pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Adapting SAM for Volumetric X-Ray Data-sets of Arbitrary Sizes
Authors: Roland Gruber, Steffen Rüger, Thomas Wittenberg
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Objective: We propose a new approach for volumetric instance segmentation in X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) data for Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) by combining the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with tile-based Flood Filling Networks (FFN). Our work evaluates the performance of SAM on volumetric NDT data-sets and demonstrates its effectiveness to segment instances in challenging imaging scenarios. Methods: We implemented and evaluated techniques to extend the image-based SAM algorithm fo the use with volumetric data-sets, enabling the segmentation of three-dimensional objects using FFN's spatially adaptability. The tile-based approach for SAM leverages FFN's capabilities to segment objects of any size. We also explore the use of dense prompts to guide SAM in combining segmented tiles for improved segmentation accuracy. Results: Our research indicates the potential of combining SAM with FFN for volumetric instance segmentation tasks, particularly in NDT scenarios and segmenting large entities and objects. Conclusion: While acknowledging remaining limitations, our study provides insights and establishes a foundation for advancements in instance segmentation in NDT scenarios.
Process mining for self-regulated learning assessment in e-learning
Authors: R. Cerezo, A. Bogarin, M. Esteban, C. Romero
Date: 2024-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Discovery

Content assessment has broadly improved in e-learning scenarios in recent decades. However, the eLearning process can give rise to a spatial and temporal gap that poses interesting challenges for assessment of not only content, but also students' acquisition of core skills such as self-regulated learning. Our objective was to discover students' self-regulated learning processes during an eLearning course by using Process Mining Techniques. We applied a new algorithm in the educational domain called Inductive Miner over the interaction traces from 101 university students in a course given over one semester on the Moodle 2.0 platform. Data was extracted from the platform's event logs with 21629 traces in order to discover students' self-regulation models that contribute to improving the instructional process. The Inductive Miner algorithm discovered optimal models in terms of fitness for both Pass and Fail students in this dataset, as well as models at a certain level of granularity that can be interpreted in educational terms, which are the most important achievement in model discovery. We can conclude that although students who passed did not follow the instructors' suggestions exactly, they did follow the logic of a successful self-regulated learning process as opposed to their failing classmates. The Process Mining models also allow us to examine which specific actions the students performed, and it was particularly interesting to see a high presence of actions related to forum-supported collaborative learning in the Pass group and an absence of those in the Fail group.
Floralens: a Deep Learning Model for the Portuguese Native Flora
Authors: António Filgueiras, Eduardo R. B. Marques, Luís M. B. Lopes, Miguel Marques, Hugo Silva
Date: 2024-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Deep Learning

Machine-learning techniques, especially deep convolutional neural networks, are pivotal for image-based identification of biological species in many Citizen Science platforms. In this paper, we describe the construction of a dataset for the Portuguese native flora based on publicly available research-grade datasets, and the derivation of a high-accuracy model from it using off-the-shelf deep convolutional neural networks. We anchored the dataset in high-quality data provided by Sociedade Portuguesa de Bot\^anica and added further sampled data from research-grade datasets available from GBIF. We find that with a careful dataset design, off-the-shelf machine-learning cloud services such as Google's AutoML Vision produce accurate models, with results comparable to those of Pl@ntNet, a state-of-the-art citizen science platform. The best model we derived, dubbed Floralens, has been integrated into the public website of Project Biolens, where we gather models for other taxa as well. The dataset used to train the model is also publicly available on Zenodo.
Beyond Quantities: Machine Learning-based Characterization of Inequality in Infrastructure Quality Provision in Cities
Authors: Bo Li, Ali Mostafavi
Date: 2024-02-14 00:00:00

The objective of this study is to characterize inequality in infrastructure quality across urban areas. While a growing of body of literature has recognized the importance of characterizing infrastructure inequality in cities and provided quantified metrics to inform urban development plans, the majority of the existing approaches focus primarily on measuring the quantity of infrastructure, assuming that more infrastructure is better. Also, the existing research focuses primarily on index-based approaches in which the status of infrastructure provision in urban areas is determined based on assumed subjective weights. The focus on infrastructure quantity and use of indices obtained from subjective weights has hindered the ability to properly examine infrastructure inequality as it pertains to urban inequality and environmental justice considerations. Recognizing this gap, we propose a machine learning-based approach in which infrastructure features that shape environmental hazard exposure are identified and we use the weights obtained by the model to calculate an infrastructure quality provision for spatial areas of cities and accordingly, quantify the extent of inequality in infrastructure quality. The implementation of the model in five metropolitan areas in the U.S. demonstrates the capability of the proposed approach in characterizing inequality in infrastructure quality and capturing city-specific differences in the weights of infrastructure features. The results also show that areas in which low-income populations reside have lower infrastructure quality provision, suggesting the lower infrastructure quality provision as a determinant of urban disparities. Accordingly, the proposed approach can be effectively used to inform integrated urban design strategies to promote infrastructure equity and environmental justice based on data-driven and machine intelligence-based insights.
Evaluating Terrain-Dependent Performance for Martian Frost Detection in Visible Satellite Observations
Authors: Gary Doran, Serina Diniega, Steven Lu, Mark Wronkiewicz, Kiri L. Wagstaff
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00

