Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the Design and Implementation of a Peer-To-Peer COVID-19 Contact Tracing Mobile App (COCOA) in Japan

We evaluate a Bluetooth-based mobile contact-confirming app, COVID-19 Contact-Confirming Application (COCOA), which is being used in Japan to contain the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel virus termed SARS-COV-2. The app prioritizes the protection of users’ privacy from a variety of parties (eg, other users, potential attackers, and public authorities), enhances the capacity to balance the current load of excessive pressure on health care systems (eg, local triage of exposure risk and reduction of in-person hospital visits), increases the speed of responses to the pandemic (eg, automated recording of close contact based on proximity), and reduces operation errors and population mobility. The peer-to-peer framework of COCOA is intended to provide the public with dynamic and credible updates on the COVID-19 pandemic without sacrificing the privacy of their information. However, cautions must be exercised to address critical concerns, such as the rate of participation and delays in data sharing. The results of a simulation imply that the participation rate in Japan needs to be close 90% to effectively control the spread of COVID-19.
Persian sign language recognition using IMU and surface EMG sensors

A sign language recognition (SLR) system has been broadly used by deaf individuals as a communicative tool. Progress of SLR systems paves the way for the development of Human–computer interaction (HCI) since sign language is the most structured form, and every movement has a specific meaning. In this paper, a wearable low-cost device based on surface electromyography (sEMG) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors was designed and fabricated. The fusion of these two sensors will improve the system’s accuracy to capture signs. In this work, sEMG and IMU recordings were collected from ten volunteers while performing 20 commonly used Persian Sign Language (PSL) signs ten times in defined time gaps. To make the proposed algorithm computationally efficient, the 25 highest-ranked features of two modalities (sEMG, IMU) were extracted and classified by the KNN classifier that achieved 96.13% average accuracy. These results demonstrate the feasibility of our purposed method for PSL recognition.
ReLaText: Exploiting visual relationships for arbitrary-shaped scene text detection with graph convolutional networks

We introduce a new arbitrary-shaped text detection approach named ReLaText by formulating text detection as a visual relationship detection problem. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this new formulation, we start from using a “link” relationship to address the challenging text-line grouping problem firstly. The key idea is to decompose text detection into two subproblems, namely detection of text primitives and prediction of link relationships between nearby text primitive pairs. Specifically, an anchor-free region proposal network based text detector is first used to detect text primitives of different scales from different feature maps of a feature pyramid network, from which a text primitive graph is constructed by linking each pair of nearby text primitives detected from a same feature map with an edge. Then, a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based link relationship prediction module is used to prune wrongly-linked edges in the text primitive graph to generate a number of disjoint subgraphs, each representing a detected text instance. As GCN can effectively leverage context information to improve link prediction accuracy, our GCN based text-line grouping approach can achieve better text detection accuracy than previous text-line grouping methods, especially when dealing with text instances with large inter-character or very small inter-line spacing. Consequently, the proposed ReLaText achieves state-of-the-art performance on five public text detection benchmarks, namely RCTW-17, MSRA-TD500, Total-Text, CTW1500 and DAST1500.
The Next Generation of Medical Decision Support: A Roadmap Toward Transparent Expert Companions

Increasing quality and performance of artificial intelligence (AI) in general and machine learning (ML) in particular is followed by a wider use of these approaches in everyday life. As part of this development, ML classifiers have also gained more importance for diagnosing diseases within biomedical engineering and medical sciences. However, many of those ubiquitous high-performing ML algorithms reveal a black-box-nature, leading to opaque and incomprehensible systems that complicate human interpretations of single predictions or the whole prediction process. This puts up a serious challenge on human decision makers to develop trust, which is much needed in life-changing decision tasks. This paper is designed to answer the question how expert companion systems for decision support can be designed to be interpretable and therefore transparent and comprehensible for humans. On the other hand, an approach for interactive ML as well as human-in-the-loop-learning is demonstrated in order to integrate human expert knowledge into ML models so that humans and machines act as companions within a critical decision task. We especially address the problem of Semantic Alignment between ML classifiers and its human users as a prerequisite for semantically relevant and useful explanations as well as interactions. Our roadmap paper presents and discusses an interdisciplinary yet integrated Comprehensible Artificial Intelligence (cAI)-transition-framework with regard to the task of medical diagnosis. We explain and integrate relevant concepts and research areas to provide the reader with a hands-on-cookbook for achieving the transition from opaque black-box models to interactive, transparent, comprehensible and trustworthy systems. To make our approach tangible, we present suitable state of the art methods with regard to the medical domain and include a realization concept of our framework. The emphasis is on the concept of Mutual Explanations (ME) that we introduce as a dialogue-based, incremental process in order to provide human ML users with trust, but also with stronger participation within the learning process.
A Two-Phase Anomaly Detection Model for Secure Intelligent Transportation Ride-Hailing Trajectories

