pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Optimizing traffic signs and lights visibility for the teleoperation of autonomous vehicles through ROI compression
Authors: I. Dror, O. Hadar
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Data Compression, Semantic Segmentation

Autonomous vehicles are a promising solution to traffic congestion, air pollution, accidents, and wasted time and resources. However, remote driver intervention may be necessary for extreme situations to ensure safe roadside parking or complete remote takeover. In such cases, high-quality real-time video streaming is crucial for practical remote driving. In a preliminary study, we already presented a region of interest (ROI) HEVC data compression where the image was segmented into two categories of ROI and background, allocating more bandwidth to the ROI, yielding an improvement in the visibility of the classes that essential for driving while transmitting the background with lesser quality. However, migrating bandwidth to the large ROI portion of the image doesn't substantially improve the quality of traffic signs and lights. This work categorized the ROIs into either background, weak ROI, or strong ROI. The simulation-based approach uses a photo-realistic driving scenario database created with the Cognata self-driving car simulation platform. We use semantic segmentation to categorize the compression quality of a Coding Tree Unit (CTU) according to each pixel class. A background CTU can contain only sky, trees, vegetation, or building classes. Essentials for remote driving include significant classes such as roads, road marks, cars, and pedestrians. And most importantly, traffic signs and traffic lights. We apply thresholds to decide if the number of pixels in a CTU of a particular category is enough to declare it as belonging to the strong or weak ROI. Then, we allocate the bandwidth according to the CTU categories. Our results show that the perceptual quality of traffic signs, especially textual signs and traffic lights, improves significantly by up to 5.5 dB compared to the only background and foreground partition, while the weak ROI classes at least retain their original quality.
Inline AI: Open-source Deep Learning Inference for Cardiac MR
Authors: Hui Xue, Rhodri H Davies, James Howard, Hunain Shiwani, Azaan Rehman, Iain Pierce, Henry Procter, Marianna Fontana, James C Moon, Eylem Levelt, Peter Kellman
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Deep Learning

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) is established as a non-invasive imaging technique for evaluation of heart function, anatomy, and myocardial tissue characterization. Quantitative biomarkers are central for diagnosis and management of heart disease. Deep learning (DL) is playing an ever more important role in extracting these quantitative measures from CMR images. While many researchers have reported promising results in training and evaluating models, model deployment into the imaging workflow is less explored. A new imaging AI framework, the InlineAI, was developed and open-sourced. The main innovation is to enable the model inference inline as a part of imaging computation, instead of as an offline post-processing step and to allow users to plug in their models. We demonstrate the system capability on three applications: long-axis CMR cine landmark detection, short-axis CMR cine analysis of function and anatomy, and quantitative perfusion mapping. The InlineAI allowed models to be deployed into imaging workflow in a streaming manner directly on the scanner. The model was loaded and inference on incoming images were performed while the data acquisition was ongoing, and results were sent back to scanner. Several biomarkers were extracted from model outputs in the demonstrated applications and reported as curves and tabular values. All processes are full automated. the model inference was completed within 6-45s after the end of imaging data acquisition.
Imaging transformer for MRI denoising with the SNR unit training: enabling generalization across field-strengths, imaging contrasts, and anatomy
Authors: Hui Xue, Sarah Hooper, Azaan Rehman, Iain Pierce, Thomas Treibel, Rhodri Davies, W Patricia Bandettini, Rajiv Ramasawmy, Ahsan Javed, Zheren Zhu, Yang Yang, James Moon, Adrienne Campbell, Peter Kellman
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Denoising

