Query: Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network

Relevant passages:
Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift <=SEP=> Training Deep Neural Networks is complicated by the fact that the distribution of each layer’s inputs changes during training, as the parameters of the previous layers change. This slows down the training by requiring lower learning rates and careful parameter initialization, and makes it notoriously hard to train models with saturating nonlinearities. We refer to this phenomenon as internal covariate shift, and address the problem by normalizing layer inputs. Our method draws its strength from making normalization a part of the model architecture and performing the normalization for each training mini-batch. Batch Normalization allows us to use much higher learning rates and be less careful about initialization, and in some cases eliminates the need for Dropout. Applied to a stateof-the-art image classification model, Batch Normalization achieves the same accuracy with 14 times fewer training steps, and beats the original model by a significant margin. Using an ensemble of batch-normalized networks, we improve upon the best published result on ImageNet classification: reaching 4.82% top-5 test error, exceeding the accuracy of human raters.

ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks <=SEP=> We trained a large, deep convolutional neural network to classify the 1.2 million high-resolution images in the ImageNet LSVRC-2010 contest into the 1000 different classes. On the test data, we achieved top-1 and top-5 error rates of 37.5% and 17.0%, respectively, which is considerably better than the previous state-of-the-art. The neural network, which has 60 million parameters and 650,000 neurons, consists of five convolutional layers, some of which are followed by max-pooling layers, and three fully connected layers with a final 1000-way softmax. To make training faster, we used non-saturating neurons and a very efficient GPU implementation of the convolution operation. To reduce overfitting in the fully connected layers we employed a recently developed regularization method called "dropout" that proved to be very effective. We also entered a variant of this model in the ILSVRC-2012 competition and achieved a winning top-5 test error rate of 15.3%, compared to 26.2% achieved by the second-best entry.

New edge-directed interpolation <=SEP=> This paper proposes an edge-directed interpolation algorithm for natural images. The basic idea is to first estimate local covariance coefficients from a low-resolution image and then use these covariance estimates to adapt the interpolation at a higher resolution based on the geometric duality between the low-resolution covariance and the high-resolution covariance. The edge-directed property of covariance-based adaptation attributes to its capability of tuning the interpolation coefficients to match an arbitrarily oriented step edge. A hybrid approach of switching between bilinear interpolation and covariance-based adaptive interpolation is proposed to reduce the overall computational complexity. Two important applications of the new interpolation algorithm are studied: resolution enhancement of grayscale images and reconstruction of color images from CCD samples. Simulation results demonstrate that our new interpolation algorithm substantially improves the subjective quality of the interpolated images over conventional linear interpolation.

Image super-resolution using gradient profile prior <=SEP=> In this paper, we propose an image super-resolution approach using a novel generic image prior - gradient profile prior, which is a parametric prior describing the shape and the sharpness of the image gradients. Using the gradient profile prior learned from a large number of natural images, we can provide a constraint on image gradients when we estimate a hi-resolution image from a low-resolution image. With this simple but very effective prior, we are able to produce state-of-the-art results. The reconstructed hi-resolution image is sharp while has rare ringing or jaggy artifacts.

A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style <=SEP=> Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Tübingen, Germany Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Tübingen, Germany Graduate School for Neural Information Processing, Tübingen, Germany Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA ∗To whom correspondence should be addressed; E-mail: leon.gatys@bethgelab.org

PCA-based feature selection scheme for machine defect classification <=SEP=> The sensitivity of various features that are characteristic of a machine defect may vary considerably under different operating conditions. Hence it is critical to devise a systematic feature selection scheme that provides guidance on choosing the most representative features for defect classification. This paper presents a feature selection scheme based on the principal component analysis (PCA) method. The effectiveness of the scheme was verified experimentally on a bearing test bed, using both supervised and unsupervised defect classification approaches. The objective of the study was to identify the severity level of bearing defects, where no a priori knowledge on the defect conditions was available. The proposed scheme has shown to provide more accurate defect classification with fewer feature inputs than using all features initially considered relevant. The result confirms its utility as an effective tool for machine health assessment.

