OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
FogAdapt: Self-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation of Foggy Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents FogAdapt, a novel approach for domain adaptation of semantic segmentation for dense foggy scenes. Although significant research has been directed to reduce the domain shift in semantic segmentation, adaptation to scenes with adverse weather conditions remains an open question. Large variations in the visibility of the scene due to weather conditions, such as fog, smog, and haze, exacerbate the domain shift, thus making unsupervised adaptation in such scenarios challenging. We propose a self-entropy and multi-scale information augmented self-supervised domain adaptation method (FogAdapt) to minimize the domain shift in foggy scenes segmentation. Supported by the empirical evidence that an increase in fog density results in high self-entropy for segmentation probabilities, we introduce a self-entropy based loss function to guide the adaptation method. Furthermore, inferences obtained at different image scales are combined and weighted by the uncertainty to generate scale-invariant pseudo-labels for the target domain. These scale-invariant pseudo-labels are robust to visibility and scale variations. We evaluate the proposed model on real clear-weather scenes to real foggy scenes adaptation and synthetic non-foggy images to real foggy scenes adaptation scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that FogAdapt significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation of foggy images. Specifically, by considering the standard settings compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, FogAdapt gains 3.8% on Foggy Zurich, 6.0% on Foggy Driving-dense, and 3.6% on Foggy Driving in mIoU when adapted from Cityscapes to Foggy Zurich.
Posture Prediction for Healthy Sitting using a Smart Chair
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Poor sitting habits have been identified as a risk factor to musculoskeletal disorders and lower back pain especially on the elderly, disabled people, and office workers. In the current computerized world, even while involved in leisure or work activity, people tend to spend most of their days sitting at computer desks. This can result in spinal pain and related problems. Therefore, a means to remind people about their sitting habits and provide recommendations to counterbalance, such as physical exercise, is important. Posture recognition for seated postures have not received enough attention as most works focus on standing postures. Wearable sensors, pressure or force sensors, videos and images were used for posture recognition in the literature. The aim of this study is to build Machine Learning models for classifying sitting posture of a person by analyzing data collected from a chair platted with two 32 by 32 pressure sensors at its seat and backrest. Models were built using five algorithms: Random Forest (RF), Gaussian Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine and Deep Neural Network (DNN). All the models are evaluated using KFold cross-validation technique. This paper presents experiments conducted using the two separate datasets, controlled and realistic, and discusses results achieved at classifying six sitting postures. Average classification accuracies of 98% and 97% were achieved on the controlled and realistic datasets, respectively.
Detecting CAN Masquerade Attacks with Signal Clustering Similarity
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Vehicular Controller Area Networks (CANs) are susceptible to cyber attacks of different levels of sophistication. Fabrication attacks are the easiest to administer -- an adversary simply sends (extra) frames on a CAN -- but also the easiest to detect because they disrupt frame frequency. To overcome time-based detection methods, adversaries must administer masquerade attacks by sending frames in lieu of (and therefore at the expected time of) benign frames but with malicious payloads. Research efforts have proven that CAN attacks, and masquerade attacks in particular, can affect vehicle functionality. Examples include causing unintended acceleration, deactivation of vehicle's brakes, as well as steering the vehicle. We hypothesize that masquerade attacks modify the nuanced correlations of CAN signal time series and how they cluster together. Therefore, changes in cluster assignments should indicate anomalous behavior. We confirm this hypothesis by leveraging our previously developed capability for reverse engineering CAN signals (i.e., CAN-D [Controller Area Network Decoder]) and focus on advancing the state of the art for detecting masquerade attacks by analyzing time series extracted from raw CAN frames. Specifically, we demonstrate that masquerade attacks can be detected by computing time series clustering similarity using hierarchical clustering on the vehicle's CAN signals (time series) and comparing the clustering similarity across CAN captures with and without attacks. We test our approach in a previously collected CAN dataset with masquerade attacks (i.e., the ROAD dataset) and develop a forensic tool as a proof of concept to demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach for detecting CAN masquerade attacks.
