Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
An Image-Based Benchmark Dataset and a Novel Object Detector for Water Surface Object Detection

Water surface object detection is one of the most significant tasks in autonomous driving and water surface vision applications. To date, existing public large-scale datasets collected from websites do not focus on specific scenarios. As a characteristic of these datasets, the quantity of the images and instances is also still at a low level. To accelerate the development of water surface autonomous driving, this paper proposes a large-scale, high-quality annotated benchmark dataset, named Water Surface Object Detection Dataset (WSODD), to benchmark different water surface object detection algorithms. The proposed dataset consists of 7,467 water surface images in different water environments, climate conditions, and shooting times. In addition, the dataset comprises a total of 14 common object categories and 21,911 instances. Simultaneously, more specific scenarios are focused on in WSODD. In order to find a straightforward architecture to provide good performance on WSODD, a new object detector, named CRB-Net, is proposed to serve as a baseline. In experiments, CRB-Net was compared with 16 state-of-the-art object detection methods and outperformed all of them in terms of detection precision. In this paper, we further discuss the effect of the dataset diversity (e.g., instance size, lighting conditions), training set size, and dataset details (e.g., method of categorization). Cross-dataset validation shows that WSODD significantly outperforms other relevant datasets and that the adaptability of CRB-Net is excellent.
Data fusion and transfer learning empowered granular trust evaluation for Internet of Things

In the Internet of Things (IoT), a huge amount of valuable data is generated by various IoT applications. As the IoT technologies become more complex, the attack methods are more diversified and can cause serious damages. Thus, establishing a secure IoT network based on user trust evaluation to defend against security threats and ensure the reliability of data source of collected data have become urgent issues, in this paper, a Data Fusion and transfer learning empowered granular Trust Evaluation mechanism (DFTE) is proposed to address the above challenges. Specifically, to meet the granularity demands of trust evaluation, time–space empowered fine/coarse grained trust evaluation models are built utilizing deep transfer learning algorithms based on data fusion. Moreover, to prevent privacy leakage and task sabotage, a dynamic reward and punishment mechanism is developed to encourage honest users by dynamically adjusting the scale of reward or punishment and accurately evaluating users’ trusts. The extensive experiments show that: (i) the proposed DFTE achieves high accuracy of trust evaluation under different granular demands through efficient data fusion; (ii) DFTE performs excellently in participation rate and data reliability.
Duo-SegNet: Adversarial Dual-Views for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Segmentation of images is a long-standing challenge in medical AI. This is mainly due to the fact that training a neural network to perform image segmentation requires a significant number of pixel-level annotated data, which is often unavailable. To address this issue, we propose a semi-supervised image segmentation technique based on the concept of multi-view learning. In contrast to the previous art, we introduce an adversarial form of dual-view training and employ a critic to formulate the learning problem in multi-view training as a min-max problem. Thorough quantitative and qualitative evaluations on several datasets, indicate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art medical image segmentation algorithms consistently and comfortably. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/himashi92/Duo-SegNet.
Video Action Understanding

Many believe that the successes of deep learning on image understanding problems can be replicated in the realm of video understanding. However, due to the scale and temporal nature of video, the span of video understanding problems and the set of proposed deep learning solutions is arguably wider and more diverse than those of their 2D image siblings. Finding, identifying, and predicting actions are a few of the most salient tasks in this emerging and rapidly evolving field. With a pedagogical emphasis, this tutorial introduces and systematizes fundamental topics, basic concepts, and notable examples in supervised video action understanding. Specifically, we clarify a taxonomy of action problems, catalog and highlight video datasets, describe common video data preparation methods, present the building blocks of state-of-the art deep learning model architectures, and formalize domain-specific metrics to baseline proposed solutions. This tutorial is intended to be accessible to a general computer science audience and assumes a conceptual understanding of supervised learning.
Robust Watermarking for Deep Neural Networks via Bi-level Optimization

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become state-of-the-art in many application domains. The increasing complexity and cost for building these models demand means for protecting their intellectual property (IP). This paper presents a novel DNN framework that optimizes the robustness of the embedded watermarks. Our method is originated from DNN fault attacks. Different from prior end-to-end DNN watermarking approaches, we only modify a tiny subset of weights to embed the watermark, which also facilities better control of the model behaviors and enables larger rooms for optimizing the robustness of the watermarks.In this paper, built upon the above concept, we pro-pose a bi-level optimization framework where the inner loop phase optimizes the example-level problem to generate robust exemplars, while the outer loop phase proposes a masked adaptive optimization to achieve the robustness of the projected DNN models. Our method alternates the learning of the protected models and watermark exemplars across all phases, where watermark exemplars are not just data samples that could be optimized and adjusted instead. We verify the performance of the proposed methods over a wide range of datasets and DNN architectures. Various transformation attacks including fine-tuning, pruning and overwriting are used to evaluate the robustness.
Seeing Dynamic Scene in the Dark: A High-Quality Video Dataset with Mechatronic Alignment

