pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
NeuralMagicEye: Learning to See and Understand the Scene Behind an Autostereogram
Authors: Zhengxia Zou, Tianyang Shi, Yi Yuan, Zhenwei Shi
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00

An autostereogram, a.k.a. magic eye image, is a single-image stereogram that can create visual illusions of 3D scenes from 2D textures. This paper studies an interesting question that whether a deep CNN can be trained to recover the depth behind an autostereogram and understand its content. The key to the autostereogram magic lies in the stereopsis - to solve such a problem, a model has to learn to discover and estimate disparity from the quasi-periodic textures. We show that deep CNNs embedded with disparity convolution, a novel convolutional layer proposed in this paper that simulates stereopsis and encodes disparity, can nicely solve such a problem after being sufficiently trained on a large 3D object dataset in a self-supervised fashion. We refer to our method as ``NeuralMagicEye''. Experiments show that our method can accurately recover the depth behind autostereograms with rich details and gradient smoothness. Experiments also show the completely different working mechanisms for autostereogram perception between neural networks and human eyes. We hope this research can help people with visual impairments and those who have trouble viewing autostereograms. Our code is available at \url{https://jiupinjia.github.io/neuralmagiceye/}.
Voxel R-CNN: Towards High Performance Voxel-based 3D Object Detection
Authors: Jiajun Deng, Shaoshuai Shi, Peiwei Li, Wengang Zhou, Yanyong Zhang, Houqiang Li
Date: 2020-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, GPU, object-detection, Object Detection, Region Proposal, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Recent advances on 3D object detection heavily rely on how the 3D data are represented, \emph{i.e.}, voxel-based or point-based representation. Many existing high performance 3D detectors are point-based because this structure can better retain precise point positions. Nevertheless, point-level features lead to high computation overheads due to unordered storage. In contrast, the voxel-based structure is better suited for feature extraction but often yields lower accuracy because the input data are divided into grids. In this paper, we take a slightly different viewpoint -- we find that precise positioning of raw points is not essential for high performance 3D object detection and that the coarse voxel granularity can also offer sufficient detection accuracy. Bearing this view in mind, we devise a simple but effective voxel-based framework, named Voxel R-CNN. By taking full advantage of voxel features in a two stage approach, our method achieves comparable detection accuracy with state-of-the-art point-based models, but at a fraction of the computation cost. Voxel R-CNN consists of a 3D backbone network, a 2D bird-eye-view (BEV) Region Proposal Network and a detect head. A voxel RoI pooling is devised to extract RoI features directly from voxel features for further refinement. Extensive experiments are conducted on the widely used KITTI Dataset and the more recent Waymo Open Dataset. Our results show that compared to existing voxel-based methods, Voxel R-CNN delivers a higher detection accuracy while maintaining a real-time frame processing rate, \emph{i.e}., at a speed of 25 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti GPU. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/djiajunustc/Voxel-R-CNN}.
SelectScale: Mining More Patterns from Images via Selective and Soft Dropout
Authors: Zhengsu Chen, Jianwei Niu, Xuefeng Liu, Shaojie Tang
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable success in image recognition. Although the internal patterns of the input images are effectively learned by the CNNs, these patterns only constitute a small proportion of useful patterns contained in the input images. This can be attributed to the fact that the CNNs will stop learning if the learned patterns are enough to make a correct classification. Network regularization methods like dropout and SpatialDropout can ease this problem. During training, they randomly drop the features. These dropout methods, in essence, change the patterns learned by the networks, and in turn, forces the networks to learn other patterns to make the correct classification. However, the above methods have an important drawback. Randomly dropping features is generally inefficient and can introduce unnecessary noise. To tackle this problem, we propose SelectScale. Instead of randomly dropping units, SelectScale selects the important features in networks and adjusts them during training. Using SelectScale, we improve the performance of CNNs on CIFAR and ImageNet.
Evaluation and Comparison of Edge-Preserving Filters
Authors: Sarah Gingichashvili, Dani Lischinski
Date: 2020-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Edge-preserving filters play an essential role in some of the most basic tasks of computational photography, such as abstraction, tonemapping, detail enhancement and texture removal, to name a few. The abundance and diversity of smoothing operators, accompanied by a lack of methodology to evaluate output quality and/or perform an unbiased comparison between them, could lead to misunderstanding and potential misuse of such methods. This paper introduces a systematic methodology for evaluating and comparing such operators and demonstrates it on a diverse set of published edge-preserving filters. Additionally, we present a common baseline along which a comparison of different operators can be achieved and use it to determine equivalent parameter mappings between methods. Finally, we suggest some guidelines for objective comparison and evaluation of edge-preserving filters.
Classification of Pathological and Normal Gait: A Survey
Authors: Ryan C. Saxe, Samantha Kappagoda, David K. A. Mordecai
Date: 2020-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Gait Recognition, General Classification, Survey

