OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
FARM: Functional Automatic Registration Method for 3D Human Bodies
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce a new method for non-rigid registration of 3D human shapes. Our proposed pipeline builds upon a given parametric model of the human, and makes use of the functional map representation for encoding and inferring shape maps throughout the registration process. This combination endows our method with robustness to a large variety of nuisances observed in practical settings, including non-isometric transformations, downsampling, topological noise, and occlusions; further, the pipeline can be applied invariably across different shape representations (e.g. meshes and point clouds), and in the presence of (even dramatic) missing parts such as those arising in real-world depth sensing applications. We showcase our method on a selection of challenging tasks, demonstrating results in line with, or even surpassing, state-of-the-art methods in the respective areas.
ESCaF: Pupil Centre Localization Algorithm with Candidate Filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Algorithms for accurate localization of pupil centre is essential for gaze tracking in real world conditions. Most of the algorithms fail in real world conditions like illumination variations, contact lenses, glasses, eye makeup, motion blur, noise, etc. We propose a new algorithm which improves the detection rate in real world conditions. The proposed algorithm uses both edges as well as intensity information along with a candidate filtering approach to identify the best pupil candidate. A simple tracking scheme has also been added which improves the processing speed. The algorithm has been evaluated in Labelled Pupil in the Wild (LPW) dataset, largest in its class which contains real world conditions. The proposed algorithm outperformed the state of the art algorithms while achieving real-time performance.
Coloured Ring Confidential Transactions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2018
Year: 2018

