Seeing through the Mask: Multi-task Generative Mask Decoupling Face Recognition

The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic make people wear masks more frequently than ever. Current general face recognition system suffers from serious performance degradation,when encountering occluded scenes. The potential reason is that face features are corrupted by occlusions on key facial regions. To tackle this problem, previous works either extract identity-related embeddings on feature level by additional mask prediction, or restore the occluded facial part by generative models. However, the former lacks visual results for model interpretation, while the latter suffers from artifacts which may affect downstream recognition. Therefore, this paper proposes a Multi-task gEnerative mask dEcoupling face Recognition (MEER) network to jointly handle these two tasks, which can learn occlusionirrelevant and identity-related representation while achieving unmasked face synthesis. We first present a novel mask decoupling module to disentangle mask and identity information, which makes the network obtain purer identity features from visible facial components. Then, an unmasked face is restored by a joint-training strategy, which will be further used to refine the recognition network with an id-preserving loss. Experiments on masked face recognition under realistic and synthetic occlusions benchmarks demonstrate that the MEER can outperform the state-ofthe-art methods

アゾベンゼン基を有する光応答性有機シロキサン材料の創製

学位の種別: 課程博士審査委員会委員 : (主査)東京大学教授 大久保 達也, 東京大学教授 酒井 康行, 東京大学教授 久保田 純, 東京大学准教授 伊藤 大知, 東京大学准教授 加藤 大, 早稲田大学准教授 下嶋 敦University of Tokyo(東京大学

A Survey of Face Recognition

Recent years witnessed the breakthrough of face recognition with deep convolutional neural networks. Dozens of papers in the field of FR are published every year. Some of them were applied in the industrial community and played an important role in human life such as device unlock, mobile payment, and so on. This paper provides an introduction to face recognition, including its history, pipeline, algorithms based on conventional manually designed features or deep learning, mainstream training, evaluation datasets, and related applications. We have analyzed and compared state-of-the-art works as many as possible, and also carefully designed a set of experiments to find the effect of backbone size and data distribution. This survey is a material of the tutorial named The Practical Face Recognition Technology in the Industrial World in the FG2023

Eliminating Vertical Transmission of HIV in South Africa: Establishing a Baseline for the Global Alliance to End AIDS in Children

To gain a detailed overview of vertical transmission in South Africa, we describe insights from the triangulation of data sources used to monitor the national HIV program. HIV PCR results from the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) were analysed from the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) data warehouse to describe HIV testing coverage and positivity among children <2 years old from 2017–2021. NICD data were compared and triangulated with the District Health Information System (DHIS) and the Thembisa 4.6 model. For 2021, Thembisa estimates a third of children living with HIV go undiagnosed, with NICD and DHIS data indicating low HIV testing coverage at 6 months (49%) and 18 months (33%) of age, respectively. As immunisation coverage is reported at 84% and 66% at these time points, better integration of HIV testing services within the Expanded Programme for Immunization is likely to yield improved case findings. Thembisa projects a gradual decrease in vertical transmission to 450 cases per 100,000 live births by 2030. Unless major advances and strengthening of maternal and child health services, including HIV prevention, diagnosis, and care, can be achieved, the goal to end AIDS in children by 2030 in South Africa is unlikely to be realised

Surface Modification and Structural Characterization of Tourmaline Powder by KH-171

This is an article in the field of mineral materials. The tourmaline powder was modified with silane coupling agent KH-171, and the process conditions were optimized with the parameters of contact angle and turbidity of the modified product in liquid paraffin. The test results showed that the contact angle of the resulting modified tourmaline reached 133 ℃ when reacted at 60 ℃ for 2 h at a system pH value of 9, a dosage of modifier KH-171 of 2 mL, and an alcohol-to-water ratio of 1∶5, showing excellent hydrophobic properties. The modified tourmaline was characterized by IR, SEM and XRD. The results showed that the organic functional groups with carbon-carbon double bonds were successfully connected to the surface of tourmaline without changing the original crystal structure, but the agglomeration of tourmaline reduced effectively and showed better dispersion performance

Gender-related differences in care-seeking behaviour for newborns: a systematic review of the evidence in South Asia.

INTRODUCTION: Data indicate substantial excess mortality among female neonates in South Asia compared with males. We reviewed evidence on sex and gender differences in care-seeking behaviour for neonates as a driver for this. METHODS: We conducted a systematic review of literature published between January 1st, 1996 and August 31st, 2016 in Pubmed, Embase, Eldis and Imsear databases, supplemented by grey literature searches. We included observational and experimental studies, and reviews. Two research team members independently screened titles, abstracts and then full texts for inclusion, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Study quality was assessed using National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) checklists and summary judgements given using Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) criteria. Data were extracted into Microsoft Excel. RESULTS: Of 614 studies initially identified, 17 studies were included. Low quality evidence across several South Asian countries suggests that care-seeking rates for female neonates are lower than males, especially in households with older female children. Parents are more likely to pay more, and seek care from providers perceived as higher quality, for males than females. Evidence on drivers of these care-seeking behaviours is limited. Care-seeking rates are suboptimal, ranging from 20% to 76% across male and female neonates. CONCLUSION: Higher mortality observed among female neonates in South Asia may be partly explained by differences in care-seeking behaviour, though good quality evidence on drivers for this is lacking. Further research is needed, but policy interventions to improve awareness of causes of neonatal mortality, and work with households with predominantly female children may yield population health benefits. The social, economic and cultural norms that give greater value and preference to boys over girls must also be challenged through the creation of legislation and policy that support greater gender equality, as well as context-specific strategies in partnership with local influencers to change these practices.PROSPERO registration number CRD42016052256