Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Hear "No Evil", See "Kenansville": Efficient and Transferable Black-Box Attacks on Speech Recognition and Voice Identification Systems

Automatic speech recognition and voice identification systems are being deployed in a wide array of applications, from providing control mechanisms to devices lacking traditional interfaces, to the automatic transcription of conversations and authentication of users. Many of these applications have significant security and privacy considerations. We develop attacks that force mistranscription and misidentification in state of the art systems, with minimal impact on human comprehension. Processing pipelines for modern systems are comprised of signal preprocessing and feature extraction steps, whose output is fed to a machine-learned model. Prior work has focused on the models, using white-box knowledge to tailor model-specific attacks. We focus on the pipeline stages before the models, which (unlike the models) are quite similar across systems. As such, our attacks are black-box, transferable, can be tuned to require zero queries to the target, and demonstrably achieve mistranscription and misidentification rates as high as 100% by modifying only a few frames of audio. We perform a study via Amazon Mechanical Turk demonstrating that there is no statistically significant difference between human perception of regular and perturbed audio. Our findings suggest that models may learn aspects of speech that are generally not perceived by human subjects, but that are crucial for model accuracy.
Applications of Differential Privacy in Social Network Analysis: A Survey

Differential privacy provides strong privacy preservation guarantee in information sharing. As social network analysis has been enjoying many applications, it opens a new arena for applications of differential privacy. This article presents a comprehensive survey connecting the basic principles of differential privacy and applications in social network analysis. We concisely review the foundations of differential privacy and the major variants. Then, we discuss how differential privacy is applied to social network analysis, including privacy attacks in social networks, models of differential privacy in social network analysis, and a series of popular tasks, such as analyzing degree distribution, counting subgraphs and assigning weights to edges. We also discuss a series of challenges for future work.
Reversible data hiding in encrypted images based on pixel prediction and multi-MSB planes rearrangement

Great concern of reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) has arisen due to the development of cloud computing and privacy protection. RDHEI is an effective technology that can embed additional data after image encryption, extract additional data error-free and reconstruct original images losslessly. In this paper, a high-capacity and fully reversible RDHEI method is proposed, which is based on pixel prediction and multi-MSB (most significant bit) planes rearrangement. First, the median edge detector (MED) predictor is used to calculate the predicted value. Next, unlike previous methods, in the proposed method, signs of prediction errors (PEs) are represented by one bit plane and absolute values of PEs are represented by other bit planes. Then, we divide bit planes into uniform blocks and non-uniform blocks, and rearrange these blocks. Finally, according to different pixel prediction schemes, different sizes of additional data are embedded adaptively. The experimental results prove that our method has a higher embedding capacity compared with state-of-the-art RDHEI methods.
Group multi-scale attention pyramid network for traffic sign detection

Traffic sign detection has made great progress with the rise of deep learning in recent years. As a result of the complex and changeable traffic environment, detecting small traffic signs in a real-world scene is still a challenging problem. In this paper, a novel group multi-scale attention pyramid network is proposed to address the problem. Specifically, to aggregate the feature at different scales and suppress the messy information in the background, an effective multi-scale attention module is proposed. Furthermore, a feature fusion module, named adaptive pyramid convolution, is further designed, which can drive the network to learn the optimal feature fusion pattern and construct an informative feature pyramid for detecting traffic signs in different sizes. Extensive experimental results on the public traffic sign detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method when compared with several state-of-the-art methods.
Faster homomorphic comparison operations for BGV and BFV

Abstract Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows to compute any function on encrypted values. However, in practice, there is no universal FHE scheme that is effi-cient in all possible use cases. In this work, we show that FHE schemes suitable for arithmetic circuits (e.g. BGV or BFV) have a similar performance as FHE schemes for non-arithmetic circuits (TFHE) in basic comparison tasks such as less-than, maximum and minimum operations. Our implementation of the less-than function in the HElib library is up to 3 times faster than the prior work based on BGV/BFV. It allows to compare a pair of 64-bit integers in 11 milliseconds, sort 64 32-bit integers in 19 seconds and find the minimum of 64 32-bit integers in 9.5 seconds on an average laptop without multi-threading.
A transfer learning with structured filter pruning approach for improved breast cancer classification on point-of-care devices

