pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CFPNet-M: A Light-Weight Encoder-Decoder Based Network for Multimodal Biomedical Image Real-Time Segmentation
Authors: Ange Lou, Shuyue Guan, Murray Loew
Date: 2021-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, GPU, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Currently, developments of deep learning techniques are providing instrumental to identify, classify, and quantify patterns in medical images. Segmentation is one of the important applications in medical image analysis. In this regard, U-Net is the predominant approach to medical image segmentation tasks. However, we found that those U-Net based models have limitations in several aspects, for example, millions of parameters in the U-Net consuming considerable computation resource and memory, lack of global information, and missing some tough objects. Therefore, we applied two modifications to improve the U-Net model: 1) designed and added the dilated channel-wise CNN module, 2) simplified the U shape network. Based on these two modifications, we proposed a novel light-weight architecture -- Channel-wise Feature Pyramid Network for Medicine (CFPNet-M). To evaluate our method, we selected five datasets with different modalities: thermography, electron microscopy, endoscopy, dermoscopy, and digital retinal images. And we compared its performance with several models having different parameter scales. This paper also involves our previous studies of DC-UNet and some commonly used light-weight neural networks. We applied the Tanimoto similarity instead of the Jaccard index for gray-level image measurements. By comparison, CFPNet-M achieves comparable segmentation results on all five medical datasets with only 0.65 million parameters, which is about 2% of U-Net, and 8.8 MB memory. Meanwhile, the inference speed can reach 80 FPS on a single RTX 2070Ti GPU with the 256 by 192 pixels input size.
Robust Training Using Natural Transformation
Authors: Shuo Wang, Lingjuan Lyu, Surya Nepal, Carsten Rudolph, Marthie Grobler, Kristen Moore
Date: 2021-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Reconstruction

Previous robustness approaches for deep learning models such as data augmentation techniques via data transformation or adversarial training cannot capture real-world variations that preserve the semantics of the input, such as a change in lighting conditions. To bridge this gap, we present NaTra, an adversarial training scheme that is designed to improve the robustness of image classification algorithms. We target attributes of the input images that are independent of the class identification, and manipulate those attributes to mimic real-world natural transformations (NaTra) of the inputs, which are then used to augment the training dataset of the image classifier. Specifically, we apply \textit{Batch Inverse Encoding and Shifting} to map a batch of given images to corresponding disentangled latent codes of well-trained generative models. \textit{Latent Codes Expansion} is used to boost image reconstruction quality through the incorporation of extended feature maps. \textit{Unsupervised Attribute Directing and Manipulation} enables identification of the latent directions that correspond to specific attribute changes, and then produce interpretable manipulations of those attributes, thereby generating natural transformations to the input data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme by utilizing the disentangled latent representations derived from well-trained GANs to mimic transformations of an image that are similar to real-world natural variations (such as lighting conditions or hairstyle), and train models to be invariant to these natural transformations. Extensive experiments show that our method improves generalization of classification models and increases its robustness to various real-world distortions
Truly shift-equivariant convolutional neural networks with adaptive polyphase upsampling
Authors: Anadi Chaman, Ivan Dokmanić
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: CT Reconstruction, Data Augmentation, Decoder, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Reconstruction

