Sparse Network Of Winnows Research Articles

Fast face detection using a unified architecture for unconstrained and infrared face images

Human face detection along with its localization is a difficult task when the face is presented in the cluttered scene in an unconstrained scenario that might be with arbitrary pose variations, occlusions, random backgrounds and infrared (IR) environment. This paper proposes a novel face detection method which can address some of these issues and challenges quite successfully during face detection in unconstrained as well as infrared environments. It makes use of Fast Successive Mean Quantization Transform (FastSMQT) features for image enhancement and feature representation to deal with illumination and sensor insensitiveness. A split up Sparse Network of Winnows (SNoW) with Winnow updating rule is then exploited to speed up the original SNoW classifier. Finally, the features and classifiers are combined together with skin detection algorithm for face detection in crowd image and head orientation correction of near infrared faces. The proposed face detector is robust in handling pose, occlusion, illumination, blur and low image resolution. The experiment is performed on six challenging and publicly available databases, viz. BIOID, LFW, FDDB, UFI, WIDER FACE and IIT Delhi near infrared. The experimental results depict that the proposed method outperforms traditional as well as some advanced methods in detecting unconstrained and infrared faces under challenging situations.

Intelligent animal detection system using sparse multi discriminative-neural network (SMD-NN) to mitigate animal-vehicle collision.

Animal-Vehicle Collision (AVC) is a predominant problem in both urban and rural roads and highways. Detecting animals on the road is challenging due to factors like the fast movement of both animals and vehicles, highly cluttered environmental settings, noisy images, and occluded animals. Deep learning has been widely used for animal applications. However, they require large training data; henceforth, the dimensionality increases, leading to a complex model. In this paper, we present an animal detection system for mitigating AVC. The proposed system integrates sparse representation and deep features optimized with FixResNeXt. The deep features extracted from candidate parts of the animals are represented in a sparse form using a feature-efficient learning algorithm called Sparse Network of Winnows (SNoW). The experimental results prove that the proposed system is invariant to the viewpoint, partial occlusion, and illumination. On the benchmark datasets, the proposed system has achieved an average accuracy of 98.5%.