Question: Stepwise nonparametric margin maximization for facial recognition.

This paper explores the challenges faced by the conventional Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) algorithm when applied to high-dimensional data, particularly in the context of face recognition. Given the vast feature spaces associated with even low-definition face images (e.g., 64x64 pixels, resulting in 4096 dimensions), traditional LDA methods struggle with significant computational and statistical obstacles. Firstly, the computational burden of handling such large matrices (e.g., 4096x4096) becomes overwhelming, particularly when it comes to eigenvalue calculations. Secondly, these matrices are often singular, requiring a prohibitive number of training images (at least 16 million) to ensure non-singularity. Due to these limitations, the direct application of LDA to high-dimensional data like face images is deemed impractical. Consequently, an alternative dimensionality reduction step is typically required before LDA can be effectively utilized. In the field of face recognition, various strategies have been proposed to address this issue. A prominent solution is the two-stage Principal Component Analysis (PCA) followed by LDA, as detailed in [2,3], which has gained considerable attention for its effectiveness in managing high-dimensional data challenges in face recognition tasks.

This paper describes a visual object detection framework that is capable of processing images extremely rapidly while achieving high detection rates. There are three key contributions. The first is the introduction of a new image representation called the “Integral Image” which allows the features used by our detector to be computed very quickly. The second is a learning algorithm, based on AdaBoost, which selects a small number of critical visual features and yields extremely efficient classifiers [6]. The third contribution is a method for combining classifiers in a “cascade” which allows background regions of the image to be quickly discarded while spending more computation on promising object-like regions. A set of experiments in the domain of face detection are presented. The system yields face detection performace comparable to the best previous systems [18, 13, 16, 12, 1]. Implemented on a conventional desktop, face detection proceeds at 15 frames per second.

In this paper, a new dynamic facial expression recognition method is proposed. Dynamic facial expression recognition is formulated as a longitudinal groupwise registration problem. The main contributions of this method lie in the following aspects: 1) subject-specific facial feature movements of different expressions are described by a diffeomorphic growth model; 2) salient longitudinal facial expression atlas is built for each expression by a sparse groupwise image registration method, which can describe the overall facial feature changes among the whole population and can suppress the bias due to large intersubject facial variations; and 3) both the image appearance information in spatial domain and topological evolution information in temporal domain are used to guide recognition by a sparse representation method. The proposed framework has been extensively evaluated on five databases for different applications: the extended Cohn-Kanade, MMI, FERA, and AFEW databases for dynamic facial expression recognition, and UNBC-McMaster database for spontaneous pain expression monitoring. This framework is also compared with several state-of-the-art dynamic facial expression recognition methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the recognition rates of the new method are consistently higher than other methods under comparison.

In this paper, we introduce the DEEP-SEE FACE framework, an assistive device designed to improve cognition, interaction, and communication of visually impaired (VI) people in social encounters. The proposed approach jointly exploits computer vision algorithms (region proposal networks, ATLAS tracking and global, and low-level image descriptors) and deep convolutional neural networks in order to detect, track, and recognize, in real-time, various persons existent in the video streams. The major contribution of the paper concerns a global, fixed-size face representation that takes into the account of various video frames while remaining independent of the length of the image sequence. To this purpose, we introduce an effective weight adaptation scheme that is able to determine the relevance assigned to each face instance, depending on the frame degree of motion/camera blur, scale variation, and compression artifacts. Another relevant contribution involves a hard negative mining stage that helps us differentiating between known and unknown face identities. The experimental results, carried out on a large-scale data set, validate the proposed methodology with an average accuracy and recognition rates superior to 92%. When tested in real life, indoor/outdoor scenarios, the DEEP-SEE FACE prototype proves to be effective and easy to use, allowing the VI people to access visual information during social events.

Human faces undergo considerable amounts of variations with aging. While face recognition systems have been proven to be sensitive to factors such as illumination and pose, their sensitivity to facial aging effects is yet to be studied. How does age progression affect the similarity between a pair of face images of an individual? What is the confidence associated with establishing the identity between a pair of age separated face images? In this paper, we develop a Bayesian age difference classifier that classifies face images of individuals based on age differences and performs face verification across age progression. Further, we study the similarity of faces across age progression. Since age separated face images invariably differ in illumination and pose, we propose preprocessing methods for minimizing such variations. Experimental results using a database comprising of pairs of face images that were retrieved from the passports of 465 individuals are presented. The verification system for faces separated by as many as nine years, attains an equal error rate of 8.5%

Face recognition based on the analysis of 3D scans has been an active research subject over the last few years. However, the impact of the resolution of 3D scans on the recognition process has not been addressed explicitly yet being of primal importance after the introduction of a new generation of low cost 4D scanning devices. These devices are capable of combined depth/rgb acquisition over time with a low resolution compared to the 3D scanners typically used in 3D face recognition benchmarks. In this paper, we define a super-resolution model for 3D faces by which a sequence of low-resolution 3D scans can be processed to extract a higher resolution 3D face model, namely the superface model. The proposed solution relies on the Scaled ICP procedure to align the low-resolution 3D models with each other and estimate the value of the high-resolution 3D model based on the statistics of values of the lowresolution scans in corresponding points. The approach is validated on a data set that includes, for each subject, one sequence of low-resolution 3D face scans and one ground-truth high-resolution 3D face model acquired through a high-resolution 3D scanner. In this way, results of the super-resolution process are evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively by measuring the error between the superface and the ground-truth.

We introduce a method of feature selection for Support Vector Machines. The method is based upon finding those features which minimize bounds on the leave-one-out error. This search can be efficiently performed via gradient descent. The resulting algorithms are shown to be superior to some standard feature selection algorithms on both toy data and real-life problems of face recognition, pedestrian detection and analyzing DNA micro array data.

Proc. of the International Conference on Computer Vision, Corfu (Sept. 1999) An object recognition system has been developed that uses a new class of local image features. The features are invariant to image scaling, translation, and rotation, and partially invariant to illumination changes and affine or 3D projection. These features share similar properties with neurons in inferior temporal cortex that are used for object recognition in primate vision. Features are efficiently detected through a staged filtering approach that identifies stable points in scale space. Image keys are created that allow for local geometric deformations by representing blurred image gradients in multiple orientation planes and at multiple scales. The keys are used as input to a nearest-neighbor indexing method that identifies candidate object matches. Final verification of each match is achieved by finding a low-residual least-squares solution for the unknown model parameters. Experimental results show that robust object recognition can be achieved in cluttered partially-occluded images with a computation time of under 2 seconds.

We present a class of extremely efficient CNN models, MobileFaceNets, which use less than 1 million parameters and are specifically tailored for high-accuracy real-time face verification on mobile and embedded devices. We first make a simple analysis on the weakness of common mobile networks for face verification. The weakness has been well overcome by our specifically designed MobileFaceNets. Under the same experimental conditions, our MobileFaceNets achieve significantly superior accuracy as well as more than 2 times actual speedup over MobileNetV2. After trained by ArcFace loss on the refined MS-Celeb-1M, our single MobileFaceNet of 4.0MB size achieves 99.55% accuracy on LFW and 92.59% TAR@FAR1e-6 on MegaFace, which is even comparable to state-of-the-art big CNN models of hundreds MB size. The fastest one of MobileFaceNets has an actual inference time of 18 milliseconds on a mobile phone. For face verification, MobileFaceNets achieve significantly improved efficiency over previous state-of-the-art mobile CNNs.

Algorithms that produce classifiers with large margins, such as support vector machines (SVMs), AdaBoost, etc. are receiving more and more attention in the literature. This paper presents a real application of SVMs for synthetic aperture radar automatic target recognition (SAR/ATR) and compares the result with conventional classifiers. The SVMs are tested for classification both in closed and open sets (recognition). Experimental results showed that SVMs outperform conventional classifiers in target classification. Moreover, SVMs with the Gaussian kernels are able to form a local " bounded " decision region around each class that presents better rejection to confusers.

