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Abstract The problem of distinguishing identical twins and non‐twin look‐alikes in automated facial recognition (FR) applications has become increasingly important with the widespread adoption of facial biometrics. Due to the high facial similarity of both identical twins and look‐alikes, these face pairs represent the hardest cases presented to facial recognition tools. This work presents an application of one of the largest twin data sets compiled to date to address two FR challenges: (1) determining a baseline measure of facial similarity between identical twins and (2) applying this similarity measure to determine the impact of doppelgangers, or look‐alikes, on FR performance for large face data sets. The facial similarity measure is determined via a deep convolutional neural network. This network is trained on a tailored verification task designed to encourage the network to group together highly similar face pairs in the embedding space and achieves a test AUC of 0.9799. The proposed network provides a quantitative similarity score for any two given faces and has been applied to large‐scale face data sets to identify similar face pairs. An additional analysis that correlates the comparison score returned by a facial recognition tool and the similarity score returned by the proposed network has also been performed. 

Machine learning (ML) models have emerged as powerful tools for accelerating materials discovery and design by enabling accurate predictions of properties from compositional and structural data. These capabilities are vital for developing advanced technologies across fields such as energy, electronics, and biomedicine, potentially reducing the time and resources needed for new material exploration and promoting rapid innovation cycles. Recent efforts have focused on employing advanced ML algorithms, including deep learning-based graph neural networks, for property prediction. Additionally, ensemble models have proven to enhance the generalizability and robustness of ML and Deep Learning (DL). However, the use of such ensemble strategies in deep graph networks for material property prediction remains underexplored. Our research provides an in-depth evaluation of ensemble strategies in deep learning-based graph neural network, specifically targeting material property prediction tasks. By testing the Crystal Graph Convolutional Neural Network (CGCNN) and its multitask version, MT-CGCNN, we demonstrated that ensemble techniques, especially prediction averaging, substantially improve precision beyond traditional metrics for key properties like formation energy per atom $\left(\mathrm{\Delta }{E}^f\right)$, band gap $\left(E_g\right)$, density $\left(\rho \right)$, equivalent reaction energy per atom $\left(E_{\mathit{rxn,atom}}\right)$, energy per atom $\left(E_{\mathit{atom}}\right)$and atomic density $\left({\rho }_{\mathit{atom}}\right)$in 33,990 stable inorganic materials. These findings support the broader application of ensemble methods to enhance predictive accuracy in the field. 

In this paper, we evaluate the uniqueness of a hypothetical iris recognition system that relies upon a nonlinear mapping of iris data into a space of Gaussian codewords with independent components. Given the new data representation, we develop and apply a sphere packing bound for Gaussian codewords and a bound similar to Daugman’s to characterize the maximum iris population as a function of the relative entropy between Gaussian codewords of distinct iris classes. As a potential theoretical approach leading toward the realization of the hypothetical mapping, we work with the auto-regressive model fitted into iris data, after some data manipulation and preprocessing. The distance between a pair of codewords is measured in terms of the relative entropy (log-likelihood ratio statistic is an alternative) between distributions of codewords, which is also interpreted as a measure of iris quality. The new approach to iris uniqueness is illustrated using two toy examples involving two small datasets of iris images. For both datasets, the maximum sustainable population is presented as a function of image quality expressed in terms of relative entropy. Although the auto-regressive model may not be the best model for iris data, it lays the theoretical framework for the development of a high-performance iris recognition system utilizing a nonlinear mapping from the space of iris data to the space of Gaussian codewords with independent components. 

Although face recognition (FR) has achieved great success in recent years, it is still challenging to accurately recognize faces in low-quality images due to the obscured facial details. Nevertheless, it is often feasible to make predictions about specific soft biometric (SB) attributes, such as gender, age, and baldness even in dealing with low-quality images. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-branch neural network that leverages SB attribute information to boost the performance of FR. To this ed, we propose a cross-attribute-guided transformer fusion (CATF) module that effectively captures the long-range dependencies and relationships between FR and SB feature representations. The synergy created by the reciprocal flow of information in the dual cross-attention operations of the proposed CATF module enhances the performance of FR. Furthermore, we introduce a novel self-attention distillation framework that effectively highlights crucial facial regions, such as landmarks by aligning low-quality images with those of their high-quality counterparts in the feature space. The proposed self-attention distillation regularizes our network. to learn a unified quality-invariant feature representation in unconstrained environments. We conduct extensive experiments on various real-world FR benchmarks varying in quality. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our FR method compared to state-of-the-art FR studies. 

Annotating automatic target recognition images is challenging; for example, sometimes there is labeled data in the source domain but no labeled data in the target domain. Therefore, it is essential to construct an optimal target domain classifier using the labeled information of the source domain images. For this purpose, we propose a transductive transfer learning (TTL) network consisting of an unpaired domain translation network, a pretrained source domain classifier, and a gradually constructed target domain classifier. We delve into the unpaired domain translation network, which simultaneously optimizes cycle consistency and modulated noise contrastive losses (MoNCE). Furthermore, the proposed hybrid CUT module integrated into the TTL network generates synthetic negative patches by noisy features mixup, and all the negative patches provide modulated weight into the NCE loss by considering similarity to the query. Apart from that, this hybrid CUT network considers query selection by entropy-based attention to specifying domain variants and invariant regions. The extensive analysis depicted that the proposed transductive network can successfully annotate civilian, military vehicles, and ship targets into the three benchmark ATR datasets. We further demonstrate the importance of each component of the TTL network through extensive ablation studies into the DSIAC dataset. 

Transform and entropy models are the two core components in deep image compression neural networks. Most existing learning-based image compression methods utilize convolutional-based transform, which lacks the ability to model long-range dependencies, primarily due to the limited receptive field of the convolution operation. To address this limitation, we propose a Transformer-based nonlinear transform. This transform has the remarkable ability to efficiently capture both local and global information from the input image, leading to a more decorrelated latent representation. In addition, we introduce a novel entropy model that incorporates two different hyperpriors to model cross-channel and spatial dependencies of the latent representation. To further improve the entropy model, we add a global context that leverages distant relationships to predict the current latent more accurately. This global context employs a causal attention mechanism to extract long-range information in a content-dependent manner. Our experiments show that our proposed framework performs better than the state-of-the-art methods in terms of rate-distortion performance.