Mohammad Ahsanul Haque

An analysis of content-based classification of audio signals using a fuzzy c-means algorithm

Content-based audio signal classification into broad categories such as speech, music, or speech with noise is the first step before any further processing such as speech recognition, content-based indexing, or surveillance systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient content-based audio classification approach to classify audio signals into broad genres using a fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm. We analyze different characteristic features of audio signals in time, frequency, and coefficient domains and select the optimal feature vector by employing a noble analytical scoring method to each feature. We utilize an FCM-based classification scheme and apply it on the extracted normalized optimal feature vector to achieve an efficient classification result. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art audio classification systems by more than 11% in classification performance.

Real-time acquisition of high quality face sequences from an active pan-tilt-zoom camera

Traditional still camera-based facial image acquisition systems in surveillance applications produce low quality face images. This is mainly due to the distance between the camera and subjects of interest. Furthermore, people in such videos usually move around, change their head poses, and facial expressions. Moreover, the imaging conditions like illumination, occlusion, and noise may change. These all aggregate the quality of most of the detected face images in terms of measures like resolution, pose, brightness, and sharpness. To deal with these problems this paper presents an active camera-based realtime high-quality face image acquisition system, which utilizes pan-tilt-zoom parameters of a camera to focus on a human face in a scene and employs a face quality assessment method to log the best quality faces from the captured frames. The system consists of four modules: face detection, camera control, face tracking, and face quality assessment before logging. Experimental results show that the proposed system can effectively log the high quality faces from the active camera in real-time (an average of 61.74ms was spent per frame) with an accuracy of 85.27% compared to human annotated data.

Heartbeat Signal from Facial Video for Biometric Recognition

Different biometric traits such as face appearance and heartbeat signal from Electrocardiogram (ECG)/Phonocardiogram (PCG) are widely used in the human identity recognition. Recent advances in facial video based measurement of cardio-physiological parameters such as heartbeat rate, respiratory rate, and blood volume pressure provide the possibility of extracting heartbeat signal from facial video instead of using obtrusive ECG or PCG sensors in the body. This paper proposes the Heartbeat Signal from Facial Video (HSFV) as a new biometric trait for human identity recognition, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. Feature extraction from the HSFV is accomplished by employing Radon transform on a waterfall model of the replicated HSFV. The pairwise Minkowski distances are obtained from the Radon image as the features. The authentication is accomplished by a decision tree based supervised approach. The potential of the proposed HSFV biometric for human identification is demonstrated on a public database.

An enhanced fuzzy c-means algorithm for audio segmentation and classification

Automated audio segmentation and classification play important roles in multimedia content analysis. In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach, called the correlation intensive fuzzy c-means (CIFCM) algorithm, to audio segmentation and classification that is based on audio content analysis. While conventional methods work by considering the attributes of only the current frame or segment, the proposed CIFCM algorithm efficiently incorporates the influence of neighboring frames or segments in the audio stream. With this method, audio-cuts can be detected efficiently even when the signal contains audio effects such as fade-in, fade-out, and cross-fade. A number of audio features are analyzed in this paper to explore the differences between various types of audio data. The proposed CIFCM algorithm works by detecting the boundaries between different kinds of sounds and classifying them into clusters such as silence, speech, music, speech with music, and speech with noise. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art FCM approach in terms of audio segmentation and classification.

Quality-Aware Estimation of Facial Landmarks in Video Sequences

Face alignment in video is a primitive step for facial image analysis. The accuracy of the alignment greatly depends on the quality of the face image in the video frames and low quality faces are proven to cause erroneous alignment. Thus, this paper proposes a system for quality aware face alignment by using a Supervised Decent Method (SDM) along with a motion based forward extrapolation method. The proposed system first extracts faces from video frames. Then, it employs a face quality assessment technique to measure the face quality. If the face quality is high, the proposed system uses SDM for facial landmark detection. If the face quality is low the proposed system corrects the facial landmarks that are detected by SDM. Depending upon the face velocity in consecutive video frames and face quality measure, two algorithms are proposed for correction of landmarks in low quality faces by using an extrapolation polynomial. Experimental results illustrate the competency of the proposed method while comparing with the state-of-the art methods including an SDM-based method (from CVPR-2013) and a very recent method (from CVPR-2014) that uses parallel cascade of linear regression (Par-CLR).

