CPNet: Cross-Parallel Network for Efficient Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in video streams is a challenging problem because of the scarcity of abnormal events and the difficulty of accurately annotating them. To alleviate these issues, unsupervised learning-based prediction methods have been previously applied. These approaches train the model with only normal events and predict a future frame from a sequence of preceding frames by use of encoder-decoder architectures so that they result in small prediction errors on normal events but large errors on abnormal events. The architecture, however, comes with the computational burden as some anomaly detection tasks require low computational cost without sacrificing performance. In this paper, Cross-Parallel Network (CPNet) for efficient anomaly detection is proposed here to minimize computations without performance drops. It consists of N smaller parallel U-Net, each of which is designed to handle a single input frame, to make the calculations significantly more efficient. Additionally, an inter-network shift module is incorporated to capture temporal relationships among sequential frames to enable more accurate future predictions.The quantitative results show that our model requires less computational cost than the baseline U-Net while delivering equivalent performance in anomaly detection.

Memory-based Semantic Segmentation for Off-road Unstructured Natural Environments

With the availability of many datasets tailored for autonomous driving in real-world urban scenes, semantic segmentation for urban driving scenes achieves significant progress. However, semantic segmentation for off-road, unstructured environments is not widely studied. Directly applying existing segmentation networks often results in performance degradation as they cannot overcome intrinsic problems in such environments, such as illumination changes. In this paper, a built-in memory module for semantic segmentation is proposed to overcome these problems. The memory module stores significant representations of training images as memory items. In addition to the encoder embedding like items together, the proposed memory module is specifically designed to cluster together instances of the same class even when there are significant variances in embedded features. Therefore, it makes segmentation networks better deal with unexpected illumination changes. A triplet loss is used in training to minimize redundancy in storing discriminative representations of the memory module. The proposed memory module is general so that it can be adopted in a variety of networks. We conduct experiments on the Robot Unstructured Ground Driving (RUGD) dataset and RELLIS dataset, which are collected from off-road, unstructured natural environments. Experimental results show that the proposed memory module improves the performance of existing segmentation networks and contributes to capturing unclear objects over various off-road, unstructured natural scenes with equivalent computational cost and network parameters. As the proposed method can be integrated into compact networks, it presents a viable approach for resource-limited small autonomous platforms.

Few-shot Learning for CT Scan based COVID-19 Diagnosis

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern infecting more than 40 million people across 188 countries and territories. Chest computed tomography (CT) imaging technique benefits from its high diagnostic accuracy and robustness, it has become an indispensable way for COVID-19 mass testing. Recently, deep learning approaches have become an effective tool for automatic screening of medical images, and it is also being considered for COVID-19 diagnosis. However, the high infection risk involved with COVID-19 leads to relative sparseness of collected labeled data limiting the performance of such methodologies. Moreover, accurately labeling CT images require expertise of radiologists making the process expensive and time-consuming. In order to tackle the above issues, we propose a supervised domain adaption based COVID-19 CT diagnostic method which can perform effectively when only a small samples of labeled CT scans are available. To compensate for the sparseness of labeled data, the proposed method utilizes a large amount of synthetic COVID-19 CT images and adjusts the networks from the source domain (synthetic data) to the target domain (real data) with a cross-domain training mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on few-shot COVID-19 CT imaging based diagnostic tasks.

CAFE-GAN: Arbitrary Face Attribute Editing with Complementary Attention Feature

The goal of face attribute editing is altering a facial image according to given target attributes such as hair color, mustache, gender, etc. It belongs to the image-to-image domain transfer problem with a set of attributes considered as a distinctive domain. There have been some works in multi-domain transfer problem focusing on facial attribute editing employing Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). These methods have reported some successes but they also result in unintended changes in facial regions - meaning the generator alters regions unrelated to the specified attributes. To address this unintended altering problem, we propose a novel GAN model which is designed to edit only the parts of a face pertinent to the target attributes by the concept of Complementary Attention Feature (CAFE). CAFE identifies the facial regions to be transformed by considering both target attributes as well as complementary attributes, which we define as those attributes absent in the input facial image. In addition, we introduce a complementary feature matching to help in training the generator for utilizing the spatial information of attributes. Effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by analysis and comparison study with state-of-the-art methods.

