture based approach to recognition of facial actions and their temporal models

In this work, we propose a dynamic texture-based approach to the recognition of facial Action Units (AUs, atomic facial gestures) and their temporal models (i.e., sequences of temporal segments: neutral, onset, apex, and offset) in near-frontal-view face videos. Two approaches to modeling the dynamics and the appearance in the face region of an input video are compared: an extended version of Motion History Images and a novel method based on Nonrigid Registration using Free-Form Deformations (FFDs). The extracted motion representation is used to derive motion orientation histogram descriptors in both the spatial and temporal domain. Per AU, a combination of discriminative, frame-based GentleBoost ensemble learners and dynamic, generative Hidden Markov Models detects the presence of the AU in question and its temporal segments in an input image sequence. When tested for recognition of all 27 lower and upper face AUs, occurring alone or in combination in 264 sequences from the MMI facial expression database, the proposed method achieved an average event recognition accuracy of 89.2 percent for the MHI method and 94.3 percent for the FFD method. The generalization performance of the FFD method has been tested using the Cohn-Kanade database. Finally, we also explored the performance on spontaneous expressions in the Sensitive Artificial Listener data set

Log-Euclidean Bag of Words for Human Action Recognition

Representing videos by densely extracted local space-time features has recently become a popular approach for analysing actions. In this paper, we tackle the problem of categorising human actions by devising Bag of Words (BoW) models based on covariance matrices of spatio-temporal features, with the features formed from histograms of optical flow. Since covariance matrices form a special type of Riemannian manifold, the space of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices, non-Euclidean geometry should be taken into account while discriminating between covariance matrices. To this end, we propose to embed SPD manifolds to Euclidean spaces via a diffeomorphism and extend the BoW approach to its Riemannian version. The proposed BoW approach takes into account the manifold geometry of SPD matrices during the generation of the codebook and histograms. Experiments on challenging human action datasets show that the proposed method obtains notable improvements in discrimination accuracy, in comparison to several state-of-the-art methods