Uncovering cabdrivers' behavior patterns from their digital traces <=SEP=> Recognizing high-level human behavior and decisions from their digital traces are critical issues in pervasive computing systems. In this paper, we develop a novel methodology to reveal cabdrivers’ operation patterns by analyzing their continuous digital traces. For the first time, we systematically study large scale cabdrivers’ behavior in a real and complex city context through their daily digital traces. We identify a set of valuable features, which are simple and effective to classify cabdrivers, delineate cabdrivers’ operation patterns and compare the different cabdrivers’ behavior. The methodology and steps could spatially and temporally quantify, visualize, and examine different cabdrivers’ operation patterns. Drivers were categorized into top drivers and ordinary drivers by their daily income. We use the daily operations of 3000 cabdrivers in over 48 million of trips and 240 million kilometers to uncover: (1) spatial selection behavior, (2) context-aware spatio-temporal operation behavior, (3) route choice behavior, and (4) operation tactics. Though we focused on cabdriver operation patterns analysis from their digital traces, the methodology is a general empirical and analytical methodology for any GPS-like trace analysis. Our work demonstrates the great potential to utilize the massive pervasive data sets to understand human behavior and high-level intelligence. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Predicting SMEs' adoption of enterprise systems <=SEP=> Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that can be used to predict which small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are more likely to become adopters of enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, SCM and e-procurement). Design/methodology/approach – Direct interviews were used to collect data from a random sample of SMEs located in the Northwest of England. Using logistic regression, 102 responses were analysed. Findings – The results reveal that the factors influencing SMEs’ adoption of enterprise systems are different from the factors influencing SMEs’ adoption of other previously studied information systems (IS) innovations. SMEs were found to be more influenced by technological and organisational factors than environmental factors. Moreover, the results indicate that firms with a greater perceived relative advantage, a greater ability to experiment with these systems before adoption, greater top management support, greater organisational readiness and a larger size are predicted to become adopters of enterprise systems. Research limitations/implications – Although this study focused on the factors that influence SMEs’ adoption of a set of enterprise systems (i.e. ERP, CRM, SCM and e-procurement), it fails to differentiate between factors that influence each of these systems. Practical implications – The model can be used to assist software vendors not only to develop marketing strategies that can target potential adopters, but also to develop strategies to increase the adoption of ES among SMEs. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the continuing research in IS innovations adoption/diffusion in the small business context.

Minimising semantic drift with Mutual Exclusion Bootstrapping <=SEP=> Iterative bootstrapping techniques are commonly used to extract lexical semantic resources from raw text. Their major weakness is that, without costly human intervention, the extracted terms (often rapidly) drift from the meaning of the original seed terms. In this paper we propose Mutual Exclusion bootstrapping (MEB) in which multiple semantic classes compete for each extracted term. This significantly reduces the problem of semantic drift by providing boundaries for the semantic classes. We demonstrate the superiority of MEB to standard bootstrapping in extracting named entities from the Google Web 1T 5-grams. Finally, we demonstrate that MEB is a multi-way cut problem over semantic classes, terms and contexts.

Time-dependent visual adaptation for fast realistic image display <=SEP=> Human vision takes time to adapt to large changes in scene intensity, and these transient adjustments have a profound effect on visual appearance. This paper offers a new operator to include these appearance changes in animations or interactive real-time simulations, and to match a user's visual responses to those the user would experience in a real-world scene.
Large, abrupt changes in scene intensities can cause dramatic compression of visual responses, followed by a gradual recovery of normal vision. Asymmetric mechanisms govern these time-dependent adjustments, and offer adaptation to increased light that is much more rapid than adjustment to darkness. We derive a new tone reproduction operator that simulates these mechanisms. The operator accepts a stream of scene intensity frames and creates a stream of color display images.
All operator components are derived from published quantitative measurements from physiology, psychophysics, color science, and photography. ept intentionally simple to allow fast computation, the operator is meant for use with real-time walk-through renderings, high dynamic range video cameras, and other interactive applications. We demonstrate its performance on both synthetically generated and acquired “real-world” scenes with large dynamic variations of illumination and contrast.

