pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Feature Integration for Simultaneous Detection of Salient Object, Edge and Skeleton
Authors: Jiang-Jiang Liu, Qibin Hou, Ming-Ming Cheng
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Detection, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we solve three low-level pixel-wise vision problems, including salient object segmentation, edge detection, and skeleton extraction, within a unified framework. We first show some similarities shared by these tasks and then demonstrate how they can be leveraged for developing a unified framework that can be trained end-to-end. In particular, we introduce a selective integration module that allows each task to dynamically choose features at different levels from the shared backbone based on its own characteristics. Furthermore, we design a task-adaptive attention module, aiming at intelligently allocating information for different tasks according to the image content priors. To evaluate the performance of our proposed network on these tasks, we conduct exhaustive experiments on multiple representative datasets. We will show that though these tasks are naturally quite different, our network can work well on all of them and even perform better than current single-purpose state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we also conduct adequate ablation analyses that provide a full understanding of the design principles of the proposed framework. To facilitate future research, source code will be released.
BiFNet: Bidirectional Fusion Network for Road Segmentation
Authors: Haoran Li, Yaran Chen, Qichao Zhang, Dongbin Zhao
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Road Segmentation, Sensor Fusion

Multi-sensor fusion-based road segmentation plays an important role in the intelligent driving system since it provides a drivable area. The existing mainstream fusion method is mainly to feature fusion in the image space domain which causes the perspective compression of the road and damages the performance of the distant road. Considering the bird's eye views(BEV) of the LiDAR remains the space structure in horizontal plane, this paper proposes a bidirectional fusion network(BiFNet) to fuse the image and BEV of the point cloud. The network consists of two modules: 1) Dense space transformation module, which solves the mutual conversion between camera image space and BEV space. 2) Context-based feature fusion module, which fuses the different sensors information based on the scenes from corresponding features.This method has achieved competitive results on KITTI dataset.
Are You A Risk Taker? Adversarial Learning of Asymmetric Cross-Domain Alignment for Risk Tolerance Prediction
Authors: Zhe Liu, Lina Yao, Xianzhi Wang, Lei Bai, Jake An
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Representation Learning, Survey

Most current studies on survey analysis and risk tolerance modelling lack professional knowledge and domain-specific models. Given the effectiveness of generative adversarial learning in cross-domain information, we design an Asymmetric cross-Domain Generative Adversarial Network (ADGAN) for domain scale inequality. ADGAN utilizes the information-sufficient domain to provide extra information to improve the representation learning on the information-insufficient domain via domain alignment. We provide data analysis and user model on two data sources: Consumer Consumption Information and Survey Information. We further test ADGAN on a real-world dataset with view embedding structures and show ADGAN can better deal with the class imbalance and unqualified data space than state-of-the-art, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging asymmetrical domain information.
Statistical inference in massive datasets by empirical likelihood
Authors: Xuejun Ma, Shaochen Wang, Wang Zhou
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a new statistical inference method for massive data sets, which is very simple and efficient by combining divide-and-conquer method and empirical likelihood. Compared with two popular methods (the bag of little bootstrap and the subsampled double bootstrap), we make full use of data sets, and reduce the computation burden. Extensive numerical studies and real data analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our proposed method. Furthermore, the asymptotic property of our method is derived.
Automatic Grading of Knee Osteoarthritis on the Kellgren-Lawrence Scale from Radiographs Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Sudeep Kondal, Viraj Kulkarni, Ashrika Gaikwad, Amit Kharat, Aniruddha Pant
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, object-detection, Object Detection, regression

The severity of knee osteoarthritis is graded using the 5-point Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) scale where healthy knees are assigned grade 0, and the subsequent grades 1-4 represent increasing severity of the affliction. Although several methods have been proposed in recent years to develop models that can automatically predict the KL grade from a given radiograph, most models have been developed and evaluated on datasets not sourced from India. These models fail to perform well on the radiographs of Indian patients. In this paper, we propose a novel method using convolutional neural networks to automatically grade knee radiographs on the KL scale. Our method works in two connected stages: in the first stage, an object detection model segments individual knees from the rest of the image; in the second stage, a regression model automatically grades each knee separately on the KL scale. We train our model using the publicly available Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) dataset and demonstrate that fine-tuning the model before evaluating it on a dataset from a private hospital significantly improves the mean absolute error from 1.09 (95% CI: 1.03-1.15) to 0.28 (95% CI: 0.25-0.32). Additionally, we compare classification and regression models built for the same task and demonstrate that regression outperforms classification.
On the Synergies between Machine Learning and Binocular Stereo for Depth Estimation from Images: a Survey
Authors: Matteo Poggi, Fabio Tosi, Konstantinos Batsos, Philippos Mordohai, Stefano Mattoccia
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Stereo Matching

