A Computer Vision Based Approach for Stalking Detection Using a CNN-LSTM-MLP Hybrid Fusion Model

Criminal and suspicious activity detection has become a popular research topic in recent years. The rapid growth of computer vision technologies has had a crucial impact on solving this issue. However, physical stalking detection is still a less explored area despite the evolution of modern technology. Nowadays, stalking in public places has become a common occurrence with women being the most affected. Stalking is a visible action that usually occurs before any criminal activity begins as the stalker begins to follow, loiter, and stare at the victim before committing any criminal activity such as assault, kidnapping, rape, and so on. Therefore, it has become a necessity to detect stalking as all of these criminal activities can be stopped in the first place through stalking detection. In this research, we propose a novel deep learning-based hybrid fusion model to detect potential stalkers from a single video with a minimal number of frames. We extract multiple relevant features, such as facial landmarks, head pose estimation, and relative distance, as numerical values from video frames. This data is fed into a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to perform a classification task between a stalking and a non-stalking scenario. Simultaneously, the video frames are fed into a combination of convolutional and LSTM models to extract the spatio-temporal features. We use a fusion of these numerical and spatio-temporal features to build a classifier to detect stalking incidents. Additionally, we introduce a dataset consisting of stalking and non-stalking videos gathered from various feature films and television series, which is also used to train the model. The experimental results show the efficiency and dynamism of our proposed stalker detection system, achieving 89.58% testing accuracy with a significant improvement as compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Coseparable Nonnegative Tensor Factorization With T-CUR Decomposition

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is an important unsupervised learning method to extract meaningful features from data. To address the NMF problem within a polynomial time framework, researchers have introduced a separability assumption, which has recently evolved into the concept of coseparability. This advancement offers a more efficient core representation for the original data. However, in the real world, the data is more natural to be represented as a multi-dimensional array, such as images or videos. The NMF's application to high-dimensional data involves vectorization, which risks losing essential multi-dimensional correlations. To retain these inherent correlations in the data, we turn to tensors (multidimensional arrays) and leverage the tensor t-product. This approach extends the coseparable NMF to the tensor setting, creating what we term coseparable Nonnegative Tensor Factorization (NTF). In this work, we provide an alternating index selection method to select the coseparable core. Furthermore, we validate the t-CUR sampling theory and integrate it with the tensor Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method (t-DEIM) to introduce an alternative, randomized index selection process. These methods have been tested on both synthetic and facial analysis datasets. The results demonstrate the efficiency of coseparable NTF when compared to coseparable NMF.

SeFi-IDE: Semantic-Fidelity Identity Embedding for Personalized Diffusion-Based Generation

Advanced diffusion-based Text-to-Image (T2I) models, such as the Stable Diffusion Model, have made significant progress in generating diverse and high-quality images using text prompts alone. However, T2I models are unable to accurately map identities (IDs) when non-famous users require personalized image generation. The main problem is that existing T2I models do not learn the ID-image alignments of new users. The previous methods either failed to accurately fit the face region or lost the interactive generative ability with other existing concepts in T2I models (i.e., unable to generate other concepts described in given prompts such as scenes, actions, and facial attributes). In this paper, we focus on accurate and semantic-fidelity ID embedding into the Stable Diffusion Model for personalized generation. We address this challenge from two perspectives: face-wise region fitting, and semantic-fidelity token optimization. Specifically, we first visualize the attention overfit problem, and propose a face-wise attention loss to fit the face region instead of the whole target image. This key trick significantly enhances the ID accuracy and interactive generative ability with other existing concepts. Then, we optimize one ID representation as multiple per-stage tokens where each token contains two disentangled features. This expansion of the textual conditioning space enhances semantic-fidelity control. Extensive experiments validate that our results exhibit superior ID accuracy and manipulation ability compared to previous methods.

Probabilistic Speech-Driven 3D Facial Motion Synthesis: New Benchmarks, Methods, and Applications

We consider the task of animating 3D facial geometry from speech signal. Existing works are primarily deterministic, focusing on learning a one-to-one mapping from speech signal to 3D face meshes on small datasets with limited speakers. While these models can achieve high-quality lip articulation for speakers in the training set, they are unable to capture the full and diverse distribution of 3D facial motions that accompany speech in the real world. Importantly, the relationship between speech and facial motion is one-to-many, containing both inter-speaker and intra-speaker variations and necessitating a probabilistic approach. In this paper, we identify and address key challenges that have so far limited the development of probabilistic models: lack of datasets and metrics that are suitable for training and evaluating them, as well as the difficulty of designing a model that generates diverse results while remaining faithful to a strong conditioning signal as speech. We first propose large-scale benchmark datasets and metrics suitable for probabilistic modeling. Then, we demonstrate a probabilistic model that achieves both diversity and fidelity to speech, outperforming other methods across the proposed benchmarks. Finally, we showcase useful applications of probabilistic models trained on these large-scale datasets: we can generate diverse speech-driven 3D facial motion that matches unseen speaker styles extracted from reference clips; and our synthetic meshes can be used to improve the performance of downstream audio-visual models.

Learning Position-Aware Implicit Neural Network for Real-World Face Inpainting

Face inpainting requires the model to have a precise global understanding of the facial position structure. Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of deep learning backbones, recent works in face inpainting have achieved decent performance in ideal setting (square shape with $512px$). However, existing methods often produce a visually unpleasant result, especially in the position-sensitive details (e.g., eyes and nose), when directly applied to arbitrary-shaped images in real-world scenarios. The visually unpleasant position-sensitive details indicate the shortcomings of existing methods in terms of position information processing capability. In this paper, we propose an \textbf{I}mplicit \textbf{N}eural \textbf{I}npainting \textbf{N}etwork (IN$^2$) to handle arbitrary-shape face images in real-world scenarios by explicit modeling for position information. Specifically, a downsample processing encoder is proposed to reduce information loss while obtaining the global semantic feature. A neighbor hybrid attention block is proposed with a hybrid attention mechanism to improve the facial understanding ability of the model without restricting the shape of the input. Finally, an implicit neural pyramid decoder is introduced to explicitly model position information and bridge the gap between low-resolution features and high-resolution output. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in real-world face inpainting task.