Narrowband Internet of Things: Evolutions, Technologies, and Open Issues <=SEP=> We are on the threshold of the explosive growth in the global Internet-of-Things (IoT) market. Comparing with the legacy human-centric applications, machine type communication scenarios exhibit totally different characteristics, such as low throughput, delay insensitivity, occasional transmission, and deep coverage. Meanwhile, it also requires the terminal devices to be cheap enough and sustain long battery life. These demands hasten the prosperity of low power wide area (LPWA) technologies. Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) is the newest Long Term Evolution (LTE) specification ratified by the third generation partner project as one of the LPWA solutions to achieve the objectives of super coverage, low power, low cost, and massive connection. Working in the licensed frequency band, it is designed to reuse and coexist with the existing LTE cellular networks, which endows it with outstanding advantages in decreasing network installation cost and minimizing product time-to-market. In this backdrop, it has been extensively regarded as one of the most promising technologies toward the IoT landscape. However, as a new LTE standard, there are still a lot of challenges that need to overcome. This paper surveys its evolutions, technologies, and issues, spanning from performance analysis, design optimization, combination with other leading technologies, to implementation and application. The goal is to deliver a holistic understanding for the emerging wireless communication system, in helping to spur further research in accelerating the broad use of NB-IoT.

Texture classification and segmentation using multiresolution simultaneous autoregressive models <=SEP=> 

ENHANCING THE TOURISM EXPERIENCE THROUGH MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS <=SEP=> The paper discusses the use of Augmented Reality (AR) applications for the needs of tourism. It describes the technology’s evolution from pilot applications into commercial mobile applications. We address the technical aspects of mobile AR applications development, emphasizing on the technologies that render the delivery of augmented reality content possible and experientially superior. We examine the state of the art, providing an analysis concerning the development and the objectives of each application. Acknowledging the various technological limitations hindering AR’s substantial end-user adoption, the paper proposes a model for developing AR mobile applications for the field of tourism, aiming to release AR’s full potential within the field.

k -Anonymous Data Mining: A Survey <=SEP=> Data mining technology has attracted significant interest as a means of identifying patterns and trends from large collections of data. It is however evident that the collection and analysis of data that include personal information may violate the privacy of the individuals to whom information refers. Privacy protection in data mining is then becoming a crucial issue that has captured the attention of many researchers. In this chapter, we first describe the concept of k-anonymity and illustrate different approaches for its enforcement. We then discuss how the privacy requirements characterized by k-anonymity can be violated in data mining and introduce possible approaches to ensure the satisfaction of k-anonymity in data mining.

An expert evaluation of word-sized visualizations for analyzing eye movement data <=SEP=> Word-sized visualizations for eye movement data allow analysts to compare a variety of experiment conditions or participants at the sametime. Weimplementedasetofsuchword-sizedvisualizations as part of an analysis framework. We want to ﬁnd out which of the visualizations is most suitable for different analysis tasks. To this end, we applied the framework to data from an eye tracking study on the reading behavior of users studying metro maps. In anexpertevaluationwithﬁveanalysts,weidentiﬁeddistinguishing characteristics of the different word-sized visualizations.

Comparing Business and Household Sector Innovation in Consumer Products : Findings from a Representative Study in the United Kingdom <=SEP=> In a first survey of its type, we measure development and modification of consumer products by product users in a representative sample of 1,173 UK consumers aged 18 and over. We estimate this previously unmeasured type of innovation to be quite large: 6.1% of UK consumers – nearly 2.9 million individuals have engaged in consumer product innovation during the prior three years. In aggregate, consumers’ annual product development expenditures are more than 1.4 times larger than the annual consumer product R&D expenditures of all firms in the UK combined. Consumers engage in many small projects which seem complementary to the innovation efforts of incumbent producers. Consumer innovators very seldom protect their innovations via intellectual property, and 17% diffuse to others. These results imply that official statistics partly miss relevant innovation activity, and that existing companies should reconfigure their product development systems to find and build upon prototypes developed by consumers. 1 MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge MA, USA. 2 RSM Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. 3 EIM Business and Policy Research, Zoetermeer, The Netherlands. 4 Centre for Research in Innovation Management, University of Brighton, United Kingdom. * Corresponding author. E-mail: evhippel@mit.edu. Phone: +1 617-253-7155