Stereo matching is one of the longest-standing problems in computer vision with close to 40 years of studies and research. Throughout the years the paradigm has shifted from local, pixel-level decision to various forms of discrete and continuous optimization to data-driven, learning-based methods. Recently, the rise of machine learning and the rapid proliferation of deep learning enhanced stereo matching with new exciting trends and applications unthinkable until a few years ago. Interestingly, the relationship between these two worlds is two-way. While machine, and especially deep, learning advanced the state-of-the-art in stereo matching, stereo itself enabled new ground-breaking methodologies such as self-supervised monocular depth estimation based on deep networks. In this paper, we review recent research in the field of learning-based depth estimation from single and binocular images highlighting the synergies, the successes achieved so far and the open challenges the community is going to face in the immediate future.
Deep Learning on Traffic Prediction: Methods, Analysis and Future Directions
Authors: Xueyan Yin, Genze Wu, Jinze Wei, Yanming Shen, Heng Qi, Bao-Cai Yin
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Prediction, Traffic Prediction

Traffic prediction plays an essential role in intelligent transportation system. Accurate traffic prediction can assist route planing, guide vehicle dispatching, and mitigate traffic congestion. This problem is challenging due to the complicated and dynamic spatio-temporal dependencies between different regions in the road network. Recently, a significant amount of research efforts have been devoted to this area, especially deep learning method, greatly advancing traffic prediction abilities. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey on deep learning-based approaches in traffic prediction from multiple perspectives. Specifically, we first summarize the existing traffic prediction methods, and give a taxonomy. Second, we list the state-of-the-art approaches in different traffic prediction applications. Third, we comprehensively collect and organize widely used public datasets in the existing literature to facilitate other researchers. Furthermore, we give an evaluation and analysis by conducting extensive experiments to compare the performance of different methods on a real-world public dataset. Finally, we discuss open challenges in this field.
Realistic Large-Scale Fine-Depth Dehazing Dataset from 3D Videos
Authors: Ruoteng Li, Xiaoyi Zhang, ShaoDi You, Yu Li
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Benchmarking, Image Dehazing

Image dehazing is one of the important and popular topics in computer vision and machine learning. A reliable real-time dehazing method with reliable performance is highly desired for many applications such as autonomous driving, security surveillance, etc. While recent learning-based methods require datasets containing pairs of hazy images and clean ground truth, it is impossible to capture them in real scenes. Many existing works compromise this difficulty to generate hazy images by rendering the haze from depth on common RGBD datasets using the haze imaging model. However, there is still a gap between the synthetic datasets and real hazy images as large datasets with high-quality depth are mostly indoor and depth maps for outdoor are imprecise. In this paper, we complement the existing datasets with a new, large, and diverse dehazing dataset containing real outdoor scenes from High-Definition (HD) 3D movies. We select a large number of high-quality frames of real outdoor scenes and render haze on them using depth from stereo. Our dataset is clearly more realistic and more diversified with better visual quality than existing ones. More importantly, we demonstrate that using this dataset greatly improves the dehazing performance on real scenes. In addition to the dataset, we also evaluate a series state of the art methods on the proposed benchmarking datasets.
Accurate Tumor Tissue Region Detection with Accelerated Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Gabriel Tjio, Xulei Yang, Jia Mei Hong, Sum Thai Wong, Vanessa Ding, Andre Choo, Yi Su
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00

