Human-robot interaction and computer-vision-based services for autonomous robots

L'Aprenentatge per Imitació (IL), o Programació de robots per Demostració (PbD), abasta mètodes pels quals un robot aprèn noves habilitats a través de l'orientació humana i la imitació. La PbD s'inspira en la forma en què els éssers humans aprenen noves habilitats per imitació amb la finalitat de desenvolupar mètodes pels quals les noves tasques es poden transferir als robots. Aquesta tesi està motivada per la pregunta genèrica de "què imitar?", Que es refereix al problema de com extreure les característiques essencials d'una tasca. Amb aquesta finalitat, aquí adoptem la perspectiva del Reconeixement d'Accions (AR) per tal de permetre que el robot decideixi el què cal imitar o inferir en interactuar amb un ésser humà. L'enfoc proposat es basa en un mètode ben conegut que prové del processament del llenguatge natural: és a dir, la bossa de paraules (BoW). Aquest mètode s'aplica a grans bases de dades per tal d'obtenir un model entrenat. Encara que BoW és una tècnica d'aprenentatge de màquines que s'utilitza en diversos camps de la investigació, en la classificació d'accions per a l'aprenentatge en robots està lluny de ser acurada. D'altra banda, se centra en la classificació d'objectes i gestos en lloc d'accions. Per tant, en aquesta tesi es demostra que el mètode és adequat, en escenaris de classificació d'accions, per a la fusió d'informació de diferents fonts o de diferents assajos. Aquesta tesi fa tres contribucions: (1) es proposa un mètode general per fer front al reconeixement d'accions i per tant contribuir a l'aprenentatge per imitació; (2) la metodologia pot aplicar-se a grans bases de dades, que inclouen diferents modes de captura de les accions; i (3) el mètode s'aplica específicament en un projecte internacional d'innovació real anomenat Vinbot.El Aprendizaje por Imitación (IL), o Programación de robots por Demostración (PbD), abarca métodos por los cuales un robot aprende nuevas habilidades a través de la orientación humana y la imitación. La PbD se inspira en la forma en que los seres humanos aprenden nuevas habilidades por imitación con el fin de desarrollar métodos por los cuales las nuevas tareas se pueden transferir a los robots. Esta tesis está motivada por la pregunta genérica de "qué imitar?", que se refiere al problema de cómo extraer las características esenciales de una tarea. Con este fin, aquí adoptamos la perspectiva del Reconocimiento de Acciones (AR) con el fin de permitir que el robot decida lo que hay que imitar o inferir al interactuar con un ser humano. El enfoque propuesto se basa en un método bien conocido que proviene del procesamiento del lenguaje natural: es decir, la bolsa de palabras (BoW). Este método se aplica a grandes bases de datos con el fin de obtener un modelo entrenado. Aunque BoW es una técnica de aprendizaje de máquinas que se utiliza en diversos campos de la investigación, en la clasificación de acciones para el aprendizaje en robots está lejos de ser acurada. Además, se centra en la clasificación de objetos y gestos en lugar de acciones. Por lo tanto, en esta tesis se demuestra que el método es adecuado, en escenarios de clasificación de acciones, para la fusión de información de diferentes fuentes o de diferentes ensayos. Esta tesis hace tres contribuciones: (1) se propone un método general para hacer frente al reconocimiento de acciones y por lo tanto contribuir al aprendizaje por imitación; (2) la metodología puede aplicarse a grandes bases de datos, que incluyen diferentes modos de captura de las acciones; y (3) el método se aplica específicamente en un proyecto internacional de innovación real llamado Vinbot.Imitation Learning (IL), or robot Programming by Demonstration (PbD), covers methods by which a robot learns new skills through human guidance and imitation. PbD takes its inspiration from the way humans learn new skills by imitation in order to develop methods by which new tasks can be transmitted to robots. This thesis is motivated by the generic question of “what to imitate?” which concerns the problem of how to extract the essential features of a task. To this end, here we adopt Action Recognition (AR) perspective in order to allow the robot to decide what has to be imitated or inferred when interacting with a human kind. The proposed approach is based on a well-known method from natural language processing: namely, Bag of Words (BoW). This method is applied to large databases in order to obtain a trained model. Although BoW is a machine learning technique that is used in various fields of research, in action classification for robot learning it is far from accurate. Moreover, it focuses on the classification of objects and gestures rather than actions. Thus, in this thesis we show that the method is suitable in action classification scenarios for merging information from different sources or different trials. This thesis makes three contributions: (1) it proposes a general method for dealing with action recognition and thus to contribute to imitation learning; (2) the methodology can be applied to large databases which include different modes of action captures; and (3) the method is applied specifically in a real international innovation project called Vinbot

