PlaceRaider: Virtual Theft in Physical Spaces with Smartphones

As smartphones become more pervasive, they are increasingly targeted by malware. At the same time, each new generation of smartphone features increasingly powerful onboard sensor suites. A new strain of sensor malware has been developing that leverages these sensors to steal information from the physical environment (e.g., researchers have recently demonstrated how malware can listen for spoken credit card numbers through the microphone, or feel keystroke vibrations using the accelerometer). Yet the possibilities of what malware can see through a camera have been understudied. This paper introduces a novel visual malware called PlaceRaider, which allows remote attackers to engage in remote reconnaissance and what we call virtual theft. Through completely opportunistic use of the camera on the phone and other sensors, PlaceRaider constructs rich, three dimensional models of indoor environments. Remote burglars can thus download the physical space, study the environment carefully, and steal virtual objects from the environment (such as financial documents, information on computer monitors, and personally identifiable information). Through two human subject studies we demonstrate the effectiveness of using mobile devices as powerful surveillance and virtual theft platforms, and we suggest several possible defenses against visual malware

Fully-Coupled Two-Stream Spatiotemporal Networks for Extremely Low Resolution Action Recognition

A major emerging challenge is how to protect people's privacy as cameras and computer vision are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, including in smart devices inside homes. A potential solution is to capture and record just the minimum amount of information needed to perform a task of interest. In this paper, we propose a fully-coupled two-stream spatiotemporal architecture for reliable human action recognition on extremely low resolution (e.g., 12x16 pixel) videos. We provide an efficient method to extract spatial and temporal features and to aggregate them into a robust feature representation for an entire action video sequence. We also consider how to incorporate high resolution videos during training in order to build better low resolution action recognition models. We evaluate on two publicly-available datasets, showing significant improvements over the state-of-the-art.Comment: 9 pagers, 5 figures, published in WACV 201

Lower leg injuries and personal watercraft sports activities

In this retrospective study, data from personal watercraft (PWC) accidents are examined in order to increase the understanding of lower leg injuries resulting from PWC sports activities. The literature indicates that approximately 33% of all PWC related injuries involve the lower leg, yet studies containing detailed reports of such injuries are scarce. Three major PWC manufacturers provided the data for this study. The data included associated x-rays and medical records from treating physicians, and sometimes witness descriptions of the accidents. The synopsis of each accident can give important details such as demographics of the injured person, make of the PWC(s) involved, and the injuries sustained. The x-rays provide objective data regarding the resulting fracture. Each accident summary is discussed such that the injured parties remain undisclosed. A refined literature review provides summary information as to the anatomy of the leg as well as the injury causing mechanisms. In summary, of the twenty-seven files, sixteen are external rotation injuries. In other words, 59.3% of the injuries are primarily the result of an external rotation movement of the foot. Also, nine out of twenty-seven, or 33.3% are due to one of the bending mechanisms (impact or inertial bending). The 33.3% of injuries primarily due to bending are is broken up into 11.1% pure bending, 7.4% impact, and 14.8% inertial bending. The remaining two, or 7.4% were primarily caused by an axial mechanism. An interesting observation is that the results in this study indicate that the most common motion resulting in ankle fracture is external rotation. This is also sited as the most common motion that results in ankle injury in Fractures of the Lower Extremity , by J. Charles Taylor, as stated in chapter Hi\u27s literature review