Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Using synthetic data for person tracking under adverse weather conditions

Robust visual tracking plays a vital role in many areas such as autonomous cars, surveillance and robotics. Recent trackers were shown to achieve adequate results under normal tracking scenarios with clear weather conditions, standard camera setups and lighting conditions. Yet, the performance of these trackers, whether they are correlation filter-based or learning-based, degrade under adverse weather conditions. The lack of videos with such weather conditions, in the available visual object tracking datasets, is the prime issue behind the low performance of the learning-based tracking algorithms. In this work, we provide a new person tracking dataset of real-world sequences (PTAW172Real) captured under foggy, rainy and snowy weather conditions to assess the performance of the current trackers. We also introduce a novel person tracking dataset of synthetic sequences (PTAW217Synth) procedurally generated by our NOVA framework spanning the same weather conditions in varying severity to mitigate the problem of data scarcity. Our experimental results demonstrate that the performances of the state-of-the-art deep trackers under adverse weather conditions can be boosted when the available real training sequences are complemented with our synthetically generated dataset during training.
Online Local Path Planning on the Campus Environment for Autonomous Driving Considering Road Constraints and Multiple Obstacles

In this paper, an urban-based path planning algorithm that considered multiple obstacles and road constraints in a university campus environment with an autonomous micro electric vehicle (micro-EV) is studied. Typical path planning algorithms, such as A*, particle swarm optimization (PSO), and rapidly exploring random tree* (RRT*), take a single arrival point, resulting in a lane departure situation on the high curved roads. Further, these could not consider urban-constraints to set collision-free obstacles. These problems cause dangerous obstacle collisions. Additionally, for drive stability, real-time operation should be guaranteed. Therefore, an urban-based online path planning algorithm, which is robust in terms of a curved-path with multiple obstacles, is proposed. The algorithm is constructed using two methods, A* and an artificial potential field (APF). To validate and evaluate the performance in a campus environment, autonomous driving systems, such as vehicle localization, object recognition, vehicle control, are implemented in the micro-EV. Moreover, to confirm the algorithm stability in the complex campus environment, hazard scenarios that complex obstacles can cause are constructed. These are implemented in the form of a delivery service using an autonomous driving simulator, which mimics the Chungbuk National University (CBNU) campus.
BlockchainAs a Service (BaaS) Framework for Government Funded Projects e-Tendering Process Administration and Quality Assurance using Smart Contracts

Government funded projects require the use of bidding via tenders, this process is tedious and leads to corruption as there is very less transparency. This paper proposes a solution using Blockchain as a Service for easy and transparent administration of public projects which allows various stakeholders to scrutinize the entire process.
An Efficient K-Means Clustering Algorithm for Analysing COVID-19

COVID-19 hits the world like a storm by arising pandemic situations for most of the countries around the world. The whole world is trying to overcome this pandemic situation. A better health care quality may help a country to tackle the pandemic. Making clusters of countries with similar types of health care quality provides an insight into the quality of health care in different countries. In the area of machine learning and data science, the K-means clustering algorithm is typically used to create clusters based on similarity. In this paper, we propose an efficient K-means clustering method that determines the initial centroids of the clusters efficiently. Based on this proposed method, we have determined health care quality clusters of countries utilizing the COVID-19 datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed method reduces the number of iterations and execution time to analyze COVID-19 while comparing with the traditional k-means clustering algorithm.
Video object detection with a convolutional regression tracker

Video object detection is a fundamental research task for scene understanding. Compared with object detection in images, object detection in videos has been less researched due to shortage of labelled video datasets. As frames in a video clip are highly correlated, a larger quantity of video labels are needed to have good data variation, which are not always available as the labels are much more expensive to attain. Regarding the above-mentioned problem, it is easy to train an image object detector, but not always possible to train a video object detector if there are insufficient video labels for certain classes. In order to deal with this problem and improve the performance of an image object detector for the classes without video labels, we propose to augment a well-trained image object detector with an efficient and effective class-agnostic convolutional regression tracker for the video object detection task. The tracker learns to track objects by reusing the features from the image object detector, which is a light-weighted increment to the detector, with only a slight speed drop for the video object detection task. The performance of our model is evaluated on the large-scale ImageNet VID dataset. Our strategy improves the mean average precision (mAP) score for the image object detector by around 5% and around 3% for the image object detector plus Seq-NMS post-processing.
Unsupervised domain-adaptive scene-specific pedestrian detection for static video surveillance

