Honglei Zhang

The 2nd competition on counter measures to 2D face spoofing attacks

As a crucial security problem, anti-spoofing in biometrics, and particularly for the face modality, has achieved great progress in the recent years. Still, new threats arrive inform of better, more realistic and more sophisticated spoofing attacks. The objective of the 2nd Competition on Counter Measures to 2D Face Spoofing Attacks is to challenge researchers to create counter measures effectively detecting a variety of attacks. The submitted propositions are evaluated on the Replay-Attack database and the achieved results are presented in this paper.

Limited random walk algorithm for big graph data clustering

Graph clustering is an important technique to understand the relationships between the vertices in a big graph. In this paper, we propose a novel random-walk-based graph clustering method. The proposed method restricts the reach of the walking agent using an inflation function and a normalization function. We analyze the behavior of the limited random walk procedure and propose a novel algorithm for both global and local graph clustering problems. Previous random-walk-based algorithms depend on the chosen fitness function to find the clusters around a seed vertex. The proposed algorithm tackles the problem in an entirely different manner. We use the limited random walk procedure to find attractor vertices in a graph and use them as features to cluster the vertices. According to the experimental results on the simulated graph data and the real-world big graph data, the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in solving graph clustering problems. Since the proposed method uses the embarrassingly parallel paradigm, it can be efficiently implemented and embedded in any parallel computing environment such as a MapReduce framework. Given enough computing resources, we are capable of clustering graphs with millions of vertices and hundreds millions of edges in a reasonable time.

A k-nearest neighbor multilabel ranking algorithm with application to content-based image retrieval

Multilabel ranking is an important machine learning task with many applications, such as content-based image retrieval (CBIR). However, when the number of labels is large, traditional algorithms are either infeasible or show poor performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective multilabel ranking algorithm that is based on k-nearest neighbor paradigm. The proposed algorithm ranks labels according to the probabilities of the label association using the neighboring samples around a query sample. Different from traditional approaches, we take only positive samples into consideration and determine the model parameters by directly optimizing ranking loss measures. We evaluated the proposed algorithm using four popular multilabel datasets. The proposed algorithm achieves equivalent or better performance than other instance-based learning algorithms. When applied to a CBIR system with a dataset of 1 million samples and over 190 thousand labels, which is much larger than any other multilabel datasets used earlier, the proposed algorithm clearly outperforms the competing algorithms.

Outlier edge detection using random graph generation models and applications

Outliers are samples that are generated by different mechanisms from other normal data samples. Graphs, in particular social network graphs, may contain nodes and edges that are made by scammers, malicious programs or mistakenly by normal users. Detecting outlier nodes and edges is important for data mining and graph analytics. However, previous research in the field has merely focused on detecting outlier nodes. In this article, we study the properties of edges and propose effective outlier edge detection algorithm. The proposed algorithms are inspired by community structures that are very common in social networks. We found that the graph structure around an edge holds critical information for determining the authenticity of the edge. We evaluated the proposed algorithms by injecting outlier edges into some real-world graph data. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithms can effectively detect outlier edges. In particular, the algorithm based on the Preferential Attachment Random Graph Generation model consistently gives good performance regardless of the test graph data. More important, by analyzing the authenticity of the edges in a graph, we are able to reveal underlying structure and properties of a graph. Thus, the proposed algorithms are not limited in the area of outlier edge detection. We demonstrate three different applications that benefit from the proposed algorithms: (1) a preprocessing tool that improves the performance of graph clustering algorithms; (2) an outlier node detection algorithm; and (3) a novel noisy data clustering algorithm. These applications show the great potential of the proposed outlier edge detection techniques. They also address the importance of analyzing the edges in graph mining—a topic that has been mostly neglected by researchers.

Tut MUVIS image retrieval system proposal for MSR-Bing challenge 2014

This paper presents our system designed for MSR-Bing Image Retrieval Challenge @ ICME 2014. The core of our system is formed by a text processing module combined with a module performing PCA-assisted perceptron regression with random sub-space selection (P2R2S2). P2R2S2 uses Over-Feat features as a starting point and transforms them into more descriptive features via unsupervised training. The relevance score for each query-image pair is obtained by comparing the transformed features of the query image and the relevant training images. We also use a face bank, duplicate image detection, and optical character recognition to boost our evaluation accuracy. Our system achieves 0.5099 in terms of DCG25 on the development set and 0.5116 on the test set.