a b s t r a c tSurveillance cameras have become a customary security equipment in buildings and streets worldwide. It is up to the field of Computational Forensics to provide automated methods for extracting and analyzing relevant image data captured by such equipment. In this article, we describe an effective and semi-automated method for detecting vanishing points, with their subsequent application to the problem of computing heights in single images. With no necessary camera calibration, our method iteratively clusters segments in the bidimensional projective space, identifying all vanishing points -finite and infinite -in an image. We conduct experiments on images of man-made environments to evaluate the output of the proposed method and we also consider its application on a photogrammetry framework.
With the widespread use of biometric authentication comes the exploitation of presentation attacks, possibly undermining the effectiveness of these technologies in real-world setups. One example takes place when an impostor, aiming at unlocking someone else's smartphone, deceives the built-in face recognition system by presenting a printed image of the user. In this work, we study the problem of automatically detecting presentation attacks against face authentication methods, considering the use-case of fast device unlocking and hardware constraints of mobile devices. To enrich the understanding of how a purely software-based method can be used to tackle the problem, we present a solely data-driven approach trained with multi-resolution patches and a multi-objective loss function crafted specifically to the problem. We provide a careful analysis that considers several user-disjoint and cross-factor protocols, highlighting some of the problems with current datasets and approaches. Such analysis, besides demonstrating the competitive results yielded by the proposed method, provides a better conceptual understanding of the problem. To further enhance efficacy and discriminability, we propose a method that leverages the available gallery of user data in the device and adapts the method decision-making process to the user's and the device's own characteristics. Finally, we introduce a new presentation-attack dataset tailored to the mobile-device setup, with real-world variations in lighting, including outdoors and low-light sessions, in contrast to existing public datasets.
In this article we present the first effective method based on global optimization for the reconstruction of image puzzles comprising rectangle pieces-Puzzle Solving by Quadratic Programming (PSQP). The proposed novel mathematical formulation reduces the problem to the maximization of a constrained quadratic function, which is solved via a gradient ascent approach. The proposed method is deterministic and can deal with arbitrary identical rectangular pieces. We provide experimental results showing its effectiveness when compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Although the method was developed to solve image puzzles, we also show how to apply it to the reconstruction of simulated strip-shredded documents, broadening its applicability.
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