In this paper, we investigate the impact of adversarial attacks on identity encoders within a realistic de-identification framework. Our experiments show that the transferability of attacks transfers from an external surrogate model to the system model (e.g., CosFace to ArcFace), allows the adversary to cause identity information to leak in a sufficiently sensitive face recognition system. We present experimental evidence and propose strategies to mitigate this vulnerability. Specifically, we show how fine-tuning on adversarial examples helps to mitigate this effect for distortion-based attacks (i.e., snow, fog, etc.), while a simple low-pass filter can attenuate the effect of adversarial noise without affecting the de-identified images. Our mitigation results in a de-identification system that preserves its functionality while being significantly more robust to adversarial noise. 

The subject of this work is to check how different types of music affect human emotions. While listening to music, a subjective survey and brain activity measurements were carried out using an EEG helmet. The aim is to demonstrate the impact of different music genres on emotions. The research involved a diverse group of participants of different gender and musical preferences. This had the effect of capturing a wide range of emotional responses to music. After the experiment, a relationship analysis of the respondents' questionnaires with EEG signals was performed. The analysis revealed connections between emotions and observed brain activity.

Hyperspectral unmixing (HU) is a crucial method for interpreting remotely sensed hyperspectral images (HSIs), with the aim of splitting the image into pure spectral components (endmembers) and their abundance fractions in every pixel of the scene. However, the effectiveness of this procedure is hindered by the presence of noise and anomalies. These kind of disruptions mainly arise from real-world factors such as atmospheric effects and endmember variability. To address this challenge, a novel approach called Graph-Regularized Oblique Projection Weighted NMF (GOP-WNMF) is introduced, which is grounded in a more precise separation of signal and noise subspaces, aiming to enhance the accuracy and robustness of the analysis. GOP-WNMF achieves this by constructing an oblique projector that projects each pixel onto the signal subspace, i.e., the space formed by signatures of endmembers, and parallel to the noise subspace. This approach effectively suppresses noise while preserving crucial spectral information. Furthermore, our new oblique NMF framework includes a unique residual-based weighting approach to detect and remove anomalies in pixels and spectral bands simultaneously. In addition to this, another weighting matrix is proposed by establishing a bipartite graph connecting endmembers and pixels to promote smoothness and sparsity in the resulting abundance maps. GOP-WNMF also enhances abundance map estimation accuracy by mitigating the negative effects of pixel outliers through the utilization of Laplacian eigenmaps technique to maintain the manifold structure of data. The effectiveness of GOP-WNMF is evaluated through comprehensive testing on synthetic and real HSIs, and its superiority is demonstrated over multiple state-of-the-art approaches. The source code is also available at https://github.com/yasinhashemi/GOP-WNMF. © 2025 The Authors

Crime is a critical problem-which often takes place behind closed doors, posing additional difficulties for investigators. To bring hidden truths to light, evidence at indoor crime scenes must be documented before any contamination or degradation occurs. Here, we address this challenge from the perspective of artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and robotics: Specifically, we explore the use of a blimp as a "floating camera" to drift over and record evidence with minimal disturbance. Adopting a rapid prototyping approach, we develop a proof-of-concept to investigate capabilities required for manual or semi-autonomous operation. Consequently, our results demonstrate the feasibility of equipping indoor blimps with various components (such as RGB and thermal cameras, LiDARs, and WiFi, with 20 minutes of battery life). Moreover, we confirm the core premise: that such blimps can be used to observe crime scene evidence while generating little airflow. We conclude by proposing some ideas related to detection (e.g., of bloodstains), mapping, and path planning, with the aim of stimulating further discussion and exploration. © 2025 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

The widespread use of mobile devices for all kinds of transactions makes necessary reliable and real-time identity authentication, leading to the adoption of face recognition (FR) via the cameras embedded in such devices. Progress of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has provided substantial advances in FR. Nonetheless, the size of state-of-the-art architectures is unsuitable for mobile deployment, since they often encompass hundreds of megabytes and millions of parameters. We address this by studying methods for deep network compression applied to FR. In particular, we apply network pruning based on Taylor scores, where less important filters are removed iteratively. The method is tested on three networks based on the small SqueezeNet (1.24M parameters) and the popular MobileNetv2 (3.5M) and ResNet50 (23.5M) architectures. These have been selected to showcase the method on CNNs with different complexities and sizes. We observe that a substantial percentage of filters can be removed with minimal performance loss. Also, filters with the highest amount of output channels tend to be removed first, suggesting that high-dimensional spaces within popular CNNs are over-dimensioned. The models of this paper are available at https://github.com/HalmstadUniversityBiometrics/CNN-pruning-for-face-recognition. © 2025.

