Autoencoders are unsupervised models which have been used for detecting anomalies in multi-sensor environments. A typical use includes training a predictive model with data from sensors operating under normal conditions and using the model to detect anomalies. Anomalies can come either from real changes in the environment (real drift) or from faulty sensory devices (virtual drift); however, the use of Autoencoders to distinguish between different anomalies has not yet been considered. To this end, we first propose the development of Bayesian Autoencoders to quantify epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. We then test the Bayesian Autoencoder using a real-world industrial dataset for hydraulic condition monitoring. The system is injected with noise and drifts, and we have found the epistemic uncertainty to be less sensitive to sensor perturbations as compared to the reconstruction loss. By observing the reconstructed signals with the uncertainties, we gain interpretable insights, and these uncertainties offer a potential avenue for distinguishing real and virtual drifts.
In this paper, we propose POTATOES (Partitioning OverfiTting AuTOencoder EnSemble), a new method for unsupervised outlier detection (UOD). More precisely, given any autoencoder for UOD, this technique can be used to improve its accuracy while at the same time removing the burden of tuning its regularization. The idea is to not regularize at all, but to rather randomly partition the data into sufficiently many equally sized parts, overfit each part with its own autoencoder, and to use the maximum over all autoencoder reconstruction errors as the anomaly score. We apply our model to various realistic datasets and show that if the set of inliers is dense enough, our method indeed improves the UOD performance of a given autoencoder significantly. For reproducibility, the code is made available on github so the reader can recreate the results in this paper as well as apply the method to other autoencoders and datasets.
In this paper, we introduce MIMII DUE, a new dataset for malfunctioning industrial machine investigation and inspection with domain shifts due to changes in operational and environmental conditions. Conventional methods for anomalous sound detection face practical challenges because the distribution of features changes between the training and operational phases (called domain shift) due to various real-world factors. To check the robustness against domain shifts, we need a dataset that actually includes domain shifts, but such a dataset does not exist so far. The new dataset we created consists of the normal and abnormal operating sounds of five different types of industrial machines under two different operational/environmental conditions (source domain and target domain) independent of normal/abnormal, with domain shifts occurring between the two domains. Experimental results showed significant performance differences between the source and target domains, indicating that the dataset contains the domain shifts. These findings demonstrate that the dataset will be helpful for checking the robustness against domain shifts. The dataset is a subset of the dataset for DCASE 2021 Challenge Task 2 and freely available for download at //zenodo.org/record/4740355
Detecting money laundering in gambling is becoming increasingly challenging for the gambling industry as consumers migrate to online channels. Whilst increasingly stringent regulations have been applied over the years to prevent money laundering in gambling, despite this, online gambling is still a channel for criminals to spend proceeds from crime. Complementing online gambling's growth more concerns are raised to its effects compared with gambling in traditional, physical formats, as it might introduce higher levels of problem gambling or fraudulent behaviour due to its nature of immediate interaction with online gambling experience. However, in most cases the main issue when organisations try to tackle those areas is the absence of high quality data. Since fraud detection related issues face the significant problem of the class imbalance, in this paper we propose a novel system based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for generating synthetic data in order to train a supervised classifier. Our framework Synthetic Data Generation GAN (SDG-GAN), manages to outperformed density based over-sampling methods and improve the classification performance of benchmarks datasets and the real world gambling fraud dataset.
We address the problem of anomaly detection in videos. The goal is to identify unusual behaviours automatically by learning exclusively from normal videos. Most existing approaches are usually data-hungry and have limited generalization abilities. They usually need to be trained on a large number of videos from a target scene to achieve good results in that scene. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot scene-adaptive anomaly detection problem to address the limitations of previous approaches. Our goal is to learn to detect anomalies in a previously unseen scene with only a few frames. A reliable solution for this new problem will have huge potential in real-world applications since it is expensive to collect a massive amount of data for each target scene. We propose a meta-learning based approach for solving this new problem; extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
Detecting objects in aerial images is challenging for at least two reasons: (1) target objects like pedestrians are very small in pixels, making them hardly distinguished from surrounding background; and (2) targets are in general sparsely and non-uniformly distributed, making the detection very inefficient. In this paper, we address both issues inspired by observing that these targets are often clustered. In particular, we propose a Clustered Detection (ClusDet) network that unifies object clustering and detection in an end-to-end framework. The key components in ClusDet include a cluster proposal sub-network (CPNet), a scale estimation sub-network (ScaleNet), and a dedicated detection network (DetecNet). Given an input image, CPNet produces object cluster regions and ScaleNet estimates object scales for these regions. Then, each scale-normalized cluster region is fed into DetecNet for object detection. ClusDet has several advantages over previous solutions: (1) it greatly reduces the number of chips for final object detection and hence achieves high running time efficiency, (2) the cluster-based scale estimation is more accurate than previously used single-object based ones, hence effectively improves the detection for small objects, and (3) the final DetecNet is dedicated for clustered regions and implicitly models the prior context information so as to boost detection accuracy. The proposed method is tested on three popular aerial image datasets including VisDrone, UAVDT and DOTA. In all experiments, ClusDet achieves promising performance in comparison with state-of-the-art detectors. Code will be available in \url{//github.com/fyangneil}.
