Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
RayMVSNet++: Learning Ray-Based 1D Implicit Fields for Accurate Multi-View Stereo

Learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) has by far centered around 3D convolution on cost volumes. Due to the high computation and memory consumption of 3D CNN, the resolution of output depth is often considerably limited. Different from most existing works dedicated to adaptive refinement of cost volumes, we opt to directly optimize the depth value along each camera ray, mimicking the range (depth) finding of a laser scanner. This reduces the MVS problem to ray-based depth optimization which is much more light-weight than full cost volume optimization. In particular, we propose RayMVSNet which learns sequential prediction of a 1D implicit field along each camera ray with the zero-crossing point indicating scene depth. This sequential modeling, conducted based on transformer features, essentially learns the epipolar line search in traditional multi-view stereo. We devise a multi-task learning for better optimization convergence and depth accuracy. We found the monotonicity property of the SDFs along each ray greatly benefits the depth estimation. Our method ranks top on both the DTU and the Tanks & Temples datasets over all previous learning-based methods, achieving an overall reconstruction score of 0.33 mm on DTU and an F-score of 59.48% on Tanks & Temples. It is able to produce high-quality depth estimation and point cloud reconstruction in challenging scenarios such as objects/scenes with non-textured surface, severe occlusion, and highly varying depth range. Further, we propose RayMVSNet++ to enhance contextual feature aggregation for each ray through designing an attentional gating unit to select semantically relevant neighboring rays within the local frustum around that ray. This improves the performance on datasets with more challenging examples (e.g., low-quality images caused by poor lighting conditions or motion blur). RayMVSNet++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ScanNet dataset. In particular, it attains an AbsRel of 0.058m and produces accurate results on the two subsets of textureless regions and large depth variation.
Multimodal CNN Networks for Brain Tumor Segmentation in MRI: A BraTS 2022 Challenge Solution

Automatic segmentation is essential for the brain tumor diagnosis, disease prognosis, and follow-up therapy of patients with gliomas. Still, accurate detection of gliomas and their sub-regions in multimodal MRI is very challenging due to the variety of scanners and imaging protocols. Over the last years, the BraTS Challenge has provided a large number of multi-institutional MRI scans as a benchmark for glioma segmentation algorithms. This paper describes our contribution to the BraTS 2022 Continuous Evaluation challenge. We propose a new ensemble of multiple deep learning frameworks namely, DeepSeg, nnU-Net, and DeepSCAN for automatic glioma boundaries detection in pre-operative MRI. It is worth noting that our ensemble models took first place in the final evaluation on the BraTS testing dataset with Dice scores of 0.9294, 0.8788, and 0.8803, and Hausdorf distance of 5.23, 13.54, and 12.05, for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed ensemble method ranked first in the final ranking on another unseen test dataset, namely Sub-Saharan Africa dataset, achieving mean Dice scores of 0.9737, 0.9593, and 0.9022, and HD95 of 2.66, 1.72, 3.32 for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively. The docker image for the winning submission is publicly available at ( https://hub.docker.com/r/razeineldin/camed22 ).
Competition between green and non-green products in the blockchain era

Blockchain technology has been used to certify the green level of green products, which changes the competition landscape between green and non-green products. We explore the important issue concerning how blockchain adoption affects the duopoly game between green and non-green products. We first examine a benchmark case where blockchain is not used. Then we develop two pricing models to analyze the value of blockchain adoption and the competition landscape between green and non-green products, where one concerns a green product manufacturer that applies blockchain to certify the green level of its product, and the other concerns a non-green product manufacturer. To assess the robustness of the results, we extend the models to consider two important cases, namely (i) substitutability between green and non-green products, and (ii) mixed competition including the simultaneous presence of conventional, blockchain-enabled, and non-green products in the marketplace. We show that the green product manufacturer does not necessarily increase its price when adopting blockchain, whereas the non-green product manufacturer does. Specifically, when the green level is high, the GPM's blockchain adoption decreases price competition between green and non-green products, causing both the green and non-green product manufacturers to raise prices. In addition, it is intriguing to find that the presence of more sustainable consumers in the market does not cause the green product manufacturer to charge a higher price than the non-green product manufacturer. Under the mixed competition scenario, as a result of blockchain adoption, the blockchain-enabled green product manufacturer charges a higher price than the green and non-green product manufacturer. However, this does not inherently result in a higher profit margin for the blockchain-enabled green product manufacturer.
Optimizing classification efficiency with machine learning techniques for pattern matching

