Face Recognition with Degraded Images

After more than two decades of research on the topic, automatic face recognition is finding its applications in our daily life; banks, governments, airports and many other institutions and organizations are showing interest in employing such systems for security purposes. However, there are so many unanswered questions remaining and challenges not yet been tackled. Despite its common occurrence in images, blur is one of the topics that has not been studied until recently. There are generally two types of approached for dealing with blur in images: (1) identifying the blur system in order to restore the image, (2) extracting features that are blur invariant. The first category requires extra computation that makes it expensive for large scale pattern recognition applications. The second category, however, does not suffer from this drawback. This class of features were proposed for the first time in 1995, and has attracted more attention in the last few years. The proposed invariants are mostly developed in the spatial domain and the Fourier domain. The spatial domain blur invariants are developed based on moments, while those in the Fourier domain are defined based on the phase\u27 properties. In this dissertation, wavelet domain blur invariants are proposed for the first time, and their performance is evaluated in different experiments. It is also shown that the spatial domain blur invariants are a special case of the proposed invariants. The second contribution of this dissertation is blur invariant descriptors that are developed based on an alternative definition for ordinary moments that is proposed in this dissertation for the first time. These descriptors are used forface recognition with blurred images, where excellent results are achieved. Also, in a comparison with the state-of-art, the superiority of the proposed technique is demonstrated

Vision Based Extraction of Nutrition Information from Skewed Nutrition Labels

An important component of a healthy diet is the comprehension and retention of nutritional information and understanding of how different food items and nutritional constituents affect our bodies. In the U.S. and many other countries, nutritional information is primarily conveyed to consumers through nutrition labels (NLs) which can be found in all packaged food products. However, sometimes it becomes really challenging to utilize all this information available in these NLs even for consumers who are health conscious as they might not be familiar with nutritional terms or find it difficult to integrate nutritional data collection into their daily activities due to lack of time, motivation, or training. So it is essential to automate this data collection and interpretation process by integrating Computer Vision based algorithms to extract nutritional information from NLs because it improves the user’s ability to engage in continuous nutritional data collection and analysis. To make nutritional data collection more manageable and enjoyable for the users, we present a Proactive NUTrition Management System (PNUTS). PNUTS seeks to shift current research and clinical practices in nutrition management toward persuasion, automated nutritional information processing, and context-sensitive nutrition decision support. PNUTS consists of two modules, firstly a barcode scanning module which runs on smart phones and is capable of vision-based localization of One Dimensional (1D) Universal Product Code (UPC) and International Article Number (EAN) barcodes with relaxed pitch, roll, and yaw camera alignment constraints. The algorithm localizes barcodes in images by computing Dominant Orientations of Gradients (DOGs) of image segments and grouping smaller segments with similar DOGs into larger connected components. Connected components that pass given morphological criteria are marked as potential barcodes. The algorithm is implemented in a distributed, cloud-based system. The system’s front end is a smartphone application that runs on Android smartphones with Android 4.2 or higher. The system’s back end is deployed on a five node Linux cluster where images are processed. The algorithm was evaluated on a corpus of 7,545 images extracted from 506 videos of bags, bottles, boxes, and cans in a supermarket. The DOG algorithm was coupled to our in-place scanner for 1D UPC and EAN barcodes. The scanner receives from the DOG algorithm the rectangular planar dimensions of a connected component and the component’s dominant gradient orientation angle referred to as the skew angle. The scanner draws several scan lines at that skew angle within the component to recognize the barcode in place without any rotations. The scanner coupled to the localizer was tested on the same corpus of 7,545 images. Laboratory experiments indicate that the system can localize and scan barcodes of any orientation in the yaw plane, of up to 73.28 degrees in the pitch plane, and of up to 55.5 degrees in the roll plane. The videos have been made public for all interested research communities to replicate our findings or to use them in their own research. The front end Android application is available for free download at Google Play under the title of NutriGlass. This module is also coupled to a comprehensive NL database from which nutritional information can be retrieved on demand. Currently our NL database consists of more than 230,000 products. The second module of PNUTS is an algorithm whose objective is to determine the text skew angle of an NL image without constraining the angle’s magnitude. The horizontal, vertical, and diagonal matrices of the (Two Dimensional) 2D Haar Wavelet Transform are used to identify 2D points with significant intensity changes. The set of points is bounded with a minimum area rectangle whose rotation angle is the text’s skew. The algorithm’s performance is compared with the performance of five text skew detection algorithms on 1001 U.S. nutrition label images and 2200 single- and multi-column document images in multiple languages. To ensure the reproducibility of the reported results, the source code of the algorithm and the image data have been made publicly available. If the skew angle is estimated correctly, optical character recognition (OCR) techniques can be used to extract nutrition information

The computational magic of the ventral stream: sketch of a theory (and why some deep architectures work).

