pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Nonlinear Filter Based Image Denoising Using AMF Approach
Authors: T. K. Thivakaran, RM. Chandrasekaran
Date: 2010-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Image Enhancement, Image Restoration

This paper proposes a new technique based on nonlinear Adaptive Median filter (AMF) for image restoration. Image denoising is a common procedure in digital image processing aiming at the removal of noise, which may corrupt an image during its acquisition or transmission, while retaining its quality. This procedure is traditionally performed in the spatial or frequency domain by filtering. The aim of image enhancement is to reconstruct the true image from the corrupted image. The process of image acquisition frequently leads to degradation and the quality of the digitized image becomes inferior to the original image. Filtering is a technique for enhancing the image. Linear filter is the filtering in which the value of an output pixel is a linear combination of neighborhood values, which can produce blur in the image. Thus a variety of smoothing techniques have been developed that are non linear. Median filter is the one of the most popular non-linear filter. When considering a small neighborhood it is highly efficient but for large window and in case of high noise it gives rise to more blurring to image. The Centre Weighted Median (CWM) filter has got a better average performance over the median filter [8]. However the original pixel corrupted and noise reduction is substantial under high noise condition. Hence this technique has also blurring affect on the image. To illustrate the superiority of the proposed approach by overcoming the existing problem, the proposed new scheme (AMF) Adaptive Median Filter has been simulated along with the standard ones and various performance measures have been compared.
Investigation and Assessment of Disorder of Ultrasound B-mode Images
Authors: Vidhi Rawat, Alok Jain, Vibhakar Shrimali
Date: 2010-03-09 00:00:00

Digital image plays a vital role in the early detection of cancers, such as prostate cancer, breast cancer, lungs cancer, cervical cancer. Ultrasound imaging method is also suitable for early detection of the abnormality of fetus. The accurate detection of region of interest in ultrasound image is crucial. Since the result of reflection, refraction and deflection of ultrasound waves from different types of tissues with different acoustic impedance. Usually, the contrast in ultrasound image is very low and weak edges make the image difficult to identify the fetus region in the ultrasound image. So the analysis of ultrasound image is more challenging one. We try to develop a new algorithmic approach to solve the problem of non clarity and find disorder of it. Generally there is no common enhancement approach for noise reduction. This paper proposes different filtering techniques based on statistical methods for the removal of various noise. The quality of the enhanced images is measured by the statistical quantity measures: Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).
Exploring Descriptions of Movement Through Geovisual Analytics
Authors: Scott Pezanowski, Prasenjit Mitra, Alan M. MacEachren
Date: 2022-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Negation

Sensemaking using automatically extracted information from text is a challenging problem. In this paper, we address a specific type of information extraction, namely extracting information related to descriptions of movement. Aggregating and understanding information related to descriptions of movement and lack of movement specified in text can lead to an improved understanding and sensemaking of movement phenomena of various types, e.g., migration of people and animals, impediments to travel due to COVID-19, etc. We present GeoMovement, a system that is based on combining machine learning and rule-based extraction of movement-related information with state-of-the-art visualization techniques. Along with the depiction of movement, our tool can extract and present a lack of movement. Very little prior work exists on automatically extracting descriptions of movement, especially negation and movement. Apart from addressing these, GeoMovement also provides a novel integrated framework for combining these extraction modules with visualization. We include two systematic case studies of GeoMovement that show how humans can derive meaningful geographic movement information. GeoMovement can complement precise movement data, e.g., obtained using sensors, or be used by itself when precise data is unavailable.
Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Confidence-Based Multi-Class Positive and Unlabeled Learning
Authors: Kang Zhou, Yuepei Li, Qi Li
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

In this paper, we study the named entity recognition (NER) problem under distant supervision. Due to the incompleteness of the external dictionaries and/or knowledge bases, such distantly annotated training data usually suffer from a high false negative rate. To this end, we formulate the Distantly Supervised NER (DS-NER) problem via Multi-class Positive and Unlabeled (MPU) learning and propose a theoretically and practically novel CONFidence-based MPU (Conf-MPU) approach. To handle the incomplete annotations, Conf-MPU consists of two steps. First, a confidence score is estimated for each token of being an entity token. Then, the proposed Conf-MPU risk estimation is applied to train a multi-class classifier for the NER task. Thorough experiments on two benchmark datasets labeled by various external knowledge demonstrate the superiority of the proposed Conf-MPU over existing DS-NER methods.
Predicting Clinical Intent from Free Text Electronic Health Records
Authors: Kawsar Noor, Katherine Smith, Julia Bennett, Jade OConnell, Jessica Fisk, Monika Hunt, Gary Philippo, Teresa Xu, Simon Knight, Luis Romao, Richard JB Dobson, Wai Keong Wong
Date: 2022-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

