OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CNN-based Ego-Motion Estimation for Fast MAV Maneuvers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In the field of visual ego-motion estimation for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs), fast maneuvers stay challenging mainly because of the big visual disparity and motion blur. In the pursuit of higher robustness, we study convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that predict the relative pose between subsequent images from a fast-moving monocular camera facing a planar scene. Aided by the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), we mainly focus on translational motion. The networks we study have similar small model sizes (around 1.35MB) and high inference speeds (around 10 milliseconds on a mobile GPU). Images for training and testing have realistic motion blur. Departing from a network framework that iteratively warps the first image to match the second with cascaded network blocks, we study different network architectures and training strategies. Simulated datasets and a self-collected MAV flight dataset are used for evaluation. The proposed setup shows better accuracy over existing networks and traditional feature-point-based methods during fast maneuvers. Moreover, self-supervised learning outperforms supervised learning. Videos and open-sourced code are available at https://github.com/tudelft/PoseNet_Planar
Bridging BAD Islands: Declarative Data Sharing at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

In many Big Data applications today, information needs to be actively shared between systems managed by different organizations. To enable sharing Big Data at scale, developers would have to create dedicated server programs and glue together multiple Big Data systems for scalability. Developing and managing such glued data sharing services requires a significant amount of work from developers. In our prior work, we developed a Big Active Data (BAD) system for enabling Big Data subscriptions and analytics with millions of subscribers. Based on that, we introduce a new mechanism for enabling the sharing of Big Data at scale declaratively so that developers can easily create and provide data sharing services using declarative statements and can benefit from an underlying scalable infrastructure. We show our implementation on top of the BAD system, explain the data sharing data flow among multiple systems, and present a prototype system with experimental results.
Aerial-Ground Interference Mitigation for Cellular-Connected UAV
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

To support large-scale deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in future, a new wireless communication paradigm, namely, cellular-connected UAV, has recently received an upsurge of interests in both academia and industry. Specifically, cellular base stations (BSs) and spectrum are reused to serve UAVs as new aerial user equipments (UEs) for meeting their communication requirements. However, compared to traditional terrestrial UEs, the high altitude of UAVs results in more frequent line-of-sight (LoS) channels with both their associated and non-associated BSs in a much wider area, which causes stronger aerial-ground interference to both UAVs and terrestrial UEs. As such, conventional techniques designed for mitigating the terrestrial interference become ineffective in coping with the new and more severe UAV-terrestrial interference. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this article new interference mitigation solutions for achieving spectral efficient operation of the cellular network with co-existing UAVs and terrestrial UEs. In particular, we exploit the powerful sensing capability of UAVs and inactive BSs in the network for interference mitigation/cancellation. Numerical results are presented to verify the efficacy of the proposed solutions and show their significant spectrum efficiency gains over terrestrial interference mitigation techniques.
TGCN: Time Domain Graph Convolutional Network for Multiple Objects Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Multiple object tracking is to give each object an id in the video. The difficulty is how to match the predicted objects and detected objects in same frames. Matching features include appearance features, location features, etc. These features of the predicted object are basically based on some previous frames. However, few papers describe the relationship in the time domain between the previous frame features and the current frame features.In this paper, we proposed a time domain graph convolutional network for multiple objects tracking.The model is mainly divided into two parts, we first use convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract pedestrian appearance feature, which is a normal operation processing image in deep learning, then we use GCN to model some past frames' appearance feature to get the prediction appearance feature of the current frame. Due to this extension, we can get the pose features of the current frame according to the relationship between some frames in the past. Experimental evaluation shows that our extensions improve the MOTA by 1.3 on the MOT16, achieving overall competitive performance at high frame rates.
Smile and Laugh Expressions Detection Based on Local Minimum Key Points
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, a smile and laugh facial expression is presented based on dimension reduction and description process of the key points. The paper has two main objectives; the first is to extract the local critical points in terms of their apparent features, and the second is to reduce the system's dependence on training inputs. To achieve these objectives, three different scenarios on extracting the features are proposed. First of all, the discrete parts of a face are detected by local binary pattern method that is used to extract a set of global feature vectors for texture classification considering various regions of an input-image face. Then, in the first scenario and with respect to the correlation changes of adjacent pixels on the texture of a mouth area, a set of local key points are extracted using the Harris corner detector. In the second scenario, the dimension reduction of the extracted points of first scenario provided by principal component analysis algorithm leading to reduction in computational costs and overall complexity without loss of performance and flexibility, etc.
On-Device Document Classification using multimodal features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