This paper explores the theoretical consequences of a simple assumption: the computational goal of the feedforward path in the ventral stream -- from V1, V2, V4 and to IT -- is to discount image transformations, after learning them during development

3D Object Recognition Using Fast Overlapped Block Processing Technique

Three-dimensional (3D) image and medical image processing, which are considered big data analysis, have attracted significant attention during the last few years. To this end, efficient 3D object recognition techniques could be beneficial to such image and medical image processing. However, to date, most of the proposed methods for 3D object recognition experience major challenges in terms of high computational complexity. This is attributed to the fact that the computational complexity and execution time are increased when the dimensions of the object are increased, which is the case in 3D object recognition. Therefore, finding an efficient method for obtaining high recognition accuracy with low computational complexity is essential. To this end, this paper presents an efficient method for 3D object recognition with low computational complexity. Specifically, the proposed method uses a fast overlapped technique, which deals with higher-order polynomials and high-dimensional objects. The fast overlapped block-processing algorithm reduces the computational complexity of feature extraction. This paper also exploits Charlier polynomials and their moments along with support vector machine (SVM). The evaluation of the presented method is carried out using a well-known dataset, the McGill benchmark dataset. Besides, comparisons are performed with existing 3D object recognition methods. The results show that the proposed 3D object recognition approach achieves high recognition rates under different noisy environments. Furthermore, the results show that the presented method has the potential to mitigate noise distortion and outperforms existing methods in terms of computation time under noise-free and different noisy environments

High Performance Video Stream Analytics System for Object Detection and Classification

Due to the recent advances in cameras, cell phones and camcorders, particularly the resolution at which they can record an image/video, large amounts of data are generated daily. This video data is often so large that manually inspecting it for object detection and classification can be time consuming and error prone, thereby it requires automated analysis to extract useful information and meta-data. The automated analysis from video streams also comes with numerous challenges such as blur content and variation in illumination conditions and poses. We investigate an automated video analytics system in this thesis which takes into account the characteristics from both shallow and deep learning domains. We propose fusion of features from spatial frequency domain to perform highly accurate blur and illumination invariant object classification using deep learning networks. We also propose the tuning of hyper-parameters associated with the deep learning network through a mathematical model. The mathematical model used to support hyper-parameter tuning improved the performance of the proposed system during training. The outcomes of various hyper-parameters on system's performance are compared. The parameters that contribute towards the most optimal performance are selected for the video object classification. The proposed video analytics system has been demonstrated to process a large number of video streams and the underlying infrastructure is able to scale based on the number and size of the video stream(s) being processed. The extensive experimentation on publicly available image and video datasets reveal that the proposed system is significantly more accurate and scalable and can be used as a general purpose video analytics system.N/