Abstract The study proposes a novel model for DNA sequence classification that combines machine learning methods and a pattern-matching algorithm. This model aims to effectively categorize DNA sequences based on their features and enhance the accuracy and efficiency of DNA sequence classification. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated using various machine learning algorithms, and the results indicate that the SVM linear classifier achieves the highest accuracy and F1 score among the tested algorithms. This finding suggests that the proposed model can provide better overall performance than other algorithms in DNA sequence classification. In addition, the proposed model is compared to two suggested algorithms, namely FLPM and PAPM, and the results show that the proposed model outperforms these algorithms in terms of accuracy and efficiency. The study further explores the impact of pattern length on the accuracy and time complexity of each algorithm. The results show that as the pattern length increases, the execution time of each algorithm varies. For a pattern length of 5, SVM Linear and EFLPM have the lowest execution time of 0.0035 s. However, at a pattern length of 25, SVM Linear has the lowest execution time of 0.0012 s. The experimental results of the proposed model show that SVM Linear has the highest accuracy and F1 score among the tested algorithms. SVM Linear achieved an accuracy of 0.963 and an F1 score of 0.97, indicating that it can provide the best overall performance in DNA sequence classification. Naive Bayes also performs well with an accuracy of 0.838 and an F1 score of 0.94. The proposed model offers a valuable contribution to the field of DNA sequence analysis by providing a novel approach to pre-processing and feature extraction. The model’s potential applications include drug discovery, personalized medicine, and disease diagnosis. The study’s findings highlight the importance of considering the impact of pattern length on the accuracy and time complexity of DNA sequence classification algorithms.
The Meta-Metaverse: Ideation and Future Directions

In the era of digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI), the utilization of Metaverse technology has become increasingly crucial. As the world becomes more digitized, there is a pressing need to effectively transfer real-world assets into the digital realm and establish meaningful relationships between them. However, existing approaches have shown significant limitations in achieving this goal comprehensively. To address this, this research introduces an innovative methodology called the Meta-Metaverse, which aims to enhance the immersive experience and create realistic digital twins across various domains such as biology, genetics, economy, medicine, environment, gaming, digital twins, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, psychology, supply chain, social networking, smart manufacturing, and politics. The multi-layered structure of Metaverse platforms and digital twins allows for greater flexibility and scalability, offering valuable insights into the potential impact of advancing science, technology, and the internet. This article presents a detailed description of the proposed methodology and its applications, highlighting its potential to transform scientific research and inspire groundbreaking ideas in science, medicine, and technology.
YOLO-Lite: An Efficient Lightweight Network for SAR Ship Detection

Automatic ship detection in SAR images plays an essential role in both military and civilian fields. However, most of the existing deep learning detection methods introduce complex models and huge calculations while improving the detection accuracy, which is not conducive to the application of real-time ship detection. To solve this problem, an efficient lightweight network YOLO-Lite is proposed for SAR ship detection in this paper. First, a lightweight feature enhancement backbone (LFEBNet) is designed to reduce the amount of calculation. Additionally, a channel and position enhancement attention (CPEA) module is constructed and embedded into the backbone network to more accurately locate the target location by capturing the positional information. Second, an enhanced spatial pyramid pooling (EnSPP) module is customized to enhance the expression ability of features and address the position information loss of small SAR ships in high-level features. Third, we construct an effective multi-scale feature fusion network (MFFNet) with two feature fusion channels to obtain feature maps with more position and semantic information. Furthermore, a novel confidence loss function is proposed to effectively improve the SAR ship target detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on SSDD and SAR ship datasets verify the effectiveness of our YOLO-Lite, which can not only accurately detect SAR ships in different backgrounds but can also realize a lightweight architecture with low computation cost.
Corporate digital responsibility (CDR) in the age of AI: implications for interactive marketing

