Real Time System for Facial Analysis

In this paper we describe the anatomy of a real-time facial analysis system. The system recognizes the age, gender and facial expression from users in appearing in front of the camera. All components are based on convolutional neural networks, whose accuracy we study on commonly used training and evaluation sets. A key contribution of the work is the description of the interplay between processing threads for frame grabbing, face detection and the three types of recognition. The python code for executing the system uses common libraries--keras/tensorflow, opencv and dlib--and is available for download.

Acoustic Scene Classification: A Competition Review

In this paper we study the problem of acoustic scene classification, i.e., categorization of audio sequences into mutually exclusive classes based on their spectral content. We describe the methods and results discovered during a competition organized in the context of a graduate machine learning course; both by the students and external participants. We identify the most suitable methods and study the impact of each by performing an ablation study of the mixture of approaches. We also compare the results with a neural network baseline, and show the improvement over that. Finally, we discuss the impact of using a competition as a part of a university course, and justify its importance in the curriculum based on student feedback.