Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Fail-Safe Motion Planning for Online Verification of Autonomous Vehicles Using Convex Optimization

Safe motion planning for autonomous vehicles is a challenging task, since the exact future motion of other traffic participant is usually unknown. In this article, we present a verification technique ensuring that autonomous vehicles do not cause collisions by using fail-safe trajectories. Fail-safe trajectories are executed if the intended motion of the autonomous vehicle causes a safety-critical situation. Our verification technique is real-time capable and operates under the premise that intended trajectories are only executed if they have been verified as safe. The benefits of our proposed approach are demonstrated in different scenarios on an actual vehicle. Moreover, we present the first in-depth analysis of our verification technique used in dense urban traffic. Our results indicate that fail-safe motion planning has the potential to drastically reduce accidents while not resulting in overly conservative behaviors of the autonomous vehicle.
Neighborhood global learning based flower pollination algorithm and its application to unmanned aerial vehicle path planning

Flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is a meta-heuristic optimization algorithm that imitates the pollination phenomenon of flowering plants in nature. Due to this algorithm is prone to premature convergence when solving complex optimization problems. So this paper introduces a neighborhood global learning based flower pollination algorithm(NGFPA). Firstly, we analyze the FPA using the constant coefficient differential equation and change the FPA’s global equation. Secondly, we build a neighborhood global learning to enhance population diversity. Finally, the population reconstruction mechanism is added to inhibit the population premature convergence. The convergence of NGFPA is proven using the knowledge of differential equations and stochastic function analysis. We test the performance of NGFPA by optimizing CEC2017. Experiment results show that NGFPA has better performance in comparison with other swarm intelligence algorithms. Furthermore, NGFPA is used to solve the problem of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) path planning. Simulation results indicate that NGFPA can obtain smoother paths in different obstacle environments. Therefore, NGFPA is effective and valuable.
Multi-Interactive Attention Network for Fine-grained Feature Learning in CTR Prediction

In the Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction scenario, user's sequential behaviors are well utilized to capture the user interest in the recent literature. However, despite being extensively studied, these sequential methods still suffer from three limitations. First, existing methods mostly utilize attention on the behavior of users, which is not always suitable for CTR prediction, because users often click on new products that are irrelevant to any historical behaviors. Second, in the real scenario, there are numerous users that have operations a long time ago, but turn relatively inactive in recent times. Thus, it is hard to precisely capture user's current preferences through early behaviors. Third, multiple representations of user's historical behaviors in different feature subspaces are largely ignored. To remedy these issues, we propose a Multi-Interactive Attention Network (MIAN) to comprehensively extract the latent relationship among all kinds of fine-grained features (e.g., gender, age and occupation in user-profile). Specifically, MIAN contains a Multi-Interactive Layer (MIL) that integrates three local interaction modules to capture multiple representations of user preference through sequential behaviors and simultaneously utilize the fine-grained user-specific as well as context information. In addition, we design a Global Interaction Module (GIM) to learn the high-order interactions and balance the different impacts of multiple features. Finally, Offline experiment results from three datasets, together with an Online A/B test in a large-scale recommendation system, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Segmentation of leukocyte by semantic segmentation model: A deep learning approach

In diagnostic research, analysis of blood micrographs has emerged as one of the relevant techniques for identifying various blood-related diseases. Analysis of white blood cells using computer-aided techniques aids the pathologist to promote accurate diagnosis and early detection of blood diseases. An automated white blood cell analysis system involves cell segmentation, feature extraction, and classification, and its performance depends upon the accuracy of cell segmentation. Accurate and automatic segmentation of leukocyte remains a difficult task because of the complex nature of cell images, staining techniques, and imaging conditions. Here, we employ a semantic segmentation technique that uses a deep learning network to segment leukocyte from microscopic blood images accurately. The proposed model uses DeepLabv3+ architecture with ResNet-50 as a feature extractor network. The experiments have been carried out on three different public datasets consisting of five categories of white blood cells, and 10-fold cross-validation is performed to assert the model's effectiveness. The average segmentation accuracy achieved throughout the suggested network is 96.1% and 92.1% intersection- over-union, which is more than different approaches to supervised learning. Experimental results reveal that the suggested model performs better than other techniques and is appropriate for hematological analysis.
An Adaptive Motion Planning Technique for On-Road Autonomous Driving

