Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A Robust Quasi-Quantum Walks-based Steganography Protocol for Secure Transmission of Images on Cloud-based E-healthcare Platforms

Traditionally, tamper-proof steganography involves using efficient protocols to encrypt the stego cover image and/or hidden message prior to embedding it into the carrier object. However, as the inevitable transition to the quantum computing paradigm beckons, its immense computing power will be exploited to violate even the best non-quantum, i.e., classical, stego protocol. On its part, quantum walks can be tailored to utilise their astounding ‘quantumness’ to propagate nonlinear chaotic behaviours as well as its sufficient sensitivity to alterations in primary key parameters both important properties for efficient information security. Our study explores using a classical (i.e., quantum-inspired) rendition of the controlled alternate quantum walks (i.e., CAQWs) model to fabricate a robust image steganography protocol for cloud-based E-healthcare platforms by locating content that overlays the secret (or hidden) bits. The design employed in our technique precludes the need for pre and/or post encryption of the carrier and secret images. Furthermore, our design simplifies the process to extract the confidential (hidden) information since only the stego image and primary states to run the CAQWs are required. We validate our proposed protocol on a dataset of medical images, which exhibited remarkable outcomes in terms of their security, good visual quality, high resistance to data loss attacks, high embedding capacity, etc., making the proposed scheme a veritable strategy for efficient medical image steganography.
Adaptive Morphological Reconstruction for Seeded Image Segmentation

Morphological reconstruction (MR) is often employed by seeded image segmentation algorithms such as watershed transform and power watershed as it is able to filter seeds (regional minima) to reduce over-segmentation. However, MR might mistakenly filter meaningful seeds that are required for generating accurate segmentation and it is also sensitive to the scale because a single-scale structuring element is employed. In this paper, a novel adaptive morphological reconstruction (AMR) operation is proposed that has three advantages. Firstly, AMR can adaptively filter useless seeds while preserving meaningful ones. Secondly, AMR is insensitive to the scale of structuring elements because multiscale structuring elements are employed. Finally, AMR has two attractive properties: monotonic increasingness and convergence that help seeded segmentation algorithms to achieve a hierarchical segmentation. Experiments clearly demonstrate that AMR is useful for improving algorithms of seeded image segmentation and seed-based spectral segmentation. Compared to several state-of-the-art algorithms, the proposed algorithms provide better segmentation results requiring less computing time. Source code is available at https://github.com/SUST-reynole/AMR.
A Deep Learning Trained by Genetic Algorithm to Improve the Efficiency of Path Planning for Data Collection With Multi-UAV

To collect data of distributed sensors located at different areas in challenging scenarios through artificial way is obviously inefficient, due to the numerous labor and time. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) emerges as a promising solution, which enables multi-UAV collect data automatically with the preassigned path. However, without a well-planned path, the required number and consumed energy of UAVs will increase dramatically. Thus, minimizing the required number and optimizing the path of UAVs, referred as multi-UAV path planning, are essential to achieve the efficient data collection. Therefore, some heuristic algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Ant Colony Algorithm (ACA) which works well for multi-UAV path planning have been proposed. Nevertheless, in challenging scenarios with high requirement for timeliness, the performance of convergence speed of above algorithms is imperfect, which will lead to an inefficient optimization process and delay the data collection. Deep learning (DL), once trained by enough datasets, has high solving speed without worries about convergence problems. Thus, in this paper, we propose an algorithm called Deep Learning Trained by Genetic Algorithm (DL-GA), which combines the advantages of DL and GA. GA will collect states and paths from various scenarios and then use them to train the deep neural network so that while facing the familiar scenarios, it can rapidly give the optimized path, which can satisfy high timeliness requirements. Numerous experiments demonstrate that the solving speed of DL-GA is much faster than GA almost without loss of optimization capacity and even can outperform GA under some specific conditions.
Time series forecasting of COVID-19 transmission in Asia Pacific countries using deep neural networks

The novel human coronavirus disease COVID-19 has become the fifth documented pandemic since the 1918 flu pandemic. COVID-19 was first reported in Wuhan, China, and subsequently spread worldwide. Almost all of the countries of the world are facing this natural challenge. We present forecasting models to estimate and predict COVID-19 outbreak in Asia Pacific countries, particularly Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Bangladesh. We have utilized the latest deep learning techniques such as Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTM), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) to quantify the intensity of pandemic for the near future. We consider the time variable and data non-linearity when employing neural networks. Each model's salient features have been evaluated to foresee the number of COVID-19 cases in the next 10 days. The forecasting performance of employed deep learning models shown up to July 01, 2020, is more than 90% accurate, which shows the reliability of the proposed study. We hope that the present comparative analysis will provide an accurate picture of pandemic spread to the government officials so that they can take appropriate mitigation measures.
Multi-Scale Feature Fusion Convolutional Neural Network for Indoor Small Target Detection

