Exploring Automatic Diagnosis of COVID-19 from Crowdsourced Respiratory Sound Data

Audio signals generated by the human body (e.g., sighs, breathing, heart, digestion, vibration sounds) have routinely been used by clinicians as diagnostic or progression indicators for diseases and disease onset. However, until recently, such signals were usually collected through manual auscultation at scheduled visits. Research has now started to use digital technology to gather bodily sounds (e.g., from digital stethoscopes) for cardiovascular or respiratory examination, which could then be used for automatic analysis. Some initial work shows promise in detecting diagnostic signals of COVID-19 from voice and coughs. In this paper we describe our data analysis over a large-scale crowdsourced dataset of respiratory sounds collected to aid diagnosis of COVID-19. We use coughs and breathing to understand how discernible COVID-19 sounds are from those in asthma or healthy controls. Our results show that even a simple binary machine learning classifier is able to classify correctly healthy and COVID-19 sounds. We also show how we distinguish a user who tested positive for COVID-19 and has a cough from a healthy user with cough, and users who tested positive for COVID-19 and have a cough from users with asthma and a cough. Our models achieve an AUC above 70% across all tasks. Clearly these results are preliminary and only scratch the surface of the possibilities of the exploitation of this type of data and audio-based machine learning. This work opens the door to further investigation of how automatically analysed respiratory patterns could be used as pre-screening signals to aid COVID-19 diagnosis.

An Early Study on Intelligent Analysis of Speech under COVID-19: Severity, Sleep Quality, Fatigue, and Anxiety

The COVID-19 outbreak was announced as a global pandemic by the World Health Organisation in March 2020 and has affected a growing number of people in the past few weeks. In this context, advanced artificial intelligence techniques are brought to the fore in responding to fight against and reduce the impact of this global health crisis. In this study, we focus on developing some potential use-cases of intelligent speech analysis for COVID-19 diagnosed patients. In particular, by analysing speech recordings from these patients, we construct audio-only-based models to automatically categorise the health state of patients from four aspects, including the severity of illness, sleep quality, fatigue, and anxiety. For this purpose, two established acoustic feature sets and support vector machines are utilised. Our experiments show that an average accuracy of .69 obtained estimating the severity of illness, which is derived from the number of days in hospitalisation. We hope that this study can foster an extremely fast, low-cost, and convenient way to automatically detect the COVID-19 disease.

Learning-based real-time method to looking through scattering medium beyond the memory effect

Strong scattering medium brings great difficulties to optical imaging, which is also a problem in medical imaging and many other fields. Optical memory effect makes it possible to image through strong random scattering medium. However, this method also has the limitation of limited angle field-of-view (FOV), which prevents it from being applied in practice. In this paper, a kind of practical convolutional neural network called PDSNet is proposed, which effectively breaks through the limitation of optical memory effect on FOV. Experiments is conducted to prove that the scattered pattern can be reconstructed accurately in real-time by PDSNet, and it is widely applicable to retrieve complex objects of random scales and different scattering media.

Learning-based real-time method to looking through scattering medium oriented to practical application

Strong scattering media brings great difficulties to optical imaging, which is also a problem that medical imaging and many other fields must face. Optical memory effect makes it possible to image through strong scattering medium. However, this method also has the limitation of limited angle field-of-view (FOV), which prevents it from being applied in practice. In this paper, a kind of practical convolutional neural network called PDSNet is proposed, which effectively breaks through the limitation of optical memory effect on image field angle. Experiments is conducted to prove that the scattered pattern can be reconstructed quickly and accurately by PDSNet, and it is widely applicable to restoring speckle pattern generated from objects of different scales and scattering medias with different statistical characteristics.

