Fine-Grained Engine Fault Sound Event Detection Using Multimodal Signals

Sound event detection (SED) is an active area of audio research that aims to detect the temporal occurrence of sounds. In this paper, we apply SED to engine fault detection by introducing a multimodal SED framework that detects fine-grained engine faults of automobile engines using audio and accelerometer-recorded vibration. We first introduce the problem of engine fault SED on a dataset collected from a large variety of vehicles with expertly-labeled engine fault sound events. Next, we propose a SED model to temporally detect ten fine-grained engine faults that occur within vehicle engines and further explore a pretraining strategy using a large-scale weakly-labeled engine fault dataset. Through multiple evaluations, we show our proposed framework is able to effectively detect engine fault sound events. Finally, we investigate the interaction and characteristics of each modality and show that fusing features from audio and vibration improves overall engine fault SED capabilities.

Liveness Detection Competition -- Noncontact-based Fingerprint Algorithms and Systems (LivDet-2023 Noncontact Fingerprint)

Liveness Detection (LivDet) is an international competition series open to academia and industry with the objec-tive to assess and report state-of-the-art in Presentation Attack Detection (PAD). LivDet-2023 Noncontact Fingerprint is the first edition of the noncontact fingerprint-based PAD competition for algorithms and systems. The competition serves as an important benchmark in noncontact-based fingerprint PAD, offering (a) independent assessment of the state-of-the-art in noncontact-based fingerprint PAD for algorithms and systems, and (b) common evaluation protocol, which includes finger photos of a variety of Presentation Attack Instruments (PAIs) and live fingers to the biometric research community (c) provides standard algorithm and system evaluation protocols, along with the comparative analysis of state-of-the-art algorithms from academia and industry with both old and new android smartphones. The winning algorithm achieved an APCER of 11.35% averaged overall PAIs and a BPCER of 0.62%. The winning system achieved an APCER of 13.0.4%, averaged over all PAIs tested over all the smartphones, and a BPCER of 1.68% over all smartphones tested. Four-finger systems that make individual finger-based PAD decisions were also tested. The dataset used for competition will be available 1 to all researchers as per data share protocol

DIOR: Dataset for Indoor-Outdoor Reidentification -- Long Range 3D/2D Skeleton Gait Collection Pipeline, Semi-Automated Gait Keypoint Labeling and Baseline Evaluation Methods

In recent times, there is an increased interest in the identification and re-identification of people at long distances, such as from rooftop cameras, UAV cameras, street cams, and others. Such recognition needs to go beyond face and use whole-body markers such as gait. However, datasets to train and test such recognition algorithms are not widely prevalent, and fewer are labeled. This paper introduces DIOR -- a framework for data collection, semi-automated annotation, and also provides a dataset with 14 subjects and 1.649 million RGB frames with 3D/2D skeleton gait labels, including 200 thousands frames from a long range camera. Our approach leverages advanced 3D computer vision techniques to attain pixel-level accuracy in indoor settings with motion capture systems. Additionally, for outdoor long-range settings, we remove the dependency on motion capture systems and adopt a low-cost, hybrid 3D computer vision and learning pipeline with only 4 low-cost RGB cameras, successfully achieving precise skeleton labeling on far-away subjects, even when their height is limited to a mere 20-25 pixels within an RGB frame. On publication, we will make our pipeline open for others to use.

RealCQA: Scientific Chart Question Answering as a Test-bed for First-Order Logic

We present a comprehensive study of chart visual question-answering(QA) task, to address the challenges faced in comprehending and extracting data from chart visualizations within documents. Despite efforts to tackle this problem using synthetic charts, solutions are limited by the shortage of annotated real-world data. To fill this gap, we introduce a benchmark and dataset for chart visual QA on real-world charts, offering a systematic analysis of the task and a novel taxonomy for template-based chart question creation. Our contribution includes the introduction of a new answer type, 'list', with both ranked and unranked variations. Our study is conducted on a real-world chart dataset from scientific literature, showcasing higher visual complexity compared to other works. Our focus is on template-based QA and how it can serve as a standard for evaluating the first-order logic capabilities of models. The results of our experiments, conducted on a real-world out-of-distribution dataset, provide a robust evaluation of large-scale pre-trained models and advance the field of chart visual QA and formal logic verification for neural networks in general.

SpaDen : Sparse and Dense Keypoint Estimation for Real-World Chart Understanding

We introduce a novel bottom-up approach for the extraction of chart data. Our model utilizes images of charts as inputs and learns to detect keypoints (KP), which are used to reconstruct the components within the plot area. Our novelty lies in detecting a fusion of continuous and discrete KP as predicted heatmaps. A combination of sparse and dense per-pixel objectives coupled with a uni-modal self-attention-based feature-fusion layer is applied to learn KP embeddings. Further leveraging deep metric learning for unsupervised clustering, allows us to segment the chart plot area into various objects. By further matching the chart components to the legend, we are able to obtain the data series names. A post-processing threshold is applied to the KP embeddings to refine the object reconstructions and improve accuracy. Our extensive experiments include an evaluation of different modules for KP estimation and the combination of deep layer aggregation and corner pooling approaches. The results of our experiments provide extensive evaluation for the task of real-world chart data extraction.

