pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards the Localisation of Lesions in Diabetic Retinopathy
Authors: Samuel Ofosu Mensah, Bubacarr Bah, Willie Brink
Date: 2020-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have successfully been used to classify diabetic retinopathy (DR) fundus images in recent times. However, deeper representations in CNNs may capture higher-level semantics at the expense of spatial resolution. To make predictions usable for ophthalmologists, we use a post-attention technique called Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) on the penultimate layer of deep learning models to produce coarse localisation maps on DR fundus images. This is to help identify discriminative regions in the images, consequently providing evidence for ophthalmologists to make a diagnosis and potentially save lives by early diagnosis. Specifically, this study uses pre-trained weights from four state-of-the-art deep learning models to produce and compare localisation maps of DR fundus images. The models used include VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, and InceptionResNetV2. We find that InceptionV3 achieves the best performance with a test classification accuracy of 96.07%, and localise lesions better and faster than the other models.
Blurring Fools the Network -- Adversarial Attacks by Feature Peak Suppression and Gaussian Blurring
Authors: Chenchen Zhao, Hao Li
Date: 2020-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Existing pixel-level adversarial attacks on neural networks may be deficient in real scenarios, since pixel-level changes on the data cannot be fully delivered to the neural network after camera capture and multiple image preprocessing steps. In contrast, in this paper, we argue from another perspective that gaussian blurring, a common technique of image preprocessing, can be aggressive itself in specific occasions, thus exposing the network to real-world adversarial attacks. We first propose an adversarial attack demo named peak suppression (PS) by suppressing the values of peak elements in the features of the data. Based on the blurring spirit of PS, we further apply gaussian blurring to the data, to investigate the potential influence and threats of gaussian blurring to performance of the network. Experiment results show that PS and well-designed gaussian blurring can form adversarial attacks that completely change classification results of a well-trained target network. With the strong physical significance and wide applications of gaussian blurring, the proposed approach will also be capable of conducting real world attacks.
Overcoming Language Priors with Self-supervised Learning for Visual Question Answering
Authors: Xi Zhu, Zhendong Mao, Chunxiao Liu, Peng Zhang, Bin Wang, Yongdong Zhang
Date: 2020-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Self-Supervised Learning, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Most Visual Question Answering (VQA) models suffer from the language prior problem, which is caused by inherent data biases. Specifically, VQA models tend to answer questions (e.g., what color is the banana?) based on the high-frequency answers (e.g., yellow) ignoring image contents. Existing approaches tackle this problem by creating delicate models or introducing additional visual annotations to reduce question dependency while strengthening image dependency. However, they are still subject to the language prior problem since the data biases have not been even alleviated. In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised learning framework to solve this problem. Concretely, we first automatically generate labeled data to balance the biased data, and propose a self-supervised auxiliary task to utilize the balanced data to assist the base VQA model to overcome language priors. Our method can compensate for the data biases by generating balanced data without introducing external annotations. Experimental results show that our method can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art, improving the overall accuracy from 49.50% to 57.59% on the most commonly used benchmark VQA-CP v2. In other words, we can increase the performance of annotation-based methods by 16% without using external annotations.
Atlas-ISTN: Joint Segmentation, Registration and Atlas Construction with Image-and-Spatial Transformer Networks
Authors: Matthew Sinclair, Andreas Schuh, Karl Hahn, Kersten Petersen, Ying Bai, James Batten, Michiel Schaap, Ben Glocker
Date: 2020-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning models for semantic segmentation are able to learn powerful representations for pixel-wise predictions, but are sensitive to noise at test time and do not guarantee a plausible topology. Image registration models on the other hand are able to warp known topologies to target images as a means of segmentation, but typically require large amounts of training data, and have not widely been benchmarked against pixel-wise segmentation models. We propose Atlas-ISTN, a framework that jointly learns segmentation and registration on 2D and 3D image data, and constructs a population-derived atlas in the process. Atlas-ISTN learns to segment multiple structures of interest and to register the constructed, topologically consistent atlas labelmap to an intermediate pixel-wise segmentation. Additionally, Atlas-ISTN allows for test time refinement of the model's parameters to optimize the alignment of the atlas labelmap to an intermediate pixel-wise segmentation. This process both mitigates for noise in the target image that can result in spurious pixel-wise predictions, as well as improves upon the one-pass prediction of the model. Benefits of the Atlas-ISTN framework are demonstrated qualitatively and quantitatively on 2D synthetic data and 3D cardiac computed tomography and brain magnetic resonance image data, out-performing both segmentation and registration baseline models. Atlas-ISTN also provides inter-subject correspondence of the structures of interest, enabling population-level shape and motion analysis.
Self-Supervision based Task-Specific Image Collection Summarization
Authors: Anurag Singh, Deepak Kumar Sharma, Sudhir Kumar Sharma
Date: 2020-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Generative Adversarial Network