Weighted Random Sampling over Joins
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Joining records with all other records that meet a linkage condition can result in an astronomically large number of combinations due to many-to-many relationships. For such challenging (acyclic) joins, a random sample over the join result is a practical alternative to working with the oversized join result. Whereas prior works are limited to uniform join sampling where each join row is assigned the same probability, the scope is extended in this work to weighted sampling to support emerging applications such as scientific discovery in observational data and privacy-preserving query answering. Notwithstanding some naive methods, this work presents the first approach for weighted random sampling from join results. Due to a lack of baselines, experiments over various join types and real-world data sets are conducted to show substantial memory savings and competitive performance with main-memory index-based approaches in the equal-probability setting. In contrast to existing uniform sampling approaches that require prepared structures that occupy contested resources to squeeze out slightly faster query-times, the proposed approaches exhibit qualities that are urgently needed in practice, namely reduced memory footprint, streaming operation, support for selections, outer joins, semi joins and anti joins and unequal-probability sampling. All pertinent code and data can be found at: https://github.com/shekelyan/weightedjoinsampling
A New Amharic Speech Emotion Dataset and Classification Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we present the Amharic Speech Emotion Dataset (ASED), which covers four dialects (Gojjam, Wollo, Shewa and Gonder) and five different emotions (neutral, fearful, happy, sad and angry). We believe it is the first Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) dataset for the Amharic language. 65 volunteer participants, all native speakers, recorded 2,474 sound samples, two to four seconds in length. Eight judges assigned emotions to the samples with high agreement level (Fleiss kappa = 0.8). The resulting dataset is freely available for download. Next, we developed a four-layer variant of the well-known VGG model which we call VGGb. Three experiments were then carried out using VGGb for SER, using ASED. First, we investigated whether Mel-spectrogram features or Mel-frequency Cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features work best for Amharic. This was done by training two VGGb SER models on ASED, one using Mel-spectrograms and the other using MFCC. Four forms of training were tried, standard cross-validation, and three variants based on sentences, dialects and speaker groups. Thus, a sentence used for training would not be used for testing, and the same for a dialect and speaker group. The conclusion was that MFCC features are superior under all four training schemes. MFCC was therefore adopted for Experiment 2, where VGGb and three other existing models were compared on ASED: RESNet50, Alex-Net and LSTM. VGGb was found to have very good accuracy (90.73%) as well as the fastest training time. In Experiment 3, the performance of VGGb was compared when trained on two existing SER datasets, RAVDESS (English) and EMO-DB (German) as well as on ASED (Amharic). Results are comparable across these languages, with ASED being the highest. This suggests that VGGb can be successfully applied to other languages. We hope that ASED will encourage researchers to experiment with other models for Amharic SER.
Building Human-like Communicative Intelligence: A Grounded Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems excel at diverse tasks, from image classification to strategy games, even outperforming humans in many of these domains. After making astounding progress in language learning in the recent decade, AI systems, however, seem to approach the ceiling that does not reflect important aspects of human communicative capacities. Unlike human learners, communicative AI systems often fail to systematically generalize to new data, suffer from sample inefficiency, fail to capture common-sense semantic knowledge, and do not translate to real-world communicative situations. Cognitive Science offers several insights on how AI could move forward from this point. This paper aims to: (1) suggest that the dominant cognitively-inspired AI directions, based on nativist and symbolic paradigms, lack necessary substantiation and concreteness to guide progress in modern AI, and (2) articulate an alternative, "grounded", perspective on AI advancement, inspired by Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive Cognition (4E) research. I review results on 4E research lines in Cognitive Science to distinguish the main aspects of naturalistic learning conditions that play causal roles for human language development. I then use this analysis to propose a list of concrete, implementable components for building "grounded" linguistic intelligence. These components include embodying machines in a perception-action cycle, equipping agents with active exploration mechanisms so they can build their own curriculum, allowing agents to gradually develop motor abilities to promote piecemeal language development, and endowing the agents with adaptive feedback from their physical and social environment. I hope that these ideas can direct AI research towards building machines that develop human-like language abilities through their experiences with the world.
