Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Deep-learning based Method for the Classification of the Cellular Images

: The present work proposes a classification method for the Human Epithelial of type 2 (HEp-2) cell images using an unsupervised deep feature learning method. Unlike most of the state-of-the-art methods in the literature that utilize deep learning in a strictly supervised way, we propose here the use of the deep convolutional autoencoder (DCAE) as the principal feature extractor for classifying the different types of the HEp-2 cellular images. The network takes the original cellular images as the inputs and learns how to reconstruct them through an encoding-decoding process in order to capture the features related to the global shape of the cells. A final feature vector is constructed by using the latent representations extracted from the DCAE, giving a highly discriminative feature representation. The created features will then be fed to a nonlinear classifier whose output will represent the final type of the cell image. We have tested the discriminability of the proposed features on one of the most popular HEp-2 cell classification datasets, the SNPHEp-2 dataset and the results show that the proposed features manage to capture the distinctive characteristics of the different cell types while performing at least as well as some of the actual deep learning based state-of-the-art methods.
Using Training Samples Retrieved from a Topographic Map and Unsupervised Segmentation for the Classification of Airborne Laser Scanning Data

The labeling of point clouds is the fundamental task in airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds processing. Many supervised methods have been proposed for the point clouds classification work. Training samples play an important role in the supervised classification. Most of the training samples are generated by manual labeling, which is time-consuming. To reduce the cost of manual annotating for ALS data, we propose a framework that automatically generates training samples using a two-dimensional (2D) topographic map and an unsupervised segmentation step. In this approach, input point clouds, at first, are separated into the ground part and the non-ground part by a DEM filter. Then, a point-in-polygon operation using polygon maps derived from a 2D topographic map is used to generate initial training samples. The unsupervised segmentation method is applied to reduce the noise and improve the accuracy of the point-in-polygon training samples. Finally, the super point graph is used for the training and testing procedure. A comparison with the point-based deep neural network Pointnet++ (average F1 score 59.4%) shows that the segmentation based strategy improves the performance of our initial training samples (average F1 score 65.6%). After adding the intensity value in unsupervised segmentation, our automatically generated training samples have competitive results with an average F1 score of 74.8% for ALS data classification while using the ground truth training samples the average F1 score is 75.1%. The result shows that our framework is feasible to automatically generate and improve the training samples with low time and labour costs.
Axis Learning for Orientated Objects Detection in Aerial Images

Orientated object detection in aerial images is still a challenging task due to the bird’s eye view and the various scales and arbitrary angles of objects in aerial images. Most current methods for orientated object detection are anchor-based, which require considerable pre-defined anchors and are time consuming. In this article, we propose a new one-stage anchor-free method to detect orientated objects in per-pixel prediction fashion with less computational complexity. Arbitrary orientated objects are detected by predicting the axis of the object, which is the line connecting the head and tail of the object, and the width of the object is vertical to the axis. By predicting objects at the pixel level of feature maps directly, the method avoids setting a number of hyperparameters related to anchor and is computationally efficient. Besides, a new aspect-ratio-aware orientation centerness method is proposed to better weigh positive pixel points, in order to guide the network to learn discriminative features from a complex background, which brings improvements for large aspect ratio object detection. The method is tested on two common aerial image datasets, achieving better performance compared with most one-stage orientated methods and many two-stage anchor-based methods with a simpler procedure and lower computational complexity.
Multi-Temporal Sentinel-1 Backscatter and Coherence for Rainforest Mapping

This paper reports recent advancements in the field of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for forest mapping by using interferometric short-time-series. In particular, we first present how the interferometric capabilities of the Sentinel-1 satellites constellation can be exploited for the monthly mapping of the Amazon rainforest. Indeed, the evolution in time of the interferometric coherence can be properly modeled as an exponential decay and the retrieved interferometric parameters can be used, together with the backscatter, as input features to the machine learning Random Forests classifier. Furthermore, we present an analysis on the benefits of the use of textural information, derived from Sentinel-1 backscatter, in order to enhance the classification accuracy. These textures are computed through the Sum And Difference Histograms methodology and the final classification accuracy, resulting by adding them to the aforementioned features, is a thematic map that exceeds an overall agreement of 85%, when validated using the optical external reference Finer Resolution Observation and Monitoring of Global Land Cover (FROM-GLC) map. The experiments presented in the final part of the paper are enriched with a further analysis and discussion on the selected scenes using updated multispectral Sentinel-2 acquisitions.
An Effective Way to Map Land-Use Intensity with a High Spatial Resolution Based on Habitat Type and Environmental Data