Successful applications of deep learning (DL) requires large amount of annotated data. This often restricts the benefits of employing DL to businesses and individuals with large budgets for data-collection and computation. Summarization offers a possible solution by creating much smaller representative datasets that can allow real-time deep learning and analysis of big data and thus democratize use of DL. In the proposed work, our aim is to explore a novel approach to task-specific image corpus summarization using semantic information and self-supervision. Our method uses a classification-based Wasserstein generative adversarial network (CLSWGAN) as a feature generating network. The model also leverages rotational invariance as self-supervision and classification on another task. All these objectives are added on a features from resnet34 to make it discriminative and robust. The model then generates a summary at inference time by using K-means clustering in the semantic embedding space. Thus, another main advantage of this model is that it does not need to be retrained each time to obtain summaries of different lengths which is an issue with current end-to-end models. We also test our model efficacy by means of rigorous experiments both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Confused Modulo Projection based Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption -- Cryptosystem, Library and Applications on Secure Smart Cities
Authors: Xin Jin, Hongyu Zhang, XiaoDong Li, Haoyang Yu, Beisheng Liu, Shujiang Xie, Amit Kumar Singh, Yujie Li
Date: 2020-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Flow Estimation

With the development of cloud computing, the storage and processing of massive visual media data has gradually transferred to the cloud server. For example, if the intelligent video monitoring system cannot process a large amount of data locally, the data will be uploaded to the cloud. Therefore, how to process data in the cloud without exposing the original data has become an important research topic. We propose a single-server version of somewhat homomorphic encryption cryptosystem based on confused modulo projection theorem named CMP-SWHE, which allows the server to complete blind data processing without \emph{seeing} the effective information of user data. On the client side, the original data is encrypted by amplification, randomization, and setting confusing redundancy. Operating on the encrypted data on the server side is equivalent to operating on the original data. As an extension, we designed and implemented a blind computing scheme of accelerated version based on batch processing technology to improve efficiency. To make this algorithm easy to use, we also designed and implemented an efficient general blind computing library based on CMP-SWHE. We have applied this library to foreground extraction, optical flow tracking and object detection with satisfactory results, which are helpful for building smart cities. We also discuss how to extend the algorithm to deep learning applications. Compared with other homomorphic encryption cryptosystems and libraries, the results show that our method has obvious advantages in computing efficiency. Although our algorithm has some tiny errors ($10^{-6}$) when the data is too large, it is very efficient and practical, especially suitable for blind image and video processing.
Multi-Label Noise Robust Collaborative Learning for Remote Sensing Image Classification
Authors: Ahmet Kerem Aksoy, Mahdyar Ravanbakhsh, Begüm Demir
Date: 2020-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Multi-Label Learning, Remote Sensing Image Classification