Subtle Contact Nuances in the Delivery of Human-to-Human Touch Distinguish Emotional Sentiment
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

We routinely communicate distinct social and emotional sentiments through nuanced touch. For example, we might gently hold another's arm to offer a sense of calm, yet intensively hold another's arm to express excitement or anxiety. As this example indicates, distinct sentiments may be shaped by the subtlety in one's touch delivery. This work investigates how slight distinctions in skin-to-skin contact influence both the recognition of cued emotional messages (e.g., anger, sympathy) and the rating of emotional content (i.e., arousal, valence). By self-selecting preferred gestures (e.g., holding, stroking), touchers convey distinct messages by touching the receiver's forearm. Skin-to-skin contact attributes (e.g., velocity, depth, area) are optically tracked in high resolution. Contact is then examined within gesture, between messages. The results indicate touchers subtly, but significantly, vary contact attributes of a gesture to communicate distinct messages, which are recognizable by receivers. This tuning also correlates with receivers' arousal and valence. For instance, arousal increases with velocity for stroking, and depth for holding. Moreover, as shown here with human-to-human touch, valence is tied with velocity, which is the same trend as reported with brushes. The findings indicate that subtle nuance in skin-to-skin contact is important in conveying social messages and inducing emotions.
Message Expiration-Based Distributed Multi-Robot Task Management
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Distributed task assignment for multiple agents raises fundamental and novel control theory and robotics problems. A new challenge is the development of distributed algorithms that dynamically assign tasks to multiple agents, not relying on prior assignment information. This work presents a distributed method for multi-robot task management based on a message expiration-based validation approach. Our approach handles the conflicts caused by a disconnection in the distributed multi-robot system by using distance-based and timestamp-based measurements to validate the task allocation for each robot. Simulation experiments in the Robotarium simulator platform have verified the validity of the proposed approach.
Self-orthogonal generalized twisted Reed-Solomon codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, by calculating the dual code of the Schur square for the standard twisted Reed-Solomon code, we give a sufficient and necessary condition for the generalized twisted Reed-Solomon code with $h+t\le k-1$ to be self-orthogonal, where $k$ is dimension, $h$ is hook and $t$ is twist. And then, we show that there is no self-orthogonal generalized twisted Reed-Solomon code under some conditions. Furthermore, several classes of self-orthogonal generalized twisted Reed-Solomon codes are constructed, and some of these codes are non-GRS self-orthogonal MDS codes or NMDS codes.
Effective capacity maximization of two-way full-duplex and half-duplex relays with finite block length packets transmission
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In order to satisfy the delay requirements of telecommunication systems, in this paper, we present a cooperative network with the short packet transmission in the Rayleigh fading channel. The desired relay can be implemented as a two-way half-duplex (HD) or a two-way full-duplex (FD). Also, for more accurate satisfaction and reduction of communication delays, sending and receiving with short packets is considered. Effective capacity appropriately measures the transmission rate under the delay constraint. Therefore, it is considered as a performance evaluation criterion here. With a two-way relay, two nodes exchange data with each other using a relay simultaneously. The priorities and requirements of the two nodes are not necessarily the same. Therefore, to increase performance, the system is modeled and solved as a multi-objective problem. In this way, the available power in the network is divided between the relay and two nodes, and the effective capacity of the two nodes is maximized. Depending on the different conditions, the optimal amount of allocated power to relay and nodes is calculated. However, due to the complexity and time consuming calculations, an approximate method which speeds up the calculation is presented. The approximated solution has a very close performance to the optimal allocated power. Finally, various comparisons have been made in different conditions between the performance of two-way HD and two-way FD relays. The improvement of multi-objective power allocation has been shown, especially when the relay is not located in the middle of two nodes.
A Compiler Framework for Optimizing Dynamic Parallelism on GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Dynamic parallelism on GPUs allows GPU threads to dynamically launch other GPU threads. It is useful in applications with nested parallelism, particularly where the amount of nested parallelism is irregular and cannot be predicted beforehand. However, prior works have shown that dynamic parallelism may impose a high performance penalty when a large number of small grids are launched. The large number of launches results in high launch latency due to congestion, and the small grid sizes result in hardware underutilization. To address this issue, we propose a compiler framework for optimizing the use of dynamic parallelism in applications with nested parallelism. The framework features three key optimizations: thresholding, coarsening, and aggregation. Thresholding involves launching a grid dynamically only if the number of child threads exceeds some threshold, and serializing the child threads in the parent thread otherwise. Coarsening involves executing the work of multiple thread blocks by a single coarsened block to amortize the common work across them. Aggregation involves combining multiple child grids into a single aggregated grid. Our evaluation shows that our compiler framework improves the performance of applications with nested parallelism by a geometric mean of 43.0x over applications that use dynamic parallelism, 8.7x over applications that do not use dynamic parallelism, and 3.6x over applications that use dynamic parallelism with aggregation alone as proposed in prior work.