Gait recognition is a term commonly referred to as an identification problem within the Computer Science field. There are a variety of methods and models capable of identifying an individual based on their pattern of ambulatory locomotion. By surveying the current literature on gait recognition, this paper seeks to identify appropriate metrics, devices, and algorithms for collecting and analyzing data regarding patterns and modes of ambulatory movement across individuals. Furthermore, this survey seeks to motivate interest in a broader scope of longitudinal analysis regarding the perturbations in gait across states (i.e. physiological, emotive, and/or cognitive states). More broadly, inferences to normal versus pathological gait patterns can be attributed, based on both longitudinal and non-longitudinal forms of classification. This may indicate promising research directions and experimental designs, such as creating algorithmic metrics for the quantification of fatigue, or models for forecasting episodic disorders. Furthermore, in conjunction with other measurements of physiological and environmental conditions, pathological gait classification might be applicable to inference for syndromic surveillance of infectious disease states or cognitive impairment.
SASSI -- Super-Pixelated Adaptive Spatio-Spectral Imaging
Authors: Vishwanath Saragadam, Michael DeZeeuw, Richard Baraniuk, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Aswin Sankaranarayanan
Date: 2020-12-28 00:00:00

We introduce a novel video-rate hyperspectral imager with high spatial, and temporal resolutions. Our key hypothesis is that spectral profiles of pixels in a super-pixel of an oversegmented image tend to be very similar. Hence, a scene-adaptive spatial sampling of an hyperspectral scene, guided by its super-pixel segmented image, is capable of obtaining high-quality reconstructions. To achieve this, we acquire an RGB image of the scene, compute its super-pixels, from which we generate a spatial mask of locations where we measure high-resolution spectrum. The hyperspectral image is subsequently estimated by fusing the RGB image and the spectral measurements using a learnable guided filtering approach. Due to low computational complexity of the superpixel estimation step, our setup can capture hyperspectral images of the scenes with little overhead over traditional snapshot hyperspectral cameras, but with significantly higher spatial and spectral resolutions. We validate the proposed technique with extensive simulations as well as a lab prototype that measures hyperspectral video at a spatial resolution of $600 \times 900$ pixels, at a spectral resolution of 10 nm over visible wavebands, and achieving a frame rate at $18$fps.
Comparison of different CNNs for breast tumor classification from ultrasound images
Authors: Jorge F. Lazo, Sara Moccia, Emanuele Frontoni, Elena De Momi
Date: 2020-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Transfer Learning