The development of accurate methods for multi-label classification (MLC) of remote sensing (RS) images is one of the most important research topics in RS. The MLC methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown strong performance gains in RS. However, they usually require a high number of reliable training images annotated with multiple land-cover class labels. Collecting such data is time-consuming and costly. To address this problem, the publicly available thematic products, which can include noisy labels, can be used to annotate RS images with zero-labeling cost. However, multi-label noise (which can be associated with wrong and missing label annotations) can distort the learning process of the MLC methods. To address this problem, we propose a novel multi-label noise robust collaborative learning (RCML) method to alleviate the negative effects of multi-label noise during the training phase of a CNN model. RCML identifies, ranks and excludes noisy multi-labels in RS images based on three main modules: 1) the discrepancy module; 2) the group lasso module; and 3) the swap module. The discrepancy module ensures that the two networks learn diverse features, while producing the same predictions. The task of the group lasso module is to detect the potentially noisy labels assigned to multi-labeled training images, while the swap module is devoted to exchange the ranking information between two networks. Unlike the existing methods that make assumptions about noise distribution, our proposed RCML does not make any prior assumption about the type of noise in the training set. The experiments conducted on two multi-label RS image archives confirm the robustness of the proposed RCML under extreme multi-label noise rates. Our code is publicly available at: http://www.noisy-labels-in-rs.org
Consolidated Dataset and Metrics for High-Dynamic-Range Image Quality
Authors: Aliaksei Mikhailiuk, Maria Perez-Ortiz, Dingcheng Yue, Wilson Suen, Rafal K. Mantiuk
Date: 2020-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Increasing popularity of high-dynamic-range (HDR) image and video content brings the need for metrics that could predict the severity of image impairments as seen on displays of different brightness levels and dynamic range. Such metrics should be trained and validated on a sufficiently large subjective image quality dataset to ensure robust performance. As the existing HDR quality datasets are limited in size, we created a Unified Photometric Image Quality dataset (UPIQ) with over 4,000 images by realigning and merging existing HDR and standard-dynamic-range (SDR) datasets. The realigned quality scores share the same unified quality scale across all datasets. Such realignment was achieved by collecting additional cross-dataset quality comparisons and re-scaling data with a psychometric scaling method. Images in the proposed dataset are represented in absolute photometric and colorimetric units, corresponding to light emitted from a display. We use the new dataset to retrain existing HDR metrics and show that the dataset is sufficiently large for training deep architectures. We show the utility of the dataset on brightness aware image compression.
MA-Unet: An improved version of Unet based on multi-scale and attention mechanism for medical image segmentation
Authors: Yutong Cai, Yong Wang
Date: 2020-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are promoting the development of medical image semantic segmentation, the standard model still has some shortcomings. First, the feature mapping from the encoder and decoder sub-networks in the skip connection operation has a large semantic difference. Second, the remote feature dependence is not effectively modeled. Third, the global context information of different scales is ignored. In this paper, we try to eliminate semantic ambiguity in skip connection operations by adding attention gates (AGs), and use attention mechanisms to combine local features with their corresponding global dependencies, explicitly model the dependencies between channels and use multi-scale predictive fusion to utilize global information at different scales. Compared with other state-of-the-art segmentation networks, our model obtains better segmentation performance while introducing fewer parameters.
A Multi-View Dynamic Fusion Framework: How to Improve the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation from Multi-Views?
Authors: Yi Ding, Wei Zheng, Guozheng Wu, Ji Geng, Mingsheng Cao, Zhiguang Qin
Date: 2020-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, MULTI-VIEW LEARNING, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

When diagnosing the brain tumor, doctors usually make a diagnosis by observing multimodal brain images from the axial view, the coronal view and the sagittal view, respectively. And then they make a comprehensive decision to confirm the brain tumor based on the information obtained from multi-views. Inspired by this diagnosing process and in order to further utilize the 3D information hidden in the dataset, this paper proposes a multi-view dynamic fusion framework to improve the performance of brain tumor segmentation. The proposed framework consists of 1) a multi-view deep neural network architecture, which represents multi learning networks for segmenting the brain tumor from different views and each deep neural network corresponds to multi-modal brain images from one single view and 2) the dynamic decision fusion method, which is mainly used to fuse segmentation results from multi-views as an integrate one and two different fusion methods, the voting method and the weighted averaging method, have been adopted to evaluate the fusing process. Moreover, the multi-view fusion loss, which consists of the segmentation loss, the transition loss and the decision loss, is proposed to facilitate the training process of multi-view learning networks so as to keep the consistency of appearance and space, not only in the process of fusing segmentation results, but also in the process of training the learning network. \par By evaluating the proposed framework on BRATS 2015 and BRATS 2018, it can be found that the fusion results from multi-views achieve a better performance than the segmentation result from the single view and the effectiveness of proposed multi-view fusion loss has also been proved. Moreover, the proposed framework achieves a better segmentation performance and a higher efficiency compared to other counterpart methods.
Automatic Diagnosis of Pneumothorax from Chest Radiographs: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Tahira Iqbal, Arslan Shaukat, Usman Akram, Zartasha Mustansar
Date: 2020-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Pneumothorax Detection, Systematic Literature Review

