Abstract: Micro-expressions reveal underlying emotions and are widely applied in political psychology, lie detection, law enforcement and medical care. Micro-expression spotting aims to detect the temporal locations of facial expressions from video sequences and is a crucial task in micro-expression recognition. In this study, the problem of micro-expression spotting is formulated as micro-expression classification per frame. We propose an effective spotting model with sliding windows called the spatio-temporal spotting network. The method involves a sliding window detection mechanism, combines the spatial features from the local key frames and the global temporal features and performs micro-expression spotting. The experiments are conducted on the CAS(ME)2 database and the SAMM Long Videos database, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 30.58% for the CAS(ME)2 and 23.98% for the SAMM Long Videos according to overall F-scores.

Abstract: Motion perception is an amazing innate ability of the creatures on the planet. This adroitness entails a functional advantage that enables species to compete better in the wild. The motion perception ability is usually employed at different levels, allowing from the simplest interaction with the ’physis’ up to the most transcendental survival tasks. Among the five classical perception system , vision is the most widely used in the motion perception field. Millions years of evolution have led to a highly specialized visual system in humans, which is characterized by a tremendous accuracy as well as an extraordinary robustness. Although humans and an immense diversity of species can distinguish moving object with a seeming simplicity, it has proven to be a difficult and non trivial problem from a computational perspective. In the field of Computer Vision, the detection of moving objects is a challenging and fundamental research area. This can be referred to as the ’origin’ of vast and numerous vision-based research sub-areas. Nevertheless, from the bottom to the top of this hierarchical analysis, the foundations still relies on when and where motion has occurred in an image. Pixels corresponding to moving objects in image sequences can be identified by measuring changes in their values. However, a pixel’s value (representing a combination of color and brightness) could also vary due to other factors such as: variation in scene illumination, camera noise and nonlinear sensor responses among others. The challenge lies in detecting if the changes in pixels’ value are caused by a genuine object movement or not. An additional challenging aspect in motion detection is represented by moving cast shadows. The paradox arises because a moving object and its cast shadow share similar motion patterns. However, a moving cast shadow is not a moving object. In fact, a shadow represents a photometric illumination effect caused by the relative position of the object with respect to the light sources. Shadow detection methods are mainly divided in two domains depending on the application field. One normally consists of static images where shadows are casted by static objects, whereas the second one is referred to image sequences where shadows are casted by moving objects. For the first case, shadows can provide additional geometric and semantic cues about shape and position of its casting object as well as the localization of the light source. Although the previous information can be extracted from static images as well as video sequences, the main focus in the second area is usually change detection, scene matching or surveillance. In this context, a shadow can severely affect with the analysis and interpretation of the scene. The work done in the thesis is focused on the second case, thus it addresses the problem of detection and removal of moving cast shadows in video sequences in order to enhance the detection of moving object.

Abstract: A novel three-dimensional measurement technique is proposed. The methodology consists in mapping from the screen coordinates reported by the optical camera to the real world, and integrating distance gradients from the beginning to the end point, while also minimising the error through fitting pixel locations to a smooth curve. The results demonstrate accuracy of less than half a centimetre using Microsoft Kinect II.

Abstract: This work summarizes the 2020 ChaLearn Looking at People Fair Face Recognition and Analysis Challenge and provides a description of the top-winning solutions and analysis of the results. The aim of the challenge was to evaluate accuracy and bias in gender and skin colour of submitted algorithms on the task of 1:1 face verification in the presence of other confounding attributes. Participants were evaluated using an in-the-wild dataset based on reannotated IJB-C, further enriched 12.5K new images and additional labels. The dataset is not balanced, which simulates a real world scenario where AI-based models supposed to present fair outcomes are trained and evaluated on imbalanced data. The challenge attracted 151 participants, who made more 1.8K submissions in total. The final phase of the challenge attracted 36 active teams out of which 10 exceeded 0.999 AUC-ROC while achieving very low scores in the proposed bias metrics. Common strategies by the participants were face pre-processing, homogenization of data distributions, the use of bias aware loss functions and ensemble models. The analysis of top-10 teams shows higher false positive rates (and lower false negative rates) for females with dark skin tone as well as the potential of eyeglasses and young age to increase the false positive rates too.

Abstract: Pretraining has proven successful in Document Intelligence tasks where deluge of documents are used to pretrain the models only later to be finetuned on downstream tasks. One of the problems of the pretraining approaches is the inconsistent usage of pretraining data with different OCR engines leading to incomparable results between models. In other words, it is not obvious whether the performance gain is coming from diverse usage of amount of data and distinct OCR engines or from the proposed models. To remedy the problem, we make public the OCR annotations for IDL documents using commercial OCR engine given their superior performance over open source OCR models. The contributed dataset (OCR-IDL) has an estimated monetary value over 20K US$. It is our hope that OCR-IDL can be a starting point for future works on Document Intelligence. All of our data and its collection process with the annotations can be found in this https URL.