In recent years, X-ray screening systems have been used to safeguard environments in which access... more In recent years, X-ray screening systems have been used to safeguard environments in which access control is of paramount importance. Security checkpoints have been placed at the entrances to many public places to detect prohibited items such as handguns and explosives. Human operators complete these tasks because automated recognition in baggage inspection is far from perfect. Research and development on X-ray testing is, however, ongoing into new approaches that can be used to aid human operators. This paper attempts to make a contribution to the field of object recognition by proposing a new approach called Adaptive Sparse Representation (XASR+). It consists of two stages: learning and testing. In the learning stage, for each object of training dataset, several patches are extracted from its X-ray images in order to construct representative dictionaries. A stop-list is used to remove very common words of the dictionaries. In the testing stage, test patches of the test image are extracted, and for each test patch a dictionary is built concatenating the 'best' representative dictionary of each object. Using this adapted dictionary, each test patch is classified following the Sparse Representation Classification (SRC) methodology. Finally, the test image is classified by patch voting. Thus, our approach is able to deal with less constrained conditions including some contrast variability, pose, intra-class variability, size of the image and focal distance. We tested the effectiveness of our method for the detection of four different objects. In our experiments, the recognition rate was more than 97% in each class, and more than 94% if the object is occluded less than 15%. Results show that XASR+ deals well with unconstrained conditions, outperforming various representative methods in the literature. Index Terms-X-ray testing, computer vision, sparse representations, image analysis.
Although unconstrained face recognition has been widely studied over recent years, state-of-the-a... more Although unconstrained face recognition has been widely studied over recent years, state-of-the-art algorithms still result in an unsatisfactory performance for low-quality images. In this paper, we make two contributions to this field: the first one is the release of a new dataset called 'AR-LQ' that can be used in conjunction with the well-known 'AR' dataset to evaluate face recognition algorithms on blurred and low-resolution face images. The proposed dataset contains five new blurred faces (at five different levels, from low to severe blurriness) and five new low-resolution images (at five different levels, from 66 ⇥ 48 to 7 ⇥ 5 pixels) for each of the hundred subjects of the 'AR' dataset. The new blurred images were acquired by using a DLSR camera with manual focus that takes an out-of-focus photograph of a monitor that displays a sharp face image. In the same way, the low-resolution images were acquired from the monitor by a DLSR at different distances. Thus, an attempt is made to acquire low-quality images that have been degraded by a real degradation process. Our second contribution is an extension of a known face recognition technique based on sparse representations (ASR) that takes into account low-resolution face images. The proposed method, called blur-ASR or bASR, was designed to recognize faces using dictionaries with different levels of blurriness. These were obtained by digitally blurring the training images, and a sharpness metric for matching blurriness between the query image and the dictionaries. These two main adjustments made the algorithm more robust with respect to low-quality images. In our experiments, bASR consistently outperforms other state-of-art methods including hand-crafted features, sparse representations, and a seven well-known deep learning face recognition techniques with and without super resolution techniques. On average, bASR obtained 88.8% of accuracy, whereas the rest obtained less than 78.4%.
Although face recognition systems have achieved impressive performance in recent years, the low-r... more Although face recognition systems have achieved impressive performance in recent years, the low-resolution face recognition task remains challenging, especially when the low-resolution faces are captured under non-ideal conditions, as is common in surveillance-based applications. Faces captured in such conditions are often contaminated by blur, non-uniform lighting, and non-frontal face pose. In this paper, we analyze face recognition techniques using data captured under low-quality conditions in the wild. We provide a comprehensive analysis of experimental results for two of the most important applications in real surveillance applications, and demonstrate practical approaches to handle both cases that show promising performance. The following three contributions are made: (i) we conduct experiments to evaluate super-resolution methods for low-resolution face recognition; (ii) we study face re-identification on various public face datasets including real surveillance and low-resolution subsets of large-scale datasets, present a baseline result for several deep learning based approaches, and improve them by introducing a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) pre-training approach and fully convolutional architecture; and (iii) we explore low-resolution face identification by employing a state-of-the-art supervised discriminative learning approach. Evaluations are conducted on challenging portions of the SCface and UCCSface datasets.
