The new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has seriously affected the world. By the end of November 2020, the global number of new coronavirus cases had already exceeded 60 million and the number of deaths 1,410,378 according to information from the World Health Organization (WHO). To limit the spread of the disease, mandatory face-mask rules are now becoming common in public settings around the world. Additionally, many public service providers require customers to wear face-masks in accordance with predefined rules (e.g., covering both mouth and nose) when using public services. These developments inspired research into automatic (computer-vision-based) techniques for face-mask detection that can help monitor public behavior and contribute towards constraining the COVID-19 pandemic. Although existing research in this area resulted in efficient techniques for face-mask detection, these usually operate under the assumption that modern face detectors provide perfect detection performance (even for masked faces) and that the main goal of the techniques is to detect the presence of face-masks only. In this study, we revisit these common assumptions and explore the following research questions: (i) How well do existing face detectors perform with masked-face images? (ii) Is it possible to detect a proper (regulation-compliant) placement of facial masks? and iii) How useful are existing face-mask detection techniques for monitoring applications during the COVID-19 pandemic? To answer these and related questions we conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of several recent face detectors for their performance with masked-face images. Furthermore, we investigate the usefulness of multiple off-the-shelf deep-learning models for recognizing correct face-mask placement. Finally, we design a complete pipeline for recognizing whether face-masks are worn correctly or not and compare the performance of the pipeline with standard face-mask detection models from the literature. To facilitate the study, we compile a large dataset of facial images from the publicly available MAFA and Wider Face datasets and annotate it with compliant and non-compliant labels. The annotation dataset, called Face-Mask-Label Dataset (FMLD), is made publicly available to the research community.

This paper presents the summary report on the DeepFake Game Competition on Visual Realism Assessment (DFGC-VRA). Deep-learning based face-swap videos, also known as deepfakes, are becoming more and more realistic and deceiving. The malicious usage of these face-swap videos has caused wide concerns. There is a ongoing deepfake game between its creators and detectors, with the human in the loop. The research community has been focusing on the automatic detection of these fake videos, but the assessment of their visual realism, as perceived by human eyes, is still an unexplored dimension. Visual realism assessment, or VRA, is essential for assessing the potential impact that may be brought by a specific face-swap video, and it is also useful as a quality metric to compare different face-swap methods. This is the third edition of DFGC competitions, which focuses on the new visual realism assessment topic, different from previous ones that compete creators versus detectors. With this competition, we conduct a comprehensive study of the SOTA performance on the new task. We also release our MindSpore codes to further facilitate research in this field (https://github.com/bomb2peng/DFGC-VRA-benckmark).

The study investigates the task of authorship attribution on short texts in Slovenian using the BERT language model. Authorship attribution is the task of attributing a written text to its author, frequently using stylometry or computational techniques. We create five custom datasets for different numbers of included text authors and fine-tune two BERT models, SloBERTa and BERT Multilingual (mBERT), to evaluate their performance in closed-class and open-class problems with varying numbers of authors. Our models achieved an F1 score of approximately $0.95$ when using the dataset with the comments of the top five users by the number of written comments. Training on datasets that include comments written by an increasing number of people results in models with a gradually decreasing F1 score. Including out-of-class comments in the evaluation decreases the F1 score by approximately $0.05$. The study demonstrates the feasibility of using BERT models for authorship attribution in short texts in the Slovenian language.

The quality of synthetic data has advanced to such a degree of realism that distinguishing it from genuine data samples is increasingly challenging. Deepfake content, including images, videos, and audio, is often used maliciously, necessitating effective detection methods. While numerous competitions have propelled the development of deepfake detectors, a significant gap remains in accurately pinpointing the temporal boundaries of manipulations. Addressing this, we propose an approach for temporal deepfake localization (TDL) utilizing a window-based method for audio (W-TDL) and a complementary visual frame-based model. Our contributions include an effective method for detecting and localizing fake video and audio segments and addressing unbalanced training labels in spoofed audio datasets. Our approach leverages the EVA visual transformer for frame-level analysis and a modified TDL method for audio, achieving competitive results in the 1M-DeepFakes Detection Challenge. Comprehensive experiments on the AV-Deepfake1M dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, providing an effective solution to detect and localize deepfake manipulations.

The scientific monograph ('Rudolf Badjura – Life and Work') was co-written by eleven experts from different fields, which shows that Rudolf Badjura was an extremely versatile person. He was born on 17^th April 1881 in Litija. Between 1903 and 1905, after graduating from secondary school in Ljubljana, he performed military service in the infantry regiment of that time. In 1905 he attended a secondary school leaving examination course at the German trade academy in Prague, where he also joined the local mountaineering group. On his return to Ljubljana, he was first employed at the farmers' savings bank ("Kmetijska posojilnica"), and he later worked in the accountancy department of the wood dealer Hieng. Until his retirement, he was employed at the Carniola regional council. His work formed an integral part of his life, especially with regard to skiing and leisure activities in nature. In addition, he wrote tourist guides and collected folk terminology and geographical names, with particular focus on Slovene culture. Badjura's life was also heavily influenced by the first world war and his military career. His bibliographic opus consists of more than 60 units. Co-publisher: Združenje vojaških gornikov Slovenije