Intelligent frame selection as a privacy-friendlier alternative to face recognition

The widespread deployment of surveillance cameras for facial recognition gives rise to many privacy concerns. This study proposes a privacy-friendly alternative to large scale facial recognition. While there are multiple techniques to preserve privacy, our work is based on the minimization principle which implies minimizing the amount of collected personal data. Instead of running facial recognition software on all video data, we propose to automatically extract a high quality snapshot of each detected person without revealing his or her identity. This snapshot is then encrypted and access is only granted after legal authorization. We introduce a novel unsupervised face image quality assessment method which is used to select the high quality snapshots. For this, we train a variational autoencoder on high quality face images from a publicly available dataset and use the reconstruction probability as a metric to estimate the quality of each face crop. We experimentally confirm that the reconstruction probability can be used as biometric quality predictor. Unlike most previous studies, we do not rely on a manually defined face quality metric as everything is learned from data. Our face quality assessment method outperforms supervised, unsupervised and general image quality assessment methods on the task of improving face verification performance by rejecting low quality images. The effectiveness of the whole system is validated qualitatively on still images and videos.Comment: accepted for AAAI 2021 Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Artificial Intelligence (PPAI-21

Inverse reinforcement learning through logic constraint inference

Autonomous robots start to be integrated in human environments where explicit and implicit social norms guide the behavior of all agents. To assure safety and predictability, these artificial agents should act in accordance with the applicable social norms. However, it is not straightforward to define these rules and incorporate them in an agent's policy. Particularly because social norms are often implicit and environment specific. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative approach to extract a set of rules from observed human trajectories. This hybrid method combines the strengths of inverse reinforcement learning and inductive logic programming. We experimentally show how our method successfully induces a compact logic program which represents the behavioral constraints applicable in a Tower of Hanoi and a traffic simulator environment. The induced program is adopted as prior knowledge by a model-free reinforcement learning agent to speed up training and prevent any social norm violation during exploration and deployment. Moreover, expressing norms as a logic program provides improved interpretability, which is an important pillar in the design of safe artificial agents, as well as transferability to similar environments