Facial age estimation has achieved considerable success under controlled conditions. However, in unconstrained real-world scenarios, which are often referred to as ”in the wild”, age estimation remains challenging, especially when faces are partially occluded, which may obscure their visibility. To address this limitation, we propose a new approach integrating generative adversarial networks (GANs) and transformer architectures to enable robust age estimation from occluded faces. We employ an SN-Patch GAN to effectively remove occlusions, while an Attentive Residual Convolution Module (ARCM), paired with a Swin Transformer, enhances feature representation. Additionally, we introduce a Multi-Task Age Head (MTAH) that combines regression and distribution learning, further improving age estimation under occlusion. Experimental results on the FG-NET, UTKFace, and MORPH datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art techniques for occluded facial age estimation by achieving an MAE of 3.00, 4.54, and 2.53 years, respectively.

Data will be made available on request

Spam has become an effective way for cybercriminals to spread malware. Although cybersecurity agencies and companies develop products and organise courses for people to detect malicious spam email patterns, spam attacks are not totally avoided yet. In this work, we present and make publicly available "Spam Email Malware Detection - 600" (SEMD-600), a new dataset, based on Bruce Guenter's, for malware detection in spam using only the text of the email. We also introduce a pipeline for malware detection based on traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Using SEMD-600, we compare the text representation techniques Bag of Words and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), in combination with three different supervised classifiers: Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes and Logistic Regression, to detect malware in plain text documents. We found that combining TF-IDF with Logistic Regression achieved the best performance, with a macro F1 score of 0.763.

Abstract 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.

Cybercriminals have increasingly used spam email to send scams, phishing, malware and other frauds to organisations and people. They design sophisticated and contextualised emails to make them look trustworthy for users, being the sender addresses an essential part. Although cybersecurity agencies and companies develop products and organise courses for people to detect emails patterns, spam attacks are not totally avoided yet.

This paper introduces a method for characterizing and classifying skin lesions in dermoscopic color images with the goal of detecting which ones are melanoma (cancerous lesions). The images are described by means of the Local Binary Patterns (LBPs) computed on geometrical feature maps of each color component of the image. These maps are extracted from geometrical measurements of the General Adaptive Neighborhoods (GAN) of the pixels. The GAN of a pixel is a region surrounding it and fitting its local image spatial structure. The performance of the proposed texture descriptor has been evaluated by means of an Artificial Neural Network, and it has been compared with the classical LBPs. Experimental results using ROC curves show that the GAN-based method outperforms the classical one and the dermatologists' predictions.

Local oriented statistical information booster (LOSIB) is a descriptor enhancer based on the extraction of the gray level differences along several orientations. Specifically, the mean of the differences along particular orientations is considered. In this paper we have carried out some experiments using several classical texture descriptors to show that classification results are better when they are combined with LOSIB, than without it. Both parametric and non-parametric classifiers, Support Vector Machine and k-Nearest Neighbourhoods respectively, were applied to assess this new method. Furthermore, two different texture dataset were evaluated: KTH-Tips-2a and Brodatz32 to prove the robustness of LOSIB. Global descriptors such as WCF4 (Wavelet Co-occurrence Features), that extracts Haralick features from the Wavelet Transform, have been combined with LOSIB obtaining an improvement of 16.94% on KTH and 7.55% on Brodatz when classifying with SVM. Moreover, LOSIB was used together with state-of-the-art local descriptors such as LBP (Local Binary Pattern) and several of its recent variants. Combined with CLBP (Complete LBP), the LOSIB booster results were improved in 5.80% on KTH-Tips 2a and 7.09% on the Brodatz dataset. For all the tested descriptors, we have observed that a higher performance has been achieved, with the two classifiers on both datasets, when using some LOSIB settings.

In this work, a descriptor called a ZIBO (absolute Zernike moments with Invariant Boundary Orientation) that describes the shape of objects using the module of Zernike moments and the edge features obtained from an almost rotational invariant version of the Edge Gradient Co-occurrence Matrix (EGCM) is proposed. The two descriptors obtained, the Zernike module as global descriptor and the new version of EGCM as local one, are used to characterize images from three different datasets, Kimia99, MPEG2 and MPEG7. Later on, the concatenation of both local and global descriptors was evaluated using kNN with City block and Chi-square distance metrics. Also, the descriptors are assessed separately with a weight-based method, being the results obtained compared with the ones reached by the baseline method, ZMEG (Zernike Moment Edge Gradient). Using MPEG7, which is the most challenging dataset, and the weight-based classifier, this proposal obtained a success rate of 78.29%, outperforming the 75.86% achieved by ZMEG method. With the MPEG2 dataset, results were even better with an 81.00% of success rate against 77.25% of ZMEG.

This paper introduces a new descriptor for characterizing and classifying the pixels of texture images by means of General Adaptive Neighborhoods (GANs). The GAN of a pixel is a spatial region surrounding it and fitting its local image structure. The features describing each pixel are then regionbased and intensity-based measurements of its corresponding GAN. In addition, these features are combined with the graylevel values of adaptive mathematical morphology operators using GANs as structuring elements. The classification of each pixel of images belonging to five different textures of the VisTex database has been carried out to test the performance of this descriptor. For the sake of comparison, other adaptive neighborhoods introduced in the literature have also been used to extract these features from: the Morphological Amoebas (MA), adaptive geodesic neighborhoods (AGN) and salience adaptive structuring elements (SASE). Experimental results show that the GAN-based method outperforms the others for the performed classification task, achieving an overall accuracy of 97.25% in the five-way classifications, and area under curve values close to 1 in all the five one class vs. all classes" binary classification problems."