Robust image watermarking that can resist camera shooting has become an active research topic in recent years due to the increasing demand for preventing sensitive information displayed on computer screens from being captured. However, many mainstream schemes require human assistance during the watermark detection process and cannot adapt to scenarios that require processing a large number of images. Although deep learning-based schemes enable end-to-end watermark embedding and detection, their limited generalization ability makes them vulnerable to failure in complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose a carefully crafted watermarking system that can resist camera shooting. The proposed scheme deals with two important problems: automatic watermark localization (AWL) and automatic watermark detection (AWD). AWL automatically identifies the region of interest (RoI), which contains watermark information, in the camera-shooting image by analyzing the local statistical characteristics. Meanwhile, AWD extracts the hidden watermark from the identified RoI after applying perspective correction. Compared with previous works, the proposed scheme is fully automatic, making it ideal for application scenarios. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is not limited to any specific watermark embedding strategy, allowing for improvements in the watermark embedding and extraction procedure. Extensive experimental results and analysis show that the embedded watermark can be automatically and reliably extracted from the camera-shooting image in different scenarios, demonstrating the superiority and applicability of the proposed approach.
The tremendous recent advances in generative artificial intelligence techniques have led to significant successes and promise in a wide range of different applications ranging from conversational agents and textual content generation to voice and visual synthesis. Amid the rise in generative AI and its increasing widespread adoption, there has been significant growing concern over the use of generative AI for malicious purposes. In the realm of visual content synthesis using generative AI, key areas of significant concern has been image forgery (e.g., generation of images containing or derived from copyright content), and data poisoning (i.e., generation of adversarially contaminated images). Motivated to address these key concerns to encourage responsible generative AI, we introduce the DeepfakeArt Challenge, a large-scale challenge benchmark dataset designed specifically to aid in the building of machine learning algorithms for generative AI art forgery and data poisoning detection. Comprising of over 32,000 records across a variety of generative forgery and data poisoning techniques, each entry consists of a pair of images that are either forgeries / adversarially contaminated or not. Each of the generated images in the DeepfakeArt Challenge benchmark dataset has been quality checked in a comprehensive manner. The DeepfakeArt Challenge is a core part of GenAI4Good, a global open source initiative for accelerating machine learning for promoting responsible creation and deployment of generative AI for good.
Audio DeepFakes (DF) are artificially generated utterances created using deep learning, with the primary aim of fooling the listeners in a highly convincing manner. Their quality is sufficient to pose a severe threat in terms of security and privacy, including the reliability of news or defamation. Multiple neural network-based methods to detect generated speech have been proposed to prevent the threats. In this work, we cover the topic of adversarial attacks, which decrease the performance of detectors by adding superficial (difficult to spot by a human) changes to input data. Our contribution contains evaluating the robustness of 3 detection architectures against adversarial attacks in two scenarios (white-box and using transferability) and enhancing it later by using adversarial training performed by our novel adaptive training. Moreover, one of the investigated architectures is RawNet3, which, to the best of our knowledge, we adapted for the first time to DeepFake detection.
Detecting change-points in data is challenging because of the range of possible types of change and types of behaviour of data when there is no change. Statistically efficient methods for detecting a change will depend on both of these features, and it can be difficult for a practitioner to develop an appropriate detection method for their application of interest. We show how to automatically generate new offline detection methods based on training a neural network. Our approach is motivated by many existing tests for the presence of a change-point being representable by a simple neural network, and thus a neural network trained with sufficient data should have performance at least as good as these methods. We present theory that quantifies the error rate for such an approach, and how it depends on the amount of training data. Empirical results show that, even with limited training data, its performance is competitive with the standard CUSUM-based classifier for detecting a change in mean when the noise is independent and Gaussian, and can substantially outperform it in the presence of auto-correlated or heavy-tailed noise. Our method also shows strong results in detecting and localising changes in activity based on accelerometer data.
Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of valuable original natural language contents found in subscription-based media outlets, web novel platforms, and outputs of large language models. However, these contents are susceptible to illegal piracy and potential misuse without proper security measures. This calls for a secure watermarking system to guarantee copyright protection through leakage tracing or ownership identification. To effectively combat piracy and protect copyrights, a multi-bit watermarking framework should be able to embed adequate bits of information and extract the watermarks in a robust manner despite possible corruption. In this work, we explore ways to advance both payload and robustness by following a well-known proposition from image watermarking and identify features in natural language that are invariant to minor corruption. Through a systematic analysis of the possible sources of errors, we further propose a corruption-resistant infill model. Our full method improves upon the previous work on robustness by +16.8% point on average on four datasets, three corruption types, and two corruption ratios. Code available at //github.com/bangawayoo/nlp-watermarking.
