Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Anomaly Based Sea-Surface Small Target Detection Using K-Nearest Neighbor Classification

Sea-surface small target detection is always a difficult problem in high-resolution maritime ubiquitous radars for complex characteristics of sea clutter, weak target returns, and diversity of targets. Multiple features extracted from radar returns in different domains have ability but not enough to solely distinguish radar returns with target from sea clutter. Joint exploitation of multiple features becomes the key to improve detection performance. In this article, the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm and anomaly detection idea are cooperated to develop a novel sea-surface target detection method in the feature space spanned by the eight existing salient features. The detection is realized by the anomaly detection followed by a specially designed KNN-based classifier with a controllable false alarm rate. In the anomaly detection, a decision region is determined by the hyper-spherical coverage of the training set of sea clutter that is sufficient and ergodic in the feature space. The KNN-based classifier is designed based on the training sample set of sea clutter and the training sample set of simulated target returns plus sea clutter that is sufficient but nonergodic, by joint usage of feature weighting, neighbor weighting, and distance weighting. The novel method is validated by the two open and recognized IPIX and CSIR radar databases for sea-surface small target detection. The results show that it provides significant performance improvement in comparison with the existing multiple-feature-based detection methods, owing to the fact that the novel method avoids the dimension restriction and feature compression loss in the existing methods.
A Multi-Task Collaborative Network for Light Field Salient Object Detection

Being able to predict the salient object is of fundamental importance in image processing and computer vision. With numerous approaches proposed for automatic image and video salient object detection, much less work has been dedicated to detecting and segmenting salient objects from light fields. In this article, based on the intrinsic characteristics of light fields, we carefully explore the complementary coherence among multiple cues including spatial, edge and depth information, and elaborately design a multi-task collaborative network for light field salient object detection. More specifically, the correlation mechanisms among edge detection, depth inference and salient object detection are carefully investigated to facilitate the representative saliency features. We first model the coherence among low-level features and heuristic semantic priors, as well as the edge information. Subsequently, the depth-oriented saliency features are derived from the geometry of light fields, in which the 3D convolution operation is leveraged with powerful representation capability to model the disparity correlations among multiple viewpoint images. Finally, a feature-enhanced salient object generator is developed to integrate these complementary saliency features, leading to the final salient object predictions for light fields. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model against the state-of-the-art methods over the public light field salient object detection datasets.
Trustworthy AI in the Age of Pervasive Computing and Big Data

The era of pervasive computing has resulted in countless devices that continuously monitor users and their environment, generating an abundance of user behavioural data. Such data may support improving the quality of service, but may also lead to adverse usages such as surveillance and advertisement. In parallel, Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are being applied to sensitive fields such as healthcare, justice, or human resources, raising multiple concerns on the trustworthiness of such systems. Trust in AI systems is thus intrinsically linked to ethics, including the ethics of algorithms, the ethics of data, or the ethics of practice. In this paper, we formalise the requirements of trustworthy AI systems through an ethics perspective. We specifically focus on the aspects that can be integrated into the design and development of AI systems. After discussing the state of research and the remaining challenges, we show how a concrete use-case in smart cities can benefit from these methods.
Privacy Risk Awareness in Wearables and the Internet of Things

Day to day interactions with wearable and pervasive systems lead to collected data that capture various aspects of human behavior and enable machine learning algorithms to extract extensive information about users. We discuss privacy risk awareness, and ways to preserve privacy and integrate it in current frameworks.
Crowd Counting via Segmentation Guided Attention Networks and Curriculum Loss

Automatic crowd behaviour analysis is an important task for intelligent transportation systems to enable effective flow control and dynamic route planning for varying road participants. Crowd counting is one of the keys to automatic crowd behaviour analysis. Crowd counting using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) has achieved encouraging progress in recent years. Researchers have devoted much effort to the design of variant CNN architectures and most of them are based on the pre-trained VGG16 model. Due to the insufficient expressive capacity, the backbone network of VGG16 is usually followed by another cumbersome network specially designed for good counting performance. Although VGG models have been outperformed by Inception models in image classification tasks, the existing crowd counting networks built with Inception modules still only have a small number of layers with basic types of Inception modules. To fill in this gap, in this paper, we firstly benchmark the baseline Inception-v3 model on commonly used crowd counting datasets and achieve surprisingly good performance comparable with or better than most existing crowd counting models. Subsequently, we push the boundary of this disruptive work further by proposing a Segmentation Guided Attention Network (SGANet) with Inception-v3 as the backbone and a novel curriculum loss for crowd counting. We conduct thorough experiments to compare the performance of our SGANet with prior arts and the proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art performance with MAE of 57.6, 6.3 and 87.6 on ShanghaiTechA, ShanghaiTechB and UCF_QNRF, respectively.
Data Encryption for Internet of Things Applications Based on Catalan Objects and Two Combinatorial Structures