Mapping and monitoring agricultural land-use intensity (LUI) changes are essential for understanding their effects on biodiversity. Current land-use models provide a rather coarse spatial resolution, while in-situ measurements of LUI cover only a limited extent and are time-consuming and expensive. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of using habitat type, topo-climatic, economic output, and remote-sensing data to map LUI at a high spatial resolution. To accomplish this, we first rated the habitat types across the agricultural landscape in terms of the amount and frequency of fertiliser input, pesticide input, ploughing, grazing, mowing, harvesting, and biomass output. We consolidated these ratings into one LUI index per habitat type that we then related to topo-climatic, economic output, and remote-sensing predictors. The results showed that the LUI index was strongly related to plant indicator values for mowing tolerance and soil nutrient content and to aerial nitrogen deposition, and thus, is an adequate index. Topo-climatic, and, to a smaller extent, economic output and remote-sensing predictors, proved suitable for mapping LUI. Large- to medium-scale patterns are explained by topo-climatic predictors, while economic output predictors explain medium-scale patterns and remote-sensing predictors explain local-scale patterns. With the fine-scale LUI map produced from this study, it is now possible to estimate within unvarying land-use classes, the effect on agrobiodiversity of an increase in LUI on fertile and accessible lands and of a decrease of LUI by the abandonment of marginal agricultural lands, and thus, provide a valuable base for understanding the effects of LUI on biodiversity. Due to the worldwide availability of remote-sensing and climate data, our methodology can be easily applied to other countries where habitat-type data are available. Given their low explanatory power, economic output variables may be omitted if not available.
An Improved Convolution Neural Network-Based Model for Classifying Foliage and Woody Components from Terrestrial Laser Scanning Data

Separating foliage and woody components can effectively improve the accuracy of simulating the forest eco-hydrological processes. It is still challenging to use deep learning models to classify canopy components from the point cloud data collected in forests by terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). In this study, we developed a convolution neural network (CNN)-based model to separate foliage and woody components (FWCNN) by combing the geometrical and laser return intensity (LRI) information of local point sets in TLS datasets. Meanwhile, we corrected the LRI information and proposed a contribution score evaluation method to objectively determine hyper-parameters (learning rate, batch size, and validation split rate) in the FWCNN model. Our results show that: (1) Correcting the LRI information could improve the overall classification accuracy (OA) of foliage and woody points in tested broadleaf (from 95.05% to 96.20%) and coniferous (from 93.46% to 94.98%) TLS datasets (Kappa ≥ 0.86). (2) Optimizing hyper-parameters was essential to enhance the running efficiency of the FWCNN model, and the determined hyper-parameter set was suitable to classify all tested TLS data. (3) The FWCNN model has great potential to classify TLS data in mixed forests with OA > 84.26% (Kappa ≥ 0.67). This work provides a foundation for retrieving the structural features of woody materials within the forest canopy.
Surface Water Quality Analysis Using CORINE Data: An Application to Assess Reservoirs in Poland

Reservoirs are formed through the artificial damming of a river valley. Reservoirs, among others, capture polluted load transported by the tributaries in the form of suspended and dissolved sediments and substances. Therefore, reservoirs are treated in the European Union (EU) as “artificial” or “heavily modified” surface water bodies. The reservoirs’ pollutant load depends to a large extent on the degree of anthropogenic impact in the respective river catchment area. The purpose of this paper is to assess the mutual relation between the catchment area and the reservoirs. In particular, we focus on the effects of certain land use/land cover on reservoirs’ water quality. For this study, we selected twenty Polish reservoirs for an in-depth analysis using 2018 CORINE Land Cover data. This analysis allowed the identification of the main triggering factors in terms of water quality of the respective reservoirs. Moreover, our assessment clearly shows that water quality of the analysed dam reservoirs is directly affected by the composition of land use/land cover, both of the entire total reservoir catchment areas and the directly into the reservoir draining sub-catchment areas.
Sample Generation with Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Adaptation Network (SaGAAN) for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral image analysis plays an important role in agriculture, mineral industry, and for military purposes. However, it is quite challenging when classifying high-dimensional hyperspectral data with few labeled samples. Currently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been widely used for sample generation, but it is difficult to acquire high-quality samples with unwanted noises and uncontrolled divergences. To generate high-quality hyperspectral samples, a self-attention generative adversarial adaptation network (SaGAAN) is proposed in this work. It aims to increase the number and quality of training samples to avoid the impact of over-fitting. Compared to the traditional GANs, the proposed method has two contributions: (1) it includes a domain adaptation term to constrain generated samples to be more realistic to the original ones; and (2) it uses the self-attention mechanism to capture the long-range dependencies across the spectral bands and further improve the quality of generated samples. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SaGAAN, we tested it on two well-known hyperspectral datasets: Pavia University and Indian Pines. The experiment results illustrate that the proposed method can greatly improve the classification accuracy, even with a small number of initial labeled samples.
Oil Spill Monitoring of Shipborne Radar Image Features Using SVM and Local Adaptive Threshold

