Patent Publication Number: US-2022237884-A1

Title: Keypoint based action localization

Description:
RELATED APPLICATION INFORMATION 
     This application claims priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 63/142,602, filed on Jan. 28, 2021, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. 
    
    
     BACKGROUND 
     Technical Field 
     The present invention relates to object tracking and more particularly to keypoint based action localization. 
     Description of the Related Art 
     Given a video, and a query that requests the final location of a specific object in the video, the task is to locate the final location of the object in the video. The video consists of a large number of objects or a person moving through time. It is quite challenging to localize the object within the video as it moves around in the video through occlusions or hides at different camera angles. 
     SUMMARY 
     According to aspects of the present invention, a computer-implemented method is provided for action localization. The method includes converting one or more video frames into person keypoints and object keypoints. The method further includes embedding position, timestamp, instance, and type information with the person keypoints and object keypoints to obtain keypoint embeddings. The method also includes predicting, by a hierarchical transformer encoder using the keypoint embeddings, human actions and bounding box information of when and where the human actions occur in one or more video frames. 
     According to other aspects of the present invention, a computer program product is provided for action localization. The computer program product includes a non-transitory computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith. The program instructions are executable by a computer to cause the computer to perform a method. The method includes converting, by a processor device of the computer, one or more video frames into person keypoints and object keypoints. The method further includes embedding, by the processor device, position, timestamp, instance, and type information with the person keypoints and object keypoints to obtain keypoint embeddings. The method also includes predicting, by a hierarchical transformer encoder of the computer using the keypoint embeddings, human actions and bounding box information of when and where the human actions occur in the one or more video frames. 
     According to yet other aspects of the present invention, a computer processing system is provided for action localization. The computer processing system includes a memory device for storing program code. The computer processing system further includes a processor device for operatively coupled to the memory device for running the program code to convert one or more video frames into person keypoints and object keypoints. The processor device further runs the program code to embed position, timestamp, instance, and type information with the person keypoints and object keypoints to obtain keypoint embeddings. The processor device also runs the program code to predict, using a hierarchical transformer encoder that inputs the keypoint embeddings, human actions and bounding box information of when and where the human actions occur in the one or more video frames 
     These and other features and advantages will become apparent from the following detailed description of illustrative embodiments thereof, which is to be read in connection with the accompanying drawings. 
    
    
     
       BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF DRAWINGS 
       The disclosure will provide details in the following description of preferred embodiments with reference to the following figures wherein: 
         FIG. 1  is a block diagram showing an exemplary computing device, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention; 
         FIG. 2  is a block diagram showing an exemplary system for keypoint based action localization, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention; 
         FIG. 3  is a block diagram further showing the hierarchical transformer encoder of  FIG. 2 , in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention; 
         FIG. 4  is a block diagram further showing the keypoints embedding network of  FIG. 2 , in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention; and 
         FIG. 5  is a flow diagram showing an exemplary method for keypoint based action localization, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. 
     
    
    
     DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS 
     Embodiments of the present invention are directed to keypoint based action localization. 
     Embodiments of the present invention propose a method to address the action localization problem using just keypoint information. This proposed approach does not use any RGB information in the video processing pipeline. Hence, using LIDAR data or other NFC data that gives keypoints, it is possible to perform action recognition and localization, which was not previously possible. 
     Embodiments of the present invention are distinct since they just use keypoint information to predict action localization results. Embodiments of the present invention provide a top-down architecture that first detects the bounding boxes of all actors in each frame and then classifies the actions they are doing at a given timestamp. The model includes three stages followed by the idea of tubelet action recognition. First, a set of keypoints are identified as the “Action Representation” for a video clip of T frames. Second, a Keypoints Embedding Network projects keypoints to more representative features by adding the knowledge of spatial-temporal information and the characteristic of keypoints. This includes embedding information like position, type, etc. Finally, an Action Tagger Network learns the higher-order interactive features and assigns action tags to each actor. 
       FIG. 1  is a block diagram showing an exemplary computing device  100 , in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. The computing device  100  is configured to perform keypoint based action localization. 
     The computing device  100  may be embodied as any type of computation or computer device capable of performing the functions described herein, including, without limitation, a computer, a server, a rack based server, a blade server, a workstation, a desktop computer, a laptop computer, a notebook computer, a tablet computer, a mobile computing device, a wearable computing device, a network appliance, a web appliance, a distributed computing system, a processor-based system, and/or a consumer electronic device. Additionally or alternatively, the computing device  100  may be embodied as a one or more compute sleds, memory sleds, or other racks, sleds, computing chassis, or other components of a physically disaggregated computing device. As shown in  FIG. 1 , the computing device  100  illustratively includes the processor  110 , an input/output subsystem  120 , a memory  130 , a data storage device  140 , and a communication subsystem  150 , and/or other components and devices commonly found in a server or similar computing device. Of course, the computing device  100  may include other or additional components, such as those commonly found in a server computer (e.g., various input/output devices), in other embodiments. Additionally, in some embodiments, one or more of the illustrative components may be incorporated in, or otherwise form a portion of, another component. For example, the memory  130 , or portions thereof, may be incorporated in the processor  110  in some embodiments. 
     The processor  110  may be embodied as any type of processor capable of performing the functions described herein. The processor  110  may be embodied as a single processor, multiple processors, a Central Processing Unit(s) (CPU(s)), a Graphics Processing Unit(s) (GPU(s)), a single or multi-core processor(s), a digital signal processor(s), a microcontroller(s), or other processor(s) or processing/controlling circuit(s). 
     The memory  130  may be embodied as any type of volatile or non-volatile memory or data storage capable of performing the functions described herein. In operation, the memory  130  may store various data and software used during operation of the computing device  100 , such as operating systems, applications, programs, libraries, and drivers. The memory  130  is communicatively coupled to the processor  110  via the I/O subsystem  120 , which may be embodied as circuitry and/or components to facilitate input/output operations with the processor  110  the memory  130 , and other components of the computing device  100 . For example, the I/O subsystem  120  may be embodied as, or otherwise include, memory controller hubs, input/output control hubs, platform controller hubs, integrated control circuitry, firmware devices, communication links (e.g., point-to-point links, bus links, wires, cables, light guides, printed circuit board traces, etc.) and/or other components and subsystems to facilitate the input/output operations. In some embodiments, the I/O subsystem  120  may form a portion of a system-on-a-chip (SOC) and be incorporated, along with the processor  110 , the memory  130 , and other components of the computing device  100 , on a single integrated circuit chip. 
     The data storage device  140  may be embodied as any type of device or devices configured for short-term or long-term storage of data such as, for example, memory devices and circuits, memory cards, hard disk drives, solid state drives, or other data storage devices. The data storage device  140  can store program code for keypoint based action recognition. The communication subsystem  150  of the computing device  100  may be embodied as any network interface controller or other communication circuit, device, or collection thereof, capable of enabling communications between the computing device  100  and other remote devices over a network. The communication subsystem  150  may be configured to use any one or more communication technology (e.g., wired or wireless communications) and associated protocols (e.g., Ethernet, InfiniBand®, Bluetooth®, Wi-Fi®, WiMAX, etc.) to effect such communication. 
     As shown, the computing device  100  may also include one or more peripheral devices  160 . The peripheral devices  160  may include any number of additional input/output devices, interface devices, and/or other peripheral devices. For example, in some embodiments, the peripheral devices  160  may include a display, touch screen, graphics circuitry, keyboard, mouse, speaker system, microphone, network interface, and/or other input/output devices, interface devices, and/or peripheral devices. 