Facial expressions are one of the most powerful, natural and immediate means for human being to communicate their emotions and intensions. Recognition of facial expression has many applications including human-computer interaction, cognitive science, human emotion analysis, personality development etc. In this paper, we propose a new method for the recognition of facial expressions from single image frame that uses combination of appearance and geometric features with support vector machines classification. In general, appearance features for the recognition of facial expressions are computed by dividing face region into regular grid (holistic representation). But, in this paper we extracted region specific appearance features by dividing the whole face region into domain specific local regions. Geometric features are also extracted from corresponding domain specific regions. In addition, important local regions are determined by using incremental search approach which results in the reduction of feature dimension and improvement in recognition accuracy. The results of facial expressions recognition using features from domain specific regions are also compared with the results obtained using holistic representation. The performance of the proposed facial expression recognition system has been validated on publicly available extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) facial expression data sets.


Question: Stepwise nonparametric margin maximization for face recognition.

This comprehensive review explores the landscape of face recognition research, focusing on both still and video-based methodologies. The growing interest in face recognition can be attributed to two primary factors: the expanding market for commercial and law enforcement applications, and the advancements in technology following decades of intensive study. While current machine recognition systems have achieved a degree of sophistication, their effectiveness is often compromised in real-world scenarios, particularly when dealing with variations in lighting and pose. This highlights the significant gap between current systems and the capabilities of the human visual system. The paper offers an exhaustive and critical analysis of the recent developments in the field of face recognition. Our dual objectives are to provide a contemporary overview of the existing research and to contribute insights into the challenges and opportunities in the automated recognition of faces. To ensure a thorough survey, we classify various recognition techniques and provide in-depth descriptions of prominent methods within each category. Furthermore, we address related topics such as psychological studies, system evaluation, and the impact of illumination and pose variations on recognition accuracy.

Face recognition is receiving a significant attention due to the need of facing important challenges when developing real applications under unconstrained environments. The three most important challenges are facial occlusion, the problem of dealing with a single sample per subject (SSPS) and facial expression. This paper describes and analyzes various strategies that have been developed recently for overcoming these three major challenges that seriously affect the performance of real face recognition systems. This survey is organized in three parts. In the first part, approaches to tackle the challenge of facial occlusion are classified, illustrated and compared. The second part briefly describes the SSPS problem and the associated solutions. In the third part, facial expression challenge is illustrated. In addition, pros and cons of each technique are stated. Finally, several improvements for future research are suggested, providing a useful perspective for addressing new research in face recognition.

This thesis focuses on the area of face processing and aims at designing a reliable framework to facilitate face, age, and gender recognition. A Bag-of-Words framework has been optimized for the task of face recognition by evaluating different feature descriptors and different bag-of-words configurations. More specifically, we choose a compact set of features (e.g., descriptors, window locations, window sizes, dictionary sizes, etc.) in order to produce the highest possible rate of accuracy. Experiments on a challenging dataset shows that our framework achieves a better level of accuracy when compared to other popular approaches such as dimension reduction techniques, edge detection operators, and texture and shape feature extractors. The second contribution of this thesis is the proposition of a general framework for age and gender classification. Although the vast majority of the existing solutions focus on a single visual descriptor that often only encodes a certain characteristic of the image regions, this thesis aims at integrating multiple feature types. For this purpose, feature selection is employed to obtain more accurate and robust facial descriptors. Once descriptors have been computed, a compact set of features is chosen, which facilitates facial image processing for age and gender analysis. In addition to this, a new color descriptor (CLR-LBP) is proposed and the results obtained is shown to be comparable to those of other pre-existing color descriptors. The experimental results indicates that our age and gender framework outperforms other proposed methods when examined on two challenging databases, where face objects are present with different expressions and levels of illumination. This achievement demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed solution and allows us to achieve a higher accuracy over the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Compressive Sensing has become one of the standard methods of face recognition within the literature. We show, however, that the sparsity assumption which underpins much of this work is not supported by the data. This lack of sparsity in the data means that compressive sensing approach cannot be guaranteed to recover the exact signal, and therefore that sparse approximations may not deliver the robustness or performance desired. In this vein we show that a simple £2 approach to the face recognition problem is not only significantly more accurate than the state-of-the-art approach, it is also more robust, and much faster. These results are demonstrated on the publicly available YaleB and AR face datasets but have implications for the application of Compressive Sensing more broadly.

Face representation is a crucial step of face recognition systems. An optimal face representation should be discriminative, robust, compact, and very easyto-implement. While numerous hand-crafted and learning-based representations have been proposed, considerable room for improvement is still present. In this paper, we present a very easy-to-implement deep learning framework for face representation. Our method bases on a new structure of deep network (called Pyramid CNN). The proposed Pyramid CNN adopts a greedy-filter-and-down-sample operation, which enables the training procedure to be very fast and computationefficient. In addition, the structure of Pyramid CNN can naturally incorporate feature sharing across multi-scale face representations, increasing the discriminative ability of resulting representation. Our basic network is capable of achieving high recognition accuracy (85.8% on LFW benchmark) with only 8 dimension representation. When extended to feature-sharing Pyramid CNN, our system achieves the state-of-the-art performance (97.3%) on LFW benchmark. We also introduce a new benchmark of realistic face images on social network and validate our proposed representation has a good ability of generalization.

Look-up table (LUT) classifiers are often used to construct concise classifiers for rapid object detection due to their favorable convergent ability. However, their poor generalization ability imposes restrictions on their applications. A novel improvement to LUT classifiers is proposed in this paper where the new confident of each partition is recalculated by smoothing the old ones within its neighbor partitions. The new confidents are more generalizable than the old ones because each of the new predicts is supported by more training samples and the high frequency components in the old predict sequences are suppressed greatly through smoothing operation. Both weight sum smoothing method and confident smoothing method are introduced here, which all bring negligible extra computation cost in training time and no extra cost in test time. Experimental results in the domain of upright frontal face detection using smoothed LUT classifiers with identical smoothing width and smoothing factor for all partitions based on Haar-like rectangle features show that smoothed LUT classifiers generalize much better and also converge more or less worse than unsmooth LUT classifiers. Specifically, smoothed LUT classifiers can delicately balance between generalization ability and convergent ability through carefully set smoothing parameters.

In this research, a design and implementation of real-time face recognition engine using compact features vector extracted by linear binary pattern (LBP) and zoned discrete cosine transforms (DCT) analysis is proposed for electronics key. The function of LBP is to normalize the lighting variations of the input face image and the function of zoned DCT is to define the local descriptors of the face image. In order to get more compact features vector, the predictive LDA is employed for dimensional reduction. The aims of this research is to develop fast and strong face recognition that can be implemented for electronic key which will be implemented for substituting current security system (PIN and password). In addition, the recognition engine is also designed for real time face recognition which can work on hardware having limited resources such as Intel atom computer, raspberry pi, and android smart phone. The experimental results show that the proposed engine provide high enough recognition rate, and small false rejection rate (FRR) and false acceptance rate (FAR). In addition, the engine needs short processing time.

Recently, several machine learning methods for gender classification from frontal facial images have been proposed. Their variety suggests that there is not a unique or generic solution to this problem. In addition to the diversity of methods, there is also a diversity of benchmarks used to assess them. This gave us the motivation for our work: to select and compare in a concise but reliable way the main state-of-the-art methods used in automatic gender recognition. As expected, there is no overall winner. The winner, based on the accuracy of the classification, depends on the type of benchmarks used.