Recognition of Facial Expressions using Local Mean Binary Pattern

In this paper, we propose a novel appearance based local feature extraction technique called Local Mean Binary Pattern (LMBP), which efficiently encodes the local texture and global shape of the face. LMBP code is produced by weighting the thresholded neighbor intensity values with respect to mean of 3 x 3 patch. LMBP produces highly discriminative code compared to other state of the art methods. The micro pattern is derived using the mean of the patch, and hence it is robust against illumination and noise variations. An image is divided into M x N regions and feature descriptor is derived by concatenating LMBP distribution of each region. We also propose a novel template matching strategy called Histogram Normalized Absolute Difference (HNAD) for comparing LMBP histograms. Rigorous experiments prove the effectiveness and robustness of LMBP operator. Experiments also prove the superiority of HNAD measure over well-known template matching methods such as L2 norm and Chi-Square measure. We also investigated LMBP for facial expression recognition low resolution. The performance of the proposed approach is tested on well-known datasets CK, JAFFE, and TFEID

Gaussian processes for modeling of facial expressions

Automated analysis of facial expressions has been gaining significant attention over the past years. This stems from the fact that it constitutes the primal step toward developing some of the next-generation computer technologies that can make an impact in many domains, ranging from medical imaging and health assessment to marketing and education. No matter the target application, the need to deploy systems under demanding, real-world conditions that can generalize well across the population is urgent. Hence, careful consideration of numerous factors has to be taken prior to designing such a system. The work presented in this thesis focuses on tackling two important problems in automated analysis of facial expressions: (i) view-invariant facial expression analysis; (ii) modeling of the structural patterns in the face, in terms of well coordinated facial muscle movements. Driven by the necessity for efficient and accurate inference mechanisms we explore machine learning techniques based on the probabilistic framework of Gaussian processes (GPs). Our ultimate goal is to design powerful models that can efficiently handle imagery with spontaneously displayed facial expressions, and explain in detail the complex configurations behind the human face in real-world situations. To effectively decouple the head pose and expression in the presence of large out-of-plane head rotations we introduce a manifold learning approach based on multi-view learning strategies. Contrary to the majority of existing methods that typically treat the numerous poses as individual problems, in this model we first learn a discriminative manifold shared by multiple views of a facial expression. Subsequently, we perform facial expression classification in the expression manifold. Hence, the pose normalization problem is solved by aligning the facial expressions from different poses in a common latent space. We demonstrate that the recovered manifold can efficiently generalize to various poses and expressions even from a small amount of training data, while also being largely robust to corrupted image features due to illumination variations. State-of-the-art performance is achieved in the task of facial expression classification of basic emotions. The methods that we propose for learning the structure in the configuration of the muscle movements represent some of the first attempts in the field of analysis and intensity estimation of facial expressions. In these models, we extend our multi-view approach to exploit relationships not only in the input features but also in the multi-output labels. The structure of the outputs is imposed into the recovered manifold either from heuristically defined hard constraints, or in an auto-encoded manner, where the structure is learned automatically from the input data. The resulting models are proven to be robust to data with imbalanced expression categories, due to our proposed Bayesian learning of the target manifold. We also propose a novel regression approach based on product of GP experts where we take into account people's individual expressiveness in order to adapt the learned models on each subject. We demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed models on the task of facial expression recognition and intensity estimation.Open Acces

Real-world Human Re-identification: Attributes and Beyond.

