Automating the processes involved in facial composite production

Bringing a criminal to justice is a labour intensive process. In the current paper, we explored ways of reducing police time when constructing and identifying facial composites. In the former, we designed and evaluated a standalone version of the EvoFIT composite system. This was found to perform similarly to the full system that normally requires several hours of a police officer’s time. In the latter, we built a small database of composites that could be used to search for matching identities. It was found that pixel intensity (texture) information was valuable for composites produced from a traditional feature-based system, but feature shape information for composites produced from the recognition-based EvoFIT. The results show promise for the automated construction and identification of facial composites

The Impact of Weapons and Unusual Objects on the Construction of Facial Composites

The presence of a weapon in the perpetration of a crime can impede an observer’s ability to describe and/or recognise the person responsible. In the current experiment, we explore whether weapons when present at encoding of a target identity interfere with construction of a facial composite. Participants encoded an unfamiliar target face seen either on its own or paired with a knife. Encoding duration (10 or 30 seconds) was also manipulated. The following day, participants recalled the face and constructed a composite of it using a holistic system (EvoFIT). Correct naming of the participants’ composites was found to reduce reliably when target faces were paired with the weapon at 10 seconds but not at 30 seconds. These data suggest that the presence of a weapon reduces the effectiveness of facial composites following short encoding duration. Implications for theory and police practice are discussed

Using the STROBE statement to assess reporting in blindness prevalence surveys in low and middle income countries.

OBJECTIVE: Cross-sectional blindness prevalence surveys are essential to plan and monitor eye care services. Incomplete or inaccurate reporting can prevent effective translation of research findings. The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) statement is a 32 item checklist developed to improve reporting of observational studies. The aim of this study was to assess the completeness of reporting in blindness prevalence surveys in low and middle income countries (LMICs) using STROBE. METHODS: MEDLINE, EMBASE and Web of Science databases were searched on April 8 2016 to identify cross-sectional blindness prevalence surveys undertaken in LMICs and published after STROBE was published in December 2007. The STROBE tool was applied to all included studies, and each STROBE item was categorized as 'yes' (met criteria), 'no' (did not meet criteria) or 'not applicable'. The 'Completeness of reporting (COR) score' for each manuscript was calculated: COR score = yes / [yes + no]. In journals with included studies the instructions to authors and reviewers were checked for reference to STROBE. RESULTS: The 89 included studies were undertaken in 32 countries and published in 37 journals. The mean COR score was 60.9% (95% confidence interval [CI] 58.1-63.7%; range 30.8-88.9%). The mean COR score did not differ between surveys published in journals with author instructions referring to STROBE (10/37 journals; 61.1%, 95%CI 56.4-65.8%) or in journals where STROBE was not mentioned (60.9%, 95%CI 57.4-64.3%; p = 0.93). CONCLUSION: While reporting in blindness prevalence surveys is strong in some areas, others need improvement. We recommend that more journals adopt the STROBE checklist and ensure it is used by authors and reviewers

Efficient key management for cryptographically enforced access control

Cryptographic enforcement of access control mechanisms relies on encrypting protected data with the keys stored by authorized users. This approach poses the problem of the distribution of secret keys. In this paper, a key management scheme is presented where each user stores a single key and is capable of efficiently calculating appropriate keys needed to access requested data. The proposed scheme does not require encryption of the same data (key) multiple times with the keys of different users or groups of users. It is designed especially for the purpose of access control. Thanks to that, the space needed for storing public parameters is significantly reduced. Furthermore, the proposed method supports flexible updates when user's access rights change

Method of Key Management

The invention relates to a method of key management for group-based controlled access to encrypted data, in which a decryption key for the encrypted data can be obtained by a party if the party is a member of at least one group which is authorized to access the data, the groups being organized in a hierarchical tree in which each non-leaf node represents a group and each leaf node represents a member of all groups represented by nodes hierarchically superior to the leaf node in question

The BIR database – Identifying typographic emphasis in list-like historical documents

International audienceLayout analysis and optical character recognition have become traditional tasks for processing historical prints, but are now insufficient. Additional information is found in typographic emphasis, such as bold and italic letters. They carry semantic meaning (titles, emphasis...) and also outline the structure of the page (entries, sub-parts...). Retrieving such data is therefore crucial for information extraction and automatic document structuring. In this paper, we introduce the Bold-Italic-Regular (BIR) database, which contains 285 pages of scanned, list-like historical prints that have been annotated at word level with bold and italic emphasis. Baseline results are provided for word detection and style classification using state-of-the-art deep neural network models, highlighting promising possibilities, such as near-human performance for isolated word classification, but also demonstrating limitations for the task at hand

Method of Key Management

The invention relates to a method of key management for group-based controlled access to encrypted data, in which a decryption key for the encrypted data can be obtained by a party if the party is a member of at least one group which is authorized to access the data, the groups being organized in a hierarchical tree in which each non-leaf node represents a group and each leaf node represents a member of all groups represented by nodes hierarchically superior to the leaf node in question