In deep metric learning targeted at time series, the correlation between feature activations may be easily enlarged through highly nonlinear neural networks, leading to suboptimal embedding effectiveness. An effective solution to this problem is whitening. For example, in online signature verification, whitening can be derived for three individual Gaussian distributions, namely the distributions of local features at all temporal positions 1) for all signatures of all subjects, 2) for all signatures of each particular subject, and 3) for each particular signature of each particular subject. This study proposes a unified method called total whitening that integrates these individual Gaussians. Total whitening rectifies the layout of multiple individual Gaussians to resemble a standard normal distribution, improving the balance between intraclass invariance and interclass discriminative power. Experimental results demonstrate that total whitening achieves state-of-the-art accuracy when tested on online signature verification benchmarks.

Predicting which part of a scene elderly people would pay attention to could be useful in assisting their daily activities, such as driving, walking, and searching. Many computational models for predicting focus of attention (FoA) have been developed. However, most of them focus on mimicking adult FoA and do not work well for predicting elderly's, due to age-related changes in human vision. Is it possible to leverage the prediction results made by an FoA model of general adults to accurately predict elderly's FoA, rather than training a new network from scratch? In this paper, we consider a novel problem of translating adult's FoA to elderly's and propose an approach based on deep image-to-image translation. Experimental results on two datasets covering both free-viewing and task-based viewing scenarios demonstrate that our model gives remarkable prediction accuracy compared to baselines.

Audio-visual co-segmentation is a task to extract segments and regions corresponding to specific events on unlabelled audio and video signals. It is particularly important to accomplish it in an unsupervised way, since it is generally very difficult to manually label all the objects and events appearing in audio-visual signals for supervised learning. Here, we propose to take advantage of temporal proximity of corresponding audio and video entities included in the signals. For this purpose, we newly employ a guided attention scheme to this task to efficiently detect and utilize temporal cooccurrences of audio and video information. The experiments using a real TV broadcasting of Sumo wrestling, a sport event, with live commentaries show that our model can automatically extract specific athlete movements and its spoken descriptions in an unsupervised manner.