After a patient consultation, a clinician determines the steps in the management of the patient. A clinician may for example request to see the patient again or refer them to a specialist. Whilst most clinicians will record their intent as "next steps" in the patient's clinical notes, in some cases the clinician may forget to indicate their intent as an order or request, e.g. failure to place the follow-up order. This consequently results in patients becoming lost-to-follow up and may in some cases lead to adverse consequences. In this paper we train a machine learning model to detect a clinician's intent to follow up with a patient from the patient's clinical notes. Annotators systematically identified 22 possible types of clinical intent and annotated 3000 Bariatric clinical notes. The annotation process revealed a class imbalance in the labeled data and we found that there was only sufficient labeled data to train 11 out of the 22 intents. We used the data to train a BERT based multilabel classification model and reported the following average accuracy metrics for all intents: macro-precision: 0.91, macro-recall: 0.90, macro-f1: 0.90.
Probabilistic AutoRegressive Neural Networks for Accurate Long-range Forecasting
Authors: Madhurima Panja, Tanujit Chakraborty, Uttam Kumar, Abdenour Hadid
Date: 2022-04-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Epidemiology, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting, Uncertainty Quantification

Forecasting time series data is a critical area of research with applications spanning from stock prices to early epidemic prediction. While numerous statistical and machine learning methods have been proposed, real-life prediction problems often require hybrid solutions that bridge classical forecasting approaches and modern neural network models. In this study, we introduce the Probabilistic AutoRegressive Neural Networks (PARNN), capable of handling complex time series data exhibiting non-stationarity, nonlinearity, non-seasonality, long-range dependence, and chaotic patterns. PARNN is constructed by improving autoregressive neural networks (ARNN) using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) feedback error, combining the explainability, scalability, and "white-box-like" prediction behavior of both models. Notably, the PARNN model provides uncertainty quantification through prediction intervals, setting it apart from advanced deep learning tools. Through comprehensive computational experiments, we evaluate the performance of PARNN against standard statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models, including Transformers, NBeats, and DeepAR. Diverse real-world datasets from macroeconomics, tourism, epidemiology, and other domains are employed for short-term, medium-term, and long-term forecasting evaluations. Our results demonstrate the superiority of PARNN across various forecast horizons, surpassing the state-of-the-art forecasters. The proposed PARNN model offers a valuable hybrid solution for accurate long-range forecasting. By effectively capturing the complexities present in time series data, it outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy and reliability. The ability to quantify uncertainty through prediction intervals further enhances the model's usefulness in decision-making processes.
Generative Design Ideation: A Natural Language Generation Approach
Authors: Qihao Zhu, Jianxi Luo
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

This paper aims to explore a generative approach for knowledge-based design ideation by applying the latest pre-trained language models in artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, a method of fine-tuning the generative pre-trained transformer using the USPTO patent database is proposed. The AI-generated ideas are not only in concise and understandable language but also able to synthesize the target design with external knowledge sources with controllable knowledge distance. The method is tested in a case study of rolling toy design and the results show good performance in generating ideas of varied novelty with near-field and far-field source knowledge.
Design and Development of Rule-based open-domain Question-Answering System on SQuAD v2.0 Dataset
Authors: Pragya Katyayan, Nisheeth Joshi
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering

Human mind is the palace of curious questions that seek answers. Computational resolution of this challenge is possible through Natural Language Processing techniques. Statistical techniques like machine learning and deep learning require a lot of data to train and despite that they fail to tap into the nuances of language. Such systems usually perform best on close-domain datasets. We have proposed development of a rule-based open-domain question-answering system which is capable of answering questions of any domain from a corresponding context passage. We have used 1000 questions from SQuAD 2.0 dataset for testing the developed system and it gives satisfactory results. In this paper, we have described the structure of the developed system and have analyzed the performance.
Medical Dataset Classification for Kurdish Short Text over Social Media
Authors: Ari M. Saeed, Shnya R. Hussein, Chro M. Ali, Tarik A. Rashid
Date: 2022-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: text-classification, Text Classification

The Facebook application is used as a resource for collecting the comments of this dataset, The dataset consists of 6756 comments to create a Medical Kurdish Dataset (MKD). The samples are comments of users, which are gathered from different posts of pages (Medical, News, Economy, Education, and Sport). Six steps as a preprocessing technique are performed on the raw dataset to clean and remove noise in the comments by replacing characters. The comments (short text) are labeled for positive class (medical comment) and negative class (non-medical comment) as text classification. The percentage ratio of the negative class is 55% while the positive class is 45%.
Vehicle Models and Optimal Control on a Nonplanar Surface
Authors: Thomas Fork, H. Eric Tseng, Francesco Borrelli
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00

