The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) is the British Machine Vision Association’s (BMVA) annual conference on machine vision, image processing, and pattern recognition. It is one of the major international conferences on computer vision and related areas held in the UK. With increasing popularity and quality, it has established itself as a prestigious event on the vision calendar.
Dr. Mubarak Shah delivered a keynote speech on “Privacy Preservation and Bias Mitigation in Human Action Recognition” at BMVC which was held November 25-28, 2024 in Glasgow, UK.
Abstract: Advances in action recognition have enabled a wide range of real-world applications, e.g. elderly person monitoring systems, autonomous vehicles, sports analysis. As these techniques are being used in the real world two important issues have emerged: privacy and bias. Most of these video understanding applications involve extensive computation, for which a user needs to share the video data to the cloud computation server, where the user also ends up sharing the private visual information like gender, skin color, clothing, background objects etc. Therefore, there is a pressing need for solutions to privacy preserving action recognition. Beyond privacy protection, bias in video understanding can lead to unfair and incorrect decision making. Action recognition models may predict specific actions based on gender stereotypes, such as associating a perceived female subject with hands near her face as applying makeup or brushing hair, even with nothing in hand, or they may suffer from background bias (i.e., inferring actions based on background cues) and foreground bias (i.e., relying on subject appearance). In this talk, I will present our recent work on Privacy Preservation and Bias Mitigation in human action recognition.