The development of object detection technology makes it possible for robots to interact with people and the environment, but the changeable application scenarios make the detection accuracy of small and medium objects in the practical application of object detection technology low. In this paper, based on multi-scale feature fusion of indoor small target detection method, using the device to collect different indoor images with angle, light, and shade conditions, and use the image enhancement technology to set up and amplify a date set, with indoor scenarios and the SSD algorithm in target detection layer and its adjacent features fusion. The Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5, SSD, and SSD target detection models based on multi-scale feature fusion were trained on an indoor scene data set based on transfer learning. The experimental results show that multi-scale feature fusion can improve the detection accuracy of all kinds of objects, especially for objects with a relatively small scale. In addition, although the detection speed of the improved SSD algorithm decreases, it is faster than the Faster R-CNN, which better achieves the balance between target detection accuracy and speed.
High-Fidelity GAN Inversion for Image Attribute Editing

We present a novel highfidelity generative adversarial network (GAN) inversion framework that enables attribute editing with image-specific details well-preserved (e.g., background, appearance, and illumination). We first analyze the challenges of highfidelity GAN inversion from the perspective of lossy data compression. With a low bitrate latent code, previous works have difficulties in preserving highfidelity details in reconstructed and edited images. Increasing the size of a latent code can improve the accuracy of GAN inversion but at the cost of inferior editability. To improve image fidelity without compromising editability, we propose a distortion consultation approach that employs a distortion map as a reference for highfidelity reconstruction. In the distortion consultation inversion (DCI), the distortion map is first projected to a high-rate latent map, which then complements the basic low-rate latent code with more details via consultation fusion. To achieve high-fidelity editing, we propose an adaptive distortion alignment (ADA) module with a self-supervised training scheme, which bridges the gap between the edited and inversion images. Extensive experiments in the face and car domains show a clear improvement in both inversion and editing quality. The project page is https://tengfei-wang.github.io/HFGI/.
Blockchain-based decentralized federated transfer learning methodology for collaborative machinery fault diagnosis

Due to the limitations of data quality and quantity of a single industrial user, the development of intelligent machinery fault diagnosis methods has been reaching a bottleneck in the perspectives of both academic research and engineering applications in the recent years. Collaborative fault diagnosis model development has been receiving increasing attention, where the distributed data at different users are explored simultaneously. However, data security and privacy are the major industrial concerns, which have not been well addressed in the literature. In this paper, a blockchain-based decentralized federated transfer learning method is proposed for collaborative machinery fault diagnosis. A tailored committee consensus scheme is designed for optimization of the model aggregation process, and a source data-free transfer learning method is further proposed. After global model initialization, the fault diagnosis model can be built through iterations of committee member selection, performance evaluation, transfer learning, model aggregation and blockchain updates. The experiments on two decentralized fault diagnosis datasets are implemented for validations, and higher than 90% testing accuracies can be generally achieved. The experimental results indicate the proposed method is effective in data privacy-preserving collaborative fault diagnosis of multiple users. It offers a promising tool for applications in the real industrial scenarios.
Blockchain—Internet of Things Applications: Opportunities and Challenges for Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0

Today, blockchain is becoming more popular in academia and industry because it is a distributed, decentralised technology which is changing many industries in terms of security, building trust, etc. A few blockchain applications are banking, insurance, logistics, transportation, etc. Many insurance companies have been thinking about how blockchain could help them be more efficient. There is still a lot of hype about this immutable technology, even though it has not been utilised to its full potential. Insurers have to decide whether or not to use blockchain, just like many other businesses do. This technology keeps a distributed ledger on each blockchain node, making it more secure and transparent. The blockchain network can operate smart contracts and convince others to agree, so criminals cannot make mistakes. On another side, the Internet of Things (IoT) might make a real-time application work faster through its automation. With the integration of blockchain and IoT, there will always be a problem with technology regarding IoT devices and mining the blockchain. This paper gives a real-time view of blockchain-IoT-based applications for Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0. The last few sections discuss essential topics such as open issues, challenges, and research opportunities for future researchers to expand research in blockchain-IoT-based applications.
Vectorization of Text Documents for Identifying Unifiable News Articles