PhDSurveillance systems capable of performing a diverse range of tasks that support human intelligence and analytical efforts are becoming widespread and crucial due to increasing threats upon national infrastructure and evolving business and governmental analytical requirements. Surveillance data can be critical for crime-prevention, forensic analysis, and counter-terrorism activities in both civilian and governmental agencies alike. However, visual surveillance data must currently be parsed by trained human operators and therefore any utility is offset by the inherent training and staffing costs as a result. The automated analysis of surveillance video is therefore of great scientific interest. One of the open problems within this area is that of reliably matching humans between disjoint surveillance camera views, termed re-identification. Automated re-identification facilitates human operational efficiency in the grouping of disparate and fragmented people observations through space and time into individual personal identities, a pre-requisite for higher-level surveillance tasks. However, due to the complex nature of realworld scenes and the highly variable nature of human appearance, reliably re-identifying people is non-trivial. Most re-identification approaches developed so far rely on low-level visual feature matching approaches that aim to match human detections against a known gallery of potential matches. However, for many applications an initial detection of a human may be unavailable or a low-level feature representation may not be sufficiently invariant to photometric or geometric variability inherent between camera views. This thesis begins by proposing a “mid-level” human-semantic representation that exploits expert human knowledge of surveillance task execution to the task of re-identifying people in order to compute an attribute-based description of a human. It further shows how this attribute-based description is synergistic with low-level data-derived features to enhance re-identification accuracy and subsequently gain further performance benefits by employing a discriminatively learned distance metric. Finally, a novel “zero-shot” scenario is proposed in which a visual probe is unavailable but re-identification is still possible via a manually provided semantic attribute description. The approach is extensively evaluated using several public benchmark datasets. One challenge in constructing an attribute-based and human-semantic representation is the requirement for extensive annotation. Mitigating this annotation cost in order to present a realistic and scalable re-identification system, is motivation for the second technical area of this thesis, where transfer-learning and data-mining are investigatedin two different approaches. Discriminative methods trade annotation cost for enhanced performance. Because discriminative person re-identification models operate between two camera views, annotation cost therefore scales quadratically on the number of cameras in the entire network. For practical re-identification, this 4 is an unreasonable expectation and prohibitively expensive. By leveraging flexible multi-source transfer of re-identification models, part of this cost may be alleviated. Specifically, it is possible to leverage prior re-identification models learned for a set of source-view pairs (domains), and flexibly combine those to obtain good re-identification performance for a given target-view pair with greatly reduced annotation requirements. The volume of exhaustive annotation effort required for attribute-driven re-identification scales linearly on the number of cameras and attributes. Real-world operation of an attributeenabled, distributed camera network would also require prohibitive quantities of annotation effort by human experts. This effort is completely avoided by taking a data-driven approach to attribute computation, by learning an effective associated representation by crawling large volumes of Internet data. By training on a larger and more diverse array of examples, this representation is more view-invariant and generalisable than attributes trained on conventional scales. These automatically discovered attributes are shown to provide a valuable representation that significantly improves re-identification performance. Moreover, a method to map them onto existing expert-annotated-ontologies is contributed. In the final contribution of this thesis, the underlying assumptions about visual surveillance equipment and re-identification are challenged and the thesis motivates a novel research area using dynamic, mobile platforms. Such platforms violate the common assumption shared by most previous research, namely that surveillance devices are always stationary, relative to the observed scene. The most important new challenge discovered in this exciting area is that the unconstrained video is too challenging for traditional approaches to applying discriminative methods that rely on the explicit modelling of appearance translations when modelling view-pairs, or even a single view. A new dataset was collected by a remote-operated vehicle using control software developed to simulate a fully-autonomous re-identification unmanned aerial vehicle programmed to fly in proximity with humans until images of sufficient quality for re-identification are obtained. Variations of the standard re-identification model are investigated in an enhanced re-identification paradigm, and new challenges with this distinct form of re-identification are elucidated. Finally, conventional wisdom regarding re-identification in light of these observations is re-examined

Face modeling for face recognition in the wild.