Low-light video enhancement is an important task. Previous work is mostly trained on paired static images or videos. We compile a new dataset formed by our new strategy that contains high-quality spatially-aligned video pairs from dynamic scenes in low- and normal-light conditions. We built it using a mechatronic system to precisely control the dynamics during the video capture process, and further align the video pairs, both spatially and temporally, by identifying the system’s uniform motion stage. Besides the dataset, we propose an end-to-end framework, in which we design a self-supervised strategy to reduce noise, while enhancing the illumination based on the Retinex theory. Extensive experiments based on various metrics and large-scale user study demonstrate the value of our dataset and effectiveness of our method. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/SDSD.
BiaSwap: Removing Dataset Bias with Bias-Tailored Swapping Augmentation

Deep neural networks often make decisions based on the spurious correlations inherent in the dataset, failing to generalize in an unbiased data distribution. Although previous approaches pre-define the type of dataset bias to prevent the network from learning it, recognizing the bias type in the real dataset is often prohibitive. This paper proposes a novel bias-tailored augmentation-based approach, BiaSwap, for learning debiased representation without requiring supervision on the bias type. Assuming that the bias corresponds to the easy-to-learn attributes, we sort the training images based on how much a biased classifier can exploits them as shortcut and divide them into bias-guiding and bias-contrary samples in an unsupervised manner. Afterwards, we integrate the style-transferring module of the image translation model with the class activation maps of such biased classifier, which enables to primarily transfer the bias attributes learned by the classifier. Therefore, given the pair of bias-guiding and bias-contrary, BiaSwap generates the bias-swapped image which contains the bias attributes from the bias-contrary images, while preserving bias-irrelevant ones in the bias-guiding images. Given such augmented images, BiaSwap demonstrates the superiority in debiasing against the existing baselines over both synthetic and real-world datasets. Even without careful supervision on the bias, BiaSwap achieves a remarkable performance on both unbiased and bias-guiding samples, implying the improved generalization capability of the model.
Smart Supply Chain Management Using the Blockchain and Smart Contract

The manufacture of raw materials to deliver the product to the consumer in a traditional supply chain system is a manual process with insufficient data and transaction security. It also takes a significant amount of time, making the entire procedure lengthy. Overall, the undivided process is ineffective and untrustworthy for consumers. If blockchain and smart contract technologies are integrated into traditional supply chain management systems, data security, authenticity, time management, and transaction processes will all be significantly improved. Blockchain is a revolutionary, decentralized technology that protects data from unauthorized access. The entire supply chain management (SCM) will be satisfied with the consumer once smart contracts are implemented. The plan becomes more trustworthy when the mediator is contracted, which is doable in these ways. The tags employed in the conventional SCM process are costly and have limited possibilities. As a result, it is difficult to maintain product secrecy and accountability in the SCM scheme. It is also a common target for wireless attacks (reply attacks, eavesdropping, etc.). In SCM, the phrase “product confidentiality” is very significant. It means that only those who have been validated have access to the information. This paper emphasizes reducing the involvement of third parties in the supply chain system and improving data security. Traditional supply chain management systems have a number of significant flaws. Lack of traceability, difficulty maintaining product safety and quality, failure to monitor and control inventory in warehouses and shops, rising supply chain expenses, and so on, are some of them. The focus of this paper is on minimizing third-party participation in the supply chain system and enhancing data security. This improves accessibility, efficiency, and timeliness throughout the whole process. The primary advantage is that individuals will feel safer throughout the payment process. However, in this study, a peer-to-peer encrypted system was utilized in conjunction with a smart contract. Additionally, there are a few other features. Because this document makes use of an immutable ledger, the hacker will be unable to get access to it. Even if they get access to the system, they will be unable to modify any data. If the goods are defective, the transaction will be halted, and the customer will be reimbursed, with the seller receiving the merchandise. By using cryptographic methods, transaction security will be a feasible alternative for recasting these issues. Finally, this paper will demonstrate how to maintain the method with the maximum level of safety, transparency, and efficiency.
Catalytic Transformations of Pure Entangled States