In this paper we present a comprehensive and critical survey of face detection algorithms. Face detection is a necessary first-step in face recognition systems, with the purpose of localizing and extracting the face region from the background. It also has several applications in areas such as content-based image retrieval, video coding, video conferencing, crowd surveillance, and intelligent human–computer interfaces. However, it was not until recently that the face detection problem received considerable attention among researchers. The human face is a dynamic object and has a high degree of variability in its apperance, which makes face detection a difficult problem in computer vision. A wide variety of techniques have been proposed, ranging from simple edge-based algorithms to composite high-level approaches utilizing advanced pattern recognition methods. The algorithms presented in this paper are classified as either feature-based or image-based and are discussed in terms of their technical approach and performance. Due to the lack of standardized tests, we do not provide a comprehensive comparative evaluation, but in cases where results are reported on common datasets, comparisons are presented. We also give a presentation of some proposed applications and possible application areas. c © 2001 Academic Press

Face detection is one of the challenging problems in image processing. This report proposes a novel technique for detecting faces in color images using skin color model algorithm combined with skin likely-hood, skin Segmentation, Morphological operation and Template matching. Color images with skin color in the chromatic and pure color space YCrCb, which separates luminance and chrominance components. A Gaussian probability density is estimated from skin samples, collected from different ethnic groups, via the maximum-likelihood criterion. Adaptive thresholding for segmentation to localize the faces within the detected skin regions. Further, mathematical morphological operators are used to remove noisy regions and fill holes in the skin-color region, so that candidate human face regions can be extracted. These systems can achieve high detection accuracy, high detection speed and reduce the false detecting rate. The two methodology used for the Skin Segmentation is YCbCr and RGB Model. In YCbCr model both the skin colour and texture of the image can be used to identify the particular object in the image,where as in RGB model only the skin color has to be used for identification of the person.Hence the YCbCr model is better than the RGB model . From our analysis we conclude that the new approach in modeling skin color can achieve good detection success rate. The algorithm gives computationally a very efficient as well as an accurate approach for skin detection. The performance of different color space may be dependent on the method used to model the color for skin pixel. Keywords—Gaussian probability, YCrCb,RGB Model

One key challenge of facial trait recognition is the large non-rigid appearance variations due to some irrelevant real world factors, such as viewpoint and expression changes. In this paper, we explore how the shape information, i.e. facial landmark positions, can be explicitly deployed into the popular Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture to disentangle such irrelevant non-rigid appearance variations. First, instead of using fixed kernels, we propose a kernel adaptation method to dynamically determine the convolutional kernels according to the spatial distribution of facial landmarks, which helps learning more robust features. Second, motivated by the intuition that different local facial regions may demand different adaptation functions, we further propose a tree-structured convolutional architecture to hierarchically fuse multiple local adaptive CNN subnetworks. Comprehensive experiments on WebFace, Morph II and MultiPIE databases well validate the effectiveness of the proposed kernel adaptation method and tree-structured convolutional architecture for facial trait recognition tasks, including identity, age and gender recognition. For all the tasks, the proposed architecture consistently achieves the state-of-the-art performances.


Question: Stepwise nonparametric margin maximum criterion for face recognition implementation.

This paper presents a novel approach for visual matching of images for face recognition and image retrieval, employing a probabilistic similarity measure rooted in Bayesian (MAP) analysis of image discrepancies. The superiority of this probabilistic matching technique over traditional Euclidean nearest-neighbor eigenface matching was evident in the results of DARPA's 1996 "FERET" face recognition competition, where this Bayesian matching algorithm emerged as the top performer. Moreover, the paper introduces a streamlined method for substituting the computationally expensive nonlinear (on-line) Bayesian similarity calculations with less costly linear (off-line) subspace projections and basic Euclidean norms. This results in a notable acceleration in computational speed, crucial for implementation with extensive databases. This work is subject to copyright restrictions and may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for commercial purposes without permission from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. Reproduction for nonprofit educational and research purposes is permitted under the condition that all whole or partial copies include a notice of such permission, acknowledgment of the authors and their contributions, and all relevant portions of the copyright notice. For any other form of copying, reproduction, or republishing, a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. is required. All rights are reserved. Copyright © Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., 2002. 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139. This paper was published in Pattern Recognition, Vol. 33, No. 11, pages 1771-1782, November 2000.

Real-world face recognition systems often have to face the single sample per person (SSPP) problem, that is, only a single training sample for each person is enrolled in the database. In this case, many of the popular face recognition methods fail to work well due to the inability to learn the discriminatory information specific to the persons to be identified. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an Adaptive Generic Learning (AGL) method, which adapts a generic discriminant model to better distinguish the persons with single face sample. As a specific implementation of the AGL, a Coupled Linear Representation (CLR) algorithm is proposed to infer, based on the generic training set, the within-class scatter matrix and the class mean of each person given its single enrolled sample. Thus, the traditional Fisher's Linear Discriminant (FLD) can be applied to SSPP task. Experiments on the FERET and a challenging passport face database show that the proposed method can achieve better results compared with other common solutions to the SSPP problem.

Iris biometric is one of the most reliable biometrics with respect to performance. However, this reliability is a function of the ideality of the data. One of the most important steps in processing nonideal data is reliable and precise segmentation of the iris pattern from remaining background. In this paper, a segmentation methodology that aims at compensating various nonidealities contained in iris images during segmentation is proposed. The virtue of this methodology lies in its capability to reliably segment nonideal imagery that is simultaneously affected with such factors as specular reflection, blur, lighting variation, occlusion, and off-angle images. We demonstrate the robustness of our segmentation methodology by evaluating ideal and nonideal data sets, namely, the Chinese Academy of Sciences iris data version 3 interval subdirectory, the iris challenge evaluation data, the West Virginia University (WVU) data, and the WVU off-angle data. Furthermore, we compare our performance to that of our implementation of Camus and Wildes's algorithm and Masek's algorithm. We demonstrate considerable improvement in segmentation performance over the formerly mentioned algorithms.

Among various skin detection methods, Skin Probability Map (SPM) method is an effective one. Though SPM method possesses high true acceptance rate (TAR), its false acceptance rate (FAR) is unacceptable in some cases. The reason is that SPM method only use pixel-level color information. This paper proposes an improved skin detection method that integrates color, texture and space information. After color filter, a texture filter is constructed based on texture features extracted form Gabor wavelet transform. Texture filter will further filter non-skin pixels, meanwhile, it may also filter some skin pixel. To compensate the loss, after texture filter, a marker driven watershed transform is then used to grow already obtained skin regions. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve better performance than that of SPM.

Human faces undergo considerable amounts of variations with aging. While face recognition systems have been proven to be sensitive to factors such as illumination and pose, their sensitivity to facial aging effects is yet to be studied. How does age progression affect the similarity between a pair of face images of an individual? What is the confidence associated with establishing the identity between a pair of age separated face images? In this paper, we develop a Bayesian age difference classifier that classifies face images of individuals based on age differences and performs face verification across age progression. Further, we study the similarity of faces across age progression. Since age separated face images invariably differ in illumination and pose, we propose preprocessing methods for minimizing such variations. Experimental results using a database comprising of pairs of face images that were retrieved from the passports of 465 individuals are presented. The verification system for faces separated by as many as nine years, attains an equal error rate of 8.5%

Multibiometric systems are being increasingly de- ployed in many large-scale biometric applications (e.g., FBI-IAFIS, UIDAI system in India) because they have several advantages such as lower error rates and larger population coverage compared to unibiometric systems. However, multibiometric systems require storage of multiple biometric templates (e.g., fingerprint, iris, and face) for each user, which results in increased risk to user privacy and system security. One method to protect individual templates is to store only the secure sketch generated from the corresponding template using a biometric cryptosystem. This requires storage of multiple sketches. In this paper, we propose a feature-level fusion framework to simultaneously protect multiple templates of a user as a single secure sketch. Our main contributions include: (1) practical implementation of the proposed feature-level fusion framework using two well-known biometric cryptosystems, namery,fuzzy vault and fuzzy commitment, and (2) detailed analysis of the trade-off between matching accuracy and security in the proposed multibiometric cryptosystems based on two different databases (one real and one virtual multimodal database), each containing the three most popular biometric modalities, namely, fingerprint, iris, and face. Experimental results show that both the multibiometric cryptosystems proposed here have higher security and matching performance compared to their unibiometric counterparts.

In this paper, we propose an unsupervised face clustering algorithm called “Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering” (PAHC) that exploits the local structure of deep representations. In the proposed method, a similarity measure between deep features is computed by evaluating linear SVM margins. SVMs are trained using nearest neighbors of sample data, and thus do not require any external training data. Clus- ters are then formed by thresholding the similarity scores. We evaluate the clustering performance using three challenging un- constrained face datasets, including Celebrity in Frontal-Profile (CFP), IARPA JANUS Benchmark A (IJB-A), and JANUS Challenge Set 3 (JANUS CS3) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we also show that the proposed clustering algorithm can be applied to curate a set of large-scale and noisy training dataset while maintaining sufficient amount of images and their variations due to nuisance factors. The face verification performance on JANUS CS3 improves significantly by finetuning a DCNN model with the curated MS-Celeb-1M dataset which contains over three million face images.

The primary problem dealt with in this paper is the following. Given some description of a visual object, find that object in an actual photograph. Part of the solution to this problem is the specification of a descriptive scheme, and a metric on which to base the decision of "goodness" of matching or detection.

