Defect detection is a crucial part of the pipeline in many industries. In the textile industry, it is especially important, as it will affect the quality and price of the final product. However, it is mostly performed by human agents, who have been reported to have poor performance, along with requiring a costly and time-consuming training process. As such, methods to automate the process have been increasingly explored throughout the last 20 years. While there are many traditional approaches to this problem, with the advent of deep learning, machine learning-based approaches now constitute the majority of all possible approaches. Other articles have explored traditional approaches and machine learning approaches in a more general way, detailing their evolution over time. In this review, we summarize the most important advancements in the last 5 years and focus mostly on machine learning-based approaches. We also outline the most promising avenues of research in the future.

Human Attribute Recognition (HAR) is a highly active research field in computer vision and pattern recognition domains with various applications such as surveillance or fashion. Several approaches have been proposed to tackle the particular challenges in HAR. However, these approaches have dramatically changed over the last decade, mainly due to the improvements brought by deep learning solutions. To provide insights for future algorithm design and dataset collections, in this survey, (1) we provide an in-depth analysis of existing HAR techniques, concerning the advances proposed to address the HAR’s main challenges; (2) we provide a comprehensive discussion over the publicly available datasets for the development and evaluation of novel HAR approaches; (3) we outline the applications and typical evaluation metrics used in the HAR context.

Periocular recognition has emerged as a particularly valuable biometric identification method in challenging scenarios, such as partially occluded faces due to COVID-19 protective masks masks, in which face recognition might not be applicable. This work presents a periocular recognition framework based on deep learning, which automatically localises and analyses the most important areas in the periocular region. The main idea is to derive several parallel local branches from a neural network architecture, which in a semi-supervised manner learn the most discriminative areas in the feature map and solve the identification problem solely upon the corresponding cues. Here, each local branch learns a transformation matrix that allows for basic geometrical transformations (cropping and scaling), which is used to select a region of interest in the feature map, further analysed by a set of shared convolutional layers. Finally, the information extracted by the local branches and the main global branch are fused together for recognition. The experiments carried out on the challenging UBIRIS-v2 benchmark show that by integrating the proposed framework with various ResNet architectures, we consistently obtain an improvement in mAP of more than 4% over the “vanilla” architecture. In addition, extensive ablation studies were performed to better understand the behavior of the network and how the spatial transformation and the local branches influence the overall performance of the model. The proposed method can be easily adapted to other computer vision problems, which is also regarded as one of its strengths.

Brain tissue segmentation is an important component of the clinical diagnosis of brain diseases using multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MR). Brain tissue segmentation has been developed by many unsupervised methods in the literature. The most commonly used unsupervised methods are K-Means, Expectation-Maximization, and Fuzzy Clustering. Fuzzy clustering methods offer considerable benefits compared with the aforementioned methods as they are capable of handling brain images that are complex, largely uncertain, and imprecise. However, this approach suffers from the intrinsic noise and intensity inhomogeneity (IIH) in the data resulting from the acquisition process. To resolve these issues, we propose a fuzzy consensus clustering algorithm that defines a membership function resulting from a voting schema to cluster the pixels. In particular, we first pre-process the MRI data and employ several segmentation techniques based on traditional fuzzy sets and intuitionistic sets. Then, we adopted a voting schema to fuse the results of the applied clustering methods. Finally, to evaluate the proposed method, we used the well-known performance measures (boundary measure, overlap measure, and volume measure) on two publicly available datasets (OASIS and IBSR18). The experimental results show the superior performance of the proposed method in comparison with the recent state of the art. The performance of the proposed method is also presented using a real-world Autism Spectrum Disorder Detection problem with better accuracy compared to other existing methods.