pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Lung Diseases Image Segmentation using Faster R-CNNs
Authors: Mihir Jain
Date: 2023-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Region Proposal, Semantic Segmentation, Specificity

Lung diseases are a leading cause of child mortality in the developing world, with India accounting for approximately half of global pneumonia deaths (370,000) in 2016. Timely diagnosis is crucial for reducing mortality rates. This paper introduces a low-density neural network structure to mitigate topological challenges in deep networks. The network incorporates parameters into a feature pyramid, enhancing data extraction and minimizing information loss. Soft Non-Maximal Suppression optimizes regional proposals generated by the Region Proposal Network. The study evaluates the model on chest X-ray images, computing a confusion matrix to determine accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity. We analyze loss functions, highlighting their trends during training. The regional proposal loss and classification loss assess model performance during training and classification phases. This paper analysis lung disease detection and neural network structures.
ConvFormer: Plug-and-Play CNN-Style Transformers for Improving Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Xian lin, Zengqiang Yan, Xianbo Deng, Chuansheng Zheng, Li Yu
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Transformers have been extensively studied in medical image segmentation to build pairwise long-range dependence. Yet, relatively limited well-annotated medical image data makes transformers struggle to extract diverse global features, resulting in attention collapse where attention maps become similar or even identical. Comparatively, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have better convergence properties on small-scale training data but suffer from limited receptive fields. Existing works are dedicated to exploring the combinations of CNN and transformers while ignoring attention collapse, leaving the potential of transformers under-explored. In this paper, we propose to build CNN-style Transformers (ConvFormer) to promote better attention convergence and thus better segmentation performance. Specifically, ConvFormer consists of pooling, CNN-style self-attention (CSA), and convolutional feed-forward network (CFFN) corresponding to tokenization, self-attention, and feed-forward network in vanilla vision transformers. In contrast to positional embedding and tokenization, ConvFormer adopts 2D convolution and max-pooling for both position information preservation and feature size reduction. In this way, CSA takes 2D feature maps as inputs and establishes long-range dependency by constructing self-attention matrices as convolution kernels with adaptive sizes. Following CSA, 2D convolution is utilized for feature refinement through CFFN. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ConvFormer working as a plug-and-play module for consistent performance improvement of transformer-based frameworks. Code is available at https://github.com/xianlin7/ConvFormer.
Motion Compensated Unsupervised Deep Learning for 5D MRI
Authors: Joseph Kettelkamp, Ludovica Romanin, Davide Piccini, Sarv Priya, Mathews Jacob
Date: 2023-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We propose an unsupervised deep learning algorithm for the motion-compensated reconstruction of 5D cardiac MRI data from 3D radial acquisitions. Ungated free-breathing 5D MRI simplifies the scan planning, improves patient comfort, and offers several clinical benefits over breath-held 2D exams, including isotropic spatial resolution and the ability to reslice the data to arbitrary views. However, the current reconstruction algorithms for 5D MRI take very long computational time, and their outcome is greatly dependent on the uniformity of the binning of the acquired data into different physiological phases. The proposed algorithm is a more data-efficient alternative to current motion-resolved reconstructions. This motion-compensated approach models the data in each cardiac/respiratory bin as Fourier samples of the deformed version of a 3D image template. The deformation maps are modeled by a convolutional neural network driven by the physiological phase information. The deformation maps and the template are then jointly estimated from the measured data. The cardiac and respiratory phases are estimated from 1D navigators using an auto-encoder. The proposed algorithm is validated on 5D bSSFP datasets acquired from two subjects.
Secure Control of Networked Inverted Pendulum Visual Servo System with Adverse Effects of Image Computation (Extended Version)
Authors: Dajun Du, Changda Zhang, Qianjiang Lu, Minrui Fei, Huiyu Zhou
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00

When visual image information is transmitted via communication networks, it easily suffers from image attacks, leading to system performance degradation or even crash. This paper investigates secure control of networked inverted pendulum visual servo system (NIPVSS) with adverse effects of image computation. Firstly, the image security limitation of the traditional NIPVSS is revealed, where its stability will be destroyed by eavesdropping-based image attacks. Then, a new NIPVSS with the fast scaled-selective image encryption (F2SIE) algorithm is proposed, which not only meets the real-time requirement by reducing the computational complexity, but also improve the security by reducing the probability of valuable information being compromised by eavesdropping-based image attacks. Secondly, adverse effects of the F2SIE algorithm and image attacks are analysed, which will produce extra computational delay and errors. Then, a closed-loop uncertain time-delay model of the new NIPVSS is established, and a robust controller is designed to guarantee system asymptotic stability. Finally, experimental results of the new NIPVSS demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.
Compact Representation of n-th order TGV
Authors: Manu Ghulyani, Muthuvel Arigovindan
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00

