Biometrics systems have significantly improved person identification and authentication, playing an important role in personal, national, and global security. However, these systems might be deceived ...(or spoofed) and, despite the recent advances in spoofing detection, current solutions often rely on domain knowledge, specific biometric reading systems, and attack types. We assume a very limited knowledge about biometric spoofing at the sensor to derive outstanding spoofing detection systems for iris, face, and fingerprint modalities based on two deep learning approaches. The first approach consists of learning suitable convolutional network architectures for each domain, whereas the second approach focuses on learning the weights of the network via back propagation. We consider nine biometric spoofing benchmarks - each one containing real and fake samples of a given biometric modality and attack type - and learn deep representations for each benchmark by combining and contrasting the two learning approaches. This strategy not only provides better comprehension of how these approaches interplay, but also creates systems that exceed the best known results in eight out of the nine benchmarks. The results strongly indicate that spoofing detection systems based on convolutional networks can be robust to attacks already known and possibly adapted, with little effort, to image-based attacks that are yet to come.
The process of colorizing involves creating or predicting information for images or videos. While the current literature has produced relevant and high-quality results for image colorization, video ...colorization poses greater challenges due to additional complexities such as temporal color consistency and consistency between scenes. This work provides an analysis of the state-of-the-art techniques in video colorization, including the most commonly used colorization and machine learning techniques, as well as color space and correlated techniques to enhance current results. Unlike other reviews on colorization, this paper focuses on solutions for both natural video and animation.
Although the development of sequencing technologies has provided a large number of protein sequences, the analysis of functions that each one plays is still difficult due to the efforts of ...laboratorial methods, making necessary the usage of computational methods to decrease this gap. As the main source of information available about proteins is their sequences, approaches that can use this information, such as classification based on the patterns of the amino acids and the inference based on sequence similarity using alignment tools, are able to predict a large collection of proteins. The methods available in the literature that use this type of feature can achieve good results, however, they present restrictions of protein length as input to their models. In this work, we present a new method, called TEMPROT, based on the fine-tuning and extraction of embeddings from an available architecture pre-trained on protein sequences. We also describe TEMPROT+, an ensemble between TEMPROT and BLASTp, a local alignment tool that analyzes sequence similarity, which improves the results of our former approach.
The evaluation of our proposed classifiers with the literature approaches has been conducted on our dataset, which was derived from CAFA3 challenge database. Both TEMPROT and TEMPROT+ achieved competitive results on Formula: see text, Formula: see text, AuPRC and IAuPRC metrics on Biological Process (BP), Cellular Component (CC) and Molecular Function (MF) ontologies compared to state-of-the-art models, with the main results equal to 0.581, 0.692 and 0.662 of Formula: see text on BP, CC and MF, respectively.
The comparison with the literature showed that our model presented competitive results compared the state-of-the-art approaches considering the amino acid sequence pattern recognition and homology analysis. Our model also presented improvements related to the input size that the model can use to train compared to the literature methods.
Protein secondary structures are important in many biological processes and applications. Due to advances in sequencing methods, there are many proteins sequenced, but fewer proteins with secondary ...structures defined by laboratory methods. With the development of computer technology, computational methods have (started to) become the most important methodologies for predicting secondary structures. We evaluated two different approaches to this problem-driven by the recent results obtained by computational methods in this task-(i) template-free classifiers, based on machine learning techniques; and (ii) template-based classifiers, based on searching tools. Both approaches are formed by different sub-classifiers-six for template-free and two for template-based, each with a specific view of the protein. Our results show that these ensembles improve the results of each approach individually.
For decades, photographs have been used to document space-time events and they have often served as evidence in courts. Although photographers are able to create composites of analog pictures, this ...process is very time consuming and requires expert knowledge. Today, however, powerful digital image editing software makes image modifications straightforward. This undermines our trust in photographs and, in particular, questions pictures as evidence for real-world events. In this paper, we analyze one of the most common forms of photographic manipulation, known as image composition or splicing. We propose a forgery detection method that exploits subtle inconsistencies in the color of the illumination of images. Our approach is machine-learning-based and requires minimal user interaction. The technique is applicable to images containing two or more people and requires no expert interaction for the tampering decision. To achieve this, we incorporate information from physics- and statistical-based illuminant estimators on image regions of similar material. From these illuminant estimates, we extract texture- and edge-based features which are then provided to a machine-learning approach for automatic decision-making. The classification performance using an SVM meta-fusion classifier is promising. It yields detection rates of 86% on a new benchmark dataset consisting of 200 images, and 83% on 50 images that were collected from the Internet.
