Effective CCTV and the challenge of constructing legitimate suspicion using remote visual images

This paper compares the effectiveness of public CCTV systems according to meta-reviews, with what might be expected based upon theoretical predictions. The apparent gulf between practice and prediction is explored in the light of the challenges faced by CCTV operators in terms of effective target selection. In addition, counter-intuitive reactions by members of the public to situational symbols of crime deterrence may also undermine the efficacy of CCTV. Evidence is introduced and reviewed that suggests CCTV operators may employ implicit profiles to select targets. Essentially, young, scruffy males who appear to be loitering are disproportionately targeted compared with their base rate use of surveyed areas. However, the extent to which such a profile is diagnostic of criminal intent or behaviour is unclear. Such profiles may represent little more than ‘pattern matching’ within an impoverished visual medium. Finally, suggestions for future research and effective CCTV operator practice are offered in order to improve target selection.Peer reviewe

First impressions: A survey on vision-based apparent personality trait analysis

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Personality analysis has been widely studied in psychology, neuropsychology, and signal processing fields, among others. From the past few years, it also became an attractive research area in visual computing. From the computational point of view, by far speech and text have been the most considered cues of information for analyzing personality. However, recently there has been an increasing interest from the computer vision community in analyzing personality from visual data. Recent computer vision approaches are able to accurately analyze human faces, body postures and behaviors, and use these information to infer apparent personality traits. Because of the overwhelming research interest in this topic, and of the potential impact that this sort of methods could have in society, we present in this paper an up-to-date review of existing vision-based approaches for apparent personality trait recognition. We describe seminal and cutting edge works on the subject, discussing and comparing their distinctive features and limitations. Future venues of research in the field are identified and discussed. Furthermore, aspects on the subjectivity in data labeling/evaluation, as well as current datasets and challenges organized to push the research on the field are reviewed.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Dominance attributions following damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Damage to the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VM) can result in dramatic and maladaptive changes in social behavior despite preservation of most other cognitive abilities. One important aspect of social cognition is the ability to detect social dominance, a process of attributing from particular social signals another person's relative standing in the social world. To test the role of the VM in making attributions of social dominance, we designed two experiments: one requiring dominance judgments from static pictures of faces, the second requiring dominance judgments from film clips. We tested three demographically matched groups of subjects: subjects with focal lesions in the VM (n=15), brain-damaged comparison subjects with lesions excluding the VM (n=11), and a reference group of normal individuals with no history of neurological disease (n=32). Contrary to our expectation, we found that subjects with VM lesions gave dominance judgments on both tasks that did not differ significantly from those given by the other groups. Despite their grossly normal performance, however, subjects with VM lesions showed more subtle impairments specifically when judging static faces: They were less discriminative in their dominance judgments, and did not appear to make normal use of gender and age of the faces in forming their judgments. The findings suggest that, in the laboratory tasks we used, damage to the VM does not necessarily impair judgments of social dominance, although it appears to result in alterations in strategy that might translate into behavioral impairments in real life

How do you say ‘hello’? Personality impressions from brief novel voices

On hearing a novel voice, listeners readily form personality impressions of that speaker. Accurate or not, these impressions are known to affect subsequent interactions; yet the underlying psychological and acoustical bases remain poorly understood. Furthermore, hitherto studies have focussed on extended speech as opposed to analysing the instantaneous impressions we obtain from first experience. In this paper, through a mass online rating experiment, 320 participants rated 64 sub-second vocal utterances of the word ‘hello’ on one of 10 personality traits. We show that: (1) personality judgements of brief utterances from unfamiliar speakers are consistent across listeners; (2) a two-dimensional ‘social voice space’ with axes mapping Valence (Trust, Likeability) and Dominance, each driven by differing combinations of vocal acoustics, adequately summarises ratings in both male and female voices; and (3) a positive combination of Valence and Dominance results in increased perceived male vocal Attractiveness, whereas perceived female vocal Attractiveness is largely controlled by increasing Valence. Results are discussed in relation to the rapid evaluation of personality and, in turn, the intent of others, as being driven by survival mechanisms via approach or avoidance behaviours. These findings provide empirical bases for predicting personality impressions from acoustical analyses of short utterances and for generating desired personality impressions in artificial voices

Objectification theory predicts college women’s attitudes toward cosmetic surgery

This study investigated cosmetic surgery attitudes within the framework of objectification theory. One hundred predominantlyWhite, British undergraduate women completed self-report measures of impression management, global selfesteem, interpersonal sexual objectification, self-surveillance, body shame, and three components of cosmetic surgery attitudes. As expected, each of the objectification theory variables predicted greater consideration of having cosmetic surgery in the future. Also, as expected, sexual objectification and body shame uniquely predicted socialmotives for cosmetic surgery, whereas self-surveillance uniquely predicted intrapersonal motives for cosmetic surgery. These findings suggest that women’s acceptance of cosmetic surgery as a way to manipulate physical appearance can be partially explained by the degree to which they view themselves through the lenses of sexual and self-objectification

Plain Tobacco Packaging: A Systematic Review

(From the Executive Summary): This systematic review outlines findings from 37 studies that provide evidence of the impacts of plain tobacco packaging. The review was conducted following the publication of the March 2011 White Paper Healthy Lives: Healthy People which set out a renewed Tobacco Control Plan for England. One of the key actions identified in the plan was to consult on possible options to reduce the promotional impact of tobacco packaging, including plain packaging. This systematic review was commissioned to provide a comprehensive overview of evidence on the impact of plain packaging in order to inform a public consultation on the issue

Predicting the Mobile Consumer Purchase Behavior using Quantified Visual Preferences

Most mobile consumers make a decision about the product in a split second. The decision making in the mobile environment is surely faster than in front of the desktop. This paper claims that the decision-making in the mobile shopping is highly depending on the product’s first impression and their visual preference. By predicting the human’s visual preference based on the image processing model of perceived colorfulness and perceived visual complexity, this study tested an S-O-R path model from visual preference to consumer’s bookmarking and purchase intention via age and gender as moderators. With the controlled laboratory experiment, we substantiated our predicting image preference model. Further, a plan for a real data based analysis is proposed to validate the congruity of our model with the Korean mobile shopping company later

Crossing the ‘Uncanny Valley’: Adaptation to Cartoon Faces Can Influence Perception of Human Faces

In this study we assessed whether there is a single face space common to both human and cartoon faces by testing whether adaptation to cartoon faces can affect perception of human faces. Participants were shown Japanese animation cartoon videos containing faces with abnormally large eyes. The use of animated videos eliminated the possibility of position-dependent retinotopic adaptation (because the faces appear at many different locations) and more closely simulated naturalistic exposure. Adaptation to cartoon faces with large eyes significantly shifted preferences for human faces toward larger eyes, consistent with a common, non-retinotopic representation for both cartoon and human faces. This supports the possibility that there are representations that are specific to faces yet common to all kinds of faces