Sensitivity to variations in illumination is a fundamental and challenging problem in face recognition. In this paper, we describe a new method based on symmetric shape-from-shading (SFS) to develop a face recognition system that is robust to changes in illumination. The basic idea of this approach is to use the symmetric SFS algorithm as a tool to obtain a prototype image which is illumination-normalized. Applying traditional SFS algorithms to real images of complex objects (in terms of their shape and albedo variations) such as faces is very challenging. It is shown that the symmetric SFS algorithm has a unique point-wise solution. In practice, given a single real face image with complex shape and varying albedo, even the symmetric SFS algorithm cannot guarantee the recovery of accurate and complete shape information. For the particular problem of face recognition, we utilize the fact that all faces share a similar shape making the direct computation of the prototype image from a given face image feasible. The symmetry property has been used to develop a new model-based source-from-shading algorithm which is more accurate than existing algorithms. Using the symmetric property, we are also able to gain insight into how changes in illumination a ect eigen-subspace based face recognition systems. Finally, to demonstrate the e cacy of our method, we have applied it to several publicly available face databases. We rst compare a new illumination-invariant measure to the measure proposed in (Jacobs et al., 1998), and then demonstrate signi cant performance improvement over existing face recognition systems using PCA and/or LDA for images acquired under variable lighting conditions.

The goal of face detection is to locate all regions that contain a face. This paper has a simple face detection procedure which has two major steps, first to segment skin region from an image, and second, to decide these regions contain human face or not. Our procedure is based on skin color segmentation and human face features (knowledge-based approach). In this paper, we used RGB, YCbCr, CEILAB (L*a*b) and HSV color models for skin color segmentation. These color models with thresholds, help to remove non skin like pixels from an image. We tested each skin region, that skin region is actually represents a human face or not, by using human face features based on knowledge of geometrical properties of human face. The experiment result shows that, the algorithm gives hopeful results. At last, we concluded this paper and proposed future work.

A facial recognition system is a computer application for automatically identifying or verifying a person from a digital image or a video frame from a video source. One of the way is to do this is by comparing selected facial features from the image and a facial database. It is typically used in security systems and can be compared to other biometrics such as fingerprint or eye iris recognition systems. In this paper we focus on 3-D facial recognition system and biometric facial recognition system. We do critics on facial recognition system giving effectiveness and weaknesses. This paper also introduces scope of recognition system in India. Face recognition has received substantial attention from researchers in biometrics, pattern recognition field and computer vision communities. Face recognition can be applied in Security measure at Air ports, Passport verification, Criminals list verification in police department, Visa processing, Verification of Electoral identification and Card Security measure at ATM’s. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a technique among the most common feature extraction techniques used in Face Recognition. In this paper, a face recognition system for personal identification and verification using Principal Component Analysis with different distance classifiers is proposed. The test results in the ORL face database produces interesting results from the point of view of recognition success, rate, and robustness of the face recognition algorithm. Different classifiers were used to match the image of a person to a class (a subject) obtained from the training data. These classifiers are: the City-Block Distance Classifier, the Euclidian distance classifier, the Squared Euclidian Distance Classifier, and the Squared Chebyshev distance Classifier.


Question: Stepwise nonparametric margin maximum criterion for face recognition.

This document explores the parameterization of a stochastic model for human face identification, highlighting its application in image recognition tasks. The utilization of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for modeling non-stationary vector time series has proven effective in speech applications and has been extended to various image recognition challenges, including human face identification [6, 7, 9]. Faces, when divided into discernible regions like the mouth, eyes, and nose, can be mapped to the states of an HMM, facilitating a top-down recognition approach that rivals the performance of established algorithms such as eigenfaces [8]. However, the selection of HMM parameters in prior studies was largely based on subjective intuition. Herein, we present empirical findings that elucidate how identification accuracy is influenced by HMM parameters, guiding the optimal choice of these parameters. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 outlines the HMM-based methodology; Section 3 delves into the training and recognition procedures; Section 4 delineates the experimental framework; Section 5 showcases the identification outcomes; and Section 6 summarizes the paper's conclusions.

Growing number of surveillance and biometric applications seek to recognize the face of individuals appearing in the viewpoint of video cameras. Systems for video-based FR can be subjected to challenging operational environments, where the appearance of faces captured with video cameras varies significantly due to changes in pose, illumination, scale, blur, expression, occlusion, etc. In particular, with still-to-video FR, a limited number of high-quality facial images are typically captured for enrollment of an individual to the system, whereas an abundance facial trajectories can be captured using video cameras during operations, under different viewpoints and uncontrolled conditions. This paper presents a deep learning architecture that can learn a robust facial representation for each target individual during enrollment, and then accurately compare the facial regions of interest (ROIs) extracted from a still reference image (of the target individual) with ROIs extracted from live or archived videos. An ensemble of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) named HaarNet is proposed, where a trunk network first extracts features from the global appearance of the facial ROIs (holistic representation). Then, three branch networks effectively embed asymmetrical and complex facial features (local representations) based on Haar-like features. In order to increase the discriminativness of face representations, a novel regularized triplet-loss function is proposed that reduces the intra-class variations, while increasing the inter-class variations. Given the single reference still per target individual, the robustness of the proposed DCNN is further improved by fine-tuning the HaarNet with synthetically-generated facial still ROIs that emulate capture conditions found in operational environments. The proposed system is evaluated on stills and videos from the challenging COX Face and Chokepoint datasets according to accuracy and complexity. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can significantly improve performance with respect to state-of-the-art systems for video-based FR.

In this paper, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN) approach for the face verification task. We propose a “Siamese” architecture of two CNNs, with each CNN reduced to only four layers by fusing convolutional and subsampling layers. Network training is performed using the stochastic gradient descent algorithm with annealed global learning rate. Generalization ability of network is investigated via unique pairing of face images, and testing is done on AT&T face database. Experimental work shows that the proposed CNN system can classify a pair of 46×46 pixel face images in 0.6 milliseconds, which is significantly faster compared to equivalent network architecture with cascade of convolutional and subsampling layers. The verification accuracy achieved is 3.33% EER (equal error rate). Learning converges within 20 epochs, and the proposed technique can verify a test subject unseen in training. This work shows the viability of the “Siamese” CNN for face verification applications, and further improvements to the architecture are under construction to enhance its performance.

This paper presents a technique for automatically detecting human faces in digital color images. This is two-step process which first detects regions contain human skin in the color image and then extracts information from these regions which might indicate the location of a face in the image. The skin detection is performed using a skin filter which relies on color and texture information. The face detection is performed on a grayscale image containing only the detected skin areas. A combination of thresh holding and mathematical morphology are used to extract object features that would indicate the presence of a face. The face detection process works predictably and fairly reliably, as test results show.

Humans detect and identify faces in a scene with little or no effort . However, building an automated system that accomplishes this task is very difficult . There are several related Subproblems : detection of a pattern as a face . identification of the face, analysis of facial expressions, and classification based on physical features of the face . A system that performs these operations will find many applications, e .g . criminal identification, authentication in secure systems, etc . Most of the work to date has been in identification . This paper surveys the past work in solving these problems . The capability of the human visual system with respect to these problems is also discussed . It is meant to serve as a guide for an automated system . Some new approaches to these problems are also briefly discussed . Face detection Face identification Facial expressions Classification Facial features

The face is one of the most powerful channels of nonverbal communication. Facial expression provides cues about emotion, intention, alertness, pain, personality, regulates interpersonal behavior, and communicates psychiatric and biomedical status among other functions. Within the past 15 years, there has been increasing interest in automated facial expression analysis within the computer vision and machine learning communities. This chapter reviews fundamental approaches to facial measurement by behavioral scientists and current efforts in automated facial expression recognition. We consider challenges, review databases available to the research community, approaches to feature detection, tracking, and representation, and both supervised and unsupervised learning. keywords : Facial expression analysis, Action unit recognition, Active Appearance Models, temporal clustering.

