Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Video Foreground Extraction Using Multi-View Receptive Field and Encoder–Decoder DCNN for Traffic and Surveillance Applications

The automatic detection of foreground (FG) objects in videos is a demanding area of computer vision, with essential applications in video-based traffic analysis and surveillance. New solutions have attempted exploiting deep neural network (DNN) for this purpose. In DNN, learning agents, i.e., features for video FG object segmentation is nontrivial, unlike image segmentation. It is a temporally processed decision-making problem, where the agents involved are the spatial and temporal correlations of the FG objects and the background (BG) of the scene. To handle this and to overcome the conventional DL models' poor delineation at the borders of FG regions due to fixed-view receptive filed-based learning, this work introduces a Multi-view Receptive Field EncoderDecoder Convolutional Neural Network called MvRF-CNN. The main contribution of the model is harnessing multiple views of convolutional (conv) kernels with residual feature fusions at early, mid and late stages in an encoder-decoder (EnDec) architecture. It enhances the ability of the model to learn condition-invariant agents resulting in highly delineated FG masks when compared to the existing approaches from heuristicto DL-based techniques. The model is trained with sequence-specific labeled samples to predict scene-specific pixel-level labels of FG objects in near static scenes with a minute dynamism. The experimental study on 37 video sequences from traffic and surveillance scenarios that include complex environments, viz. dynamic background, camera jittery, intermittent object motion, scenes with cast shadows, night videos, and lousy weather proves the effectiveness of the model. The study covers two input configurations: a 3-channel (RGB) single frame and a 3-channel double-frame with a BG such that two consecutive grayscale frames stacked with a prior BG model. The ablation investigations are also conducted to show the importance of transfer learning (TL) and mid-fusion approaches for enhancing the segmentation performance and the model's robustness on failure modes: when there is lack of manually annotated hard ground truths (HGT) and testing the model under non-scenespecific videos. In overall, the model achieves a figure-of-merit of 95% and 42 FPS of mean average performance.
Institutional governance and protection motivation: Theoretical insights into shaping employees’ security compliance behavior in higher education institutions in the developing world

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are progressively computerized to deal with substantial academic and operational information. With the increase in enriched information systems (IS) comes the potential hazard of malicious exposure to internal and external threats. This academic sector is advancing in the implementation of technical security controls; however, behavioral influence is still a challenge in the information security domain. Information security policies (ISPs) are generally designed and developed to control employees’ working behavior, yet compliance with these documents is near to non-existent. This research paper describes an empirical test of the influence of institutional governance (IG) on protection motivation and planned behavior of employees in HEIs. Results were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques. Our findings confirm the significant contribution of IG in motivating protection behavior among employees of HEIs. This cultivated motivation encourages positive conduct in information security policy compliance (ISPC).
Real-Time Object Detection With Reduced Region Proposal Network via Multi-Feature Concatenation

In recent years, object detection became more and more important following the successful results from studies in deep learning. Two types of neural network architectures are used for object detection: one-stage and two-stage. In this paper, we analyze a widely used two-stage architecture called Faster R-CNN to improve the inference time and achieve real-time object detection without compromising on accuracy. To increase the computation efficiency, pruning is first adopted to reduce the weights in convolutional and fully connected (FC) layers. However, this reduces the accuracy of detection. To address this loss in accuracy, we propose a reduced region proposal network (RRPN) with dilated convolution and concatenation of multi-scale features. In the assisted multi-feature concatenation, we propose the intra-layer concatenation and proposal refinement to efficiently integrate the feature maps from different convolutional layers; this is then provided as an input to the RRPN. Using the proposed method, the network can find object bounding boxes more accurately, thus compensating for the loss arising from compression. Finally, we test the proposed architecture using ZF-Net and VGG16 as a backbone network on the image sets in PASCAL VOC 2007 or VOC 2012. The results show that we can compress the parameters of the ZF-Net-based network by 81.2% and save 66% of computation. The parameters of VGG16-based network are compressed by 73% and save 77% of computation. Consequently, the inference speed is improved from 27 to 40 frames/s for ZF-Net and 9 to 27 frames/s for VGG16. Despite significant compression rates, the accuracy of ZF-Net is increased from 2.2% to 60.2% mean average precision (mAP) and that of VGG16 is increased from 2.6% to 69.1% mAP.
The Capacity of Private Information Retrieval With Partially Known Private Side Information