A significant progress has been made in automated medical diagnosis with the advent of deep learning methods in recent years. However, deploying a deep learning model for mobile and small-scale, low-cost devices is a major bottleneck. Further, breast cancer is more prevalent currently, and ductal carcinoma being its most common type. Although many machine/deep learning methods have already been investigated, still, there is a need for further improvement. This paper proposes a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based transfer learning approach complemented with structured filter pruning for histopathological image classification, and to bring down the run-time resource requirement of the trained deep learning models. In the proposed method, first, the less important filters are pruned from the convolutional layers and then the pruned models are trained on the histopathological image dataset. We performed extensive experiments using three popular pre-trained CNNs, VGG19, ResNet34, and ResNet50. With VGG19 pruned model, we achieved an accuracy of 91.25% outperforming earlier methods on the same dataset and architecture while reducing 63.46% FLOPs. Whereas, with the ResNet34 pruned model, the accuracy increases to 91.80% with 40.63% fewer FLOPs. Moreover, with the ResNet50 model, we achieved an accuracy of 92.07% with 30.97% less FLOPs. The experimental results reveal that the pre-trained model's performance complemented with filter pruning exceeds original pre-trained models. Another important outcome of the research is that the pruned model with reduced resource requirements can be deployed in point-of-care devices for automated diagnosis applications with ease.
Unidentified Video Objects: A Benchmark for Dense, Open-World Segmentation

Current state-of-the-art object detection and segmentation methods work well under the closed-world assumption. This closed-world setting assumes that the list of object categories is available during training and deployment. However, many real-world applications require detecting or segmenting novel objects, i.e., object categories never seen during training. In this paper, we present, UVO (Unidentified Video Objects), a new benchmark for openworld class-agnostic object segmentation in videos. Besides shifting the focus to the open-world setup, UVO is significantly larger, providing approximately 6 times more videos compared with DAVIS, and 7 times more mask (instance) annotations per video compared with YouTube-VO(I)S. UVO is also more challenging as it includes many videos with crowded scenes and complex background motions. We also demonstrated that UVO can be used for other applications, such as object tracking and super-voxel segmentation. We believe that UVO is a versatile testbed for researchers to develop novel approaches for open-world class-agnostic object segmentation, and inspires new research directions towards a more comprehensive video understanding beyond classification and detection.
Rethinking the ST-GCNs for 3D skeleton-based human action recognition

The skeletal data has been an alternative for the human action recognition task as it provides more compact and distinct information compared to the traditional RGB input. However, unlike the RGB input, the skeleton data lies in a non-Euclidean space that traditional deep learning methods are not able to use their fullest potential. Fortunately, with the emerging trend of Geometric deep learning, the spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (ST-GCN) has been proposed to deal with the action recognition problem from skeleton data. ST-GCN and its variants fit well with skeleton-based action recognition and are becoming the mainstream frameworks for this task. However, the efficiency and the performance of the task are hindered by either fixing the skeleton joint correlations or providing a computational expensive strategy to construct a dynamic topology for the skeleton. We argue that many of these operations are either unnecessary or even harmful for the task. By theoretically and experimentally analysing the state-of-the-art ST-GCNs, we provide a simple but efficient strategy to capture the global graph correlations and thus efficiently model the representation of the input graph sequences. Moreover, the global graph strategy also reduces the graph sequence into the Euclidean space, thus a multi-scale temporal filter is introduced to efficiently capture the dynamic information. With the method, we are not only able to better extract the graph correlations with much fewer parameters (only 12.6% of the current best), but we also achieve a superior performance. Extensive experiments on current largest 3D datasets, NTU-RGB+D and NTU-RGB+D 120, demonstrate the ability of our network to perform efficient and lightweight priority on this task.
On Blockchain and IoT Integration Platforms: Current Implementation Challenges and Future Perspectives