Sensitivity to variations in illumination is a fundamental and challenging problem in face recognition. In this paper, we describe a new method based on symmetric shape-from-shading (SFS) to develop a face recognition system that is robust to changes in illumination. The basic idea of this approach is to use the symmetric SFS algorithm as a tool to obtain a prototype image which is illumination-normalized. Applying traditional SFS algorithms to real images of complex objects (in terms of their shape and albedo variations) such as faces is very challenging. It is shown that the symmetric SFS algorithm has a unique point-wise solution. In practice, given a single real face image with complex shape and varying albedo, even the symmetric SFS algorithm cannot guarantee the recovery of accurate and complete shape information. For the particular problem of face recognition, we utilize the fact that all faces share a similar shape making the direct computation of the prototype image from a given face image feasible. The symmetry property has been used to develop a new model-based source-from-shading algorithm which is more accurate than existing algorithms. Using the symmetric property, we are also able to gain insight into how changes in illumination a ect eigen-subspace based face recognition systems. Finally, to demonstrate the e cacy of our method, we have applied it to several publicly available face databases. We rst compare a new illumination-invariant measure to the measure proposed in (Jacobs et al., 1998), and then demonstrate signi cant performance improvement over existing face recognition systems using PCA and/or LDA for images acquired under variable lighting conditions.

Due to its indefinite evaluation criterion, facial beauty analysis has shown its challenges in pattern recognition and biometric recognition. Plenty of methods have been designed for solving this problem, but there are still various limitations. Most of the available research results in this field are achieved on a small-scale facial beauty database which is difficult in modeling the structure information for facial beauty. And majority of the presented facial beauty prediction algorithm requires burden landmark or expensive optimization procedure. In this paper, we have established a large scale facial beauty database named LSFBD, which is a new database for facial beauty analysis. The LSFBD database contains 20000 labeled images, which has 10000 unconstrained male subjects and 10000 unconstrained female subjects separately, and all images are verified with well-designed rating with average scores and standard deviation. In this database, manually adding the extreme beauty images make the distribution more reasonable and the result more accurate. CRBM or Eigenfaces results are presented in the paper as benchmark for evaluating the task of facial beauty prediction.

Model-based recognition and motion tracking depends upon the ability to solve for projection and model parameters that will best fit a 3-D model to matching 2-D image features. This paper extends current methods of parameter solving to handle objects with arbitrary curved surfaces and with any number of internal parameters representing articulations, variable dimensions, or surface deformations. Numerical stabilization methods are developed that take account of inherent inaccuracies in the image measurements and allow useful solutions to be determined even when there are fewer matches than unknown parameters. The LevenbergMarquardt method is used to always ensure convergence of the solution. These techniques allow model-based vision to be used for a much wider class of problems than was possible with previous methods. Their application is demonstrated for tracking the motion of curved, parameterized objects. This paper has been published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 13, 5 (May 1991), pp. 441–450.

One of the challenges in automatic face recognition is to achieve temporal invariance. In other words, the goal is to come up with a representation and matching scheme that is robust to changes due to facial aging. Facial aging is a complex process that affects both the 3D shape of the face and its texture (e.g., wrinkles). These shape and texture changes degrade the performance of automatic face recognition systems. However, facial aging has not received substantial attention compared to other facial variations due to pose, lighting, and expression. We propose a 3D aging modeling technique and show how it can be used to compensate for the age variations to improve the face recognition performance. The aging modeling technique adapts view-invariant 3D face models to the given 2D face aging database. The proposed approach is evaluated on three different databases (i.g., FG-NET, MORPH, and BROWNS) using FaceVACS, a state-of-the-art commercial face recognition engine.

We present a class of extremely efficient CNN models, MobileFaceNets, which use less than 1 million parameters and are specifically tailored for high-accuracy real-time face verification on mobile and embedded devices. We first make a simple analysis on the weakness of common mobile networks for face verification. The weakness has been well overcome by our specifically designed MobileFaceNets. Under the same experimental conditions, our MobileFaceNets achieve significantly superior accuracy as well as more than 2 times actual speedup over MobileNetV2. After trained by ArcFace loss on the refined MS-Celeb-1M, our single MobileFaceNet of 4.0MB size achieves 99.55% accuracy on LFW and 92.59% TAR@FAR1e-6 on MegaFace, which is even comparable to state-of-the-art big CNN models of hundreds MB size. The fastest one of MobileFaceNets has an actual inference time of 18 milliseconds on a mobile phone. For face verification, MobileFaceNets achieve significantly improved efficiency over previous state-of-the-art mobile CNNs.


Question: Stepwise nonparametric margin maximum criterion for face recognition.

In this paper, we present an innovative system designed for real-time facial recognition and tracking, inspired by physiological principles and guided by the requirements of high accuracy and efficiency. Our system is capable of identifying individuals by analyzing the characteristics of their faces against a database of known subjects, without the need for complex three-dimensional modeling. Instead, we approach the problem as a two-dimensional recognition task, leveraging the fact that faces are typically upright and can be effectively described through a limited set of characteristic views. Central to our methodology is the use of a feature space, generated by projecting face images onto a set of significant variations found within the known face dataset. These significant features, termed "eigenfaces," are the principal components or eigenvectors of the face image set, representing the most salient variations among faces. Unlike traditional features such as eyes, noses, and ears, eigenfaces are abstract representations that capture the essence of facial identity. The recognition process involves transforming an individual face image into a set of weights corresponding to the eigenface features. By comparing these weights to those of known faces, we can accurately identify a person. Our approach offers several advantages: it enables the system to learn and recognize new faces without supervision, and it can be efficiently implemented using neural network architectures. This makes our system particularly suitable for real-world applications requiring robust and scalable facial recognition capabilities.

In this work we describe experiments with eigenfaces for recognition and interactive search in a large-scale face database. Accurate visual recognition is demonstrated using a database of O(10) faces. The problem of recognition under general viewing orientation is also examined. A view-based multiple-observer eigenspace technique is proposed for use in face recognition under variable pose. In addition, a modular eigenspace description technique is used which incorporates salient features such as the eyes, nose and mouth, in an eigenfeature layer. This modular representation yields higher recognition rates as well as a more robust framework for face recognition. An automatic feature extraction technique using feature eigentemplates is also demonstrated.

This paper presents a novel and efficient facial image representation based on local binary pattern (LBP) texture features. The face image is divided into several regions from which the LBP feature distributions are extracted and concatenated into an enhanced feature vector to be used as a face descriptor. The performance of the proposed method is assessed in the face recognition problem under different challenges. Other applications and several extensions are also discussed

Sensitivity to variations in illumination is a fundamental and challenging problem in face recognition. In this paper, we describe a new method based on symmetric shape-from-shading (SFS) to develop a face recognition system that is robust to changes in illumination. The basic idea of this approach is to use the symmetric SFS algorithm as a tool to obtain a prototype image which is illumination-normalized. Applying traditional SFS algorithms to real images of complex objects (in terms of their shape and albedo variations) such as faces is very challenging. It is shown that the symmetric SFS algorithm has a unique point-wise solution. In practice, given a single real face image with complex shape and varying albedo, even the symmetric SFS algorithm cannot guarantee the recovery of accurate and complete shape information. For the particular problem of face recognition, we utilize the fact that all faces share a similar shape making the direct computation of the prototype image from a given face image feasible. The symmetry property has been used to develop a new model-based source-from-shading algorithm which is more accurate than existing algorithms. Using the symmetric property, we are also able to gain insight into how changes in illumination a ect eigen-subspace based face recognition systems. Finally, to demonstrate the e cacy of our method, we have applied it to several publicly available face databases. We rst compare a new illumination-invariant measure to the measure proposed in (Jacobs et al., 1998), and then demonstrate signi cant performance improvement over existing face recognition systems using PCA and/or LDA for images acquired under variable lighting conditions.

By using the knowledge of facial structure and temperature distribution, this paper proposes an automatic eye localization method from long wave infrared thermal images both with eyeglasses and without eyeglasses. First, with the help of support vector machine classifier, three gray-projection features are defined to determine whether a subject is with eyeglasses. For subjects with eyeglasses, the locations of valleys in the projection curve are used to perform eye localization. For subjects without eyeglasses, a facial structure consisting of 15 sub-regions is proposed to extract Haar-like features. Eight classifiers are learned from the features selected by Adaboost algorithm for left and right eye, respectively. A vote strategy is employed to find the most likely eyes. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, experiments are performed on NVIE and Equinox databases. The eyeglass detection results on NVIE database and Equinox database are 99.36% and 95%, respectively, which demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our eyeglass detection method. Eye localization results of withindatabase experiments and cross-database experiments on these two databases are very comparable with the previous results in this field, verifying the effectiveness and the generalization ability of our approach. & 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We present a real-time face tracker in this paper The system has achieved a rate of 30% frameshecond using an HP-9000 workstation with a framegrabber and a Canon VC-CI camera. It can track a person 'sface while the person moves freely (e.g., walks, jumps, sits down and stands up) in a room. Three types of models have been employed in developing the system. First, we present a stochastic model to characterize skin-color distributions of human faces. The information provided by the model is sufJicient for tracking a human face in various poses and views. This model is adaptable to different people and different lighting conditions in real-time. Second, a motion model e's used to estimate image motion and to predict search window. Third, a camera model is used toprediet and to compensate for camera motion. The system can be applied to tele-conferencing and many HCI applications including lip-reading and gaze tracking. The principle in developing this system can be extended to other tracking problems such as tracking the human hand.

