A Study of Deep Learning-Based Face Recognition Models for Sibling Identification.

Accurate identification of siblings through face recognition is a challenging task. This is predominantly because of the high degree of similarities among the faces of siblings. In this study, we investigate the use of state-of-the-art deep learning face recognition models to evaluate their capacity for discrimination between sibling faces using various similarity indices. The specific models examined for this purpose are FaceNet, VGGFace, VGG16, and VGG19. For each pair of images provided, the embeddings have been calculated using the chosen deep learning model. Five standard similarity measures, namely, cosine similarity, Euclidean distance, structured similarity, Manhattan distance, and Minkowski distance, are used to classify images looking for their identity on the threshold defined for each of the similarity measures. The accuracy, precision, and misclassification rate of each model are calculated using standard confusion matrices. Four different experimental datasets for full-frontal-face, eyes, nose, and forehead of sibling pairs are constructed using publicly available HQf subset of the SiblingDB database. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the chosen deep learning models to distinguish siblings based on the full-frontal-face and cropped face areas vary based on the face area compared. It is observed that VGGFace is best while comparing the full-frontal-face and eyes-the accuracy of classification being with more than 95% in this case. However, its accuracy degrades significantly when the noses are compared, while FaceNet provides the best result for classification based on the nose. Similarly, VGG16 and VGG19 are not the best models for classification using the eyes, but these models provide favorable results when foreheads are compared.

Geo-Social Top-k and Skyline Keyword Queries on Road Networks.

The rapid growth of GPS-enabled mobile devices has popularized many location-based applications. Spatial keyword search which finds objects of interest by considering both spatial locations and textual descriptions has become very useful in these applications. The recent integration of social data with spatial keyword search opens a new service horizon for users. Few previous studies have proposed methods to combine spatial keyword queries with social data in Euclidean space. However, most real-world applications constrain the distance between query location and data objects by a road network, where distance between two points is defined by the shortest connecting path. This paper proposes geo-social top-k keyword queries and geo-social skyline keyword queries on road networks. Both queries enrich traditional spatial keyword query semantics by incorporating social relevance component. We formalize the proposed query types and appropriate indexing frameworks and algorithms to efficiently process them. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches are evaluated using real datasets.

Transfer Learning Assisted Classification and Detection of Alzheimer's Disease Stages Using 3D MRI Scans.

Alzheimer's disease effects human brain cells and results in dementia. The gradual deterioration of the brain cells results in disability of performing daily routine tasks. The treatment for this disease is still not mature enough. However, its early diagnosis may allow restraining the spread of disease. For early detection of Alzheimer's through brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), an automated detection and classification system needs to be developed that can detect and classify the subject having dementia. These systems also need not only to classify dementia patients but to also identify the four progressing stages of dementia. The proposed system works on an efficient technique of utilizing transfer learning to classify the images by fine-tuning a pre-trained convolutional network, AlexNet. The architecture is trained and tested over the pre-processed segmented (Grey Matter, White Matter, and Cerebral Spinal Fluid) and un-segmented images for both binary and multi-class classification. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated over Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) dataset. The algorithm showed promising results by giving the best overall accuracy of 92.85% for multi-class classification of un-segmented images.

Energy Aware Cluster-Based Routing in Flying Ad-Hoc Networks.

Flying ad-hoc networks (FANETs) are a very vibrant research area nowadays. They have many military and civil applications. Limited battery energy and the high mobility of micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent their two main problems, i.e., short flight time and inefficient routing. In this paper, we try to address both of these problems by means of efficient clustering. First, we adjust the transmission power of the UAVs by anticipating their operational requirements. Optimal transmission range will have minimum packet loss ratio (PLR) and better link quality, which ultimately save the energy consumed during communication. Second, we use a variant of the K-Means Density clustering algorithm for selection of cluster heads. Optimal cluster heads enhance the cluster lifetime and reduce the routing overhead. The proposed model outperforms the state of the art artificial intelligence techniques such as Ant Colony Optimization-based clustering algorithm and Grey Wolf Optimization-based clustering algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in term of number of clusters, cluster building time, cluster lifetime and energy consumption.

Mobile-cloud assisted video summarization framework for efficient management of remote sensing data generated by wireless capsule sensors.

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) has great advantages over traditional endoscopy because it is portable and easy to use, especially in remote monitoring health-services. However, during the WCE process, the large amount of captured video data demands a significant deal of computation to analyze and retrieve informative video frames. In order to facilitate efficient WCE data collection and browsing task, we present a resource- and bandwidth-aware WCE video summarization framework that extracts the representative keyframes of the WCE video contents by removing redundant and non-informative frames. For redundancy elimination, we use Jeffrey-divergence between color histograms and inter-frame Boolean series-based correlation of color channels. To remove non-informative frames, multi-fractal texture features are extracted to assist the classification using an ensemble-based classifier. Owing to the limited WCE resources, it is impossible for the WCE system to perform computationally intensive video summarization tasks. To resolve computational challenges, mobile-cloud architecture is incorporated, which provides resizable computing capacities by adaptively offloading video summarization tasks between the client and the cloud server. The qualitative and quantitative results are encouraging and show that the proposed framework saves information transmission cost and bandwidth, as well as the valuable time of data analysts in browsing remote sensing data.