Face understanding is considered one of the most important topics in computer vision field since the face is a rich source of information in social interaction. Not only does the face provide information about the identity of people, but also of their membership in broad demographic categories (including sex, race, and age), and about their current emotional state. Facial landmarks extraction is the corner stone in the success of different facial analyses and understanding applications. In this dissertation, a novel facial modeling is designed for facial landmarks detection in unconstrained real life environment from different image modalities including infra-red and visible images. In the proposed facial landmarks detector, a part based model is incorporated with holistic face information. In the part based model, the face is modeled by the appearance of different face part(e.g., right eye, left eye, left eyebrow, nose, mouth) and their geometric relation. The appearance is described by a novel feature referred to as pixel difference feature. This representation is three times faster than the state-of-art in feature representation. On the other hand, to model the geometric relation between the face parts, the complex Bingham distribution is adapted from the statistical community into computer vision for modeling the geometric relationship between the facial elements. The global information is incorporated with the local part model using a regression model. The model results outperform the state-of-art in detecting facial landmarks. The proposed facial landmark detector is tested in two computer vision problems: boosting the performance of face detectors by rejecting pseudo faces and camera steering in multi-camera network. To highlight the applicability of the proposed model for different image modalities, it has been studied in two face understanding applications which are face recognition from visible images and physiological measurements for autistic individuals from thermal images. Recognizing identities from faces under different poses, expressions and lighting conditions from a complex background is an still unsolved problem even with accurate detection of landmark. Therefore, a learning similarity measure is proposed. The proposed measure responds only to the difference in identities and filter illuminations and pose variations. similarity measure makes use of statistical inference in the image plane. Additionally, the pose challenge is tackled by two new approaches: assigning different weights for different face part based on their visibility in image plane at different pose angles and synthesizing virtual facial images for each subject at different poses from single frontal image. The proposed framework is demonstrated to be competitive with top performing state-of-art methods which is evaluated on standard benchmarks in face recognition in the wild. The other framework for the face understanding application, which is a physiological measures for autistic individual from infra-red images. In this framework, accurate detecting and tracking Superficial Temporal Arteria (STA) while the subject is moving, playing, and interacting in social communication is a must. It is very challenging to track and detect STA since the appearance of the STA region changes over time and it is not discriminative enough from other areas in face region. A novel concept in detection, called supporter collaboration, is introduced. In support collaboration, the STA is detected and tracked with the help of face landmarks and geometric constraint. This research advanced the field of the emotion recognition

Distributed Classification of Localization Attacks in Sensor Networks Using Exchange-Based Feature Extraction and Classifier

Secure localization under different forms of attack has become an essential task in wireless sensor networks. Despite the significant research efforts in detecting the malicious nodes, the problem of localization attack type recognition has not yet been well addressed. Motivated by this concern, we propose a novel exchange-based attack classification algorithm. This is achieved by a distributed expectation maximization extractor integrated with the PECPR-MKSVM classifier. First, the mixed distribution features based on the probabilistic modeling are extracted using a distributed expectation maximization algorithm. After feature extraction, by introducing the theory from support vector machine, an extensive contractive Peaceman-Rachford splitting method is derived to build the distributed classifier that diffuses the iteration calculation among neighbor sensors. To verify the efficiency of the distributed recognition scheme, four groups of experiments were carried out under various conditions. The average success rate of the proposed classification algorithm obtained in the presented experiments for external attacks is excellent and has achieved about 93.9% in some cases. These testing results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can produce much greater recognition rate, and it can be also more robust and efficient even in the presence of excessive malicious scenario