     Of course, the computing device  100  may also include other elements (not shown), as readily contemplated by one of skill in the art, as well as omit certain elements. For example, various other input devices and/or output devices can be included in computing device  100 , depending upon the particular implementation of the same, as readily understood by one of ordinary skill in the art. For example, various types of wireless and/or wired input and/or output devices can be used. Moreover, additional processors, controllers, memories, and so forth, in various configurations can also be utilized. These and other variations of the processing system  100  are readily contemplated by one of ordinary skill in the art given the teachings of the present invention provided herein. 
     As employed herein, the term “hardware processor subsystem” or “hardware processor” can refer to a processor, memory (including RAM, cache(s), and so forth), software (including memory management software) or combinations thereof that cooperate to perform one or more specific tasks. In useful embodiments, the hardware processor subsystem can include one or more data processing elements (e.g., logic circuits, processing circuits, instruction execution devices, etc.). The one or more data processing elements can be included in a central processing unit, a graphics processing unit, and/or a separate processor- or computing element-based controller (e.g., logic gates, etc.). The hardware processor subsystem can include one or more on-board memories (e.g., caches, dedicated memory arrays, read only memory, etc.). In some embodiments, the hardware processor subsystem can include one or more memories that can be on or off board or that can be dedicated for use by the hardware processor subsystem (e.g., ROM, RAM, basic input/output system (BIOS), etc.). 
     In some embodiments, the hardware processor subsystem can include and execute one or more software elements. The one or more software elements can include an operating system and/or one or more applications and/or specific code to achieve a specified result. 
     In other embodiments, the hardware processor subsystem can include dedicated, specialized circuitry that performs one or more electronic processing functions to achieve a specified result. Such circuitry can include one or more application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), FPGAs, and/or PLAs. 
     These and other variations of a hardware processor subsystem are also contemplated in accordance with embodiments of the present invention. 
       FIG. 2  is a block diagram showing an exemplary system  200  for keypoint based action localization, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. 
     The task here is that given a video  201 , the goal is to localize the actions in the video  201 . The video  201  can be in RGB format or just a collection of keypoints using LIDAR information. In case of RGB input, the video  201  is converted to keypoints using one or more computer vision algorithms. Specifically, human tracklets  211  and object keypoints  212  are extracted from the video  201  using HRNet  210 , a top-down human keypoint estimator, and an object keypoint extractor  212  based on the computer vision algorithms. This is passed over to KeyNet architecture  290  that uses position, timestamp, instance and type embeddings for object keypoints  212  and person tracklets  211 . Actor features  231  and object features  232  from the Keypoints Embedding Networks  230  are then passed to a hierarchical transformer encoder  240 . The output of the hierarchical transformer encoder  240  is used for the action tagger network  250  to classify output actions. 
       FIG. 3  is a block diagram further showing the hierarchical transformer encoder  240  of  FIG. 2 , in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. 
     The hierarchical transformer encoder  240  includes keypoints encoder transformers  320  to learn the action-level representations from the keypoint embeddings of each actor and object through time. 
     The hierarchical transformer encoder  240  further includes an Actors Encoder Transformer  310  to learn the actor-level representations for action localization. 
       FIG. 4  is a block diagram further showing the Keypoints Embedding Network  230  of  FIG. 2 , in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. 
     The Keypoints Embedding Network  230  learns keypoints embeddings  310  based on the combination of position tokens  320 , timestamp tokens  330 , instance tokens  340 , and type (e.g., head, shoulder, wrist, etc.) tokens  350 , through a transformer  360 . A position token  320  encodes the position of a keypoint in a frame. A timestamp token  330  encodes the frame time index in a scene sequence. An instance token  340  encodes a person or an object id in a frame. A type token  350  encodes the body part type of a keypoint or a sampled object keypoint index. 
       FIG. 5  is a flow diagram showing an exemplary method  500  for keypoint based action localization, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. 
     At block  510 , convert one or more video frames into person keypoints and object keypoints. 
     In an embodiment, block  510  can include one or more of blocks  510 A through  510 D. 
     At block  510 A, convert one or more videos frames into person keypoints in the form of human joints for each detected person. 
     At block  510 B, select top N out of detected persons based on person detection confidence scores. 
     At block  510 C, extract object keypoints by subsampling the contour of an object mask detected by Mask R-CNN. 
     At block  510 D, select top N out of detected objects based on object detection confidence scores. 
     At block  520 , embed position, timestamp, instance, and type information with the person keypoints and object keypoints to obtain keypoint embeddings. 