Objects from one category may be drawn from different distributions due to diverse illuminations, backgrounds, and camera viewpoints. Traditional object detection methods generally perform poorly due to the domain shift. To address this problem, we propose to train a domain-adaptive scene-specific pedestrian detector in an unsupervised manner. A generic detector is transferred to different target domains from one labeled source domain dataset without human-annotated target samples. Specifically, we first extend the generic detector to a dual-boundary classifier and collect hard samples as unlabeled target samples according to the detection confidence. Then, we propose a cycle semantic transfer network to align the instance-level and class-level distributions between the source domain and target domain and automatically label the hard samples. The initial generic detector is then re-trained by these labeled hard samples and specialized to a target scene. This process can be conveniently extended to different surveillance scenarios and generate specific detectors under various static camera viewpoints. Moreover, to reduce the impact of mislabeled hard samples on the generic detector, an online gradual optimization algorithm is proposed to iteratively update the generic model, thereby obtaining an optimized process that is insensitive to individual mislabeled target samples. Extensive experiments show that even if the target domain is not manually annotated, the proposed self-learning method demonstrates the effectiveness of pedestrian detection in various domain shift scenarios, and it outperforms existing scene-specific pedestrian detection methods and some classic supervised methods.
Inner Eye Canthus Localization for Human Body Temperature Screening

In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for localizing the inner eye canthus in thermal face images. We first coarsely detect 5 facial keypoints corresponding to the center of the eyes, the nosetip and the ears. Then we compute a sparse 2D-3D points correspondence using a 3D Morphable Face Model (3DMM). This correspondence is used to project the entire 3D face onto the image, and subsequently locate the inner eye canthus. Detecting this location allows to obtain the most precise body temperature measurement for a person using a thermal camera. We evaluated the approach on a thermal face dataset provided with manually annotated landmarks. However, such manual annotations are normally conceived to identify facial parts such as eyes, nose and mouth, and are not specifically tailored for localizing the eye canthus region. As additional contribution, we enrich the original dataset by using the annotated landmarks to deform and project the 3DMM onto the images. Then, by manually selecting a small region corresponding to the eye canthus, we enrich the dataset with additional annotations. By using the manual landmarks, we ensure the correctness of the 3DMM projection, which can be used as ground-truth for future evaluations. Moreover, we supply the dataset with the 3D head poses and per-point visibility masks for detecting self-occlusions. The data is publicly available at https://www.micc.unifi.it/resources/datasets/thermal-face/.
Proposed End-to-End Automated E-Voting Through Blockchain Technology to Increase Voter’s Turnout

Indian voting process is always being an important and complex task for the government of India. Each and every election time in country, government wants higher percentage of voting by its countrymen. One of the reason for the less voting in country is due to physical unavailability of the voter at voting location. Government makes every possible arrangement to each and every individual to be participate in voting but for this process, voter must be physically present at the location of voting which is not being possible for every voter. Many countries implemented automated e-voting system in some sense through various available technologies. In such automated voting environment, there are two important aspects, government wants to ensure that voter is authenticated properly via the system and voter wants this system trustworthy. For a government prospective, it becomes very necessary that government implements its automated voting system highly secure, accurate, and trustworthy. Only by assuring such parameters about the system, government can win the trust of voter. In this research paper, an end-to-end automated voting system is proposed using cryptography and blockchain technology. With the help of public–private key concept in cryptography, all communication are encrypted so that communication channel keeps flowing massages securely in network and using blockchain technology, flow of transactions becomes temper proof and secure.
Designing Information Security Risk Management on Bali Regional Police Command Center Based on ISO 27005

The application of information technology in government agencies is in line with Indonesian Presidential Regulation 95/2018 concerning Electronic-Based Government Systems (EBGS). Information in the digital form generated from the application of EBGS is a precious asset that must be protected from risk. This makes an organization need information security risk management (ISRM) to control the risk. This study aims to design ISRM in a government agency as a non-profit organization, especially in a Police Command Center. The design is carried out by integrating two standards to manage information security risks. ISO 27005: 2018, which can be applied to government organizations and non-profit organizations, is used as a base of information security management, and NIST SP 800-30 revision 1 standard is used as a method in conducting information risk assessments. From this research, an information security risk management's design is produced, and the results of risk identification and recommendations for handling it. ISO 27002 is used as reference for control recommendation. The validation results concluded that the ISRM design results equipped with policy for the Indonesian national Police Command Center have been able to meet organizational needs in identifying and managing risks in carrying out operational tasks.
SM+: Refined Scale Match for Tiny Person Detection