The ability to recover MRI signal from noise is key to achieve fast acquisition, accurate quantification, and high image quality. Past work has shown convolutional neural networks can be used with abundant and paired low and high-SNR images for training. However, for applications where high-SNR data is difficult to produce at scale (e.g. with aggressive acceleration, high resolution, or low field strength), training a new denoising network using a large quantity of high-SNR images can be infeasible. In this study, we overcome this limitation by improving the generalization of denoising models, enabling application to many settings beyond what appears in the training data. Specifically, we a) develop a training scheme that uses complex MRIs reconstructed in the SNR units (i.e., the images have a fixed noise level, SNR unit training) and augments images with realistic noise based on coil g-factor, and b) develop a novel imaging transformer (imformer) to handle 2D, 2D+T, and 3D MRIs in one model architecture. Through empirical evaluation, we show this combination improves performance compared to CNN models and improves generalization, enabling a denoising model to be used across field-strengths, image contrasts, and anatomy.
Integrating AI in NDE: Techniques, Trends, and Further Directions
Authors: Eduardo Pérez, Cemil Emre Ardic, Ozan Çakıroğlu, Kevin Jacob, Sayako Kodera, Luca Pompa, Mohamad Rachid, Han Wang, Yiming Zhou, Cyril Zimmer, Florian Römer, Ahmad Osman
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00

The digital transformation is fundamentally changing our industries, affecting planning, execution as well as monitoring of production processes in a wide range of application fields. With product line-ups becoming more and more versatile and diverse, the necessary inspection and monitoring sparks significant novel requirements on the corresponding Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) systems. The establishment of increasingly powerful approaches to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) may provide just the needed innovation to solve some of these challenges. In this paper we provide a comprehensive survey about the usage of AI methods in NDE in light of the recent innovations towards NDE 4.0. Since we cannot discuss each NDE modality in one paper, we limit our attention to magnetic methods, ultrasound, thermography, as well as optical inspection. In addition to reviewing recent AI developments in each field, we draw common connections by pointing out NDE-related tasks that have a common underlying mathematical problem and categorizing the state of the art according to the corresponding sub-tasks. In so doing, interdisciplinary connections are drawn that provide a more complete overall picture.
Comparative Efficacy of Commercial Wearables for Circadian Rhythm Home Monitoring from Activity, Heart Rate, and Core Body Temperature
Authors: Fan Wu, Patrick Langer, Jinjoo Shim, Elgar Fleisch, Filipe Barata
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Rhythm

Circadian rhythms govern biological patterns that follow a 24-hour cycle. Dysfunctions in circadian rhythms can contribute to various health problems, such as sleep disorders. Current circadian rhythm assessment methods, often invasive or subjective, limit circadian rhythm monitoring to laboratories. Hence, this study aims to investigate scalable consumer-centric wearables for circadian rhythm monitoring outside traditional laboratories. In a two-week longitudinal study conducted in real-world settings, 36 participants wore an Actigraph, a smartwatch, and a core body temperature sensor to collect activity, temperature, and heart rate data. We evaluated circadian rhythms calculated from commercial wearables by comparing them with circadian rhythm reference measures, i.e., Actigraph activities and chronotype questionnaire scores. The circadian rhythm metric acrophases, determined from commercial wearables using activity, heart rate, and temperature data, significantly correlated with the acrophase derived from Actigraph activities (r=0.96, r=0.87, r=0.79; all p<0.001) and chronotype questionnaire (r=-0.66, r=-0.73, r=-0.61; all p<0.001). The acrophases obtained concurrently from consumer sensors significantly predicted the chronotype (R2=0.64; p<0.001). Our study validates commercial sensors for circadian rhythm assessment, highlighting their potential to support maintaining healthy rhythms and provide scalable and timely health monitoring in real-life scenarios.
Riemannian Covariance Fitting for Direction-of-Arrival Estimation
Authors: Joseph S. Picard, Amitay Bar, Ronen Talmon
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Direction of Arrival Estimation