This article presents a novel data encryption technique suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The cryptosystem is based on the application of a Catalan object (as a cryptographic key) that provides encryption based on combinatorial structures with noncrossing or nonnested matching. The experimental part of this article includes a comparative analysis of the proposed encryption method with the Catalan numbers and data encryption standard (DES) algorithm, which is performed with machine learning-based identification of the encryption method using ciphertext only. These tests showed that it is much more difficult to recognize ciphertext generated with the Catalan method than one made with the DES algorithm. System reliability depends on the quality of the key, therefore, statistical testing proposed by National Institute of Standards and Technology was also performed. Twelve standard tests, the approximate entropy measurement, and random digression complexity analysis are applied in order to evaluate the quality of the generated Catalan key. A proposal for applying this method in e-Health IoT is also given. Possibilities of applying this method in the IoT applications for smart cities data storage and processing are provided.
Interaction and collaboration in robot-assisted language learning for adults

This article analyses how robot–learner interaction in robot-assisted language learning (RALL) is influenced by the interaction behaviour of the robot. Since the robot behaviour is to a large extent determined by the combination of teaching strategy, robot role and robot type, previous studies in RALL are first summarised with respect to which combinations that have been chosen, the rationale behind the choice and the effects on interaction and learning. The goal of the summary is to determine a suitable pedagogical set-up for RALL with adult learners, since previous RALL studies have almost exclusively been performed with children and youths. A user study in which 33 adult second language learners practice Swedish in three-party conversations with an anthropomorphic robot head is then presented. It is demonstrated how different robot interaction behaviours influence interaction between the robot and the learners and between the two learners. Through an analysis of learner interaction, collaboration and learner ratings for the different robot behaviours, it is observed that the learners were most positive towards the robot behaviour that focused on interviewing one learner at the time (highest average ratings), but that they were the most active in sessions when the robot encouraged learner–learner interaction. Moreover, the preferences and activity differed between learner pairs, depending on, e.g., their proficiency level and how well they knew the peer. It is therefore concluded that the robot behaviour needs to adapt to such factors. In addition, collaboration with the peer played an important part in conversation practice sessions to deal with linguistic difficulties or communication problems with the robot.
The eyes have it

Interacting with people across large distances is important for remote work, interpersonal relationships, and entertainment. While such face-to-face interactions can be achieved using 2D video conferencing or, more recently, virtual reality (VR), telepresence systems currently distort the communication of eye contact and social gaze signals. Although methods have been proposed to redirect gaze in 2D teleconferencing situations to enable eye contact, 2D video conferencing lacks the 3D immersion of real life. To address these problems, we develop a system for face-to-face interaction in VR that focuses on reproducing photorealistic gaze and eye contact. To do this, we create a 3D virtual avatar model that can be animated by cameras mounted on a VR headset to accurately track and reproduce human gaze in VR. Our primary contributions in this work are a jointly-learnable 3D face and eyeball model that better represents gaze direction and upper facial expressions, a method for disentangling the gaze of the left and right eyes from each other and the rest of the face allowing the model to represent entirely unseen combinations of gaze and expression, and a gaze-aware model for precise animation from headset-mounted cameras. Our quantitative experiments show that our method results in higher reconstruction quality, and qualitative results show our method gives a greatly improved sense of presence for VR avatars.
Adaptive Square Attack: Fooling Autonomous Cars With Adversarial Traffic Signs

To better understand the road condition and make correct driving decisions, traffic sign recognition becomes a crucial component commonly equipped in the vision system of modern autonomous cars. The state-of-the-art traffic sign recognition models are designed with the backbones of deep neural networks (DNNs) since DNNs are powerful to extract more effective visual features that benefit recognition performance. As the recent studies on adversarial attacks have shown that DNNs are easy to be fooled by perturbed images and lead to misclassification, in this article, we explore the vulnerability of the DNN-based traffic sign recognition model. Most existing adversarial attack methods limitedly focus on the white-box attack on the recognition models whose underlying configurations (e.g., network architectures and parameters) are accessible. Differently, we propose a novel attacking method dubbed adaptive square attack (ASA) that can accomplish the black-box attack, i.e., bypassing the access the configurations of the recognition models. Specifically, the proposed ASA method employs an efficient sampling strategy that can generate perturbations for traffic sign images with fewer query times. Extensive experiments on the benchmark data set German traffic sign recognition benchmark with large-scale traffic sign images for autonomous cars show that our proposed ASA method is advanced to perform the black-box attack with high efficiency. Although the generated adversarial traffic sign images by the proposed ASA method are visually similar to the raw images with almost imperceptible differences, they can successfully lead to the misclassification of the state-of-the-art recognition model.
A Novel Multi-Branch Channel Expansion Network for Garbage Image Classification