Seasonal frosting and defrosting on the surface of Mars is hypothesized to drive both climate processes and the formation and evolution of geomorphological features such as gullies. Past studies have focused on manually analyzing the behavior of the frost cycle in the northern mid-latitude region of Mars using high-resolution visible observations from orbit. Extending these studies globally requires automating the detection of frost using data science techniques such as convolutional neural networks. However, visible indications of frost presence can vary significantly depending on the geologic context on which the frost is superimposed. In this study, we (1) present a novel approach for spatially partitioning data to reduce biases in model performance estimation, (2) illustrate how geologic context affects automated frost detection, and (3) propose mitigations to observed biases in automated frost detection.
Determining Intent of Changes to Ascertain Fake Crowdsourced Image Services
Authors: Muhammad Umair, Athman Bouguettaya, Abdallah Lakhdari
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00

We propose a novel framework for crowdsourced images to determine the likelihood of an image being fake. We use a service-oriented approach to model and represent crowdsourced images uploaded on social media, as image services. Trust may, in some circumstances, be determined by using only the non-functional attributes of an image service, i.e., image metadata. We define intention of changes as a key parameter to ascertain fake image services. A novel framework is proposed to estimate the intention of underlying changes considering change in semantics of an image. Our experiments show high accuracy using a large real dataset.
GPT-4V(ision) Unsuitable for Clinical Care and Education: A Clinician-Evaluated Assessment
Authors: Senthujan Senkaiahliyan, Augustin Toma, Jun Ma, An-Wen Chan, Andrew Ha, Kevin R. An, Hrishikesh Suresh, Barry Rubin, Bo wang
Date: 2023-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic

OpenAI's large multimodal model, GPT-4V(ision), was recently developed for general image interpretation. However, less is known about its capabilities with medical image interpretation and diagnosis. Board-certified physicians and senior residents assessed GPT-4V's proficiency across a range of medical conditions using imaging modalities such as CT scans, MRIs, ECGs, and clinical photographs. Although GPT-4V is able to identify and explain medical images, its diagnostic accuracy and clinical decision-making abilities are poor, posing risks to patient safety. Despite the potential that large language models may have in enhancing medical education and delivery, the current limitations of GPT-4V in interpreting medical images reinforces the importance of appropriate caution when using it for clinical decision-making.
Alpha-wolves and Alpha-mammals: Exploring Dictionary Attacks on Iris Recognition Systems
Authors: Sudipta Banerjee, Anubhav Jain, Zehua Jiang, Nasir Memon, Julian Togelius, Arun Ross
Date: 2023-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Iris Recognition

A dictionary attack in a biometric system entails the use of a small number of strategically generated images or templates to successfully match with a large number of identities, thereby compromising security. We focus on dictionary attacks at the template level, specifically the IrisCodes used in iris recognition systems. We present an hitherto unknown vulnerability wherein we mix IrisCodes using simple bitwise operators to generate alpha-mixtures - alpha-wolves (combining a set of "wolf" samples) and alpha-mammals (combining a set of users selected via search optimization) that increase false matches. We evaluate this vulnerability using the IITD, CASIA-IrisV4-Thousand and Synthetic datasets, and observe that an alpha-wolf (from two wolves) can match upto 71 identities @FMR=0.001%, while an alpha-mammal (from two identities) can match upto 133 other identities @FMR=0.01% on the IITD dataset.
Toward Improving Robustness of Object Detectors Against Domain Shift
Authors: Le-Anh Tran, Chung Nguyen Tran, Dong-Chul Park, Jordi Carrabina, David Castells-Rufas
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Object

