We present Dur360BEV, a novel spherical camera autonomous driving dataset equipped with a high-resolution 128-channel 3D LiDAR and a RTK-refined GNSS/INS system, along with a benchmark architecture designed to generate Bird-Eye-View (BEV) maps using only a single spherical camera. This dataset and benchmark address the challenges of BEV generation in autonomous driving, particularly by reducing hardware complexity through the use of a single 360-degree camera instead of multiple perspective cameras. Within our benchmark architecture, we propose a novel spherical-image-to-BEV module that leverages spherical imagery and a refined sampling strategy to project features from 2D to 3D. Our approach also includes an innovative application of focal loss, specifically adapted to address the extreme class imbalance often encountered in BEV segmentation tasks, that demonstrates improved segmentation performance on the Dur360BEV dataset. The results show that our benchmark not only simplifies the sensor setup but also achieves competitive performance. Code + Dataset: https://github.com/Tom-E-DurhamJDur360BEV

Generating 3D images of complex objects conditionally from a few 2D views is a difficult synthesis problem, compounded by issues such as domain gap and geometric misalignment. For instance, a unified framework such as Generative Adversarial Networks cannot achieve this unless they explicitly define both a domain-invariant and geometric-invariant joint latent distribution, whereas Neural Radiance Fields are generally unable to handle both issues as they optimize at the pixel level. By contrast, we propose a simple and novel 2D to 3D synthesis approach based on conditional diffusion with vector-quantized codes. Operating in an information-rich code space enables high-resolution 3D synthesis via full-coverage attention across the views. Specifically, we generate the 3D codes (e.g. for CT images) conditional on previously generated 3D codes and the entire codebook of two 2D views (e.g. 2D X-rays). Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance over specialized methods across varied evaluation criteria, including fidelity metrics such as density, coverage, and distortion metrics for two complex volumetric imagery datasets from in real-world scenarios.

Automatic detection of prohibited items within complex and cluttered X-ray security imagery is essential to maintaining transport security, where prior work on automatic prohibited item detection focus primarily on pseudo-colour (rgb) X-ray imagery. In this work we study the impact of variant X-ray imagery, i.e., X-ray energy response (high, low) and effective-z compared to rgb, via the use of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for the joint object detection and segmentation task posed within X-ray baggage security screening. We evaluate state-of-the-art CNN architectures (Mask R-CNN, YOLACT, CARAFE and Cascade Mask R-CNN) to explore the transferability of models trained with such ‘raw’ variant imagery between the varying X-ray security scanners that exhibits differing imaging geometries, image resolutions and material colour profiles. Overall, we observe maximal detection performance using CARAFE, attributable to training using combination of rgb, high, low, and effective-z Xray imagery, obtaining 0.7 mean Average Precision (mAP) for a six class object detection problem. Our results also exhibit a remarkable degree of generalisation capability in terms of cross-scanner transferability (AP: 0.835/0.611) for a one class object detection problem by combining rgb, high, low, and effective-z imagery.

Automatic perception and understanding of human emotion is becoming an increasingly attractive research field in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Emotion portrayal within conversation plays a significant role in the semantics of a sentence. However, emotion is not only biologically determined but is also influenced by the environment. Therefore, cultural differences exist in some aspects of emotions, and it is important for the next generation of computer systems to adapt the cross-cultural difference in order to enable more naturalistic interactions between humans and machines. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of state-of-the-art deep learning architectures based on recurrent neural network (RNN) variants with explicit attention modelling to bridge the gap across different cultures (German and Hungarian) for emotion prediction in video. Three different attention based network architectures are proposed in this work:- early attention fusion, extended multi-attention fusion and attention-based encoder-decoder. Our RNN variants with explicit attention modelling approach achieves very promising Concordance Correlation Coefficient results, which outperform the baseline on Arousal of 0.637 vs. 0.614 (baseline), for Valence of 0.689 vs. 0.615 and for Liking of 0.625 vs. 0.222.

The recent advancement in deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has brought insight into the automation of X-ray security screening for aviation security and beyond. Here, we explore the viability of two recent end-to-end object detection CNN architectures, Cascade R-CNN and FreeAnchor, for prohibited item detection by balancing processing time and the impact of image data compression from an operational viewpoint. Overall, we achieve maximal detection performance using a FreeAnchor architecture with a ResNet50backbone, obtaining mean Average Precision (mAP) of 87.7 and 85.8 for using the OPIXray and SIXray benchmark datasets, showing superior performance over prior work on both. With fewer parameters and less training time, FreeAnchor achieves the highest detection inference speed of $\sim 13$ fps (3.9 ms per image). Furthermore, we evaluate the impact of lossy image compression upon detector performance. The CNN models display substantial resilience to the lossy compression, resulting in only a 1.1% decrease in mAP at the JPEG compression level of 50. Additionally, a thorough evaluation of data augmentation techniques is provided, including adaptions of MixUp and CutMix strategy as well as other standard transformations, further improving the detection accuracy.

X-ray security screening is in widespread use to maintain transportation security against a wide range of potential threat profiles. Of particular interest is the recent focus on the use of automated screening approaches, including the potential anomaly detection as a methodology for concealment detection within complex electronic items. Here we address this problem considering varying segmentation strategies to enable the use of both object level and sub-component level anomaly detection via the use of secondary convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. Relative performance is evaluated over an extensive dataset of exemplar cluttered X-ray imagery, with a focus on consumer electronics items. We find that sub-component level segmentation produces marginally superior performance in the secondary anomaly detection via classification stage, with true positive of ~98% of anomalies, with a ~3% false positive.