Sparse representations-based super-resolution of key-frames extracted from frames-sequences generated by a visual sensor network.

Visual sensor networks (VSNs) usually generate a low-resolution (LR) frame-sequence due to energy and processing constraints. These LR-frames are not very appropriate for use in certain surveillance applications. It is very important to enhance the resolution of the captured LR-frames using resolution enhancement schemes. In this paper, an effective framework for a super-resolution (SR) scheme is proposed that enhances the resolution of LR key-frames extracted from frame-sequences captured by visual-sensors. In a VSN, a visual processing hub (VPH) collects a huge amount of visual data from camera sensors. In the proposed framework, at the VPH, key-frames are extracted using our recent key-frame extraction technique and are streamed to the base station (BS) after compression. A novel effective SR scheme is applied at BS to produce a high-resolution (HR) output from the received key-frames. The proposed SR scheme uses optimized orthogonal matching pursuit (OOMP) for sparse-representation recovery in SR. OOMP does better in terms of detecting true sparsity than orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP). This property of the OOMP helps produce a HR image which is closer to the original image. The K-SVD dictionary learning procedure is incorporated for dictionary learning. Batch-OMP improves the dictionary learning process by removing the limitation in handling a large set of observed signals. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and show its superiority over other state-of-the-art schemes.

Video summarization based tele-endoscopy: a service to efficiently manage visual data generated during wireless capsule endoscopy procedure.

Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) has great advantages over traditional endoscopy because it is portable and easy to use. More importantly, WCE combined with mobile computing ensures rapid transmission of diagnostic data to hospitals and enables off-site senior gastroenterologists to offer timely decision making support. However, during this WCE process, video data are produced in huge amounts, but only a limited amount of data is actually useful for diagnosis. The sharing and analysis of this video data becomes a challenging task due the constraints such as limited memory, energy, and communication capability. In order to facilitate efficient WCE data collection and browsing tasks, we present a video summarization-based tele-endoscopy service that estimates the semantically relevant video frames from the perspective of gastroenterologists. For this purpose, image moments, curvature, and multi-scale contrast are computed and are fused to obtain the saliency map of each frame. This saliency map is used to select keyframes. The proposed tele-endoscopy service selects keyframes based on their relevance to the disease diagnosis. This ensures the sending of diagnostically relevant frames to the gastroenterologist instead of sending all the data, thus saving transmission costs and bandwidth. The proposed framework also saves storage costs as well as the precious time of doctors in browsing patient's information. The qualitative and quantitative results are encouraging and show that the proposed service provides video keyframes to the gastroenterologists without discarding important information.

An autonomous decision-making framework for gait recognition systems against adversarial attack using reinforcement learning.

Gait identification based on Deep Learning (DL) techniques has recently emerged as biometric technology for surveillance. We leveraged the vulnerabilities and decision-making abilities of the DL model in gait-based autonomous surveillance systems when attackers have no access to underlying model gradients/structures using a patch-based black-box adversarial attack with Reinforcement Learning (RL). These automated surveillance systems are secured, blocking the attacker's access. Therefore, the attack can be conducted in an RL framework where the agent's goal is determining the optimal image location, causing the model to perform incorrectly when perturbed with random pixels. Furthermore, the proposed adversarial attack presents encouraging results (maximum success rate = 77.59%). Researchers should explore system resilience scenarios (e.g., when attackers have no system access) before using these models in surveillance applications.

A Smart Surveillance System for Uncooperative Gait Recognition Using Cycle Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks (CCGANs).

Surveillance remains an important research area, and it has many applications. Smart surveillance requires a high level of accuracy even when persons are uncooperative. Gait Recognition is the study of recognizing people by the way they walk even when they are unwilling to cooperate. It is another form of a behavioral biometric system in which unique attributes of an individual's gait are analyzed to determine their identity. On the other hand, one of the big limitations of the gait recognition system is uncooperative environments in which both gallery and probe sets are made under different and unknown walking conditions. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a deep learning-based method that is trained on individuals with the normal walking condition, and to deal with an uncooperative environment and recognize the individual with any dynamic walking conditions, a cycle consistent generative adversarial network is used. This method translates a GEI disturbed from different covariate factors to a normal GEI. It works like unsupervised learning, and during its training, a GEI disrupts from different covariate factors of each individual and acts as a source domain while the normal walking conditions of individuals are our target domain to which translation is required. The cycle consistent GANs automatically find an individual pair with the help of the Cycle Loss function and generate the required GEI, which is tested by the CNN model to predict the person ID. The proposed system is evaluated over a publicly available data set named CASIA-B, and it achieved excellent results. Moreover, this system can be implemented in sensitive areas, like banks, seminar halls (events), airports, embassies, shopping malls, police stations, military areas, and other public service areas for security purposes.

