Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Active contour model for inhomogenous image segmentation based on Jeffreys divergence

Inhomogenous image segmentation has been a research challenge in recent years. To deal with this difficulty, we propose a new local and global active contour model based on Jeffreys divergence. First, unlike the local data fitting energy of the region-scalable fitting model, a new local data fitting energy based on Jeffreys divergence is proposed instead of Euclidean distance, which achieves relatively better segmentation. Second, to improve the versatility of the model, a new global data fitting energy based on Jeffreys divergence is proposed. Finally, the adaptive weights of the local and global data fitting energies are developed to increase the robustness to the initial curve. Experiments on real-world and medical images with inhomogeneities indicate that the proposed model can obtain accurate segmentation results efficiently and is not strictly dependent on setting up initial curves.
Hierarchical Image Classification using Entailment Cone Embeddings

Image classification has been studied extensively, but there has been limited work in using unconventional, external guidance other than traditional image-label pairs for training. We present a set of methods for leveraging information about the semantic hierarchy embedded in class labels. We first inject label-hierarchy knowledge into an arbitrary CNN-based classifier and empirically show that availability of such external semantic information in conjunction with the visual semantics from images boosts overall performance. Taking a step further in this direction, we model more explicitly the label-label and label-image interactions using order-preserving embeddings governed by both Euclidean and hyperbolic geometries, prevalent in natural language, and tailor them to hierarchical image classification and representation learning. We empirically validate all the models on the hierarchical ETHEC dataset.
Fuzzy C-Means Clustering Algorithm with Multiple Fuzzification Coefficients

Clustering is an unsupervised machine learning technique with many practical applications that has gathered extensive research interest. Aside from deterministic or probabilistic techniques, fuzzy C-means clustering (FCM) is also a common clustering technique. Since the advent of the FCM method, many improvements have been made to increase clustering efficiency. These improvements focus on adjusting the membership representation of elements in the clusters, or on fuzzifying and defuzzifying techniques, as well as the distance function between elements. This study proposes a novel fuzzy clustering algorithm using multiple different fuzzification coefficients depending on the characteristics of each data sample. The proposed fuzzy clustering method has similar calculation steps to FCM with some modifications. The formulas are derived to ensure convergence. The main contribution of this approach is the utilization of multiple fuzzification coefficients as opposed to only one coefficient in the original FCM algorithm. The new algorithm is then evaluated with experiments on several common datasets and the results show that the proposed algorithm is more efficient compared to the original FCM as well as other clustering methods.
BNAS: Efficient Neural Architecture Search Using Broad Scalable Architecture

In this paper, we propose Broad Neural Architecture Search (BNAS) where we elaborately design broad scalable architecture dubbed Broad Convolutional Neural Network (BCNN) to solve the above issue. On one hand, the proposed broad scalable architecture has fast training speed due to its shallow topology. Moreover, we also adopt reinforcement learning and parameter sharing used in ENAS as the optimization strategy of BNAS. Hence, the proposed approach can achieve higher search efficiency. On the other hand, the broad scalable architecture extracts multi-scale features and enhancement representations, and feeds them into global average pooling layer to yield more reasonable and comprehensive representations. Therefore, the performance of broad scalable architecture can be promised. In particular, we also develop two variants for BNAS who modify the topology of BCNN. In order to verify the effectiveness of BNAS, several experiments are performed and experimental results show that 1) BNAS delivers 0.19 days which is 2.37x less expensive than ENAS who ranks the best in reinforcement learning-based NAS approaches, 2) compared with small-size (0.5 millions parameters) and medium-size (1.1 millions parameters) models, the architecture learned by BNAS obtains state-of-the-art performance (3.58% and 3.24% test error) on CIFAR-10, 3) the learned architecture achieves 25.3% top-1 error on ImageNet just using 3.9 millions parameters.
HomeSense: Design of an ambient home health and wellness monitoring platform for older adults

The unprecedented rise in the population of older adults and the number of seniors living with and managing chronic conditions are straining our institutional health care systems leading to reduced care quality and unmanageable cost increases. At the same time, an overwhelming majority of older adults express a strong desire to age in place in their communities. Ambient home sensing presents an opportunity to reduce healthcare costs by facilitating older adults’ ability to age-in-place in more familiar, less restrictive, and less expensive environments. Further, ambient home sensing tools have the potential to extend the health care work force and enhance health care quality/outcomes by facilitating remote patient monitoring as well as early intervention and prevention against adverse events – all while catering to older adults’ preference to live at home. Despite their potential, there is limited research at present about the benefits of ambient sensing systems installed in private homes, and older adults’ response to them. This paper describes a pilot ambient home sensing project, HomeSense, actively deployed in the homes of older adults residing in The Villages, Florida.
Modality adversarial neural network for visible-thermal person re-identification