In recent years, X-ray screening systems have been used to safeguard environments in which access... more In recent years, X-ray screening systems have been used to safeguard environments in which access control is of paramount importance. Security checkpoints have been placed at the entrances to many public places to detect prohibited items such as handguns and explosives. Human operators complete these tasks because automated recognition in baggage inspection is far from perfect. Research and development on X-ray testing is, however, ongoing into new approaches that can be used to aid human operators. This paper attempts to make a contribution to the field of object recognition by proposing a new approach called Adaptive Sparse Representation (XASR+). It consists of two stages: learning and testing. In the learning stage, for each object of training dataset, several patches are extracted from its X-ray images in order to construct representative dictionaries. A stop-list is used to remove very common words of the dictionaries. In the testing stage, test patches of the test image are extracted, and for each test patch a dictionary is built concatenating the 'best' representative dictionary of each object. Using this adapted dictionary, each test patch is classified following the Sparse Representation Classification (SRC) methodology. Finally, the test image is classified by patch voting. Thus, our approach is able to deal with less constrained conditions including some contrast variability, pose, intra-class variability, size of the image and focal distance. We tested the effectiveness of our method for the detection of four different objects. In our experiments, the recognition rate was more than 97% in each class, and more than 94% if the object is occluded less than 15%. Results show that XASR+ deals well with unconstrained conditions, outperforming various representative methods in the literature. Index Terms-X-ray testing, computer vision, sparse representations, image analysis.
Although unconstrained face recognition has been widely studied over recent years, state-of-the-a... more Although unconstrained face recognition has been widely studied over recent years, state-of-the-art algorithms still result in an unsatisfactory performance for low-quality images. In this paper, we make two contributions to this field: the first one is the release of a new dataset called 'AR-LQ' that can be used in conjunction with the well-known 'AR' dataset to evaluate face recognition algorithms on blurred and low-resolution face images. The proposed dataset contains five new blurred faces (at five different levels, from low to severe blurriness) and five new low-resolution images (at five different levels, from 66 ⇥ 48 to 7 ⇥ 5 pixels) for each of the hundred subjects of the 'AR' dataset. The new blurred images were acquired by using a DLSR camera with manual focus that takes an out-of-focus photograph of a monitor that displays a sharp face image. In the same way, the low-resolution images were acquired from the monitor by a DLSR at different distances. Thus, an attempt is made to acquire low-quality images that have been degraded by a real degradation process. Our second contribution is an extension of a known face recognition technique based on sparse representations (ASR) that takes into account low-resolution face images. The proposed method, called blur-ASR or bASR, was designed to recognize faces using dictionaries with different levels of blurriness. These were obtained by digitally blurring the training images, and a sharpness metric for matching blurriness between the query image and the dictionaries. These two main adjustments made the algorithm more robust with respect to low-quality images. In our experiments, bASR consistently outperforms other state-of-art methods including hand-crafted features, sparse representations, and a seven well-known deep learning face recognition techniques with and without super resolution techniques. On average, bASR obtained 88.8% of accuracy, whereas the rest obtained less than 78.4%.
Although face recognition systems have achieved impressive performance in recent years, the low-r... more Although face recognition systems have achieved impressive performance in recent years, the low-resolution face recognition task remains challenging, especially when the low-resolution faces are captured under non-ideal conditions, as is common in surveillance-based applications. Faces captured in such conditions are often contaminated by blur, non-uniform lighting, and non-frontal face pose. In this paper, we analyze face recognition techniques using data captured under low-quality conditions in the wild. We provide a comprehensive analysis of experimental results for two of the most important applications in real surveillance applications, and demonstrate practical approaches to handle both cases that show promising performance. The following three contributions are made: (i) we conduct experiments to evaluate super-resolution methods for low-resolution face recognition; (ii) we study face re-identification on various public face datasets including real surveillance and low-resolution subsets of large-scale datasets, present a baseline result for several deep learning based approaches, and improve them by introducing a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) pre-training approach and fully convolutional architecture; and (iii) we explore low-resolution face identification by employing a state-of-the-art supervised discriminative learning approach. Evaluations are conducted on challenging portions of the SCface and UCCSface datasets.
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Papers by Domingo Mery