     At block  530 , predict, by a hierarchical transformer encoder using the keypoint embeddings, human actions and bounding box information of when and where the human actions occur in the one or more video frames. 
     At block  540 , control an object responsive to the predicted human actions and bounding box information. For example, control a vehicle system for accident avoidance responsive to the predicted human actions and the bounding box information. As another example, control a robotic system for collision avoidance responsive to the predicted human actions and the bounding box information. 
     A description will now be given regarding the overall design of the present invention as shown in  FIG. 2 . A goal is to validate the hypothesis that whether or not using sparse keypoints can solve the general action recognition problem. Embodiments of the present invention provide a top-down architecture that first detects the bounding box of all actors in each frame and then classifies the actions they are doing at a given timestamp. 
     The model includes three stages followed by the idea of tubelet action recognition. First, a set of keypoints are identified as the Action Representation for a video clip  201  of T frames. Second, the Keypoints Embedding Network  230  projects keypoints to more representative features by adding the knowledge of spatial-temporal information and the characteristic of keypoints. Finally, the action tagger network  250  learns the higher-order interactive features and assign action tags to each actor. 
     A description will now be given regarding action representation, in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention. 
     Scene sequence: Embodiments of the present invention have designed the action representation as a scene sequence as follows: 
         D =( H   1   ,H   2    . . . H   N   ,O   1   ,O   2   . . . , O   K ) 
     where H i =(P 1 , P 2 , . . . , P k     h   ) is the set of k h  keypoints from the i th  human tracklet through time and O j =(P 1 , P 2 , . . . , P k     o   ) is the set of k o  keypoints from the j th  object. 
     To obtain the scene sequence D as the action representation, we proposed a keypoints sampling method to extract N human tracklets H i  for actor features and M objects keypoints as O j  for contextual features. 
     Human Tracklet. To get N human tracklets, we combine a person detector with traction, an IoU-based tracker, to build person tracklets  211  over T frames. Then an off-the-shelf keypoint estimator is used to extract k h  human joints information for each detected person over the T frames. 
     By selecting the top N people based on the detection confidence scores, those human tracklets consist of N×k h ×T keypoints. 
     Object Keypoint. The purpose to extract object keypoints is to provide contextual features in scenes to enhance the performance for those object interactive actions. Here, an assumption is made that human-object interactive actions can be modeled by a set of class-agnostic keypoints with only its shape and spatial information. Therefore, object keypoints are extracted by subsampling the contour of the object mask detected by Mask R-CNN. 
     Specifically, for each video clip, a Mask R-CNN detector is applied to its keyframe to collect the class-agnostic object masks and for each mask, the Theo Pavlidis&#39; Algorithm or other computer vision algorithm is leveraged for contour tracing. Finally, by applying an equal distance sampling, the object keypoints are extracted and have the same interval along the contour of the detected mask. 
     Hence, by selecting the top K objects with the highest confidence scores in a keyframe, O can be obtained from K×k o  keypoints for each video clip. 
     Keypoints Embedding Network 
     To effectively learn atomic actions in keypoints representations, the spatial correlation of each joint should be learned as well as how these joints transform in a video clip with T frames. Therefore, each keypoint in a scene sequence is converted into a sequence of tokens and each token is linearly projected into an embedding E, a learnable lookup table to model the relationship of each keypoint. 
     Tokenization: The goal of tokenization is to convert a scene sequence into more representative information for learning the spatial-temporal correlation between each tracklet and the contextual object keypoints. To achieve this goal, prior tokenization techniques are extended into a multi-instance and multi-category scenario to provide the embeddings for embodiments of the present invention. For Position Token and Type Token, each keypoint is provided with representations of spatial locations, temporal location index, and the unique type information (e.g., Head, Shoulder and Wrist.) respectively. A contribution of the present invention is that by extending Segment Token to T frames and addressing the idea of Instance Token to indicate the ids of tracklets that keypoints belong to in the current scene, the application of previous tokenization methods from pair-wise matching are generalized to jointly provide information of the spatial-temporal correlation of multiple instances at the same time. It is now described how to convert a scene sequence to 4 kinds of tokens in detail below: 
     Position Token: The down-sampled spatial location of the original image gives the unique representation of each pixel coordinate. For a keypoint P, its Position Token is written as ρ with the 2D position range in ([1, W′], [1, H′]), where W′ and H′ are down-sampled width and height. This reduces the computational cost while preserving the spatial correlation of each keypoint in the frame. The general expression of Position Token is as follows, where ρ n   p     k       t    indicates the Position Token of the k th  keypoint from the n th  person at timestamp t: 
       {ρ 1   p     1       1   ,ρ 1   p     2       1    . . . ρ 2   p     1       t   ,ρ 2   p     2       t    . . . ρ N−1   p     K       T    . . . ρ N   p     K       T   }  (1)
 