This paper proposes a data augmentation method for improving the robustness of driving object detectors against domain shift. Domain shift problem arises when there is a significant change between the distribution of the source data domain used in the training phase and that of the target data domain in the deployment phase. Domain shift is known as one of the most popular reasons resulting in the considerable drop in the performance of deep neural network models. In order to address this problem, one effective approach is to increase the diversity of training data. To this end, we propose a data synthesis module that can be utilized to train more robust and effective object detectors. By adopting YOLOv4 as a base object detector, we have witnessed a remarkable improvement in performance on both the source and target domain data. The code of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/tranleanh/haze-synthesis.
A Dataset and Benchmark for Copyright Infringement Unlearning from Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Rui Ma, Qiang Zhou, Yizhu Jin, Daquan Zhou, Bangjun Xiao, Xiuyu Li, Yi Qu, Aishani Singh, Kurt Keutzer, Jingtong Hu, Xiaodong Xie, Zhen Dong, Shanghang Zhang, Shiji Zhou
Date: 2024-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Copyright law confers upon creators the exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, and monetize their creative works. However, recent progress in text-to-image generation has introduced formidable challenges to copyright enforcement. These technologies enable the unauthorized learning and replication of copyrighted content, artistic creations, and likenesses, leading to the proliferation of unregulated content. Notably, models like stable diffusion, which excel in text-to-image synthesis, heighten the risk of copyright infringement and unauthorized distribution.Machine unlearning, which seeks to eradicate the influence of specific data or concepts from machine learning models, emerges as a promising solution by eliminating the \enquote{copyright memories} ingrained in diffusion models. Yet, the absence of comprehensive large-scale datasets and standardized benchmarks for evaluating the efficacy of unlearning techniques in the copyright protection scenarios impedes the development of more effective unlearning methods. To address this gap, we introduce a novel pipeline that harmonizes CLIP, ChatGPT, and diffusion models to curate a dataset. This dataset encompasses anchor images, associated prompts, and images synthesized by text-to-image models. Additionally, we have developed a mixed metric based on semantic and style information, validated through both human and artist assessments, to gauge the effectiveness of unlearning approaches. Our dataset, benchmark library, and evaluation metrics will be made publicly available to foster future research and practical applications (https://rmpku.github.io/CPDM-page/, website / http://149.104.22.83/unlearning.tar.gz, dataset).
Haze Removal via Regional Saturation-Value Translation and Soft Segmentation
Authors: Le-Anh Tran, Dong-Chul Park
Date: 2024-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing, Translation

This paper proposes a single image dehazing prior, called Regional Saturation-Value Translation (RSVT), to tackle the color distortion problems caused by conventional dehazing approaches in bright regions. The RSVT prior is developed based on two key observations regarding the relationship between hazy and haze-free points in the HSV color space. First, the hue component shows marginal variation between corresponding hazy and haze-free points, consolidating a hypothesis that the pixel value variability induced by haze primarily occurs in the saturation and value spaces. Second, in the 2D saturation-value coordinate system, most lines passing through hazy-clean point pairs are likely to intersect near the atmospheric light coordinates. Accordingly, haze removal for the bright regions can be performed by properly translating saturation-value coordinates. In addition, an effective soft segmentation method based on a morphological min-max channel is introduced. By combining the soft segmentation mask with the RSVT prior, a comprehensive single image dehazing framework is devised. Experimental results on various synthetic and realistic hazy image datasets demonstrate that the proposed scheme successfully addresses color distortion issues and restores visually appealing images. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/tranleanh/rsvt.
Enhancing Digital Hologram Reconstruction Using Reverse-Attention Loss for Untrained Physics-Driven Deep Learning Models with Uncertain Distance
Authors: Xiwen Chen, Hao Wang, Zhao Zhang, Zhenmin Li, Huayu Li, Tong Ye, Abolfazl Razi
Date: 2024-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: SSIM