CoNAN: Conditional Neural Aggregation Network For Unconstrained Face Feature Fusion

Face recognition from image sets acquired under unregulated and uncontrolled settings, such as at large distances, low resolutions, varying viewpoints, illumination, pose, and atmospheric conditions, is challenging. Face feature aggregation, which involves aggregating a set of N feature representations present in a template into a single global representation, plays a pivotal role in such recognition systems. Existing works in traditional face feature aggregation either utilize metadata or high-dimensional intermediate feature representations to estimate feature quality for aggregation. However, generating high-quality metadata or style information is not feasible for extremely low-resolution faces captured in long-range and high altitude settings. To overcome these limitations, we propose a feature distribution conditioning approach called CoNAN for template aggregation. Specifically, our method aims to learn a context vector conditioned over the distribution information of the incoming feature set, which is utilized to weigh the features based on their estimated informativeness. The proposed method produces state-of-the-art results on long-range unconstrained face recognition datasets such as BTS, and DroneSURF, validating the advantages of such an aggregation strategy.

RidgeBase: A Cross-Sensor Multi-Finger Contactless Fingerprint Dataset

Contactless fingerprint matching using smartphone cameras can alleviate major challenges of traditional fingerprint systems including hygienic acquisition, portability and presentation attacks. However, development of practical and robust contactless fingerprint matching techniques is constrained by the limited availability of large scale real-world datasets. To motivate further advances in contactless fingerprint matching across sensors, we introduce the RidgeBase benchmark dataset. RidgeBase consists of more than 15,000 contactless and contact-based fingerprint image pairs acquired from 88 individuals under different background and lighting conditions using two smartphone cameras and one flatbed contact sensor. Unlike existing datasets, RidgeBase is designed to promote research under different matching scenarios that include Single Finger Matching and Multi-Finger Matching for both contactless- to-contactless (CL2CL) and contact-to-contactless (C2CL) verification and identification. Furthermore, due to the high intra-sample variance in contactless fingerprints belonging to the same finger, we propose a set-based matching protocol inspired by the advances in facial recognition datasets. This protocol is specifically designed for pragmatic contactless fingerprint matching that can account for variances in focus, polarity and finger-angles. We report qualitative and quantitative baseline results for different protocols using a COTS fingerprint matcher (Verifinger) and a Deep CNN based approach on the RidgeBase dataset. The dataset can be downloaded here: https://www.buffalo.edu/cubs/research/datasets/ridgebase-benchmark-dataset.html

Hear The Flow: Optical Flow-Based Self-Supervised Visual Sound Source Localization

Learning to localize the sound source in videos without explicit annotations is a novel area of audio-visual research. Existing work in this area focuses on creating attention maps to capture the correlation between the two modalities to localize the source of the sound. In a video, oftentimes, the objects exhibiting movement are the ones generating the sound. In this work, we capture this characteristic by modeling the optical flow in a video as a prior to better aid in localizing the sound source. We further demonstrate that the addition of flow-based attention substantially improves visual sound source localization. Finally, we benchmark our method on standard sound source localization datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Soundnet Flickr and VGG Sound Source datasets. Code: https://github.com/denfed/heartheflow.

Article citation study: Context enhanced citation sentiment detection

Citation sentimet analysis is one of the little studied tasks for scientometric analysis. For citation analysis, we developed eight datasets comprising citation sentences, which are manually annotated by us into three sentiment polarities viz. positive, negative, and neutral. Among eight datasets, three were developed by considering the whole context of citations. Furthermore, we proposed an ensembled feature engineering method comprising word embeddings obtained for texts, parts-of-speech tags, and dependency relationships together. Ensembled features were considered as input to deep learning based approaches for citation sentiment classification, which is in turn compared with Bag-of-Words approach. Experimental results demonstrate that deep learning is useful for higher number of samples, whereas support vector machine is the winner for smaller number of samples. Moreover, context-based samples are proved to be more effective than context-less samples for citation sentiment analysis.

CAN: Composite Appearance Network and a Novel Evaluation Metric for Person Tracking

Tracking multiple people across multiple cameras is an open problem. It is typically divided into two tasks: (i) single-camera tracking (SCT) - identify trajectories in the same scene, and (ii) inter-camera tracking (ICT) - identify trajectories across cameras for real surveillance scenes. Many of the existing methods cater to single camera person tracking, while inter-camera tracking still remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a tracking method which uses motion cues and a feature aggregation network for template-based person re-identification by incorporating metadata such as person bounding box and camera information. We present an architecture called Composite Appearance Network (CAN) to address the above problem. The key structure of this architecture is a network called EvalNet that pays attention to each feature vector independently and learns to weight them based on gradients it receives for the overall template for optimal re-identification performance. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach with experiments on the challenging and large-scale multi-camera tracking dataset, DukeMTMC, and by comparing results to their baseline approach. We also survey existing tracking measures and present an online error metric called "Inference Error" (IE) that provides a better estimate of tracking/re-identification error, by treating within-camera and inter-camera errors uniformly.