Privacy in block-chains is considered second to functionality, but a vital requirement for many new applications, e.g., in the industrial environment. We propose a novel transaction type, which enables privacy preserving trading of independent assets on a common block-chain. This is achieved by extending the ring confidential transaction with an additional commitment to a colour and a publicly verifiable proof of conservation. With our coloured confidential ring signatures, new token types can be introduced and transferred by any participant using the same sized anonymity set as single-token privacy aware block-chains. Thereby, our system facilitates tracking assets on an immutable ledger without compromising the confidentiality of transactions.
Towards an Embodied Semantic Fovea: Semantic 3D scene reconstruction from ego-centric eye-tracker videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Incorporating the physical environment is essential for a complete understanding of human behavior in unconstrained every-day tasks. This is especially important in ego-centric tasks where obtaining 3 dimensional information is both limiting and challenging with the current 2D video analysis methods proving insufficient. Here we demonstrate a proof-of-concept system which provides real-time 3D mapping and semantic labeling of the local environment from an ego-centric RGB-D video-stream with 3D gaze point estimation from head mounted eye tracking glasses. We augment existing work in Semantic Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (Semantic SLAM) with collected gaze vectors. Our system can then find and track objects both inside and outside the user field-of-view in 3D from multiple perspectives with reasonable accuracy. We validate our concept by producing a semantic map from images of the NYUv2 dataset while simultaneously estimating gaze position and gaze classes from recorded gaze data of the dataset images.
Multi-Scale Gradual Integration CNN for False Positive Reduction in Pulmonary Nodule Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Lung cancer is a global and dangerous disease, and its early detection is crucial to reducing the risks of mortality. In this regard, it has been of great interest in developing a computer-aided system for pulmonary nodules detection as early as possible on thoracic CT scans. In general, a nodule detection system involves two steps: (i) candidate nodule detection at a high sensitivity, which captures many false positives and (ii) false positive reduction from candidates. However, due to the high variation of nodule morphological characteristics and the possibility of mistaking them for neighboring organs, candidate nodule detection remains a challenge. In this study, we propose a novel Multi-scale Gradual Integration Convolutional Neural Network (MGI-CNN), designed with three main strategies: (1) to use multi-scale inputs with different levels of contextual information, (2) to use abstract information inherent in different input scales with gradual integration, and (3) to learn multi-stream feature integration in an end-to-end manner. To verify the efficacy of the proposed network, we conducted exhaustive experiments on the LUNA16 challenge datasets by comparing the performance of the proposed method with state-of-the-art methods in the literature. On two candidate subsets of the LUNA16 dataset, i.e., V1 and V2, our method achieved an average CPM of 0.908 (V1) and 0.942 (V2), outperforming comparable methods by a large margin. Our MGI-CNN is implemented in Python using TensorFlow and the source code is available from 'https://github.com/ku-milab/MGICNN.'
EchoFusion: Tracking and Reconstruction of Objects in 4D Freehand Ultrasound Imaging without External Trackers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Ultrasound (US) is the most widely used fetal imaging technique. However, US images have limited capture range, and suffer from view dependent artefacts such as acoustic shadows. Compounding of overlapping 3D US acquisitions into a high-resolution volume can extend the field of view and remove image artefacts, which is useful for retrospective analysis including population based studies. However, such volume reconstructions require information about relative transformations between probe positions from which the individual volumes were acquired. In prenatal US scans, the fetus can move independently from the mother, making external trackers such as electromagnetic or optical tracking unable to track the motion between probe position and the moving fetus. We provide a novel methodology for image-based tracking and volume reconstruction by combining recent advances in deep learning and simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM). Tracking semantics are established through the use of a Residual 3D U-Net and the output is fed to the SLAM algorithm. As a proof of concept, experiments are conducted on US volumes taken from a whole body fetal phantom, and from the heads of real fetuses. For the fetal head segmentation, we also introduce a novel weak annotation approach to minimise the required manual effort for ground truth annotation. We evaluate our method qualitatively, and quantitatively with respect to tissue discrimination accuracy and tracking robustness.
Uncertainty and Interpretability in Convolutional Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation of Colorectal Polyps
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are propelling advances in a range of different computer vision tasks such as object detection and object segmentation. Their success has motivated research in applications of such models for medical image analysis. If CNN-based models are to be helpful in a medical context, they need to be precise, interpretable, and uncertainty in predictions must be well understood. In this paper, we develop and evaluate recent advances in uncertainty estimation and model interpretability in the context of semantic segmentation of polyps from colonoscopy images. We evaluate and enhance several architectures of Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) for semantic segmentation of colorectal polyps and provide a comparison between these models. Our highest performing model achieves a 76.06\% mean IOU accuracy on the EndoScene dataset, a considerable improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.
Finding any Waldo: zero-shot invariant and efficient visual search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Searching for a target object in a cluttered scene constitutes a fundamental challenge in daily vision. Visual search must be selective enough to discriminate the target from distractors, invariant to changes in the appearance of the target, efficient to avoid exhaustive exploration of the image, and must generalize to locate novel target objects with zero-shot training. Previous work has focused on searching for perfect matches of a target after extensive category-specific training. Here we show for the first time that humans can efficiently and invariantly search for natural objects in complex scenes. To gain insight into the mechanisms that guide visual search, we propose a biologically inspired computational model that can locate targets without exhaustive sampling and generalize to novel objects. The model provides an approximation to the mechanisms integrating bottom-up and top-down signals during search in natural scenes.
Automated Characterization of Stenosis in Invasive Coronary Angiography Images with Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

The determination of a coronary stenosis and its severity in current clinical workflow is typically accomplished manually via physician visual assessment (PVA) during invasive coronary angiography. While PVA has shown large inter-rater variability, the more reliable and accurate alternative of Quantitative Coronary Angiography (QCA) is challenging to perform in real-time due to the busy workflow in cardiac catheterization laboratories. We propose a deep learning approach based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that automatically characterizes and analyzes coronary stenoses in real-time by automating clinical tasks performed during QCA. Our deep learning methods for localization, segmentation and classification of stenosis in still-frame invasive coronary angiography (ICA) images of the right coronary artery (RCA) achieve performance of 72.7% localization accuracy, 0.704 dice coefficient and 0.825 C-statistic in each respective task. Integrated in an end-to-end approach, our model's performance shows statistically significant improvement in false discovery rate over the current standard in real-time clinical stenosis assessment, PVA. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first time an automated machine learning system has been developed that can implement tasks performed in QCA, and the first time an automated machine learning system has demonstrated significant improvement over the current clinical standard for rapid RCA stenosis analysis.
Learnable: Theory vs Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2018
Year: 2018

Two different views on machine learning problem: Applied learning (machine learning with business applications) and Agnostic PAC learning are formalized and compared here. I show that, under some conditions, the theory of PAC Learnable provides a way to solve the Applied learning problem. However, the theory requires to have the training sets so large, that it would make the learning practically useless. I suggest shedding some theoretical misconceptions about learning to make the theory more aligned with the needs and experience of practitioners.
A small Griko-Italian speech translation corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