X-ray imagery security screening is essential to maintaining transport security against a varying profile of threat or prohibited items. Particular interest lies in the automatic detection and classification of weapons such as firearms and knives within complex and cluttered X-ray security imagery. Here, we address this problem by exploring various end-to-end object detection Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures. We evaluate several leading variants spanning the Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, and RetinaNet architectures to explore the transferability of such models between varying X-ray scanners with differing imaging geometries, image resolutions and material colour profiles. Whilst the limited availability of X-ray threat imagery can pose a challenge, we employ a transfer learning approach to evaluate whether such inter-scanner generalisation may exist over a multiple class detection problem. Overall, we achieve maximal detection performance using a Faster R-CNN architecture with a ResNet101 classification network, obtaining 0.88 and 0.86 of mean Average Precision (mAP) for a three-class and two class item from varying X-ray imaging sources. Our results exhibit a remarkable degree of generalisability in terms of cross-scanner performance (mAP: 0.87, firearm detection: 0.94 AP). In addition, we examine the inherent adversarial discriminative capability of such networks using a specifically generated adversarial dataset for firearms detection - with a variable low false positive, as low as 5%, this shows both the challenge and promise of such threat detection within X-ray security imagery.

X-ray baggage security screening is widely used to maintain aviation and transport secure. Of particular interest is the focus on automated security X-ray analysis for particular classes of object such as electronics, electrical items and liquids. However, manual inspection of such items is challenging when dealing with potentially anomalous items. Here we present a dual convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for automatic anomaly detection within complex security X-ray imagery. We leverage recent advances in region-based (R-CNN), mask-based CNN (Mask R-CNN) and detection architectures such as RetinaNet to provide object localisation variants for specific object classes of interest. Subsequently, leveraging a range of established CNN object and fine-grained category classification approaches we formulate within object anomaly detection as a two-class problem (anomalous or benign). Whilst the best performing object localisation method is able to perform with 97.9% mean average precision (mAP) over a six-class X-ray object detection problem, subsequent two-class anomaly/benign classification is able to achieve 66% performance for within object anomaly detection. Overall, this performance illustrates both the challenge and promise of object-wise anomaly detection within the context of cluttered X-ray security imagery.

Automatic continuous affect recognition from multiple modality in the wild is arguably one of the most challenging research areas in affective computing. In addressing this regression problem, the advantages of the each modality, such as audio, video and text, have been frequently explored but in an isolated way. Little attention has been paid so far to quantify the relationship within these modalities. Motivated to leverage the individual advantages of each modality, this study investigates behavioral modeling of continuous affect estimation, in multimodal fusion approaches, using Linear Regression, Exponent Weighted Decision Fusion and Multi-Gene Genetic Programming. The capabilities of each fusion approach are illustrated by applying it to the formulation of affect estimation generated from multiple modality using classical Support Vector Regression. The proposed fusion methods were applied in the public Sentiment Analysis in the Wild (SEWA) multimodal dataset and the experimental results indicate that employing proper fusion can deliver a significant performance improvement for all affect estimation. The results further show that the proposed systems is competitive or outperform the other state-of-the-art approaches.

With the rapid development of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technology, human-computer interaction (HCI) has been greatly improved for gaming interaction of AR and VR control. The finger micro-gesture is a hot research focus due to the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearable technologies and recently Google has developed a radar based micro-gesture sensor which is Google Soli. Also, there are a number of finger micro-gesture techniques have been developed using Time of Flight (ToF) imaging sensors for wearable 3D glasses such as Atheer mobile glasses. The principle of holoscopic 3D (H3D) imaging mimics fly's eye technique that captures a true 3D optical model of the scene using a microlens array, however, there is a limited progress of holoscopic 3D systems due to the lack of high quality public available database. In this paper, holoscopic 3D camera is used to capture high quality holoscopic 3D micro-gesture video images and a new unique holoscopic 3D micro-gesture (HoMG) database is produced. HoMG database recorded the image sequence of 3 conventional gestures from 40 participants under different settings and conditions. For the purpose of H3D micro-gesture recognition, HoMG has a video subset of 960 videos and a still image subset with 30635 images. Initial micro-gesture recognition on both subsets has been conducted using the traditional 2D image and video features and popular classifiers and some encouraging performance has been achieved. The database will be available for the research communities and speed up the research in the area of holoscopic 3D micro-gesture.

Touch is a primary nonverbal communication channel used to communicate emotions or other social messages. Despite its importance, this channel is still very little explored in the affective computing field, as much more focus has been placed on visual and aural channels. In this paper, we investigate the possibility to automatically discriminate between different social touch types. We propose five distinct feature sets for describing touch behaviours captured by a grid of pressure sensors. These features are then combined together by using the Random Forest and Boosting methods for categorizing the touch gesture type. The proposed methods were evaluated on both the HAART (7 gesture types over different surfaces) and the CoST (14 gesture types over the same surface) datasets made available by the Social Touch Gesture Challenge 2015. Well above chance level performances were achieved with a 67% accuracy for the HAART and 59% for the CoST testing datasets respectively.