Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A Survey on Anomalous Behavior Detection for Elderly Care Using Dense-Sensing Networks

Facing the gradual ageing society, elderly people living independently are in need of serious attention. In order to assist them to live in a safer environment, the increasing cost of nursing care and the shortage of health-care workers urges the demand of home-based assisted living in recent times. Therefore, home-based health-care has become an active research domain, particularly the abnormal activities detection involving information and communications technologies. This survey paper highlights this kind of technologies that exist for human anomalous behavior detection. It also reviews and discusses the current research trends, their outcomes and effects in elderly care. Our study is mainly focused on dense sensing network based activities and anomaly detection, which are robust to environment change, non-intrusive, user-friendly in the sense that do not require the occupant to wear any devices. From our study, we observe that employing sensor fusion techniques could significantly increases the efficiency of dense sensing network. In addition, sensor fusion models ensure a high level of robustness and effectiveness compared to the traditional methods.
TipText: Eyes-Free Text Entry on a Fingertip Keyboard

In this paper, we propose and investigate a new text entry technique using micro thumb-tip gestures. Our technique features a miniature QWERTY keyboard residing invisibly on the first segment of the user's index finger. Text entry can be carried out using the thumb-tip to tap the tip of the index finger. The keyboard layout was optimized for eyes-free input by utilizing a spatial model reflecting the users' natural spatial awareness of key locations on the index finger. We present our approach of designing and optimizing the keyboard layout through a series of user studies and computer simulated text entry tests over 1,146,484 possibilities in the design space. The outcome is a 2×3 grid with the letters highly confining to the alphabetic and spatial arrangement of QWERTY. Our user evaluation showed that participants achieved an average text entry speed of 11.9 WPM and were able to type as fast as 13.3 WPM towards the end of the experiment.
On the abandonment and survival of open source projects: An empirical investigation

Background: Evolution of open source projects frequently depends on a small number of core developers. The loss of such core developers might be detrimental for projects and even threaten their entire continuation. However, it is possible that new core developers assume the project maintenance and allow the project to survive. Aims: The objective of this paper is to provide empirical evidence on: 1) the frequency of project abandonment and survival, 2) the differences between abandoned and surviving projects, and 3) the motivation and difficulties faced when assuming an abandoned project. Method: We adopt a mixed-methods approach to investigate project abandonment and survival. We carefully select 1,932 popular GitHub projects and recover the abandoned and surviving projects, and conduct a survey with developers that have been instrumental in the survival of the projects. Results: We found that 315 projects (16%) were abandoned and 128 of these projects (41%) survived because of new core developers who assumed the project development. The survey indicates that (i) in most cases the new maintainers were aware of the project abandonment risks when they started to contribute; (ii) their own usage of the systems is the main motivation to contribute to such projects; (iii) human and social factors played a key role when making these contributions; and (iv) lack of time and the difficulty to obtain push access to the repositories are the main barriers faced by them. Conclusions: Project abandonment is a reality even in large open source projects and our work enables a better understanding of such risks, as well as highlights ways in avoiding them.
Virtually Trying on New Clothing with Arbitrary Poses

Thanks to the recent advance in the multimedia techniques, increasing research attention has been paid to the virtual try-on task, especially with the 2D image modeling. The traditional try-on task aims to align the target clothing item naturally to the given person's body and hence present a try-on look of the person. However, in practice, people may also be interested in their try-on looks with different poses. Therefore, in this work, we introduce a new try-on setting, which enables the changes of both the clothing item and the person's pose. Towards this end, we propose a pose-guided virtual try-on scheme based on the generative adversarial networks (GANs) with a bi-stage strategy. In particular, in the first stage, we propose a shape enhanced clothing deformation model for deforming the clothing item, where the user body shape is incorporated as the intermediate guidance. For the second stage, we present an attentive bidirectional GAN, which jointly models the attentive clothing-person alignment and bidirectional generation consistency. For evaluation, we create a large-scale dataset, FashionTryOn, comprising $28,714$ triplets with each consisting of a clothing item image and two model images in different poses. Extensive experiments on FashionTryOn validate the superiority of our model over the state-of-the-art methods.
SqueezeNAS: Fast Neural Architecture Search for Faster Semantic Segmentation