This paper addresses fine-grained object detection in scenarios with limited computing resources, such as edge computing. In particular, we focus on a scenario where a single image contains objects of the same category but varying sizes, and we desire an algorithm that can not only recognize the physical class of objects but also detect their size. Deep learning (DL), particularly through the use of deep neural networks (DNNs), has become the primary approach to object detection. However, obtaining accurate fine-grained detection requires a large DNN model and a significant amount of annotated data, presenting a challenge to solve our problem particularly for resource-constrained scenarios. To this end, we propose an approach that utilizes commonsense knowledge to assist a coarse-grained object detector in achieving accurate size-related fine-grained detection results. Specifically, we introduce a commonsense knowledge inference module (CKIM) that processes the coarse-grained labels produced by a benchmark coarse-grained DL detector to generate size-related fine-grained labels. Our CKIM explores both crisp-rule and fuzzy-rule based inference methods, with the latter being employed to handle ambiguity in the target size-related labels. We implement our method based on two modern DL detectors, including Mobilenet-SSD, and YOLOv7-tiny. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves accurate fine-grained detections with a reduced amount of annotated data, and smaller model size. Our code is available at //github.com/ZJLAB-AMMI/CKIM.
Time series anomaly detection has applications in a wide range of research fields and applications, including manufacturing and healthcare. The presence of anomalies can indicate novel or unexpected events, such as production faults, system defects, or heart fluttering, and is therefore of particular interest. The large size and complex patterns of time series have led researchers to develop specialised deep learning models for detecting anomalous patterns. This survey focuses on providing structured and comprehensive state-of-the-art time series anomaly detection models through the use of deep learning. It providing a taxonomy based on the factors that divide anomaly detection models into different categories. Aside from describing the basic anomaly detection technique for each category, the advantages and limitations are also discussed. Furthermore, this study includes examples of deep anomaly detection in time series across various application domains in recent years. It finally summarises open issues in research and challenges faced while adopting deep anomaly detection models.
Weakly-Supervised Object Detection (WSOD) and Localization (WSOL), i.e., detecting multiple and single instances with bounding boxes in an image using image-level labels, are long-standing and challenging tasks in the CV community. With the success of deep neural networks in object detection, both WSOD and WSOL have received unprecedented attention. Hundreds of WSOD and WSOL methods and numerous techniques have been proposed in the deep learning era. To this end, in this paper, we consider WSOL is a sub-task of WSOD and provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements of WSOD. Specifically, we firstly describe the formulation and setting of the WSOD, including the background, challenges, basic framework. Meanwhile, we summarize and analyze all advanced techniques and training tricks for improving detection performance. Then, we introduce the widely-used datasets and evaluation metrics of WSOD. Lastly, we discuss the future directions of WSOD. We believe that these summaries can help pave a way for future research on WSOD and WSOL.
Visual information extraction (VIE) has attracted considerable attention recently owing to its various advanced applications such as document understanding, automatic marking and intelligent education. Most existing works decoupled this problem into several independent sub-tasks of text spotting (text detection and recognition) and information extraction, which completely ignored the high correlation among them during optimization. In this paper, we propose a robust visual information extraction system (VIES) towards real-world scenarios, which is a unified end-to-end trainable framework for simultaneous text detection, recognition and information extraction by taking a single document image as input and outputting the structured information. Specifically, the information extraction branch collects abundant visual and semantic representations from text spotting for multimodal feature fusion and conversely, provides higher-level semantic clues to contribute to the optimization of text spotting. Moreover, regarding the shortage of public benchmarks, we construct a fully-annotated dataset called EPHOIE (//github.com/HCIILAB/EPHOIE), which is the first Chinese benchmark for both text spotting and visual information extraction. EPHOIE consists of 1,494 images of examination paper head with complex layouts and background, including a total of 15,771 Chinese handwritten or printed text instances. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our VIES shows significant superior performance on the EPHOIE dataset and achieves a 9.01% F-score gain on the widely used SROIE dataset under the end-to-end scenario.
Benefit from the quick development of deep learning techniques, salient object detection has achieved remarkable progresses recently. However, there still exists following two major challenges that hinder its application in embedded devices, low resolution output and heavy model weight. To this end, this paper presents an accurate yet compact deep network for efficient salient object detection. More specifically, given a coarse saliency prediction in the deepest layer, we first employ residual learning to learn side-output residual features for saliency refinement, which can be achieved with very limited convolutional parameters while keep accuracy. Secondly, we further propose reverse attention to guide such side-output residual learning in a top-down manner. By erasing the current predicted salient regions from side-output features, the network can eventually explore the missing object parts and details which results in high resolution and accuracy. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach compares favorably against state-of-the-art methods, and with advantages in terms of simplicity, efficiency (45 FPS) and model size (81 MB).
Person Re-identification (re-id) faces two major challenges: the lack of cross-view paired training data and learning discriminative identity-sensitive and view-invariant features in the presence of large pose variations. In this work, we address both problems by proposing a novel deep person image generation model for synthesizing realistic person images conditional on pose. The model is based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) and used specifically for pose normalization in re-id, thus termed pose-normalization GAN (PN-GAN). With the synthesized images, we can learn a new type of deep re-id feature free of the influence of pose variations. We show that this feature is strong on its own and highly complementary to features learned with the original images. Importantly, we now have a model that generalizes to any new re-id dataset without the need for collecting any training data for model fine-tuning, thus making a deep re-id model truly scalable. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models, often significantly. In particular, the features learned on Market-1501 can achieve a Rank-1 accuracy of 68.67% on VIPeR without any model fine-tuning, beating almost all existing models fine-tuned on the dataset.