Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

With the rapid progress of recent years, techniques that generate and manipulate multimedia content can now guarantee a very advanced level of realism. The boundary between real and synthetic media has become very thin. On the one hand, this opens the door to a series of exciting applications in different fields such as creative arts, advertising, film production, video games. On the other hand, it poses enormous security threats. Software packages freely available on the web allow any individual, without special skills, to create very realistic fake images and videos. So-called deepfakes can be used to manipulate public opinion during elections, commit fraud, discredit or blackmail people. Potential abuses are limited only by human imagination. Therefore, there is an urgent need for automated tools capable of detecting false multimedia content and avoiding the spread of dangerous false information. This review paper aims to present an analysis of the methods for visual media integrity verification, that is, the detection of manipulated images and videos. Special emphasis will be placed on the emerging phenomenon of deepfakes and, from the point of view of the forensic analyst, on modern data-driven forensic methods. The analysis will help to highlight the limits of current forensic tools, the most relevant issues, the upcoming challenges, and suggest future directions for research.

Media Forensics and DeepFakes: an overview

In this paper, we propose a novel multiclass classifier for the open-set recognition scenario. This scenario is the one in which there are no a priori training samples for some classes that might appear during testing. Usually, many applications are inherently open set. Consequently, successful closed-set solutions in the literature are not always suitable for real-world recognition problems. The proposed open-set classifier extends upon the Nearest-Neighbor (NN) classifier. Nearest neighbors are simple, parameter independent, multiclass, and widely used for closed-set problems. The proposed Open-Set NN (OSNN) method incorporates the ability of recognizing samples belonging to classes that are unknown at training time, being suitable for open-set recognition. In addition, we explore evaluation measures for open-set problems, properly measuring the resilience of methods to unknown classes during testing. For validation, we consider large freely-available benchmarks with different open-set recognition regimes and demonstrate that the proposed OSNN significantly outperforms their counterparts in the literature.

/pdf/nearest-neighbors-distance-ratio-open-set-classifier-3rhpog13zq.pdf

Nearest neighbors distance ratio open-set classifier

The veil of anonymity provided by smartphones with pre-paid SIM cards, public Wi-Fi hotspots, and distributed networks like Tor has drastically complicated the task of identifying users of social media during forensic investigations. In some cases, the text of a single posted message will be the only clue to an author’s identity. How can we accurately predict who that author might be when the message may never exceed 140 characters on a service like Twitter? For the past 50 years, linguists, computer scientists, and scholars of the humanities have been jointly developing automated methods to identify authors based on the style of their writing. All authors possess peculiarities of habit that influence the form and content of their written works. These characteristics can often be quantified and measured using machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the methods of authorship attribution that can be applied to the problem of social media forensics. Furthermore, we examine emerging supervised learning-based methods that are effective for small sample sizes, and provide step-by-step explanations for several scalable approaches as instructional case studies for newcomers to the field. We argue that there is a significant need in forensics for new authorship attribution algorithms that can exploit context, can process multi-modal data, and are tolerant to incomplete knowledge of the space of all possible authors at training time.

Authorship Attribution for Social Media Forensics

Going deeper into copy-move forgery detection

Open set source camera attribution and device linking

Energy and storage restrictions are relevant variables that software applications should be concerned about when running in low-power environments. In particular, computer vision (CV) applications exemplify well that concern, since conventional uniform image sensors typically capture large amounts of data to be further handled by the appropriate CV algorithms. Moreover, much of the acquired data are often redundant and outside of the application's interest, which leads to unnecessary processing and energy spending. In the literature, techniques for sensing and re-sampling images in non-uniform fashions have emerged to cope with these problems. In this study, we propose Application-Oriented Retinal Image Models that define a space-variant configuration of uniform images and contemplate requirements of energy consumption and storage footprints for CV applications. We hypothesize that our models might decrease energy consumption in CV tasks. Moreover, we show how to create the models and validate their use in a face detection/recognition application, evidencing the compromise between storage, energy, and accuracy.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/13/3746/pdf

Application-Oriented Retinal Image Models for Computer Vision.

As ferramentas dehardware e software atuais promovem, cada vez mais, a criacao de falsificacoes com alto grau de realismo Adulteracoes fraudulentas em documentos digitais podem ser facilmente executadas visando enganar seus observadores Neste artigo, exploramos o campo de pesquisas denominado Analise Forense de Documentos, enfatizando os aspectos etico-legais acerca da adulteracao em imagens digitais Examinamos, tambem, alguns dos mais interessantes casos de falsificacao ja registrados em contextos diversos, tais como na politica, em pesquisas cientificas e na Medicina Forense Finalmente, mostramos algumas abordagens da literatura que podem ser aplicadas na tarefa de discernir entre um documento digital autentico e uma falsificacao

/pdf/analise-forense-de-documentos-digitais-alem-da-visao-humana-55x088tbmw.pdf

Análise forense de documentos digitais: além da visão humana

One of the challenges in remote phenology studies lies in how to efficiently manage large volumes of data obtained as long-term sequences of high-resolution images. A promising approach is known as image foveation, which is able to reduce the computational resources used (i.e., memory storage) in several applications. In this paper, we propose an image foveation approach towards plant phenology tracking where relevant changes within an image time series guide the creation of foveal models used to resample unseen images. By doing so, images are taken to a space-variant domain where regions vary in resolution according to their contextual relevance for the application. We performed our validation on a dataset of vegetation image sequences previously used in plant phenology studies.

Ewerton Silva

Papers

Going deeper into copy-move forgery detection

Open set source camera attribution and device linking

Application-Oriented Retinal Image Models for Computer Vision.

Análise forense de documentos digitais: além da visão humana

A Change-Driven Image Foveation Approach for Tracking Plant Phenology