One-shot lip-based biometric authentication: extending behavioral features with authentication phrase information

Lip-based biometric authentication (LBBA) is an authentication method based on a person's lip movements during speech in the form of video data captured by a camera sensor. LBBA can utilize both physical and behavioral characteristics of lip movements without requiring any additional sensory equipment apart from an RGB camera. State-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches use one-shot learning to train deep siamese neural networks which produce an embedding vector out of these features. Embeddings are further used to compute the similarity between an enrolled user and a user being authenticated. A flaw of these approaches is that they model behavioral features as style-of-speech without relation to what is being said. This makes the system vulnerable to video replay attacks of the client speaking any phrase. To solve this problem we propose a one-shot approach which models behavioral features to discriminate against what is being said in addition to style-of-speech. We achieve this by customizing the GRID dataset to obtain required triplets and training a siamese neural network based on 3D convolutions and recurrent neural network layers. A custom triplet loss for batch-wise hard-negative mining is proposed. Obtained results using an open-set protocol are 3.2% FAR and 3.8% FRR on the test set of the customized GRID dataset. Additional analysis of the results was done to quantify the influence and discriminatory power of behavioral and physical features for LBBA.

Adaptive Generation of Privileged Intermediate Information for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification

Visible-infrared person re-identification seeks to retrieve images of the same individual captured over a distributed network of RGB and IR sensors. Several V-I ReID approaches directly integrate both V and I modalities to discriminate persons within a shared representation space. However, given the significant gap in data distributions between V and I modalities, cross-modal V-I ReID remains challenging. Some recent approaches improve generalization by leveraging intermediate spaces that can bridge V and I modalities, yet effective methods are required to select or generate data for such informative domains. In this paper, the Adaptive Generation of Privileged Intermediate Information training approach is introduced to adapt and generate a virtual domain that bridges discriminant information between the V and I modalities. The key motivation behind AGPI^2 is to enhance the training of a deep V-I ReID backbone by generating privileged images that provide additional information. These privileged images capture shared discriminative features that are not easily accessible within the original V or I modalities alone. Towards this goal, a non-linear generative module is trained with an adversarial objective, translating V images into intermediate spaces with a smaller domain shift w.r.t. the I domain. Meanwhile, the embedding module within AGPI^2 aims to produce similar features for both V and generated images, encouraging the extraction of features that are common to all modalities. In addition to these contributions, AGPI^2 employs adversarial objectives for adapting the intermediate images, which play a crucial role in creating a non-modality-specific space to address the large domain shifts between V and I domains. Experimental results conducted on challenging V-I ReID datasets indicate that AGPI^2 increases matching accuracy without extra computational resources during inference.

Towards Large-scale Building Attribute Mapping using Crowdsourced Images: Scene Text Recognition on Flickr and Problems to be Solved

Crowdsourced platforms provide huge amounts of street-view images that contain valuable building information. This work addresses the challenges in applying Scene Text Recognition (STR) in crowdsourced street-view images for building attribute mapping. We use Flickr images, particularly examining texts on building facades. A Berlin Flickr dataset is created, and pre-trained STR models are used for text detection and recognition. Manual checking on a subset of STR-recognized images demonstrates high accuracy. We examined the correlation between STR results and building functions, and analysed instances where texts were recognized on residential buildings but not on commercial ones. Further investigation revealed significant challenges associated with this task, including small text regions in street-view images, the absence of ground truth labels, and mismatches in buildings in Flickr images and building footprints in OpenStreetMap (OSM). To develop city-wide mapping beyond urban hotspot locations, we suggest differentiating the scenarios where STR proves effective while developing appropriate algorithms or bringing in additional data for handling other cases. Furthermore, interdisciplinary collaboration should be undertaken to understand the motivation behind building photography and labeling. The STR-on-Flickr results are publicly available at https://github.com/ya0-sun/STR-Berlin.

An Assessment of ChatGPT on Log Data

Recent development of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT has been widely applied to a wide range of software engineering tasks. Many papers have reported their analysis on the potential advantages and limitations of ChatGPT for writing code, summarization, text generation, etc. However, the analysis of the current state of ChatGPT for log processing has received little attention. Logs generated by large-scale software systems are complex and hard to understand. Despite their complexity, they provide crucial information for subject matter experts to understand the system status and diagnose problems of the systems. In this paper, we investigate the current capabilities of ChatGPT to perform several interesting tasks on log data, while also trying to identify its main shortcomings. Our findings show that the performance of the current version of ChatGPT for log processing is limited, with a lack of consistency in responses and scalability issues. We also outline our views on how we perceive the role of LLMs in the log processing discipline and possible next steps to improve the current capabilities of ChatGPT and the future LLMs in this area. We believe our work can contribute to future academic research to address the identified issues.

Semantic Adversarial Attacks via Diffusion Models

Traditional adversarial attacks concentrate on manipulating clean examples in the pixel space by adding adversarial perturbations. By contrast, semantic adversarial attacks focus on changing semantic attributes of clean examples, such as color, context, and features, which are more feasible in the real world. In this paper, we propose a framework to quickly generate a semantic adversarial attack by leveraging recent diffusion models since semantic information is included in the latent space of well-trained diffusion models. Then there are two variants of this framework: 1) the Semantic Transformation (ST) approach fine-tunes the latent space of the generated image and/or the diffusion model itself; 2) the Latent Masking (LM) approach masks the latent space with another target image and local backpropagation-based interpretation methods. Additionally, the ST approach can be applied in either white-box or black-box settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on CelebA-HQ and AFHQ datasets, and our framework demonstrates great fidelity, generalizability, and transferability compared to other baselines. Our approaches achieve approximately 100% attack success rate in multiple settings with the best FID as 36.61. Code is available at https://github.com/steven202/semantic_adv_via_dm.