This paper presents an extension to a very low-resource parallel corpus collected in an endangered language, Griko, making it useful for computational research. The corpus consists of 330 utterances (about 20 minutes of speech) which have been transcribed and translated in Italian, with annotations for word-level speech-to-transcription and speech-to-translation alignments. The corpus also includes morphosyntactic tags and word-level glosses. Applying an automatic unit discovery method, pseudo-phones were also generated. We detail how the corpus was collected, cleaned and processed, and we illustrate its use on zero-resource tasks by presenting some baseline results for the task of speech-to-translation alignment and unsupervised word discovery. The dataset is available online, aiming to encourage replicability and diversity in computational language documentation experiments.
NDBench: Benchmarking Microservices at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2018
Year: 2018

Software vendors often report performance numbers for the sweet spot or running on specialized hardware with specific workload parameters and without realistic failures. Accurate benchmarks at the persistence layer are crucial, as failures may cause unrecoverable errors such as data loss, inconsistency or corruption. To accurately evaluate data stores and other microservices at Netflix, we developed Netflix Data Benchmark (NDBench), a Cloud benchmark tool. It can be deployed in a loosely-coupled fashion with the ability to dynamically change the benchmark parameters at runtime so we can rapidly iterate on different tests and failure modes. NDBench offers pluggable patterns and loads, support for pluggable client APIs, and was designed to run continually. This design enabled us to test long-running maintenance jobs that may affect the performance, test numerous different systems under adverse conditions, and uncover long-term issues like memory leaks or heap pressure.
On Good and Bad Intentions behind Anomalous Citation Patterns among Journals in Computer Sciences
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2018
Year: 2018

Scientific journals are an important choice of publication venue for most authors. Publishing in prestigious journal plays a decisive role for authors in hiring and promotions. In last decade, citation pressure has become intact for all scientific entities more than ever before. Unethical publication practices has started to manipulate widely used performance metric such as "impact factor" for journals and citation based indices for authors. This threatens the integrity of scientific quality and takes away deserved credit of legitimate authors and their authentic publications. In this paper we extract all possible anomalous citation patterns between journals from a Computer Science bibliographic dataset which contains more than 2,500 journals. Apart from excessive self-citations, we mostly focus on finding several patterns between two or more journals such as bi-directional mutual citations, chains, triangles, mesh, cartel relationships. On a macroscopic scale, the motivation is to understand the nature of these patterns by modeling how journals mutually interact through citations. On microscopic level, we differentiate between possible intentions (good or bad) behind such patterns. We see whether such patterns prevail for long period or during any specific time duration. For abnormal citation behavior, we study the nature of sudden inflation in impact factor of journals on a time basis which may occur due to addition of irrelevant and superfluous citations in such closed pattern interaction. We also study possible influences such as abrupt increase in paper count due to the presence of self-referential papers or duplicate manuscripts, author self-citation, author co-authorship network, author-editor network, publication houses etc. The entire study is done to question the reliability of existing bibliometrics, and hence, it is an urgent need to curtail their usage or redefine them.
Analyzing Uncivil Speech Provocation and Implicit Topics in Online Political News
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2018
Year: 2018

Online news has made dissemination of information a faster and more efficient process. Additionally, the shift from a print medium to an online interface has enabled user interactions, creating a space to mutually understand the reader responses generated by the consumption of news articles. Intermittently, the positive environment is transformed into a hate-spewing contest, with the amount and target of incivility varying depending on the specific news website in question. In this paper, we develop methods to study the emergence of incivility within the reader communities in news sites. First, we create a dataset of political news articles and their reader comments from partisan news sites. Then, we train classifiers to predict different aspects of uncivil speech in comments. We apply these classifiers to predict whether a news article is likely to provoke a substantial portion of reader comments containing uncivil language by analyzing only the article's content. Finally, we devise a technique to "read between the lines" --- finding the topics of discussions that an article triggers among its readers without frequent, explicit mentions of these topics in its content.
A user model for JND-based video quality assessment: theory and applications
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2018
Year: 2018