We present a 10 DoF dynamic vehicle model for model-based control on nonplanar road surfaces. A parametric surface is used to describe the road surface, allowing the surface parameterization to describe the pose of the vehicle. We use the proposed approach to compute minimum-time vehicle trajectories on nonplanar surfaces and compare planar and nonplanar models.
Land-use history impacts functional diversity across multiple trophic groups
Authors: Gaëtane Le Provost, Isabelle Badenhausser, Yoann Le Bagousse-Pinguet, Yann Clough, Laura Henckel, Cyrille Violle, Vincent Bretagn, Marilyn Roncoroniolle, Peter Manning, Nicolas Gross
Date: 2020-01-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: PNAS 2020 1
Tasks: Diversity, Management

Land-use change is a major driver of biodiversity loss worldwide. Although biodiversity often shows a delayed response to land-use change, previous studies have typically focused on a narrow range of current landscape factors and have largely ignored the role of land-use history in shaping plant and animal communities and their functional characteristics. Here, we used a unique database of 220,000 land-use records to investigate how 20-y of land-use changes have affected functional diversity across multiple trophic groups (primary producers, mutualists, herbivores, invertebrate predators, and vertebrate predators) in 75 grassland fields with a broad range of land-use histories. The effects of land-use history on multitrophic trait diversity were as strong as other drivers known to impact biodiversity, e.g., grassland management and current landscape composition. The diversity of animal mobility and resource-acquisition traits was lower in landscapes where much of the land had been historically converted from grassland to crop. In contrast, functional biodiversity was higher in landscapes containing old permanent grasslands, most likely because they offer a stable and high-quality habitat refuge for species with low mobility and specialized feeding niches. Our study shows that grassland-to-crop conversion has long-lasting impacts on the functional biodiversity of agricultural ecosystems. Accordingly, land-use legacy effects must be considered in conservation programs aiming to protect agricultural biodiversity. In particular, the retention of permanent grassland sanctuaries within intensive landscapes may offset ecological debts.
Beyond the Prototype: Divide-and-conquer Proxies for Few-shot Segmentation
Authors: Chunbo Lang, Binfei Tu, Gong Cheng, Junwei Han
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Meta-Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation, which aims to segment unseen-class objects given only a handful of densely labeled samples, has received widespread attention from the community. Existing approaches typically follow the prototype learning paradigm to perform meta-inference, which fails to fully exploit the underlying information from support image-mask pairs, resulting in various segmentation failures, e.g., incomplete objects, ambiguous boundaries, and distractor activation. To this end, we propose a simple yet versatile framework in the spirit of divide-and-conquer. Specifically, a novel self-reasoning scheme is first implemented on the annotated support image, and then the coarse segmentation mask is divided into multiple regions with different properties. Leveraging effective masked average pooling operations, a series of support-induced proxies are thus derived, each playing a specific role in conquering the above challenges. Moreover, we devise a unique parallel decoder structure that integrates proxies with similar attributes to boost the discrimination power. Our proposed approach, named divide-and-conquer proxies (DCP), allows for the development of appropriate and reliable information as a guide at the "episode" level, not just about the object cues themselves. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i demonstrate the superiority of DCP over conventional prototype-based approaches (up to 5~10% on average), which also establishes a new state-of-the-art. Code is available at github.com/chunbolang/DCP.
A Multi-Person Video Dataset Annotation Method of Spatio-Temporally Actions
Authors: Fan Yang
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Video Understanding