RecycleNet: Latent Feature Recycling Leads to Iterative Decision Refinement

Despite the remarkable success of deep learning systems over the last decade, a key difference still remains between neural network and human decision-making: As humans, we cannot only form a decision on the spot, but also ponder, revisiting an initial guess from different angles, distilling relevant information, arriving at a better decision. Here, we propose RecycleNet, a latent feature recycling method, instilling the pondering capability for neural networks to refine initial decisions over a number of recycling steps, where outputs are fed back into earlier network layers in an iterative fashion. This approach makes minimal assumptions about the neural network architecture and thus can be implemented in a wide variety of contexts. Using medical image segmentation as the evaluation environment, we show that latent feature recycling enables the network to iteratively refine initial predictions even beyond the iterations seen during training, converging towards an improved decision. We evaluate this across a variety of segmentation benchmarks and show consistent improvements even compared with top-performing segmentation methods. This allows trading increased computation time for improved performance, which can be beneficial, especially for safety-critical applications.

Research on self-cross transformer model of point cloud change detecter

With the vigorous development of the urban construction industry, engineering deformation or changes often occur during the construction process. To combat this phenomenon, it is necessary to detect changes in order to detect construction loopholes in time, ensure the integrity of the project and reduce labor costs. Or the inconvenience and injuriousness of the road. In the study of change detection in 3D point clouds, researchers have published various research methods on 3D point clouds. Directly based on but mostly based ontraditional threshold distance methods (C2C, M3C2, M3C2-EP), and some are to convert 3D point clouds into DSM, which loses a lot of original information. Although deep learning is used in remote sensing methods, in terms of change detection of 3D point clouds, it is more converted into two-dimensional patches, and neural networks are rarely applied directly. We prefer that the network is given at the level of pixels or points. Variety. Therefore, in this article, our network builds a network for 3D point cloud change detection, and proposes a new module Cross transformer suitable for change detection. Simultaneously simulate tunneling data for change detection, and do test experiments with our network.

M3-AUDIODEC: Multi-channel multi-speaker multi-spatial audio codec

We introduce M3-AUDIODEC, an innovative neural spatial audio codec designed for efficient compression of multi-channel (binaural) speech in both single and multi-speaker scenarios, while retaining the spatial location information of each speaker. This model boasts versatility, allowing configuration and training tailored to a predetermined set of multi-channel, multi-speaker, and multi-spatial overlapping speech conditions. Key contributions are as follows: 1) Previous neural codecs are extended from single to multi-channel audios. 2) The ability of our proposed model to compress and decode for overlapping speech. 3) A groundbreaking architecture that compresses speech content and spatial cues separately, ensuring the preservation of each speaker's spatial context after decoding. 4) M3-AUDIODEC's proficiency in reducing the bandwidth for compressing two-channel speech by 48% when compared to individual binaural channel compression. Impressively, at a 12.6 kbps operation, it outperforms Opus at 24 kbps and AUDIODEC at 24 kbps by 37% and 52%, respectively. In our assessment, we employed speech enhancement and room acoustic metrics to ascertain the accuracy of clean speech and spatial cue estimates from M3-AUDIODEC. Audio demonstrations and source code are available online.

A DenseNet-based method for decoding auditory spatial attention with EEG

Auditory spatial attention detection (ASAD) aims to decode the attended spatial location with EEG in a multiple-speaker setting. ASAD methods are inspired by the brain lateralization of cortical neural responses during the processing of auditory spatial attention, and show promising performance for the task of auditory attention decoding (AAD) with neural recordings. In the previous ASAD methods, the spatial distribution of EEG electrodes is not fully exploited, which may limit the performance of these methods. In the present work, by transforming the original EEG channels into a two-dimensional (2D) spatial topological map, the EEG data is transformed into a three-dimensional (3D) arrangement containing spatial-temporal information. And then a 3D deep convolutional neural network (DenseNet-3D) is used to extract temporal and spatial features of the neural representation for the attended locations. The results show that the proposed method achieves higher decoding accuracy than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method (94.4% compared to XANet's 90.6%) with 1-second decision window for the widely used KULeuven (KUL) dataset, and the code to implement our work is available on Github: https://github.com/xuxiran/ASAD_DenseNet

Towards Safer Robot-Assisted Surgery: A Markerless Augmented Reality Framework

Robot-assisted surgery is rapidly developing in the medical field, and the integration of augmented reality shows the potential of improving the surgeons' operation performance by providing more visual information. In this paper, we proposed a markerless augmented reality framework to enhance safety by avoiding intra-operative bleeding which is a high risk caused by the collision between the surgical instruments and the blood vessel. Advanced stereo reconstruction and segmentation networks are compared to find out the best combination to reconstruct the intra-operative blood vessel in the 3D space for the registration of the pre-operative model, and the minimum distance detection between the instruments and the blood vessel is implemented. A robot-assisted lymphadenectomy is simulated on the da Vinci Research Kit in a dry lab, and ten human subjects performed this operation to explore the usability of the proposed framework. The result shows that the augmented reality framework can help the users to avoid the dangerous collision between the instruments and the blood vessel while not introducing an extra load. It provides a flexible framework that integrates augmented reality into the medical robot platform to enhance safety during the operation.