Detecting tiny objects (e.g., less than 20 × 20 pixels) in large-scale images is an important yet open problem. Modern CNN-based detectors are challenged by the scale mismatch between the dataset for network pre-training and the target dataset for detector training. In this paper, we investigate the scale alignment between pre-training and target datasets, and propose a new refined Scale Match method (termed SM+) for tiny person detection. SM+ improves the scale match from image level to instance level, and effectively promotes the similarity between pre-training and target dataset. Moreover, considering SM+ possibly destroys the image structure, a new probabilistic structure inpainting (PSI) method is proposed for the background processing. Experiments conducted across various detectors show that SM+ noticeably improves the performance on TinyPerson, and outperforms the state-of-the-art detectors with a significant margin.
A Double Siamese Framework for Differential Morphing Attack Detection

Face morphing and related morphing attacks have emerged as a serious security threat for automatic face recognition systems and a challenging research field. Therefore, the availability of effective and reliable morphing attack detectors is strongly needed. In this paper, we proposed a framework based on a double Siamese architecture to tackle the morphing attack detection task in the differential scenario, in which two images, a trusted live acquired image and a probe image (morphed or bona fide) are given as the input for the system. In particular, the presented framework aimed to merge the information computed by two different modules to predict the final score. The first one was designed to extract information about the identity of the input faces, while the second module was focused on the detection of artifacts related to the morphing process. Experimental results were obtained through several and rigorous cross-dataset tests, exploiting three well-known datasets, namely PMDB, MorphDB, and AMSL, containing automatic and manually refined facial morphed images, showing that the proposed framework was able to achieve satisfying results.
SapAugment: Learning A Sample Adaptive Policy for Data Augmentation

Data augmentation methods usually apply the same augmentation (or a mix of them) to all the training samples. For example, to perturb data with noise, the noise is sampled from a Normal distribution with a fixed standard deviation, for all samples. We hypothesize that a hard sample with high training loss already provides strong training signal to update the model parameters and should be perturbed with mild or no augmentation. Perturbing a hard sample with a strong augmentation may also make it too hard to learn from. Furthermore, a sample with low training loss should be perturbed by a stronger augmentation to provide more robustness to a variety of conditions. To formalize these intuitions, we propose a novel method to learn a Sample-Adaptive Policy for Augmentation – SapAugment. Our policy adapts the augmentation parameters based on the training loss of the data samples. In the example of Gaussian noise, a hard sample will be perturbed with a low variance noise and an easy sample with a high variance noise. Furthermore, the proposed method combines multiple augmentation methods into a methodical policy learning framework and obviates hand-crafting augmentation parameters by trial-and-error. We apply our method on an automatic speech recognition (ASR) task, and combine existing and novel augmentations using the proposed framework. We show substantial improvement, up to 21% relative reduction in word error rate on LibriSpeech dataset, over the state-of-the-art speech augmentation method.
Jitter-based Adaptive True Random Number Generation for FPGAs in the Cloud

In this paper we present and evaluate a true random number generator (TRNG) design that is compatible with the restrictions imposed by cloud-based FPGA providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 F1. Because cloud FPGA providers disallow the ring oscillator circuits that conventionally generate TRNG entropy, our design is oscillator-free and uses clock jitter as its entropy source. The clock jitter is harvested with a time-to-digital converter (TDC) and a controllable delay line that is continuously tuned to compensate for process, voltage, and temperature variations. After describing the design, we present and validate a stochastic model that conservatively quantifies its worst-case entropy. We deploy and model the design in the cloud on 60 EC2 F1 FPGA instances to ensure sufficient randomness is captured. TRNG entropy is further validated using NIST test suites, and experiments are performed to understand how the TRNG responds to on-die power attacks that disturb the FPGA supply voltage in the vicinity of the TRNG.
Investigating Document Layout and Placement Strategies for Collaborative Sensemaking in Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) has the potential to revolutionize our workspaces, since it considerably extends the limits of current displays while keeping users aware of their collaborators and surroundings. Collective activities like brainstorming and sensemaking often use space for arranging documents and information and thus will likely benefit from AR-enhanced offices. Until now, there has been very little research on how the physical surroundings might affect virtual content placement for collaborative sensemaking. We therefore conducted an initial study with eight participants in which we compared two different room settings for collaborative image categorization regarding content placement, spatiality, and layout. We found that participants tend to utilize the room's vertical surfaces as well as the room's furniture, particularly through edges and gaps, for placement and organization. We also identified three different spatial layout patterns (panoramic-strip, semi-cylindrical layout, furniture-based distribution) and observed the usage of temporary storage spaces specifically for collaboration.
Robust pedestrian detection in thermal imagery using synthesized images