Untrained Physics-based Deep Learning (DL) methods for digital holography have gained significant attention due to their benefits, such as not requiring an annotated training dataset, and providing interpretability since utilizing the governing laws of hologram formation. However, they are sensitive to the hard-to-obtain precise object distance from the imaging plane, posing the $\textit{Autofocusing}$ challenge. Conventional solutions involve reconstructing image stacks for different potential distances and applying focus metrics to select the best results, which apparently is computationally inefficient. In contrast, recently developed DL-based methods treat it as a supervised task, which again needs annotated data and lacks generalizability. To address this issue, we propose $\textit{reverse-attention loss}$, a weighted sum of losses for all possible candidates with learnable weights. This is a pioneering approach to addressing the Autofocusing challenge in untrained deep-learning methods. Both theoretical analysis and experiments demonstrate its superiority in efficiency and accuracy. Interestingly, our method presents a significant reconstruction performance over rival methods (i.e. alternating descent-like optimization, non-weighted loss integration, and random distance assignment) and even is almost equal to that achieved with a precisely known object distance. For example, the difference is less than 1dB in PSNR and 0.002 in SSIM for the target sample in our experiment.
Discriminative Consensus Mining with A Thousand Groups for More Accurate Co-Salient Object Detection
Authors: Peng Zheng
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Co-Salient Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Co-Salient Object Detection (CoSOD) is a rapidly growing task, extended from Salient Object Detection (SOD) and Common Object Segmentation (Co-Segmentation). It is aimed at detecting the co-occurring salient object in the given image group. Many effective approaches have been proposed on the basis of existing datasets. However, there is still no standard and efficient training set in CoSOD, which makes it chaotic to choose training sets in the recently proposed CoSOD methods. First, the drawbacks of existing training sets in CoSOD are analyzed in a comprehensive way, and potential improvements are provided to solve existing problems to some extent. In particular, in this thesis, a new CoSOD training set is introduced, named Co-Saliency of ImageNet (CoSINe) dataset. The proposed CoSINe is the largest number of groups among all existing CoSOD datasets. The images obtained here span a wide variety in terms of categories, object sizes, etc. In experiments, models trained on CoSINe can achieve significantly better performance with fewer images compared to all existing datasets. Second, to make the most of the proposed CoSINe, a novel CoSOD approach named Hierarchical Instance-aware COnsensus MinEr (HICOME) is proposed, which efficiently mines the consensus feature from different feature levels and discriminates objects of different classes in an object-aware contrastive way. As extensive experiments show, the proposed HICOME achieves SoTA performance on all the existing CoSOD test sets. Several useful training tricks suitable for training CoSOD models are also provided. Third, practical applications are given using the CoSOD technique to show the effectiveness. Finally, the remaining challenges and potential improvements of CoSOD are discussed to inspire related work in the future. The source code, the dataset, and the online demo will be publicly available at github.com/ZhengPeng7/CoSINe.
Efficient and Accurate Hyperspectral Image Demosaicing with Neural Network Architectures
Authors: Eric L. Wisotzky, Lara Wallburg, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert, Thomas Wittenberg, Stephan Göb
Date: 2023-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Demosaicking, Spectral Reconstruction

Neural network architectures for image demosaicing have been become more and more complex. This results in long training periods of such deep networks and the size of the networks is huge. These two factors prevent practical implementation and usage of the networks in real-time platforms, which generally only have limited resources. This study investigates the effectiveness of neural network architectures in hyperspectral image demosaicing. We introduce a range of network models and modifications, and compare them with classical interpolation methods and existing reference network approaches. The aim is to identify robust and efficient performing network architectures. Our evaluation is conducted on two datasets, "SimpleData" and "SimRealData," representing different degrees of realism in multispectral filter array (MSFA) data. The results indicate that our networks outperform or match reference models in both datasets demonstrating exceptional performance. Notably, our approach focuses on achieving correct spectral reconstruction rather than just visual appeal, and this emphasis is supported by quantitative and qualitative assessments. Furthermore, our findings suggest that efficient demosaicing solutions, which require fewer parameters, are essential for practical applications. This research contributes valuable insights into hyperspectral imaging and its potential applications in various fields, including medical imaging.
Train Ego-Path Detection on Railway Tracks Using End-to-End Deep Learning
Authors: Thomas Laurent
Date: 2024-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Train Ego-Path Detection

This paper introduces the task of "train ego-path detection", a refined approach to railway track detection designed for intelligent onboard vision systems. Whereas existing research lacks precision and often considers all tracks within the visual field uniformly, our proposed task specifically aims to identify the train's immediate path, or "ego-path", within potentially complex and dynamic railway environments. Building on this, we extend the RailSem19 dataset with ego-path annotations, facilitating further research in this direction. At the heart of our study lies TEP-Net, an end-to-end deep learning framework tailored for ego-path detection, featuring a configurable model architecture, a dynamic data augmentation strategy, and a domain-specific loss function. Leveraging a regression-based approach, TEP-Net outperforms SOTA: while addressing the track detection problem in a more nuanced way than previously, our model achieves 97.5% IoU on the test set and is faster than all existing methods. Further comparative analysis highlights the relevance of the conceptual choices behind TEP-Net, demonstrating its inherent propensity for robustness across diverse environmental conditions and operational dynamics. This work opens promising avenues for the development of intelligent driver assistance systems and autonomous train operations, paving the way toward safer and more efficient railway transportation.