For real time applications utilizing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), it is critical that the models achieve high-accuracy on the target task and low-latency inference on the target computing platform. While Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been effectively used to develop low-latency networks for image classification, there has been relatively little effort to use NAS to optimize DNN architectures for other vision tasks. In this work, we present what we believe to be the first proxyless hardware-aware search targeted for dense semantic segmentation. With this approach, we advance the state-of-the-art accuracy for latency-optimized networks on the Cityscapes semantic segmentation dataset. Our latency-optimized small SqueezeNAS network achieves 68.02% validation class mIOU with less than 35 ms inference times on the NVIDIA Xavier. Our latency-optimized large SqueezeNAS network achieves 73.62% class mIOU with less than 100 ms inference times. We demonstrate that significant performance gains are possible by utilizing NAS to find networks optimized for both the specific task and inference hardware. We also present detailed analysis comparing our networks to recent state-of-the-art architectures. The SqueezeNAS models are available for download here: https://github.com/ashaw596/squeezenas.
Exploring Background-bias for Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos

Anomaly detection in surveillance videos, as a special case of video-based action recognition, is an important topic in multimedia community and public security. Currently, most of the state-of-the-art methods utilize deep learning to recognize the patterns of anomaly or action. However, whether deep neural networks really learn the essence of the anomaly or just remember the background is an important but often neglected problem. In this paper, we develop a series of experiments to validate the existence of background-bias phenomenon, which makes deep networks tend to learn the background information rather than the pattern of anomalies to recognize abnormal behavior. To solve it, we first re-annotate the largest anomaly detection dataset and design a new evaluation metric to measure whether the models really learn the essence of anomalies. Then, we propose an end-to-end trainable, anomaly-area guided framework, where we design a novel region loss to explicitly drive the network to learn where is anomalous region. Besides, given very deep networks and scarce training data for anomaly, our architecture is trained with a meta learning module to prevent severe overfitting. Extensive experiments on the benchmark show that our approach outperforms other methods on both the previous and our proposed evaluation metrics through reducing the influence of the background information.
RUNet: A Robust UNet Architecture for Image Super-Resolution

Single image super-resolution (SISR) is a challenging ill-posed problem which aims to restore or infer a high-resolution image from a low-resolution one. Powerful deep learning-based techniques have achieved state-of-the-art performance in SISR; however, they can underperform when handling images with non-stationary degradations, such as for the application of projector resolution enhancement. In this paper, a new UNet architecture that is able to learn the relationship between a set of degraded low-resolution images and their corresponding original high-resolution images is proposed. We propose employing a degradation model on training images in a non-stationary way, allowing the construction of a robust UNet (RUNet) for image super-resolution (SR). Experimental results show that the proposed RUNet improves the visual quality of the obtained super-resolution images while maintaining a low reconstruction error.
Binary Harris Hawks Optimizer for High-Dimensional, Low Sample Size Feature Selection

Feature selection is a preprocessing step that aims to eliminate the features that may negatively influence the performance of the machine learning techniques. The negative influence is due to the possibility of having many irrelevant and/or redundant features. In this chapter, a binary variant of recent Harris hawks optimizer (HHO) is proposed to boost the efficacy of wrapper-based feature selection techniques. HHO is a new fast and efficient swarm-based optimizer with various simple but effective exploratory and exploitative mechanisms (Levy flight, greedy selection, etc.) and a dynamic structure for solving continuous problems. However, it was originally designed for continuous search spaces. To deal with binary feature spaces, we propose a new binary HHO in this chapter. The binary HHO is validated based on special types of feature selection datasets. These hard datasets are high dimensional, which means that there is a huge number of features. Simultaneously, we should deal with a low number of samples. Various experiments and comparisons reveal the improved stability of HHO in dealing with this type of datasets.
SpecAE

Anomaly detection in attributed networks (instance-to-instance dependencies and interactions are available) has various applications such as monitoring suspicious accounts in social media and financial fraud in transaction networks. However, it remains a challenging task since the definition of anomaly becomes more complicated and topological structures are heterogeneous with nodal attributes. In this paper, we propose a spectral convolution and deconvolution based framework - SpecAE, to project the attributed network into a tailored space to detect global and community anomalies. SpecAE leverages Laplacian sharpening to amplify the distances between representations of anomalies and the ones of the majority. The learned representations along with reconstruction errors are combined with a density estimation model to perform the detection. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SpecAE.
High-Level Semantic Networks for Multi-Scale Object Detection