Existing Visible-Thermal Person Re-identification (VT-REID) methods usually adopt two-stream networks for cross-modality images. The two streams are trained to extract features from different modality images respectively. In contrast, we design a Modality Adversarial Neural Network (MANN) to solve VT-REID problem. Our proposed MANN includes a one-stream feature extractor and a modality discriminator. The heterogeneous images are processed by the feature extractor to generate modality-invariant features. And the designed modality discriminator aims to distinguish whether the extracted features are from visible or thermal modality. Moreover, our advanced dual-constrained triplet loss is introduced for better cross-modality matching performance. The experiments on two cross-modality person re-identification datasets show that MANN can effectively learn modality-invariant features and outperform state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Short report: Evaluating the safety and usability of head-mounted virtual reality compared to monitor-displayed video for children with autism spectrum disorder

Virtual reality provides a relatively inexpensive way to learn and repeatedly practice skills in personalized, controlled, and safe computer-generated settings. These systems are increasingly receiving attention as an innovative medium for delivering interventions to children with autism spectrum disorder. Although many virtual reality systems are commercially available and their use is increasing, little is known about the safety and usability of these systems for children with autism spectrum disorder. The aim of this study was a first step in addressing this gap. A convenience sample of 35 children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder participated in an immersive head-mounted display virtual reality experience and a control condition (monitor-displayed video). Levels of anxiety and negative effects experienced were not significantly different between the two conditions. Participants reported significantly enhanced spatial presence (p = 0.003; d = 0.3) and naturalness (p = 0.002; d = 0.47) for the head-mounted display–virtual reality condition, and 74% of participants preferred using head-mounted display–virtual reality over monitor-displayed video. These findings provide preliminary evidence to support the safety and usability of head-mounted display–virtual reality for children with autism spectrum disorder. Future studies are needed to replicate the results in a larger sample, a range of virtual reality experiences, and in the context of long-term exposure. Lay abstract This study investigated the safety and usability of a virtual reality experience for children with autism spectrum disorder in a laboratory setting. In our study, the negative effects of head-mounted display–virtual reality were similar to monitor-displayed video watching. At the same time, the participants indicated that the head-mounted display–virtual reality experience provided improved realism and sense of presence. This study is a first step in understanding the impact of head-mounted display on children with autism spectrum disorder.
DEAL – ‘Deep Ensemble ALgorithm’ Framework for Credit Card Fraud Detection in Real-Time Data Stream with Google TensorFlow

The state-of-the-art Credit Card Fraud Detection (CCFD) systems utilize supervised rule-based schemes to identify fraudulent behaviors in static data. Designing an efficient framework for CCFD is particularly challenging due to the imbalanced distribution of positive and negative classes in data. Conventional works overlook hidden transaction patterns and the performance evaluation methods of algorithm or system. The early models have also been criticized for over-fitting, i.e. models having less prediction accuracy than training or classification accuracy. However, the categorical accuracy is more important than overall accuracy for extremely imbalanced data; most of the previous works do not evaluate their model on the basis of categorical accuracy. In this work, we propose a predictive framework (DEAL) based on novel Deep Ensemble Learning for detecting fraudulent transaction in real-time data stream. The proposed framework is adaptive against data imbalance and robust against latent transaction patterns such as spending behavior. To build the model and predict the fraud, the transactions from real data from a major bank are passed as tensors to ensemble of Deep Learning Network. The adaptive optimization is suggested to minimize the objective function and improve fraud prediction. All Experiments are conducted in Python using scikit-learn, Google TensorFlow, and Keras Deep Learning libraries. The results demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in catching frauds.
Visual interaction networks: A novel bio-inspired computational model for image classification

Inspired by biological mechanisms and structures in neuroscience, many biologically inspired visual computational models have been presented to provide new solutions for visual recognition task. For example, convolutional neural network (CNN) was proposed according to the hierarchical structure of biological vision, which could achieve superior performance in large-scale image classification. In this paper, we propose a new framework called visual interaction networks (VIN-Net), which is inspired by visual interaction mechanisms. More specifically, self-interaction, mutual-interaction, multi-interaction, and adaptive interaction are proposed in VIN-Net, forming the first interactive completeness of the visual interaction model. To further enhance the representation ability of visual features, the adaptive adjustment mechanism is integrated into the VIN-Net model. Finally, our model is evaluated on three benchmark datasets and two self-built textile defect datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits its efficiency on visual classification tasks. Furthermore, a textile industrial application shows that the proposed architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in classification performance.
A Model for Artificial General Intelligence