Approximation contexts in addressing graph data structures

While the application of machine learning algorithms to practical problems has been expanded from fixed sized input data to sequences, trees or graphs input data, the composition of learning system has developed from a single model to integrated ones. Recent advances in graph based learning algorithms include: the SOMSD (Self Organizing Map for Structured Data), PMGraphSOM (Probability Measure Graph Self Organizing Map,GNN (Graph Neural Network) and GLSVM (Graph Laplacian Support Vector Machine). A main motivation of this thesis is to investigate if such algorithms, whether by themselves individually or modified, or in various combinations, would provide better performance over the more traditional artificial neural networks or kernel machine methods on some practical challenging problems. More succinctly, this thesis seeks to answer the main research question: when or under what conditions/contexts could graph based models be adjusted and tailored to be most efficacious in terms of predictive or classification performance on some challenging practical problems? There emerges a range of sub-questions including: how do we craft an effective neural learning system which can be an integration of several graph and non-graph based models? Integration of various graph based and non graph based kernel machine algorithms; enhancing the capability of the integrated model in working with challenging problems; tackling the problem of long term dependency issues which aggravate the performance of layer-wise graph based neural systems. This thesis will answer these questions. Recent research on multiple staged learning models has demonstrated the efficacy of multiple layers of alternating unsupervised and supervised learning approaches. This underlies the very successful front-end feature extraction techniques in deep neural networks. However much exploration is still possible with the investigation of the number of layers required, and the types of unsupervised or supervised learning models which should be used. Such issues have not been considered so far, when the underlying input data structure is in the form of a graph. We will explore empirically the capabilities of models of increasing complexities, the combination of the unsupervised learning algorithms, SOM, or PMGraphSOM, with or without a cascade connection with a multilayer perceptron, and with or without being followed by multiple layers of GNN. Such studies explore the effects of including or ignoring context. A parallel study involving kernel machines with or without graph inputs has also been conducted empirically

Deep learning based facial expression recognition and its applications

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonFacial expression recognition (FER) is a research area that consists of classifying the human emotions through the expressions on their face. It can be used in applications such as biometric security, intelligent human-computer interaction, robotics, and clinical medicine for autism, depression, pain and mental health problems. This dissertation investigates the advanced technologies for facial expression analysis and develops the artificial intelligent systems for practical applications. The first part of this work applies geometric and texture domain feature extractors along with various machine learning techniques to improve FER. Advanced 2D and 3D facial processing techniques such as Edge Oriented Histograms (EOH) and Facial Mesh Distances (FMD) are then fused together using a framework designed to investigate their individual and combined domain performances. Following these tests, the face is then broken down into facial parts using advanced facial alignment and localising techniques. Deep learning in the form of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is also explored also FER. A novel approach is used for the deep network architecture design, to learn the facial parts jointly, showing an improvement over using the whole face. Joint Bayesian is also adapted in the form of metric learning, to work with deep feature representations of the facial parts. This provides a further improvement over using the deep network alone. Dynamic emotion content is explored as a solution to provide richer information than still images. The motion occurring across the content is initially captured using the Motion History Histogram descriptor (MHH) and is critically evaluated. Based on this observation, several improvements are proposed through extensions such as Average Spatial Pooling Multi-scale Motion History Histogram (ASMMHH). This extension adds two modifications, first is to view the content in different spatial dimensions through spatial pooling; influenced by the structure of CNNs. The other modification is to capture motion at different speeds. Combined, they have provided better performance over MHH, and other popular techniques like Local Binary Patterns – Three Orthogonal Planes (LBP-TOP). Finally, the dynamic emotion content is observed in the feature space, with sequences of images represented as sequences of extracted features. A novel technique called Facial Dynamic History Histogram (FDHH) is developed to capture patterns of variations within the sequence of features; an approach not seen before. FDHH is applied in an end to end framework for applications in Depression analysis and evaluating the induced emotions through a large set of video clips from various movies. With the combination of deep learning techniques and FDHH, state-of-the-art results are achieved for Depression analysis