arXiv subjects

Shervin Minaee

Publications and source records attributed to Shervin Minaee.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

DeepIris: Iris Recognition Using A Deep Learning Approach

Iris recognition has been an active research area during last few decades, because of its wide applications in security, from airports to homeland security border control. Different features and algorithms have been proposed for iris recognition in the past. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for iris recognition based on residual convolutional neural network (CNN), which can jointly learn the feature representation and perform recognition. We train our model on a well-known iris recognition dataset using only a few training images from each class, and show promising results and improvements over previous approaches. We also present a visualization technique which is able to detect the important areas in iris images which can mostly impact the recognition results. We believe this framework can be widely used for other biometrics recognition tasks, helping to have a more scalable and accurate systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Deep-Sentiment: Sentiment Analysis Using Ensemble of CNN and Bi-LSTM Models

With the popularity of social networks, and e-commerce websites, sentiment analysis has become a more active area of research in the past few years. On a high level, sentiment analysis tries to understand the public opinion about a specific product or topic, or trends from reviews or tweets. Sentiment analysis plays an important role in better understanding customer/user opinion, and also extracting social/political trends. There has been a lot of previous works for sentiment analysis, some based on hand-engineering relevant textual features, and others based on different neural network architectures. In this work, we present a model based on an ensemble of long-short-term-memory (LSTM), and convolutional neural network (CNN), one to capture the temporal information of the data, and the other one to extract the local structure thereof. Through experimental results, we show that using this ensemble model we can outperform both individual models. We are also able to achieve a very high accuracy rate compared to the previous works.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Deep-Emotion: Facial Expression Recognition Using Attentional Convolutional Network

Facial expression recognition has been an active research area over the past few decades, and it is still challenging due to the high intra-class variation. Traditional approaches for this problem rely on hand-crafted features such as SIFT, HOG and LBP, followed by a classifier trained on a database of images or videos. Most of these works perform reasonably well on datasets of images captured in a controlled condition, but fail to perform as good on more challenging datasets with more image variation and partial faces. In recent years, several works proposed an end-to-end framework for facial expression recognition, using deep learning models. Despite the better performance of these works, there still seems to be a great room for improvement. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach based on attentional convolutional network, which is able to focus on important parts of the face, and achieves significant improvement over previous models on multiple datasets, including FER-2013, CK+, FERG, and JAFFE. We also use a visualization technique which is able to find important face regions for detecting different emotions, based on the classifier's output. Through experimental results, we show that different emotions seems to be sensitive to different parts of the face.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Efficient Super Resolution For Large-Scale Images Using Attentional GAN

Single Image Super Resolution (SISR) is a well-researched problem with broad commercial relevance. However, most of the SISR literature focuses on small-size images under 500px, whereas business needs can mandate the generation of very high resolution images. At Expedia Group, we were tasked with generating images of at least 2000px for display on the website, four times greater than the sizes typically reported in the literature. This requirement poses a challenge that state-of-the-art models, validated on small images, have not been proven to handle. In this paper, we investigate solutions to the problem of generating high-quality images for large-scale super resolution in a commercial setting. We find that training a generative adversarial network (GAN) with attention from scratch using a large-scale lodging image data set generates images with high PSNR and SSIM scores. We describe a novel attentional SISR model for large-scale images, A-SRGAN, that uses a Flexible Self Attention layer to enable processing of large-scale images. We also describe a distributed algorithm which speeds up training by around a factor of five.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

An ADMM Approach to Masked Signal Decomposition Using Subspace Representation

Signal decomposition is a classical problem in signal processing, which aims to separate an observed signal into two or more components each with its own property. Usually each component is described by its own subspace or dictionary. Extensive research has been done for the case where the components are additive, but in real world applications, the components are often non-additive. For example, an image may consist of a foreground object overlaid on a background, where each pixel either belongs to the foreground or the background. In such a situation, to separate signal components, we need to find a binary mask which shows the location of each component. Therefore it requires to solve a binary optimization problem. Since most of the binary optimization problems are intractable, we relax this problem to the approximated continuous problem, and solve it by alternating optimization technique. We show the application of the proposed algorithm for three applications: separation of text from background in images, separation of moving objects from a background undergoing global camera motion in videos, separation of sinusoidal and spike components in one dimensional signals. We demonstrate in each case that considering the non-additive nature of the problem can lead to significant improvement.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Iris-GAN: Learning to Generate Realistic Iris Images Using Convolutional GAN

Generating iris images which look realistic is both an interesting and challenging problem. Most of the classical statistical models are not powerful enough to capture the complicated texture representation in iris images, and therefore fail to generate iris images which look realistic. In this work, we present a machine learning framework based on generative adversarial network (GAN), which is able to generate iris images sampled from a prior distribution (learned from a set of training images). We apply this framework to two popular iris databases, and generate images which look very realistic, and similar to the image distribution in those databases. Through experimental results, we show that the generated iris images have a good diversity, and are able to capture different part of the prior distribution.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Finger-GAN: Generating Realistic Fingerprint Images Using Connectivity Imposed GAN