     Type Token: The Type Token represents the characteristics of the human body parts (i.e., Head, Right Shoulder and Left Wrist). The Type Token ranges in [1, K], where K is the number of keypoints. The Type Token provides the knowledge of how each human body part evolved in the keypoint sequence, which is essential to achieve high accuracy at low resolution. The Type Token k n   p     t    is assigned to the k th  keypoint at timestamp t of the n th  person. A general expression for Type Tokens are shown below as follows: 
       {1 1   p     1   ,2 1   p     1   , . . . 1 2   p     1   ,2 2   p     1   , . . . (K−1) N   p     T    . . . K N   p     T   }  (2)
 
     Segment Token: The segment token embeds the timestamp information with keypoints p t  at time t. According to our setting of the scene sequence, the range of segment token is in [1, T] where T is the total number of frames in a video clip. We assign the segment token t n   p     k    to the keypoints at frame t from the n th  person. The general expression of the Segment token is shown in Equation 3 as follows: 
       {1 1   p     1   ,1 1   p     2    . . . 1 2   p     1   ,1 2   p     2    . . . T N−1   p     K    . . . T N   p     K   }  (3)
 
     Instance Token: The instance token provides the spatial correlation between a keypoint P t  and its corresponding person instance n in a frame. The instance token serves as a similar role to the segment token while it provides spatial instead of temporal information. The instance token n p     k       t    is assigned to ρ n   p     k       t   , the k th  keypoint of the n th  person instance at frame t. The general expression of the Instance token is shown in Equation 4 as follows: 
       {1 p     1       1   ,1 p     2       1   , . . . 2 p     1       1   ,2 p     2       1   , . . . (N−1) p     K       T    . . . N p     K       T   }  (4)
 
     After tokenizing the scene sequence with the 4 kinds of the aforementioned tokens, we linearly project each token to 4 kinds of embedding metrics and the output embedding can be obtained by summing information of the 4 tokens. That is, E=E position +E Type +E segment +E instance . And the Action Tagger Network  250  takes the embedding E as input to make the actor-level action localization. 
     Action Tagger Network 
     The goal of the Action Tagger Network is to learn the spatial-temporal correlation of each keypoint P t  in scene sequence D to predict the actions for each actor subsequence. 
     To achieve this, similar to making a prediction at the sentence-level and the token-level classification subtask in BERT, the keypoint embedding vector E is fed to a series of self-attention blocks to model high-order interaction between keypoint embeddings. Then, the output representations are fed to fully-connected layers for action localization. Followed by a shared multi-class classifier, the model of the present invention can make actor-level action predictions for each actor in a scene sequence D. 
     Transformer Network: A typical Transformer implementation creates three vectors from each of the input vectors (here, the embedding of each keypoint). So for each keypoint, the following are created: a Query vector (Q); a Key vector (K); and a Value vector (V). Next, the transformer network scores the keypoints pairwise in the scene sequence D by taking the dot product of Q keypoint and K keypoint. Finally, the transformer network normalizes the scores with √{square root over (d)} and a soft-max operation, where d is the embedding dimension. By multiplying each V keypoint by the softmax score, the result can be obtained by summing up the weighted V keypoints. This is the so-called self-attention that can be expressed in the following equation: 
     
       
         
           
             
               
                 
                   
                     Attention 
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                       ( 
                       
                         Q 
                         , 
                         K 
                         , 
                         V 
                       
                       ) 
                     
                   
                   = 
                   
                     softmax 
                     ⁡ 
                     ( 
                     
                       
                         Q 
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                           K 
                           T 
                         
                       
                       
                         d 
                       
                     
                     ) 
                   
                 
               
               
                 
                   ( 
                   5 
                   ) 
                 
               
             
           
         
       
     
     Hierarchical Transformer Encoder: However, as the length of the input embedding sequence increases, the computational complexity of the Transformer Network grows quadratically due to the pairwise self-attention between the input embeddings. Therefore, to address this quadratic inefficiency, the representation of each actor is learned in a hierarchical manner instead of learning all keypoints in a single transformer. Specifically, a keypoints encode transformer will first encode the embedding of the keypoints E ρ     n       t    into a list of action-level representations. We take the representation h ρ     n       t    as the feature for human keypoints at frame t as follows: 
         E   ρ     n       t   =( e   1   ρ     n       t     ,e   2   ρ     n       t     , . . . e   K   ρ     n       t   ) where  e   K   ρ     n       t   =ρ n   p     k       t     +k   n   p     t     (6)
 
         h   ρ     n       t   =Transformer( E   ρ     n       t   )  (7)
 