This paper presents a hierarchical motion planning approach based on discrete optimization method. Well-coupled longitudinal and lateral planning strategies with adaptability features are applied for better performance of on-road autonomous driving with avoidance of both static and moving obstacles. In the path planning level, the proposed method starts with a speed profile designing for the determination of longitudinal horizon, then a set of candidate paths will be constructed with lateral offsets shifting from the base reference. Cost functions considering driving comfort and energy consumption are applied to evaluate each candidate path and the optimal one will be selected as tracking reference afterwards. Re-determination of longitudinal horizon in terms of relative distance between ego vehicle and surrounding obstacles, together with update of speed profile, will be triggered for re-planning if candidate paths ahead fail the safety checking. In the path tracking level, a pure-pursuit-based tracking controller is implemented to obtain the corresponding control sequence and further smooth the trajectory of autonomous vehicle. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and indicate its better performance in extreme traffic scenarios compared to traditional discrete optimization methods, while balancing computational burden at the same time.
Real-Time Single Image Depth Perception in the Wild with Handheld Devices

Depth perception is paramount for tackling real-world problems, ranging from autonomous driving to consumer applications. For the latter, depth estimation from a single image would represent the most versatile solution since a standard camera is available on almost any handheld device. Nonetheless, two main issues limit the practical deployment of monocular depth estimation methods on such devices: (i) the low reliability when deployed in the wild and (ii) the resources needed to achieve real-time performance, often not compatible with low-power embedded systems. Therefore, in this paper, we deeply investigate all these issues, showing how they are both addressable by adopting appropriate network design and training strategies. Moreover, we also outline how to map the resulting networks on handheld devices to achieve real-time performance. Our thorough evaluation highlights the ability of such fast networks to generalize well to new environments, a crucial feature required to tackle the extremely varied contexts faced in real applications. Indeed, to further support this evidence, we report experimental results concerning real-time, depth-aware augmented reality and image blurring with smartphones in the wild.
HMOR: Hierarchical Multi-person Ordinal Relations for Monocular Multi-person 3D Pose Estimation

Remarkable progress has been made in 3D human pose estimation from a monocular RGB camera. However, only a few studies explored 3D multi-person cases. In this paper, we attempt to address the lack of a global perspective of the top-down approaches by introducing a novel form of supervision - Hierarchical Multi-person Ordinal Relations (HMOR). The HMOR encodes interaction information as the ordinal relations of depths and angles hierarchically, which captures the body-part and joint level semantic and maintains global consistency at the same time. In our approach, an integrated top-down model is designed to leverage these ordinal relations in the learning process. The integrated model estimates human bounding boxes, human depths, and root-relative 3D poses simultaneously, with a coarse-to-fine architecture to improve the accuracy of depth estimation. The proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on publicly available multi-person 3D pose datasets. In addition to superior performance, our method costs lower computation complexity and fewer model parameters.
Sentiment analysis

Recent advances in machine learning have led to computer systems that are humanlike in behavior. Sentiment analysis, the automatic determination of emotions in text, is allowing us to capitalize on substantial previously unattainable opportunities in commerce, public health, government policy, social sciences, and art. Further, analysis of emotions in text, from news to social media posts, is improving our understanding of not just how people convey emotions through language but also how emotions shape our behavior. This article presents a sweeping overview of sentiment analysis research that includes: the origins of the field, the rich landscape of tasks, challenges, a survey of the methods and resources used, and applications. We also discuss how, without careful fore-thought, sentiment analysis has the potential for harmful outcomes. We outline the latest lines of research in pursuit of fairness in sentiment analysis.
Convolutional autoencoder based model HistoCAE for segmentation of viable tumor regions in liver whole-slide images

Abstract Liver cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths in Asia and Africa. It is caused by the Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in almost 90% of all cases. HCC is a malignant tumor and the most common histological type of the primary liver cancers. The detection and evaluation of viable tumor regions in HCC present an important clinical significance since it is a key step to assess response of chemoradiotherapy and tumor cell proportion in genetic tests. Recent advances in computer vision, digital pathology and microscopy imaging enable automatic histopathology image analysis for cancer diagnosis. In this paper, we present a multi-resolution deep learning model HistoCAE for viable tumor segmentation in whole-slide liver histopathology images. We propose convolutional autoencoder (CAE) based framework with a customized reconstruction loss function for image reconstruction, followed by a classification module to classify each image patch as tumor versus non-tumor. The resulting patch-based prediction results are spatially combined to generate the final segmentation result for each WSI. Additionally, the spatially organized encoded feature map derived from small image patches is used to compress the gigapixel whole-slide images. Our proposed model presents superior performance to other benchmark models with extensive experiments, suggesting its efficacy for viable tumor area segmentation with liver whole-slide images.
Multilevel thresholding image segmentation based on improved volleyball premier league algorithm using whale optimization algorithm

