Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Recolored Image Detection via a Deep Discriminative Model

Image recoloring is a technique that can transfer image color or theme and result in an imperceptible change in human eyes. Although image recoloring is one of the most important image manipulation techniques, there is no special method designed for detecting this kind of forgery. In this paper, we propose a trainable end-to-end system for distinguishing recolored images from natural images. The proposed network takes the original image and two derived inputs based on illumination consistency and inter-channel correlation of the original input into consideration and outputs the probability that it is recolored. Our algorithm adopts a convolutional neural network (CNN)- based deep architecture, which consists of three feature extraction blocks and a feature fusion module. To train the deep neural network, we synthesize a data set comprised of recolored images and corresponding ground truth using different recoloring methods. Extensive experimental results on the recolored images generated by various methods show that our proposed network is well generalized and very robust.
Advances in Using Agile and Lean Processes for Software Development

Software development processes have evolved according to market needs. Fast changing conditions that characterize current software markets have favored methods advocating speed and flexibility. Agile and Lean software development are in the forefront of these methods. This chapter presents a unified view of Agile software development, Lean software development, and most recent advances toward rapid releases. First, we introduce the area and explain the reasons why the software development industry begun to move into this direction in the late 1990s. Section 2 characterizes the research trends on Agile software development. This section helps understand the relevance of Agile software development in the research literature. Section 3 provides a walk through the roots of Agile and Lean thinking, as they originally emerged in manufacturing. Section 4 develops into Agile and Lean for software development. Main characteristics and most popular methods and practices of Agile and Lean software development are developed in this section. Section 5 centers on rapid releases, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, the latest advances in the area to get speed. The concepts of DevOps, as a means to take full (end-to-end) advantage of Agile and Lean, and Lean start-up, as an approach to foster innovation, are the focus of the two following 6 DevOps, 7 The Lean Startup Movement. Finally, Section 8 focuses on two important aspects of Agile and Lean software development: (1) metrics to guide decision making and (2) technical debt as a mechanism to gain business advantage. To wrap up the chapter, we peer into future directions in the area.
Privacy Preserving Location-Aware Personalized Web Service Recommendations

The personalized Web service recommendation based on Quality of Service (QoS) is gaining increasing popularity due to its promising ability to help users find high quality services. Studies suggest that it is beneficial to use Collaborative Filtering (CF)-based techniques to facilitate Web service recommendations which can achieve high accuracy in predicting the QoS for unobserved Web services. With the QoS, location of users and Web services has been another significant factor in predicting the QoS values. The more factors that are available to the service providers, the more accurate predictions can be generated. However these factors are privacy sensitive and therefore it is risky to disclose them to any third party service provider. To address this challenge, in this paper we develop a privacy preserving protocol to predict missing QoS values and thereby providing Web service recommendations based on past QoS experiences and locations of users. Our protocol is able to achieve user privacy by means of encrypting the QoS and location as well as to select suitable Web services for users without disclosing any private information. We conduct extensive experimental analysis on publicly available data sets and prove that our method is both secure and practical.
Reality-Preserving Multiple Parameter Discrete Fractional Angular Transform and Its Application to Color Image Encryption

In this paper, we first define a reality-preserving multiple parameter fractional angular transform (RPMPDFrAT), which is a useful tool for image encryption. Then, we propose a new color image encryption algorithm based on the defined RPMPDFrAT. The encryption process consists of two phases: encryption in the spatial domain and RPMPDFrAT domain. In the spatial domain, three color components of the plain image are mapped by dual cylindrical transform, which can nonlinearly hide the original color information. Then, the intermediate output is scrambled by a coupled logistic map to reduce the correlation of adjacent pixels and uniformly distribute the image energy of different color components. Thereafter, the scrambled image is transformed by the proposed RPMPDFrAT, which can ensure that we obtain the real-value output. Finally, a process similar to the spatial domain is performed in the RPMPDFrAT domain to further improve the security of the cryptosystem. Numerical simulations are performed and demonstrate that the proposed image encryption algorithm is effective and sensitive to keys. Moreover, some potential attacks are tested to verify the robustness of the proposed method, and the performance of our method outperforms previously published ones.
Secure Binary Image Steganography Based on Fused Distortion Measurement