To better solve scale variance problem, deep multi-scale methods usually detect objects of different scales by different in-network layers. However, the semantic levels of features from different layers are usually inconsistent. In this paper, we propose a multi-branch and high-level semantic network by gradually splitting a base network into multiple different branches. As a result, the different branches have same depth and the output features of different branches have similarly high-level semantics. Due to the difference of receptive fields, the different branches are suitable to detect objects of different scales. Meanwhile, the multi-branch network does not introduce additional parameters by sharing the convolutional weights of different branches. To further improve detection performance, skip-layer connections are used to add context to the branch of relatively small receptive field, and dilated convolution is incorporated to enlarge the resolutions of output feature maps. When they are embedded into Faster RCNN architecture, the weighted scores of proposal generation network and proposal classification network are further proposed. Experiments on three pedestrian datasets (i.e., the KITTI dataset, the Caltech dataset, and the Citypersons dataset), one face dataset (i.e., the WIDER FACE dataset), and two general object datasets (i.e., the COCO benchmark and the PASCAL VOC dataset) demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of proposed method. On these datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Multi-Person Hierarchical 3D Pose Estimation in Natural Videos

Despite the increasing need of analyzing human poses on the street and in the wild, multi-person 3D pose estimation using monocular static or moving camera in real-world scenarios remains a challenge, either requiring large-scale training data or high computation complexity due to the high degrees of freedom in 3D human poses. We propose a novel scheme to effectively track and hierarchically estimate 3D human poses in natural videos in an efficient fashion. Without the need of using labelled 3D training data, we formulate torso estimation as a Perspective-N-Point (PNP) problem, and limb pose estimation as an optimization problem, and hierarchically structure the high dimensional poses to efficiently address the challenge. Experiments show good performance and high efficiency of multi-person 3D pose estimation on real-world videos, including street scenarios and various human daily activities from fixed and moving cameras, resulting in great new opportunities to understand and predict human behaviors.
RGBT Salient Object Detection: Benchmark and A Novel Cooperative Ranking Approach

Despite significant progress, image saliency detection still remains a challenging task in complex scenes and environments. Integrating multiple different but complementary cues, like RGB and Thermal infrared (RGBT), may be an effective way for boosting saliency detection performance. This work contributes a RGBT image dataset, which includes 821 spatially aligned RGBT image pairs and their ground truth annotations for saliency detection purpose. Moreover, 11 challenges are annotated on these image pairs for performing the challenge-sensitive analysis and 3 kinds of baseline methods are implemented to provide a comprehensive comparison platform. With this benchmark, we propose a novel approach based on a cooperative ranking algorithm for RGBT saliency detection. In particular, we introduce a weight for each modality to describe the reliability and a ℓ <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> -based cross-modal consistency in a unified ranking model, and design an efficient solver to iteratively optimize several subproblems with closed-form solutions. Extensive experiments against baseline methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on both our introduced dataset and a public dataset.
Detection of red and white blood cells from microscopic blood images using a region proposal approach

In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient method for detecting and quantifying red and white blood cells from microscopic blood images. Laboratory tests that use a cell counter or a flow cytometer can perform a complete blood count (CBC) rapidly. Nonetheless, a manual blood smear inspection is still needed, both to have a human check on the counter results and to monitor patients under therapy. Moreover, it allows for describing the cells’ appearance as well as any abnormalities. However, manual analysis is lengthy and repetitive, and its result can be subjective and error-prone. In contrast, by using image processing techniques, the proposed system is entirely automated. The main effort is devoted to both achieving high accuracy and finding a way to overcome the typical differences in the condition of blood smear images that computer-aided methods encounter. It is based on the Edge Boxes method, which is considered a state-of-art region proposal approach. By incorporating knowledge-based constraints into the detection process using Edge Boxes, we can find cell proposals rapidly and efficiently. We tested the proposed approach on the Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia Image Database (ALL-IDB), a well-known public dataset proposed for leukaemia detection, and the Malaria Parasite Image Database (MP-IDB), a recently proposed dataset for malaria detection. Experimental results were excellent in both cases, outperforming the state-of-the-art on ALL-IDB and creating a strong baseline on MP-IDB, demonstrating that the proposed method can work well on different datasets and different types of images.
A Decentralized and Trusted Edge Computing Platform for Internet of Things

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing becomes more and more prevalent currently. However, edge computing needs to deploy a large number of edge servers to reduce the communication latency, which will bring additional costs to the system. Although there exist some idle computing resources at the edge, the owners distrust each other and lack the incentives to contribute to the system. In this article, we propose a new edge computing platform decentralized and trusted platform for edge computing (DeTEC), which provides a unified interface to users, resolves the user's requests to the most appropriate edge server through domain name server, and returns the computational results to the IoT user. To build a trustworthy system, DeTEC integrates the blockchain technology with edge computing, such that the contributions of each participant could be accounted and rewarded. We formulate the task allocation problem, taking both node capacity and reward fairness into consideration, and solve it through a heuristic algorithm. Finally, to guarantee the trustworthiness of computational results, we utilize a police patrol model and try to optimize the system overall reward. We implement DeTEC based on an open source project and conduct comprehensive experiments to test its performance. The results show that our DeTEC system works well in the IoT scenario.
Employees’ behavioural intention to smartphone security: A gender-based, cross-national study