An Analysis of Reducing Communication Delay in Network-on-Chip Interconnect Architecture

This paper presents an Enhanced Clustered Mesh (EnMesh) topology for a Network-on-Chip architecture in order to reduce the communication delay between remote regions by considering the physical positions of remote nodes. EnMesh topology includes short paths between diagonal regions to ensure fast communication among remote nodes. The performance and silicon area overhead of EnMesh are analyzed and compared to those of state-of-the-art topologies such as Mesh, Torus, and Butterfly-Fat-Tree (BFT). Experimental results demonstrate that EnMesh outperforms other existing regular topologies in terms of throughput, latency, packet loss rate, and silicon area overhead.

Spatio-Temporal Pain Recognition in CNN-based Super-Resolved Facial Images

Automatic pain detection is a long expected solution to a prevalent medical problem of pain management. This is more relevant when the subject of pain is young children or patients with limited ability to communicate about their pain experience. Computer vision-based analysis of facial pain expression provides a way of efficient pain detection. When deep machine learning methods came into the scene, automatic pain detection exhibited even better performance. In this paper, we figured out three important factors to exploit in automatic pain detection: spatial information available regarding to pain in each of the facial video frames, temporal axis information regarding to pain expression pattern in a subject video sequence, and variation of face resolution. We employed a combination of convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network to setup a deep hybrid pain detection framework that is able to exploit both spatial and temporal pain information from facial video. In order to analyze the effect of different facial resolutions, we introduce a super-resolution algorithm to generate facial video frames with different resolution setups. We investigated the performance on the publicly available UNBC-McMaster Shoulder Pain database. As a contribution, the paper provides novel and important information regarding to the performance of a hybrid deep learning framework for pain detection in facial images of different resolution.

Can contact-free measurement of heartbeat signal be used in forensics?

Biometrics and soft biometrics characteristics are of great importance in forensics applications for identifying criminals and law enforcement. Developing new biometrics and soft biometrics are therefore of interest of many applications, among them forensics. Heartbeat signals have been previously used as biometrics, but they have been measured using contact-based sensors. This paper extracts heartbeat signals, using a contact-free method by a simple webcam. The extracted signals in this case are not as precise as those that can be extracted using contact-based sensors. However, the contact-free extracted heartbeat signals are shown in this paper to have some potentials to be used as soft biometrics. Promising experimental results on a public database, have shown that utilizing these signals can improve the accuracy of spoofing detection in a face recognition system.

Facial Video based Detection of Physical Fatigue for Maximal Muscle Activity

Physical fatigue reveals the health condition of a person at, for example, health checkup, fitness assessment, or rehabilitation training. This study presents an efficient non-contact system for detecting non-localised physical fatigue from maximal muscle activity using facial videos acquired in a realistic environment with natural lighting where subjects were allowed to voluntarily move their head, change their facial expression, and vary their pose. The proposed method utilises a facial feature point tracking method by combining a ‘good feature to track’ and a ‘supervised descent method’ to address the challenges that originate from realistic scenario. A face quality assessment system was also incorporated in the proposed system to reduce erroneous results by discarding low quality faces that occurred in a video sequence due to problems in realistic lighting, head motion, and pose variation. Experimental results show that the proposed system outperforms video-based existing system for physical fatigue detection.

Facial Expression Recognition for Traumatic Brain Injured Patients

In this paper, we investigate the issues associated with facial expression recognition of Traumatic Brain Insured (TBI) patients in a realistic scenario. These patients have restricted or limited muscle movements with reduced facial expressions along with non-cooperative behavior, impaired reasoning and inappropriate responses. All these factors make automatic understanding of their expressions more complex. While the existing facial expression recognition systems showed high accuracy by taking data from healthy subjects, their performance is yet to be proved for real TBI patient data by considering the aforementioned challenges. To deal with this, we devised scenarios for data collection from the real TBI patients, collected data which is very challenging to process, devised effective way of data preprocessing so that good quality faces can be extracted from the patients facial video for expression analysis, and finally, employed a state-of-the-art deep learning framework to exploit spatio-temporal information of facial video frames in expression analysis. The experimental results confirms the difficulty in processing real TBI patients data, while showing that better face quality ensures better performance in this case.