We consider the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) of a single message out of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> messages from <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula> replicated and non-colluding databases where a cache-enabled user (retriever) of cache-size <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> possesses side information in the form of full messages that are partially known to the databases. In this model, the user and the databases engage in a two-phase scheme, namely, the prefetching phase where the user acquires side information and the retrieval phase where the user downloads desired information. In the prefetching phase, the user receives <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$m_{n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> full messages from the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$ </tex-math></inline-formula> th database, under the cache memory size constraint <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sum _{n=1}^{N} m_{n} \leq M$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . In the retrieval phase, the user wishes to retrieve a message (which is not present in its memory) such that no individual database learns anything about the identity of the desired message. In addition, the identities of the side information messages that the user did not prefetch from a database must remain private against that database. Since the side information provided by each database in the prefetching phase is known by the providing database and the side information must be kept private against the remaining databases, we coin this model as <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">partially known private side information</i> . We characterize the capacity of the PIR with partially known private side information to be <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$C=\left ({1+\frac {1}{N}+\cdots +\frac {1}{N^{K-M-1}}}\right)^{-1}=\frac {1-\frac {1}{N}}{1-\left({\frac {1}{N}}\right)^{K-M}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . Interestingly, this result is the same if none of the databases knows any of the prefetched side information, i.e., when the side information is obtained externally, a problem posed by Kadhe et al. and settled by Chen-Wang-Jafar recently. Thus, our result implies that there is no loss in using the same databases for both prefetching and retrieval phases.
Students and society in the 2020s. Three future ‘histories’ of education and technology

As social science fiction, this paper imagines three possible futures for education and technology. Among the most important technologies emerging today are data-aggregating technologies such as AI, affective computing, adaptive or predictive software, clouds and platforms. The paper is not, however, directed at specific technologies, but at indeterminate sociotechnical configurations. Set in 2040, it offers three 'histories' of the 2020s. Might students become (i) 'smooth users', improving themselves in the pursuit of frictionless efficiency within a post-democratic frame created by large corporations, (ii) 'digital nomads', seeking freedom, individualism and aesthetic joy as solopreneurs exploiting state regulations and algorithmic rules while stepping out of the state and deeply into the capitalist new economy, or (iii) participatory, democratic, ecological humans embedded in 'collective agency' that see institutions as spaces for exploring more equitable ways of living? The paper reflects on the future research and the political, educational and technological decisions which would make each of these three fictional future histories more or less likely.
Sentiment analysis for mining texts and social networks data: Methods and tools

Abstract Social networks (SNs) represent an established environment in which users share daily emotions and opinions. Therefore, they have become an essential source of big data related to sentiment/opinion sphere. Sentiment analysis (SA) aims to extract sentiments, emotions or opinions from texts, made available by different data sources like SNs. This review presents a depth study relative to the methods and the main tools for SA. The analysis was performed by defining four criteria and several variables to compare 24 tools with objective criteria. Specifically, the tools have been analyzed and tested to verify their usability, flexibility of use, and other specifications related to the type of analysis performed. The majority of tools can detect positive, negative, and neutral polarity, while few tools only detect positive and negative polarity. Moreover, seven tools were able to recognize emotions, and only one provides a visual map for geo‐referenced data. Except for one, remaining 23 tools offer service through the web interface. Finally, only nine tools provide both application program interfaces and a client for common programming languages to allow potential developer end‐users to integrate a specific SA tool into their application. Differently, from other recent surveys, the paper presents and discusses both methods and tools for analyzing texts and SN data sources to extract sentiment. Moreover, it contains a comprehensive comparison with other recent surveys. The comparative analysis of the tools completed according to objective criteria allows to highlight some limits on main tools that need to be faced with enhancing the end‐user experience. This article is categorized under: Technologies &gt; Structure Discovery and Clustering Algorithmic Development &gt; Text Mining Fundamental Concepts of Data and Knowledge &gt; Big Data Mining Application Areas &gt; Data Mining Software Tools
A Non-Local CNN for Video Denoising