In the case of marine accidents, monitoring marine oil spills can provide an important basis for identifying liabilities and assessing the damage. Shipborne radar can ensure large-scale, real-time monitoring, in all weather, with high-resolution. It therefore has the potential for broad applications in oil spill monitoring. Considering the original gray-scale image from the shipborne radar acquired in the case of the Dalian 7.16 oil spill accident, a complete oil spill detection method is proposed. Firstly, the co-frequency interferences and speckles in the original image are eliminated by preprocessing. Secondly, the wave information is classified using a support vector machine (SVM), and the effective wave monitoring area is generated according to the gray distribution matrix. Finally, oil spills are detected by a local adaptive threshold and displayed on an electronic chart based on geographic information system (GIS). The results show that the SVM can extract the effective wave information from the original shipborne radar image, and the local adaptive threshold method has strong applicability for oil film segmentation. This method can provide a technical basis for real-time cleaning and liability determination in oil spill accidents.
Assessing the Impact of Idle State Type on the Identification of RGB Color Exposure for BCI

: Self-paced Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are desirable for allowing the BCI’s user to control a BCI without a cue to indicate him/her when to send a command or message. As a ﬁrst step towards a self-paced color-based BCI, we assessed if a machine learning algorithm can learn to distinguish between primary color exposure and idle state. In this paper, we record and analyze the EEG signals from 18 subjects for assessing the feasibility of distinguishing between color exposure and idle states. Speciﬁcally, we compare separately the performances obtained in the classiﬁcation of two different types of idle states (one relaxation-related and another attention-related) and color exposure. We characterize the signals using two different ways based on discrete wavelet transform and Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), respectively. We trained and tested two different classiﬁers, support vector machine (SVM) and random forest. The outcomes provide experimental evidence that a machine learning algorithm can distinguish between the two classes (exposure to primary colors and idle states), regardless of the kind of idle state analyzed. The more consistent outcomes were obtained using EMD-based features with accuracies of 92.3% and 91.6% (considering a break and an attention-related task as the idle states). Also, when we discard the epochs’ onset the performances were 91.8% and 94.6%, respectively.
Joint Spatial-spectral Resolution Enhancement of Multispectral Images with Spectral Matrix Factorization and Spatial Sparsity Constraints

This paper presents a joint spatial-spectral resolution enhancement technique to improve the resolution of multispectral images in the spatial and spectral domain simultaneously. Reconstructed hyperspectral images (HSIs) from an input multispectral image represent the same scene in higher spatial resolution, with more spectral bands of narrower wavelength width than the input multispectral image. Many existing improvement techniques focus on spatial- or spectral-resolution enhancement, which may cause spectral distortions and spatial inconsistency. The proposed scheme introduces virtual intermediate variables to formulate a spectral observation model and a spatial observation model. The models alternately solve spectral dictionary and abundances to reconstruct desired high-resolution HSIs. An initial spectral dictionary is trained from prior HSIs captured in different landscapes. A spatial dictionary trained from a panchromatic image and its sparse coefficients provide high spatial-resolution information. The sparse coefficients are used as constraints to obtain high spatial-resolution abundances. Experiments performed on simulated datasets from AVIRIS/Landsat 7 and a real Hyperion/ALI dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art spatial- and spectral-resolution enhancement methods. The proposed method also worked well for combination of exiting spatial- and spectral-resolution enhancement methods.
Mapping Forest Vertical Structure in Jeju Island from Optical and Radar Satellite Images Using Artificial Neural Network

Recently, due to the acceleration of global warming, an accurate understanding and management of forest carbon stocks, such as forest aboveground biomass, has become very important. The vertical structure of the forest, which is the internal structure of the forest, was mainly investigated by field surveys that are labor intensive. Recently, remote sensing techniques have been actively used to explore large and inaccessible areas. In addition, machine learning techniques that could classify and analyze large amounts of data are being used in various fields. Thus, this study aims to analyze the forest vertical structure (number of tree layers) to estimate forest aboveground biomass in Jeju Island from optical and radar satellite images using artificial neural networks (ANN). For this purpose, the eight input neurons of the forest related layers, based on remote sensing data, were prepared: normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalized difference water index (NDWI), NDVI texture, NDWI texture, average canopy height, standard deviation canopy height and two types of coherence maps were created using the Kompsat-3 optical image, L-band ALOS PALSAR-1 radar images, digital surface model (DSM), and digital terrain model (DTM). The forest vertical structure data, based on field surveys, was divided into the training/validation and test data and the hyper-parameters of ANN were trained using the training/validation data. The forest vertical classification result from ANN was evaluated by comparison to the test data. It showed about a 65.7% overall accuracy based on the error matrix. This result shows that the forest vertical structure map can be effectively generated from optical and radar satellite images and existing DEM and DTM using the ANN approach, especially for national scale mapping.
Increased γ-glutamyl transferase positively contributed to the poor prognosis in lung cancer patients

