Demonstrating the veracity of videos is a longstanding problem that has recently become more urgent and acute. It is extremely hard to accurately detect manipulated videos using content analysis, especially in the face of subtle, yet effective, manipulations, such as frame rate changes or skin tone adjustments. One prominent alternative to content analysis is to securely embed provenance information into videos. However, prior approaches have poor performance and/or granularity that is too coarse. To this end, we construct Vronicle -- a video provenance system that offers fine-grained provenance information and substantially better performance. It allows a video consumer to authenticate the camera that originated the video and the exact sequence of video filters that were subsequently applied to it. Vronicle exploits the increasing popularity and availability of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) on many types of computing platforms. One contribution of Vronicle is the design of provenance information that allows the consumer to verify various aspects of the video, thereby defeating numerous fake-video creation methods. Vronicle's adversarial model allows for a powerful adversary that can manipulate the video (e.g., in transit) and the software state outside the TEE. Another contribution is the use of fixed-function Intel SGX enclaves to post-process videos. This design facilitates verification of provenance information. We present a prototype implementation of Vronicle (to be open sourced), which relies on current technologies, making it readily deployable. Our evaluation demonstrates that Vronicle's performance is well-suited for offline use-cases.
Monitoring behaviour in smart homes using sensors can offer insights into changes in the independent ability and long-term health of residents. Passive Infrared motion sensors (PIRs) are standard, however may not accurately track the full duration of movement. They also require line-of-sight to detect motion which can restrict performance and ensures they must be visible to residents. Channel State Information (CSI) is a low cost, unintrusive form of radio sensing which can monitor movement but also offers opportunities to generate rich data. We have developed a novel, self-calibrating motion detection system which uses CSI data collected and processed on a stock Raspberry Pi 4. This system exploits the correlation between CSI frames, on which we perform variance analysis using our algorithm to accurately measure the full period of a resident's movement. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach in several real-world environments. Experiments conducted demonstrate that activity start and end time can be accurately detected for motion examples of different intensities at different locations.
Labelled networks are an important class of data, naturally appearing in numerous applications in science and engineering. A typical inference goal is to determine how the vertex labels (or features) affect the network's structure. In this work, we introduce a new generative model, the feature-first block model (FFBM), that facilitates the use of rich queries on labelled networks. We develop a Bayesian framework and devise a two-level Markov chain Monte Carlo approach to efficiently sample from the relevant posterior distribution of the FFBM parameters. This allows us to infer if and how the observed vertex-features affect macro-structure. We apply the proposed methods to a variety of network data to extract the most important features along which the vertices are partitioned. The main advantages of the proposed approach are that the whole feature-space is used automatically and that features can be rank-ordered implicitly according to impact.
In this paper, we present a framework that unites obstacle avoidance and deliberate physical interaction for robotic manipulators. As humans and robots begin to coexist in work and household environments, pure collision avoidance is insufficient, as human-robot contact is inevitable and, in some situations, desired. Our work enables manipulators to anticipate, detect, and act on contact. To achieve this, we allow limited deviation from the robot's original trajectory through velocity reduction and motion restrictions. Then, if contact occurs, a robot can detect it and maneuver based on a novel dynamic contact thresholding algorithm. The core contribution of this work is dynamic contact thresholding, which allows a manipulator with onboard proximity sensors to track nearby objects and reduce contact forces in anticipation of a collision. Our framework elicits natural behavior during physical human-robot interaction. We evaluate our system on a variety of scenarios using the Franka Emika Panda robot arm; collectively, our results demonstrate that our contribution is not only able to avoid and react on contact, but also anticipate it.
The threat posed by misinformation and disinformation is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. Provenance is designed to help combat this threat by warning users when the content they are looking at may be misinformation or disinformation. It is also designed to improve media literacy among its users and ultimately reduce susceptibility to the threat among vulnerable groups within society. The Provenance browser plugin checks the content that users see on the Internet and social media and provides warnings in their browser or social media feed. Unlike similar plugins, which require human experts to provide evaluations and can only provide simple binary warnings, Provenance's state of the art technology does not require human input and it analyses seven aspects of the content users see and provides warnings where necessary.
While the publication of datasets in scientific repositories has become broadly recognised, the repositories tend to have increasing semantic-related problems. For instance, they present various data reuse obstacles for machine-actionable processes, especially in biological repositories, hampering the reproducibility of scientific experiments. An example of these shortcomings is the GenBank database. We propose GAP, an innovative data model to enhance the semantic data meaning to address these issues. The model focuses on converging related approaches like data provenance, semantic interoperability, FAIR principles, and nanopublications. Our experiments include a prototype to scrape genomic data and trace them to nanopublications as a proof of concept. For this, (meta)data are stored in a three-level nanopub data model. The first level is related to a target organism, specifying data in terms of biological taxonomy. The second level focuses on the biological strains of the target, the central part of our contribution. The strains express information related to deciphered (meta)data of the genetic variations of the genomic material. The third level stores related scientific papers (meta)data. We expect it will offer higher data storage flexibility and more extensive interoperability with other data sources by incorporating and adopting associated approaches to store genomic data in the proposed model.