Manual annotation of pathology slides for cancer diagnosis is laborious and repetitive. Therefore, much effort has been devoted to develop computer vision solutions. Our approach, (FLASH), is based on a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) architecture. It reduces computational costs and is faster than typical deep learning approaches by two orders of magnitude, making high throughput processing a possibility. In computer vision approaches using deep learning methods, the input image is subdivided into patches which are separately passed through the neural network. Features extracted from these patches are used by the classifier to annotate the corresponding region. Our approach aggregates all the extracted features into a single matrix before passing them to the classifier. Previously, the features are extracted from overlapping patches. Aggregating the features eliminates the need for processing overlapping patches, which reduces the computations required. DCCN and FLASH demonstrate high sensitivity (~ 0.96), good precision (~0.78) and high F1 scores (~0.84). The average time taken to process each sample for FLASH and DCNN is 96.6 seconds and 9489.20 seconds, respectively. Our approach was approximately 100 times faster than the original DCNN approach while simultaneously preserving high accuracy and precision.
Color Image Segmentation using Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization and Fuzzy C-means
Authors: Narayana Reddy A, Ranjita Das
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Evolutionary Algorithms, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Segmentation partitions an image into different regions containing pixels with similar attributes. A standard non-contextual variant of Fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm (FCM), considering its simplicity is generally used in image segmentation. Using FCM has its disadvantages like it is dependent on the initial guess of the number of clusters and highly sensitive to noise. Satisfactory visual segments cannot be obtained using FCM. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) belongs to the class of evolutionary algorithms and has good convergence speed and fewer parameters compared to Genetic Algorithms (GAs). An optimized version of PSO can be combined with FCM to act as a proper initializer for the algorithm thereby reducing its sensitivity to initial guess. A hybrid PSO algorithm named Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO) which improves in the calculation of various hyper parameters like inertia weight, learning factors over standard PSO, using insights from swarm behaviour, leading to improvement in cluster quality can be used. This paper presents a new image segmentation algorithm called Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization and Fuzzy C-means Clustering Algorithm (APSOF), which is based on Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO) and Fuzzy C-means clustering. Experimental results show that APSOF algorithm has edge over FCM in correctly identifying the optimum cluster centers, there by leading to accurate classification of the image pixels. Hence, APSOF algorithm has superior performance in comparison with classic Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm (FCM) for image segmentation.
Towards Non-I.I.D. and Invisible Data with FedNAS: Federated Deep Learning via Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Chaoyang He, Murali Annavaram, Salman Avestimehr
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Neural Architecture Search

Federated Learning (FL) has been proved to be an effective learning framework when data cannot be centralized due to privacy, communication costs, and regulatory restrictions. When training deep learning models under an FL setting, people employ the predefined model architecture discovered in the centralized environment. However, this predefined architecture may not be the optimal choice because it may not fit data with non-identical and independent distribution (non-IID). Thus, we advocate automating federated learning (AutoFL) to improve model accuracy and reduce the manual design effort. We specifically study AutoFL via Neural Architecture Search (NAS), which can automate the design process. We propose a Federated NAS (FedNAS) algorithm to help scattered workers collaboratively searching for a better architecture with higher accuracy. We also build a system based on FedNAS. Our experiments on non-IID dataset show that the architecture searched by FedNAS can outperform the manually predefined architecture.
Kernels for time series with irregularly-spaced multivariate observations
Authors: Ahmed Guecioueur, Franz J. Király
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

Time series are an interesting frontier for kernel-based methods, for the simple reason that there is no kernel designed to represent them and their unique characteristics in full generality. Existing sequential kernels ignore the time indices, with many assuming that the series must be regularly-spaced; some such kernels are not even psd. In this manuscript, we show that a "series kernel" that is general enough to represent irregularly-spaced multivariate time series may be built out of well-known "vector kernels". We also show that all series kernels constructed using our methodology are psd, and are thus widely applicable. We demonstrate this point by formulating a Gaussian process-based strategy - with our series kernel at its heart - to make predictions about test series when given a training set. We validate the strategy experimentally by estimating its generalisation error on multiple datasets and comparing it to relevant baselines. We also demonstrate that our series kernel may be used for the more traditional setting of time series classification, where its performance is broadly in line with alternative methods.
Moire Image Restoration using Multi Level Hyper Vision Net
Authors: D. Sabari Nathan, M. Parisa Beham, S. M. Md. Mansoor Roomi
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Demosaicking, Image Restoration, SSIM

A moire pattern in the images is resulting from high frequency patterns captured by the image sensor (colour filter array) that appear after demosaicing. These Moire patterns would appear in natural images of scenes with high frequency content. The Moire pattern can also vary intensely due to a minimal change in the camera direction/positioning. Thus the Moire pattern depreciates the quality of photographs. An important issue in demoireing pattern is that the Moireing patterns have dynamic structure with varying colors and forms. These challenges makes the demoireing more difficult than many other image restoration tasks. Inspired by these challenges in demoireing, a multilevel hyper vision net is proposed to remove the Moire pattern to improve the quality of the images. As a key aspect, in this network we involved residual channel attention block that can be used to extract and adaptively fuse hierarchical features from all the layers efficiently. The proposed algorithms has been tested with the NTIRE 2020 challenge dataset and thus achieved 36.85 and 0.98 Peak to Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM) Index respectively.
Effect of Text Color on Word Embeddings
Authors: Masaya Ikoma, Brian Kenji Iwana, Seiichi Uchida
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