EmoBed: Strengthening Monomodal Emotion Recognition via Training with Crossmodal Emotion Embeddings

Despite remarkable advances in emotion recognition, they are severely restrained from either the essentially limited property of the employed single modality, or the synchronous presence of all involved multiple modalities. Motivated by this, we propose a novel crossmodal emotion embedding framework called EmoBed, which aims to leverage the knowledge from other auxiliary modalities to improve the performance of an emotion recognition system at hand. The framework generally includes two main learning components, i. e., joint multimodal training and crossmodal training. Both of them tend to explore the underlying semantic emotion information but with a shared recognition network or with a shared emotion embedding space, respectively. In doing this, the enhanced system trained with this approach can efficiently make use of the complementary information from other modalities. Nevertheless, the presence of these auxiliary modalities is not demanded during inference. To empirically investigate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework, we perform extensive experiments on the two benchmark databases RECOLA and OMG-Emotion for the tasks of dimensional emotion regression and categorical emotion classification, respectively. The obtained results show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms related baselines in monomodal inference, and are also competitive or superior to the recently reported systems, which emphasises the importance of the proposed crossmodal learning for emotion recognition.

Non-destructive three-dimensional measurement of hand vein based on self-supervised network

At present, supervised stereo methods based on deep neural network have achieved impressive results. However, in some scenarios, accurate three-dimensional labels are inaccessible for supervised training. In this paper, a self-supervised network is proposed for binocular disparity matching (SDMNet), which computes dense disparity maps from stereo image pairs without disparity labels: In the self-supervised training, we match the stereo images densely to approximate the disparity maps and use them to warp the left and right images to estimate the right and left images; we build the loss function between estimated images and original images for self-supervised training, which adopts perceptual loss to help improve the quality of disparity maps in both detail and structure. Then, we use SDMNet to obtain disparities of hand vein. SDMNet has achieved excellent results on KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, simulated vein dataset and real vein dataset, outperforming many state-of-the-art supervised matching methods.

High Sensitivity Snapshot Spectrometer Based on Deep Network Unmixing

In this paper, we present a convolution neural network based method to recover the light intensity distribution from the overlapped dispersive spectra instead of adding an extra light path to capture it directly for the first time. Then, we construct a single-path sub-Hadamard snapshot spectrometer based on our previous dual-path snapshot spectrometer. In the proposed single-path spectrometer, we use the reconstructed light intensity as the original light intensity and recover high signal-to-noise ratio spectra successfully. Compared with dual-path snapshot spectrometer, the network based single-path spectrometer has a more compact structure and maintains snapshot and high sensitivity. Abundant simulated and experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method can obtain a better reconstructed signal-to-noise ratio spectrum than the dual-path sub-Hadamard spectrometer because of its higher light throughput.

Snore-GANs: Improving Automatic Snore Sound Classification with Synthesized Data

One of the frontier issues that severely hamper the development of automatic snore sound classification (ASSC) associates to the lack of sufficient supervised training data. To cope with this problem, we propose a novel data augmentation approach based on semi-supervised conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (scGANs), which aims to automatically learn a mapping strategy from a random noise space to original data distribution. The proposed approach has the capability of well synthesizing 'realistic' high-dimensional data, while requiring no additional annotation process. To handle the mode collapse problem of GANs, we further introduce an ensemble strategy to enhance the diversity of the generated data. The systematic experiments conducted on a widely used Munich-Passau snore sound corpus demonstrate that the scGANs-based systems can remarkably outperform other classic data augmentation systems, and are also competitive to other recently reported systems for ASSC.

Residual Pyramid Learning for Single-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Pixel-level semantic segmentation is a challenging task with a huge amount of computation, especially if the size of input is large. In the segmentation model, apart from the feature extraction, the extra decoder structure is often employed to recover spatial information. In this paper, we put forward a method for single-shot segmentation in a feature residual pyramid network (RPNet), which learns the main and residuals of segmentation by decomposing the label at different levels of residual blocks. Specifically speaking, we use the residual features to learn the edges and details, and the identity features to learn the main part of targets. At testing time, the predicted residuals are used to enhance the details of the top-level prediction. Residual learning blocks split the network into several shallow sub-networks which facilitates the training of the RPNet. We then evaluate the proposed method and compare it with recent state-of-the-art methods on CamVid and Cityscapes. The proposed single-shot segmentation based on RPNet achieves impressive results with high efficiency on pixel-level segmentation.