From small screenshots to large videos, documents take up a bulk of space in a modern smartphone. Documents in a phone can accumulate from various sources, and with the high storage capacity of mobiles, hundreds of documents are accumulated in a short period. However, searching or managing documents remains an onerous task, since most search methods depend on meta-information or only text in a document. In this paper, we showcase that a single modality is insufficient for classification and present a novel pipeline to classify documents on-device, thus preventing any private user data transfer to server. For this task, we integrate an open-source library for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and our novel model architecture in the pipeline. We optimise the model for size, a necessary metric for on-device inference. We benchmark our classification model with a standard multimodal dataset FOOD-101 and showcase competitive results with the previous State of the Art with 30% model compression.
MSD: Saliency-aware Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

To reduce a model size but retain performance, we often rely on knowledge distillation (KD) which transfers knowledge from a large "teacher" model to a smaller "student" model. However, KD on multimodal datasets such as vision-language tasks is relatively unexplored, and digesting multimodal information is challenging since different modalities present different types of information. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study to investigate the importance and effects of each modality in knowledge distillation. Furthermore, we introduce a multimodal knowledge distillation framework, modality-specific distillation (MSD), to transfer knowledge from a teacher on multimodal tasks by learning the teacher's behavior within each modality. The idea aims at mimicking a teacher's modality-specific predictions by introducing auxiliary loss terms for each modality. Furthermore, because each modality has different saliency for predictions, we define saliency scores for each modality and investigate saliency-based weighting schemes for the auxiliary losses. We further study a weight learning approach to learn the optimal weights on these loss terms. In our empirical analysis, we examine the saliency of each modality in KD, demonstrate the effectiveness of the weighting scheme in MSD, and show that it achieves better performance than KD on four multimodal datasets.
Performance Analysis and Optimization of Bidirectional Overlay Cognitive Radio Networks with Hybrid-SWIPT
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper considers a cooperative cognitive radio network with two primary users (PUs) and two secondary users (SUs) that enables two-way communications of primary and secondary systems in conjunction with non-linear energy harvesting based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT). With the considered network, SUs are able to realize their communications over the licensed spectrum while extending relay assistance to the PUs. The overall bidirectional end-to-end transmission takes place in four phases, which include both energy harvesting (EH) and information transfer. A non-linear energy harvester with a hybrid SWIPT scheme is adopted in which both power-splitting and time-switching EH techniques are used. The SUs aid in relay cooperation by performing an amplify-and-forward operation, whereas selection combining technique is adopted at the PUs to extract the intended signal from multiple received signals broadcasted by the SUs. Accurate outage probability expressions for the primary and secondary links are derived under the Nakagami-$m$ fading environment. Further, the system behavior is analyzed with respect to achievable system throughput and energy efficiency. Since the performance of the considered system is strongly affected by the spectrum sharing factor and hybrid SWIPT parameters, particle swarm optimization is implemented to optimize the system parameters so as to maximize the system throughput and energy efficiency. Simulation results are provided to corroborate the performance analysis and give useful insights into the system behavior concerning various system/channel parameters.
Low-Complexity Interference Cancellation Algorithms for Detection in Media-based Modulated Uplink Massive-MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Media-based modulation (MBM) is a novel modulation technique that can improve the spectral efficiency of the existing wireless systems. In MBM, multiple radio frequency (RF) mirrors are placed near the transmit antenna(s) and are switched ON/OFF to create different channel fade realizations. In such systems, additional information is conveyed through the ON/OFF status of RF mirrors along with conventional modulation symbols. A challenging task at the receiver is to detect the transmitted information symbols and extract the additional information from the channel fade realization used for transmission. In this paper, we consider a massive MIMO (mMIMO) system where each user relies on MBM for transmitting information to the base station, and investigate the problem of symbol detection at the base station. First, we propose a mirror activation pattern (MAP) selection based modified iterative sequential detection algorithm. With the proposed algorithm, the most favorable MAP is selected, followed by the detection of symbol corresponding to the selected MAP. Each solution is subjected to the reliability check before getting the update. Next, we introduce a $K$ favorable MAP search based iterative interference cancellation (KMAP-IIC) algorithm. In particular, a selection rule is introduced in KMAP-IIC for deciding the set of favorable MAPs over which iterative interference cancellation is performed, followed by a greedy update scheme for detecting the MBM symbols corresponding to each user. Simulation results show that the proposed detection algorithms exhibit superior performance-complexity trade-off over the existing detection techniques in MBM-mMIMO systems.
SF-QA: Simple and Fair Evaluation Library for Open-domain Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Although open-domain question answering (QA) draws great attention in recent years, it requires large amounts of resources for building the full system and is often difficult to reproduce previous results due to complex configurations. In this paper, we introduce SF-QA: simple and fair evaluation framework for open-domain QA. SF-QA framework modularizes the pipeline open-domain QA system, which makes the task itself easily accessible and reproducible to research groups without enough computing resources. The proposed evaluation framework is publicly available and anyone can contribute to the code and evaluations.
Logics of First-Order Constraints -- A Category Independent Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