Face detection has been one of the most studied topics in computer vision literature. Given an arbitrary image, the goal of face detection is to determine whether or not there are any faces in the image and, if present, return the image location and extent of each face. While this appears to be a trivial task for human beings, it is a very challenging task for computers. The difficulty associated with face detection can be attributed to many variations in scale, location, view point, illumination, occlusions, etc. Although there have been hundreds of reported approaches to face detection, if one were asked to name a single face detection algorithm that has the most impact in recent decades, it will most likely be the Viola and Jones face detection, which is capable of processing images extremely rapidly and achieve high detection rates. This project is going to study and understand the Viola-Jones algorithm by implementing the whole detection framework and based on the implementation, conduct experiment to hopefully further improve the performance.

We present Large Scale Facial Model (LSFM) - a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) automatically constructed from 9,663 distinct facial identities. To the best of our knowledge LSFM is the largest-scale Morphable Model ever constructed, containing statistical information from a huge variety of the human population. To build such a large model we introduce a novel fully automated and robust Morphable Model construction pipeline. The dataset that LSFM is trained on includes rich demographic information about each subject, allowing for the construction of not only a global 3DMM but also models tailored for specific age, gender or ethnicity groups. As an application example, we utilise the proposed model to perform age classification from 3D shape alone. Furthermore, we perform a systematic analysis of the constructed 3DMMs that showcases their quality and descriptive power. The presented extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations reveal that the proposed 3DMM achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming existing models by a large margin. Finally, for the benefit of the research community, we make publicly available the source code of the proposed automatic 3DMM construction pipeline. In addition, the constructed global 3DMM and a variety of bespoke models tailored by age, gender and ethnicity are available on application to researchers involved in medically oriented research.

Despite the importance of rigorous testing data for evaluating face recognition algorithms, all major publicly available faces-in-the-wild datasets are constrained by the use of a commodity face detector, which limits, among other conditions, pose, occlusion, expression, and illumination variations. In 2015, the NIST IJB-A dataset, which consists of 500 subjects, was released to mitigate these constraints. However, the relatively low number of impostor and genuine matches per split in the IJB-A protocol limits the evaluation of an algorithm at operationally relevant assessment points. This paper builds upon IJB-A and introduces the IARPA Janus Benchmark-B (NIST IJB-B) dataset, a superset of IJB-A. IJB-B consists of 1,845 subjects with human-labeled ground truth face bounding boxes, eye/nose locations, and covariate metadata such as occlusion, facial hair, and skintone for 21,798 still images and 55,026 frames from 7,011 videos. IJB-B was also designed to have a more uniform geographic distribution of subjects across the globe than that of IJB-A. Test protocols for IJB-B represent operational use cases including access point identification, forensic quality media searches, surveillance video searches, and clustering. Finally, all images and videos in IJB-B are published under a Creative Commons distribution license and, therefore, can be freely distributed among the research community.

One of the challenges in automatic face recognition is to achieve temporal invariance. In other words, the goal is to come up with a representation and matching scheme that is robust to changes due to facial aging. Facial aging is a complex process that affects both the 3D shape of the face and its texture (e.g., wrinkles). These shape and texture changes degrade the performance of automatic face recognition systems. However, facial aging has not received substantial attention compared to other facial variations due to pose, lighting, and expression. We propose a 3D aging modeling technique and show how it can be used to compensate for the age variations to improve the face recognition performance. The aging modeling technique adapts view-invariant 3D face models to the given 2D face aging database. The proposed approach is evaluated on three different databases (i.g., FG-NET, MORPH, and BROWNS) using FaceVACS, a state-of-the-art commercial face recognition engine.

[1] J. Xiao, S. Baker, I. Matthews, T. Kanade, “Real-Time Combined 2D + 3D Active Appearance Models,” CVPR, pp.535-542, 2004. [2] N. Gourier, D. Hall, J. L. Crowley, “Estimating Face Orientation from Robust Detection of Salient Facial Features”, Proceedings of Pointing 2004, ICPR, International Workshop on Visual Observation of Deictic Gestures, 2004. [3] G. Fanelli, M. Dantone, J. Gall, A. Jssati, L. Van Gool, “Random Forests for Real Time 3D Face Analysis,” IJCV, pp.437-458, 2013. [4] Y. LeCun, R. Bottou, Y. Bengio, P. Haffner, “Gradient-based Learning Applied to Document Recognition,” Proc. IEEE, vol. 86, no. 11, pp.2278-2324, 1998. [5] A. Krizhevsky, I. Sutskever, G. E. Hinton, “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” NIPS, pp.1106-1114, 2012. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF) grant funded by the Korea government(MSIP) (No. 2010-0028680). Proposed Method  Conventional Head Pose Estimation Approaches


Question: Cloud computing adoption: a concise overview of concerns and obstacles.

In "Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing," the authors explore the transformative impact of cloud computing on the IT industry, envisioning a future where computing is as ubiquitous as a utility. This paradigm shift makes software-as-a-service (SaaS) more compelling, and influences the design and procurement of IT hardware. Innovators with ideas for internet services no longer face significant upfront hardware costs or operational expenses. They no longer need to worry about overestimating demand, which leads to underutilized resources, or underestimating it, which results in lost opportunities. Furthermore, companies with substantial batch processing requirements can achieve rapid results without incurring additional costs for scaling up, a feature unparalleled in IT history. Cloud computing encompasses both the internet-delivered services and the datacenter infrastructure that supports them. The services have been traditionally called SaaS, while the underlying hardware and systems software constitute what we term as a cloud. When a cloud is offered on a pay-as-you-go basis to the public, it is known as a public cloud, with the service akin to utility computing. An internal cloud, exclusive to a business or organization, is referred to as a private cloud. Therefore, cloud computing is the amalgamation of SaaS and utility computing, excluding private clouds. Stakeholders can be users or providers of SaaS, or users or providers of utility computing. The discussion primarily centers around SaaS providers (cloud users) and cloud providers, areas that have received less scholarly attention. From a hardware perspective, cloud computing introduces three novel dimensions.

The Internet of healthcare things is essentially a new model that changes the way of the delivery and management of healthcare services. It utilizes digital sensors and cloud computing to present a quality healthcare service outside of the classical hospital environment. This resulted in the emergence of a new class of online web 4.0 services, which are termed “cloud healthcare services”. Cloud healthcare services offer a straightforward opportunity for patients to communicate with healthcare professionals and utilize their personal IoHT devices to obtain timely and accurate medical guidance and decisions. The personal IoHT devices integrate sensed health data at a central cloud healthcare service to extract useful health insights for wellness and preventive care strategies. However, the present practices for cloud healthcare services rely on a centralized approach, where patients’ health data are collected and stored on servers, located at remote locations, which might be functioning under data privacy laws somewhat different from the ones applied where the service is running. Promoting a privacy respecting cloud services encourages patients to actively participate in these healthcare services and to routinely provide an accurate and precious health data about themselves. With the emergence of fog computing paradigm, privacy protection can now be enforced at the edge of the patient’s network regardless of the location of service providers. In this paper, a framework for cloud healthcare recommender service is presented. We depicted the personal gateways at the patients’ side act as intermediate nodes (called fog nodes) between IoHT devices and cloud healthcare services. A fog-based middleware will be hosted on these fog nodes for an efficient aggregation of patients generated health data while maintaining the privacy and the confidentiality of their health profiles. The proposed middleware executes a two-stage concealment process that utilizes the hierarchical nature of IoHT devices. This will unburden the constrained IoHT devices from performing intensive privacy preserving processes. At that, the patients will be empowered with a tool to control the privacy of their health data by enabling them to release their health data in a concealed form. The further processing at the cloud healthcare service continues over the concealed data by applying the proposed protocols. The proposed solution was integrated into a scenario related to preserving the privacy of the patients’ health data when utilized by a cloud healthcare recommender service to generate health insights. Our approach induces a straightforward solution with accurate results, which are beneficial to both patients and service providers.