Breast cancer is one of the deadliest cancer worldwide. Timely detection could reduce mortality rates. In the clinical routine, classifying benign and malignant tumors from ultrasound (US) imaging is a crucial but challenging task. An automated method, which can deal with the variability of data is therefore needed. In this paper, we compared different Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and transfer learning methods for the task of automated breast tumor classification. The architectures investigated in this study were VGG-16 and Inception V3. Two different training strategies were investigated: the first one was using pretrained models as feature extractors and the second one was to fine-tune the pre-trained models. A total of 947 images were used, 587 corresponded to US images of benign tumors and 360 with malignant tumors. 678 images were used for the training and validation process, while 269 images were used for testing the models. Accuracy and Area Under the receiver operating characteristic Curve (AUC) were used as performance metrics. The best performance was obtained by fine tuning VGG-16, with an accuracy of 0.919 and an AUC of 0.934. The obtained results open the opportunity to further investigation with a view of improving cancer detection.
Cascaded Framework for Automatic Evaluation of Myocardial Infarction from Delayed-Enhancement Cardiac MRI
Authors: Jun Ma
Date: 2020-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Segmentation

Automatic evaluation of myocardium and pathology plays an important role in the quantitative analysis of patients suffering from myocardial infarction. In this paper, we present a cascaded convolutional neural network framework for myocardial infarction segmentation and classification in delayed-enhancement cardiac MRI. Specifically, we first use a 2D U-Net to segment the whole heart, including the left ventricle and the myocardium. Then, we crop the whole heart as a region of interest (ROI). Finally, a new 2D U-Net is used to segment the infraction and no-reflow areas in the whole heart ROI. The segmentation method can be applied to the classification task where the segmentation results with the infraction or no-reflow areas are classified as pathological cases. Our method took second place in the MICCAI 2020 EMIDEC segmentation task with Dice scores of 86.28%, 62.24%, and 77.76% for myocardium, infraction, and no-reflow areas, respectively, and first place in the classification task with an accuracy of 92%.
Myocardial Segmentation of Cardiac MRI Sequences with Temporal Consistency for Coronary Artery Disease Diagnosis
Authors: Yutian Chen, Xiaowei Xu, Dewen Zeng, Yiyu Shi, Haiyun Yuan, Jian Zhuang, Yuhao Dong, Qianjun Jia, Meiping Huang
Date: 2020-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common cause of death globally, and its diagnosis is usually based on manual myocardial segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) sequences. As the manual segmentation is tedious, time-consuming and with low applicability, automatic myocardial segmentation using machine learning techniques has been widely explored recently. However, almost all the existing methods treat the input MRI sequences independently, which fails to capture the temporal information between sequences, e.g., the shape and location information of the myocardium in sequences along time. In this paper, we propose a myocardial segmentation framework for sequence of cardiac MRI (CMR) scanning images of left ventricular cavity, right ventricular cavity, and myocardium. Specifically, we propose to combine conventional networks and recurrent networks to incorporate temporal information between sequences to ensure temporal consistent. We evaluated our framework on the Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge (ACDC) dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that our framework can improve the segmentation accuracy by up to 2% in Dice coefficient.
Ensembled ResUnet for Anatomical Brain Barriers Segmentation
Authors: Munan Ning, Cheng Bian, Chenglang Yuan, Kai Ma, Yefeng Zheng
Date: 2020-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation

Accuracy segmentation of brain structures could be helpful for glioma and radiotherapy planning. However, due to the visual and anatomical differences between different modalities, the accurate segmentation of brain structures becomes challenging. To address this problem, we first construct a residual block based U-shape network with a deep encoder and shallow decoder, which can trade off the framework performance and efficiency. Then, we introduce the Tversky loss to address the issue of the class imbalance between different foreground and the background classes. Finally, a model ensemble strategy is utilized to remove outliers and further boost performance.
Annotation-Efficient Learning for Medical Image Segmentation based on Noisy Pseudo Labels and Adversarial Learning
Authors: Lu Wang, Dong Guo, Guotai Wang, Shaoting Zhang
Date: 2020-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Despite that deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance for medical image segmentation, its success relies on a large set of manually annotated images for training that are expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose an annotation-efficient learning framework for segmentation tasks that avoids annotations of training images, where we use an improved Cycle-Consistent Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to learn from a set of unpaired medical images and auxiliary masks obtained either from a shape model or public datasets. We first use the GAN to generate pseudo labels for our training images under the implicit high-level shape constraint represented by a Variational Auto-encoder (VAE)-based discriminator with the help of the auxiliary masks, and build a Discriminator-guided Generator Channel Calibration (DGCC) module which employs our discriminator's feedback to calibrate the generator for better pseudo labels. To learn from the pseudo labels that are noisy, we further introduce a noise-robust iterative learning method using noise-weighted Dice loss. We validated our framework with two situations: objects with a simple shape model like optic disc in fundus images and fetal head in ultrasound images, and complex structures like lung in X-Ray images and liver in CT images. Experimental results demonstrated that 1) Our VAE-based discriminator and DGCC module help to obtain high-quality pseudo labels. 2) Our proposed noise-robust learning method can effectively overcome the effect of noisy pseudo labels. 3) The segmentation performance of our method without using annotations of training images is close or even comparable to that of learning from human annotations.
AILearn: An Adaptive Incremental Learning Model for Spoof Fingerprint Detection
Authors: Shivang Agarwal, Ajita Rattani, C. Ravindranath Chowdary
Date: 2020-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning

Incremental learning enables the learner to accommodate new knowledge without retraining the existing model. It is a challenging task which requires learning from new data as well as preserving the knowledge extracted from the previously accessed data. This challenge is known as the stability-plasticity dilemma. We propose AILearn, a generic model for incremental learning which overcomes the stability-plasticity dilemma by carefully integrating the ensemble of base classifiers trained on new data with the current ensemble without retraining the model from scratch using entire data. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed AILearn model on spoof fingerprint detection application. One of the significant challenges associated with spoof fingerprint detection is the performance drop on spoofs generated using new fabrication materials. AILearn is an adaptive incremental learning model which adapts to the features of the ``live'' and ``spoof'' fingerprint images and efficiently recognizes the new spoof fingerprints as well as the known spoof fingerprints when the new data is available. To the best of our knowledge, AILearn is the first attempt in incremental learning algorithms that adapts to the properties of data for generating a diverse ensemble of base classifiers. From the experiments conducted on standard high-dimensional datasets LivDet 2011, LivDet 2013 and LivDet 2015, we show that the performance gain on new fake materials is significantly high. On an average, we achieve $49.57\%$ improvement in accuracy between the consecutive learning phases.
Parzen Window Approximation on Riemannian Manifold
Authors: abhishek, Shekhar Verma
Date: 2020-12-29 00:00:00

In graph motivated learning, label propagation largely depends on data affinity represented as edges between connected data points. The affinity assignment implicitly assumes even distribution of data on the manifold. This assumption may not hold and may lead to inaccurate metric assignment due to drift towards high-density regions. The drift affected heat kernel based affinity with a globally fixed Parzen window either discards genuine neighbors or forces distant data points to become a member of the neighborhood. This yields a biased affinity matrix. In this paper, the bias due to uneven data sampling on the Riemannian manifold is catered to by a variable Parzen window determined as a function of neighborhood size, ambient dimension, flatness range, etc. Additionally, affinity adjustment is used which offsets the effect of uneven sampling responsible for the bias. An affinity metric which takes into consideration the irregular sampling effect to yield accurate label propagation is proposed. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets confirm that the proposed method increases the classification accuracy significantly and outperforms existing Parzen window estimators in graph Laplacian manifold regularization methods.
Semi-supervised Cardiac Image Segmentation via Label Propagation and Style Transfer
Authors: Yao Zhang, Jiawei Yang, Feng Hou, Yang Liu, Yixin Wang, Jiang Tian, Cheng Zhong, Yang Zhang, Zhiqiang He
Date: 2020-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Style Transfer

