Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Self-Learning Super-Resolution Using Convolutional Principal Component Analysis and Random Matching

Self-learning super-resolution (SLSR) algorithms have the advantage of being independent of an external training database. This paper proposes an SLSR algorithm that uses convolutional principal component analysis (CPCA) and random matching. The technologies of CPCA and random matching greatly improve the efficiency of self-learning. There are two main steps in this algorithm: forming the training and testing the data sets and patch matching. In the data set forming step, we propose the CPCA to extract the low-dimensional features of the data set. The CPCA uses a convolutional method to quickly extract the principal component analysis (PCA) features of each image patch in every training and testing image. In the patch matching step, we propose a two-step random oscillation accompanied with propagation to accelerate the matching process. This patch matching method avoids exhaustive searching by utilizing the local similarity prior of natural images. The two-step random oscillation first performs a coarse patch matching using the variance feature and then performs a detailed matching using the PCA feature, which is useful to find reliable matching patches. The propagation strategy enables patches to propagate the good matching patches to their neighbors. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a substantially lower time cost than that of many existing self-learning algorithms, leading to better reconstruction quality.
Split Bregman method based level set formulations for segmentation and correction with application to MR images and color images

At present, magnetic resonance (MR) images have gradually become a major aid for clinical medicine, which has greatly improved the doctor's diagnosis rate. Accurate and fast segmentation of MR images plays an extremely important role in medical research. However, due to the influence of external factors and the defects of imaging devices, the MR images have severe intensity inhomogeneity, which poses a great challenge to accurately segment MR images. To deal with this problem, this paper presents an improved active contour model by combining the level set evolution model (LSE) and the split Bregman method, and gives the two-phase, the multi-phase and the vector-valued formulations of our model, respectively. The use of the split Bregman method accelerates the minimization process of our model by reducing the computation time and iterative times. A slowly varying bias field is added into the energy functional, which is the key to correct inhomogeneous images. By estimating the bias fields, not only can we get accurate image segmentation results, but also a homogeneous image after correction is provided. Then we apply our model to segment a large amount of synthetic and real MR images, including gray and color images. Experimental results show that our model can provide satisfactory segmentation and correction results for both gray and color images. Besides, compared with the LSE model, our model has higher accuracy and is superior to the LSE model. In addition, experimental results also demonstrate that our model has the advantages of being insensitive to initial contours and robust to noises.
Quantile mechanics: Issues arising from critical review

Approximations are the alternative way of obtaining the Quantile function when the inversion method cannot be applied to distributions whose cumulative distribution functions do not have close form expressions.Approximations come in form of functional approximation, numerical algorithm, closed form expressed in terms of others and series expansions.Several quantile approximations are available which have been proven to be precise, but some issues like the presence of shape parameters, inapplicability of existing methods to complex distributions and low computational speed and accuracy place undue limitations to their effective use.Quantile mechanics (QM) is a series expansion method that addressed these issues as evidenced in the paper.Quantile mechanics is a generalization of the use of ordinary differential equations (ODE) in quantile approximation.The paper is a review that critically examined with evidences; the formulation, applications and advantages of QM over other surveyed methods.Some issues bothering on the use of QM were also discussed.The review concluded with areas of further studies which are open for scientific investigation and exploration.
Weighted-l1-method-noise regularization for image deblurring

Various image prior based regularization techniques have been proposed for image deblurring. By utilizing existing image smoothing operators, the method-noise provides a new way to formulate image regularizers. The method noise is defined as the difference of an image and its smoothed version, obtained by an image smoothing operator such as the non-local means(NLM). Therefore, the method noise mainly contains edges, small scaled details and noise (if exists). The l2-NLM method noise regularization has been successfully used in image denoising. However, the restored image exists over-smoothed edges and noise in smooth areas cannot be perfectly removed. In this work, we propose a weighted-l1-method-noise regularization model for image deblurring. We analyze the advantages of the proposed model in terms of variational form and its solution. Specifically, the l1 penalty of the method noise is better than the l2 penalty in removing noise in smooth areas. The incorporated gradient based weight can better preserve image edges. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain better results than other method noise based regularization methods.
Psychophysical evaluation of individual low-level feature influences on visual attention