Although regularization methods based on derivatives are favored for their robustness and computational simplicity, research exploring higher-order derivatives remains limited. This scarcity can possibly be attributed to the appearance of oscillations in reconstructions when directly generalizing TV-1 to higher orders (3 or more). Addressing this, Bredies et. al introduced a notable approach for generalizing total variation, known as Total Generalized Variation (TGV). This technique introduces a regularization that generates estimates embodying piece-wise polynomial behavior of varying degrees across distinct regions of an image.Importantly, to our current understanding, no sufficiently general algorithm exists for solving TGV regularization for orders beyond 2. This is likely because of two problems: firstly, the problem is complex as TGV regularization is defined as a minimization problem with non-trivial constraints, and secondly, TGV is represented in terms of tensor-fields which is difficult to implement. In this work we tackle the first challenge by giving two simple and implementable representations of n th order TGV
The Secrets of Non-Blind Poisson Deconvolution
Authors: Abhiram Gnanasambandam, Yash Sanghvi, Stanley H. Chan
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Deconvolution

Non-blind image deconvolution has been studied for several decades but most of the existing work focuses on blur instead of noise. In photon-limited conditions, however, the excessive amount of shot noise makes traditional deconvolution algorithms fail. In searching for reasons why these methods fail, we present a systematic analysis of the Poisson non-blind deconvolution algorithms reported in the literature, covering both classical and deep learning methods. We compile a list of five "secrets" highlighting the do's and don'ts when designing algorithms. Based on this analysis, we build a proof-of-concept method by combining the five secrets. We find that the new method performs on par with some of the latest methods while outperforming some older ones.
An Improved Upper Bound on the Rate-Distortion Function of Images
Authors: Zhihao Duan, Jack Ma, Jiangpeng He, Fengqing Zhu
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

Recent work has shown that Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) can be used to upper-bound the information rate-distortion (R-D) function of images, i.e., the fundamental limit of lossy image compression. In this paper, we report an improved upper bound on the R-D function of images implemented by (1) introducing a new VAE model architecture, (2) applying variable-rate compression techniques, and (3) proposing a novel \ourfunction{} to stabilize training. We demonstrate that at least 30\% BD-rate reduction w.r.t. the intra prediction mode in VVC codec is achievable, suggesting that there is still great potential for improving lossy image compression. Code is made publicly available at https://github.com/duanzhiihao/lossy-vae.
Fast and High-Performance Learned Image Compression With Improved Checkerboard Context Model, Deformable Residual Module, and Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Haisheng Fu, Feng Liang, Jie Liang, Yongqiang Wang, Guohe Zhang, Jingning Han
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Knowledge Distillation, MS-SSIM, parameter estimation, SSIM

Deep learning-based image compression has made great progresses recently. However, many leading schemes use serial context-adaptive entropy model to improve the rate-distortion (R-D) performance, which is very slow. In addition, the complexities of the encoding and decoding networks are quite high and not suitable for many practical applications. In this paper, we introduce four techniques to balance the trade-off between the complexity and performance. We are the first to introduce deformable convolutional module in compression framework, which can remove more redundancies in the input image, thereby enhancing compression performance. Second, we design a checkerboard context model with two separate distribution parameter estimation networks and different probability models, which enables parallel decoding without sacrificing the performance compared to the sequential context-adaptive model. Third, we develop an improved three-step knowledge distillation and training scheme to achieve different trade-offs between the complexity and the performance of the decoder network, which transfers both the final and intermediate results of the teacher network to the student network to help its training. Fourth, we introduce $L_{1}$ regularization to make the numerical values of the latent representation more sparse. Then we only encode non-zero channels in the encoding and decoding process, which can greatly reduce the encoding and decoding time. Experiments show that compared to the state-of-the-art learned image coding scheme, our method can be about 20 times faster in encoding and 70-90 times faster in decoding, and our R-D performance is also $2.3 \%$ higher. Our method outperforms the traditional approach in H.266/VVC-intra (4:4:4) and some leading learned schemes in terms of PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics when testing on Kodak and Tecnick-40 datasets.
An automated, high-resolution phenotypic assay for adult Brugia malayi and microfilaria
Authors: Upender Kalwa, Yunsoo Park, Michael J. Kimber, Santosh Pandey
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00