Digitization and automation have engulfed every scope and sphere of life. Internet of Things (IoT) has been the main enabler of the revolution. There still exist challenges in IoT that need to be addressed such as the limited address space for the increasing number of devices when using IPv4 and IPv6 as well as key security issues such as vulnerable access control mechanisms. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that has immense benefits such as enhanced security and traceability. Thus, blockchain can serve as a good foundation for applications based on transaction and interactions. IoT implementations and applications are by definition distributed. This means blockchain can help to solve most of the security vulnerabilities and traceability concerns of IoTs by using blockchain as a ledger that can keep track of how devices interact, in which state they are and how they transact with other IoT devices. IoT applications have been mainly implemented with technologies such as cloud and fog computing, and AI to help address some of its key challenges. The key implementation challenges and technical choices to consider in making a successful blockchain IoT (BIoT) project are clearly outlined in this paper. The security and privacy aspect of BIoT applications are also analyzed, and several relevant solutions to improve the scalability and throughput of such applications are proposed. The paper also reviews integration schemes and monitoring frameworks for BIoT applications. A hybrid blockchain IoT integration architecture that makes use of containerization is proposed.
Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition Based on Signals From Specialized Data Glove and Deep Learning Algorithms

Gesture recognition as a natural, convenient and recognizable way has been received more and more attention on human-machine interaction (HMI) recently. However, visual-based gesture recognition methods are often restricted by environments and classical wearable device-based strategies are suffered from relatively low accuracy or the complicated structures. In this study, we first design a low-cost and efficient data glove with simple hardware structure to capture finger movement and bending simultaneously. Second, a novel dynamic hand gesture recognition algorithm (DGDL-GR) is proposed to recognize human dynamic sign language, in which a fusion model of convolutional neural network (fCNN) and generic temporal convolutional network (TCN) is fully utilized. The fCNN (fusion of 1-D CNN and 2-D CNN) is proposed to extract time-domain features of finger resistance movement and spatial domain features of finger resistance bending simultaneously. Moreover, due to the superiorities of TCN in sequence modeling task, this work proposes a novel hand gesture recognition method based on the TCN, which includes causal convolution, dilation convolution, and a residual network with appropriate layers. Both long- and short-time dependencies of the hand gesture features are deeply mined and classified in the end. Results of extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed DGDL-GR algorithm outperforms many state-of-the-art algorithms on the measure of accuracy, F1 score, precision score, and recall score with the real-world dataset. Moreover, the number of residual blocks and some key hyperparameters of the proposed DGDL-GR algorithm has been studied thoroughly in this work.
A Side-Channel-Resistant Implementation of SABER

The candidates for the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization have undergone extensive studies on efficiency and theoretical security, but research on their side-channel security is largely lacking. This remains a considerable obstacle for their real-world deployment, where side-channel security can be a critical requirement. This work describes a side-channel-resistant instance of Saber, one of the lattice-based candidates, using masking as a countermeasure. Saber proves to be very efficient to masking due to two specific design choices: power-of-two moduli and limited noise sampling of learning with rounding. A major challenge in masking lattice-based cryptosystems is the integration of bit-wise operations with arithmetic masking, requiring algorithms to securely convert between masked representations. The described design includes a novel primitive for masked logical shifting on arithmetic shares and adapts an existing masked binomial sampler for Saber. An implementation is provided for an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller, and its side-channel resistance is experimentally demonstrated. The masked implementation features a 2.5x overhead factor, significantly lower than the 5.7x previously reported for a masked variant of NewHope. Masked key decapsulation requires less than 3,000,000 cycles on the Cortex-M4 and consumes less than 12kB of dynamic memory, making it suitable for deployment in embedded platforms.
No-Reference Quality Assessment for 360-Degree Images by Analysis of Multifrequency Information and Local-Global Naturalness

360-degree/omnidirectional images (OIs) have received remarkable attention due to the increasing applications of virtual reality (VR). Compared to conventional 2D images, OIs can provide more immersive experiences to consumers, benefiting from the higher resolution and plentiful field of views (FoVs). Moreover, observing OIs is usually in a head-mounted display (HMD) without references. Therefore, an efficient blind quality assessment method, which is specifically designed for 360-degree images, is urgently desired. In this paper, motivated by the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) and the viewing process of VR visual content, we propose a novel and effective no-reference omnidirectional image quality assessment (NR OIQA) algorithm by MultiFrequency Information and Local-Global Naturalness (MFILGN). Specifically, inspired by the frequency-dependent property of the visual cortex, we first decompose the projected equirectangular projection (ERP) maps into wavelet subbands by using discrete Haar wavelet transform (DHWT). Then, the entropy intensities of low-frequency and high-frequency subbands are exploited to measure the multifrequency information of OIs. In addition to considering the global naturalness of ERP maps, owing to the browsed FoVs, we extract the natural scene statistics (NSS) features from each viewport image as the measure of local naturalness. With the proposed multifrequency information measurement and local-global naturalness measurement, we utilize support vector regression (SVR) as the final image quality regressor to train the quality evaluation model from visual quality-related features to human ratings. To our knowledge, the proposed model is the first no-reference quality assessment method for 360-degree images that combines multifrequency information and image naturalness. Experimental results on two publicly available OIQA databases demonstrate that our proposed MFILGN outperforms state-of-the-art full-reference (FR) and NR approaches.
IPN Hand: A Video Dataset and Benchmark for Real-Time Continuous Hand Gesture Recognition