Quantum entanglement of pure states is usually quantified via the entanglement entropy, the von Neumann entropy of the reduced state. Entanglement entropy is closely related to entanglement distillation, a process for converting quantum states into singlets, which can then be used for various quantum technological tasks. The relation between entanglement entropy and entanglement distillation has been known only for the asymptotic setting, and the meaning of entanglement entropy in the single-copy regime has so far remained open. Here we close this gap by considering entanglement catalysis. We prove that entanglement entropy completely characterizes state transformations in the presence of entangled catalysts. Our results imply that entanglement entropy quantifies the amount of entanglement available in a bipartite pure state to be used for quantum information processing, giving asymptotic results an operational meaning also in the single-copy setup.
Pyramid Architecture Search for Real-Time Image Deblurring

Multi-scale and multi-patch deep models have been shown effective in removing blurs of dynamic scenes. However, these methods still suffer from one major obstacle: manually designing a lightweight and high-efficiency network is challenging and time-consuming. To tackle this obstacle, we propose a novel deblurring method, dubbed PyNAS (pyramid neural architecture search network), towards automatically designing hyper-parameters including the scales, patches, and standard cell operators. The proposed PyNAS adopts gradient-based search strategies and innovatively searches the hierarchy patch and scale scheme not limited to cell searching. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical search strategy tailored to the multi-scale and multi-patch deblurring task. The strategy follows the principle that the first distinguishes between the top-level (pyramid-scales and pyramid-patches) and bottom-level variables (cell operators) and then searches multi-scale variables using the top-to-bottom principle. During the search stage, PyNAS employs an early stopping strategy to avoid the collapse and computational issues. Furthermore, we use a path-level binarization mechanism for multi-scale cell searching to save the memory consumption. Our primary contribution is a real-time deblurring algorithm (around 58 fps) for 720p images while achieves state-of-the-art deblurring performance on the GoPro and Video Deblurring datasets.
Bringing Events into Video Deblurring with Non-consecutively Blurry Frames

Recently, video deblurring has attracted considerable research attention, and several works suggest that events at high time rate can benefit deblurring. Existing video deblurring methods assume consecutively blurry frames, while neglecting the fact that sharp frames usually appear nearby blurry frame. In this paper, we develop a principled framework D <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> Nets for video deblurring to exploit non-consecutively blurry frames, and propose a flexible event fusion module (EFM) to bridge the gap between event-driven and video deblurring. In D <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> Nets, we propose to first detect nearest sharp frames (NSFs) using a bidirectional LST-M detector, and then perform deblurring guided by NSFs. Furthermore, the proposed EFM is flexible to be incorporated into D <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> Nets, in which events can be leveraged to notably boost the deblurring performance. EFM can also be easily incorporated into existing deblurring networks, making event-driven deblurring task benefit from state-of-the-art deblurring methods. On synthetic and real-world blurry datasets, our methods achieve better results than competing methods, and EFM not only benefits D <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> Nets but also significantly improves the competing deblurring networks.
Local-to-global GCN with knowledge-aware representation for distantly supervised relation extraction

Distantly supervised relation extraction is a prevalent technique for identifying semantic relations between two entities. Most prior models cannot distinguish the local and global information in the long-range dependency among words effectively. The latent semantic information presented in existing knowledge graphs is completely neglected, as the knowledge graph information is simply used as a label to specify the class of relations instead of being treated as a graph. Moreover, previous studies only utilized a selective attention mechanism over sentences to alleviate the impact of noise; they did not consider the implicit interaction between sentences in a sentence bag. In this paper, (1) we propose a knowledge-aware framework to enhance word representations, which can highlight the importance of key words and relation clues; (2) we adopt a piecewise self-attention mechanism to model long-range dependency among words; (3) we design a heterogeneous graph structure for each sentence bag and introduce a heterogeneous graph convolutional network with knowledge attention to aggregate the implicit interaction among sentences from a local-to-global perspective. Experimental results on two popular relation extraction datasets demonstrate that our model obtains more discriminative relation representations and outperforms most of the state-of-the-art models.
A Portable Smart Fitness Suite for Real-Time Exercise Monitoring and Posture Correction