Reflecting our experiences in areas, like Algebraic Specifications, Abstract Model Theory, Graph Transformations, and Model Driven Software Engineering (MDSE), we present a general, category independent approach to Logics of First-Order Constraints (LFOC). Traditional First-Order Logic, Description Logic and the sketch framework are discussed as examples. We use the concept of institution [Diaconescu08,GoguenBurstall92] as a guideline to describe LFOC's. The main result states that any choice of the six parameters, we are going to describe, gives us a corresponding "institution of constraints" at hand. The "presentations" for an institution of constraints can be characterized as "first-order sketches". As a corresponding variant of the "sketch-entailments" in [Makkai97], we finally introduce "sketch rules" to equip LFOC's with the necessary expressive power.
HERMES: Scalable, Secure, and Privacy-Enhancing Vehicle Access System
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

We propose HERMES, a scalable, secure, and privacy-enhancing system for users to share and access vehicles. HERMES securely outsources operations of vehicle access token generation to a set of untrusted servers. It builds on an earlier proposal, namely SePCAR [1], and extends the system design for improved efficiency and scalability. To cater to system and user needs for secure and private computations, HERMES utilizes and combines several cryptographic primitives with secure multiparty computation efficiently. It conceals secret keys of vehicles and transaction details from the servers, including vehicle booking details, access token information, and user and vehicle identities. It also provides user accountability in case of disputes. Besides, we provide semantic security analysis and prove that HERMES meets its security and privacy requirements. Last but not least, we demonstrate that HERMES is efficient and, in contrast to SePCAR, scales to a large number of users and vehicles, making it practical for real-world deployments. We build our evaluations with two different multiparty computation protocols: HtMAC-MiMC and CBC-MAC-AES. Our results demonstrate that HERMES with HtMAC-MiMC requires only approx 1,83 ms for generating an access token for a single-vehicle owner and approx 11,9 ms for a large branch of rental companies with over a thousand vehicles. It handles 546 and 84 access token generations per second, respectively. This results in HERMES being 696 (with HtMAC-MiMC) and 42 (with CBC-MAC-AES) times faster compared to in SePCAR for a single-vehicle owner access token generation. Furthermore, we show that HERMES is practical on the vehicle side, too, as access token operations performed on a prototype vehicle on-board unit take only approx 62,087 ms.
MEDICI: A simple to use synthetic social network data generator
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