Brugia malayi are thread-like parasitic worms and one of the etiological agents of Lymphatic filariasis (LF). Existing anthelmintic drugs to treat LF are effective in reducing the larval microfilaria (mf) counts in human bloodstream but are less effective on adult parasites. To test potential drug candidates, we report a multi-parameter phenotypic assay based on tracking the motility of adult B. malayi and mf in vitro. For adult B. malayi, motility is characterized by the centroid velocity, path curvature, angular velocity, eccentricity, extent, and Euler Number. These parameters are evaluated in experiments with three anthelmintic drugs. For B. malayi mf, motility is extracted from the evolving body skeleton to yield positional data and bending angles at 74 key point. We achieved high-fidelity tracking of complex worm postures (self-occlusions, omega turns, body bending, and reversals) while providing a visual representation of pose estimates and behavioral attributes in both space and time scales.
Duration-adaptive Video Highlight Pre-caching for Vehicular Communication Network
Authors: Liang Xu, Deshi Li, Kaitao Meng, Mingliu Liu, Shuya Zhu
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00

Video traffic in vehicular communication networks (VCNs) faces exponential growth. However, different segments of most videos reveal various attractiveness for viewers, and the pre-caching decision is greatly affected by the dynamic service duration that edge nodes can provide services for mobile vehicles driving along a road. In this paper, we propose an efficient video highlight pre-caching scheme in the vehicular communication network, adapting to the service duration. Specifically, a highlight entropy model is devised with the consideration of the segments' popularity and continuity between segments within a period of time, based on which, an optimization problem of video highlight pre-caching is formulated. As this problem is non-convex and lacks a closed-form expression of the objective function, we decouple multiple variables by deriving candidate highlight segmentations of videos through wavelet transform, which can significantly reduce the complexity of highlight pre-caching. Then the problem is solved iteratively by a highlight-direction trimming algorithm, which is proven to be locally optimal. Simulation results based on real-world video datasets demonstrate significant improvement in highlight entropy and jitter compared to benchmark schemes.
FAU-Net: An Attention U-Net Extension with Feature Pyramid Attention for Prostate Cancer Segmentation
Authors: Pablo Cesar Quihui-Rubio, Daniel Flores-Araiza, Miguel Gonzalez-Mendoza, Christian Mata, Gilberto Ochoa-Ruiz
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

This contribution presents a deep learning method for the segmentation of prostate zones in MRI images based on U-Net using additive and feature pyramid attention modules, which can improve the workflow of prostate cancer detection and diagnosis. The proposed model is compared to seven different U-Net-based architectures. The automatic segmentation performance of each model of the central zone (CZ), peripheral zone (PZ), transition zone (TZ) and Tumor were evaluated using Dice Score (DSC), and the Intersection over Union (IoU) metrics. The proposed alternative achieved a mean DSC of 84.15% and IoU of 76.9% in the test set, outperforming most of the studied models in this work except from R2U-Net and attention R2U-Net architectures.
An FPGA smart camera implementation of segmentation models for drone wildfire imagery
Authors: Eduardo Guarduño-Martinez, Jorge Ciprian-Sanchez, Gerardo Valente, Vazquez-Garcia, Gerardo Rodriguez-Hernandez, Adriana Palacios-Rosas, Lucile Rossi-Tisson, Gilberto Ochoa-Ruiz
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Wildfires represent one of the most relevant natural disasters worldwide, due to their impact on various societal and environmental levels. Thus, a significant amount of research has been carried out to investigate and apply computer vision techniques to address this problem. One of the most promising approaches for wildfire fighting is the use of drones equipped with visible and infrared cameras for the detection, monitoring, and fire spread assessment in a remote manner but in close proximity to the affected areas. However, implementing effective computer vision algorithms on board is often prohibitive since deploying full-precision deep learning models running on GPU is not a viable option, due to their high power consumption and the limited payload a drone can handle. Thus, in this work, we posit that smart cameras, based on low-power consumption field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), in tandem with binarized neural networks (BNNs), represent a cost-effective alternative for implementing onboard computing on the edge. Herein we present the implementation of a segmentation model applied to the Corsican Fire Database. We optimized an existing U-Net model for such a task and ported the model to an edge device (a Xilinx Ultra96-v2 FPGA). By pruning and quantizing the original model, we reduce the number of parameters by 90%. Furthermore, additional optimizations enabled us to increase the throughput of the original model from 8 frames per second (FPS) to 33.63 FPS without loss in the segmentation performance: our model obtained 0.912 in Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC),0.915 in F1 score and 0.870 in Hafiane quality index (HAF), and comparable qualitative segmentation results when contrasted to the original full-precision model. The final model was integrated into a low-cost FPGA, which was used to implement a neural network accelerator.
Enhancing Automated and Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease Using Out-Of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Audrey Paleczny, Shubham Parab, Maxwell Zhang
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI classification, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