Multilevel thresholding image segmentation has received considerable attention in several image processing applications. However, the process of determining the optimal threshold values (as the preprocessing step) is time-consuming when traditional methods are used. Although these limitations can be addressed by applying metaheuristic methods, such approaches may be idle with a local solution. This study proposed an alternative multilevel thresholding image segmentation method called VPLWOA, which is an improved version of the volleyball premier league (VPL) algorithm using the whale optimization algorithm (WOA). In VPLWOA, the WOA is used as a local search system to improve the learning phase of the VPL algorithm. A set of experimental series is performed using two different image datasets to assess the performance of the VPLWOA in determining the values that may be optimal threshold, and the performance of this algorithm is compared with other approaches. Experimental results show that the proposed VPLWOA outperforms the other approaches in terms of several performance measures, such as signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index.
The MECCANO Dataset: Understanding Human-Object Interactions from Egocentric Videos in an Industrial-like Domain

Wearable cameras allow to collect images and videos of humans interacting with the world. While human-object interactions have been thoroughly investigated in third person vision, the problem has been understudied in egocentric settings and in industrial scenarios. To fill this gap, we introduce MECCANO, the first dataset of egocentric videos to study human-object interactions in industrial-like settings. MECCANO has been acquired by 20 participants who were asked to build a motorbike model, for which they had to interact with tiny objects and tools. The dataset has been explicitly labeled for the task of recognizing human-object interactions from an egocentric perspective. Specifically, each interaction has been labeled both temporally (with action segments) and spatially (with active object bounding boxes). With the proposed dataset, we investigate four different tasks including 1) action recognition, 2) active object detection, 3) active object recognition and 4) egocentric human-object interaction detection, which is a revisited version of the standard human-object interaction detection task. Baseline results show that the MECCANO dataset is a challenging benchmark to study egocentric human-object interactions in industrial-like scenarios. We publicy release the dataset at https://iplab.dmi.unict.it/MECCANO/.
A Parameter-Changing and Complex-Valued Zeroing Neural-Network for Finding Solution of Time-Varying Complex Linear Matrix Equations in Finite Time

For solving complex-valued linear matrix equations with time-varying coefficients (CV-LME-TVC) in the complex field, this article proposes a parameter-changing and complex-valued zeroing neural network (PC-CVZNN) model through integrating a new parameter-changing function. As compared to previous complex-valued zeroing neural networks (CVZNNs) with fixed parameters and existing parameter-changing functions, the PC-CVZNN model can achieve superior performance due to the accelerated role of the new parameter-changing function. In parts of theoretical analysis, we take advantage of Lyapunov methodology to prove that the proposed PC-CVZNN model can acquire the global and super-exponential convergence when the linear activation function is adopted, and even acquire super finite-time convergence when the new sign-bi-power activation function and its modified one are used. In parts of numerical comparison experiments, it is shown that the PC-CVZNN model possesses faster convergence rate than fixed-parameter CVZNN models and other analogy neural networks with parameter-changing function, when applied to finding the solution of CV-LME-TVC. Importantly, an application of the proposed method to the mobile manipulator control provides the potential practical value of the PC-CVZNN model in the industrial field.
Revisiting Street-to-Aerial View Image Geo-localization and Orientation Estimation

Street-to-aerial image geo-localization, which matches a query street-view image to the GPS-tagged aerial images in a reference set, has attracted increasing attention recently. In this paper, we revisit this problem and point out the ignored issue about image alignment information. We show that the performance of a simple Siamese network is highly dependent on the alignment setting and the comparison of previous works can be unfair if they have different assumptions. Instead of focusing on the feature extraction under the alignment assumption, we show that improvements in metric learning techniques significantly boost the performance regardless of the alignment. Without leveraging the alignment information, our pipeline outperforms previous works on both panorama and cropped datasets. Furthermore, we conduct visualization to help understand the learned model and the effect of alignment information using Grad-CAM. With our discovery on the approximate rotation-invariant activation maps, we propose a novel method to estimate the orientation/alignment between a pair of cross-view images with unknown alignment information. It achieves state-of-the-art results on the CVUSA dataset.
Processes soft modeling based on stacked autoencoders and wavelet extreme learning machine for aluminum plant-wide application