Some state-of-the-art binary image steganographic methods aim to generate stego images with good visual quality, while others focus more on the statistical security of the anti-steganalysis. This paper proposes a binary steganographic scheme that improves both of them by selecting more appropriate flipped pixels. First, a fused distortion measurement is developed that combines the advantages of flipping distortion measurement (FDM) and two data-carrying pixel location methods, including the edge adaptive grid method (EAG) and the “Connectivity Preserving” criterion (CPc). The FDM measures the distortion score by statistical features and achieves high-statistical security, while the EAG and CPc select pixels by analyzing the local texture structures based on visual quality. Then, to eliminate the interference brought by adjacent flipped pixels, a flipping position optimization strategy is proposed to find better positions for flipping pixels to further improve the steganographic performance. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed steganographic scheme can achieve stronger statistical security with better visual quality without degrading the embedding capacity.
Video-Based Person Re-identification via 3D Convolutional Networks and Non-local Attention

Video-based person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging problem, where some video tracks of people across non-overlapping cameras are available for matching. Feature aggregation from a video track is a key step for video-based person ReID. Many existing methods tackle this problem by average/maximum temporal pooling or RNNs with attention. However, these methods cannot deal with temporal dependency and spatial misalignment problems at the same time. We are inspired by video action recognition that involves the identification of different actions from video tracks. Firstly, we use 3D convolutions on video volume, instead of using 2D convolutions across frames, to extract spatial and temporal features simultaneously. Secondly, we use a non-local block to tackle the misalignment problem and capture spatial-temporal long-range dependencies. As a result, the network can learn useful spatial-temporal information as a weighted sum of the features in all space and temporal positions in the input feature map. Experimental results on three datasets show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin on multiple metrics.
Robust Consensus Nonlinear Information Filter for Distributed Sensor Networks With Measurement Outliers

The traditional consensus-based filters are widely used in distributed sensor networks. However, they suffer from divergence when outliers occur. This paper proposes a robust consensus nonlinear information filter for distributed state estimation with measurement outliers. Unlike the Gaussian assumption in traditional consensus filers, the measurement of each sensor node is modeled here as a multivariate Student- t process with unknown parameters of the sufficient statistic. The variational Bayesian method is employed to jointly estimate the state and the parameters. As the state and parameters are coupled, the updated equation can be solved by fixed point iteration. The centralized outliers robust information filter is first derived for multiple sensors. It is then extended to a distributed version to fuse information from multiple interconnected local estimators. The integral of the consensus-based nonlinear filter is approximated by Gaussian approximation under the framework of the information filter. The consensuses are based on both likelihoods and prior probability distributions. The consensus and convergence of the proposed method are also analyzed. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is effective in dealing with outliers.
Information hiding with adaptive steganography based on novel fuzzy edge identification

The evolution in communication techniques has created wide threats for crucial information transfer through a communication channel. Covert communication with steganography is a skill of concealing secret information within cover object and hence shields the data theft over rapidly growing network. Recently, diverse steganography techniques using edge identification have been proposed in literature. Numerous methods however utilize certain pixels in the cover image for inserting edge information, resulting in significant deformation. The conventional edge detection method limits the deployment of edge detection in steganography as concealing the information would introduce some variations to the cover image. Hence inserting data in pixel areas recognized by existing conventional edge detection techniques like canny cannot ensure the recognition of the exact edge locations for the cover and stego images. In this paper, an Adaptive steganography method based on novel fuzzy edge identification is proposed. The method proposed is proficient of estimating the precise edge areas of a cover image and also ensures the exact edge location after embedding the secret message. Experimental results reveal that the technique has attained good imperceptibility compared to the Hayat Al-Dmour and Ahmed Al-Ani Edge XOR method in spatial domain.
Multiple Relevant Feature Ensemble Selection Based on Multilayer Co-Evolutionary Consensus MapReduce