This paper addresses the taxi fraud problem and introduces a new solution to identify trajectory outliers. The approach as presented allows to identify both individual and group outliers and is based on a two phase-based algorithm. The first phase determines the individual trajectory outliers by computing the distance of each point in each trajectory, whereas the second identifies the group trajectory outliers by exploring the individual trajectory outliers using both feature selection and sliding windows strategies. A parallel version of the algorithm is also proposed using a sliding window-based GPU approach to boost the runtime performance. Extensive experiments have been carried out to thoroughly demonstrate the usefulness of our methodology on both synthetic and real trajectory databases. The results show that the GPU approach enables reaching a speed-up of 341 over the sequential algorithm on large synthetic databases. The efficiency of the proposed method to detect both individual and group trajectory outliers on a real-world taxi trajectory database is also demonstrated in comparison with baseline trajectory outlier and group detection algorithms. The results are very promising and show superiority of the proposed method both in reducing computational time and enhancing the quality of returned outliers. Finally, we prime our methodology and results for future refinement using deep learning methodologies.
Sequential Dual Attention Network for Rain Streak Removal in a Single Image

Various weather conditions, such as rain, haze, or snow, can degrade visual quality in images/videos, which may significantly degrade the performance of related applications. In this paper, a novel framework based on sequential dual attention deep network is proposed for removing rain streaks (deraining) in a single image, called by SSDRNet (Sequential dual attentionbased Single image DeRaining deep Network). Since the inherent correlation among rain steaks within an image should be stronger than that between the rain streaks and the background (non-rain) pixels, a two-stage learning strategy is implemented to better capture the distribution of rain streaks within a rainy image. The two-stage deep neural network primarily involves three blocks: residual dense blocks (RDBs), sequential dual attention blocks (SDABs), and multi-scale feature aggregation modules (MAMs), which are all delicately and specifically designed for rain removal. The two-stage strategy successfully learns very fine details of the rain steaks of the image and then clearly removes them. Extensive experimental results have shown that the proposed deep framework achieves the best performance on qualitative and quantitative metrics compared with state-of-the-art methods. The corresponding code and the trained model of the proposed SSDRNet have been available online at https://github.com/fityanul/SDAN-for-Rain-Removal.
Software visualization and deep transfer learning for effective software defect prediction

Software defect prediction aims to automatically locate defective code modules to better focus testing resources and human effort. Typically, software defect prediction pipelines are comprised of two parts: the first extracts program features, like abstract syntax trees, by using external tools, and the second applies machine learning-based classification models to those features in order to predict defective modules. Since such approaches depend on specific feature extraction tools, machine learning classifiers have to be custom-tailored to effectively build most accurate models.
Computer aided diagnosis of thyroid nodules based on the devised small-datasets multi-view ensemble learning

With the development of deep learning, its application in diagnosis of benign and malignant thyroid nodules has been widely concerned. However, it is difficult to obtain medical images, resulting in insufficient number of data, which contradicts the large amount of data required for acquiring effective deep learning diagnostic models. A multi-view ensemble learning based on voting mechanism is proposed herein to boost the performance of the models trained by small-dataset thyroid nodule ultrasound images. The method integrates three kinds of diagnosis results which are obtained from 3-view dataset which is composed of thyroid nodule ultrasound images, medical features extracted based on U-Net output and useful features selected by mRMR from the statistical features and texture features. To obtain preliminary diagnosis results, the images are utilized for training GoogleNet. For improving the results, supplementary methods were proposed based on the medical features and the selected features. To analyze the contribution of these features and acquire two groups of diagnosis results, the designed Xgboost classifier is utilized for obtaining two groups of features respectively. Subsequently, the boosting final results are obtained through majority voting mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed method is utilized to diagnose sequence images (the images extracted by frame from videos) to solve the poor results caused by slight differences. Finally, better final results are obtained for both of the normal dataset and the sequence dataset (consisting of sequence images). Compared with the accuracies obtained by only training deep learning models with small datasets, the diagnostic accuracies of the above two datasets are improved to 92.11% and 92.54% respectively by utilizing the proposed method.
An empirical study of multi-scale object detection in high resolution UAV images