Data-driven soft modeling has been extensively used for industrial processes to estimate key quality indicators which are hard to measure by some physical devices. However,the existing deep soft methods faces the challenge of training efficiency, gradient diminishing and explosion. Constructing an accurate and robust soft model is still a challenging topic from an application point of view. This paper develops an effective and efficient soft method (SAE-WELM) for processes modeling. First, a stacked autoencoder (SAE) is used to extract the deep features. Then, a top-layer extreme learning machine (ELM) is further applied to a plant-wide industrial aluminum production process. The activation function is wavelet kernel. Finally, the approximation and convergence of the proposed SAE-WELM are theoretically proved. The industrial case demonstrates that SAE-WELM captures the deep features faster than other iterative-based neural networks, and the accuracy and robustness outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Face Quality Estimation and Its Correlation to Demographic and Non-Demographic Bias in Face Recognition

Face quality assessment aims at estimating the utility of a face image for the purpose of recognition. It is a key factor to achieve high face recognition performances. Currently, the high performance of these face recognition systems come with the cost of a strong bias against demographic and non-demographic sub-groups. Recent work has shown that face quality assessment algorithms should adapt to the deployed face recognition system, in order to achieve highly accurate and robust quality estimations. However, this could lead to a bias transfer towards the face quality assessment leading to discriminatory effects e.g. during enrolment. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of the correlation between bias in face recognition and face quality assessment. Experiments were conducted on two publicly available datasets captured under controlled and uncontrolled circumstances with two popular face embeddings. We evaluated four state-of-the-art solutions for face quality assessment towards biases to pose, ethnicity, and age. The experiments showed that the face quality assessment solutions assign significantly lower quality values towards subgroups affected by the recognition bias demonstrating that these approaches are biased as well. This raises ethical questions towards fairness and discrimination which future works have to address.
Cryptocurrencies’ Price Crash Risk and Crisis Sentiment

We examine the effect of crisis sentiment on cryptocurrencies’ price crash risk. We show that cryptocurrencies’ price crash risk is positively related to the FEARS index, indicating that a higher crisis sentiment by investors increases cryptocurrencies’ price crash risk. Our findings advance the understanding of the consequences of investor sentiment on the cryptocurrency market.
SparkNoC: An energy-efficiency FPGA-based accelerator using optimized lightweight CNN for edge computing

Over the past few years, Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) have been extensively adopted in broad AI applications and have achieved noticeable effect. Deploying the feedforward inference of CNN on edge devices has now been considered a research hotspot in Edge Computing. In terms of the mobile embedded devices that exhibit constrained resources and power budget, the considerable parameters and computational bottlenecks raised rigorous requirements of deploying the CNN feedforward inference. To address this challenge, the present study develops a lightweight neural network architecture termed as SparkNet, capable of significantly reducing the weight parameters and computation demands. The feasibility of the SparkNet is verified on four datasets, i.e., MINIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and SVHN. Besides, the SparkNet is reported exhibiting the ability to effectively compress the convolutional neural network by a factor of 150x. Compared with GPU and ASIC, an FPGA-based accelerator exhibits obvious advantages for its reconfigurable property, flexibility, power efficiency, as well as massive parallelism. Moreover, the network model of the SparkNet and the proposed accelerator architecture are both specifically built for FPGA. The SparkNet on chip (SparkNOC) that maps all the layers of the network to their own dedicated hardware unit for simultaneous pipelined work has been implemented on FPGA. The proposals of this study are assessed by deploying SparkNet model on Intel Arria 10 GX1150 FPGA platform. As revealed from the experimental results, the fully pipelined CNN hardware accelerator achieves 337.2 GOP/s performance under the energy efficiency of 44.48 GOP/s/w, indicating that it outperforms the previous methods.
Systematization of Corner Cases for Visual Perception in Automated Driving

One major task in automated driving is the development of robust and safe visual perception modules. It is of utmost importance that visual perception reacts adequately to so-called corner cases, which range from overexposure of the image sensor to unexpected and potentially dangerous traffic situations. Their detection thus has high significance both as an online system in the intelligent vehicle, but also in the extraction of relevant training and test data for perception modules. In this paper, we provide a systematization of corner cases for visual perception in automated driving, with the categories being structured by detection complexity. Furthermore, we discuss existing metrics and datasets which can be used for the evaluation of corner case detection methods depending on their suitability to provide beneficial information for the various categories.