Although feature selection for large data has been intensively investigated in data mining, machine learning, and pattern recognition, the challenges are not just to invent new algorithms to handle noisy and uncertain large data in applications, but rather to link the multiple relevant feature sources, structured, or unstructured, to develop an effective feature reduction method. In this paper, we propose a multiple relevant feature ensemble selection (MRFES) algorithm based on multilayer co-evolutionary consensus MapReduce (MCCM). We construct an effective MCCM model to handle feature ensemble selection of large-scale datasets with multiple relevant feature sources, and explore the unified consistency aggregation between the local solutions and global dominance solutions achieved by the co-evolutionary memeplexes, which participate in the cooperative feature ensemble selection process. This model attempts to reach a mutual decision agreement among co-evolutionary memeplexes, which calls for the need for mechanisms to detect some noncooperative co-evolutionary behaviors and achieve better Nash equilibrium resolutions. Extensive experimental comparative studies substantiate the effectiveness of MRFES to solve large-scale dataset problems with the complex noise and multiple relevant feature sources on some well-known benchmark datasets. The algorithm can greatly facilitate the selection of relevant feature subsets coming from the original feature space with better accuracy, efficiency, and interpretability. Moreover, we apply MRFES to human cerebral cortex-based classification prediction. Such successful applications are expected to significantly scale up classification prediction for large-scale and complex brain data in terms of efficiency and feasibility.
Rain Streaks Removal for Single Image via Kernel-Guided Convolutional Neural Network

Rain streak removal is an important issue and has recently been investigated extensively. Existing methods, especially the newly emerged deep learning methods, could remove the rain streaks well in many cases. However the essential factor in the generative procedure of the rain streaks, i.e., the motion blur, which leads to the line pattern appearances, were neglected by the deep learning rain streaks approaches and this resulted in over-derain or under-derain results. In this paper, we propose a novel rain streak removal approach using a kernel guided convolutional neural network (KGCNN), achieving the state-of-the-art performance with simple network architectures. We first model the rain streak interference with its motion blur mechanism. Then, our framework starts with learning the motion blur kernel, which is determined by two factors including angle and length, by a plain neural network, denoted as parameter net, from a patch of the texture component. Then, after a dimensionality stretching operation, the learned motion blur kernel is stretched into a degradation map with the same spatial size as the rainy patch. The stretched degradation map together with the texture patch is subsequently input into a derain convolutional network, which is a typical ResNet architecture and trained to output the rain streaks with the guidance of the learned motion blur kernel. Experiments conducted on extensive synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which preserves the texture and the contrast while removing the rain streaks.
Wasabi

WebAssembly is the new low-level language for the web and has now been implemented in all major browsers since over a year. To ensure the security, performance, and correctness of future web applications, there is a strong need for dynamic analysis tools for WebAssembly. However, building such tools from scratch requires knowledge of low-level details of the language and its runtime environment. This paper presents Wasabi, the first general-purpose framework for dynamically analyzing WebAssembly. Wasabi provides an easy-to-use, high-level API that supports heavyweight dynamic analyses. It is based on binary instrumentation, which inserts calls to analysis functions written in JavaScript into a WebAssembly binary. Dynamically analyzing WebAssembly comes with several unique challenges, such as the problem of tracing type-polymorphic instructions with analysis functions that have a fixed type, which we address through on-demand monomorphization. Our evaluation on compute-intensive benchmarks and real-world applications shows that Wasabi (i) faithfully preserves the original program behavior, (ii) imposes an overhead that is reasonable for heavyweight dynamic analysis, and (iii) makes it straightforward to implement various dynamic analyses, including instruction counting, call graph extraction, memory access tracing, and taint analysis.
Improving Generalization of Genetic Programming for Symbolic Regression With Angle-Driven Geometric Semantic Operators

Geometric semantic genetic programming (GP) has recently attracted much attention. The key innovations are inducing a unimodal fitness landscape in the semantic space and providing a theoretical framework for designing geometric semantic operators. The geometric semantic operators aim to manipulate the semantics of programs by making a bounded semantic impact and generating child programs with similar or better behavior than their parents. These properties are shown to be highly related to a notable generalization improvement in GP. However, the potential ineffectiveness and difficulties in bounding the variations in these geometric operators still limits their positive effect on generalization. This paper attempts to further explore the geometry and search space of geometric operators to gain a greater generalization improvement in GP for symbolic regression. To this end, a new angle-driven selection operator and two new angle-driven geometric search operators are proposed. The angle-awareness brings new geometric properties to these geometric operators, which are expected to provide a greater leverage for approximating the target semantics in each operation, and more importantly, be resistant to overfitting. The experiments show that compared with two state-of-the-art geometric semantic operators, our angle-driven geometric operators not only drive the evolutionary process to fit the target semantics more efficiently but also improve the generalization performance. A further comparison between the evolved models shows that the new method generally produces simpler models with a much smaller size and is more likely to evolve toward the correct structure of the target models.
Learning Attentional Recurrent Neural Network for Visual Tracking