Covariance fitting (CF) is a comprehensive approach for direction of arrival (DoA) estimation, consolidating many common solutions. Standard practice is to use Euclidean criteria for CF, disregarding the intrinsic Hermitian positive-definite (HPD) geometry of the spatial covariance matrices. We assert that this oversight leads to inherent limitations. In this paper, as a remedy, we present a comprehensive study of the use of various Riemannian metrics of HPD matrices in CF. We focus on the advantages of the Affine-Invariant (AI) and the Log-Euclidean (LE) Riemannian metrics. Consequently, we propose a new practical beamformer based on the LE metric and derive analytically its spatial characteristics, such as the beamwidth and sidelobe attenuation, under noisy conditions. Comparing these features to classical beamformers shows significant advantage. In addition, we demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, the LE beamformer's robustness in scenarios with small sample sizes and in the presence of noise, interference, and multipath channels.
Spatio-Spectral Structure Tensor Total Variation for Hyperspectral Image Denoising and Destriping
Authors: Shingo Takemoto, Kazuki Naganuma, Shunsuke Ono
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Hyperspectral Image Denoising, Image Denoising

This paper proposes a novel regularization method, named Spatio-Spectral Structure Tensor Total Variation (S3TTV), for denoising and destriping of hyperspectral (HS) images. HS images are inevitably contaminated by various types of noise, during acquisition process, due to the measurement equipment and the environment. For HS image denoising and destriping tasks, Spatio-Spectral Total Variation (SSTV) is widely known as a powerful regularization approach that models the spatio-spectral piecewise smoothness. However, since SSTV refers only to the local differences of pixels/bands, edges and textures that extend beyond adjacent pixels are not preserved during denoising process. To address this problem, we newly introduce S3TTV, which is designed to preserve two essential physical characteristics of HS images: semi-local spatial structures and spectral correlation across all bands. Specifically, we define S3TTV as the sum of the nuclear norms of spatio-spectral structure tensors, which are matrices formed by arranging second-order spatio-spectral difference vectors within semi-local areas. Furthermore, we formulate the HS image denoising and destriping problem as a constrained convex optimization problem involving S3TTV and develop an algorithm based on a preconditioned primal-dual splitting method to solve this problem efficiently. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of S3TTV by comparing it with existing methods, including state-of-the-art ones through denoising and destriping experiments.
Distributed Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Latency Minimization in Mobile Edge Computing Networks
Authors: Minwoo Kim, Jonggyu Jang, Youngchol Choi, Hyun Jong Yang
Date: 2024-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Edge-computing

The growth in artificial intelligence (AI) technology has attracted substantial interests in latency-aware task offloading of mobile edge computing (MEC)-namely, minimizing service latency. Additionally, the use of MEC systems poses an additional problem arising from limited battery resources of MDs. This paper tackles the pressing challenge of latency-aware distributed task offloading optimization, where user association (UA), resource allocation (RA), full-task offloading, and battery of mobile devices (MDs) are jointly considered. In existing studies, joint optimization of overall task offloading and UA is seldom considered due to the complexity of combinatorial optimization problems, and in cases where it is considered, linear objective functions such as power consumption are adopted. Revolutionizing the realm of MEC, our objective includes all major components contributing to users' quality of experience, including latency and energy consumption. To achieve this, we first formulate an NP-hard combinatorial problem, where the objective function comprises three elements: communication latency, computation latency, and battery usage. We derive a closed-form RA solution of the problem; next, we provide a distributed pricing-based UA solution. We simulate the proposed algorithm for various resource-intensive tasks. Our numerical results show that the proposed method Pareto-dominates baseline methods. More specifically, the results demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform baseline methods by 1.62 times shorter latency with 41.2% less energy consumption.
Comparison of Extended and Unscented Kalman Filters Performance in a Hybrid BLE-UWB Localization System
Authors: Marcin Kolakowski
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00

The paper presents a comparison of performance of two Kalman Filters: extended Kalman filter (EKF) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF) in a hybrid Bluetooth-Low-Energy-ultra-wideband (BLE-UWB) based localization system. In the system, the user is localized primarily based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurements of BLE signals. The UWB part of the system is periodically used to improve localization accuracy by supplying the algorithm with measured UWB packets time difference of arrival (TDOA). The proposed scheme was experimentally validated using two algorithms: the EKF and the UKF. The localization accuracy of both algorithms is compared.
A Hybrid BLE/UWB Localization Technique with Automatic Radio Map Creation
Authors: Marcin Kolakowski
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Hybrid Positioning