Social distancing enhanced automated optimal design of physical spaces in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, manually enhanced ad-hoc solutions have helped the physical space designers and decision makers to cope with the dynamic nature of space planning. Due to the unpredictable nature by which the pandemic is unfolding, the standard operating procedures also change, and the protocols for physical interaction require continuous reconsideration. Consequently, the development of an appropriate technological solution to address the current challenge of reconfiguring common physical environments with prescribed physical distancing measures is much needed. To do this, we propose a design optimization methodology which takes the dimensions, as well as the constraints and other necessary requirements of a given physical space to yield optimal redesign solutions on the go. The methodology we propose here utilizes the solution to the well-known mathematical circle packing problem, which we define as a constrained mathematical optimization problem. The resulting optimization problem is solved subject to a given set of parameters and constraints - corresponding to the requirements on the social distancing criteria between people and the imposed constraints on the physical spaces such as the position of doors, windows, walkways and the variables related to the indoor airflow pattern. Thus, given the dimensions of a physical space and other essential requirements, the solution resulting from the automated optimization algorithm can suggest an optimal set of redesign solutions from which a user can pick the most feasible option. We demonstrate our automated optimal design methodology by way of a number of practical examples, and we discuss how this framework can be further taken forward as a design platform that can be implemented practically.

SiNC: Saliency-injected neural codes for representation and efficient retrieval of medical radiographs.

Medical image collections contain a wealth of information which can assist radiologists and medical experts in diagnosis and disease detection for making well-informed decisions. However, this objective can only be realized if efficient access is provided to semantically relevant cases from the ever-growing medical image repositories. In this paper, we present an efficient method for representing medical images by incorporating visual saliency and deep features obtained from a fine-tuned convolutional neural network (CNN) pre-trained on natural images. Saliency detector is employed to automatically identify regions of interest like tumors, fractures, and calcified spots in images prior to feature extraction. Neuronal activation features termed as neural codes from different CNN layers are comprehensively studied to identify most appropriate features for representing radiographs. This study revealed that neural codes from the last fully connected layer of the fine-tuned CNN are found to be the most suitable for representing medical images. The neural codes extracted from the entire image and salient part of the image are fused to obtain the saliency-injected neural codes (SiNC) descriptor which is used for indexing and retrieval. Finally, locality sensitive hashing techniques are applied on the SiNC descriptor to acquire short binary codes for allowing efficient retrieval in large scale image collections. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on the radiology images dataset reveal that the proposed framework achieves high retrieval accuracy and efficiency for scalable image retrieval applications and compares favorably with existing approaches.

Sparse coded image super-resolution using K-SVD trained dictionary based on regularized orthogonal matching pursuit.

Image super-resolution (SR) plays a vital role in medical imaging that allows a more efficient and effective diagnosis process. Usually, diagnosing is difficult and inaccurate from low-resolution (LR) and noisy images. Resolution enhancement through conventional interpolation methods strongly affects the precision of consequent processing steps, such as segmentation and registration. Therefore, we propose an efficient sparse coded image SR reconstruction technique using a trained dictionary. We apply a simple and efficient regularized version of orthogonal matching pursuit (ROMP) to seek the coefficients of sparse representation. ROMP has the transparency and greediness of OMP and the robustness of the L1-minization that enhance the dictionary learning process to capture feature descriptors such as oriented edges and contours from complex images like brain MRIs. The sparse coding part of the K-SVD dictionary training procedure is modified by substituting OMP with ROMP. The dictionary update stage allows simultaneously updating an arbitrary number of atoms and vectors of sparse coefficients. In SR reconstruction, ROMP is used to determine the vector of sparse coefficients for the underlying patch. The recovered representations are then applied to the trained dictionary, and finally, an optimization leads to high-resolution output of high-quality. Experimental results demonstrate that the super-resolution reconstruction quality of the proposed scheme is comparatively better than other state-of-the-art schemes.

MRT letter: visual attention driven framework for hysteroscopy video abstraction.

Diagnostic hysteroscopy is a popular method for investigating the regions in the female reproductive system. The videos generated by hysteroscopy sessions of patients are recurrently archived in medical libraries. Gynecologists often need to browse these libraries in search of similar cases or for reviewing old videos of a patient. Diagnostic hysteroscopy videos contain a lot of information with abundant redundancy. Key frame extraction-based video summarization can be used to reduce this huge amount of data. Moreover, key frames can be used for browsing and indexing of hysteroscopy videos. In this article, a domain specific visual attention driven framework for summarization of hysteroscopy videos is proposed. The visual attention model is materialized by computing saliency based on color, texture, and motion. The experimental results, in comparison with other techniques, demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework.

Prioritization of brain MRI volumes using medical image perception model and tumor region segmentation.

The objective of the present study is to explore prioritization methods in diagnostic imaging modalities to automatically determine the contents of medical images. In this paper, we propose an efficient prioritization of brain MRI. First, the visual perception of the radiologists is adapted to identify salient regions. Then this saliency information is used as an automatic label for accurate segmentation of brain lesion to determine the scientific value of that image. The qualitative and quantitative results prove that the rankings generated by the proposed method are closer to the rankings created by radiologists.