In this study we provide the analysis of eye movement behavior elicited by low-level feature distinctiveness with a dataset of synthetically-generated image patterns. Design of visual stimuli was inspired by the ones used in previous psychophysical experiments, namely in free-viewing and visual searching tasks, to provide a total of 15 types of stimuli, divided according to the task and feature to be analyzed. Our interest is to analyze the influences of low-level feature contrast between a salient region and the rest of distractors, providing fixation localization characteristics and reaction time of landing inside the salient region. Eye-tracking data was collected from 34 participants during the viewing of a 230 images dataset. Results show that saliency is predominantly and distinctively influenced by: 1. feature type, 2. feature contrast, 3. temporality of fixations, 4. task difficulty and 5. center bias. This experimentation proposes a new psychophysical basis for saliency model evaluation using synthetic images.
Optimal realistic attacks in continuous-variable quantum key distribution

Quantum cryptographic protocols are typically analyzed by assuming that potential opponents can carry out all physical operations, an assumption which grants capabilities far in excess of present technology. Adjusting this assumption to reflect more realistic capabilities is an attractive prospect, but one that can only be justified with a rigorous, quantitative framework that relates adversarial restrictions to the protocol's security and performance. We investigate the effect of limitations on the eavesdropper's (Eve's) ability to make a coherent attack on the security of continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD). We consider a realistic attack in which the total decoherence induced during the attack is modeled by a Gaussian channel. Based on our decoherence model, we propose an optimal hybrid attack, which allows Eve to perform a combination of both coherent and individual attacks simultaneously. We evaluate the asymptotic and composable finite-size security of a heterodyne CV-QKD protocol against such hybrid attacks in terms of Eve's decoherence. We show that when the decoherence is greater than a threshold value, Eve's most effective strategy is reduced to the individual attack. Thus, if we are willing to assume that the decoherence caused by the memory and the collective measurement is large enough, it is sufficient to analyze the security of the protocol only against individual attacks, which significantly improves the CV-QKD performance in terms of both the key rate and maximum secure transmission distance.
Scaling-up in-memory datalog processing

Recursive query processing has experienced a recent resurgence, as a result of its use in many modern application domains, including data integration, graph analytics, security, program analysis, networking and decision making. Due to the large volumes of data being processed, several research efforts across multiple communities have explored how to scale up recursive queries, typically expressed in Datalog. Our experience with these tools indicate that their performance does not translate across domains---e.g., a tool designed for large-scale graph analytics does not exhibit the same performance on program-analysis tasks, and vice versa. Starting from the above observation, we make the following two contributions. First, we perform a detailed experimental evaluation comparing a number of state-of-the-art Datalog systems on a wide spectrum of graph analytics and program-analysis tasks, and summarize the pros and cons of existing techniques. Second, we design and implement our own general-purpose Datalog engine, called RecStep, on top of a parallel single-node relational system. We outline the techniques we applied on RecStep, as well as the contribution of each technique to the overall performance. Using RecStep as a baseline, we demonstrate that it generally out-performs state-of-the-art parallel Datalog engines on complex and large-scale Datalog evaluation, by a 4-6X margin. An additional insight from our work is that it is possible to build a high-performance Datalog system on top of a relational engine, an idea that has been dismissed in past work.
Distributional Semantics Meets Multi-Label Learning

We present a label embedding based approach to large-scale multi-label learning, drawing inspiration from ideas rooted in distributional semantics, specifically the Skip Gram Negative Sampling (SGNS) approach, widely used to learn word embeddings. Besides leading to a highly scalable model for multi-label learning, our approach highlights interesting connections between label embedding methods commonly used for multi-label learning and paragraph embedding methods commonly used for learning representations of text data. The framework easily extends to incorporating auxiliary information such as label-label correlations; this is crucial especially when many training instances are only partially annotated. To facilitate end-to-end learning, we develop a joint learning algorithm that can learn the embeddings as well as a regression model that predicts these embeddings for the new input to be annotated, via efficient gradient based methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through an extensive set of experiments on a variety of benchmark datasets, and show that the proposed models perform favorably as compared to state-of-the-art methods for large-scale multi-label learning.
Scene-Awareness Based Single Image Dehazing Technique via Automatic Estimation of Sky Area

The occurrence of fog, mist, smog, or haze significantly reduces the visibility of the scenes and images, resulting in limited recognition of computer vision and computer graphics. So, removing haze from images is a must. In this paper, we regard image dehazing as a mathematical inversion process and image restoration based on atmospheric scattering models. The atmospheric light can be accurately estimated by combining the gray threshold segmentation and the skyline method. The improved least squares filtering method is used to optimize the transmittance map so that the edge details can be highlighted and the halo effect can be alleviated. A large number of test images show that our algorithm can achieve better experimental results than the other seven most advanced dehazing strategies.
CAMO: A Collaborative Ranking Method for Content Based Recommendation