Non-local patch-based methods were until recently state-of-the-art for image denoising but are now outperformed by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Yet they are still the best ones for video denoising, as video redundancy is a key factor to attain high denoising performance. In this work we propose a novel video denoising CNN. Non-local self-similarity is incorporated into the network via a first non-trainable layer which finds for each patch in the input image its most similar patches in a 3D spatio-temporal search region centered at the target patch. The central values of these patches are then gathered in a feature vector which is assigned to each image pixel. This information is presented to a CNN which is trained to predict a clean image. The proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful application of CNNs to video denoising.
A Marker-Less Registration Approach for Mixed Reality–Aided Maxillofacial Surgery: a Pilot Evaluation

As of common routine in tumor resections, surgeons rely on local examinations of the removed tissues and on the swiftly made microscopy findings of the pathologist, which are based on intraoperatively taken tissue probes. This approach may imply an extended duration of the operation, increased effort for the medical staff, and longer occupancy of the operating room (OR). Mixed reality technologies, and particularly augmented reality, have already been applied in surgical scenarios with positive initial outcomes. Nonetheless, these methods have used manual or marker-based registration. In this work, we design an application for a marker-less registration of PET-CT information for a patient. The algorithm combines facial landmarks extracted from an RGB video stream, and the so-called Spatial-Mapping API provided by the HMD Microsoft HoloLens. The accuracy of the system is compared with a marker-based approach, and the opinions of field specialists have been collected during a demonstration. A survey based on the standard ISO-9241/110 has been designed for this purpose. The measurements show an average positioning error along the three axes of (x, y, z) = (3.3 ± 2.3, - 4.5 ± 2.9, - 9.3 ± 6.1) mm. Compared with the marker-based approach, this shows an increment of the positioning error of approx. 3 mm along two dimensions (x, y), which might be due to the absence of explicit markers. The application has been positively evaluated by the specialists; they have shown interest in continued further work and contributed to the development process with constructive criticism.
PA3D: Pose-Action 3D Machine for Video Recognition

Recent studies have witnessed the successes of using 3D CNNs for video action recognition. However, most 3D models are built upon RGB and optical flow streams, which may not fully exploit pose dynamics, i.e., an important cue of modeling human actions. To fill this gap, we propose a concise Pose-Action 3D Machine (PA3D), which can effectively encode multiple pose modalities within a unified 3D framework, and consequently learn spatio-temporal pose representations for action recognition. More specifically, we introduce a novel temporal pose convolution to aggregate spatial poses over frames. Unlike the classical temporal convolution, our operation can explicitly learn the pose motions that are discriminative to recognize human actions. Extensive experiments on three popular benchmarks (i.e., JHMDB, HMDB, and Charades) show that, PA3D outperforms the recent pose-based approaches. Furthermore, PA3D is highly complementary to the recent 3D CNNs, e.g., I3D. Multi-stream fusion achieves the state-of-the-art performance on all evaluated data sets.
No-reference color image quality assessment: from entropy to perceptual quality

This paper presents a high-performance general-purpose no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) method based on image entropy. The image features are extracted from two domains. In the spatial domain, the mutual information between different color channels and the two-dimensional entropy are calculated. In the frequency domain, the statistical characteristics of the two-dimensional entropy and the mutual information of the filtered subband images are computed as the feature set of the input color image. Then, with all the extracted features, the support vector classifier (SVC) for distortion classification and support vector regression (SVR) are utilized for the quality prediction, to obtain the final quality assessment score. The proposed method, which we call entropy-based no-reference image quality assessment (ENIQA), can assess the quality of different categories of distorted images, and has a low complexity. The proposed ENIQA method was assessed on the LIVE and TID2013 databases and showed a superior performance. The experimental results confirmed that the proposed ENIQA method has a high consistency of objective and subjective assessment on color images, which indicates the good overall performance and generalization ability of ENIQA. The implementation is available on github https://github.com/jacob6/ENIQA .
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Depth Prediction from Images