The prominent technology that drives the industry now-a-days is cloud computing. The growth of cloud computing has resulted in the setup of large number of data centers around the world. The data centers consume more power making it source for the carbon dioxide emission and a major contributor to greenhouse effect. This led to the deployment of virtualization. Infrastructure as a Service is one of the important services offered by cloud computing that allows virtualization and hardware to get virtualized by creating many instances of Virtual Machine (VM) on a single Physical Machine (PM) and helps in improving utilization of resources. VM consolidation includes method of choosing the more appropriate algorithm for migration of VM's and placement of VMs to the most suitable host. VM placement is a part of VM migration. The effective placement of VM is aimed to improve performance, resource utilization and reduce the energy consumption in data centers without SLA violation. This paper aims to focus on various VM placement schemes.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2014.09.012 0950-5849/ 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author at: Center of Informatics, Federal University of Pernambuco (CIn/UFPE), Av. Jornalista Anibal Fernandes, S/N, Cidade Universitária, 50. Recife, PE, Brazil. Tel.: +55 81 8250 0470. E-mail addresses: fss4@cin.ufpe.br (F. Selleri Silva), fsfs@cin.ufpe.br (F.S.F. Soares), alp5@cin.ufpe.br (A.L. Peres), ima2@cin.ufpe.br (I.M.d. Azevedo), aplfv@ci (A.P.L.F. Vasconcelos), fkk@cin.ufpe.br (F.K. Kamei), srlm@cin.ufpe.br (S.R.d.L. Meira). Fernando Selleri Silva a,b,⇑, Felipe Santana Furtado Soares , Angela Lima Peres , Ivanildo Monteiro de Azevedo , Ana Paula L.F. Vasconcelos , Fernando Kenji Kamei , Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira a,c

Cloud computing based delivery model has been adopted by end-users and enterprises to reduce IT costs and complexities. The ability to offload user software and data to cloud data centers has raised many security and privacy concerns over the cloud computing model. Significant research efforts have focused on hyper visor security and low-layer operating system implementations in cloud data centers. Unfortunately, the role of cloud carrier in the security and privacy of user software and data has not been well studied. Cloud carrier represents the wide area network that provides the connectivity and transport of cloud services between cloud consumers and cloud providers. In this paper, we present a risk assessment framework to study the security risk of the cloud carrier between cloud consumers and cloud providers. The risk assessment framework leverages the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) to examine the security vulnerabilities of operating systems of routers within the cloud carrier. This framework provides quantifiable security metrics for cloud carrier, which enables cloud consumers to establish the quality of security services among cloud providers. Such security metric information is very useful in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiation between a cloud consumer and a cloud provider. It can be also be used to build a tool to verify SLA compliance. Furthermore, we implement this framework for the cloud carriers of Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure Platform. Our experiments show that the security risks of cloud carriers on these two commercial clouds are significantly different. This finding provides guidance for a network provider to improve the security of cloud carriers.

Cloud computing provides cost-efficient opportunities for enterprises by offering a variety of dynamic, scalable, and shared services. Usually, cloud providers provide assurances by specifying technical and functional descriptions in Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for the services they offer. The descriptions in SLAs are not consistent among the cloud providers even though they offer services with similar functionality. Therefore, customers are not sure whether they can identify a trustworthy cloud provider only based on its SLA. To support the customers in reliably identifying trustworthy cloud providers, we propose a multi-faceted Trust Management (TM) system architecture for a cloud computing marketplace. This system provides means to identify the trustworthy cloud providers in terms of different attributes (e.g., security, performance, compliance) assessed by multiple sources and roots of trust information.

Sharing of resources on the cloud can be achieved on a large scale, since it is cost effective and location independent. Despite the hype surrounding cloud computing, organizations are still reluctant to deploy their businesses in the cloud computing environment due to concerns in secure resource sharing. In this paper, we propose a cloud resource mediation service offered by cloud service providers, which plays the role of trusted third party among its different tenants. This paper formally specifies the resource sharing mechanism between two different tenants in the presence of our proposed cloud resource mediation service. The correctness of permission activation and delegation mechanism among different tenants using four distinct algorithms (activation, delegation, forward revocation, and backward revocation) is also demonstrated using formal verification. The performance analysis suggests that the sharing of resources can be performed securely and efficiently across different tenants of the cloud.

Cloud computing, enabled by virtualization technologies, is becoming a mainstream computing model. Many companies are starting to utilize the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing model, leasing guest virtual machines (VMs) from the infrastructure providers for economic reasons: to reduce their operating costs and to increase the flexibility of their own infrastructures. Yet, many companies may be hesitant to move to cloud computing due to security concerns. An integral part of any virtualization technology is the all-powerful hyper visor. A hyper visor is a system management software layer which can access all resources of the platform. Much research has been done on using hyper visors to monitor guest VMs for malicious code and on hardening hyper visors to make them more secure. There is, however, another threat which has not been addressed by researchers -- that of compromised or malicious hyper visors that can extract sensitive or confidential data from guest VMs. Consequently, we propose that a new research direction needs to be undertaken to tackle this threat. We further propose that new hardware mechanisms in the multi core microprocessors are a viable way of providing protections for the guest VMs from the hyper visor, while still allowing the hyper visor to flexibly manage the resources of the physical platform.

Cloud computing provides support for hosting client's application. Cloud is a distributed platform that provides hardware, software and network resources to both execute consumer's application and also to store and mange user's data. Cloud is also used to execute scientific workflow applications that are in general complex in nature when compared to other applications. Since cloud is a distributed platform, it is more prone to errors and failures. In such an environment, avoiding a failure is difficult and identifying the source of failure is also complex. Because of this, fault tolerance mechanisms are implemented on the cloud platform. This ensures that even if there are failures in the environment, critical data of the client is not lost and user's application running on cloud is not affected in any manner. Fault tolerance mechanisms also help in improving the cloud's performance by proving the services to the users as required on demand. In this paper a survey of existing fault tolerance mechanisms for the cloud platform are discussed. This paper also discusses the failures, fault tolerant clustering methods and fault tolerant models that are specific for scientific workflow applications.

The increasing popularity of cloud storage services has lead companies that handle critical data to think about using these services for their storage needs. Medical record databases, large biomedical datasets, historical information about power systems and financial data are some examples of critical data that could be moved to the cloud. However, the reliability and security of data stored in the cloud still remain major concerns. In this work we present DepSky, a system that improves the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of information stored in the cloud through the encryption, encoding, and replication of the data on diverse clouds that form a cloud-of-clouds. We deployed our system using four commercial clouds and used PlanetLab to run clients accessing the service from different countries. We observed that our protocols improved the perceived availability, and in most cases, the access latency, when compared with cloud providers individually. Moreover, the monetary costs of using DepSky in this scenario is at most twice the cost of using a single cloud, which is optimal and seems to be a reasonable cost, given the benefits.

Fog Computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage, and application services to end-users. In this article, we elaborate the motivation and advantages of Fog computing, and analyse its applications in a series of real scenarios, such as Smart Grid, smart traffic lights in vehicular networks and software defined networks. We discuss the state-of-the-art of Fog computing and similar work under the same umbrella. Security and privacy issues are further disclosed according to current Fog computing paradigm. As an example, we study a typical attack, man-in-the-middle attack, for the discussion of security in Fog computing. We investigate the stealthy features of this attack by examining its CPU and memory consumption on Fog device.


Question: Cloud computing adoption: a concise overview of concerns and obstacles.