A study on human gait analysis <=SEP=> Human gait is one of the most important biometric which has so far been neglected for use in medical diagnostics. In this paper, we make a feasibility study on human gait acquired from a wearable sensor based biometric suit called as Intelligent Gait Oscillation Detector (IGOD). This suit measures simultaneous gait oscillation from eight major joints (two knees, two hips, two elbows and two shoulders) of a human body. Techniques for analyzing and understanding the human gait patterns were developed. Variance in the gait oscillation was studied with respect to gait speed varying from 3km/hr to 5km/hr. Gender variance (male/female) gait oscillation has also been studied. A comprehensive analysis on human gait affected by knee joint movement and hip joint oscillation has been addressed with the arm swing effects. This analysis will provide us with an insight on human bipedal locomotion and its stability. We plan to create a repository of human gait oscillations which could extensively be analyzed for person identification and detecting walking problems in patients, which is detection of disease in the medical field.

Cross-lingual Argumentation Mining: Machine Translation (and a bit of Projection) is All You Need! <=SEP=> Argumentation mining (AM) requires the identification of complex discourse structures and has lately been applied with success monolingually. In this work, we show that the existing resources are, however, not adequate for assessing cross-lingual AM, due to their heterogeneity or lack of complexity. We therefore create suitable parallel corpora by (human and machine) translating a popular AM dataset consisting of persuasive student essays into German, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We then compare (i) annotation projection and (ii) bilingual word embeddings based direct transfer strategies for cross-lingual AM, finding that the former performs considerably better and almost eliminates the loss from cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, we find that annotation projection works equally well when using either costly human or cheap machine translations. Our code and data are available at http://github.com/UKPLab/ coling2018-xling_argument_mining.

A Brief Review of Digital Games and Learning <=SEP=> Digital games have caught the attention of scholars across a variety of disciplines. Today, scholars from fields as diverse as media design, literature, computer science, education, and theatre studies have together contributed to the understanding of this emergent medium and its phenomenon as a learning tool The unsatisfying experience of directly adopting game formats into educational contexts has motivated researchers to study successful (commercial) digital games, in particular to examine the play activities of digital games and the principles underlying the design of digital games in order to develop concepts and strategies for rich virtual learning contexts. In this review, provided is a brief account of academic arguments regarding digital games and learning.

Adversarial examples: A survey <=SEP=> Adversarial examples are a phenomenon that have gathered a lot of attention in recent studies. The fact that the addition of very small, but carefully crafted perturbations to the inputs of sophisticated and high performing machine learning models may cause them to make significant errors, is both fascinating and important. A survey of findings connected with adversarial examples is presented and discussed in this paper.

Sex-work harm reduction <=SEP=> Sex work is an extremely dangerous profession. The use of harm-reduction principles can help to safeguard sex workers' lives in the same way that drug users have benefited from drug-use harm reduction. Sex workers are exposed to serious harms: drug use, disease, violence, discrimination, debt, criminalisation, and exploitation (child prostitution, trafficking for sex work, and exploitation of migrants). Successful and promising harm-reduction strategies are available: education, empowerment, prevention, care, occupational health and safety, decriminalisation of sex workers, and human-rights-based approaches. Successful interventions include peer education, training in condom-negotiating skills, safety tips for street-based sex workers, male and female condoms, the prevention-care synergy, occupational health and safety guidelines for brothels, self-help organisations, and community-based child protection networks. Straightforward and achievable steps are available to improve the day-to-day lives of sex workers while they continue to work. Conceptualising and debating sex-work harm reduction as a new paradigm can hasten this process.