Graph neural networks (GNNs), especially dynamic GNNs, have become a research hotspot in spatiotemporal forecasting problems. While many dynamic graph construction methods have been developed, relatively few of them explore the causal relationship between neighbor nodes. Thus, the resulting models lack strong explainability for the causal relationship between the neighbor nodes of the dynamically generated graphs, which can easily lead to a risk in subsequent decisions. Moreover, few of them consider the uncertainty and noise of dynamic graphs based on the time series datasets, which are ubiquitous in real-world graph structure networks. In this article, we propose a novel dynamic diffusion-variational GNN (DVGNN) for spatiotemporal forecasting. For dynamic graph construction, an unsupervised generative model is devised. Two layers of graph convolutional network (GCN) are applied to calculate the posterior distribution of the latent node embeddings in the encoder stage. Then, a diffusion model is used to infer the dynamic link probability and reconstruct causal graphs (CGs) in the decoder stage adaptively. The new loss function is derived theoretically, and the reparameterization trick is adopted in estimating the probability distribution of the dynamic graphs by evidence lower bound (ELBO) during the backpropagation period. After obtaining the generated graphs, dynamic GCN and temporal attention are applied to predict future states. Experiments are conducted on four real-world datasets of different graph structures in different domains. The results demonstrate that the proposed DVGNN model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and achieves outstanding root mean square error (RMSE) results while exhibiting higher robustness. Also, by F1-score and probability distribution analysis, we demonstrate that DVGNN better reflects the causal relationship and uncertainty of dynamic graphs. The website of the code is https://github.com/gorgen2020/DVGNN.

Technologies such as robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Computer Vision (CV) can be applied to crime scene analysis (CSA) to help protect lives, facilitate justice, and deter crime, but an overview of the tasks that can be automated has been lacking. Here we follow a speculative prototyping approach: First, the STAIR tool is used to rapidly review the literature and identify tasks that seem to have not received much attention, like accessing crime scenes through a window, mapping/gathering evidence, and analyzing blood smears. Secondly, we present a prototype of a small drone that implements these three tasks with 75%,85%, and 80% performance, to perform a minimal analysis of an indoor crime scene. Lessons learned are reported, toward guiding next work. ©2025 IEEE

Recent developments in Swin Transformer have shown its great potential in various computer vision tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. However, it is challenging to achieve desired performance by directly employing the Swin Transformer in multi-view 3D object recognition since the Swin Transformer independently extracts the characteristics of each view and relies heavily on a subsequent fusion strategy to unify the multi-view information. This leads to the problem of the insufficient extraction of interdependencies between the multi-view images. To this end, we propose an aggregation strategy integrated into the Swin Transformer to reinforce the connections between internal features across multiple views, thus leading to a complete interpretation of isolated features extracted by the Swin Transformer. Specifically, we utilize Swin Transformer to learn view-level feature representations from multi-view images and then calculate their view discrimination scores. The scores are employed to assign the view-level features to different groups. Finally, a grouping and fusion network is proposed to aggregate the features from view and group levels. The experimental results indicate that our method attains state-of-the-art performance compared to prior approaches in multi-view 3D object recognition tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/Qishaohua94/DEST. ©2024 IEEE.

We apply pre-trained architectures, originally developed for the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, for periocular recognition. These architectures have demon-strated significant success in various computer vision tasks beyond the ones for which they were designed. This work builds on our previous study using off-the-shelf Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and extends it to include the more recently proposed Vision Transformers (ViT). Despite being trained for generic object classification, middle-layer features from CNNs and ViTs are a suitable way to recognize individuals based on periocular images. We also demonstrate that CNNs and ViTs are highly complementary since their combination results in boosted accuracy. In addition, we show that a small portion of these pre-trained models can achieve good accuracy, resulting in thinner models with fewer parameters, suitable for resource-limited environments such as mobiles. This efficiency improves if traditional handcrafted features are added as well. ©2024 IEEE.