     where ρ n   p     k       t    is the Position token and k n   p     t    is the Type token. 
     Then, an actor encode transformer will encode the person tracklet representation d ρ     n    through time from (h ρ     n       1   , h ρ     n       2    . . . h ρ     n       T   ). The collective context sensitive tracklet representations of each person in the scene sequence can be represented as (d ρ     1   , d ρ     2   , . . . d ρ     N   ). Finally, the actor-level action is derived by linearly projecting d ρ     n    to the number of total classes in the dataset as follows: 
         R   ρ     n   =( r   ρ     n       1     ,r   ρ     n       2     , . . . r   ρ     n       T   ) where  r   ρ     n       t     =h   ρ     n       t     +n   p     t     +t   n   p   (8)
 
         d   ρ     n   =Transformer( R   ρ     n   )  (9)
 
     where n p     t    is the Instance Token and t n   p  is the Segment Token for the n th  instance at frame time t. 
     RGB Features Extractor 
     To validate the effectiveness of the representation gathered by our proposed KeyNet, an RGB based architecture is built using full information in every actor tracklet to predict actions. For this, the same strategy is applied as the above to build human tracklets by directly cropping the actor sub-image instead of extracting K keypoints for each detected person. 
     Regarding the RGB feature extractor, first the image-based features of each actor are extracted with HRNet. Then the features are linearly projected to the same output dimension of the Keypoint Embedding Network. Since the image features are extracted frame by frame, it includes no clue of the spatial correlation and temporal ordering. Hence, the same embedding techniques are applied as the keypoints embedding network to address the spatial-temporal correlation. For spatial correlation, the position token is based on the center of an actor bounding box. The same Segment Token in the Keypoints Embedding Network is used to provide temporal clues. Hence, the resulting feature of each actor is the sum of (1) image features extracted from HRNet, (2) position embedding for spatial correlation and (3) segment embedding for temporal clues. By feeding this representation to the proposed action tagger network  250 , the performance of features extracted from images are compared with features derived from keypoints. 
     The present invention may be a system, a method, and/or a computer program product at any possible technical detail level of integration. The computer program product may include a computer readable storage medium (or media) having computer readable program instructions thereon for causing a processor to carry out aspects of the present invention. 
     The computer readable storage medium can be a tangible device that can retain and store instructions for use by an instruction execution device. The computer readable storage medium may be, for example, but is not limited to, an electronic storage device, a magnetic storage device, an optical storage device, an electromagnetic storage device, a semiconductor storage device, or any suitable combination of the foregoing. A non-exhaustive list of more specific examples of the computer readable storage medium includes the following: a portable computer diskette, a hard disk, a random access memory (RAM), a read-only memory (ROM), an erasable programmable read-only memory (EPROM or Flash memory), a static random access memory (SRAM), a portable compact disc read-only memory (CD-ROM), a digital versatile disk (DVD), a memory stick, a floppy disk, a mechanically encoded device such as punch-cards or raised structures in a groove having instructions recorded thereon, and any suitable combination of the foregoing. A computer readable storage medium, as used herein, is not to be construed as being transitory signals per se, such as radio waves or other freely propagating electromagnetic waves, electromagnetic waves propagating through a waveguide or other transmission media (e.g., light pulses passing through a fiber-optic cable), or electrical signals transmitted through a wire. 
     Computer readable program instructions described herein can be downloaded to respective computing/processing devices from a computer readable storage medium or to an external computer or external storage device via a network, for example, the Internet, a local area network, a wide area network and/or a wireless network. The network may comprise copper transmission cables, optical transmission fibers, wireless transmission, routers, firewalls, switches, gateway computers and/or edge servers. A network adapter card or network interface in each computing/processing device receives computer readable program instructions from the network and forwards the computer readable program instructions for storage in a computer readable storage medium within the respective computing/processing device. 
     Computer readable program instructions for carrying out operations of the present invention may be assembler instructions, instruction-set-architecture (ISA) instructions, machine instructions, machine dependent instructions, microcode, firmware instructions, state-setting data, or either source code or object code written in any combination of one or more programming languages, including an object oriented programming language such as SMALLTALK, C++ or the like, and conventional procedural programming languages, such as the “C” programming language or similar programming languages. The computer readable program instructions may execute entirely on the user&#39;s computer, partly on the user&#39;s computer, as a stand-alone software package, partly on the user&#39;s computer and partly on a remote computer or entirely on the remote computer or server. In the latter scenario, the remote computer may be connected to the user&#39;s computer through any type of network, including a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN), or the connection may be made to an external computer (for example, through the Internet using an Internet Service Provider). In some embodiments, electronic circuitry including, for example, programmable logic circuitry, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), or programmable logic arrays (PLA) may execute the computer readable program instructions by utilizing state information of the computer readable program instructions to personalize the electronic circuitry, in order to perform aspects of the present invention. 