Being accurate, efficient, and compact is essential to a facial landmark detector for practical use. To simultaneously consider the three concerns, this paper investigates a neat model with promising detection accuracy under wild environments e.g., unconstrained pose, expression, lighting, and occlusion conditions) and super real-time speed on a mobile device. More concretely, we customize an end-to-end single stage network associated with acceleration techniques. During the training phase, for each sample, rotation information is estimated for geometrically regularizing landmark localization, which is then NOT involved in the testing phase. A novel loss is designed to, besides considering the geometrical regularization, mitigate the issue of data imbalance by adjusting weights of samples to different states, such as large pose, extreme lighting, and occlusion, in the training set. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our design and reveal its superior performance over state-of-the-art alternatives on widely-adopted challenging benchmarks, i.e., 300W (including iBUG, LFPW, AFW, HELEN, and XM2VTS) and AFLW. Our model can be merely 2.1Mb of size and reach over 140 fps per face on a mobile phone (Qualcomm ARM 845 processor) with high precision, making it attractive for large-scale or real-time applications. We have made our practical system based on PFLD 0.25X model publicly available at \url{//sites.google.com/view/xjguo/fld} for encouraging comparisons and improvements from the community.
Person re-identification (re-ID) has attracted much attention recently due to its great importance in video surveillance. In general, distance metrics used to identify two person images are expected to be robust under various appearance changes. However, our work observes the extreme vulnerability of existing distance metrics to adversarial examples, generated by simply adding human-imperceptible perturbations to person images. Hence, the security danger is dramatically increased when deploying commercial re-ID systems in video surveillance, especially considering the highly strict requirement of public safety. Although adversarial examples have been extensively applied for classification analysis, it is rarely studied in metric analysis like person re-identification. The most likely reason is the natural gap between the training and testing of re-ID networks, that is, the predictions of a re-ID network cannot be directly used during testing without an effective metric. In this work, we bridge the gap by proposing Adversarial Metric Attack, a parallel methodology to adversarial classification attacks, which can effectively generate adversarial examples for re-ID. Comprehensive experiments clearly reveal the adversarial effects in re-ID systems. Moreover, by benchmarking various adversarial settings, we expect that our work can facilitate the development of robust feature learning with the experimental conclusions we have drawn.
In recent years, deep learning has shown performance breakthroughs in many applications, such as image detection, image segmentation, pose estimation, and speech recognition. However, this comes with a major concern: deep networks have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Adversarial examples are slightly modified inputs that are intentionally designed to cause a misclassification by the model. In the domains of images and speech, the modifications are so small that they are not seen or heard by humans, but nevertheless greatly affect the classification of the model. Deep learning models have been successfully applied to malware detection. In this domain, generating adversarial examples is not straightforward, as small modifications to the bytes of the file could lead to significant changes in its functionality and validity. We introduce a novel loss function for generating adversarial examples specifically tailored for discrete input sets, such as executable bytes. We modify malicious binaries so that they would be detected as benign, while preserving their original functionality, by injecting a small sequence of bytes (payload) in the binary file. We applied this approach to an end-to-end convolutional deep learning malware detection model and show a high rate of detection evasion. Moreover, we show that our generated payload is robust enough to be transferable within different locations of the same file and across different files, and that its entropy is low and similar to that of benign data sections.
Though quite challenging, leveraging large-scale unlabeled or partially labeled images in a cost-effective way has increasingly attracted interests for its great importance to computer vision. To tackle this problem, many Active Learning (AL) methods have been developed. However, these methods mainly define their sample selection criteria within a single image context, leading to the suboptimal robustness and impractical solution for large-scale object detection. In this paper, aiming to remedy the drawbacks of existing AL methods, we present a principled Self-supervised Sample Mining (SSM) process accounting for the real challenges in object detection. Specifically, our SSM process concentrates on automatically discovering and pseudo-labeling reliable region proposals for enhancing the object detector via the introduced cross image validation, i.e., pasting these proposals into different labeled images to comprehensively measure their values under different image contexts. By resorting to the SSM process, we propose a new AL framework for gradually incorporating unlabeled or partially labeled data into the model learning while minimizing the annotating effort of users. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks clearly demonstrate our proposed framework can achieve the comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods with significantly fewer annotations.