COVID-19 CT Image Synthesis with a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing global pandemic that has spread rapidly since December 2019. Real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) and chest computed tomography (CT) imaging both play an important role in COVID-19 diagnosis. Chest CT imaging offers the benefits of quick reporting, a low cost, and high sensitivity for the detection of pulmonary infection. Recently, deep-learning-based computer vision methods have demonstrated great promise for use in medical imaging applications, including X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, and CT imaging. However, training a deep-learning model requires large volumes of data, and medical staff faces a high risk when collecting COVID-19 CT data due to the high infectivity of the disease. Another issue is the lack of experts available for data labeling. In order to meet the data requirements for COVID-19 CT imaging, we propose a CT image synthesis approach based on a conditional generative adversarial network that can effectively generate high-quality and realistic COVID-19 CT images for use in deep-learning-based medical imaging tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art image synthesis methods with the generated COVID-19 CT images and indicates promising for various machine learning applications including semantic segmentation and classification.

Data Separability for Neural Network Classifiers and the Development of a Separability Index

In machine learning, the performance of a classifier depends on both the classifier model and the dataset. For a specific neural network classifier, the training process varies with the training set used; some training data make training accuracy fast converged to high values, while some data may lead to slowly converged to lower accuracy. To quantify this phenomenon, we created the Distance-based Separability Index (DSI), which is independent of the classifier model, to measure the separability of datasets. In this paper, we consider the situation where different classes of data are mixed together in the same distribution is most difficult for classifiers to separate, and we show that the DSI can indicate whether data belonging to different classes have similar distributions. When comparing our proposed approach with several existing separability/complexity measures using synthetic and real datasets, the results show the DSI is an effective separability measure. We also discussed possible applications of the DSI in the fields of data science, machine learning, and deep learning.

NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Real-World Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on real world super-resolution. It focuses on the participating methods and final results. The challenge addresses the real world setting, where paired true high and low-resolution images are unavailable. For training, only one set of source input images is therefore provided along with a set of unpaired high-quality target images. In Track 1: Image Processing artifacts, the aim is to super-resolve images with synthetically generated image processing artifacts. This allows for quantitative benchmarking of the approaches \wrt a ground-truth image. In Track 2: Smartphone Images, real low-quality smart phone images have to be super-resolved. In both tracks, the ultimate goal is to achieve the best perceptual quality, evaluated using a human study. This is the second challenge on the subject, following AIM 2019, targeting to advance the state-of-the-art in super-resolution. To measure the performance we use the benchmark protocol from AIM 2019. In total 22 teams competed in the final testing phase, demonstrating new and innovative solutions to the problem.

Correlation Distance Skip Connection Denoising Autoencoder (CDSK-DAE) for Speech Feature Enhancement

Performance of learning based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is susceptible to noise, especially when it is introduced in the testing data while not presented in the training data. This work focuses on a feature enhancement for noise robust end-to-end ASR system by introducing a novel variant of denoising autoencoder (DAE). The proposed method uses skip connections in both encoder and decoder sides by passing speech information of the target frame from input to the model. It also uses a new objective function in training model that uses a correlation distance measure in penalty terms by measuring dependency of the latent target features and the model (latent features and enhanced features obtained from the DAE). Performance of the proposed method was compared against a conventional model and a state of the art model under both seen and unseen noisy environments of 7 different types of background noise with different SNR levels (0, 5, 10 and 20 dB). The proposed method also is tested using linear and non-linear penalty terms as well, where, they both show an improvement on the overall average WER under noisy conditions both seen and unseen in comparison to the state-of-the-art model.