Pablo Blanco

Mr. Pablo Blanco


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

10Years (2017-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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1 January 2021 in Applied Sciences
Verified
Journal Article
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PBPablo Blanco
Pablo Blanco
Eduardo FIDALGOEduardo FIDALGO
Eduardo FIDALGO
EAEnrique Alegre
Enrique Alegre
Roberto Vasco CarofilisRoberto Vasco Carofilis
Roberto Vasco Carofilis
FJFrancisco Jáñez-Martino
Francisco Jáñez-Martino
VFVictor Fidalgo
Victor Fidalgo
Industrial control systems depend heavily on security and monitoring protocols. Several tools are available for this purpose, which scout vulnerabilities and take screenshots of various control panels for later analysis. However, they do not adequately classify images into specific control groups, which is crucial for security-based tasks performed by manual operators. To solve this problem, we propose a pipeline based on deep learning to classify snapshots of industrial control panels into three categories: internet technologies, operation technologies, and others. More specifically, we compare the use of transfer learning and fine-tuning in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) pre-trained on ImageNet to select the best CNN architecture for classifying the screenshots of industrial control systems. We propose the critical infrastructure dataset (CRINF-300), which is the first publicly available information technology (IT)/operational technology (OT) snapshot dataset, with 337 manually labeled images. We used the CRINF-300 to train and evaluate eighteen different pipelines, registering their performance under CPU and GPU environments. We found out that the Inception-ResNet-V2 and VGG16 architectures obtained the best results on transfer learning and fine-tuning, with F1-scores of 0.9832 and 0.9373, respectively. In systems where time is critical and the GPU is available, we recommend using the MobileNet-V1 architecture, with an average time of 0.03 s to process an image and with an F1-score of 0.9758.

16 October 2020 in Sensors
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Journal Article
Open access
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PBPablo Blanco
Pablo Blanco
Eduardo FIDALGOEduardo FIDALGO
Eduardo FIDALGO
EAEnrique Alegre
Enrique Alegre
RARocío Alaiz-Rodríguez
Rocío Alaiz-Rodríguez
FJFrancisco Jáñez-Martino
Francisco Jáñez-Martino
ABAlexandra Bonnici
Alexandra Bonnici
Retrieving text embedded within images is a challenging task in real-world settings. Multiple problems such as low-resolution and the orientation of the text can hinder the extraction of information. These problems are common in environments such as Tor Darknet and Child Sexual Abuse images, where text extraction is crucial in the prevention of illegal activities. In this work, we evaluate eight text recognizers and, to increase the performance of text transcription, we combine these recognizers with rectification networks and super-resolution algorithms. We test our approach on four state-of-the-art and two custom datasets (TOICO-1K and Child Sexual Abuse (CSA)-text, based on text retrieved from Tor Darknet and Child Sexual Exploitation Material, respectively). We obtained a 0.3170 score of correctly recognized words in the TOICO-1K dataset when we combined Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and rectification-based recognizers. For the CSA-text dataset, applying resolution enhancements achieved a final score of 0.6960. The highest performance increase was achieved on the ICDAR 2015 dataset, with an improvement of 4.83% when combining the MORAN recognizer and the Residual Dense resolution approach. We conclude that rectification outperforms super-resolution when applied separately, while their combination achieves the best average improvements in the chosen datasets.

6 July 2022 in IET Image Processing
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Journal Article
Open access
PBPablo Blanco
Pablo Blanco
Eduardo FIDALGOEduardo FIDALGO
Eduardo FIDALGO
EAEnrique Alegre
Enrique Alegre
Victor Gonzalez CastroVictor Gonzalez Castro
Victor Gonzalez Castro
Text Spotting is the union of the tasks of detection and transcription of the text that is present in images. Due to the various problems often found when retrieving text, such as orientation, aspect ratio, vertical text or multiple languages in the same image, this can be a challenging task. In this paper, the most recent methods and publications in this field are analysed and compared. Apart from presenting features already seen in other surveys, such as their architectures and performance on different datasets, novel perspectives for comparison are also included, such as the hardware, software, backbone architectures, main problems to solve, or programming languages of the algorithms. The review highlights information often omitted in other studies, providing a better understanding of the current state of research in Text Spotting, from 2016 to 2022, current problems and future trends, as well as establishing a baseline for future methods development, comparison of results and serving as guideline for choosing the most appropriate method to solve a particular problem.

12 July 2024 in Jornadas de Automática
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Journal Article
Open access
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PBPablo Blanco
Pablo Blanco
ACAndrés Carofilis
Andrés Carofilis
EFEduardo Fidalgo
Eduardo Fidalgo
EAEnrique Alegre
Enrique Alegre
La globalización de las tecnologías de comunicación ha llevado a un aumento de las estafas mediante técnicas de phishing. Los Equipos de Respuesta ante Emergencias Informáticas (CERTs) reciben capturas de pantalla enviadas por usuarios cuyos smartphones reciben mensajes sospechosos. Estos SMS tratan de suplantar compañías conocidas para persuadir a sus usuarios de tomar acciones urgentes, robando sus datos o realizando acciones no autorizadas en sus cuentas bancarias. Estos mensajes se conocen como Smishing, y los CERTs están interesados en herramientas que permitan automatizar la extracción de URLs en capturas de pantalla para verificar si contienen phishing. En este trabajo, proponemos una estrategia de extracción de URLs de capturas de pantalla que combinan técnicas tradicionales de visión artificial, como preprocesado y operaciones morfológicas, con mecanismos de detección y reconocimiento de URL para recuperar las URLs sospechosas. Evaluando nuestra propuesta en 117 capturas de Smishing que contienen 121 URLs, logramos una precisión del 61.16% en la recuperación de URLs en mensajes Smishing.

21 May 2020 in arXiv
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Preprint
Open access
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RBRubel Biswas
Rubel Biswas
Roberto Vasco CarofilisRoberto Vasco Carofilis
Roberto Vasco Carofilis
Eduardo FIDALGOEduardo FIDALGO
Eduardo FIDALGO
FJFrancisco Jáñez-Martino
Francisco Jáñez-Martino
PBPablo Blanco
Pablo Blanco
The Tor darknet hosts different types of illegal content, which are monitored by cybersecurity agencies. However, manually classifying Tor content can be slow and error-prone. To support this task, we introduce Frequency-Dominant Neighborhood Structure (F-DNS), a new perceptual hashing method for automatically classifying domains by their screenshots. First, we evaluated F-DNS using images subject to various content preserving operations. We compared them with their original images, achieving better correlation coefficients than other state-of-the-art methods, especially in the case of rotation. Then, we applied F-DNS to categorize Tor domains using the Darknet Usage Service Images-2K (DUSI-2K), a dataset with screenshots of active Tor service domains. Finally, we measured the performance of F-DNS against an image classification approach and a state-of-the-art hashing method. Our proposal obtained 98.75% accuracy in Tor images, surpassing all other methods compared.

21 December 2017
Verified
Book Chapter
Closed access
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FSFrancisco J. Rodríguez Sedano
Francisco J. Rodríguez Sedano
Pere PonsaPere Ponsa
Pere Ponsa
PBPablo Blanco
Pablo Blanco
LMLuis Miguel Muñoz
Luis Miguel Muñoz