A recently developed Functional Modeling Framework suggests that all models of cognition can be represented by a minimally reducible set of functions, and proposes to define the criteria for a model of cognition to have the potential for the general problem solving ability commonly recognized as true human intelligence. This human-centric functional modeling approach is intended to enable different models of AGI to be more easily compared so research can reliably converge on a single understanding, enabling the possibility of massively collaborative interdisciplinary projects to research and implement models of consciousness or cognition where difficulty in communicating very different ideas, particularly in the case of new models without a significant following, has prevented such massive collaboration from in practice having proved possible before. This paper summarizes a model of cognition developed within this framework.
Optimal probes and error-correction schemes in multi-parameter quantum metrology

We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the possibility of achieving the Heisenberg scaling in general adaptive multi-parameter estimation schemes in presence of Markovian noise. In situations where the Heisenberg scaling is achievable, we provide a semidefinite program to identify the optimal quantum error correcting (QEC) protocol that yields the best estimation precision. We overcome the technical challenges associated with potential incompatibility of the measurement optimally extracting information on different parameters by utilizing the Holevo Cramér-Rao (HCR) bound for pure states. We provide examples of significant advantages offered by our joint-QEC protocols, that sense all the parameters utilizing a single error-corrected subspace, over separate-QEC protocols where each parameter is effectively sensed in a separate subspace.
Optimized Lossless Data Hiding in JPEG Bitstream and Relay Transfer-Based Extension

This paper proposes a new framework of lossless data hiding (LDH) in JPEG images. The proposed framework contains two algorithms, i.e., the optimized basic LDH and the relay transfer based extension. In the basic algorithm, we aim to preserve the filesize after data embedding. The data hiding process is optimized by variable-length-code (VLC) mapping, combination and permutation. In the extended algorithm, we focus on embedding more bits into the bitstream with a condition that the filesize increment is allowed. To decrease the filesize increment, we propose a relay transfer based algorithm to preprocess the JPEG bitstream. Subsequently, we embed data into the processed bitstream using the basic LDH. Both algorithms provide better performances than previous arts. After lossless data hiding, the marked JPEG bitstream is compliant to common JPEG decoders. Since all operations are implemented on VLCs and the Huffman codes, no distortion is generated on the image pixels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms previous methods.
Convolutional Neural Networks Backbones for Object Detection

Detecting objects in images is an extremely important step in many image and video analysis applications. Object detection is considered as one of the main challenges in the field of computer vision, which focuses on identifying and locating objects of different classes in an image. In this paper, we aim to highlight the important role of deep learning and convolutional neural networks in particular in the object detection task. We analyze and focus on the various state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks serving as a backbone in object detection models. We test and evaluate them in the common datasets and benchmarks up-to-date. We Also outline the main features of each architecture. We demonstrate that the application of some convolutional neural network architectures has yielded very promising state-of-the-art results in image classification in the first place and then in the object detection task. The results have surpassed all the traditional methods, and in some cases, outperformed the human being’s performance.
DA-CapsNet: dual attention mechanism capsule network

Abstract A capsule network (CapsNet) is a recently proposed neural network model with a new structure. The purpose of CapsNet is to form activation capsules. In this paper, our team proposes a dual attention mechanism capsule network (DA-CapsNet). In DA-CapsNet, the first layer of the attention mechanism is added after the convolution layer and is referred to as Conv-Attention; the second layer is added after the PrimaryCaps and is referred to as Caps-Attention. The experimental results show that DA-CapsNet performs better than CapsNet. For MNIST, the trained DA-CapsNet is tested in the testset, the accuracy of the DA-CapsNet is 100% after 8 epochs, compared to 25 epochs for CapsNet. For SVHN, CIFAR10, FashionMNIST, smallNORB, and COIL-20, the highest accuracy of DA-CapsNet was 3.46%, 2.52%, 1.57%, 1.33% and 1.16% higher than that of CapsNet. And the results of image reconstruction in COIL-20 show that DA-CapsNet has a more competitive performance than CapsNet.
LSTM based prediction of malaria abundances using big data

Malaria prevails in subtropical countries where health monitoring facilities are minimal. Time series prediction models are required to forecast malaria and minimize the effect of this disease on the population. This study proposes a novel scalable framework to predict the instances of malaria in selected geographical locations. Satellite data and clinical data, along with a long short-term memory (LSTM) classifier, were used to predict malaria abundances in the state of Telangana, India. The proposed model provided a 12 months seasonal pattern for selected regions in the state. Each region had different responses based on environmental factors. Analysis indicated that both environmental and clinical variables play an important role in malaria transmission. In conclusion, the Apache Spark-based LSTM presents an effective strategy to identify locations of endemic malaria.
Self-Supervised Multiscale Adversarial Regression Network for Stereo Disparity Estimation