State-of-the-art approaches to infer dense depth measurements from images rely on CNNs trained end-to-end on a vast amount of data. However, these approaches suffer a drastic drop in accuracy when dealing with environments much different in appearance and/or context from those observed at training time. This domain shift issue is usually addressed by fine-tuning on smaller sets of images from the target domain annotated with depth labels. Unfortunately, relying on such supervised labeling is seldom feasible in most practical settings. Therefore, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation technique which does not require groundtruth labels. Our method relies only on image pairs and leverages on classical stereo algorithms to produce disparity measurements alongside with confidence estimators to assess upon their reliability. We propose to fine-tune both depth-from-stereo as well as depth-from-mono architectures by a novel confidence-guided loss function that handles the measured disparities as noisy labels weighted according to the estimated confidence. Extensive experimental results based on standard datasets and evaluation protocols prove that our technique can address effectively the domain shift issue with both stereo and monocular depth prediction architectures and outperforms other state-of-the-art unsupervised loss functions that may be alternatively deployed to pursue domain adaptation.
A Method of Information Protection for Collaborative Deep Learning under GAN Model Attack

Deep learning is widely used in the medical field owing to its high accuracy in medical image classification and biological applications. However, under collaborative deep learning, there is a serious risk of information leakage based on the deep convolutional generation against the network's privacy protection method. Moreover, the risk of such information leakage is greater in the medical field. This paper proposes a deep convolution generative adversarial networks (DCGAN) based privacy protection method to protect the information of collaborative deep learning training and enhance its stability. The proposed method adopts encrypted transmission in the process of deep network parameter transmission. By setting the buried point to detect a generative adversarial network (GAN) attack in the network and adjusting the training parameters, training based on the GAN model attack is forced to be invalid, and the information is effectively protected.
Mixed reality-based user interface for quality control inspection of car body surfaces

In recent years, the quality control of car body surfaces production lines have been put in the context of Industry 4.0. The emergence of automatic defect detection systems have helped to standardize the brand quality and gather information about all quality control tasks performed by workers. However, current worker interfaces used to indicate the location and other characteristics of the defects found by these systems have overcome the ergonomics of workers and increased their stress at work. This paper presents a novel mixed reality-based user interface for quality control inspection which is more intuitive, in order to improve the ergonomics of workers, reduce their stress at work and improve the productivity of current quality control production lines. An experimental prototype is shown in the paper in order to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed interface. In addition, the paper shows the results of several usability tests that compare the proposed mixed reality-based user interface with current interfaces used in important factories such as Mercedes-Benz, analyzing the benefits and drawbacks of each interface.
VoteNet: A Deep Learning Label Fusion Method for Multi-atlas Segmentation

Deep learning (DL) approaches are state-of-the-art for many medical image segmentation tasks. They offer a number of advantages: they can be trained for specific tasks, computations are fast at test time, and segmentation quality is typically high. In contrast, previously popular multi-atlas segmentation (MAS) methods are relatively slow (as they rely on costly registrations) and even though sophisticated label fusion strategies have been proposed, DL approaches generally outperform MAS. In this work, we propose a DL-based label fusion strategy (VoteNet) which locally selects a set of reliable atlases whose labels are then fused via plurality voting. Experiments on 3D brain MRI data show that by selecting a good initial atlas set MAS with VoteNet significantly outperforms a number of other label fusion strategies as well as a direct DL segmentation approach. We also provide an experimental analysis of the upper performance bound achievable by our method. While unlikely achievable in practice, this bound suggests room for further performance improvements. Lastly, to address the runtime disadvantage of standard MAS, all our results make use of a fast DL registration approach.
Security and Privacy of Smart Home Systems Based on the Internet of Things and Stereo Matching Algorithms

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), security and privacy of smart home systems based on IoT are more and more popular. As the key component of IoT, wireless communication and sensor technology are prerequisites for the security and confidentiality of smart home systems. The smart home systems integrate electronic information technology and computer control. By designing and installing various sensors in the home for collecting data, and then using the IoT platform for data transmission, the remote control of the home running state can be realized. The home security is guaranteed. This article designs IoT architecture of smart home, and then hardware and software are designed according to the system architecture. The hardware part is mainly analyzed from the image recognition module and the speech recognition module. In addition, a stereo matching algorithm for smart video surveillance is proposed to optimize the accuracy of the surveillance system. Finally, the simulation results prove that the designed smart home systems have a low cost and high accuracy. It not only optimizes the performance of smart home systems but also improves the safety factor.