Improvising Age Verification Technologies in Canada: Technical, Regulatory and Social Dynamics

Age verification, which is a mandatory legal requirement for delivering certain age-appropriate services or products, has recently been emphasized around the globe to ensure online safety for children. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has facilitated the recent development of some cutting-edge age-verification technologies, particularly using biometrics. However, successful deployment and mass acceptance of these technologies are significantly dependent on the corresponding socio-economic and regulatory context. This paper reviews such key dynamics for improvising age-verification technologies in Canada. It is particularly essential for such technologies to be inclusive, transparent, adaptable, privacy-preserving, and secure. Effective collaboration between academia, government, and industry entities can help to meet the growing demands for age-verification services in Canada while maintaining a user-centric approach.

DiffeoRaptor: Diffeomorphic Inter-modal Image Registration using RaPTOR

Purpose: Diffeomorphic image registration is essential in many medical imaging applications. Several registration algorithms of such type have been proposed, but primarily for intra-contrast alignment. Currently, efficient inter-modal/contrast diffeomorphic registration, which is vital in numerous applications, remains a challenging task. Methods: We proposed a novel inter-modal/contrast registration algorithm that leverages Robust PaTch-based cOrrelation Ratio (RaPTOR) metric to allow inter-modal/contrast image alignment and bandlimited geodesic shooting demonstrated in Fourier Approximated Lie Algebras (FLASH) algorithm for fast diffeomorphic registration. Results: The proposed algorithm, named DiffeoRaptor, was validated with three public databases for the tasks of brain and abdominal image registration while comparing the results against three state-of-the-art techniques, including FLASH, NiftyReg, and Symmetric image normalization (SyN). Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that DiffeoRaptor offered comparable or better registration performance in terms of registration accuracy. Moreover, DiffeoRaptor produces smoother deformations than SyN in inter-modal and contrast registration. The code for DiffeoRaptor is publicly available at https://github.com/nimamasoumi/DiffeoRaptor.

Multi-Site Infant Brain Segmentation Algorithms: The iSeg-2019 Challenge

To better understand early brain growth patterns in health and disorder, it is critical to accurately segment infant brain magnetic resonance (MR) images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Deep learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance; however, one of major limitations is that the learning-based methods may suffer from the multi-site issue, that is, the models trained on a dataset from one site may not be applicable to the datasets acquired from other sites with different imaging protocols/scanners. To promote methodological development in the community, iSeg-2019 challenge (http://iseg2019.web.unc.edu) provides a set of 6-month infant subjects from multiple sites with different protocols/scanners for the participating methods. Training/validation subjects are from UNC (MAP) and testing subjects are from UNC/UMN (BCP), Stanford University, and Emory University. By the time of writing, there are 30 automatic segmentation methods participating in iSeg-2019. We review the 8 top-ranked teams by detailing their pipelines/implementations, presenting experimental results and evaluating performance in terms of the whole brain, regions of interest, and gyral landmark curves. We also discuss their limitations and possible future directions for the multi-site issue. We hope that the multi-site dataset in iSeg-2019 and this review article will attract more researchers on the multi-site issue.

Applying r-spatiogram in object tracking for occlusion handling

Object tracking is one of the most important problems in computer vision. The aim of video tracking is to extract the trajectories of a target or object of interest, i.e. accurately locate a moving target in a video sequence and discriminate target from non-targets in the feature space of the sequence. So, feature descriptors can have significant effects on such discrimination. In this paper, we use the basic idea of many trackers which consists of three main components of the reference model, i.e., object modeling, object detection and localization, and model updating. However, there are major improvements in our system. Our forth component, occlusion handling, utilizes the r-spatiogram to detect the best target candidate. While spatiogram contains some moments upon the coordinates of the pixels, r-spatiogram computes region-based compactness on the distribution of the given feature in the image that captures richer features to represent the objects. The proposed research develops an efficient and robust way to keep tracking the object throughout video sequences in the presence of significant appearance variations and severe occlusions. The proposed method is evaluated on the Princeton RGBD tracking dataset considering sequences with different challenges and the obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.