FERGI: Automatic Annotation of User Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation from Spontaneous Facial Expression Reaction

Researchers have proposed to use data of human preference feedback to fine-tune text-to-image generative models. However, the scalability of human feedback collection has been limited by its reliance on manual annotation. Therefore, we develop and test a method to automatically annotate user preferences from their spontaneous facial expression reaction to the generated images. We collect a dataset of Facial Expression Reaction to Generated Images (FERGI) and show that the activations of multiple facial action units (AUs) are highly correlated with user evaluations of the generated images. Specifically, AU4 (brow lowerer) is most consistently reflective of negative evaluations of the generated image. This can be useful in two ways. Firstly, we can automatically annotate user preferences between image pairs with substantial difference in AU4 responses to them with an accuracy significantly outperforming state-of-the-art scoring models. Secondly, directly integrating the AU4 responses with the scoring models improves their consistency with human preferences. Additionally, the AU4 response best reflects the user's evaluation of the image fidelity, making it complementary to the state-of-the-art scoring models, which are generally better at reflecting image-text alignment. Finally, this method of automatic annotation with facial expression analysis can be potentially generalized to other generation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/ShuangquanFeng/FERGI, and the dataset is also available at the same link for research purposes.

Cooperative Dual Attention for Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement with Facial Cues

In this work, we focus on leveraging facial cues beyond the lip region for robust Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement (AVSE). The facial region, encompassing the lip region, reflects additional speech-related attributes such as gender, skin color, nationality, etc., which contribute to the effectiveness of AVSE. However, static and dynamic speech-unrelated attributes also exist, causing appearance changes during speech. To address these challenges, we propose a Dual Attention Cooperative Framework, DualAVSE, to ignore speech-unrelated information, capture speech-related information with facial cues, and dynamically integrate it with the audio signal for AVSE. Specifically, we introduce a spatial attention-based visual encoder to capture and enhance visual speech information beyond the lip region, incorporating global facial context and automatically ignoring speech-unrelated information for robust visual feature extraction. Additionally, a dynamic visual feature fusion strategy is introduced by integrating a temporal-dimensional self-attention module, enabling the model to robustly handle facial variations. The acoustic noise in the speaking process is variable, impacting audio quality. Therefore, a dynamic fusion strategy for both audio and visual features is introduced to address this issue. By integrating cooperative dual attention in the visual encoder and audio-visual fusion strategy, our model effectively extracts beneficial speech information from both audio and visual cues for AVSE. Thorough analysis and comparison on different datasets, including normal and challenging cases with unreliable or absent visual information, consistently show our model outperforming existing methods across multiple metrics.

SoK: Facial Deepfake Detectors

Deepfakes have rapidly emerged as a profound and serious threat to society, primarily due to their ease of creation and dissemination. This situation has triggered an accelerated development of deepfake detection technologies. However, many existing detectors rely heavily on lab-generated datasets for validation, which may not effectively prepare them for novel, emerging, and real-world deepfake techniques. In this paper, we conduct an extensive and comprehensive review and analysis of the latest state-of-the-art deepfake detectors, evaluating them against several critical criteria. These criteria facilitate the categorization of these detectors into 4 high-level groups and 13 fine-grained sub-groups, all aligned with a unified standard conceptual framework. This classification and framework offer deep and practical insights into the factors that affect detector efficacy. We assess the generalizability of 16 leading detectors across various standard attack scenarios, including black-box, white-box, and gray-box settings. Our systematized analysis and experimentation lay the groundwork for a deeper understanding of deepfake detectors and their generalizability, paving the way for future research focused on creating detectors adept at countering various attack scenarios. Additionally, this work offers insights for developing more proactive defenses against deepfakes.

PatternPortrait: Draw Me Like One of Your Scribbles

This paper introduces a process for generating abstract portrait drawings from pictures. Their unique style is created by utilizing single freehand pattern sketches as references to generate unique patterns for shading. The method involves extracting facial and body features from images and transforming them into vector lines. A key aspect of the research is the development of a graph neural network architecture designed to learn sketch stroke representations in vector form, enabling the generation of diverse stroke variations. The combination of these two approaches creates joyful abstract drawings that are realized via a pen plotter. The presented process garnered positive feedback from an audience of approximately 280 participants.

Smart Driver Monitoring Robotic System to Enhance Road Safety : A Comprehensive Review

The future of transportation is being shaped by technology, and one revolutionary step in improving road safety is the incorporation of robotic systems into driver monitoring infrastructure. This literature review explores the current landscape of driver monitoring systems, ranging from traditional physiological parameter monitoring to advanced technologies such as facial recognition to steering analysis. Exploring the challenges faced by existing systems, the review then investigates the integration of robots as intelligent entities within this framework. These robotic systems, equipped with artificial intelligence and sophisticated sensors, not only monitor but actively engage with the driver, addressing cognitive and emotional states in real-time. The synthesis of existing research reveals a dynamic interplay between human and machine, offering promising avenues for innovation in adaptive, personalized, and ethically responsible human-robot interactions for driver monitoring. This review establishes a groundwork for comprehending the intricacies and potential avenues within this dynamic field. It encourages further investigation and advancement at the intersection of human-robot interaction and automotive safety, introducing a novel direction. This involves various sections detailing technological enhancements that can be integrated to propose an innovative and improved driver monitoring system.