A Two-Stage Cascaded Detection Scheme for Double HEVC Compression Based on Temporal Inconsistency

Nowadays, verifying the integrity of digital videos is significant especially for applications about multimedia communication. In video forensics, detection of double compression can be treated as the first step to analyze whether a suspicious video undergoes any tampering operations. In the last decade, numerous detection methods have been proposed to address this issue, but most existing methods design a universal detector which is hard to handle various recompression settings efficiently. In this work, we found that the statistics of different Coding Unit (CU) types have dissimilar properties when original videos are recompressed by the increased and decreased bit rates. It motivates us to propose a two-stage cascaded detection scheme for double HEVC compression based on temporal inconsistency to overcome limitations of existing methods. For a given video, CU information maps are extracted from each short-time video clip using our proposed value mapping strategy. In the first detection stage, a compact feature is extracted based on the distribution of different CU types and Kullback–Leibler divergence between temporally adjacent frames. This detection feature is fed into the Support Vector Machine classifier to identify abnormal frames with the increased bit rate. In the second stage, a shallow convolutional neural network equipped with dense connections is designed carefully to learn robust spatiotemporal representations, which can identify abnormal frames with the decreased bit rate whose forensic traces are less detectable. In experiments, the proposed method can achieve more promising detection accuracy compared with several state-of-the-art methods under various coding parameter settings, especially when the original video is recompressed with a low quality (e.g., more than 8%).

Cross-Modal Attention Network for Temporal Inconsistent Audio-Visual Event Localization

In human multi-modality perception systems, the benefits of integrating auditory and visual information are extensive as they provide plenty supplementary cues for understanding the events. Despite some recent methods proposed for such application, they cannot deal with practical conditions with temporal inconsistency. Inspired by human system which puts different focuses at specific locations, time segments and media while performing multi-modality perception, we provide an attention-based method to simulate such process. Similar to human mechanism, our network can adaptively select “where” to attend, “when” to attend and “which” to attend for audio-visual event localization. In this way, even with large temporal inconsistent between vision and audio, our network is able to adaptively trade information between different modalities and successfully achieve event localization. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on AVE (Audio-Visual Event) dataset collected in the real life. In addition, we also systemically investigate audio-visual event localization tasks. The visualization results also help us better understand how our model works.

Efficient Temporal Planning Using Metastates

When performing temporal planning as forward state-space search, effective state memoisation is challenging. Whereas in classical planning, two states are equal if they have the same facts and variable values, in temporal planning this is not the case: as the plans that led to the two states are subject to temporal constraints, one might be extendable into at temporally valid plan, while the other might not. In this paper, we present an approach for reducing the state space explosion that arises due to having to keep many copies of the same ‘classically’ equal state – states that are classically equal are aggregated into metastates, and these are separated lazily only in the case of temporal inconsistency. Our evaluation shows that this approach, implemented in OPTIC and compared to existing state-of-the-art memoisation techniques, improves performance across a range of temporal domains.

Construction and assessment of a low cost NDVI sensor

Given the potential of low cost sensors for agriculture, a monitoring system with low cost components was constructed to evaluate its capacity to detect variations in vegetative vigor in smooth lettuce seedlings under different growing conditions. The results showed temporal inconsistency and low variability in NDVI values. The inconsistency can be attributed mainly to factors such as luminosity and the high capacity of retention of water and nutrients of the substrate. Days with milder light intensity produced potentially better NDVI values. The low variability of NDVI eventually contributed to its low correlation with mass.