Convolutional neural networks lack shift equivariance due to the presence of downsampling layers. In image classification, adaptive polyphase downsampling (APS-D) was recently proposed to make CNNs perfectly shift invariant. However, in networks used for image reconstruction tasks, it can not by itself restore shift equivariance. We address this problem by proposing adaptive polyphase upsampling (APS-U), a non-linear extension of conventional upsampling, which allows CNNs with symmetric encoder-decoder architecture (for example U-Net) to exhibit perfect shift equivariance. With MRI and CT reconstruction experiments, we show that networks containing APS-D/U layers exhibit state of the art equivariance performance without sacrificing on image reconstruction quality. In addition, unlike prior methods like data augmentation and anti-aliasing, the gains in equivariance obtained from APS-D/U also extend to images outside the training distribution.
End-to-End Optical Character Recognition for Bengali Handwritten Words
Authors: Farisa Benta Safir, Abu Quwsar Ohi, M. F. Mridha, Muhammad Mostafa Monowar, Md. Abdul Hamid
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a process of converting analogue documents into digital using document images. Currently, many commercial and non-commercial OCR systems exist for both handwritten and printed copies for different languages. Despite this, very few works are available in case of recognising Bengali words. Among them, most of the works focused on OCR of printed Bengali characters. This paper introduces an end-to-end OCR system for Bengali language. The proposed architecture implements an end to end strategy that recognises handwritten Bengali words from handwritten word images. We experiment with popular convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures, including DenseNet, Xception, NASNet, and MobileNet to build the OCR architecture. Further, we experiment with two different recurrent neural networks (RNN) methods, LSTM and GRU. We evaluate the proposed architecture using BanglaWritting dataset, which is a peer-reviewed Bengali handwritten image dataset. The proposed method achieves 0.091 character error rate and 0.273 word error rate performed using DenseNet121 model with GRU recurrent layer.
DiagSet: a dataset for prostate cancer histopathological image classification
Authors: Michał Koziarski, Bogusław Cyganek, Przemysław Niedziela, Bogusław Olborski, Zbigniew Antosz, Marcin Żydak, Bogdan Kwolek, Paweł Wąsowicz, Andrzej Bukała, Jakub Swadźba, Piotr Sitkowski
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Histopathological Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Cancer diseases constitute one of the most significant societal challenges. In this paper, we introduce a novel histopathological dataset for prostate cancer detection. The proposed dataset, consisting of over 2.6 million tissue patches extracted from 430 fully annotated scans, 4675 scans with assigned binary diagnoses, and 46 scans with diagnoses independently provided by a group of histopathologists can be found at https://github.com/michalkoziarski/DiagSet. Furthermore, we propose a machine learning framework for detection of cancerous tissue regions and prediction of scan-level diagnosis, utilizing thresholding to abstain from the decision in uncertain cases. The proposed approach, composed of ensembles of deep neural networks operating on the histopathological scans at different scales, achieves 94.6% accuracy in patch-level recognition and is compared in a scan-level diagnosis with 9 human histopathologists showing high statistical agreement.
Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Detection from Microscopic Images Using Weighted Ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Chayan Mondal, Md. Kamrul Hasan, Md. Tasnim Jawad, Aishwariya Dutta, Md. Rabiul Islam, Md. Abdul Awal, Mohiuddin Ahmad
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Diagnostic, Prognosis

Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) is a blood cell cancer characterized by numerous immature lymphocytes. Even though automation in ALL prognosis is an essential aspect of cancer diagnosis, it is challenging due to the morphological correlation between malignant and normal cells. The traditional ALL classification strategy demands experienced pathologists to carefully read the cell images, which is arduous, time-consuming, and often suffers inter-observer variations. This article has automated the ALL detection task from microscopic cell images, employing deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We explore the weighted ensemble of different deep CNNs to recommend a better ALL cell classifier. The weights for the ensemble candidate models are estimated from their corresponding metrics, such as accuracy, F1-score, AUC, and kappa values. Various data augmentations and pre-processing are incorporated for achieving a better generalization of the network. We utilize the publicly available C-NMC-2019 ALL dataset to conduct all the comprehensive experiments. Our proposed weighted ensemble model, using the kappa values of the ensemble candidates as their weights, has outputted a weighted F1-score of 88.6 %, a balanced accuracy of 86.2 %, and an AUC of 0.941 in the preliminary test set. The qualitative results displaying the gradient class activation maps confirm that the introduced model has a concentrated learned region. In contrast, the ensemble candidate models, such as Xception, VGG-16, DenseNet-121, MobileNet, and InceptionResNet-V2, separately produce coarse and scatter learned areas for most example cases. Since the proposed kappa value-based weighted ensemble yields a better result for the aimed task in this article, it can experiment in other domains of medical diagnostic applications.
Towards Explainable, Privacy-Preserved Human-Motion Affect Recognition
Authors: Matthew Malek-Podjaski, Fani Deligianni
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Subject Transfer, Transfer Learning

