Deep Learning for Diagonal Earlobe Crease Detection

An article published on Medical News Today in June 2022 presented a fundamental question in its title: Can an earlobe crease predict heart attacks? The author explained that end arteries supply the heart and ears. In other words, if they lose blood supply, no other arteries can take over, resulting in tissue damage. Consequently, some earlobes have a diagonal crease, line, or deep fold that resembles a wrinkle. In this paper, we take a step toward detecting this specific marker, commonly known as DELC or Frank's Sign. For this reason, we have made the first DELC dataset available to the public. In addition, we have investigated the performance of numerous cutting-edge backbones on annotated photos. Experimentally, we demonstrate that it is possible to solve this challenge by combining pre-trained encoders with a customized classifier to achieve 97.7% accuracy. Moreover, we have analyzed the backbone trade-off between performance and size, estimating MobileNet as the most promising encoder.Comment: Accepted at 12th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications (ICPRAM 2023

An X3D Neural Network Analysis for Runner's Performance Assessment in a Wild Sporting Environment

We present a transfer learning analysis on a sporting environment of the expanded 3D (X3D) neural networks. Inspired by action quality assessment methods in the literature, our method uses an action recognition network to estimate athletes' cumulative race time (CRT) during an ultra-distance competition. We evaluate the performance considering the X3D, a family of action recognition networks that expand a small 2D image classification architecture along multiple network axes, including space, time, width, and depth. We demonstrate that the resulting neural network can provide remarkable performance for short input footage, with a mean absolute error of 12 minutes and a half when estimating the CRT for runners who have been active from 8 to 20 hours. Our most significant discovery is that X3D achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring almost seven times less memory to achieve better precision than previous work.Comment: Accepted to the 18th International Conference on Machine Vision Applications (MVA 2023

A Large-Scale Re-identification Analysis in Sporting Scenarios: the Betrayal of Reaching a Critical Point

Re-identifying participants in ultra-distance running competitions can be daunting due to the extensive distances and constantly changing terrain. To overcome these challenges, computer vision techniques have been developed to analyze runners' faces, numbers on their bibs, and clothing. However, our study presents a novel gait-based approach for runners' re-identification (re-ID) by leveraging various pre-trained human action recognition (HAR) models and loss functions. Our results show that this approach provides promising results for re-identifying runners in ultra-distance competitions. Furthermore, we investigate the significance of distinct human body movements when athletes are approaching their endurance limits and their potential impact on re-ID accuracy. Our study examines how the recognition of a runner's gait is affected by a competition's critical point (CP), defined as a moment of severe fatigue and the point where the finish line comes into view, just a few kilometers away from this location. We aim to determine how this CP can improve the accuracy of athlete re-ID. Our experimental results demonstrate that gait recognition can be significantly enhanced (up to a 9% increase in mAP) as athletes approach this point. This highlights the potential of utilizing gait recognition in real-world scenarios, such as ultra-distance competitions or long-duration surveillance tasks.Comment: Accepted at 7th International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023

Communication, development, and social change in Spain: A field between institutionalization and implosion

This paper renders an account of the rapid institutionalization of the academic field of Communication for Development and Social Change (CDCS) in Spain in recent years following a period of neglect and marginalization. The ongoing expansion of the field of CDSC in the Spanish context is understood as a process of implosion, i.e. a collapse inwards, which results from the inconsistencies and weaknesses of fast and late institutionalization. The methodological approach for this inquiry is a documental review of both academic literature and research and institutional reports produced in Spain between 1980 and 2010. Based on this review, the paper contrasts the trajectory of the field in Spain with the debates at the international level, establishing relevant continuities and differences.This article is part of the Research Project (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, Spain) CSO2014-52005-R titled ‘Evaluation and Monitoring of Communication for Development and Social Change in Spain: design of indicators to measure its social impact’ (2015–2017)17 página

Decontextualized I3D ConvNet for ultra-distance runners performance analysis at a glance

In May 2021, the site runnersworld.com published that participation in ultra-distance races has increased by 1,676% in the last 23 years. Moreover, nearly 41% of those runners participate in more than one race per year. The development of wearable devices has undoubtedly contributed to motivating participants by providing performance measures in real-time. However, we believe there is room for improvement, particularly from the organizers point of view. This work aims to determine how the runners performance can be quantified and predicted by considering a non-invasive technique focusing on the ultra-running scenario. In this sense, participants are captured when they pass through a set of locations placed along the race track. Each footage is considered an input to an I3D ConvNet to extract the participant's running gait in our work. Furthermore, weather and illumination capture conditions or occlusions may affect these footages due to the race staff and other runners. To address this challenging task, we have tracked and codified the participant's running gait at some RPs and removed the context intending to ensure a runner-of-interest proper evaluation. The evaluation suggests that the features extracted by an I3D ConvNet provide enough information to estimate the participant's performance along the different race tracks.Comment: Accepted at 21st International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP 2021

Deep learning for source camera identification on mobile devices

In the present paper, we propose a source camera identification method for mobile devices based on deep learning. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown a remarkable performance on several tasks such as image recognition, video analysis or natural language processing. A CNN consists on a set of layers where each layer is composed by a set of high pass filters which are applied all over the input image. This convolution process provides the unique ability to extract features automatically from data and to learn from those features. Our proposal describes a CNN architecture which is able to infer the noise pattern of mobile camera sensors (also known as camera fingerprint) with the aim at detecting and identifying not only the mobile device used to capture an image (with a 98\% of accuracy), but also from which embedded camera the image was captured. More specifically, we provide an extensive analysis on the proposed architecture considering different configurations. The experiment has been carried out using the images captured from different mobile devices cameras (MICHE-I Dataset was used) and the obtained results have proved the robustness of the proposed method.Comment: 15 pages single column, 9 figure

Deep learning for source camera identification on mobile devices

In the present paper, we propose a source camera identification (SCI) method for mobile devices based on deep learning. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown a remarkable performance on several tasks such as image recognition, video analysis or natural language processing. A CNN consists on a set of layers where each layer is composed by a set of high pass filters which are applied all over the input image. This convolution process provides the unique ability to extract features automatically from data and to learn from those features. Our proposal describes a CNN architecture which is able to infer the noise pattern of mobile camera sensors (also known as camera fingerprint) with the aim at detecting and identifying not only the mobile device used to capture an image (with a 98% of accuracy), but also from which embedded camera the image was captured. More specifically, we provide an extensive analysis on the proposed architecture considering different configurations. The experiment has been carried out using the images captured from different mobile device cameras (MICHE-I Dataset) and the obtained results have proved the robustness of the proposed method