The video quality assessment (VQA) technology has attracted a lot of attention in recent years due to an increasing demand of video streaming services. Existing VQA methods are designed to predict video quality in terms of the mean opinion score (MOS) calibrated by humans in subjective experiments. However, they cannot predict the satisfied user ratio (SUR) of an aggregated viewer group. Furthermore, they provide little guidance to video coding parameter selection, e.g. the Quantization Parameter (QP) of a set of consecutive frames, in practical video streaming services. To overcome these shortcomings, the just-noticeable-difference (JND) based VQA methodology has been proposed as an alternative. It is observed experimentally that the JND location is a normally distributed random variable. In this work, we explain this distribution by proposing a user model that takes both subject variabilities and content variabilities into account. This model is built upon user's capability to discern the quality difference between video clips encoded with different QPs. Moreover, it analyzes video content characteristics to account for inter-content variability. The proposed user model is validated on the data collected in the VideoSet. It is demonstrated that the model is flexible to predict SUR distribution of a specific user group.
Unsupervised Adversarial Depth Estimation using Cycled Generative Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

While recent deep monocular depth estimation approaches based on supervised regression have achieved remarkable performance, costly ground truth annotations are required during training. To cope with this issue, in this paper we present a novel unsupervised deep learning approach for predicting depth maps and show that the depth estimation task can be effectively tackled within an adversarial learning framework. Specifically, we propose a deep generative network that learns to predict the correspondence field i.e. the disparity map between two image views in a calibrated stereo camera setting. The proposed architecture consists of two generative sub-networks jointly trained with adversarial learning for reconstructing the disparity map and organized in a cycle such as to provide mutual constraints and supervision to each other. Extensive experiments on the publicly available datasets KITTI and Cityscapes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and competitive results with state of the art methods. The code and trained model are available on https://github.com/andrea-pilzer/unsup-stereo-depthGAN.
Goal-Oriented Mutation Testing with Focal Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2018
Year: 2018

Mutation testing is the state-of-the-art technique for assessing the fault-detection capacity of a test suite. Unfortunately, mutation testing consumes enormous computing resources because it runs the whole test suite for each and every injected mutant. In this paper we explore fine-grained traceability links at method level (named focal methods), to reduce the execution time of mutation testing and to verify the quality of the test cases for each individual method, instead of the usually verified overall test suite quality. Validation of our approach on the open source Apache Ant project shows a speed-up of 573.5x for the mutants located in focal methods with a quality score of 80%.
Ontology-Grounded Topic Modeling for Climate Science Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2018
Year: 2018

In scientific disciplines where research findings have a strong impact on society, reducing the amount of time it takes to understand, synthesize and exploit the research is invaluable. Topic modeling is an effective technique for summarizing a collection of documents to find the main themes among them and to classify other documents that have a similar mixture of co-occurring words. We show how grounding a topic model with an ontology, extracted from a glossary of important domain phrases, improves the topics generated and makes them easier to understand. We apply and evaluate this method to the climate science domain. The result improves the topics generated and supports faster research understanding, discovery of social networks among researchers, and automatic ontology generation.
Tiny-DSOD: Lightweight Object Detection for Resource-Restricted Usages
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2018
Year: 2018

Object detection has made great progress in the past few years along with the development of deep learning. However, most current object detection methods are resource hungry, which hinders their wide deployment to many resource restricted usages such as usages on always-on devices, battery-powered low-end devices, etc. This paper considers the resource and accuracy trade-off for resource-restricted usages during designing the whole object detection framework. Based on the deeply supervised object detection (DSOD) framework, we propose Tiny-DSOD dedicating to resource-restricted usages. Tiny-DSOD introduces two innovative and ultra-efficient architecture blocks: depthwise dense block (DDB) based backbone and depthwise feature-pyramid-network (D-FPN) based front-end. We conduct extensive experiments on three famous benchmarks (PASCAL VOC 2007, KITTI, and COCO), and compare Tiny-DSOD to the state-of-the-art ultra-efficient object detection solutions such as Tiny-YOLO, MobileNet-SSD (v1 & v2), SqueezeDet, Pelee, etc. Results show that Tiny-DSOD outperforms these solutions in all the three metrics (parameter-size, FLOPs, accuracy) in each comparison. For instance, Tiny-DSOD achieves 72.1% mAP with only 0.95M parameters and 1.06B FLOPs, which is by far the state-of-the-arts result with such a low resource requirement.