Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 has presented direct and indirect challenges to the scientific community. One of the most prominent indirect challenges advents from the mandatory use of face masks in a large number of countries. Face recognition methods struggle to perform identity verification with similar accuracy on masked and unmasked individuals. It has been shown that the performance of these methods drops considerably in the presence of face masks, especially if the reference image is unmasked. We propose FocusFace, a multi-task architecture that uses contrastive learning to be able to accurately perform masked face recognition. The proposed architecture is designed to be trained from scratch or to work on top of state-of-the-art face recognition methods without sacrificing the capabilities of a existing models in conventional face recognition tasks. We also explore different approaches to design the contrastive learning module. Results are presented in terms of masked-masked (MM) and unmasked-masked (U-M) face verification performance. For both settings, the results are on par with published methods, but for M-M specifically, the proposed method was able to outperform all the solutions that it was compared to. We further show that when using our method on top of already existing methods the training computational costs decrease significantly while retaining similar performances. The implementation and the trained models are available at GitHub.

Abstract
The present work introduces a hybrid integration of the self-organizing map and the hidden Markov model (HMM) for anomaly detection in 802.11 wireless networks. The self-organizing hidden Markov model map (SOHMMM) deals with the spatial connections of HMMs, along with the inherent temporal dependencies of data sequences. In essence, an HMM is associated with each neuron of the SOHMMM lattice. In this paper, the SOHMMM algorithm is employed for anomaly detection in 802.11 wireless access point usage data. Furthermore, we extend the SOHMMM online gradient descent unsupervised learning algorithm for multivariate Gaussian emissions. The experimental analysis uses two types of data: synthetic data to investigate the accuracy and convergence of the SOHMMM algorithm and wireless simulation data to verify the significance and efficiency of the algorithm in anomaly detection. The sensitivity and specificity of the SOHMMM algorithm in anomaly detection are compared to two other approaches, namely HMM initialized with universal background model (HMM-UBM) and SOHMMM with zero neighborhood (Z-SOHMMM). The results from the wireless simulation experiments show that SOHMMM outperformed the aforementioned approaches in all the presented anomalous scenarios.

Abstract
Biometric recognition and presentation attack detection (PAD) methods strongly rely on deep learning algorithms. Though often more accurate, these models operate as complex black boxes. Interpretability tools are now being used to delve deeper into the operation of these methods, which is why this work advocates their integration in the PAD scenario. Building upon previous work, a face PAD model based on convolutional neural networks was implemented and evaluated both through traditional PAD metrics and with interpretability tools. An evaluation on the stability of the explanations obtained from testing models with attacks known and unknown in the learning step is made. To overcome the limitations of direct comparison, a suitable representation of the explanations is constructed to quantify how much two explanations differ from each other. From the point of view of interpretability, the results obtained in intra and inter class comparisons led to the conclusion that the presence of more attacks during training has a positive effect in the generalisation and robustness of the models. This is an exploratory study that confirms the urge to establish new approaches in biometrics that incorporate interpretability tools. Moreover, there is a need for methodologies to assess and compare the quality of explanations.

Abstract

Abstract
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic and inflammatory disorder that causes degeneration of axons in brain white matter and spinal cord. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is extensively used to identify MS lesions and evaluate the progression of the disease, but the manual identification and quantification of lesions are time consuming and error-prone tasks. Thus, automated Deep Learning methods, in special Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are becoming popular to segment medical images. It has been noticed that the performance of those methods tends to decrease when applied to MRI acquired under different protocols. The aim of this work is to statistically evaluate the possible influence of domain adaptation during the training process of CNNs models for segmenting MS lesions in MRI. The segmentation models were tested on MRIs (FLAIR and T1) of 20 patients diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. The set of segmented images of each different model was compared statistically, through the metrics Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Predictive Positive Value (PPV) and Absolute Volume Difference (AVD). The results indicate that the domain adapted training can improve the performance of automatic segmentation methods, by CNNs, and have great potential to be used in medical clinics in the future. © 2021 IEEE.

Abstract