Accurate segmentation of cardiac structures can assist doctors to diagnose diseases, and to improve treatment planning, which is highly demanded in the clinical practice. However, the shortage of annotation and the variance of the data among different vendors and medical centers restrict the performance of advanced deep learning methods. In this work, we present a fully automatic method to segment cardiac structures including the left (LV) and right ventricle (RV) blood pools, as well as for the left ventricular myocardium (MYO) in MRI volumes. Specifically, we design a semi-supervised learning method to leverage unlabelled MRI sequence timeframes by label propagation. Then we exploit style transfer to reduce the variance among different centers and vendors for more robust cardiac image segmentation. We evaluate our method in the M&Ms challenge 7 , ranking 2nd place among 14 competitive teams.
A Review of Machine Learning Techniques for Applied Eye Fundus and Tongue Digital Image Processing with Diabetes Management System
Authors: Wei Xiang Lim, ZhiYuan Chen, Amr Ahmed, Tissa Chandesa, Iman Liao
Date: 2020-12-30 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Management

Diabetes is a global epidemic and it is increasing at an alarming rate. The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) projected that the total number of people with diabetes globally may increase by 48%, from 425 million (year 2017) to 629 million (year 2045). Moreover, diabetes had caused millions of deaths and the number is increasing drastically. Therefore, this paper addresses the background of diabetes and its complications. In addition, this paper investigates innovative applications and past researches in the areas of diabetes management system with applied eye fundus and tongue digital images. Different types of existing applied eye fundus and tongue digital image processing with diabetes management systems in the market and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques from previous literature have been reviewed. The implication of this paper is to have an overview in diabetic research and what new machine learning techniques can be proposed in solving this global epidemic.
Unpaired Image Enhancement with Quality-Attention Generative Adversarial Network
Authors: Zhangkai Ni, Wenhan Yang, Shiqi Wang, Lin Ma, Sam Kwong
Date: 2020-12-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Enhancement

In this work, we aim to learn an unpaired image enhancement model, which can enrich low-quality images with the characteristics of high-quality images provided by users. We propose a quality attention generative adversarial network (QAGAN) trained on unpaired data based on the bidirectional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) embedded with a quality attention module (QAM). The key novelty of the proposed QAGAN lies in the injected QAM for the generator such that it learns domain-relevant quality attention directly from the two domains. More specifically, the proposed QAM allows the generator to effectively select semantic-related characteristics from the spatial-wise and adaptively incorporate style-related attributes from the channel-wise, respectively. Therefore, in our proposed QAGAN, not only discriminators but also the generator can directly access both domains which significantly facilitates the generator to learn the mapping function. Extensive experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art methods based on unpaired learning, our proposed method achieves better performance in both objective and subjective evaluations.
Fast Hyperspectral Image Recovery via Non-iterative Fusion of Dual-Camera Compressive Hyperspectral Imaging
Authors: wei he, Naoto Yokoya, Xin Yuan
Date: 2020-12-30 00:00:00

Coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging (CASSI) is a promising technique to capture the three-dimensional hyperspectral image (HSI) using a single coded two-dimensional (2D) measurement, in which algorithms are used to perform the inverse problem. Due to the ill-posed nature, various regularizers have been exploited to reconstruct the 3D data from the 2D measurement. Unfortunately, the accuracy and computational complexity are unsatisfied. One feasible solution is to utilize additional information such as the RGB measurement in CASSI. Considering the combined CASSI and RGB measurement, in this paper, we propose a new fusion model for the HSI reconstruction. We investigate the spectral low-rank property of HSI composed of a spectral basis and spatial coefficients. Specifically, the RGB measurement is utilized to estimate the coefficients, meanwhile the CASSI measurement is adopted to provide the orthogonal spectral basis. We further propose a patch processing strategy to enhance the spectral low-rank property of HSI. The proposed model neither requires non-local processing or iteration, nor the spectral sensing matrix of the RGB detector. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real HSI dataset demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art not only in quality but also speeds up the reconstruction more than 5000 times.