More than 10.7% of people aged 65 and older are affected by Alzheimer's disease. Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial as most Alzheimer's patients are unaware of having it until the effects become detrimental. AI has been known to use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to diagnose Alzheimer's. However, models which produce low rates of false diagnoses are critical to prevent unnecessary treatments. Thus, we trained supervised Random Forest models with segmented brain volumes and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) outputs to classify different Alzheimer's stages. We then applied out-of-distribution (OOD) detection to the CNN model, enabling it to report OOD if misclassification is likely, thereby reducing false diagnoses. With an accuracy of 98% for detection and 95% for classification, our model based on CNN results outperformed our segmented volume model, which had detection and classification accuracies of 93% and 87%, respectively. Applying OOD detection to the CNN model enabled it to flag brain tumor images as OOD with 96% accuracy and minimal overall accuracy reduction. By using OOD detection to enhance the reliability of MRI classification using CNNs, we lowered the rate of false positives and eliminated a significant disadvantage of using Machine Learning models for healthcare tasks. Source code available upon request.
Generalizability and Application of the Skin Reflectance Estimate Based on Dichromatic Separation (SREDS)
Authors: Joseph Drahos, Richard Plesh, Keivan Bahmani, Mahesh Banavar, Stephanie Schuckers
Date: 2023-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Privacy Preserving

Face recognition (FR) systems have become widely used and readily available in recent history. However, differential performance between certain demographics has been identified within popular FR models. Skin tone differences between demographics can be one of the factors contributing to the differential performance observed in face recognition models. Skin tone metrics provide an alternative to self-reported race labels when such labels are lacking or completely not available e.g. large-scale face recognition datasets. In this work, we provide a further analysis of the generalizability of the Skin Reflectance Estimate based on Dichromatic Separation (SREDS) against other skin tone metrics and provide a use case for substituting race labels for SREDS scores in a privacy-preserving learning solution. Our findings suggest that SREDS consistently creates a skin tone metric with lower variability within each subject and SREDS values can be utilized as an alternative to the self-reported race labels at minimal drop in performance. Finally, we provide a publicly available and open-source implementation of SREDS to help the research community. Available at https://github.com/JosephDrahos/SREDS
Spectral Adversarial MixUp for Few-Shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Jiajin Zhang, Hanqing Chao, Amit Dhurandhar, Pin-Yu Chen, Ali Tajer, Yangyang Xu, Pingkun Yan
Date: 2023-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Sensitivity, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Domain shift is a common problem in clinical applications, where the training images (source domain) and the test images (target domain) are under different distributions. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) techniques have been proposed to adapt models trained in the source domain to the target domain. However, those methods require a large number of images from the target domain for model training. In this paper, we propose a novel method for Few-Shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (FSUDA), where only a limited number of unlabeled target domain samples are available for training. To accomplish this challenging task, first, a spectral sensitivity map is introduced to characterize the generalization weaknesses of models in the frequency domain. We then developed a Sensitivity-guided Spectral Adversarial MixUp (SAMix) method to generate target-style images to effectively suppresses the model sensitivity, which leads to improved model generalizability in the target domain. We demonstrated the proposed method and rigorously evaluated its performance on multiple tasks using several public datasets.
Deep Unfolding Convolutional Dictionary Model for Multi-Contrast MRI Super-resolution and Reconstruction
Authors: Pengcheng Lei, Faming Fang, Guixu Zhang, Ming Xu
Date: 2023-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tasks often involve multiple contrasts. Recently, numerous deep learning-based multi-contrast MRI super-resolution (SR) and reconstruction methods have been proposed to explore the complementary information from the multi-contrast images. However, these methods either construct parameter-sharing networks or manually design fusion rules, failing to accurately model the correlations between multi-contrast images and lacking certain interpretations. In this paper, we propose a multi-contrast convolutional dictionary (MC-CDic) model under the guidance of the optimization algorithm with a well-designed data fidelity term. Specifically, we bulid an observation model for the multi-contrast MR images to explicitly model the multi-contrast images as common features and unique features. In this way, only the useful information in the reference image can be transferred to the target image, while the inconsistent information will be ignored. We employ the proximal gradient algorithm to optimize the model and unroll the iterative steps into a deep CDic model. Especially, the proximal operators are replaced by learnable ResNet. In addition, multi-scale dictionaries are introduced to further improve the model performance. We test our MC-CDic model on multi-contrast MRI SR and reconstruction tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed MC-CDic model against existing SOTA methods. Code is available at https://github.com/lpcccc-cv/MC-CDic.