This paper describes an application, called Medici, designed to produce synthetic data for social network graphs, which can be used for analysis, hypothesis testing and application development by researchers and practitioners in the field. It builds on previous work by providing an integrated system, and a user friendly screen interface. It can be run with default values to produce graph data and statistics, which can then be used for further processing. The system is made publicly available in a Github Java project. The annex provides a user manual with a screen by screen guide.
Dynamic Prioritization for Conflict-Free Path Planning of Multi-Robot Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Planning collision-free paths for multi-robot systems (MRS) is a challenging problem because of the safety and efficiency constraints required for real-world solutions. Even though coupled path planning approaches provide optimal collision-free paths for each agent of the MRS, they search the composite space of all the agents and therefore, suffer from exponential increase in computation with the number of robots. On the other hand, prioritized approaches provide a practical solution to applications with large number of robots, especially when path computation time and collision avoidance take precedence over guaranteed globally optimal solution. While most centrally-planned algorithms use static prioritization, a dynamic prioritization algorithm, PD*, is proposed that employs a novel metric, called freedom index, to decide the priority order of the robots at each time step. This allows the PD* algorithm to simultaneously plan the next step for all robots while ensuring collision-free operation in obstacle ridden environments. Extensive simulations were performed to test and compare the performance of the proposed PD* scheme with other state-of-the-art algorithms. It was found that PD* improves upon the computational time by 25% while providing solutions of similar path lengths. Increase in efficiency was particularly prominent in scenarios with large number of robots and/or higher obstacle densities, where the probability of collisions is higher, suggesting the suitability of PD* in solving such problems.
Multi-object Tracking with a Hierarchical Single-branch Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recent Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) methods have gradually attempted to integrate object detection and instance re-identification (Re-ID) into a united network to form a one-stage solution. Typically, these methods use two separated branches within a single network to accomplish detection and Re-ID respectively without studying the inter-relationship between them, which inevitably impedes the tracking performance. In this paper, we propose an online multi-object tracking framework based on a hierarchical single-branch network to solve this problem. Specifically, the proposed single-branch network utilizes an improved Hierarchical Online In-stance Matching (iHOIM) loss to explicitly model the inter-relationship between object detection and Re-ID. Our novel iHOIM loss function unifies the objectives of the two sub-tasks and encourages better detection performance and feature learning even in extremely crowded scenes. Moreover, we propose to introduce the object positions, predicted by a motion model, as region proposals for subsequent object detection, where the intuition is that detection results and motion predictions can complement each other in different scenarios. Experimental results on MOT16 and MOT20 datasets show that we can achieve state-of-the-art tracking performance, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness of each proposed component.
Statistical CSI Based Hybrid mmWave MIMO-NOMA with Max-Min Fairness
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and millimeter wave (mmWave) are two key enabling technologies for the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks and beyond. In this paper, we consider mmWave NOMA systems with max-min fairness constraints. On the one hand, existing beamforming designs aiming at maximizing the spectrum efficiency (SE) are unsuitable for the NOMA systems with fairness in this paper. On the other hand, previous work on about mmWave NOMA mostly depends on full knowledge of channel state information (CSI) which is extremely difficult to obtain accurately in mmWave communication systems. To address this problem, we propose a heuristic hybrid beamforming design based on the statistical CSI (SCSI) user grouping strategy. An analog beamforming scheme is first proposed to integrate the whole cluster users to mitigate the inter-cluster interference in the first stage. Then two digital beamforming designs are proposed to further suppress the interference based on SCSI. One is the widely used zero forcing (ZF) approach and the other is derived from the signal-to leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR) metric extended from orthogonal multiple access (OMA) systems. The effective gains fed back from the users are used for the power allocation. We introduce the quadratic transform (QT) method and bisection approach to reformulate this complex problem so as to rend it solvable. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithms outperform the previous algorithms in term of user fairness.
Counting independent sets in strongly orderable graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the problem of devising algorithms to count exactly the number of independent sets of a graph G . We show that there is a polynomial time algorithm for this problem when G is restricted to the class of strongly orderable graphs, a superclass of chordal bipartite graphs. We also show that such an algorithm exists for graphs of bounded clique-width. Our results extends to a more general setting of counting independent sets in a weighted graph and can be used to count the number of independent sets of any given size k .
Internet of Everything enabled solution for COVID-19, its new variants and future pandemics: Framework, Challenges, and Research Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

After affecting the world in unexpected ways, COVID-19 has started mutating which is evident with the insurgence of its new variants. The governments, hospitals, schools, industries, and humans, in general, are looking for a potential solution in the vaccine which will eventually be available but its timeline for eradicating the virus is yet unknown. Several researchers have encouraged and recommended the use of good practices such as physical healthcare monitoring, immunity-boosting, personal hygiene, mental healthcare, and contact tracing for slowing down the spread of the virus. In this article, we propose the use of wearable/mobile sensors integrated with the Internet of Everything to cover the spectrum of good practices in an automated manner. We present hypothetical frameworks for each of the good practice modules and propose the COvid-19 Resistance Framework using the Internet of Everything (CORFIE) to tie all the individual modules in a unified architecture. We envision that CORFIE would be influential in assisting people with the new normal for current and future pandemics as well as instrumental in halting the economic losses, respectively. We also provide potential challenges and their probable solutions in compliance with the proposed CORFIE.