Purpose Despite all the recent achievements in the field of interactive marketing and artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider the ethical implications of these technologies. This paper explains the concept of corporate digital responsibility (CDR) and how it is affected by new advances in AI. Design/methodology/approach The authors build on the work of Wirtz et al. , (2023) and derive several managerial implications for the challenges that AI poses to CDR. CDR refers to a service company's ethical and fair use of data and technology within its digital service ecosystem. It involves establishing standards, protecting customer privacy, conducting external audits and striving for an equitable power dynamic between service firms and their partners. Findings Despite the risks involved, many companies are not prioritizing good CDR practices. Financial benefits from the collection and use of consumer data, improved customer experience through AI-driven customization and personalization, cost reduction through service automation and the trade-offs between organizational goals and CDR practices can prevent companies from prioritizing good CDR practices. Originality/value This is one of the first articles in the service domain to take the concept of CDR and apply it to recent developments in generative AI. Research limitations/implications The emergence of powerful AI tools presents opportunities and challenges. Research opportunities include responsible business restructuring, responsible service automation to ensure fairness and human oversight, addressing dehumanization of service delivery, responsible customer profiling to address privacy and discrimination concerns and preventing AI misuse.
Hierarchical attention aggregation with multi-resolution feature learning for GAN-based underwater image enhancement

In recent years, underwater image enhancement and restoration technologies have become increasingly important in order to optimize the efficiency of maritime operations and promote the automatic machine learning of the maritime industry. A new hierarchical attention aggregation with multi-resolution feature learning for GAN-based underwater image enhancement is proposed to address the problems of color bias, underexposure, and blurring in underwater images. The proposed method consists of a generator and a discriminator. Specifically, the generator includes an encoder, a bottleneck layer, and a decoder. Generator introduces inter-block serial connections for better adaptation to complex image scenes and task requirements, and parallel connections to extract multi-level features and enhance the expressive capacity of the network. To extract semantic and contextual information, hierarchical attention dense aggregation is designed in the encoder, which includes multi-scale feature hierarchy and dense feature hierarchy. Additionally, a multi-scale spatial attention mechanism is designed in the bottleneck layer to handle variations in underwater image scenes. In the decoder, the feature channel layer is emphasized, and a multi-channel attention mechanism is proposed to restore the multi-resolution channel features to a three-channel enhanced image. Furthermore, the angular loss function is introduced as additional supervision, which improves the similarity between the generated and original images, increases image clarity, and reduces color bias. Meanwhile, we employ the patch discriminator to enhance machine vision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Pyramid Attention Network for Image Restoration

Abstract Self-similarity refers to the image prior widely used in image restoration algorithms that small but similar patterns tend to occur at different locations and scales. However, recent advanced deep convolutional neural network-based methods for image restoration do not take full advantage of self-similarities by relying on self-attention neural modules that only process information at the same scale. To solve this problem, we present a novel Pyramid Attention module for image restoration, which captures long-range feature correspondences from a multi-scale feature pyramid. Inspired by the fact that corruptions, such as noise or compression artifacts, drop drastically at coarser image scales, our attention module is designed to be able to borrow clean signals from their “clean” correspondences at the coarser levels. The proposed pyramid attention module is a generic building block that can be flexibly integrated into various neural architectures. Its effectiveness is validated through extensive experiments on multiple image restoration tasks: image denoising, demosaicing, compression artifact reduction, and super resolution. Without any bells and whistles, our PANet (pyramid attention module with simple network backbones) can produce state-of-the-art results with superior accuracy and visual quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Pyramid-Attention-Networks
From Hype to Reality: Unveiling the Promises, Challenges and Opportunities of Blockchain in Supply Chain Systems

Blockchain is a groundbreaking technology widely adopted in industrial applications for improving supply chain management (SCM). The SCM and logistics communities have paid close attention to the development of blockchain technology. The primary purpose of employing a blockchain for SCM is to lower production costs while enhancing the system’s security. In recent years, blockchain-related SCM research has drawn much interest, and it is fair to state that this technology is now the most promising option for delivering reliable services/goods in supply chain networks. This study uses rigorous methods to review the technical implementation aspects of SCM systems driven by Blockchain. To ensure the security of industrial applications, we primarily concentrated on developing SCM solutions with blockchain capabilities. In this study, the unique qualities of blockchain technology have been exploited to analyze the main effects of leveraging it in the SCM. Several security metrics are utilized to validate and compare the blockchain methodologies’ effectiveness in SCM. The blockchain may alter the supply chain to make it more transparent and efficient by creating a useful tool for strategic planning and enhancing connections among the customers, suppliers, and accelerators. Moreover, the performance of traditional and blockchain-enabled SCM systems is compared in this study based on the parameters of efficiency, execution time, security level, and latency.
Enhancing Retail Checkout through Video Inpainting, YOLOv8 Detection, and DeepSort Tracking