Object detection in images collected by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) constitutes a challenging task in computer vision, due to difficulties of learning a well-trained object detection model for handling instances in UAV images with arbitrary orientations, variation in different scales, irregular shapes, etc. In order to facilitate object detection research and extend its applications in natural scenarios by using UAVs, this paper presents a large-scale benchmark dataset, MOHR, aiming at performing multi-scale object detection in UAV images with high resolution. A total of 90,014 object instances with labels and bounding boxes were annotated. In order to build a baseline for object detection on the MOHR dataset, we performed an empirical study by evaluating six state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detection models trained on our proposed dataset. Experimental results show promising detection performance, but also demonstrate that the dataset is quite challenging for adopting natural image-based object detection models for UAV images.
Who2com: Collaborative Perception via Learnable Handshake Communication

In this paper, we propose the problem of collaborative perception, where robots can combine their local observations with those of neighboring agents in a learnable way to improve accuracy on a perception task. Unlike existing work in robotics and multi-agent reinforcement learning, we formulate the problem as one where learned information must be shared across a set of agents in a bandwidth-sensitive manner to optimize for scene understanding tasks such as semantic segmentation. Inspired by networking communication protocols, we propose a multi-stage handshake communication mechanism where the neural network can learn to compress relevant information needed for each stage. Specifically, a target agent with degraded sensor data sends a compressed request, the other agents respond with matching scores, and the target agent determines who to connect with (i.e., receive information from). We additionally develop the AirSim-CP dataset and metrics based on the AirSim simulator where a group of aerial robots perceive diverse landscapes, such as roads, grasslands, buildings, etc. We show that for the semantic segmentation task, our handshake communication method significantly improves accuracy by approximately 20% over decentralized baselines, and is comparable to centralized ones using a quarter of the bandwidth.
Efficient Large-Scale Multi-Drone Delivery Using Transit Networks

We consider the problem of controlling a large fleet of drones to deliver packages simultaneously across broad urban areas. To conserve energy, drones hop between public transit vehicles (e.g., buses and trams). We design a comprehensive algorithmic framework that strives to minimize the maximum time to complete any delivery. We address the multifaceted complexity of the problem through a two-layer approach. First, the upper layer assigns drones to package delivery sequences with a near-optimal polynomial-time task allocation algorithm. Then, the lower layer executes the allocation by periodically routing the fleet over the transit network while employing efficient bounded-suboptimal multi-agent pathfinding techniques tailored to our setting. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on settings with up to 200 drones, 5000 packages, and transit networks with up to 8000 stops in San Francisco and Washington DC. Our results show that the framework computes solutions within a few seconds (up to 2 minutes at most) on commodity hardware, and that drones travel up to 450% of their flight range with public transit.
Efficient Reversible Data Hiding for JPEG Images With Multiple Histograms Modification

Most current reversible data hiding (RDH) techniques are designed for uncompressed images. However, JPEG images are more commonly used in our daily lives. Up to now, several RDH methods for JPEG images have been proposed, yet few of them investigated the adaptive data embedding as the lack of accurate measurement for the embedding distortion. To realize adaptive embedding and optimize the embedding performance, in this article, a novel RDH scheme for JPEG images based on multiple histogram modification (MHM) and rate-distortion optimization is proposed. Firstly, with selected coefficients, the RDH for JPEG images is generalized into a MHM embedding framework. Then, by estimating the embedding distortion, the rate-distortion model is formulated, so that the expansion bins can be adaptively determined for different histograms and images. Finally, to optimize the embedding performance in real time, a greedy algorithm with low computation complexity is proposed to derive the nearly optimal embedding efficiently. Experiments show that the proposed method can yield better embedding performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in terms of both visual quality and file size preservation.
A Benign and Malignant Breast Tumor Classification Method via Efficiently Combining Texture and Morphological Features on Ultrasound Images