Challenges for the Self-Safety in Autonomous Vehicles <=SEP=> The combination of multiple functions having different and complementary capabilities enables the emergence of Autonomous Vehicles. Their deployment is limited by the level of complexity they represent together with the challenges encountered in real environments with strong safety concerns. Thus a major concern prior to massive deployment is on how to ensure the safety of autonomous vehicles despite likely internal (e.g. malfunctions) and external (e.g., aggressive behaviors) disturbances they might undergo. This paper presents the challenges that undergoes the design and development of autonomous vehicles with respect to their functional architecture and adaptive behaviors from a safety perspective. For the purpose of the rationales, we define needs and requirements that lead to the formulation of an architectural framework. Our approach is based on paradigms and technologies from non-automotive domains to address non-functional system properties like safety, reliability and security. The notion of micro-services is also introduced for the self-safety of autonomous vehicles. These are part of the proposed framework that should facilitate the analysis, design, development and validation for the adequate composition and orchestration of services aimed to warrant the required non-functional properties, such as safety. In the present paper, we introduce the structural and behavioral adaptations of the framework to offer a holistic and scalable vision of the safety over the system.

Toward a Semantic Forum for Active Collaborative Learning <=SEP=> Online discussion forums provide open workspace allowing learners to share information, exchange ideas, address problems and discuss on specific themes. But the substantial impediment to its promotion as effective elearning facility lies in the continuously increasing messages but with discrete and incoherent structure as well as the loosely-tied learners with response-freeness. To motivate and facilitate active collaborative learning, this paper describes the design of a semantic forum with semantic link networking on discussion transcripts. Based on domain ontology and text mining technologies, messages are automatically processed for structural modeling with semantic association and special interest groups are automatically discovered for topic-centric social context measurement, which lays the foundation for the fulfillment of distinctive functionalities in the semantic forum (i.e. semantic search, relational navigation and recommendation). Compared with traditional forums, the semantic forum has three outstanding features. First, it deals with the structural incoherence and content isolation within forums. Second, it enables active learning by providing learners with relational navigation to meet their learning demands. Third, it supports social context based ranking to recommend learning companions or transcripts for collaborative problem-solving.

Unique Signatures of Histograms for Local Surface Description <=SEP=> This paper deals with local 3D descriptors for surface matching. First, we categorize existing methods into two classes: Signatures and Histograms. Then, by discussion and experiments alike, we point out the key issues of uniqueness and repeatability of the local reference frame. Based on these observations, we formulate a novel comprehensive proposal for surface representation, which encompasses a new unique and repeatable local reference frame as well as a new 3D descriptor. The latter lays at the intersection between Signatures and Histograms, so as to possibly achieve a better balance between descriptiveness and robustness. Experiments on publicly available datasets as well as on range scans obtained with Spacetime Stereo provide a thorough validation of our proposal.

Automatic collision avoidance during parking and maneuvering — An optimal control approach <=SEP=> In order to reduce the great number of parking incidences and other collisions in low speed scenarios, an obstacle avoidance algorithm is proposed. Since collision avoidance can be achieved by sole braking when driving slowly this algorithm's objective is a comfort orientated braking routine. Therefore, an optimization problem is formulated leading to jerk and time optimal trajectories for braking. In addition to that, based on the prediction of the future vehicle motion, this algorithm compensates for a significant actuator time delay. Using an occupancy grid for representing the static vehicle environment and the current driving state, possible collision points are determined not only for the vehicle front or rear, but also for both vehicle sides, where no sensors are located. The algorithm's performance is demonstrated in a real-world scenario.

