Search

In the absence of vaccines or medicines to stop COVID-19, one of the effective methods to slow the spread of the coronavirus and reduce the overloading of healthcare is to wear a face mask. Nevertheless, to mandate the use of face masks or coverings in public areas, additional human resources are required, which is tedious and attention-intensive. To automate the monitoring process, one of the promising solutions is to leverage existing object detection models to detect the faces with or without masks. As such, security officers do not have to stare at the monitoring devices or crowds, and only have to deal with the alerts triggered by the detection of faces without masks. Existing object detection models usually focus on designing the CNN-based network architectures for extracting discriminative features. However, the size of training datasets of face mask detection is small, while the difference between faces with and without masks is subtle. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a face mask detection framework that uses the context attention module to enable the effective attention of the feed-forward convolution neural network by adapting their attention maps feature refinement. Moreover, we further propose an anchor-free detector with Triplet-Consistency Representation Learning by integrating the consistency loss and the triplet loss to deal with the small-scale training data and the similarity between masks and occlusions. Extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods. The source code is released as a public download to improve public health at https://github.com/wei-1006/MaskFaceDetection., Comment: Accepted by ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (2021)

This study proposes a multiparty mediated quantum secret sharing (MQSS) protocol that allows n restricted quantum users to share a secret via the assistance of a dishonest third-party (TP) with full quantum capabilities. Under the premise that a restricted quantum user can only perform the Hadamard transformation and the Z-basis measurement, the proposed MQSS protocol has addressed two common challenges in the existing semi-quantum secret sharing protocols: (1) the dealer must have full quantum capability, and (2) the classical users must equip with the wavelength quantum filter and the photon number splitters (PNS) to detect the Trojan horse attacks. The security analysis has also delivered proof to show that the proposed MQSS protocol can avoid the collective attack, the collusion attack, and the Trojan horse attacks. In addition, the proposed MQSS protocol is more efficient than the existing SQSS protocols due to the restricted quantum users can only equip with two quantum operations, and the qubits are transmitted within a shorter distance.

The mediated semi-quantum key distribution (MSQKD) protocol is an important research issue that lets two classical participants share secret keys securely between each other with the help of a third party (TP). However, in the existing MSQKD protocols, there are two improvable issues, namely (1) the classical participants must be equipped with expensive detectors to avoid Trojan horse attacks and (2) the trustworthiness level of TP must be honest. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing MSQKD protocols can resolve both these issues. Therefore, this study takes Bell states as the quantum resource to propose a MSQKD protocol, in which the classical participants do not need a Trojan horse detector and the TP is dishonest. Furthermore, the proposed protocol is shown to be secure against well-known attacks and the classical participants only need two quantum capabilities. Therefore, in comparison to the existing MSQKD protocols, the proposed protocol is better practical.

This study distinguishes the weak fairness property from the strong fairness property which is necessary in the quantum key agreement (QKA) and shows that most of the existing QKAs cannot achieve the strong fairness property with a key manipulation problem.To solve this problem, a model which describes the way to design a QKA with the strong fairness property is proposed. Based on the model, an example QKA is presented. Security analyses show that the proposed QKA is effective to resist not only outsider's eavesdropping attack but also insider's key manipulation.

Recently, Li et al. [Phys. Rev. A, 82(2), 022303] presented two semi-quantum secret sharing (SQSS) protocols using GHZ-like states. The proposed schemes are rather practical because only the secret dealer requires to equip with advanced quantum devices such as quantum memory, whereas the other agents can merely perform classical operations to complete the secret sharing. However, this study points out that a security pitfall exists in the eavesdropping check phase of both schemes that could mount to an Intercept-resend attack and a Trojan horse attack on the two schemes, respectively, to disclose the other agent's shadow, and further to reveal the master key of the SQSS, which contradicts to the security requirement of a QSS. Fortunately, two possible solutions are proposed to avoid this security pitfall.