Vectorization is imperative for processing textual data in natural language processing applications.Vectorization enables the machines to understand the textual contents by converting them into meaningful numerical representations.The proposed work targets at identifying unifiable news articles for performing multi-document summarization.A framework is introduced for identification of news articles related to top trending topics/hashtags and multi-document summarization of unifiable news articles based on the trending topics, for capturing opinion diversity on those topics.Text clustering is applied to the corpus of news articles related to each trending topic to obtain smaller unifiable groups.The effectiveness of various text vectorization methods, namely the bag of word representations with tf-idf scores, word embeddings, and document embeddings are investigated for clustering news articles using the k-means.The paper presents the comparative analysis of different vectorization methods obtained on documents from DUC 2004 benchmark dataset in terms of purity.
Toward Practical Quantum Secure Direct Communication: A Quantum-Memory-Free Protocol and Code Design

Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is capable of direct confidential communications over a quantum channel, which is achieved by dispensing with the key agreement channel of the well-known quantum key distribution (QKD). However, to make QSDC a practical reality, we have to mitigate its reliance on quantum memory, its immediate communication interruption caused by eavesdropping and its low transmission reliability due to the heavy qubit losses. Hence a new QSDC protocol is proposed based on a sophisticated coded single-photon DL04 QSDC protocol to tackle the open challenges. In particular, quantum memory is dispensed with and a high-accuracy secrecy capacity estimate is derived for this protocol by conceiving dynamic joint encryption and error-control (JEEC) coding. We demonstrate that this quantum-memory-free DL04 QSDC (QMF-DL04 QSDC) protocol inches closer to the quantum channel's capacity and significantly improves the original DL04 QSDC's robustness. Moreover, a rate-compatible low-rate JEEC coding scheme is designed for the proposed framework, and the JEEC code advocated is shown to approach the secrecy capacity, despite tolerating an extremely high loss of qubits in the time-varying wiretap channel. Our simulations and experimental results demonstrate that the QMF-DL04 QSDC scheme significantly increases both the secure information rate and the communication distance of the original DL04 protocol.
Rethinking Bayesian Learning for Data Analysis: The art of prior and inference in sparsity-aware modeling

Sparse modeling for signal processing and machine learning has been at the focus of scientific research for over two decades. Among others, supervised sparsity-aware learning comprises two major paths paved by: a) discriminative methods and b) generative methods. The latter, more widely known as Bayesian methods, enable uncertainty evaluation w.r.t. the performed predictions. Furthermore, they can better exploit related prior information and naturally introduce robustness into the model, due to their unique capacity to marginalize out uncertainties related to the parameter estimates. Moreover, hyper-parameters associated with the adopted priors can be learnt via the training data. To implement sparsity-aware learning, the crucial point lies in the choice of the function regularizer for discriminative methods and the choice of the prior distribution for Bayesian learning. Over the last decade or so, due to the intense research on deep learning, emphasis has been put on discriminative techniques. However, a come back of Bayesian methods is taking place that sheds new light on the design of deep neural networks, which also establish firm links with Bayesian models and inspire new paths for unsupervised learning, such as Bayesian tensor decomposition. The goal of this article is two-fold. First, to review, in a unified way, some recent advances in incorporating sparsity-promoting priors into three highly popular data modeling tools, namely deep neural networks, Gaussian processes, and tensor decomposition. Second, to review their associated inference techniques from different aspects, including: evidence maximization via optimization and variational inference methods. Challenges such as small data dilemma, automatic model structure search, and natural prediction uncertainty evaluation are also discussed. Typical signal processing and machine learning tasks are demonstrated.
A new human-based metaheuristic algorithm for solving optimization problems on the base of simulation of driving training process

In this paper, a new stochastic optimization algorithm is introduced, called Driving Training-Based Optimization (DTBO), which mimics the human activity of driving training. The fundamental inspiration behind the DTBO design is the learning process to drive in the driving school and the training of the driving instructor. DTBO is mathematically modeled in three phases: (1) training by the driving instructor, (2) patterning of students from instructor skills, and (3) practice. The performance of DTBO in optimization is evaluated on a set of 53 standard objective functions of unimodal, high-dimensional multimodal, fixed-dimensional multimodal, and IEEE CEC2017 test functions types. The optimization results show that DTBO has been able to provide appropriate solutions to optimization problems by maintaining a proper balance between exploration and exploitation. The performance quality of DTBO is compared with the results of 11 well-known algorithms. The simulation results show that DTBO performs better compared to 11 competitor algorithms and is more efficient in optimization applications.
UrbanLF: A Comprehensive Light Field Dataset for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes

As one of the fundamental technologies for scene understanding, semantic segmentation has been widely explored in the last few years.Light field cameras encode the geometric information by simultaneously recording the spatial information and angular information of light rays, which provides us with a new way to solve this issue.In this paper, we propose a high-quality and challenging urban scene dataset, containing 1074 samples composed of real-world and synthetic light field images as well as pixel-wise annotations for 14 semantic classes.To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest and the most diverse light field dataset for semantic segmentation.We further design two new semantic segmentation baselines tailored for light field and compare them with state-of-the-art RGB, video and RGB-D-based methods using the proposed dataset.The outperforming results of our baselines demonstrate the advantages of the geometric information in light field for this task.We also provide evaluations of super-resolution and depth estimation methods, showing that the proposed dataset presents new challenges and supports detailed comparisons among different methods.We expect this work inspires new research direction and stimulates scientific progress in related fields.The complete dataset is available at https://github.com/HAWKEYE-Group/UrbanLF.
Embracing Single Stride 3D Object Detector with Sparse Transformer

In LiDAR-based 3D object detection for autonomous driving, the ratio of the object size to input scene size is significantly smaller compared to 2D detection cases. Over-looking this difference, many 3D detectors directly follow the common practice of 2D detectors, which downsample the feature maps even after quantizing the point clouds. In this paper, we start by rethinking how such multi-stride stereotype affects the LiDAR-based 3D object detectors. Our experiments point out that the downsampling operations bring few advantages, and lead to inevitable information loss. To remedy this issue, we propose Single-stride Sparse Transformer (SST) to maintain the original resolution from the beginning to the end of the network. Armed with transformers, our method addresses the problem of insufficient receptive field in single-stride architectures. It also cooperates well with the sparsity of point clouds and naturally avoids expensive computation. Eventually, our SST achieves state-of-the-art results on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset. It is worth mentioning that our method can achieve exciting performance (83.8 LEVEL_1 AP on validation split) on small object (pedestrian) detection due to the characteristic of single stride. Our codes will be public soon.
ChatGPT: Jack of all trades, master of none

OpenAI has released the Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) and revolutionized the approach in artificial intelligence to human-model interaction. Several publications on ChatGPT evaluation test its effectiveness on well-known natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the existing studies are mostly non-automated and tested on a very limited scale. In this work, we examined ChatGPT's capabilities on 25 diverse analytical NLP tasks, most of them subjective even to humans, such as sentiment analysis, emotion recognition, offensiveness, and stance detection. In contrast, the other tasks require more objective reasoning like word sense disambiguation, linguistic acceptability, and question answering. We also evaluated GPT-4 model on five selected subsets of NLP tasks. We automated ChatGPT and GPT-4 prompting process and analyzed more than 49k responses. Our comparison of its results with available State-of-the-Art (SOTA) solutions showed that the average loss in quality of the ChatGPT model was about 25% for zero-shot and few-shot evaluation. For GPT-4 model, a loss for semantic tasks is significantly lower than for ChatGPT. We showed that the more difficult the task (lower SOTA performance), the higher the ChatGPT loss. It especially refers to pragmatic NLP problems like emotion recognition. We also tested the ability to personalize ChatGPT responses for selected subjective tasks via Random Contextual Few-Shot Personalization, and we obtained significantly better user-based predictions. Additional qualitative analysis revealed a ChatGPT bias, most likely due to the rules imposed on human trainers by OpenAI. Our results provide the basis for a fundamental discussion of whether the high quality of recent predictive NLP models can indicate a tool's usefulness to society and how the learning and validation procedures for such systems should be established.
HYDRO-3D: Hybrid Object Detection and Tracking for Cooperative Perception Using 3D LiDAR

3D-LiDAR-based cooperative perception has been generating significant interest for its ability to tackle challenges such as occlusion, sparse point clouds, and out-of-range issues that can be problematic for single-vehicle perception. Despite its effectiveness in overcoming various challenges, cooperative per-ception's performance can still be affected by the aforementioned issues when Connected Automated Vehicles (CAVs) operate at the edges of their sensing range. Our proposed approach called HYDRO-3D aims to improve object detection performance by explicitly incorporating historical object tracking information. Specifically, HYDRO-3D combines object detection features from a state-of-the-art object detection algorithm (V2X-ViT) with historical information from the object tracking algorithm to infer objects. Afterward, a novel spatial-temporal 3D neural network performing global and local manipulations of object-tracking historical data is applied to generate the feature map to enhance object detection. The proposed HYDRO-3D method is comprehensively evaluated on the state-of-the-art V2XSet. The qualitative and quantitative experiment results demonstrate that the HYDRO-3D can effectively utilize the object tracking information and achieve robust object detection performance. It outperforms the SOTA V2X-ViT by 3.7% in AP@0.7 of object detection for CAVs and can also be generalized to single-vehicle object detection with 4.5% improvement in AP@0.7.