In real-world recommendation tasks, feedback data are usually sparse. Therefore, a recommender’s performance is often determined by how much information that it can extract from textual contents. However, current methods do not make full use of the semantic information. They encode the textual contents either by “bag-of-words” technique or Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The former neglects the order of words while the latter ignores the fact that textual contents can contain multiple topics. Besides, there exists a dilemma in designing a recommender. On the one hand, we shall use a sophisticated model to exploit every drop of information in item contents; on the other hand, we shall adopt a simple model to prevent itself from over-fitting when facing the sparse feedbacks. To fill the gaps, we propose a recommender named CAMO 1. CAMO employs a multi-layer content encoder for simultaneously capturing the semantic information of multitopic and word order. Moreover, CAMO makes use of adversarial training to prevent the complex encoder from overfitting. Extensive empirical studies show that CAMO outperforms state-of-the-art methods in predicting users’ preferences.
Connecting Language to Images: A Progressive Attention-Guided Network for Simultaneous Image Captioning and Language Grounding

Image captioning and visual language grounding are two important tasks for image understanding, but are seldom considered together. In this paper, we propose a Progressive Attention-Guided Network (PAGNet), which simultaneously generates image captions and predicts bounding boxes for caption words. PAGNet mainly has two distinctive properties: i) It can progressively refine the predictive results of image captioning, by updating the attention map with the predicted bounding boxes. ii) It learns bounding boxes of the words using a weakly supervised strategy, which combines the frameworks of Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) and Markov Decision Process (MDP). By using the attention map generated in the captioning process, PAGNet significantly reduces the search space of the MDP. We conduct experiments on benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of PAGNet and results show that PAGNet achieves the best performance.
Distributed fusion for nonlinear uncertain systems with multiplicative parameters and random delay

This paper proposes an information filtering-based distributed fusion for nonlinear uncertain systems with multiplicative random parameters and randomly delayed measurements in sensor networks. This is a typical nonlinear and non-Gaussian stochastic system with multiple uncertainties including nonlinearity, multiplicative random parameters and random delay, along with additive noises. In the criterion of minimizing the mean square error of state estimate, the centralized information-type filter via Gaussian mixture realization is put forward, by applying statistical linear regression to nonlinear measurement models to reconstruct a new and equivalent one with the linear form. Then, the distributed implementation is designed via average consensus with the corresponding weight of each component being updated distributively, in order to ensure that the Gaussian mixture distribution of the posterior probability density in each processing unit asymptotically approximates the corresponding one in the centralized fusion as closely as possible. Meanwhile, the d-step lag state smoothing is obtained to further improve the estimation precision, in terms of the proposed filtering method. An example with multiplicative random parameters and one-step/two-step random delay in the distributed processing network is simulated to validate the proposed method.
Single image super-resolution based on adaptive convolutional sparse coding and convolutional neural networks

The convolutional sparse coding-based super-resolution (CSC-SR) method has shown its good performance in single image super-resolution. It divides the low-resolution (LR) image into low-frequency part and the high-frequency part, and reconstructs their corresponding high-resolution (HR) image with bicubic interpolation and convolutional sparse coding (CSC) method, respectively. This paper is devoted to improve the performance of CSC-SR method. As convolutional neural network (CNN) can reveal the mapping relation between the LR image and the HR image for the low-frequency part better, we replace the bicubic interpolation with CNN to reconstruct the HR image for the low-frequency part. In addition, we propose an adaptive CSC method to reconstruct the HR image for the high-frequency part. We name our proposed super-resolution method as hybrid adaptive convolutional sparse coding-based super-resolution (HACSC-SR) method. Many comparison experiments illustrate that our proposed HACSC-SR method is superior to CSC-SR, CNN as well as several existing super-resolution methods.
<b>GaussianProcesses.jl</b>: A Nonparametric Bayes Package for the <i>Julia</i> Language