Human motion characteristics are used to monitor the progression of neurological diseases and mood disorders. Since perceptions of emotions are also interleaved with body posture and movements, emotion recognition from human gait can be used to quantitatively monitor mood changes. Many existing solutions often use shallow machine learning models with raw positional data or manually extracted features to achieve this. However, gait is composed of many highly expressive characteristics that can be used to identify human subjects, and most solutions fail to address this, disregarding the subject's privacy. This work introduces a novel deep neural network architecture to disentangle human emotions and biometrics. In particular, we propose a cross-subject transfer learning technique for training a multi-encoder autoencoder deep neural network to learn disentangled latent representations of human motion features. By disentangling subject biometrics from the gait data, we show that the subject's privacy is preserved while the affect recognition performance outperforms traditional methods. Furthermore, we exploit Guided Grad-CAM to provide global explanations of the model's decision across gait cycles. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method to existing methods at recognizing emotions using both 3D temporal joint signals and manually extracted features. We also show that this data can easily be exploited to expose a subject's identity. Our method shows up to 7% improvement and highlights the joints with the most significant influence across the average gait cycle.
Differentiable Neural Architecture Search for Extremely Lightweight Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Han Huang, Li Shen, Chaoyang He, Weisheng Dong, Wei Liu
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Image Super-Resolution, Neural Architecture Search, Reinforcement Learning (RL), SSIM, Super-Resolution

Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) tasks have achieved significant performance with deep neural networks. However, the large number of parameters in CNN-based met-hods for SISR tasks require heavy computations. Although several efficient SISR models have been recently proposed, most are handcrafted and thus lack flexibility. In this work, we propose a novel differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approach on both the cell-level and network-level to search for lightweight SISR models. Specifically, the cell-level search space is designed based on an information distillation mechanism, focusing on the combinations of lightweight operations and aiming to build a more lightweight and accurate SR structure. The network-level search space is designed to consider the feature connections among the cells and aims to find which information flow benefits the cell most to boost the performance. Unlike the existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) based NAS methods for SISR tasks, our search pipeline is fully differentiable, and the lightweight SISR models can be efficiently searched on both the cell-level and network-level jointly on a single GPU. Experiments show that our methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and model complexity with merely 68G Multi-Adds for $\times 2$ and 18G Multi-Adds for $\times 4$ SR tasks.
Fish Disease Detection Using Image Based Machine Learning Technique in Aquaculture
Authors: Md Shoaib Ahmed, Tanjim Taharat Aurpa, Md. Abul Kalam Azad
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Image Augmentation, Image Classification

Fish diseases in aquaculture constitute a significant hazard to nutriment security. Identification of infected fishes in aquaculture remains challenging to find out at the early stage due to the dearth of necessary infrastructure. The identification of infected fish timely is an obligatory step to thwart from spreading disease. In this work, we want to find out the salmon fish disease in aquaculture, as salmon aquaculture is the fastest-growing food production system globally, accounting for 70 percent (2.5 million tons) of the market. In the alliance of flawless image processing and machine learning mechanism, we identify the infected fishes caused by the various pathogen. This work divides into two portions. In the rudimentary portion, image pre-processing and segmentation have been applied to reduce noise and exaggerate the image, respectively. In the second portion, we extract the involved features to classify the diseases with the help of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm of machine learning with a kernel function. The processed images of the first portion have passed through this (SVM) model. Then we harmonize a comprehensive experiment with the proposed combination of techniques on the salmon fish image dataset used to examine the fish disease. We have conveyed this work on a novel dataset compromising with and without image augmentation. The results have bought a judgment of our applied SVM performs notably with 91.42 and 94.12 percent of accuracy, respectively, with and without augmentation.
TextAdaIN: Paying Attention to Shortcut Learning in Text Recognizers
Authors: Oren Nuriel, Sharon Fogel, Ron Litman
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Handwritten Text Recognition, Scene Text Recognition

Leveraging the characteristics of convolutional layers, neural networks are extremely effective for pattern recognition tasks. However in some cases, their decisions are based on unintended information leading to high performance on standard benchmarks but also to a lack of generalization to challenging testing conditions and unintuitive failures. Recent work has termed this "shortcut learning" and addressed its presence in multiple domains. In text recognition, we reveal another such shortcut, whereby recognizers overly depend on local image statistics. Motivated by this, we suggest an approach to regulate the reliance on local statistics that improves text recognition performance. Our method, termed TextAdaIN, creates local distortions in the feature map which prevent the network from overfitting to local statistics. It does so by viewing each feature map as a sequence of elements and deliberately mismatching fine-grained feature statistics between elements in a mini-batch. Despite TextAdaIN's simplicity, extensive experiments show its effectiveness compared to other, more complicated methods. TextAdaIN achieves state-of-the-art results on standard handwritten text recognition benchmarks. It generalizes to multiple architectures and to the domain of scene text recognition. Furthermore, we demonstrate that integrating TextAdaIN improves robustness towards more challenging testing conditions. The official Pytorch implementation can be found at https://github.com/amazon-research/textadain-robust-recognition.
Binarized Weight Error Networks With a Transition Regularization Term
Authors: Savas Ozkan, Gozde Bozdagi Akar
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00