The retail industry has witnessed a remarkable upswing in the utilization of cutting-edge artificial intelligence and computer vision techniques. Among the prominent challenges in this domain is the development of an automated checkout system that can address the multifaceted issues that arise in real-world checkout scenarios, including object occlusion, motion blur, and similarity in scanned items. In this paper, we propose a sophisticated deep learning-based framework that can effectively recognize, localize, track, and count products as they traverse in front of a camera. Our approach, which we call RetailCounter, is founded on a detect-then-track paradigm, wherein we apply tracking on the bounding box of the detected objects. Furthermore, we have incorporated an automatic identification of the detection region of interest (ROI) and efficient removal of unwanted objects from the ROI. The performance of our proposed framework is competitive, as evidenced by our F1 score of 0.8177 and the fourth-place ranking that we achieved in track 4 of the 2023 AI City Challenge.
Audio-Visual Person-of-Interest DeepFake Detection

Face manipulation technology is advancing very rapidly, and new methods are being proposed day by day. The aim of this work is to propose a deepfake detector that can cope with the wide variety of manipulation methods and scenarios encountered in the real world. Our key insight is that each person has specific characteristics that a synthetic generator likely cannot reproduce. Accordingly, we extract audio-visual features which characterize the identity of a person, and use them to create a person-of-interest (POI) deepfake detector. We leverage a contrastive learning paradigm to learn the moving-face and audio segment embeddings that are most discriminative for each identity. As a result, when the video and/or audio of a person is manipulated, its representation in the embedding space becomes inconsistent with the real identity, allowing reliable detection. Training is carried out exclusively on real talking-face video; thus, the detector does not depend on any specific manipulation method and yields the highest generalization ability. In addition, our method can detect both single-modality (audio-only, video-only) and multimodality (audio-video) attacks, and is robust to low-quality or corrupted videos. Experiments on a wide variety of datasets confirm that our method ensures a SOTA performance, especially on low quality videos. Code is publicly available on-line at https://github.com/grip-unina/poi-forensics.
Denoising diffusion models for out-of-distribution detection

Out-of-distribution detection is crucial to the safe deployment of machine learning systems. Currently, unsupervised out-of-distribution detection is dominated by generative-based approaches that make use of estimates of the likelihood or other measurements from a generative model. Reconstruction-based methods offer an alternative approach, in which a measure of reconstruction error is used to determine if a sample is out-of-distribution. However, reconstruction-based approaches are less favoured, as they require careful tuning of the model’s information bottleneck-such as the size of the latent dimension - to produce good results. In this work, we exploit the view of denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) as denoising autoencoders where the bottleneck is controlled externally, by means of the amount of noise applied. We propose to use DDPMs to reconstruct an input that has been noised to a range of noise levels, and use the resulting multi-dimensional reconstruction error to classify out-of-distribution inputs. We validate our approach both on standard computer-vision datasets and on higher dimension medical datasets. Our approach outperforms not only reconstruction-based methods, but also state-of-the-art generative-based approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/marksgraham/ddpm-ood.
Federated Learning Based on CTC for Heterogeneous Internet of Things

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning technique that allows for on-site data collection and processing without sacrificing data privacy and transmission. Heterogeneity is a key challenge in federated settings. Recently, cross-technology communication (CTC) has emerged as a solution for Internet of Things (IoT) heterogeneity, enabling direct communication between different wireless devices without the need for hardware modifications or gateway intervention. For example, a sophisticated WiFi device can serve as a central coordinator for other heterogeneous devices, such as LoRa, ZigBee, Bluetooth, and LTE, leading to more efficient and ubiquitous cross-network information exchange. However, heterogeneous wireless technologies present different data transmission rates and computing resources, making it difficult to achieve high accuracy in predictions due to large amounts of multidimensional data, communication delays, transmission latency, limited processing capacity, and data privacy concerns. In this work, we propose an FL framework based on CTC for heterogeneous IoT applications, called FLCTC. To demonstrate the usability of FLCTC, we implemented FLCTC and a specific solution for forest fire prediction. FLCTC was concretely implemented as a federal deep learning based on long and short-term memory and used for forest fire prediction, addressing the challenge of data characterization in heterogeneous IoT networks. FLCTC promises to improve communication efficiency and prediction accuracy. Our platform-based evaluation results show that FLCTC is feasible, with a recall of 96% and an accuracy of 88%, offering valuable insights into the use of FL with CTC for heterogeneous IoT applications.