Continuous hand gesture recognition (HGR) is an essential part of human-computer interaction with a wide range of applications in the automotive sector, consumer electronics, home automation, and others. In recent years, accurate and efficient deep learning models have been proposed for HGR. However, in the research community, the current publicly available datasets lack real-world elements needed to build responsive and efficient HGR systems. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark dataset named IPN Hand with sufficient size, variety, and real-world elements able to train and evaluate deep neural networks. This dataset contains more than 4,000 gesture samples and 800,000 RGB frames from 50 distinct subjects. We design 13 different static and dynamic gestures focused on interaction with touchless screens. We especially consider the scenario when continuous gestures are performed without transition states, and when subjects perform natural movements with their hands as non-gesture actions. Gestures were collected from about 30 diverse scenes, with real-world variation in background and illumination. With our dataset, the performance of three 3D-CNN models is evaluated on the tasks of isolated and continuous realtime HGR. Furthermore, we analyze the possibility of increasing the recognition accuracy by adding multiple modalities derived from RGB frames, i.e., optical flow and semantic segmentation, while keeping the real-time performance of the 3D-CNN model. Our empirical study also provides a comparison with the publicly available nvGesture (NVIDIA) dataset. The experimental results show that the state-of-the-art ResNext-101 model decreases about 30% accuracy when using our real-world dataset, demonstrating that the IPN Hand dataset can be used as a benchmark, and may help the community to step forward in the continuous HGR. Our dataset and pre-trained models used in the evaluation are publicly available at github.com/GibranBenitez/IPN-hand.
A comprehensive scoping review of Bayesian networks in healthcare: Past, present and future

No comprehensive review of Bayesian networks (BNs) in healthcare has been published in the past, making it difficult to organize the research contributions in the present and identify challenges and neglected areas that need to be addressed in the future. This unique and novel scoping review of BNs in healthcare provides an analytical framework for comprehensively characterizing the domain and its current state. A literature search of health and health informatics literature databases using relevant keywords found 3810 articles that were reduced to 123. This was after screening out those presenting Bayesian statistics, meta-analysis or neural networks, as opposed to BNs and those describing the predictive performance of multiple machine learning algorithms, of which BNs were simply one type. Using the novel analytical framework, we show that: (1) BNs in healthcare are not used to their full potential; (2) a generic BN development process is lacking; (3) limitations exist in the way BNs in healthcare are presented in the literature, which impacts understanding, consensus towards systematic methodologies, practice and adoption; and (4) a gap exists between having an accurate BN and a useful BN that impacts clinical practice. This review highlights several neglected issues, such as restricted aims of BNs, ad hoc BN development methods, and the lack of BN adoption in practice and reveals to researchers and clinicians the need to address these problems. To map the way forward, the paper proposes future research directions and makes recommendations regarding BN development methods and adoption in practice.
Multitarget Tracking Using Siamese Neural Networks

In this article, we detect and track visual objects by using Siamese network or twin neural network. The Siamese network is constructed to classify moving objects based on the associations of object detection network and object tracking network, which are thought of as the two branches of the twin neural network. The proposed tracking method was designed for single-target tracking, which implements multitarget tracking by using deep neural networks and object detection. The contributions of this article are stated as follows. First, we implement the proposed method for visual object tracking based on multiclass classification using deep neural networks. Then, we attain multitarget tracking by combining the object detection network and the single-target tracking network. Next, we uplift the tracking performance by fusing the outcomes of the object detection network and object tracking network. Finally, we speculate on the object occlusion problem based on IoU and similarity score, which effectively diminish the influence of this issue in multitarget tracking.