Spatio-temporal action detection is an important and challenging problem in video understanding. However, the application of the existing large-scale spatio-temporal action datasets in specific fields is limited, and there is currently no public tool for making spatio-temporal action datasets, it takes a lot of time and effort for researchers to customize the spatio-temporal action datasets, so we propose a multi-Person video dataset Annotation Method of spatio-temporally actions.First, we use ffmpeg to crop the videos and frame the videos; then use yolov5 to detect human in the video frame, and then use deep sort to detect the ID of the human in the video frame. By processing the detection results of yolov5 and deep sort, we can get the annotation file of the spatio-temporal action dataset to complete the work of customizing the spatio-temporal action dataset. https://github.com/Whiffe/Custom-ava-dataset_Custom-Spatio-Temporally-Action-Video-Dataset
DGECN: A Depth-Guided Edge Convolutional Network for End-to-End 6D Pose Estimation
Authors: Tuo Cao, Fei Luo, Yanping Fu, Wenxiao Zhang, Shengjie Zheng, Chunxia Xiao
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Monocular 6D pose estimation is a fundamental task in computer vision. Existing works often adopt a two-stage pipeline by establishing correspondences and utilizing a RANSAC algorithm to calculate 6 degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) pose. Recent works try to integrate differentiable RANSAC algorithms to achieve an end-to-end 6D pose estimation. However, most of them hardly consider the geometric features in 3D space, and ignore the topology cues when performing differentiable RANSAC algorithms. To this end, we proposed a Depth-Guided Edge Convolutional Network (DGECN) for 6D pose estimation task. We have made efforts from the following three aspects: 1) We take advantages ofestimated depth information to guide both the correspondences-extraction process and the cascaded differentiable RANSAC algorithm with geometric information. 2)We leverage the uncertainty ofthe estimated depth map to improve accuracy and robustness ofthe output 6D pose. 3) We propose a differentiable Perspective-n-Point(PnP) algorithm via edge convolution to explore the topology relations between 2D-3D correspondences. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed network outperforms current works on both effectiveness and efficiency.
SelfD: Self-Learning Large-Scale Driving Policies From the Web
Authors: Jimuyang Zhang, Ruizhao Zhu, Eshed Ohn-Bar
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decision Making, Self-Learning

Effectively utilizing the vast amounts of ego-centric navigation data that is freely available on the internet can advance generalized intelligent systems, i.e., to robustly scale across perspectives, platforms, environmental conditions, scenarios, and geographical locations. However, it is difficult to directly leverage such large amounts of unlabeled and highly diverse data for complex 3D reasoning and planning tasks. Consequently, researchers have primarily focused on its use for various auxiliary pixel- and image-level computer vision tasks that do not consider an ultimate navigational objective. In this work, we introduce SelfD, a framework for learning scalable driving by utilizing large amounts of online monocular images. Our key idea is to leverage iterative semi-supervised training when learning imitative agents from unlabeled data. To handle unconstrained viewpoints, scenes, and camera parameters, we train an image-based model that directly learns to plan in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) space. Next, we use unlabeled data to augment the decision-making knowledge and robustness of an initially trained model via self-training. In particular, we propose a pseudo-labeling step which enables making full use of highly diverse demonstration data through "hypothetical" planning-based data augmentation. We employ a large dataset of publicly available YouTube videos to train SelfD and comprehensively analyze its generalization benefits across challenging navigation scenarios. Without requiring any additional data collection or annotation efforts, SelfD demonstrates consistent improvements (by up to 24%) in driving performance evaluation on nuScenes, Argoverse, Waymo, and CARLA.
Feature anomaly detection system (FADS) for intelligent manufacturing
Authors: Anthony Garland, Kevin Potter, Matt Smith
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is important for industrial automation and part quality assurance, and while humans can easily detect anomalies in components given a few examples, designing a generic automated system that can perform at human or above human capabilities remains a challenge. In this work, we present a simple new anomaly detection algorithm called FADS (feature-based anomaly detection system) which leverages pretrained convolutional neural networks (CNN) to generate a statistical model of nominal inputs by observing the activation of the convolutional filters. During inference the system compares the convolutional filter activation of the new input to the statistical model and flags activations that are outside the expected range of values and therefore likely an anomaly. By using a pretrained network, FADS demonstrates excellent performance similar to or better than other machine learning approaches to anomaly detection while at the same time FADS requires no tuning of the CNN weights. We demonstrate FADS ability by detecting process parameter changes on a custom dataset of additively manufactured lattices. The FADS localization algorithm shows that textural differences that are visible on the surface can be used to detect process parameter changes. In addition, we test FADS on benchmark datasets, such as the MVTec Anomaly Detection dataset, and report good results.
Adversarial Contrastive Learning by Permuting Cluster Assignments
Authors: Muntasir Wahed, Afrina Tabassum, Ismini Lourentzou
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Contrastive learning has gained popularity as an effective self-supervised representation learning technique. Several research directions improve traditional contrastive approaches, e.g., prototypical contrastive methods better capture the semantic similarity among instances and reduce the computational burden by considering cluster prototypes or cluster assignments, while adversarial instance-wise contrastive methods improve robustness against a variety of attacks. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work jointly considers robustness, cluster-wise semantic similarity and computational efficiency. In this work, we propose SwARo, an adversarial contrastive framework that incorporates cluster assignment permutations to generate representative adversarial samples. We evaluate SwARo on multiple benchmark datasets and against various white-box and black-box attacks, obtaining consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.