Due to the lack of data available for training, deep learning hardly performed well in the field of garbage image classification.We choose the TrashNet data set which is widely used in the field of garbage image classification, and try to overcome data deficiencies in this field by optimizing the network structure.In this article, it is found that the deeper network and short-circuit connection, which are generally accepted in the field of deep learning, will not work well on the TrashNet data set.By analyzing and modifying the network structure, we propose an effective method to improve the network performance on TrashNet data set.This method widens the network by expanding branches, and then uses add layers to realize the fusion of feature information.It can make full use of feature information at slight additional computational cost.Using this method to replace the core structure of the Xception network, the performance of the improved network has been improved greatly.Finally, the M-b Xception network proposed by us achieves 94.34% classification accuracy on the TrashNet data set, and has certain advantages over some state-of-the-art methods on multiple indicators.
Experimental realization of controlled quantum teleportation of arbitrary qubit states via cluster states

Abstract Controlled quantum teleportation involves a third party as a controller for the teleportation of state. Here, we present the novel protocols for controlling teleportation of the arbitrary two-qubit and three-qubit states through five-qubit and seven-qubit cluster states respectively. In these schemes, Alice sends the arbitrary qubit states to the remote receiver Bob through the cluster states as quantum channels under the control of Charlie. Bob can recover the mentioned states by making appropriate unitary operations, and we point out that the efficiency in our schemes is 100%. In the process of our analysis, we find the classical communication cost in our protocols is remarkably reduced when compared to the previous protocols. We perform the experimental realization of the above protocols on “IBM 16 Melbourne” quantum computer and “IBM quantum simulator” and we calculate the fidelity. We also examine the security analysis against Charlie, and these schemes which we considered here are secure against Charlie’s attacks.
LayerChain: A Hierarchical Edge-Cloud Blockchain for Large-Scale Low-Delay Industrial Internet of Things Applications

The combination of pervasive edge computing and blockchain technologies opens up significant possibilities for industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, but there are several critical limitations regarding efficient storage and rapid response for large-scale low-delay IIoT scenarios. To address these limitations, in this article we propose a hierarchical edge-cloud blockchain called LayerChain. Specifically, to promote scalability, we design a layered structure to hierarchically store the blockchain data in multiple distributed clouds and edge nodes. Next, we propose a node classification method to accommodate differences between the edge nodes when deploying the blockchain. Moreover, to mitigate lengthy delays during block propagation, we propose a tree-based clustering algorithm where blocks are propagated through different clusters with a compressed tree depth. Simulation results show that our LayerChain efficiently reduces the system's resource requirements and block propagation time, making it well-suited for large-scale low-delay IIoT applications.
Pilot Pattern Design for Deep Learning-Based Channel Estimation in OFDM Systems

In this letter, we present a downlink pilot design scheme for Deep Learning (DL) based channel estimation (ChannelNet) in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Specifically, in the proposed scheme, a feature selection method named Concrete Autoencoder (ConcreteAE) is used to find the most informative locations for pilot transmission. This autoencoder consists of a concrete layer as the encoder and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) as the decoder. During the training, the concrete layer selects the most informative pilot locations, and the decoder reconstructs an approximate estimation of the channel. Eventually, the ChannelNet is trained on the output of the ConcreteAE aiming to reconstruct the ideal channel response. The estimation error results show that this approach outperforms the previously presented ChannelNet with a uniformly distributed pilot pattern, and its performance is comparable to the minimum mean square error (MMSE).
Efficient Projected Frame Padding for Video-Based Point Cloud Compression

