With the growing access to administrative health databases, retrospective studies have become crucial evidence for medical treatments. Yet, non-randomized studies frequently face selection biases, requiring mitigation strategies. Propensity score matching (PSM) addresses these biases by selecting comparable populations, allowing for analysis without further methodological constraints. However, PSM has several drawbacks. Different matching methods can produce significantly different Average Treatment Effects (ATE) for the same task, even when meeting all validation criteria. To prevent cherry-picking the best method, public authorities must involve field experts and engage in extensive discussions with researchers. To address this issue, we introduce a novel metric, A2A, to reduce the number of valid matches. A2A constructs artificial matching tasks that mirror the original ones but with known outcomes, assessing each matching method's performance comprehensively from propensity estimation to ATE estimation. When combined with Standardized Mean Difference, A2A enhances the precision of model selection, resulting in a reduction of up to 50% in ATE estimation errors across synthetic tasks and up to 90% in predicted ATE variability across both synthetic and real-world datasets. To our knowledge, A2A is the first metric capable of evaluating outcome correction accuracy using covariates not involved in selection. Computing A2A requires solving hundreds of PSMs, we therefore automate all manual steps of the PSM pipeline. We integrate PSM methods from Python and R, our automated pipeline, a new metric, and reproducible experiments into popmatch, our new Python package, to enhance reproducibility and accessibility to bias correction methods.
Traditionally, audio-visual automatic speech recognition has been studied under the assumption that the speaking face on the visual signal is the face matching the audio. However, in a more realistic setting, when multiple faces are potentially on screen one needs to decide which face to feed to the A/V ASR system. The present work takes the recent progress of A/V ASR one step further and considers the scenario where multiple people are simultaneously on screen (multi-person A/V ASR). We propose a fully differentiable A/V ASR model that is able to handle multiple face tracks in a video. Instead of relying on two separate models for speaker face selection and audio-visual ASR on a single face track, we introduce an attention layer to the ASR encoder that is able to soft-select the appropriate face video track. Experiments carried out on an A/V system trained on over 30k hours of YouTube videos illustrate that the proposed approach can automatically select the proper face tracks with minor WER degradation compared to an oracle selection of the speaking face while still showing benefits of employing the visual signal instead of the audio alone.
Balancing computational efficiency with recognition accuracy is one of the major challenges in real-world video-based face recognition. A significant design decision for any such system is whether to process and use all possible faces detected over the video frames, or whether to select only a few "best" faces. This paper presents a video face recognition system based on probabilistic Multi-Region Histograms to characterise performance trade-offs in: (i) selecting a subset of faces compared to using all faces, and (ii) combining information from all faces via clustering. Three face selection metrics are evaluated for choosing a subset: face detection confidence, random subset, and sequential selection. Experiments on the recently introduced MOBIO dataset indicate that the usage of all faces through clustering always outperformed selecting only a subset of faces. The experiments also show that the face selection metric based on face detection confidence generally provides better recognition performance than random or sequential sampling. Moreover, the optimal number of faces varies drastically across selection metric and subsets of MOBIO. Given the trade-offs between computational effort, recognition accuracy and robustness, it is recommended that face feature clustering would be most advantageous in batch processing (particularly for video-based watchlists), whereas face selection methods should be limited to applications with significant computational restrictions.
In video based face recognition, face images are typically captured over multiple frames in uncontrolled conditions, where head pose, illumination, shadowing, motion blur and focus change over the sequence. Additionally, inaccuracies in face localisation can also introduce scale and alignment variations. Using all face images, including images of poor quality, can actually degrade face recognition performance. While one solution it to use only the "best" subset of images, current face selection techniques are incapable of simultaneously handling all of the abovementioned issues. We propose an efficient patch-based face image quality assessment algorithm which quantifies the similarity of a face image to a probabilistic face model, representing an "ideal" face. Image characteristics that affect recognition are taken into account, including variations in geometric alignment (shift, rotation and scale), sharpness, head pose and cast shadows. Experiments on FERET and PIE datasets show that the proposed algorithm is able to identify images which are simultaneously the most frontal, aligned, sharp and well illuminated. Further experiments on a new video surveillance dataset (termed ChokePoint) show that the proposed method provides better face subsets than existing face selection techniques, leading to significant improvements in recognition accuracy.