In natural scenes and documents, we can find the correlation between a text and its color. For instance, the word, "hot", is often printed in red, while "cold" is often in blue. This correlation can be thought of as a feature that represents the semantic difference between the words. Based on this observation, we propose the idea of using text color for word embeddings. While text-only word embeddings (e.g. word2vec) have been extremely successful, they often represent antonyms as similar since they are often interchangeable in sentences. In this paper, we try two tasks to verify the usefulness of text color in understanding the meanings of words, especially in identifying synonyms and antonyms. First, we quantify the color distribution of words from the book cover images and analyze the correlation between the color and meaning of the word. Second, we try to retrain word embeddings with the color distribution of words as a constraint. By observing the changes in the word embeddings of synonyms and antonyms before and after re-training, we aim to understand the kind of words that have positive or negative effects in their word embeddings when incorporating text color information.
Super-Resolution-based Snake Model -- An Unsupervised Method for Large-Scale Building Extraction using Airborne LiDAR Data and Optical Image
Authors: Thanh Huy Nguyen, Sylvie Daniel, Didier Gueriot, Christophe Sintes, Jean-Marc Le Caillec
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Automatic extraction of buildings in urban and residential scenes has become a subject of growing interest in the domain of photogrammetry and remote sensing, particularly since mid-1990s. Active contour model, colloquially known as snake model, has been studied to extract buildings from aerial and satellite imagery. However, this task is still very challenging due to the complexity of building size, shape, and its surrounding environment. This complexity leads to a major obstacle for carrying out a reliable large-scale building extraction, since the involved prior information and assumptions on building such as shape, size, and color cannot be generalized over large areas. This paper presents an efficient snake model to overcome such challenge, called Super-Resolution-based Snake Model (SRSM). The SRSM operates on high-resolution LiDAR-based elevation images -- called z-images -- generated by a super-resolution process applied to LiDAR data. The involved balloon force model is also improved to shrink or inflate adaptively, instead of inflating the snake continuously. This method is applicable for a large scale such as city scale and even larger, while having a high level of automation and not requiring any prior knowledge nor training data from the urban scenes (hence unsupervised). It achieves high overall accuracy when tested on various datasets. For instance, the proposed SRSM yields an average area-based Quality of 86.57% and object-based Quality of 81.60% on the ISPRS Vaihingen benchmark datasets. Compared to other methods using this benchmark dataset, this level of accuracy is highly desirable even for a supervised method. Similarly desirable outcomes are obtained when carrying out the proposed SRSM on the whole City of Quebec (total area of 656 km2), yielding an area-based Quality of 62.37% and an object-based Quality of 63.21%.
Predicting Online Item-choice Behavior: A Shape-restricted Regression Perspective
Authors: Naoki Nishimura, Noriyoshi Sukegawa, Yuichi Takano, Jiro Iwanaga
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, regression, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

This paper examines the relationship between user pageview (PV) histories and their item-choice behavior on an e-commerce website. We focus on PV sequences, which represent time series of the number of PVs for each user--item pair. We propose a shape-restricted optimization model that accurately estimates item-choice probabilities for all possible PV sequences. This model imposes monotonicity constraints on item-choice probabilities by exploiting partial orders for PV sequences, according to the recency and frequency of a user's previous PVs. To improve the computational efficiency of our optimization model, we devise efficient algorithms for eliminating all redundant constraints according to the transitivity of the partial orders. Experimental results using real-world clickstream data demonstrate that our method achieves higher prediction performance than that of a state-of-the-art optimization model and common machine learning methods.
JL-DCF: Joint Learning and Densely-Cooperative Fusion Framework for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
Authors: Keren Fu, Deng-Ping Fan, Ge-Peng Ji, Qijun Zhao
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, RGB-D Salient Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

This paper proposes a novel joint learning and densely-cooperative fusion (JL-DCF) architecture for RGB-D salient object detection. Existing models usually treat RGB and depth as independent information and design separate networks for feature extraction from each. Such schemes can easily be constrained by a limited amount of training data or over-reliance on an elaborately-designed training process. In contrast, our JL-DCF learns from both RGB and depth inputs through a Siamese network. To this end, we propose two effective components: joint learning (JL), and densely-cooperative fusion (DCF). The JL module provides robust saliency feature learning, while the latter is introduced for complementary feature discovery. Comprehensive experiments on four popular metrics show that the designed framework yields a robust RGB-D saliency detector with good generalization. As a result, JL-DCF significantly advances the top-1 D3Net model by an average of ~1.9% (S-measure) across six challenging datasets, showing that the proposed framework offers a potential solution for real-world applications and could provide more insight into the cross-modality complementarity task. The code will be available at https://github.com/kerenfu/JLDCF/.