The classification of benign and malignant based on ultrasound images is of great value because breast cancer is an enormous threat to women’s health worldwide. Although both texture and morphological features are crucial representations of ultrasound breast tumor images, their straightforward combination brings little effect for improving the classification of benign and malignant since high-dimensional texture features are too aggressive so that drown out the effect of low-dimensional morphological features. For that, an efficient texture and morphological feature combing method is proposed to improve the classification of benign and malignant. Firstly, both texture (i.e., local binary patterns (LBP), histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), and gray-level co-occurrence matrixes (GLCM)) and morphological (i.e., shape complexities) features of breast ultrasound images are extracted. Secondly, a support vector machine (SVM) classifier working on texture features is trained, and a naive Bayes (NB) classifier acting on morphological features is designed, in order to exert the discriminative power of texture features and morphological features, respectively. Thirdly, the classification scores of the two classifiers (i.e., SVM and NB) are weighted fused to obtain the final classification result. The low-dimensional nonparameterized NB classifier is effectively control the parameter complexity of the entire classification system combine with the high-dimensional parametric SVM classifier. Consequently, texture and morphological features are efficiently combined. Comprehensive experimental analyses are presented, and the proposed method obtains a 91.11% accuracy, a 94.34% sensitivity, and an 86.49% specificity, which outperforms many related benign and malignant breast tumor classification methods.
Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Data of World Cup Soccer Tournament Using Machine Learning

In the derived approach, an analysis is performed on Twitter data for World Cup soccer 2014 held in Brazil to detect the sentiment of the people throughout the world using machine learning techniques. By filtering and analyzing the data using natural language processing techniques, sentiment polarity was calculated based on the emotion words detected in the user tweets. The dataset is normalized to be used by machine learning algorithms and prepared using natural language processing techniques like word tokenization, stemming and lemmatization, part-of-speech (POS) tagger, name entity recognition (NER), and parser to extract emotions for the textual data from each tweet. This approach is implemented using Python programming language and Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). A derived algorithm extracts emotional words using WordNet with its POS (part-of-speech) for the word in a sentence that has a meaning in the current context, and is assigned sentiment polarity using the SentiWordNet dictionary or using a lexicon-based method. The resultant polarity assigned is further analyzed using naïve Bayes, support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), and random forest machine learning algorithms and visualized on the Weka platform. Naïve Bayes gives the best accuracy of 88.17% whereas random forest gives the best area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) of 0.97.
Localization and recognition of leukocytes in peripheral blood: A deep learning approach

Automatic recognition and classification of leukocytes helps medical practitioners to diagnose various blood-related diseases by analysing their percentages. Different researchers have come up with different algorithms that use traditional learning for the classification of different types of leukocytes. In contrast to traditional learning, in which no knowledge is retained that can be transferred from one model to another, our proposed algorithm uses deep learning approach for segmentation and classification. The proposed algorithm has two-stage pipelining consisting of semantic segmentation and transfer learning-based classification. Here, we have used pre-trained networks, utilizing knowledge from previously learned tasks, called DeepLabv3+ for segmentation of leukocytes and AlexNet to classify five categories of leukocytes in peripheral blood from whole blood smear microscopic images. For experimentation, a microscopic blood image dataset consisting of 257 cells belonging to five types of leukocytes was used. The results obtained from experiments show that the proposed algorithm attained a mean average precision of 98.42% (@IoU = 0.7) in white blood cell localization and a classification accuracy of 98.87 ± 1% compared to existing methods.
HOT-Net: Non-Autoregressive Transformer for 3D Hand-Object Pose Estimation

As we use our hands frequently in daily activities, the analysis of hand-object interactions plays a critical role to many multimedia understanding and interaction applications. Different from conventional 3D hand-only and object-only pose estimation, estimating 3D hand-object pose is more challenging due to the mutual occlusions between hand and object, as well as the physical constraints between them. To overcome these issues, we propose to fully utilize the structural correlations among hand joints and object corners in order to obtain more reliable poses. Our work is inspired by structured output learning models in sequence transduction field like Transformer encoder-decoder framework. Besides modeling inherent dependencies from extracted 2D hand-object pose, our proposed Hand-Object Transformer Network (HOT-Net) also captures the structural correlations among 3D hand joints and object corners. Similar to Transformer's autoregressive decoder, by considering structured output patterns, this helps better constrain the output space and leads to more robust pose estimation. However, different from Transformer's sequential modeling mechanism, HOT-Net adopts a novel non-autoregressive decoding strategy for 3D hand-object pose estimation. Specifically, our model removes the Transformer's dependence on previously generated results and explicitly feeds a reference 3D hand-object pose into the decoding process to provide equivalent target pose patterns for parallely localizing each 3D keypoint. To further improve physical validity of estimated hand pose, besides anatomical constraints, we propose a cooperative pose constraint, aiming to enable the hand pose to cooperate with hand shape, to generate hand mesh. We demonstrate real-time speed and state-of-the-art performance on benchmark hand-object datasets for both 3D hand and object poses.