This paper proposes a novel nonnegative sparse representation approach, called two-stage sparse representation (TSR), for robust face recognition on a large-scale database. Based on the divide and conquer strategy, TSR decomposes the procedure of robust face recognition into outlier detection stage and recognition stage. In the first stage, we propose a general multisubspace framework to learn a robust metric in which noise and outliers in image pixels are detected. Potential loss functions, including L₁ , L_2,1, and correntropy are studied. In the second stage, based on the learned metric and collaborative representation, we propose an efficient nonnegative sparse representation algorithm to find an approximation solution of sparse representation. According to the L₁ ball theory in sparse representation, the approximated solution is unique and can be optimized efficiently. Then a filtering strategy is developed to avoid the computation of the sparse representation on the whole large-scale dataset. Moreover, theoretical analysis also gives the necessary condition for nonnegative least squares technique to find a sparse solution. Extensive experiments on several public databases have demonstrated that the proposed TSR approach, in general, achieves better classification accuracy than the state-of-the-art sparse representation methods. More importantly, a significant reduction of computational costs is reached in comparison with sparse representation classifier; this enables the TSR to be more suitable for robust face recognition on a large-scale dataset.

Large-scale is a trend in person re-identification (re-id). It is important that real-time search be performed in a large gallery. While previous methods mostly focus on discriminative learning, this paper makes the attempt in integrating deep learning and hashing into one framework to evaluate the efficiency and accuracy for large-scale person re-id. We integrate spatial information for discriminative visual representation by partitioning the pedestrian image into horizontal parts. Specifically, Part-based Deep Hashing (PDH) is proposed, in which batches of triplet samples are employed as the input of the deep hashing architecture. Each triplet sample contains two pedestrian images (or parts) with the same identity and one pedestrian image (or part) of the different identity. A triplet loss function is employed with a constraint that the Hamming distance of pedestrian images (or parts) with the same identity is smaller than ones with the different identity. In the experiment, we show that the proposed PDH method yields very competitive re-id accuracy on the large-scale Market-1501 and Market-1501+500K datasets.

This paper describes a method to distinguish documents produced by laser printers, inkjet printers, and electrostatic copiers, three commonly used document creation devices. The proposed approach can distinguish between documents produced by these sources based on features extracted from the characters in the documents. Hence, it can also be used to detect tampered documents produced by a mixture of these sources. We analyze the characteristics associated with laser/inkjet printers and electrostatic copiers and determine the signatures created by the different physical and technical processes involved in each type of printing. Based on the analysis of these signatures, we computed the features of noise energy, contour roughness, and average gradient. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to distinguish documents produced by laser printer, inkjet printer, and copier based on features extracted from individual characters in the documents. Experimental results show that this method has an average accuracy of 90% and works with JPEG compression.

Human adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technique is largely hampered because of the increasing complexity and opacity of AI development. Explainable AI (XAI) techniques with various methods and tools have been developed to bridge this gap between high-performance black-box AI models and human understanding. However, the current adoption of XAI technique still lacks “human-centered” guidance for designing proper solutions to meet different stakeholders’ needs in XAI practice. We first summarize a human-centered demand framework to categorize different stakeholders into five key roles with specific demands by reviewing existing research and then extract six commonly used human-centered XAI evaluation measures which are helpful for validating the effect of XAI. In addition, a taxonomy of XAI methods is developed for visual computing with analysis of method properties. Holding clearer human demands and XAI methods in mind, we take a medical image diagnosis scenario as an example to present an overview of how extant XAI approaches for visual computing fulfil stakeholders’ human-centered demands in practice. And we check the availability of open-source XAI tools for stakeholders’ use. This survey provides further guidance for matching diverse human demands with appropriate XAI methods or tools in specific applications with a summary of main challenges and future work toward human-centered XAI in practice.

Cross-media hashing, which maps data from different modalities to a low-dimensional sharing Hamming space, has attracted considerable attention due to the rapid increase of multimodal data, for example, images and texts. Recent cross-media hashing works mainly aim at learning compact hash codes to preserve the class label-based or feature-based similarities among samples. However, these methods ignore the unbalanced semantic gaps between different modalities and high-level semantic concepts, which generally results in less effective hash functions and unsatisfying retrieval performance. Specifically, the key words of texts contain semantic meanings, while the low-level features of images lack of semantic meanings. That means the semantic gap in image modality is larger than that in text modality. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective hashing method for cross-media retrieval to address this problem, dubbed discrete semantic alignment hashing (DSAH). First, DSAH formulates to exploit collaborative filtering to mine the relations between class labels and hash codes, which can reduce memory consumption and computational cost compared to pairwise similarity. Then, the attribute of image modality is employed to align the semantic information with text modality. Finally, to further improve the quality of hash codes, we propose a discrete optimization algorithm to learn discrete hash codes directly, and each bit has a closed-form solution. Extensive experiments on multiple public databases show that our model can seamlessly incorporate attributes and achieve promising performance.

Semantic image segmentation can be accomplished by assigning a proper object category label to each meaningful region of an image. Beyond the original bottom-up models, the use of top-down categorization information has been applied to semantic segmentation to improve performance. An excellent example of such a top-down scheme is to integrate a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model with sparse dictionary learning. However, the existing solutions merely consider the discrimination of dictionaries to obtain better sparse codes, without considering the inherent data locality characteristics. In this paper, we explore such characteristics and propose a novel semantic segmentation framework based on an innovative CRF model with locality-consistent dictionary learning. In particular, we propose two new locality-consistent dictionary learning strategies by capturing the local consistencies in the feature space and the label space. In addition, we develop a joint dictionary and a CRF model parameter learning algorithm to seamlessly integrate the proposed locality-consistent dictionary learning strategies into the CRF model. Extensive experiments are conducted with two popular databases of different traits (i.e., Graz-02 and PASCAL-CONTEXT). The simulation results confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme, especially when training data is limited.