Parametric Scattering Networks

La plupart des percées dans l'apprentissage profond et en particulier dans les réseaux de neurones convolutifs ont impliqué des efforts importants pour collecter et annoter des quantités massives de données. Alors que les mégadonnées deviennent de plus en plus répandues, il existe de nombreuses applications où la tâche d'annoter plus d'un petit nombre d'échantillons est irréalisable, ce qui a suscité un intérêt pour les tâches d'apprentissage sur petits échantillons. Il a été montré que les transformées de diffusion d'ondelettes sont efficaces dans le cadre de données annotées limitées. La transformée de diffusion en ondelettes crée des invariants géométriques et une stabilité de déformation. Les filtres d'ondelettes utilisés dans la transformée de diffusion sont généralement sélectionnés pour créer une trame serrée via une ondelette mère paramétrée. Dans ce travail, nous étudions si cette construction standard est optimale. En nous concentrant sur les ondelettes de Morlet, nous proposons d'apprendre les échelles, les orientations et les rapports d'aspect des filtres. Nous appelons notre approche le Parametric Scattering Network. Nous illustrons que les filtres appris par le réseau de diffusion paramétrique peuvent être interprétés en fonction de la tâche spécifique sur laquelle ils ont été entrainés. Nous démontrons également empiriquement que notre transformée de diffusion paramétrique partage une stabilité aux déformations similaire à la transformée de diffusion traditionnelle. Enfin, nous montrons que notre version apprise de la transformée de diffusion génère des gains de performances significatifs par rapport à la transformée de diffusion standard lorsque le nombre d'échantillions d'entrainement est petit. Nos résultats empiriques suggèrent que les constructions traditionnelles des ondelettes ne sont pas toujours nécessaires.Most breakthroughs in deep learning have required considerable effort to collect massive amounts of well-annotated data. As big data becomes more prevalent, there are many applications where annotating more than a small number of samples is impractical, leading to growing interest in small sample learning tasks and deep learning approaches towards them. Wavelet scattering transforms have been shown to be effective in limited labeled data settings. The wavelet scattering transform creates geometric invariants and deformation stability. In multiple signal domains, it has been shown to yield more discriminative representations than other non-learned representations and to outperform learned representations in certain tasks, particularly on limited labeled data and highly structured signals. The wavelet filters used in the scattering transform are typically selected to create a tight frame via a parameterized mother wavelet. In this work, we investigate whether this standard wavelet filterbank construction is optimal. Focusing on Morlet wavelets, we propose to learn the scales, orientations, and aspect ratios of the filters to produce problem-specific parameterizations of the scattering transform. We call our approach the Parametric Scattering Network. We illustrate that filters learned by parametric scattering networks can be interpreted according to the specific task on which they are trained. We also empirically demonstrate that our parametric scattering transforms share similar stability to deformations as the traditional scattering transforms. We also show that our approach yields significant performance gains in small-sample classification settings over the standard scattering transform. Moreover, our empirical results suggest that traditional filterbank constructions may not always be necessary for scattering transforms to extract useful representations

Design of a secure architecture for the exchange of biomedical information in m-Health scenarios