Deep learning approaches have significantly contributed to recent progress in stereo matching. These deep stereo matching methods are usually based on supervised training, which requires a large amount of high-quality ground-truth depth map annotations that are expensive to collect. Furthermore, only a limited quantity of stereo vision training data are currently available, obtained either by active sensors (Lidar and ToF cameras) or through computer graphics simulations and not meeting requirements for deep supervised training. Here, we propose a novel deep stereo approach called the &#x201C;self-supervised multiscale adversarial regression network (SMAR-Net),&#x201D; which relaxes the need for ground-truth depth maps for training. Specifically, we design a two-stage network. The first stage is a disparity regressor, in which a regression network estimates disparity values from stacked stereo image pairs. Stereo image stacking method is a novel contribution as it not only contains the spatial appearances of stereo images but also implies matching correspondences with different disparity values. In the second stage, a synthetic left image is generated based on the left&#x2013;right consistency assumption. Our network is trained by minimizing a hybrid loss function composed of a content loss and an adversarial loss. The content loss minimizes the average warping error between the synthetic images and the real ones. In contrast to the generative adversarial loss, our proposed adversarial loss penalizes mismatches using multiscale features. This constrains the synthetic image and real image as being pixelwise identical instead of just belonging to the same distribution. Furthermore, the combined utilization of multiscale feature extraction in both the content loss and adversarial loss further improves the adaptability of SMAR-Net in ill-posed regions. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that SMAR-Net outperforms the current state-of-the-art self-supervised methods and achieves comparable outcomes to supervised methods. The source code can be accessed at: <uri>https://github.com/Dawnstar8411/SMAR-Net</uri>.
Performance evaluation of real-time stream processing systems for Internet of Things applications

In the current scenario, IoT is an ideal and novel technology, which fulfills the needs of most of the commercial, non-commercial, government, and private organizations by its real-time supportive nature and characteristics. However, real-time processing itself a very critical research topic. But, most of the IoT applications are empowered by real-time data processing. Thus, it become a vital part of IoT. In this work, we proposed a four-layer infrastructure for IoT along with stream processing. Further, we use stream processing techniques along with IoT infrastructure for applications and analyze the performance of stream processing techniques for IoT applications. Also, we compare and find the five most suitable distributed stream processing systems for IoT, based on its performance and characteristics. We use two benchmark applications to evaluate the performance of distributed stream processing systems against response time, throughput, jitter, and scalability. Based on that, we suggest the adapted solution for IoT applications. We evaluate the performance with peak stream rates from 100k to 1M along with the various frequencies of benchmark applications. Further, on the basis of results, we conclude that Apache NiFi is the most suitable solution for IoT applications.
Wearable sensor-based fuzzy decision-making model for improving the prediction of human activities in rehabilitation

Sports actions are commonly recurrent due to the abnormal dynamic human activities. Detecting physical injuries based on the actions of the sportsperson helps to fasten rehabilitation treatments. Rehabilitation relies on the precise detection of activities and continuous monitoring of the actions of the sportsperson. In this paper, wearable sensor-based fuzzy decision-making (FDM) model is introduced for improving the prediction accuracy of different activities of the sportsperson. This model relies on altering sensor data aggregation and processing them using classification conditions for improving the prediction accuracy. The decision-making is performed by linearly classifying independent membership functions for different aggregation time and inputs. The combined processing of the inputs and time-based actions using independent decisions helps to improve the prediction accuracy of 93.3% with 26.081 ms decision time compared to conventional algorithms.
HTML: A Parametric Hand Texture Model for 3D Hand Reconstruction and Personalization

3D hand reconstruction from images is a widely-studied problem in computer vision and graphics, and has a particularly high relevance for virtual and augmented reality. Although several 3D hand reconstruction approaches leverage hand models as a strong prior to resolve ambiguities and achieve more robust results, most existing models account only for the hand shape and poses and do not model the texture. To fill this gap, in this work we present HTML, the first parametric texture model of human hands. Our model spans several dimensions of hand appearance variability (e.g., related to gender, ethnicity, or age) and only requires a commodity camera for data acquisition. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our appearance model can be used to tackle a range of challenging problems such as 3D hand reconstruction from a single monocular image. Furthermore, our appearance model can be used to define a neural rendering layer that enables training with a self-supervised photometric loss. We make our model publicly available.