Despite the benefits of bring your own device (BYOD) programmes, they are considered one of the top security risks companies are facing. Furthermore, there is a gap in the literature in understanding gender differences in employees' smartphone security behavioural intention. This research analyses gender differences in smartphone security behavioural intention among employees in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the United States (US). The research develops a new model, the behavioural model of cybersecurity (BMS), based on a combination of the protection motivation theory (PMT), the general deterrence theory (GDT) and Hofstede's cultural dimensions. A questionnaire was distributed to employees in both countries. A total of 1156 useable responses were analysed using partial least squares-structural equation modelling. The findings show that gender differences exist, but neither male nor female employees in either country are aware of the risks associated with their use of smartphones, despite their awareness of the existence of their company's BYOD security policies. The research provides theoretical and practical contributions by developing a new model combining the PMT, GDT and Hofstede's cultural dimensions and suggests gender differences in employees' smartphone security behavioural intention in a cross-national context. It has several practical implications for practitioners and policymakers.
RGB and LiDAR fusion based 3D Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving

LiDAR has become a standard sensor for autonomous driving applications as they provide highly precise 3D point clouds. LiDAR is also robust for low-light scenarios at night-time or due to shadows where the performance of cameras is degraded. LiDAR perception is gradually becoming mature for algorithms including object detection and SLAM. However, semantic segmentation algorithm remains to be relatively less explored. Motivated by the fact that semantic segmentation is a mature algorithm on image data, we explore sensor fusion based 3D segmentation. Our main contribution is to convert the RGB image to a polar-grid mapping representation used for LiDAR and design early and mid-level fusion architectures. Additionally, we design a hybrid fusion architecture that combines both fusion algorithms. We evaluate our algorithm on KITTI dataset which provides segmentation annotation for cars, pedestrians and cyclists. We evaluate two state-of-the-art architectures namely SqueezeSeg and PointSeg and improve the mIoU score by 10% in both cases relative to the LiDAR only baseline.
SMIT: Stochastic Multi-Label Image-to-Image Translation

Cross-domain mapping has been a very active topic in recent years. Given one image, its main purpose is to translate it to the desired target domain, or multiple domains in the case of multiple labels. This problem is highly challenging due to three main reasons: (i) unpaired datasets, (ii) multiple attributes, and (iii) the multimodality (e.g. style) associated with the translation. Most of the existing state-of-the-art has focused only on two reasons i.e., either on (i) and (ii) or (i) and (iii). In this work, we propose a joint framework (i, ii, iii) of diversity and multi-mapping image-to-image translations, using a single generator to conditionally produce countless and unique fake images that hold the underlying characteristics of the source image. Our system does not use style regularization, instead, it uses an embedding representation that we call domain embedding for both domain and style. Extensive experiments over different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in comparison with the state-of-the-art in both multi-label and multimodal problems. Additionally, our method is able to generalize under different scenarios: continuous style interpolation, continuous label interpolation, and fine-grained mapping.
Polynomial Learning Rate Policy with Warm Restart for Deep Neural Network

Learning rate (LR) is one of the most important hyper-parameters in any deep neural network (DNN) optimization process. It controls the speed of network convergence to the point of global minima by navigation through non-convex loss surface. The performance of a DNN is affected by presence of local minima, saddle points, etc. in the loss surface. Decaying the learning rate by a factor at fixed number of epochs or exponentially is the conventional way of varying the LR. Recently, two new approaches for setting learning rate have been introduced namely cyclical learning rate and stochastic gradient descent with warm restarts. In both of these approaches, the learning rate value is varied in a cyclic pattern between two boundary values. This paper introduces another warm restart technique which is inspired by these two approaches and it uses “poly” LR policy. The proposed technique is called as polynomial learning rate with warm restart and it requires only a single warm restart. The proposed LR policy helps in faster convergence of the DNN and it has slightly higher classification accuracy. The performance of the proposed LR policy is demonstrated on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and tiny ImageNet dataset with CNN, ResNets and Wide Residual Networks (WRN) architectures.