In this paper we propose a method for improving pedestrian detection in the thermal domain using two stages: first, a generative data augmentation approach is used, then a domain adaptation method using generated data adapts an RGB pedestrian detector. Our model, based on the Least-Squares Generative Adversarial Network, is trained to synthesize realistic thermal versions of input RGB images which are then used to augment the limited amount of labeled thermal pedestrian images available for training. We apply our generative data augmentation strategy in order to adapt a pretrained YOLOv3 pedestrian detector to detection in the thermal-only domain. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach: using less than 50% of available real thermal training data, and relying on synthesized data generated by our model in the domain adaptation phase, our detector achieves state-of-the-art results on the KAIST Multispectral Pedestrian Detection Benchmark; even if more real thermal data is available adding GAN generated images to the training data results in improved performance, thus showing that these images act as an effective form of data augmentation. To the best of our knowledge, our detector achieves the best single-modality detection results on KAIST with respect to the state-of-the-art.
Wavelet Attention Embedding Networks for Video Super-Resolution

Recently, Video super-resolution (VSR) has become more crucial as the resolution of display has been grown. The majority of deep learning-based VSR methods combine the convolutional neural networks (CNN) with motion compensation or alignment module to estimate a high-resolution (HR) frame from low-resolution (LR) frames. However, most of the previous methods deal with the spatial features equally and may result in the misaligned temporal features by the pixel-based motion compensation and alignment module. It can lead to the damaging effect on the accuracy of the estimated HR feature. In this paper, we propose a wavelet attention embedding network (WAEN), including wavelet embedding network (WENet) and attention embedding network (AENet), to fully exploit the spatio-temporal informative features. The WENet is operated as a spatial feature extractor of individual low and high-frequency information based on 2-D Haar discrete wavelet transform. The meaningful temporal feature is extracted in the AENet through utilizing the weighted attention map between frames. Experimental results verify that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Automatic Detection of Five API Documentation Smells: Practitioners’ Perspectives

The learning and usage of an API is supported by official documentation. Like source code, API documentation is itself a software product. Several research results show that bad design in API documentation can make the reuse of API features difficult. Indeed, similar to code smells or code anti-patterns, poorly designed API documentation can also exhibit `smells'. Such documentation smells can be described as bad documentation styles that do not necessarily produce an incorrect documentation but nevertheless make the documentation difficult to properly understand and to use. Recent research on API documentation has focused on finding content inaccuracies in API documentation and to complement API documentation with external resources (e.g., crowd-shared code examples). We are aware of no research that focused on the automatic detection of API documentation smells. This paper makes two contributions. First, we produce a catalog of five API documentation smells by consulting literature on API documentation presentation problems. We create a benchmark dataset of 1,000 API documentation units by exhaustively and manually validating the presence of the five smells in Java official API reference and instruction documentation. Second, we conduct a survey of 21 professional software developers to validate the catalog. The developers agreed that they frequently encounter all five smells in API official documentation and 95.2% of them reported that the presence of the documentation smells negatively affects their productivity. The participants wished for tool support to automatically detect and fix the smells in API official documentation. We develop a suite of rule-based, deep and shallow machine learning classifiers to automatically detect the smells. The best performing classifier BERT, a deep learning model, achieves F1-scores of 0.75 - 0.97.
Streaming VR Games to the Broad Audience: A Comparison of the First-Person and Third-Person Perspectives

The spectatorship experience for virtual reality (VR) games differs strongly from its non-VR precursor. When watching non-VR games on platforms such as Twitch, spectators just see what the player sees, as the physical interaction is mostly unimportant for the overall impression. In VR, the immersive full-body interaction is a crucial part of the player experience. Hence, content creators, such as streamers, often rely on green screens or similar solutions to offer a mixed-reality third-person view to disclose their full-body actions. Our work compares the most popular realizations of the first-person and the third-person perspective in an online survey (N = 217) with three different VR games. Contrary to the current trend to stream in third-person, our key result is that most viewers prefer the first-person version, which they attribute mostly to the better focus on in-game actions and higher involvement. Based on the study insights, we provide design recommendations for both perspectives.