Generating realistic biometric images has been an interesting and, at the same time, challenging problem. Classical statistical models fail to generate realistic-looking fingerprint images, as they are not powerful enough to capture the complicated texture representation in fingerprint images. In this work, we present a machine learning framework based on generative adversarial networks (GAN), which is able to generate fingerprint images sampled from a prior distribution (learned from a set of training images). We also add a suitable regularization term to the loss function, to impose the connectivity of generated fingerprint images. This is highly desirable for fingerprints, as the lines in each finger are usually connected. We apply this framework to two popular fingerprint databases, and generate images which look very realistic, and similar to the samples in those databases. Through experimental results, we show that the generated fingerprint images have a good diversity, and are able to capture different parts of the prior distribution. We also evaluate the Frechet Inception distance (FID) of our proposed model, and show that our model is able to achieve good quantitative performance in terms of this score.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

MTBI Identification From Diffusion MR Images Using Bag of Adversarial Visual Features

In this work, we propose bag of adversarial features (BAF) for identifying mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) patients from their diffusion magnetic resonance images (MRI) (obtained within one month of injury) by incorporating unsupervised feature learning techniques. MTBI is a growing public health problem with an estimated incidence of over 1.7 million people annually in US. Diagnosis is based on clinical history and symptoms, and accurate, concrete measures of injury are lacking. Unlike most of previous works, which use hand-crafted features extracted from different parts of brain for MTBI classification, we employ feature learning algorithms to learn more discriminative representation for this task. A major challenge in this field thus far is the relatively small number of subjects available for training. This makes it difficult to use an end-to-end convolutional neural network to directly classify a subject from MR images. To overcome this challenge, we first apply an adversarial auto-encoder (with convolutional structure) to learn patch-level features, from overlapping image patches extracted from different brain regions. We then aggregate these features through a bag-of-word approach. We perform an extensive experimental study on a dataset of 227 subjects (including 109 MTBI patients, and 118 age and sex matched healthy controls), and compare the bag-of-deep-features with several previous approaches. Our experimental results show that the BAF significantly outperforms earlier works relying on the mean values of MR metrics in selected brain regions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Ad-Net: Audio-Visual Convolutional Neural Network for Advertisement Detection In Videos

Personalized advertisement is a crucial task for many of the online businesses and video broadcasters. Many of today's broadcasters use the same commercial for all customers, but as one can imagine different viewers have different interests and it seems reasonable to have customized commercial for different group of people, chosen based on their demographic features, and history. In this project, we propose a framework, which gets the broadcast videos, analyzes them, detects the commercial and replaces it with a more suitable commercial. We propose a two-stream audio-visual convolutional neural network, that one branch analyzes the visual information and the other one analyzes the audio information, and then the audio and visual embedding are fused together, and are used for commercial detection, and content categorization. We show that using both the visual and audio content of the videos significantly improves the model performance for video analysis. This network is trained on a dataset of more than 50k regular video and commercial shots, and achieved much better performance compared to the models based on hand-crafted features.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

A Deep Unsupervised Learning Approach Toward MTBI Identification Using Diffusion MRI

Mild traumatic brain injury is a growing public health problem with an estimated incidence of over 1.7 million people annually in US. Diagnosis is based on clinical history and symptoms, and accurate, concrete measures of injury are lacking. This work aims to directly use diffusion MR images obtained within one month of trauma to detect injury, by incorporating deep learning techniques. To overcome the challenge due to limited training data, we describe each brain region using the bag of word representation, which specifies the distribution of representative patch patterns. We apply a convolutional auto-encoder to learn the patch-level features, from overlapping image patches extracted from the MR images, to learn features from diffusion MR images of brain using an unsupervised approach. Our experimental results show that the bag of word representation using patch level features learnt by the auto encoder provides similar performance as that using the raw patch patterns, both significantly outperform earlier work relying on the mean values of MR metrics in selected brain regions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Image Segmentation Using Subspace Representation and Sparse Decomposition

Image foreground extraction is a classical problem in image processing and vision, with a large range of applications. In this dissertation, we focus on the extraction of text and graphics in mixed-content images, and design novel approaches for various aspects of this problem. We first propose a sparse decomposition framework, which models the background by a subspace containing smooth basis vectors, and foreground as a sparse and connected component. We then formulate an optimization framework to solve this problem, by adding suitable regularizations to the cost function to promote the desired characteristics of each component. We present two techniques to solve the proposed optimization problem, one based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and the other one based on robust regression. Promising results are obtained for screen content image segmentation using the proposed algorithm. We then propose a robust subspace learning algorithm for the representation of the background component using training images that could contain both background and foreground components, as well as noise. With the learnt subspace for the background, we can further improve the segmentation results, compared to using a fixed subspace. Lastly, we investigate a different class of signal/image decomposition problem, where only one signal component is active at each signal element. In this case, besides estimating each component, we need to find their supports, which can be specified by a binary mask. We propose a mixed-integer programming problem, that jointly estimates the two components and their supports through an alternating optimization scheme. We show the application of this algorithm on various problems, including image segmentation, video motion segmentation, and also separation of text from textured images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Identifying Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Patients From MR Images Using Bag of Visual Words

Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a growing public health problem with an estimated incidence of one million people annually in US. Neurocognitive tests are used to both assess the patient condition and to monitor the patient progress. This work aims to directly use MR images taken shortly after injury to detect whether a patient suffers from mTBI, by incorporating machine learning and computer vision techniques to learn features suitable discriminating between mTBI and normal patients. We focus on 3 regions in brain, and extract multiple patches from them, and use bag-of-visual-word technique to represent each subject as a histogram of representative patterns derived from patches from all training subjects. After extracting the features, we use greedy forward feature selection, to choose a subset of features which achieves highest accuracy. We show through experimental studies that BoW features perform better than the simple mean value features which were used previously.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Image Decomposition Using a Robust Regression Approach

This paper considers how to separate text and/or graphics from smooth background in screen content and mixed content images and proposes an algorithm to perform this segmentation task. The proposed methods make use of the fact that the background in each block is usually smoothly varying and can be modeled well by a linear combination of a few smoothly varying basis functions, while the foreground text and graphics create sharp discontinuity. This algorithm separates the background and foreground pixels by trying to fit pixel values in the block into a smooth function using a robust regression method. The inlier pixels that can be well represented with the smooth model will be considered as background, while remaining outlier pixels will be considered foreground. We have also created a dataset of screen content images extracted from HEVC standard test sequences for screen content coding with their ground truth segmentation result which can be used for this task. The proposed algorithm has been tested on the dataset mentioned above and is shown to have superior performance over other methods, such as the hierarchical k-means clustering algorithm, shape primitive extraction and coding, and the least absolute deviation fitting scheme for foreground segmentation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Face Recognition Using Scattering Convolutional Network

Face recognition has been an active research area in the past few decades. In general, face recognition can be very challenging due to variations in viewpoint, illumination, facial expression, etc. Therefore it is essential to extract features which are invariant to some or all of these variations. Here a new image representation, called scattering transform/network, has been used to extract features from faces. The scattering transform is a kind of convolutional network which provides a powerful multi-layer representation for signals. After extraction of scattering features, PCA is applied to reduce the dimensionality of the data and then a multi-class support vector machine is used to perform recognition. The proposed algorithm has been tested on three face datasets and achieved a very high recognition rate.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

A Machine Learning Approach For Identifying Patients with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Using Diffusion MRI Modeling

While diffusion MRI has been extremely promising in the study of MTBI, identifying patients with recent MTBI remains a challenge. The literature is mixed with regard to localizing injury in these patients, however, gray matter such as the thalamus and white matter including the corpus callosum and frontal deep white matter have been repeatedly implicated as areas at high risk for injury. The purpose of this study is to develop a machine learning framework to classify MTBI patients and controls using features derived from multi-shell diffusion MRI in the thalamus, frontal white matter and corpus callosum.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Automatic Question-Answering Using A Deep Similarity Neural Network

Automatic question-answering is a classical problem in natural language processing, which aims at designing systems that can automatically answer a question, in the same way as human does. In this work, we propose a deep learning based model for automatic question-answering. First the questions and answers are embedded using neural probabilistic modeling. Then a deep similarity neural network is trained to find the similarity score of a pair of answer and question. Then for each question, the best answer is found as the one with the highest similarity score. We first train this model on a large-scale public question-answering database, and then fine-tune it to transfer to the customer-care chat data. We have also tested our framework on a public question-answering database and achieved very good performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Subspace Learning in The Presence of Sparse Structured Outliers and Noise

Subspace learning is an important problem, which has many applications in image and video processing. It can be used to find a low-dimensional representation of signals and images. But in many applications, the desired signal is heavily distorted by outliers and noise, which negatively affect the learned subspace. In this work, we present a novel algorithm for learning a subspace for signal representation, in the presence of structured outliers and noise. The proposed algorithm tries to jointly detect the outliers and learn the subspace for images. We present an alternating optimization algorithm for solving this problem, which iterates between learning the subspace and finding the outliers. This algorithm has been trained on a large number of image patches, and the learned subspace is used for image segmentation, and is shown to achieve better segmentation results than prior methods, including least absolute deviation fitting, k-means clustering based segmentation in DjVu, and shape primitive extraction and coding algorithm.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Text Extraction From Texture Images Using Masked Signal Decomposition

Text extraction is an important problem in image processing with applications from optical character recognition to autonomous driving. Most of the traditional text segmentation algorithms consider separating text from a simple background (which usually has a different color from texts). In this work we consider separating texts from a textured background, that has similar color to texts. We look at this problem from a signal decomposition perspective, and consider a more realistic scenario where signal components are overlaid on top of each other (instead of adding together). When the signals are overlaid, to separate signal components, we need to find a binary mask which shows the support of each component. Because directly solving the binary mask is intractable, we relax this problem to the approximated continuous problem, and solve it by alternating optimization method. We show that the proposed algorithm achieves significantly better results than other recent works on several challenging images.

cs.CV↗