Mercury BLASTN: Faster DNA Sequence Comparison using a Streaming Hardware Architecture <=SEP=> Motivation: Large-scale DNA sequence comparison, as implemented by BLAST and related algorithms, is one of the pillars of modern genomic analysis. One way to accelerate these computations is with a streaming architecture, in which processors are arranged in a pipeline that replicates the multistage structure of the algorithm. To achieve high performance, the processor hardware implementing the critical seed matching and ungapped extension stages of BLAST should be specialized to execute these stages as quickly as possible. However, accelerating these stages requires solving two key problems: first, the seed matching stage is not of a form which has traditionally been amenable to hardware acceleration; and second, the accelerated implementation of BLAST should retain sensitivity at least comparable to that of the original software. Results: We describe Mercury BLASTN, an FPGA-based implementation of BLAST for DNA. Mercury BLASTN combines a Bloom filtering approach to seed matching with a modified ungapped extension algorithm to overcome barriers to placing the early stages of BLAST onto hardware. On a previous-generation FPGA hardware platform, Mercury BLASTN runs 5 to 11 times faster than NCBI BLASTN current-generation general-purpose CPUs, with the prospect of a further eight-fold speedup on current-generation FPGAs. Moreover, its sensitivity to significant DNA sequence alignments is 99% of that observed with software NCBI BLASTN. Availability: Academic users should contact the authors for information on acquiring a prototype of the Mercury BLASTN system. Contact: jbuhler@cse.wustl.edu

Comprehensive Survey on T-SDN: Software-Defined Networking for Transport Networks <=SEP=> Paradoxically, with an ever-increasing traffic demand, today transport-network operators experience a progressive erosion of their margins. The alarms of change are set, and software define networking (SDN) is coming to the rescue with the promise of reducing capital expenditures and operational expenses. Driven by economic needs and network innovation facilities, today transport SDN (T-SDN) is a reality. It gained big momentum in the last years, however, in the networking industry, the transport network will be perhaps the last segment to embrace SDN, mainly due to the heterogeneous nature and complexity of the optical equipment composing it. This survey guides the reader through a fascinating technological adventure that provides an organic analysis of the T-SDN development and evolution considering contributions from: academic research, standardization bodies, industrial development, open source projects, and alliances among them. After creating a comprehensive picture of T-SDN, we provide an analysis of many open issues that are expected to need significant future work, and give our vision in this path toward a fully programmable and dynamic transport network.

JM: An R Package for the Joint Modelling of Longitudinal and Time-to-Event Data <=SEP=> In longitudinal studies measurements are often collected on different types of outcomes for each subject. These may include several longitudinally measured responses (such as blood values relevant to the medical condition under study) and the time at which an event of particular interest occurs (e.g., death, development of a disease or dropout from the study). These outcomes are often separately analyzed; however, in many instances, a joint modeling approach is either required or may produce a better insight into the mechanisms that underlie the phenomenon under study. In this paper we present the R package JM that fits joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data.

Gated Recurrent Capsules for Visual Word Embeddings <=SEP=> The caption retrieval task can be defined as follows: given a set of images I and a set of describing sentences S, for each image i in I we ought to find the sentence in S that best describes i. The most commonly applied method to solve this problem is to build a multimodal space and to map each image and each sentence to that space, so that they can be compared easily. A non-conventional model called Word2VisualVec has been proposed recently: instead of mapping images and sentences to a multimodal space, they mapped sentences directly to a space of visual features. Advances in the computation of visual features let us infer that such an approach is promising. In this paper, we propose a new Recurrent Neural Network model following that unconventional approach based on Gated Recurrent Capsules (GRCs), designed as an extension of Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). We show that GRCs outperform GRUs on the caption retrieval task. We also state that GRCs present a great potential for other applications.

Improving Convergence Speed and Scalability in OSPF: A Survey <=SEP=> Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), a link state routing protocol, is a popular interior gateway protocol (IGP) in the Internet. Wide spread deployment and years of experience running the protocol have motivated continuous improvements in its operation as the nature and demands of the routing infrastructures have changed. Modern routing domains need to maintain a very high level of service availability. Hence, OSPF needs to achieve fast convergence to topology changes. Also, the ever-growing size of routing domains, and possible presence of wireless mobile adhoc network (MANET) components, requires highly scalable operation on part of OSPF to avoid routing instability. Recent years have seen significant efforts aimed at improving OSPF's convergence speed as well as scalability and extending OSPF to achieve seamless integration of mobile adhoc networks with conventional wired networks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these efforts.