El paradigma de m-Salud (salud móvil) aboga por la integración masiva de las más avanzadas tecnologías de comunicación, red móvil y sensores en aplicaciones y sistemas de salud, para fomentar el despliegue de un nuevo modelo de atención clínica centrada en el usuario/paciente. Este modelo tiene por objetivos el empoderamiento de los usuarios en la gestión de su propia salud (p.ej. aumentando sus conocimientos, promocionando estilos de vida saludable y previniendo enfermedades), la prestación de una mejor tele-asistencia sanitaria en el hogar para ancianos y pacientes crónicos y una notable disminución del gasto de los Sistemas de Salud gracias a la reducción del número y la duración de las hospitalizaciones. No obstante, estas ventajas, atribuidas a las aplicaciones de m-Salud, suelen venir acompañadas del requisito de un alto grado de disponibilidad de la información biomédica de sus usuarios para garantizar una alta calidad de servicio, p.ej. fusionar varias señales de un usuario para obtener un diagnóstico más preciso. La consecuencia negativa de cumplir esta demanda es el aumento directo de las superficies potencialmente vulnerables a ataques, lo que sitúa a la seguridad (y a la privacidad) del modelo de m-Salud como factor crítico para su éxito. Como requisito no funcional de las aplicaciones de m-Salud, la seguridad ha recibido menos atención que otros requisitos técnicos que eran más urgentes en etapas de desarrollo previas, tales como la robustez, la eficiencia, la interoperabilidad o la usabilidad. Otro factor importante que ha contribuido a retrasar la implementación de políticas de seguridad sólidas es que garantizar un determinado nivel de seguridad implica unos costes que pueden ser muy relevantes en varias dimensiones, en especial en la económica (p.ej. sobrecostes por la inclusión de hardware extra para la autenticación de usuarios), en el rendimiento (p.ej. reducción de la eficiencia y de la interoperabilidad debido a la integración de elementos de seguridad) y en la usabilidad (p.ej. configuración más complicada de dispositivos y aplicaciones de salud debido a las nuevas opciones de seguridad). Por tanto, las soluciones de seguridad que persigan satisfacer a todos los actores del contexto de m-Salud (usuarios, pacientes, personal médico, personal técnico, legisladores, fabricantes de dispositivos y equipos, etc.) deben ser robustas y al mismo tiempo minimizar sus costes asociados. Esta Tesis detalla una propuesta de seguridad, compuesta por cuatro grandes bloques interconectados, para dotar de seguridad a las arquitecturas de m-Salud con unos costes reducidos. El primer bloque define un esquema global que proporciona unos niveles de seguridad e interoperabilidad acordes con las características de las distintas aplicaciones de m-Salud. Este esquema está compuesto por tres capas diferenciadas, diseñadas a la medidas de los dominios de m-Salud y de sus restricciones, incluyendo medidas de seguridad adecuadas para la defensa contra las amenazas asociadas a sus aplicaciones de m-Salud. El segundo bloque establece la extensión de seguridad de aquellos protocolos estándar que permiten la adquisición, el intercambio y/o la administración de información biomédica -- por tanto, usados por muchas aplicaciones de m-Salud -- pero no reúnen los niveles de seguridad detallados en el esquema previo. Estas extensiones se concretan para los estándares biomédicos ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD y SCP-ECG. El tercer bloque propone nuevas formas de fortalecer la seguridad de los tests biomédicos, que constituyen el elemento esencial de muchas aplicaciones de m-Salud de carácter clínico, mediante codificaciones novedosas. Finalmente el cuarto bloque, que se sitúa en paralelo a los anteriores, selecciona herramientas genéricas de seguridad (elementos de autenticación y criptográficos) cuya integración en los otros bloques resulta idónea, y desarrolla nuevas herramientas de seguridad, basadas en señal -- embedding y keytagging --, para reforzar la protección de los test biomédicos.The paradigm of m-Health (mobile health) advocates for the massive integration of advanced mobile communications, network and sensor technologies in healthcare applications and systems to foster the deployment of a new, user/patient-centered healthcare model enabling the empowerment of users in the management of their health (e.g. by increasing their health literacy, promoting healthy lifestyles and the prevention of diseases), a better home-based healthcare delivery for elderly and chronic patients and important savings for healthcare systems due to the reduction of hospitalizations in number and duration. It is a fact that many m-Health applications demand high availability of biomedical information from their users (for further accurate analysis, e.g. by fusion of various signals) to guarantee high quality of service, which on the other hand entails increasing the potential surfaces for attacks. Therefore, it is not surprising that security (and privacy) is commonly included among the most important barriers for the success of m-Health. As a non-functional requirement for m-Health applications, security has received less attention than other technical issues that were more pressing at earlier development stages, such as reliability, eficiency, interoperability or usability. Another fact that has contributed to delaying the enforcement of robust security policies is that guaranteeing a certain security level implies costs that can be very relevant and that span along diferent dimensions. These include budgeting (e.g. the demand of extra hardware for user authentication), performance (e.g. lower eficiency and interoperability due to the addition of security elements) and usability (e.g. cumbersome configuration of devices and applications due to security options). Therefore, security solutions that aim to satisfy all the stakeholders in the m-Health context (users/patients, medical staff, technical staff, systems and devices manufacturers, regulators, etc.) shall be robust and, at the same time, minimize their associated costs. This Thesis details a proposal, composed of four interrelated blocks, to integrate appropriate levels of security in m-Health architectures in a cost-efcient manner. The first block designes a global scheme that provides different security and interoperability levels accordingto how critical are the m-Health applications to be implemented. This consists ofthree layers tailored to the m-Health domains and their constraints, whose security countermeasures defend against the threats of their associated m-Health applications. Next, the second block addresses the security extension of those standard protocols that enable the acquisition, exchange and/or management of biomedical information | thus, used by many m-Health applications | but do not meet the security levels described in the former scheme. These extensions are materialized for the biomedical standards ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD and SCP-ECG. Then, the third block proposes new ways of enhancing the security of biomedical standards, which are the centerpiece of many clinical m-Health applications, by means of novel codings. Finally the fourth block, with is parallel to the others, selects generic security methods (for user authentication and cryptographic protection) whose integration in the other blocks results optimal, and also develops novel signal-based methods (embedding and keytagging) for strengthening the security of biomedical tests. The layer-based extensions of the standards ISO/IEEE 11073 PHD and SCP-ECG can be considered as robust, cost-eficient and respectful with their original features and contents. The former adds no attributes to its data information model, four new frames to the service model |and extends four with new sub-frames|, and only one new sub-state to the communication model. Furthermore, a lightweight architecture consisting of a personal health device mounting a 9 MHz processor and an aggregator mounting a 1 GHz processor is enough to transmit a 3-lead electrocardiogram in real-time implementing the top security layer. The extra requirements associated to this extension are an initial configuration of the health device and the aggregator, tokens for identification/authentication of users if these devices are to be shared and the implementation of certain IHE profiles in the aggregator to enable the integration of measurements in healthcare systems. As regards to the extension of SCP-ECG, it only adds a new section with selected security elements and syntax in order to protect the rest of file contents and provide proper role-based access control. The overhead introduced in the protected SCP-ECG is typically 2{13 % of the regular file size, and the extra delays to protect a newly generated SCP-ECG file and to access it for interpretation are respectively a 2{10 % and a 5 % of the regular delays. As regards to the signal-based security techniques developed, the embedding method is the basis for the proposal of a generic coding for tests composed of biomedical signals, periodic measurements and contextual information. This has been adjusted and evaluated with electrocardiogram and electroencephalogram-based tests, proving the objective clinical quality of the coded tests, the capacity of the coding-access system to operate in real-time (overall delays of 2 s for electrocardiograms and 3.3 s for electroencephalograms) and its high usability. Despite of the embedding of security and metadata to enable m-Health services, the compression ratios obtained by this coding range from ' 3 in real-time transmission to ' 5 in offline operation. Complementarily, keytagging permits associating information to images (and other signals) by means of keys in a secure and non-distorting fashion, which has been availed to implement security measures such as image authentication, integrity control and location of tampered areas, private captioning with role-based access control, traceability and copyright protection. The tests conducted indicate a remarkable robustness-capacity tradeoff that permits implementing all this measures simultaneously, and the compatibility of keytagging with JPEG2000 compression, maintaining this tradeoff while setting the overall keytagging delay in only ' 120 ms for any image size | evidencing the scalability of this technique. As a general conclusion, it has been demonstrated and illustrated with examples that there are various, complementary and structured manners to contribute in the implementation of suitable security levels for m-Health architectures with a moderate cost in budget, performance, interoperability and usability. The m-Health landscape is evolving permanently along all their dimensions, and this Thesis aims to do so with its security. Furthermore, the lessons learned herein may offer further guidance for the elaboration of more comprehensive and updated security schemes, for the extension of other biomedical standards featuring low emphasis on security or privacy, and for the improvement of the state of the art regarding signal-based protection methods and applications