The state-of-the-art 2D-based dynamic point cloud (DPC) compression algorithm is the video-based point cloud compression (V-PCC) developed by the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG). It first projects the DPC patch by patch from 3D to 2D and organizes the projected patches into a video. The video is then efficiently compressed by High Efficiency Video Coding. However, there are many unoccupied pixels that may have a significant influence on the coding efficiency. These unoccupied pixels are currently padded using either the average of 4-neighbors for the geometry or the push-pull algorithm for the color attribute. While these algorithms are simple, the unoccupied pixels are not handled in the most efficient way. In this paper, we divide the unoccupied pixels into two groups: those that should be occupied and those that should not be occupied according to the occupancy map. We then design padding algorithms tailored to each group to improve the rate-distortion performance of the V-PCC reference software, for both the geometry and the color attribute. The first group is the unoccupied pixels that should be occupied according to the block-based occupancy map. We attempt to pad those pixels using the real points in the original DPC to improve the quality of the reconstructed DPC. Additionally, we attempt to maintain the smoothness of each block so as not to negatively influence the video compression efficiency. The second group is the unoccupied pixels that were correctly identified as unoccupied according to the block-based occupancy map. These pixels are useless for improving the reconstructed quality of the DPC. Therefore, we attempt to minimize the bit cost of these pixels without considering their reconstruction qualities. The bit cost is determined by the residue of these pixels obtained by subtracting the prediction pixels from the original pixels. Therefore, we propose padding the residue using the average residue of the occupied pixels in order to minimize the bit cost. The proposed algorithms are implemented in the V-PCC and the corresponding HEVC reference software. The experimental results show the proposed algorithms can bring significant bitrate savings compared with the V-PCC.
An incremental density-based clustering framework using fuzzy local clustering

This paper presents a novel incremental density-based clustering framework using the one-pass scheme, named Fuzzy Incremental Density-based Clustering (FIDC). Employing one-pass clustering in which each data point is processed once and discarded, FIDC can process large datasets with less computation time and memory, compared to its density-based clustering counterparts. Fuzzy local clustering is employed in local clusters assignment process to reduce clustering inconsistencies from one-pass clustering. To improve the clustering performance and simplify the parameter choosing process, the modified valley seeking algorithm is used to adaptively determine the outlier thresholds for generating the final clusters. FIDC can operate in both traditional and stream data clustering. The experimental results show that FIDC outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in both clustering modes.
Multi-objective ensembles of echo state networks and extreme learning machines for streamflow series forecasting

Streamflow series forecasting composes a fundamental step in planning electric energy production for hydroelectric plants. In Brazil, such plants produce almost 70% of the total energy. Therefore, it is of great importance to improve the quality of streamflow series forecasting by investigating state-of-the-art time series forecasting algorithms. To this end, this work proposes the development of ensembles of unorganized machines, namely Extreme Learning Machines (ELMs) and Echo State Networks (ESNs). Two primary contributions are proposed: (1) a new training logic for ESNs that enables the application of bootstrap aggregation (bagging); and (2) the employment of multi-objective optimization to select and adjust the weights of the ensemble’s base models, taking into account the trade-off between bias and variance. Experiments are conducted on streamflow series data from five real-world Brazilian hydroelectric plants, namely those in Sobradinho, Serra da Mesa, Jiraú, Furnas and Água Vermelha. The statistical results for four different prediction horizons (1, 3, 6, and 12 months ahead) indicate that the ensembles of unorganized machines achieve better results than autoregressive (AR) models in terms of the Nash–Sutcliffe model efficiency coefficient (NSE), root mean squared error (RMSE), coefficient of determination (R2), and RMSE-observations standard deviation ratio (RSR). In such results, the ensembles with ESNs and the multi-objective optimization design procedure achieve the best scores.
A Robust Deep-Learning-Enabled Trust-Boundary Protection for Adversarial Industrial IoT Environment

In recent years, trust-boundary protection has become a challenging problem in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments. Trust boundaries separate IIoT processes and data stores in different groups based on user access privilege. Points where dataflow intersects with the trust boundary are becoming entry points for attackers. Attackers use various model skewing and intelligent techniques to generate adversarial/noisy examples that are indistinguishable from natural data. Many of the existing machine-learning (ML)-based approaches attempt to circumvent this problem. However, owing to an extremely large attack surface in the IIoT network, capturing a true distribution during training is difficult. The standard generative adversarial network (GAN) commonly generates adversarial examples for training using randomly sampled noise. However, the distribution of noisy inputs of GAN largely differs from actual distribution of data in IIoT networks and shows less robustness against adversarial attacks. Therefore, in this article, we propose a downsampler-encoder-based cooperative data generator that is trained using an algorithm to ensure better capture of the actual distribution of attack models for the large IIoT attack surface. The proposed downsampler-based data generator is alternatively updated and verified during training using a deep neural network discriminator to ensure robustness. This guarantees the performance of the generator against input sets with a high noise level at time of training and testing. Various experiments are conducted on a real IIoT testbed data set. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms conventional deep learning and other ML techniques in terms of robustness against adversarial/noisy examples in the IIoT environment.