This paper proposes a novel binarized weight network (BT) for a resource-efficient neural structure. The proposed model estimates a binary representation of weights by taking into account the approximation error with an additional term. This model increases representation capacity and stability, particularly for shallow networks, while the computation load is theoretically reduced. In addition, a novel regularization term is introduced that is suitable for all threshold-based binary precision networks. This term penalizes the trainable parameters that are far from the thresholds at which binary transitions occur. This step promotes a swift modification for binary-precision responses at train time. The experimental results are carried out for two sets of tasks: visual classification and visual inverse problems. Benchmarks for Cifar10, SVHN, Fashion, ImageNet2012, Set5, Set14, Urban and BSD100 datasets show that our method outperforms all counterparts with binary precision.
Interaction Detection Between Vehicles and Vulnerable Road Users: A Deep Generative Approach with Attention
Authors: Hao Cheng, Li Feng, Hailong Liu, Takatsugu Hirayama, Hiroshi Murase, Monika Sester
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Self-Driving Cars

Intersections where vehicles are permitted to turn and interact with vulnerable road users (VRUs) like pedestrians and cyclists are among some of the most challenging locations for automated and accurate recognition of road users' behavior. In this paper, we propose a deep conditional generative model for interaction detection at such locations. It aims to automatically analyze massive video data about the continuity of road users' behavior. This task is essential for many intelligent transportation systems such as traffic safety control and self-driving cars that depend on the understanding of road users' locomotion. A Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder based model with Gaussian latent variables is trained to encode road users' behavior and perform probabilistic and diverse predictions of interactions. The model takes as input the information of road users' type, position and motion automatically extracted by a deep learning object detector and optical flow from videos, and generates frame-wise probabilities that represent the dynamics of interactions between a turning vehicle and any VRUs involved. The model's efficacy was validated by testing on real--world datasets acquired from two different intersections. It achieved an F1-score above 0.96 at a right--turn intersection in Germany and 0.89 at a left--turn intersection in Japan, both with very busy traffic flows.
Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving with Topometric Map
Authors: Jiaolong Xu, Liang Xiao, Dawei Zhao, Yiming Nie, Bin Dai
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

State-of-the-art autonomous driving systems rely on high definition (HD) maps for localization and navigation. However, building and maintaining HD maps is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, the HD maps assume structured environment such as the existence of major road and lanes, which are not present in rural areas. In this work, we propose an end-to-end transformer networks based approach for map-less autonomous driving. The proposed model takes raw LiDAR data and noisy topometric map as input and produces precise local trajectory for navigation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in real-world driving data, including both urban and rural areas. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal methods and is robust to the perturbations of the topometric map. The code of the proposed method is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Jiaolong/trajectory-prediction}.
Improving Cost Learning for JPEG Steganography by Exploiting JPEG Domain Knowledge
Authors: Weixuan Tang, Bin Li, Mauro Barni, Jin Li, Jiwu Huang
Date: 2021-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Although significant progress in automatic learning of steganographic cost has been achieved recently, existing methods designed for spatial images are not well applicable to JPEG images which are more common media in daily life. The difficulties of migration mostly lie in the unique and complicated JPEG characteristics caused by 8x8 DCT mode structure. To address the issue, in this paper we extend an existing automatic cost learning scheme to JPEG, where the proposed scheme called JEC-RL (JPEG Embedding Cost with Reinforcement Learning) is explicitly designed to tailor the JPEG DCT structure. It works with the embedding action sampling mechanism under reinforcement learning, where a policy network learns the optimal embedding policies via maximizing the rewards provided by an environment network. The policy network is constructed following a domain-transition design paradigm, where three modules including pixel-level texture complexity evaluation, DCT feature extraction, and mode-wise rearrangement, are proposed. These modules operate in serial, gradually extracting useful features from a decompressed JPEG image and converting them into embedding policies for DCT elements, while considering JPEG characteristics including inter-block and intra-block correlations simultaneously. The environment network is designed in a gradient-oriented way to provide stable reward values by using a wide architecture equipped with a fixed preprocessing layer with 8x8 DCT basis filters. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve good security performance for JPEG images against both advanced feature based and modern CNN based steganalyzers.