     Aspects of the present invention are described herein with reference to flowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams of methods, apparatus (systems), and computer program products according to embodiments of the invention. It will be understood that each block of the flowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams, and combinations of blocks in the flowchart illustrations and/or block diagrams, can be implemented by computer readable program instructions. 
     These computer readable program instructions may be provided to a processor of a general purpose computer, special purpose computer, or other programmable data processing apparatus to produce a machine, such that the instructions, which execute via the processor of the computer or other programmable data processing apparatus, create means for implementing the functions/acts specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks. These computer readable program instructions may also be stored in a computer readable storage medium that can direct a computer, a programmable data processing apparatus, and/or other devices to function in a particular manner, such that the computer readable storage medium having instructions stored therein comprises an article of manufacture including instructions which implement aspects of the function/act specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks. 
     The computer readable program instructions may also be loaded onto a computer, other programmable data processing apparatus, or other device to cause a series of operational steps to be performed on the computer, other programmable apparatus or other device to produce a computer implemented process, such that the instructions which execute on the computer, other programmable apparatus, or other device implement the functions/acts specified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks. 
     The flowchart and block diagrams in the Figures illustrate the architecture, functionality, and operation of possible implementations of systems, methods, and computer program products according to various embodiments of the present invention. In this regard, each block in the flowchart or block diagrams may represent a module, segment, or portion of instructions, which comprises one or more executable instructions for implementing the specified logical function(s). In some alternative implementations, the functions noted in the block may occur out of the order noted in the figures. For example, two blocks shown in succession may, in fact, be executed substantially concurrently, or the blocks may sometimes be executed in the reverse order, depending upon the functionality involved. It will also be noted that each block of the block diagrams and/or flowchart illustration, and combinations of blocks in the block diagrams and/or flowchart illustration, can be implemented by special purpose hardware-based systems that perform the specified functions or acts or carry out combinations of special purpose hardware and computer instructions. 
     Reference in the specification to “one embodiment” or “an embodiment” of the present invention, as well as other variations thereof, means that a particular feature, structure, characteristic, and so forth described in connection with the embodiment is included in at least one embodiment of the present invention. Thus, the appearances of the phrase “in one embodiment” or “in an embodiment”, as well any other variations, appearing in various places throughout the specification are not necessarily all referring to the same embodiment. 
     It is to be appreciated that the use of any of the following “/”, “and/or”, and “at least one of”, for example, in the cases of “A/B”, “A and/or B” and “at least one of A and B”, is intended to encompass the selection of the first listed option (A) only, or the selection of the second listed option (B) only, or the selection of both options (A and B). As a further example, in the cases of “A, B, and/or C” and “at least one of A, B, and C”, such phrasing is intended to encompass the selection of the first listed option (A) only, or the selection of the second listed option (B) only, or the selection of the third listed option (C) only, or the selection of the first and the second listed options (A and B) only, or the selection of the first and third listed options (A and C) only, or the selection of the second and third listed options (B and C) only, or the selection of all three options (A and B and C). This may be extended, as readily apparent by one of ordinary skill in this and related arts, for as many items listed. 
     The foregoing is to be understood as being in every respect illustrative and exemplary, but not restrictive, and the scope of the invention disclosed herein is not to be determined from the Detailed Description, but rather from the claims as interpreted according to the full breadth permitted by the patent laws. It is to be understood that the embodiments shown and described herein are only illustrative of the present invention and that those skilled in the art may implement various modifications without departing from the scope and spirit of the invention. Those skilled in the art could implement various other feature combinations without departing from the scope and spirit of the invention. Having thus described aspects of the invention, with the details and particularity required by the patent laws, what is claimed and desired protected by Letters Patent is set forth in the appended claims.