Existing visual tracking methods face many challenges: 1) the changed size and number of targets over time, occlusion in discrete frames, and mis-identification for crossing targets. Long short-term memory (LSTM) has the advantage of modeling long-term tasks and is suitable for tracking. We propose a novel online attentional recurrent neural network (ARNN) model for visual tracking, whose core component is a two-layer bidirectional LSTM along the x-and y-axes. Several bidirectional LSTMs can be cascaded or parallelly connected together to exploit multiscale target features and can give more precise tracked object locations. Each bidirectional LSTM utilizes the convolutional features of a convolutional neural network inside two bounding boxes from two frames to check whether the target in the current frame is the one in previous frames. An attention mechanism is also adopted to enhance the proposed model to better express the patch-level features of the tracking targets. Interattention and intra-attention models are proposed to imitate the temporal and spatial tracking mechanism of primate visual cortex. Interattention learns to overcome the occlusion problem, and intra-attention is able to mark important regions to better trace the target. The bidirectional LSTM and the attention mechanism are jointly trained. The combination of them further improves the accuracy of target tracking in videos. The outstanding performances in the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed online method ARNN and yield competitive results compared with the state-of-the-art tracking methods.
Multiple Marginal Fisher Analysis

Dimension reduction is a fundamental task of machine learning and computer vision, which is widely used in a variety of industrial applications. Over past decades, a lot of unsupervised and supervised algorithms have been proposed. However, few of them can automatically determine the feature dimension that could be adaptive to different data distributions. To obtain a good performance, it is popular to seek the optimal dimension by exhaustively enumerating some possible values. Clearly, such a scheme is ad hoc and computationally extensive. Therefore, a method which can automatically estimate the feature dimension in an efficient and principled manner is of significant practical and theoretical value. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised subspace learning method called multiple marginal Fisher analysis (MMFA), which can automatically estimate the feature dimension. By maxing the interclass separability among marginal points while minimizing within-class scatter, MMFA obtains low-dimensional representations with outstanding discriminative properties. Extensive experiments show that MMFA not only outperforms other algorithms on clean data, but also show robustness on corrupted and disguised data.
Big Data Processing Workflows Oriented Real-Time Scheduling Algorithm using Task-Duplication in Geo-Distributed Clouds

Scheduling big data processing workflows involves both large-scale tasks and transmission of massive intermediate data among tasks, thus optimizing their completion time and monetary cost becomes a challenging issue. Besides, data streams are continuously generated, and dynamically submitted to clouds for real-time or near real-time processing. Naturally, responsive schedules are required to keep pace with such dynamic environments and this further aggravates the difficulty of the workflow scheduling problem. To address these issues, we first derive two theorems to minimize the completion time of a set of parallel workflow tasks and the start time of each workflow task, and then define the latest finish time for workflow tasks, which is also proved its advantage in reducing costs without delaying the completion of workflows. On the basis of these theorems, we propose a novel real-time scheduling algorithm using task-duplication, RTSATD, such that minimizing both the completion time and monetary cost of processing big data workflows in clouds. The performance of RTSATD is analyzed by using both synthesized and real-world workflows. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm with respect to completion time (up to 28.73 percent) and resource utilization (up to 46.31 percent) over two existing approaches.
Building user profiles based on sequences for content and collaborative filtering

Modeling user profiles is a necessary step for most information filtering systems – such as recommender systems – to provide personalized recommendations. However, most of them work with users or items as vectors, by applying different types of mathematical operations between them and neglecting sequential or content-based information. Hence, in this paper we study how to propose an adaptive mechanism to obtain user sequences using different sources of information, allowing the generation of hybrid recommendations as a seamless, transparent technique from the system viewpoint. As a proof of concept, we develop the Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) algorithm as a similarity metric to compare the user sequences, where, in the process of adapting this algorithm to recommendation, we include different parameters to control the efficiency by reducing the information used in the algorithm (preference filter), to decide when a neighbor is considered useful enough to be included in the process (confidence filter), to identify whether two interactions are equivalent (δ-matching threshold), and to normalize the length of the LCS in a bounded interval (normalization functions). These parameters can be extended to work with any type of sequential algorithm. We evaluate our approach with several state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms using different evaluation metrics measuring the accuracy, diversity, and novelty of the recommendations, and analyze the impact of the proposed parameters. We have found that our approach offers a competitive performance, outperforming content, collaborative, and hybrid baselines, and producing positive results when either content- or rating-based information is exploited.