Gaussian processes are a class of flexible nonparametric Bayesian tools that are widely used across the sciences, and in industry, to model complex data sources. Key to applying Gaussian process models is the availability of well-developed open source software, which is available in many programming languages. In this paper, we present a tutorial of the GaussianProcesses.jl package that has been developed for the Julia programming language. GaussianProcesses.jl utilizes the inherent computational benefits of the Julia language, including multiple dispatch and just-in-time compilation, to produce a fast, flexible and user-friendly Gaussian processes package. The package provides many mean and kernel functions with supporting inference tools to fit exact Gaussian process models, as well as a range of alternative likelihood functions to handle non-Gaussian data (e.g., binary classification models) and sparse approximations for scalable Gaussian processes. The package makes efficient use of existing Julia packages to provide users with a range of optimization and plotting tools.
Joint Correlation Filtering for Visual Tracking

Correlation filtering-based visual tracking has achieved impressive success in terms of both tracking accuracy and computational efficiency. In this paper, a novel correlation filtering approach is proposed by means of joint learning to bridge the gap between the circulant filtering and the classical filtering methods. The circulant structure of tracking and the information from successive frames are simultaneously exploited in the proposed work. A new formulation for the correlation filter learning is proposed to enhance the discrimination of the learned filter by integrating both the kernel and the image feature domains. The proposed approach is computationally efficient since a closed-form solution is derived for the new formulation. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular tracking benchmarks, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed tracker outperforms most of the state-of-the-art trackers.
Fingereye: improvising security and optimizing ATM transaction time based on iris-scan authentication

The tumultuous increase in ATM attacks using eavesdropping, shoulder-surfing, has risen great concerns. Attackers often target the authentication stage where a customer may be entering his login information on the ATM and thus use direct observation techniques by looking over the customer's shoulder to steal his passwords. Existing authentication mechanism employs the traditional password-based authentication system which fails to curb these attacks. This paper addresses this problem using the FingerEye. The FingerEye is a robust system integrated with iris-scan authentication. A customer’s profile is created at registration where the pattern in his iris is analyzed and converted into binary codes. The binary codes are then stored in the bank database and are required for verification prior to any transaction. We leverage on the iris because every user has unique eyes which do not change until death and even a blind person with iris can be authenticated too. We implemented and tested the proposed system using CIMB bank, Malaysia as case study. The FingerEye is integrated with the current infrastructure employed by the bank and as such, no extra cost was incurred. Our result demonstrates that ATM attacks become impractical. Moreover, transactions were executed faster from 6.5 seconds to 1.4 seconds.
Providing Bandwidth Guarantees, Work Conservation and Low Latency Simultaneously in the Cloud

Today's cloud is shared among multiple tenants running different applications, and a desirable multi-tenant datacenter network infrastructure should provide bandwidth guarantees for throughput-intensive applications, low latency for latency-sensitive short messages, as well as work conservation to fully utilize the network bandwidth. Despite significant efforts in recent years, none of them can achieve these three properties simultaneously. In this paper, we identify the key deficiency of prior solutions and use this insight to motivate our design of Trinity-a simple, practical yet effective solution that achieves bandwidth guarantees, work conservation and low latency simultaneously in the cloud. We implement Trinity using existing commodity hardwares and demonstrate its superior performance over prior solutions using testbed experiments.
Multiview discriminative marginal metric learning for makeup face verification

Makeup face verification in the wild is an important research problem for its popularization in real-world. However, little effort has been made to tackle it in computer vision. In this research, we first build a new database, i.e., Facial Beauty Database (FBD), which contains paired facial images of 8933 subjects without and with makeup in different real-world scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, FBD is the largest makeup face database to date compared with existing databases for facial makeup research. Moreover, we propose a new discriminative marginal metric learning (DMML) algorithm to deal with this problem in the wild. Inspired by the fact that interclass marginal faces are usually more discriminative than interclass nonmarginal faces in learning the discriminative metric space, we use the interclass marginal faces to depict the discriminative information. Simultaneously, we wish that those interclass marginal faces without makeup relations are separated from each other as far as possible, so that more discriminative information between facial images without and with makeup can be exploited for verification. Furthermore, since multiple features could provide comprehensive information in describing the facial representations from diverse points of view and extract more informative cues from facial images, we also introduce a multiview discriminative marginal metric learning (MDMML) algorithm by effectively learning a robust metric space such that multiple features from different points of view can be integrated to effectively enhance the performance of makeup face verification. Experimental results on two real-world makeup face databases are utilized to show the effectiveness of our method and the possibility of verifying the makeup relations from facial images in real-world.