A key challenge of big data analytics is how to collect a large volume of (labeled) data. Crowdsourcing aims to address this challenge via aggregating and estimating high-quality data (e.g., sentiment label for text) from pervasive clients/users. Existing studies on crowdsourcing focus on designing new methods to improve the aggregated data quality from unreliable/noisy clients. However, the security aspects of such crowdsourcing systems remain under-explored to date. We aim to bridge this gap in this work. Specifically, we show that crowdsourcing is vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, in which malicious clients provide carefully crafted data to corrupt the aggregated data. We formulate our proposed data poisoning attacks as an optimization problem that maximizes the error of the aggregated data. Our evaluation results on one synthetic and two real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed attacks can substantially increase the estimation errors of the aggregated data. We also propose two defenses to reduce the impact of malicious clients. Our empirical results show that the proposed defenses can substantially reduce the estimation errors of the data poisoning attacks.
In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the imbalance problems in object detection. To analyze the problems in a systematic manner, we introduce a problem-based taxonomy. Following this taxonomy, we discuss each problem in depth and present a unifying yet critical perspective on the solutions in the literature. In addition, we identify major open issues regarding the existing imbalance problems as well as imbalance problems that have not been discussed before. Moreover, in order to keep our review up to date, we provide an accompanying webpage which catalogs papers addressing imbalance problems, according to our problem-based taxonomy. Researchers can track newer studies on this webpage available at: //github.com/kemaloksuz/ObjectDetectionImbalance .
During the recent years, correlation filters have shown dominant and spectacular results for visual object tracking. The types of the features that are employed in these family of trackers significantly affect the performance of visual tracking. The ultimate goal is to utilize robust features invariant to any kind of appearance change of the object, while predicting the object location as properly as in the case of no appearance change. As the deep learning based methods have emerged, the study of learning features for specific tasks has accelerated. For instance, discriminative visual tracking methods based on deep architectures have been studied with promising performance. Nevertheless, correlation filter based (CFB) trackers confine themselves to use the pre-trained networks which are trained for object classification problem. To this end, in this manuscript the problem of learning deep fully convolutional features for the CFB visual tracking is formulated. In order to learn the proposed model, a novel and efficient backpropagation algorithm is presented based on the loss function of the network. The proposed learning framework enables the network model to be flexible for a custom design. Moreover, it alleviates the dependency on the network trained for classification. Extensive performance analysis shows the efficacy of the proposed custom design in the CFB tracking framework. By fine-tuning the convolutional parts of a state-of-the-art network and integrating this model to a CFB tracker, which is the top performing one of VOT2016, 18% increase is achieved in terms of expected average overlap, and tracking failures are decreased by 25%, while maintaining the superiority over the state-of-the-art methods in OTB-2013 and OTB-2015 tracking datasets.
Network Virtualization is one of the most promising technologies for future networking and considered as a critical IT resource that connects distributed, virtualized Cloud Computing services and different components such as storage, servers and application. Network Virtualization allows multiple virtual networks to coexist on same shared physical infrastructure simultaneously. One of the crucial keys in Network Virtualization is Virtual Network Embedding, which provides a method to allocate physical substrate resources to virtual network requests. In this paper, we investigate Virtual Network Embedding strategies and related issues for resource allocation of an Internet Provider(InP) to efficiently embed virtual networks that are requested by Virtual Network Operators(VNOs) who share the same infrastructure provided by the InP. In order to achieve that goal, we design a heuristic Virtual Network Embedding algorithm that simultaneously embeds virtual nodes and virtual links of each virtual network request onto physic infrastructure. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our proposed scheme improves significantly the performance of Virtual Network Embedding by enhancing the long-term average revenue as well as acceptance ratio and resource utilization of virtual network requests compared to prior algorithms.
Object detection is considered one of the most challenging problems in this field of computer vision, as it involves the combination of object classification and object localization within a scene. Recently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been demonstrated to achieve superior object detection performance compared to other approaches, with YOLOv2 (an improved You Only Look Once model) being one of the state-of-the-art in DNN-based object detection methods in terms of both speed and accuracy. Although YOLOv2 can achieve real-time performance on a powerful GPU, it still remains very challenging for leveraging this approach for real-time object detection in video on embedded computing devices with limited computational power and limited memory. In this paper, we propose a new framework called Fast YOLO, a fast You Only Look Once framework which accelerates YOLOv2 to be able to perform object detection in video on embedded devices in a real-time manner. First, we leverage the evolutionary deep intelligence framework to evolve the YOLOv2 network architecture and produce an optimized architecture (referred to as O-YOLOv2 here) that has 2.8X fewer parameters with just a ~2% IOU drop. To further reduce power consumption on embedded devices while maintaining performance, a motion-adaptive inference method is introduced into the proposed Fast YOLO framework to reduce the frequency of deep inference with O-YOLOv2 based on temporal motion characteristics. Experimental results show that the proposed Fast YOLO framework can reduce the number of deep inferences by an average of 38.13%, and an average speedup of ~3.3X for objection detection in video compared to the original YOLOv2, leading Fast YOLO to run an average of ~18FPS on a Nvidia Jetson TX1 embedded system.