Localization systems intended for home use by people with mild cognitive impairment should comply with specific requirements. They should provide the users with sub-meter accuracy allowing for analyzing patient's movement trajectory and be energy effective, so the devices do not need frequent charging. Such requirements could be satisfied by employing a hybrid positioning system combining accurate UWB with energy efficient Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. In the paper, such a solution is presented and experimentally verified. In the proposed system, user's location is derived using BLE based fingerprinting. A radio map utilized by the algorithm is created automatically during system operation with the support of UWB subsystem. Such an approach allows the users to repeat system calibration as often as possible, which raises systems resistance to environmental changes.
Multi-Polarization Superposition Beamforming: Novel Scheme of Transmit Power Allocation and Subcarrier Assignment
Authors: Paul Oh, Sean Kwon
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00

The 5th generation (5G) new radio (NR) access technology and the beyond-5G future wireless communication require extremely high data rate and spectrum efficiency. Energy-efficient transmission/reception schemes are also regarded as an important component. The polarization domain has attracted substantial attention in this aspects. This paper is the first to propose \textit{multi-polarization superposition beamforming (MPS-Beamforming)} with cross-polarization discrimination (XPD) and cross-polarization ratio (XPR)-aware transmit power allocation utilizing the 5G NR antenna panel structure. The appropriate orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) subcarrier assignment algorithm is also proposed to verify the theoretical schemes via simulations. The detailed theoretical derivation along with comprehensive simulation results illustrate that the proposed novel scheme of MPS-Beamforming is significantly beneficial to the improvement of the performance in terms of the symbol error rate (SER) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain at the user equipment (UE). For instance, a provided practical wireless channel environment in the simulations exhibits 8 dB SNR gain for $10^{-4}$ SER in a deterministic channel, and 4 dB SNR gain for $10^{-5}$ SER in abundant statistical channel realizations.
SSwsrNet: A Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning Framework for Wireless Signal Recognition
Authors: Hao Zhang, Fuhui Zhou, Qihui Wu, Naofal Al-Dhahir
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Learning

Wireless signal recognition (WSR) is crucial in modern and future wireless communication networks since it aims to identify properties of the received signal. Although many deep learning-based WSR models have been developed, they still rely on a large amount of labeled training data. Thus, they cannot tackle the few-sample problem in the practically and dynamically changing wireless communication environment. To overcome this challenge, a novel SSwsrNet framework is proposed by using the deep residual shrinkage network (DRSN) and semi-supervised learning. The DRSN can learn discriminative features from noisy signals. Moreover, a modular semi-supervised learning method that combines labeled and unlabeled data using MixMatch is exploited to further improve the classification performance under few-sample conditions. Extensive simulation results on automatic modulation classification (AMC) and wireless technology classification (WTC) demonstrate that our proposed WSR scheme can achieve better performance than the benchmark schemes in terms of classification accuracy. This novel method enables more robust and adaptive signal recognition for next-generation wireless networks.
GNSS Spoofing Detection by Crowdsourcing Double Differential Pseudorange Spatial Distribution
Authors: Xin Chen, Kai Wang
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00

It is widely known that spoofing is a major threat that adversely impacts the reliability and accuracy of GNSS applications. In this study, a crowdsourcing double differential pseudorange spatial (D2SP) random set is constructed and the distribution of the set is derived.Based on the variance of the D2SP set, a tri-level hypothesis detection algorithm is designed to classify spoofing-free, fully-spoofed, and partially-spoofed cases in the region of interest (ROI).It does not require the prior knowledge of the truth positions or relative distances of the receivers.Simulation test results show that the proposed D2SP spoofing detection method has the advantages of lower computational complexity and higher tolerance for multipath errors compared with the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) method that is the current mainstream spoofing detection algorithm based on multiple receivers' differential pseudoranges.Moreover, it also shows better flexibility for different sizes of ROI and numbers of the crowdsourcing receivers.
Kalman filter based localization in hybrid BLE-UWB positioning system
Authors: Marcin Kolakowski
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Hybrid Positioning