Maximum Energy Subsampling: A General Scheme For Multi-resolution Image Representation And Analysis

Image descriptors play an important role in image representation and analysis. Multi-resolution image descriptors can effectively characterize complex images and extract their hidden information. Wavelets descriptors have been widely used in multi-resolution image analysis. However, making the wavelets transform shift and rotation invariant produces redundancy and requires complex matching processes. As to other multi-resolution descriptors, they usually depend on other theories or information, such as filtering function, prior-domain knowledge, etc.; that not only increases the computation complexity, but also generates errors. We propose a novel multi-resolution scheme that is capable of transforming any kind of image descriptor into its multi-resolution structure with high computation accuracy and efficiency. Our multi-resolution scheme is based on sub-sampling an image into an odd-even image tree. Through applying image descriptors to the odd-even image tree, we get the relative multi-resolution image descriptors. Multi-resolution analysis is based on downsampling expansion with maximum energy extraction followed by upsampling reconstruction. Since the maximum energy usually retained in the lowest frequency coefficients; we do maximum energy extraction through keeping the lowest coefficients from each resolution level. Our multi-resolution scheme can analyze images recursively and effectively without introducing artifacts or changes to the original images, produce multi-resolution representations, obtain higher resolution images only using information from lower resolutions, compress data, filter noise, extract effective image features and be implemented in parallel processing