In this paper, we explore transformed spaces, represented by image illuminant maps, to propose a methodology for selecting complementary forms of characterizing visual properties for an effective and ...automated detection of image forgeries. We combine statistical telltales provided by different image descriptors that explore color, shape, and texture features. We focus on detecting image forgeries containing people and present a method for locating the forgery, specifically, the face of a person in an image. Experiments performed on three different open-access data sets show the potential of the proposed method for pinpointing image forgeries containing people. In the two first data sets (DSO-1 and DSI-1), the proposed method achieved a classification accuracy of 94% and 84%, respectively, a remarkable improvement when compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, when evaluating the third data set comprising questioned images downloaded from the Internet, we also present a detailed analysis of target images.
Pollution in the form of litter in the natural environment is one of the great challenges of our times. Automated litter detection can help assess waste occurrences in the environment. Different ...machine learning solutions have been explored to develop litter detection tools, thereby supporting research, citizen science, and volunteer clean-up initiatives. However, to the best of our knowledge, no work has investigated the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning object detection approaches in the context of litter detection. In particular, no studies have focused on the assessment of those methods aiming their use in devices with low processing capabilities, e.g., mobile phones, typically employed in citizen science activities. In this paper, we fill this literature gap. We performed a comparative study involving state-of-the-art CNN architectures (e.g., Faster RCNN, Mask-RCNN, EfficientDet, RetinaNet and YOLO-v5), two litter image datasets and a smartphone. We also introduce a new dataset for litter detection, named PlastOPol, composed of 2418 images and 5300 annotations. The experimental results demonstrate that object detectors based on the YOLO family are promising for the construction of litter detection solutions, with superior performance in terms of detection accuracy, processing time, and memory footprint.
Recent technological advances have enabled the development of compact and portable cameras for the generation of large volumes of video content. Several applications have benefited from such ...significant growth of multimedia data, such as telemedicine, surveillance and security, entertainment, teaching, and robotics. However, videos captured by amateurs are subject to unwanted motion or vibration while handling the camera. Video stabilization techniques aim to detect and remove glitches or instabilities caused during the acquisition process to enhance visual quality. In this work, we introduce and analyze a novel representation based on visual rhythms for qualitative evaluation of video stabilization methods. Experiments conducted on different video sequences are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the visual representation as qualitative measure for evaluating video stability. In addition, we present a proposal to calculate an objective metric extracted from the visual rhythms.
Given a video or an image of a person acquired from a camera, person re-identification is the process of retrieving all instances of the same person from videos or images taken from a different ...camera with non-overlapping view. This task has applications in various fields, such as surveillance, forensics, robotics, multimedia. In this paper, we present a novel framework, named Saliency-Semantic Parsing Re-Identification (SSP-ReID), for taking advantage of the capabilities of both clues: saliency and semantic parsing maps, to guide a backbone convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn complementary representations that improves the results over the original backbones. The insight of fusing multiple clues is based on specific scenarios in which one response is better than another, thus favoring the combination of them to increase performance. Due to its definition, our framework can be easily applied to a wide variety of networks and, in contrast to other competitive methods, our training process follows simple and standard protocols. We present extensive evaluation of our approach through five backbones and three benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our person re-identification framework. In addition, we combine our framework with re-ranking techniques and compare it against state-of-the-art approaches, achieving competitive results.
•Development of a novel framework for person re-identification based on saliency and semantic parsing•Fusion of multiple clues to guide a backbone convolutional neural network•Evaluation on challenging public data sets•Results superior/comparable to the literature
The development of multimedia equipments has allowed a significant growth in the production of videos through professional and amateur cameras, smartphones, and other mobile devices. Examples of ...applications involving video processing and analysis include surveillance and security, telemedicine, entertainment, teaching, and robotics. Video stabilization refers to the set of techniques required to detect and correct glitches or instabilities caused during the video acquisition process due to vibrations and undesired motion when handling the camera. In this work, we propose and evaluate a novel approach to video stabilization based on an adaptive Gaussian filter to smooth the camera trajectories. Experiments conducted on several video sequences demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, which generates videos with adequate trade-off between stabilization rate and amount of frame pixels. Our results were compared to YouTube’s state-of-the-art method, achieving competitive results.