Binary classification | EPFL Graph Search

Binary classification is the task of classifying the elements of a set into two groups (each called class) on the basis of a classification rule. Typical binary classification problems include:

Medical testing to determine if a patient has certain disease or not;
Quality control in industry, deciding whether a specification has been met;
In information retrieval, deciding whether a page should be in the result set of a search or not.

Binary classification is dichotomization applied to a practical situation. In many practical binary classification problems, the two groups are not symmetric, and rather than overall accuracy, the relative proportion of different types of errors is of interest. For example, in medical testing, detecting a disease when it is not present (a false positive) is considered differently from not detecting a disease when it is present (a false negative). Statistical binary classification Statistical classification is a problem studied in machine l

Multivariate Boosting with Look-Up Tables for Face Processing

Cosmin Atanasoaei

This thesis proposes a novel unified boosting framework. We apply this framework to the several face processing tasks, face detection, facial feature localisation, and pose classification, and use the same boosting algorithm and the same pool of features (local binary features). This is in contrast with the standard approaches that make use of a variety of features and models, for example AdaBoost, cascades of boosted classifiers and Active Appearance Models. The unified boosting framework covers multivariate classification and regression problems and it is achieved by interpreting boosting as optimization in the functional space of the weak learners. Thus a wide range of smooth loss functions can be optimized with the same algorithm. There are two general optimization strategies we propose that extend recent works on TaylorBoost and Variational AdaBoost. The first proposition is an empirical expectation formulation that minimizes the average loss and the second is a variational formulation that includes an additional penalty for large variations between predictions. These two boosting formulations are used to train real-time models using local binary features. This is achieved using look-up-tables as weak learners and multi-block Local Binary Patterns as features. The resulting boosting algorithms are simple, efficient and easily scalable with the available resources. Furthermore, we introduce a novel coarse-to-fine feature selection method to handle high resolution models and a bootstrapping algorithm to sample representative training data from very large pools of data. The proposed approach is evaluated for several face processing tasks. These tasks include frontal face detection (binary classification), facial feature localization (multivariate regression) and pose estimation (multivariate classification). Several studies are performed to assess different optimization algorithms, bootstrapping parametrizations and feature sharing methods (for the multivariate case). The results show good performance for all of these tasks. In addition to this, two other contributions are presented. First, we propose a context-based model for removing the false alarms generated by a given generic face detector. Second, we propose a new face detector that predicts the Jaccard distance between the current location and the ground truth. This allows us to formulate the face detection problem as a regression task.

EPFL2012

Trustworthy Biometric Verification under Spoofing Attacks

Ivana Chingovska

The need for automation of the identity recognition process for a vast number of applications resulted in great advancement of biometric systems in the recent years. Yet, many studies indicate that these systems suffer from vulnerabilities to spoofing (presentation) attacks: a weakness that may compromise their usage in many cases. Face verification systems account for one of the most attractive spoofing targets, due to the easy access to face images of users, as well as the simplicity of the spoofing attack manufacturing process. Many counter-measures to spoofing have been proposed in the literature. They are based on different cues that are used to distinguish between real accesses and spoofing attacks. The task of detecting spoofing attacks is most often considered as a binary classification problem, with real accesses being the positive class and spoofing attacks being the negative class. The main objective of this thesis is to put the problem of anti-spoofing in a wider context, with an accent on its cooperation with a biometric verification system. In such a context, it is important to adopt an integrated perspective on biometric verification and anti-spoofing. In this thesis we identify and address three points where integration of the two systems is of interest. The first integration point is situated at input-level. At this point, we are concerned with providing a unified information that both verification and anti-spoofing systems use. The unified information includes the samples used to enroll clients in the system, as well as the identity claims of the client at query time. We design two anti-spoofing schemes, one with a generative and one with a discriminative approach, which we refer to as client-specific, as opposed to the traditional client-independent ones. The proposed methods are applied on several case studies for the face mode. Overall, the experimental results prove the integration to be beneficial for creating trustworthy face verification systems. At input-level, the results show the advantage of the client-specific approaches over the client-independent ones. At output-level, they present a comparison of the fusion methods. The case studies are furthermore used to demonstrate the EPS framework and its potential in evaluation of biometric verification systems under spoofing attacks. The source code for the full set of methods is available as free software, as a satellite package to the free signal processing and machine learning toolbox Bob. It can be used to reproduce the results of the face mode case studies presented in this thesis, as well as to perform additional analysis and improve the proposed methods. Furthermore, it can be used to design case studies applying the proposed methods to other biometric modes. At the second integration point, situated at output-level, we address the issue of combining the output of biometric verification and anti-spoofing systems in order to achieve an optimal combined decision about an input sample. We adopt a multiple expert fusion approach and we investigate several fusion methods, comparing the verification performance and robustness to spoofing of the fused systems. The third integration point is associated with the evaluation process. The integrated perspective implies three types of inputs for the biometric system: real accesses, zero-effort impostors and spoofing attacks. We propose an evaluation methodology for biometric verification systems under spoofing attacks, called Expected Performance and Spoofability (EPS) framework, which accounts for all the three types of input and the error rates associated with them. Within this framework, we propose the EPS Curve (EPSC), which enables unbiased comparison of systems.

EPFL2016

On Learning to Identify Genders from Raw Speech Signal Using CNNs

Selen Hande Kabil, Hannah Muckenhirn

Automatic Gender Recognition (AGR) is the task of identifying the gender of a speaker given a speech signal. Standard approaches extract features like fundamental frequency and cepstral features from the speech signal and train a binary classifier. Inspired from recent works in the area of automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker recognition and presentation attack detection, we present a novel approach where relevant features and classifier are jointly learned from the raw speech signal in end-to-end manner. We propose a convolutional neural networks (CNN) based gender classifier that consists of: (1) convolution layers, which can be interpreted as a feature learning stage and (2) a multilayer perceptron (MLP), which can be interpreted as a classification stage. The system takes raw speech signal as input, and outputs gender posterior probabilities. Experimental studies conducted on two datasets, namely AVspoof and ASVspoof 2015, with different architectures show that with simple architectures the proposed approach yields better system than standard acoustic features based approach. Further analysis of the CNNs show that the CNNs learn formant and fundamental frequency information for gender identification.

ISCA-INT SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOC2018