There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

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

Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques.

We present a generative appearance-based method for recognizing human faces under variation in lighting and viewpoint. Our method exploits the fact that the set of images of an object in fixed pose, but under all possible illumination conditions, is a convex cone in the space of images. Using a small number of training images of each face taken with different lighting directions, the shape and albedo of the face can be reconstructed. In turn, this reconstruction serves as a generative model that can be used to render (or synthesize) images of the face under novel poses and illumination conditions. The pose space is then sampled and, for each pose, the corresponding illumination cone is approximated by a low-dimensional linear subspace whose basis vectors are estimated using the generative model. Our recognition algorithm assigns to a test image the identity of the closest approximated illumination cone. Test results show that the method performs almost without error, except on the most extreme lighting directions.

From few to many: illumination cone models for face recognition under variable lighting and pose

We present a neural network-based upright frontal face detection system. A retinally connected neural network examines small windows of an image and decides whether each window contains a face. The system arbitrates between multiple networks to improve performance over a single network. We present a straightforward procedure for aligning positive face examples for training. To collect negative examples, we use a bootstrap algorithm, which adds false detections into the training set as training progresses. This eliminates the difficult task of manually selecting nonface training examples, which must be chosen to span the entire space of nonface images. Simple heuristics, such as using the fact that faces rarely overlap in images, can further improve the accuracy. Comparisons with several other state-of-the-art face detection systems are presented, showing that our system has comparable performance in terms of detection and false-positive rates.

Neural network-based face detection

Describes the derivation of probability of correctness from scores assigned by most recognizers. Derivation of probability values puts the output of different recognizers on the same scale; this makes comparison across recognizers trivial. The authors draw on examples from handwritten word recognition to illustrate their point.

/pdf/a-methodology-for-mapping-scores-to-probabilities-22g3xmbi2n.pdf

A methodology for mapping scores to probabilities

This chapter presents a taxonomy of the latest behavioural biometrics, including some future oriented approaches. Current research in the field is examined and analyzed along with the features used to describe different types of behaviour. After comparing accuracy rates for verification of users using dif ferent behavioural biometric approaches, researchers address privacy issues which arise or might arise in the future with the use of behavioural biometrics. Finally, generalized properties of behaviour are addressed as well as influence of environmental factors on observed behaviour and potential directions for future research in behavioural biometrics.

Taxonomy of Behavioural Biometrics

Inspired by the the behavioral scientific discoveries of Dr. Paul Ekman in relation to deceit detection, along with the television drama series Lie to Me, also based on Dr. Ekman's work, we use machine learning techniques to study the underlying phenomena expressed when a person tells a lie. We build an automated framework which detects deceit by measuring the deviation from normal behavior, at a critical point in the course of an investigative interrogation. Behavioral psychologists have shown that the eyes (via either gaze aversion or gaze extension) can be good “reflectors” of the inner emotions, when a person tells a high-stake lie. Hence we develop our deceit detection framework around eye movement changes. A dynamic bayesian model of eye movements is trained during a normal course of conversation for each subject, to represent normal behavior. The remaining conversation is broken into sequences and each sequence is tested against the parameters of the model of normal behavior. At the critical points in the interrogations, the deviations from normalcy are observed and used to deduce verity/deceit. An analysis on 40 subjects gave an accuracy of 82.5% which strongly suggests that the latent parameters of eye movements successfully capture behavioral changes and could be viable for use in automated deceit detection.

Lie to Me: Deceit detection via online behavioral learning

Despite advances in fingerprint identification techniques, matching incomplete or partial fingerprints still poses a difficult challenge. While the introduction of compact silicon chip-based sensors that capture only a part of the fingerprint area have made this problem important from a commercial perspective, there is also considerable interest on the topic for processing partial and latent fingerprints obtained at crime scenes. Attempts to match partial fingerprints using singular ridge structures-based alignment techniques fail when the partial print does not include such structures (e.g., core or delta). We present a multi-path fingerprint matching approach that utilizes localized secondary features derived using only the relative information of minutiae. Since the minutia-based fingerprint representation, is an ANSI-NIST standard, our approach has the advantage of being directly applicable to already existing databases. We also analyze the vulnerability of partial fingerprint identification systems to brute force attacks. The described matching approach has been tested on one of FVC2002’s DB1 database11. The experimental results show that our approach achieves an equal error rate of 1.25% and a total error rate of 1.8% (with FAR at 0.2% and FRR at 1.6%).

Venu Govindaraju

Papers

A methodology for mapping scores to probabilities

Taxonomy of Behavioural Biometrics

Lie to Me: Deceit detection via online behavioral learning

Security and matching of partial fingerprint recognition systems

Syntactic methodology of pruning large lexicons in cursive script recognition