Fitness and sport have drawn significant attention in wearable and persuasive computing. Physical activities are worthwhile for health, well-being, improved fitness levels, lower mental pressure and tension levels. Nonetheless, during high-power and commanding workouts, there is a high likelihood that physical fitness is seriously influenced. Jarring motions and improper posture during workouts can lead to temporary or permanent disability. With the advent of technological advances, activity acknowledgment dependent on wearable sensors has pulled in countless studies. Still, a fully portable smart fitness suite is not industrialized, which is the central need of today's time, especially in the Covid-19 pandemic. Considering the effectiveness of this issue, we proposed a fully portable smart fitness suite for the household to carry on their routine exercises without any physical gym trainer and gym environment. The proposed system considers two exercises, i.e., T-bar and bicep curl with the assistance of the virtual real-time android application, acting as a gym trainer overall. The proposed fitness suite is embedded with a gyroscope and EMG sensory modules for performing the above two exercises. It provided alerts on unhealthy, wrong posture movements over an android app and is guided to the best possible posture based on sensor values. The KNN classification model is used for prediction and guidance for the user while performing a particular exercise with the help of an android application-based virtual gym trainer through a text-to-speech module. The proposed system attained 89% accuracy, which is quite effective with portability and a virtually assisted gym trainer feature.
TEBCF: Real-World Underwater Image Texture Enhancement Model Based on Blurriness and Color Fusion

Real-world underwater images suffer from quality degeneration caused by the scattering and absorption of light propagation. The damage of the detailed textures in underwater images shows the negative effect of detection and recognition. To recovery the image visibility and sharpness for the above applications, a new image enhancement method is proposed for extracting the image textures. To enhance the image textures with high quality, we propose a multiscale fusion enhancement. Two new fusion inputs are built on different color methods. One input is devoted to improve the sharpness by contrast-based dark channel prior dehazing in the red–green–blue (RGB) model. The other input is designed based on multiple morphological operation and color compensation from the opponent color in the CIE <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1976~L^{\ast}a^{\ast}b^{\ast}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> color space (CIELAB) model. This input is used to enhance the counter brightness and adjust the color distribution. The dominant features of the two inputs are merged. Therefore, the contrast of the fusion output is enhanced adaptively to recover the final enhanced result. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our results reveal that the proposed method can enrich the image textures based on an impressive visual perception of contrast, saturation, and sharpness. Moreover, our method also shows strong robustness in challenge scenes and improves the performance of several underwater applications.
Light Field Saliency Detection with Dual Local Graph Learning and Reciprocative Guidance

The application of light field data in salient object detection is becoming increasingly popular recently. The difficulty lies in how to effectively fuse the features within the focal stack and how to cooperate them with the feature of the all-focus image. Previous methods usually fuse focal stack features via convolution or ConvLSTM, which are both less effective and ill-posed. In this paper, we model the information fusion within focal stack via graph networks. They introduce powerful context propagation from neighbouring nodes and also avoid ill-posed implementations. On the one hand, we construct local graph connections thus avoiding prohibitive computational costs of traditional graph networks. On the other hand, instead of processing the two kinds of data separately, we build a novel dual graph model to guide the focal stack fusion process using all-focus patterns. To handle the second difficulty, previous methods usually implement one-shot fusion for focal stack and all-focus features, hence lacking a thorough exploration of their supplements. We introduce a reciprocative guidance scheme and enable mutual guidance between these two kinds of information at multiple steps. As such, both kinds of features can be enhanced iteratively, finally benefiting the saliency prediction. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed models are all beneficial and we achieve significantly better results than state-of-the-art methods.
A Threshold Proxy Re-Encryption Scheme for Secure IoT Data Sharing Based on Blockchain

The IoT devices deployed in various application scenarios will generate massive data with immeasurable value every day. These data often contain the user’s personal privacy information, so there is an imperative need to guarantee the reliability and security of IoT data sharing. We proposed a new encrypted data storing and sharing architecture by combining proxy re-encryption with blockchain technology. The consensus mechanism based on threshold proxy re-encryption eliminates dependence on the third-party central service providers. Multiple consensus nodes in the blockchain network act as proxy service nodes to re-encrypt data and combine converted ciphertext, and personal information will not be disclosed in the whole procedure. That eliminates the restrictions of using decentralized network to store and distribute private encrypted data safely. We implemented a lot of simulated experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework. The results show that the proposed architecture can meet the extensive data access demands and increase a tolerable time latency. Our scheme is one of the essays to utilize the threshold proxy re-encryption and blockchain consensus algorithm to support IoT data sharing.