Background: γ-glutamyl transferase (GGT) has a critical effect on tumor initiation, progression, and metastasis; however, the particular role of circulating GGT factor in the prognosis of lung cancer remains undetermined. The aim of this study is to identify the relationship between the circulating level of GGT and poor prognosis of lung cancer patients. Methods: A total of 1,098 lung cancer patients whose GGT values were available were enrolled in this study and divided into positive and negative groups. SPSS 19.0 was introduced to analyze the relationship between GGT and clinical characteristics and metastasis. The relationship between survival status and GGT was completed by Kaplan-Meier method. Cox regression model was conducted to confirm whether GGT served as an independent risk factor in the prognosis of lung cancer. Results: Elevated GGT level was positively related to liver (P Conclusions: Our results confirmed that GGT contributed to poor survival of lung cancer and was important in prediction of metastasis and poor prognosis.
Estimation of Shortwave Solar Radiation on Clear-Sky Days for a Valley Glacier with Sentinel-2 Time Series

Downward surface shortwave radiation (DSSR) is the main energy source for most glacial melting, and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data have been used extensively in the inversion of input parameters for estimating DSSR. However, for valley glaciers under complex climatic conditions, the values of MODIS atmospheric products, especially aerosol products, are often invalid, and TM images are always saturated with snow. Furthermore, an estimation model based on optical satellite images must simultaneously consider terrain and atmospheric effects and the transient nature of ice/snow albedo. Based on a high-resolution (12 m) digital elevation model (DEM), the newly launched Sentinel-2 satellites, rather than MODIS and TM, were used to provide input data for our published mountain radiation scheme in a valley glacier. Considering Laohugou Glacier No. 12 as the study area, 62 typical Sentinel-2 scenes were selected and spatiotemporal DSSR variations on the glacier surface were obtained with a 10 m spatial resolution during a mass-balance year from September 2017 to August 2018. Ground-based measurements on 52 clear-sky days were used for validation and the mean bias error (MBE = −16.0 W/m2) and root-mean-square difference (RMSD = 73.6 W/m2) were relatively low. The results confirm that DSSR is affected mainly by the solar zenith angle and atmospheric attenuation in flat areas of valley glaciers, while in areas with complex terrain, the DSSR received by the glacier surface is affected primarily by the terrain and ice/snow albedo, which exhibits very high spatial heterogeneity.
Safe Feedback Motion Planning: A Contraction Theory and ℒ1-Adaptive Control Based Approach

Autonomous robots that are capable of operating safely in the presence of imperfect model knowledge or external disturbances are vital in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we present a planner-agnostic framework to design and certify safe tubes around desired trajectories that the robot is always guaranteed to remain inside. By leveraging recent results in contraction analysis and ℒ1-adaptive control we synthesize an architecture that induces safe tubes for nonlinear systems with state and time-varying uncertainties. We demonstrate with a few illustrative examples1 how contraction theory-based ℒ1-adaptive control can be used in conjunction with traditional motion planning algorithms to obtain provably safe trajectories.
A comprehensive review on functional properties of fermented rice bran

A predominant by-product of rice processing is rice bran (RB). The phytochemical composition of the RB varied among the cultivars. RB is rich in oil, phenolic compounds, polysaccharides, proteins, and micronutrients along with more than 100 known antioxidants and bioactive phytonutrients. The crude and purified RB extracts were used in pharmacological, cosmeceuticals, and food industries. Fermentation process improved the phytochemical constituents and enhanced the bioactivity of RB. The fermented RB (FRB) has been reported for the enhanced antioxidant, anti-cancer, and anti-inflammatory bowel diseases, anti-diabetes activities, etc., FRB is used as potent animal feed, especially in poultry industries. RB bioactive principles were studied for their potential application in anti-aging treatments, and cosmetics. The current manuscript summarizes the changes in the phytochemical content of RB during the fermentation process and functional property of FRB.