Among various medical imaging tools, chest radiographs are the most important and widely used diagnostic tool for detection of thoracic pathologies. Research is being carried out in order to propose robust automatic diagnostic tool for detection of pathologies from chest radiographs. Artificial Intelligence techniques especially deep learning methodologies have found to be giving promising results in automating the field of medicine. Lot of research has been done for automatic and fast detection of pneumothorax from chest radiographs while proposing several frameworks based on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. This study summarizes the existing literature for the automatic detection of pneumothorax from chest x-rays along with describing the available chest radiographs datasets. The comparative analysis of the literature is also provided in terms of goodness. Limitations of the existing literature along with the research gaps is also given for further investigation. The paper provides a brief overview of the present work for pneumothorax detection for helping the researchers in selection of optimal approach for future research.
Sim-to-real for high-resolution optical tactile sensing: From images to 3D contact force distributions
Authors: Carmelo Sferrazza, Raffaello D'Andrea
Date: 2020-12-21 00:00:00

The images captured by vision-based tactile sensors carry information about high-resolution tactile fields, such as the distribution of the contact forces applied to their soft sensing surface. However, extracting the information encoded in the images is challenging and often addressed with learning-based approaches, which generally require a large amount of training data. This article proposes a strategy to generate tactile images in simulation for a vision-based tactile sensor based on an internal camera that tracks the motion of spherical particles within a soft material. The deformation of the material is simulated in a finite element environment under a diverse set of contact conditions, and spherical particles are projected to a simulated image. Features extracted from the images are mapped to the 3D contact force distribution, with the ground truth also obtained via finite-element simulations, with an artificial neural network that is therefore entirely trained on synthetic data avoiding the need for real-world data collection. The resulting model exhibits high accuracy when evaluated on real-world tactile images, is transferable across multiple tactile sensors without further training, and is suitable for efficient real-time inference.
Self-Supervised Learning for Visual Summary Identification in Scientific Publications
Authors: Shintaro Yamamoto, Anne Lauscher, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Goran Glavaš, Shigeo Morishima
Date: 2020-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Providing visual summaries of scientific publications can increase information access for readers and thereby help deal with the exponential growth in the number of scientific publications. Nonetheless, efforts in providing visual publication summaries have been few and far apart, primarily focusing on the biomedical domain. This is primarily because of the limited availability of annotated gold standards, which hampers the application of robust and high-performing supervised learning techniques. To address these problems we create a new benchmark dataset for selecting figures to serve as visual summaries of publications based on their abstracts, covering several domains in computer science. Moreover, we develop a self-supervised learning approach, based on heuristic matching of inline references to figures with figure captions. Experiments in both biomedical and computer science domains show that our model is able to outperform the state of the art despite being self-supervised and therefore not relying on any annotated training data.
CODE: Contrastive Pre-training with Adversarial Fine-tuning for Zero-shot Expert Linking
Authors: Bo Chen, Jing Zhang, Xiaokang Zhang, Xiaobin Tang, Lingfan Cai, Hong Chen, Cuiping Li, Peng Zhang, Jie Tang
Date: 2020-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Contrastive Learning, Domain Adaptation, Self-Supervised Learning

Expert finding, a popular service provided by many online websites such as Expertise Finder, LinkedIn, and AMiner, is beneficial to seeking candidate qualifications, consultants, and collaborators. However, its quality is suffered from lack of ample sources of expert information. This paper employs AMiner as the basis with an aim at linking any external experts to the counterparts on AMiner. As it is infeasible to acquire sufficient linkages from arbitrary external sources, we explore the problem of zero-shot expert linking. In this paper, we propose CODE, which first pre-trains an expert linking model by contrastive learning on AMiner such that it can capture the representation and matching patterns of experts without supervised signals, then it is fine-tuned between AMiner and external sources to enhance the models transferability in an adversarial manner. For evaluation, we first design two intrinsic tasks, author identification and paper clustering, to validate the representation and matching capability endowed by contrastive learning. Then the final external expert linking performance on two genres of external sources also implies the superiority of the adversarial fine-tuning method. Additionally, we show the online deployment of CODE, and continuously improve its online performance via active learning.