In this paper a concept of hybrid Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Ultra-wideband (UWB) positioning system is presented. The system is intended to be energy efficient. Low energy BLE unit is used as a primary source of measurement data and for most of the time localization is calculated based on received signal strength (RSS). UWB technology is used less often. Time difference of arrival (TDOA) values measured with UWB radios are periodically used to improve RSS based localization. The paper contains a description of proposed hybrid positioning algorithm. Results of simulations and experiments confirming algorithm's efficiency are also included.
Log-PDE Methods for Rough Signature Kernels
Authors: Maud Lemercier, Terry Lyons, Cristopher Salvi
Date: 2024-04-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Signature kernels, inner products of path signatures, underpin several machine learning algorithms for multivariate time series analysis. For bounded variation paths, signature kernels were recently shown to solve a Goursat PDE. However, existing PDE solvers only use increments as input data, leading to first order approximation errors. These approaches become computationally intractable for highly oscillatory input paths, as they have to be resolved at a fine enough scale to accurately recover their signature kernel, resulting in significant time and memory complexities. In this paper, we extend the analysis to rough paths, and show, leveraging the framework of smooth rough paths, that the resulting rough signature kernels can be approximated by a novel system of PDEs whose coefficients involve higher order iterated integrals of the input rough paths. We show that this system of PDEs admits a unique solution and establish quantitative error bounds yielding a higher order approximation to rough signature kernels.
A Coupled Neural Field Model for the Standard Consolidation Theory
Authors: Lisa Blum Moyse, Hugues Berry
Date: 2024-04-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Hippocampus, Retrieval

The standard consolidation theory states that short-term memories located in the hippocampus enable the consolidation of long-term memories in the neocortex. In other words, the neocortex slowly learns long-term memories with a transient support of the hippocampus that quickly learns unstable memories. However, it is not clear yet what could be the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these differences in learning rates and memory time-scales. Here, we propose a novel modelling approach of the standard consolidation theory, that focuses on its potential neurobiological mechanisms. In addition to synaptic plasticity and spike frequency adaptation, our model incorporates adult neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus as well as the difference in size between the neocortex and the hippocampus, that we associate with distance-dependent synaptic plasticity. We also take into account the interconnected spatial structure of the involved brain areas, by incorporating the above neurobiological mechanisms in a coupled neural field framework, where each area is represented by a separate neural field with intra- and inter-area connections. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply neural fields to this process. Using numerical simulations and mathematical analysis, we explore the short-term and long-term dynamics of the model upon alternance of phases of hippocampal replay and retrieval cue of an external input. This external input is encodable as a memory pattern in the form of a multiple bump attractor pattern in the individual neural fields. In the model, hippocampal memory patterns become encoded first, before neocortical ones, because of the smaller distances between the bumps of the hippocampal memory patterns. As a result, retrieval of the input pattern in the neocortex at short time-scales necessitates the additional input delivered by the memory pattern of the hippocampus. Neocortical memory patterns progressively consolidate at longer times, up to a point where their retrieval does not need the support of the hippocampus anymore. At longer times, perturbation of the hippocampal neural fields by neurogenesis erases the hippocampus pattern, leading to a final state where the memory pattern is exclusively evoked in the neocortex. Therefore, the dynamics of our model successfully reproduces the main features of the standard consolidation theory. This suggests that neurogenesis in the hippocampus and distance-dependent synaptic plasticity coupled to synaptic depression and spike frequency adaptation, are indeed critical neurobiological processes in memory consolidation.