A face image not only provides details about the identity of a subject but also reveals several attributes such as gender, race, sexual orientation, and age. Advancements in machine learning algorithms and popularity of sharing images on the World Wide Web, including social media websites, have increased the scope of data analytics and information profiling from photo collections. This poses a serious privacy threat for individuals who do not want to be profiled. This research presents a novel algorithm for anonymizing selective attributes which an individual does not want to share without affecting the visual quality of images. Using the proposed algorithm, a user can select single or multiple attributes to be surpassed while preserving identity information and visual content. The proposed adversarial perturbation based algorithm embeds imperceptible noise in an image such that attribute prediction algorithm for the selected attribute yields incorrect classification result, thereby preserving the information according to user's choice. Experiments on three popular databases i.e. MUCT, LFWcrop, and CelebA show that the proposed algorithm not only anonymizes k-attributes, but also preserves image quality and identity information.

With increasing number of COVID-19 cases globally, all the countries are ramping up the testing numbers. While the RT-PCR kits are available in sufficient quantity in several countries, others are facing challenges with limited availability of testing kits and processing centers in remote areas. This has motivated researchers to find alternate methods of testing which are reliable, easily accessible and faster. Chest X-Ray is one of the modalities that is gaining acceptance as a screening modality. Towards this direction, the paper has two primary contributions. Firstly, we present the COVID-19 Multi-Task Network (COMiT-Net) which is an automated end-to-end network for COVID-19 screening. The proposed network not only predicts whether the CXR has COVID-19 features present or not, it also performs semantic segmentation of the regions of interest to make the model explainable. Secondly, with the help of medical professionals, we manually annotate the lung regions and semantic segmentation of COVID19 symptoms in CXRs taken from the ChestXray-14, CheXpert, and a consolidated COVID-19 dataset. These annotations will be released to the research community. Experiments performed with more than 2500 frontal CXR images show that at 90% specificity, the proposed COMiT-Net yields 96.80% sensitivity.

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With increasing number of COVID-19 cases globally, all the countries are ramping up the testing numbers. While the RT-PCR kits are available in sufficient quantity in several countries, others are facing challenges with limited availability of testing kits and processing centers in remote areas. This has motivated researchers to find alternate methods of testing which are reliable, easily accessible and faster. Chest X-Ray is one of the modalities that is gaining acceptance as a screening modality. Towards this direction, the paper has two primary contributions. Firstly, we present the COVID-19 Multi-Task Network which is an automated end-to-end network for COVID-19 screening. The proposed network not only predicts whether the CXR has COVID-19 features present or not, it also performs semantic segmentation of the regions of interest to make the model explainable. Secondly, with the help of medical professionals, we manually annotate the lung regions of 9000 frontal chest radiographs taken from ChestXray-14, CheXpert and a consolidated COVID-19 dataset. Further, 200 chest radiographs pertaining to COVID-19 patients are also annotated for semantic segmentation. This database will be released to the research community.

PurposeTo advance the usage of CXRs as a viable solution for efficient COVID-19 diagnostics by providing large-scale annotations of the abnormalities in frontal CXRs in BIMCV-COVID19+ database, and to provide a robust evaluation mechanism to facilitate its usage.Materials and MethodsWe provide the abnormality annotations in frontal CXRs by creating bounding boxes. The frontal CXRs are a part of the existing BIMCV-COVID19+ database. We also define four different protocols for robust evaluation of semantic segmentation and classification algorithms. Finally, we benchmark the defined protocols and report the results using popular deep learning models as a part of this study.ResultsFor semantic segmentation, Mask-RCNN performs the best among all the models with a DICE score of 0.43 ± 0.01. For classification, we observe that MobileNetv2 yields the best results for 2-class and 3-class classification. We also observe that deep models report a lower performance for classifying other classes apart from the COVID class.ConclusionBy making the annotated data and protocols available to the scientific community, we aim to advance the usage of CXRs as a viable solution for efficient COVID-19 diagnostics. This large-scale data will be useful for ML algorithms and can be used for learning radiological patterns observed in COVID-19 patients. Further, the protocols will facilitate ML practitioners for unified large-scale evaluation of their algorithms.Data Availability StatementThe data associated with this work is available here : Radiologists’ Annotations on COVID-19+ X-rays https://osf.io/b35xu/ via @OSFramework andhttp://covbase4all.igib.res.in/.

Modern deep learning systems have achieved unparalleled success and several applications have significantly benefited due to these technological advancements. However, these systems have also shown vulnerabilities with strong implications on the fairness and trustability of such systems. Among these vulnerabilities, bias has been an Achilles’ heel problem. Many applications such as face recognition and language translation have shown high levels of bias in the systems towards particular demographic sub-groups. Unbalanced representation of these sub-groups in the training data is one of the primary reasons of biased behavior. To address this important challenge, we propose a two-fold contribution: a bias estimation metric termed as Precise Subgroup Equivalence to jointly measure the bias in model prediction and the overall model performance. Secondly, we propose a novel bias mitigation algorithm which is inspired from adversarial perturbation and uses the PSE metric. The mitigation algorithm learns a single uniform perturbation termed as Subgroup Invariant Perturbation which is added to the input dataset to generate a transformed dataset. The transformed dataset, when given as input to the pre-trained model reduces the bias in model prediction. Multiple experiments performed on four publicly available face datasets showcase the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for race and gender prediction.

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