Mushrooms Detection, Localization and 3D Pose Estimation using RGB-D Sensor for Robotic-picking Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose mushrooms detection, localization and 3D pose estimation algorithm using RGB-D data acquired from a low-cost consumer RGB-D sensor. We use the RGB and depth information for different purposes. From RGB color, we first extract initial contour locations of the mushrooms and then provide both the initial contour locations and the original image to active contour for mushrooms segmentation. These segmented mushrooms are then used as input to a circular Hough transform for each mushroom detection including its center and radius. Once each mushroom's center position in the RGB image is known, we then use the depth information to locate it in 3D space i.e. in world coordinate system. In case of missing depth information at the detected center of each mushroom, we estimate from the nearest available depth information within the radius of each mushroom. We also estimate the 3D pose of each mushroom using a pre-prepared upright mushroom model. We use a global registration followed by local refine registration approach for this 3D pose estimation. From the estimated 3D pose, we use only the rotation part expressed in quaternion as an orientation of each mushroom. These estimated (X,Y,Z) positions, diameters and orientations of the mushrooms are used for robotic-picking applications. We carry out extensive experiments on both 3D printed and real mushrooms which show that our method has an interesting performance.
Smart Power Supply for UAV Agility Enhancement Using Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Recently unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been widely deployed in various real-world scenarios such as disaster rescue and package delivery. Many of these working environments are unstructured with uncertain and dynamic obstacles. UAV collision frequently happens. An UAV with high agility is highly desired to adjust its motions to adapt to these environmental dynamics. However, UAV agility is restricted by its battery power output; particularly, an UAV's power system cannot be aware of its actual power need in motion planning while the need is dynamically changing as the environment and UAV condition vary. It is difficult to accurately and timely align the power supply with power needs in motion plannings. This mismatching will lead to an insufficient power supply to an UAV and cause delayed motion adjustments, largely increasing the risk of collisions with obstacles and therefore undermine UAV agility. To improve UAV agility, a novel intelligent power solution, Agility-Enhanced Power Supply (AEPS), was developed to proactively prepare appropriate amount powers at the right timing to support motion planning with enhanced agility. This method builds a bridge between the physical power system and UAV planning. With agility-enhanced motion planning, the safety of UAV in complex working environment will be enhanced. To evaluate AEPS effectiveness, missions of "patrol missions for community security" with unexpected obstacles were adopted; the power supply is realized by hybrid integration of fuel cell, battery, and capacitor. The effectiveness of AEPS in improving UAV agility was validated by the successful and timely power supply, improved task success rate and system safety, and reduced mission duration.
Image-based Automatic Dial Meter Reading in Unconstrained Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The replacement of analog meters with smart meters is costly, laborious, and far from complete in developing countries. The Energy Company of Parana (Copel) (Brazil) performs more than 4 million meter readings (almost entirely of non-smart devices) per month, and we estimate that 850 thousand of them are from dial meters. Therefore, an image-based automatic reading system can reduce human errors, create a proof of reading, and enable the customers to perform the reading themselves through a mobile application. We propose novel approaches for Automatic Dial Meter Reading (ADMR) and introduce a new dataset for ADMR in unconstrained scenarios, called UFPR-ADMR-v2. Our best-performing method combines YOLOv4 with a novel regression approach (AngReg), and explores several postprocessing techniques. Compared to previous works, it decreased the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) from 1,343 to 129 and achieved a meter recognition rate (MRR) of 98.90% -- with an error tolerance of 1 Kilowatt-hour (kWh).
Fake Hilsa Fish Detection Using Machine Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Hilsa is the national fish of Bangladesh. Bangladesh is earning a lot of foreign currency by exporting this fish. Unfortunately, in recent days, some unscrupulous businessmen are selling fake Hilsa fishes to gain profit. The Sardines and Sardinella are the most sold in the market as Hilsa. The government agency of Bangladesh, namely Bangladesh Food Safety Authority said that these fake Hilsa fish contain high levels of cadmium and lead which are detrimental for humans. In this research, we have proposed a method that can readily identify original Hilsa fish and fake Hilsa fish. Based on the research available on online literature, we are the first to do research on identifying original Hilsa fish. We have collected more than 16,000 images of original and counterfeit Hilsa fish. To classify these images, we have used several deep learning-based models. Then, the performance has been compared between them. Among those models, DenseNet201 achieved the highest accuracy of 97.02%.