Exploring Cloud Computing: A Comprehensive Look at Business Implications and Future Directions

To fully harness the potential of cloud computing (CC), it is crucial to gain a comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted issues at play, as seen from the vantage points of both technology providers and consumers. An equally pressing need exists to delve into the business-centric aspects of CC. To this end, we conducted in-depth interviews with a range of industry leaders, comprising developers and enterprise users evaluating CC's suitability. This paper elucidates the key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that CC poses for the industry. We also pinpoint the critical issues that will impact various stakeholders within the CC ecosystem. A set of practical guidelines is provided for professionals tasked with the implementation and management of CC technologies. For information systems (IS) researchers, we highlight the research domains that require attention to ensure we can effectively counsel the industry in the future. Lastly, we discuss the pivotal challenges confronting governmental bodies in their role of regulating cloud computing, emphasizing the need for a forward-thinking regulatory framework.

Fog Computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage, and application services to end-users. In this article, we elaborate the motivation and advantages of Fog computing, and analyse its applications in a series of real scenarios, such as Smart Grid, smart traffic lights in vehicular networks and software defined networks. We discuss the state-of-the-art of Fog computing and similar work under the same umbrella. Security and privacy issues are further disclosed according to current Fog computing paradigm. As an example, we study a typical attack, man-in-the-middle attack, for the discussion of security in Fog computing. We investigate the stealthy features of this attack by examining its CPU and memory consumption on Fog device.

Vehicular networking has a significant advantages in the today era. It provides desirable features and some specific applications such as efficient traffic management, road safety and infotainment. The vehicle consists of comparatively more communication systems such as on-board computing device, storage and computing power, GPS etc. to provide Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The new hybrid technology known as Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) has great impact on the ITS by using the resources of vehicles such as GPS, storage, internet and computing power for instant decision making and sharing information on the cloud. Moreover, the paper not only present the concept of vehicular cloud but also provide a brief overview on the applications, security issues, threats and security solution for the VCC.

By using Cloud storage, users can access applications, services, software whenever they requires over the internet. Users can put their data remotely to cloud storage and get benefit of on-demand services and application from the resources. The cloud must have to ensure data integrity and security of data of user. The issue about cloud storage is integrity and privacy of data of user can arise. To maintain to overkill this issue here, we are giving public auditing process for cloud storage that users can make use of a third-party auditor (TPA) to check the integrity of data. Not only verification of data integrity, the proposed system also supports data dynamics. The work that has been done in this line lacks data dynamics and true public auditability. The auditing task monitors data modifications, insertions and deletions. The proposed system is capable of supporting public auditability, data dynamics and Multiple TPA are used for the auditing process. We also extend our concept to ring signatures in which HARS scheme is used. Merkle Hash Tree is used to improve block level authentication. Further we extend our result to enable the TPA to perform audits for multiple users simultaneously through Batch auditing.

Previous studies on technology adoption disagree regarding the relative magnitude of the effects of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. However these studies did not consider moderating variables. We investigated four potential moderating variables – perceived risk, technology type, user experience, and gender – in users’ technology adoption. Their moderating effects were tested in an empirical study of 161 subjects. Results showed that perceived risk, technology type, and gender were significant moderating variables. However the effects of user experience were marginal after the variance of errors was removed. # 2007 Published by Elsevier B.V. www.elsevier.com/locate/im Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Information & Management 45 (2008) 1–9

Cloud federations have been formed to share the services, prompt and support cooperation, as well as interoperability among their already deployed cloud systems. However, the creation and management of the cloud federations lead to various security issues such as confidentially, integrity and availability of the data. Despite the access control policies in place, an attacker may compromise the communication channel processing the access requests and the decisions between the access control systems and the members(users) and vice-versa. In cloud federation, the rating of the services offered by different cloud members becomes integral to providing the users with the best quality services. Hence, we propose an innovative blockchainbased framework that on the one hand permits secure communication between the members of the federation and the access control systems, while on the other hand provides the quality services to the members by considering the service constraints imposed by them.

It is already true that Big Data has drawn huge attention from researchers in information sciences, policy and decision makers in governments and enterprises. As the speed of information growth exceeds Moore’s Law at the beginning of this new century, excessive data is making great troubles to human beings. However, there are so much potential and highly useful values hidden in the huge volume of data. A new scientific paradigm is born as dataintensive scientific discovery (DISD), also known as Big Data problems. A large number of fields and sectors, ranging from economic and business activities to public administration, from national security to scientific researches in many areas, involve with Big Data problems. On the one hand, Big Data is extremely valuable to produce productivity in businesses and evolutionary breakthroughs in scientific disciplines, which give us a lot of opportunities to make great progresses in many fields. There is no doubt that the future competitions in business productivity and technologies will surely converge into the Big Data explorations. On the other hand, Big Data also arises with many challenges, such as difficulties in data capture, data storage, data analysis and data visualization. This paper is aimed to demonstrate a close-up view about Big Data, including Big Data applications, Big Data opportunities and challenges, as well as the state-of-the-art techniques and technologies we currently adopt to deal with the Big Data problems. We also discuss several underlying methodologies to handle the data deluge, for example, granular computing, cloud computing, bio-inspired computing, and quantum computing. 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

With the rapid development of the computer technology, cloud-based services have become a hot topic. Cloud-based services not only provide users with convenience, but also bring many security issues. Therefore, the study of access control scheme to protect users' privacy in cloud environment is of great significance. In this paper, we present an access control system with privilege separation based on privacy protection (PS-ACS). In the PS-ACS scheme, we divide the users into personal domain (PSD) and public domain (PUD) logically. In the PSD, we set read and write access permissions for users respectively. The Key-Aggregate Encryption (KAE) is exploited to implement the read access permission which improves the access efficiency. A high degree of patient privacy is guaranteed simultaneously by exploiting an Improved Attribute-based Signature (IABS) which can determine the users' write access. For the users of PUD, a hierarchical attribute-based encryption (HABE) is applied to avoid the issues of single point of failure and complicated key distribution. Function and performance testing result shows that the PS-ACS scheme can achieve privacy protection in cloud-based services.

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly important for provision of services and storage of data in the Internet. However there are several significant challenges in securing cloud infrastructures from different types of attacks. The focus of this paper is on the security services that a cloud provider can offer as part of its infrastructure to its customers (tenants) to counteract these attacks. Our main contribution is a security architecture that provides a flexible security as a service model that a cloud provider can offer to its tenants and customers of its tenants. Our security as a service model while offering a baseline security to the provider to protect its own cloud infrastructure also provides flexibility to tenants to have additional security functionalities that suit their security requirements. The paper describes the design of the security architecture and discusses how different types of attacks are counteracted by the proposed architecture. We have implemented the security architecture and the paper discusses analysis and performance evaluation results.

Cloud computing based delivery model has been adopted by end-users and enterprises to reduce IT costs and complexities. The ability to offload user software and data to cloud data centers has raised many security and privacy concerns over the cloud computing model. Significant research efforts have focused on hyper visor security and low-layer operating system implementations in cloud data centers. Unfortunately, the role of cloud carrier in the security and privacy of user software and data has not been well studied. Cloud carrier represents the wide area network that provides the connectivity and transport of cloud services between cloud consumers and cloud providers. In this paper, we present a risk assessment framework to study the security risk of the cloud carrier between cloud consumers and cloud providers. The risk assessment framework leverages the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) to examine the security vulnerabilities of operating systems of routers within the cloud carrier. This framework provides quantifiable security metrics for cloud carrier, which enables cloud consumers to establish the quality of security services among cloud providers. Such security metric information is very useful in the Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiation between a cloud consumer and a cloud provider. It can be also be used to build a tool to verify SLA compliance. Furthermore, we implement this framework for the cloud carriers of Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure Platform. Our experiments show that the security risks of cloud carriers on these two commercial clouds are significantly different. This finding provides guidance for a network provider to improve the security of cloud carriers.

Today, cloud computing applications are rapidly constructed by services belonging to different cloud providers and service owners. This work presents the inter-cloud elasticity framework, which focuses on cloud load balancing based on dynamic virtual machine reconfiguration when variations on load or on user requests volume are observed. We design a dynamic reconfiguration system, called inter-cloud load balancer (ICLB), that allows scaling up or down the virtual resources (thus providing automatized elasticity), by eliminating service downtimes and communication failures. It includes an inter-cloud load balancer for distributing incoming user HTTP traffic across multiple instances of inter-cloud applications and services and we perform dynamic reconfiguration of resources according to the real time requirements. The experimental analysis includes different topologies by showing how real-time traffic variation (using real world workloads) affects resource utilization and by achieving better resource usage in inter-cloud.