Low-light Pedestrian Detection in Visible and Infrared Image Feeds: Issues and Challenges

Pedestrian detection has become a cornerstone for several high-level tasks, including autonomous driving, intelligent transportation, and traffic surveillance. There are several works focussed on pedestrian detection using visible images, mainly in the daytime. However, this task is very intriguing when the environmental conditions change to poor lighting or nighttime. Recently, new ideas have been spurred to use alternative sources, such as Far InfraRed (FIR) temperature sensor feeds for detecting pedestrians in low-light conditions. This study comprehensively reviews recent developments in low-light pedestrian detection approaches. It systematically categorizes and analyses various algorithms from region-based to non-region-based and graph-based learning methodologies by highlighting their methodologies, implementation issues, and challenges. It also outlines the key benchmark datasets that can be used for research and development of advanced pedestrian detection algorithms, particularly in low-light situations

Advanced Deep Regression Models for Forecasting Time Series Oil Production

Global oil demand is rapidly increasing and is expected to reach 106.3 million barrels per day by 2040. Thus, it is vital for hydrocarbon extraction industries to forecast their production to optimize their operations and avoid losses. Big companies have realized that exploiting the power of deep learning (DL) and the massive amount of data from various oil wells for this purpose can save a lot of operational costs and reduce unwanted environmental impacts. In this direction, researchers have proposed models using conventional machine learning (ML) techniques for oil production forecasting. However, these techniques are inappropriate for this problem as they can not capture historical patterns found in time series data, resulting in inaccurate predictions. This research aims to overcome these issues by developing advanced data-driven regression models using sequential convolutions and long short-term memory (LSTM) units. Exhaustive analyses are conducted to select the optimal sequence length, model hyperparameters, and cross-well dataset formation to build highly generalized robust models. A comprehensive experimental study on Volve oilfield data validates the proposed models. It reveals that the LSTM-based sequence learning model can predict oil production better than the 1-D convolutional neural network (CNN) with mean absolute error (MAE) and R2 score of 111.16 and 0.98, respectively. It is also found that the LSTM-based model performs better than all the existing state-of-the-art solutions and achieves a 37% improvement compared to a standard linear regression, which is considered the baseline model in this work.

Multi-class Brain Tumor Segmentation using Graph Attention Network

Brain tumor segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an important role in diagnostic radiology. To overcome the practical issues in manual approaches, there is a huge demand for building automatic tumor segmentation algorithms. This work introduces an efficient brain tumor summation model by exploiting the advancement in MRI and graph neural networks (GNNs). The model represents the volumetric MRI as a region adjacency graph (RAG) and learns to identify the type of tumors through a graph attention network (GAT) -- a variant of GNNs. The ablation analysis conducted on two benchmark datasets proves that the proposed model can produce competitive results compared to the leading-edge solutions. It achieves mean dice scores of 0.91, 0.86, 0.79, and mean Hausdorff distances in the 95th percentile (HD95) of 5.91, 6.08, and 9.52 mm, respectively, for whole tumor, core tumor, and enhancing tumor segmentation on BraTS2021 validation dataset. On average, these performances are >6\% and >50%, compared to a GNN-based baseline model, respectively, on dice score and HD95 evaluation metrics.

ANOVA-based Automatic Attribute Selection and a Predictive Model for Heart Disease Prognosis

Studies show that Studies that cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are malignant for human health. Thus, it is important to have an efficient way of CVD prognosis. In response to this, the healthcare industry has adopted machine learning-based smart solutions to alleviate the manual process of CVD prognosis. Thus, this work proposes an information fusion technique that combines key attributes of a person through analysis of variance (ANOVA) and domain experts' knowledge. It also introduces a new collection of CVD data samples for emerging research. There are thirty-eight experiments conducted exhaustively to verify the performance of the proposed framework on four publicly available benchmark datasets and the newly created dataset in this work. The ablation study shows that the proposed approach can achieve a competitive mean average accuracy (mAA) of 99.2% and a mean average AUC of 97.9%.

Global Attention-based Encoder-Decoder LSTM Model for Temperature Prediction of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors

Temperature monitoring is critical for electrical motors to determine if device protection measures should be executed. However, the complexity of the internal structure of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors (PMSM) makes the direct temperature measurement of the internal components difficult. This work pragmatically develops three deep learning models to estimate the PMSMs' internal temperature based on readily measurable external quantities. The proposed supervised learning models exploit Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) modules, bidirectional LSTM, and attention mechanism to form encoder-decoder structures to predict simultaneously the temperatures of the stator winding, tooth, yoke, and permanent magnet. Experiments were conducted in an exhaustive manner on a benchmark dataset to verify the proposed models' performances. The comparative analysis shows that the proposed global attention-based encoder-decoder (EnDec) model provides a competitive overall performance of 1.72 Mean Squared Error (MSE) and 5.34 Mean Absolute Error (MAE).

CxSE: Chest X-ray Slow Encoding CNN forCOVID-19 Diagnosis

The coronavirus continues to disrupt our everyday lives as it spreads at an exponential rate. It needs to be detected quickly in order to quarantine positive patients so as to avoid further spread. This work proposes a new convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture called 'slow Encoding CNN. The proposed model's best performance wrt Sensitivity, Positive Predictive Value (PPV) found to be SP=0.67, PP=0.98, SN=0.96, and PN=0.52 on AI AGAINST COVID19 - Screening X-ray images for COVID-19 Infections competition's test data samples. SP and PP stand for the Sensitivity and PPV of the COVID-19 positive class, while PN and SN stand for the Sensitivity and PPV of the COVID-19 negative class.

A Hybrid Learner for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is used to predict the dynamic motion path of a moving platform based on the location coordinates and the precise mapping of the physical environment. SLAM has great potential in augmented reality (AR), autonomous vehicles, viz. self-driving cars, drones, Autonomous navigation robots (ANR). This work introduces a hybrid learning model that explores beyond feature fusion and conducts a multimodal weight sewing strategy towards improving the performance of a baseline SLAM algorithm. It carries out weight enhancement of the front end feature extractor of the SLAM via mutation of different deep networks' top layers. At the same time, the trajectory predictions from independently trained models are amalgamated to refine the location detail. Thus, the integration of the aforesaid early and late fusion techniques under a hybrid learning framework minimizes the translation and rotation errors of the SLAM model. This study exploits some well-known deep learning (DL) architectures, including ResNet18, ResNet34, ResNet50, ResNet101, VGG16, VGG19, and AlexNet for experimental analysis. An extensive experimental analysis proves that hybrid learner (HL) achieves significantly better results than the unimodal approaches and multimodal approaches with early or late fusion strategies. Hence, it is found that the Apolloscape dataset taken in this work has never been used in the literature under SLAM with fusion techniques, which makes this work unique and insightful.

Multi-channel MRI Embedding: An EffectiveStrategy for Enhancement of Human Brain WholeTumor Segmentation

One of the most important tasks in medical image processing is the brain's whole tumor segmentation. It assists in quicker clinical assessment and early detection of brain tumors, which is crucial for lifesaving treatment procedures of patients. Because, brain tumors often can be malignant or benign, if they are detected at an early stage. A brain tumor is a collection or a mass of abnormal cells in the brain. The human skull encloses the brain very rigidly and any growth inside this restricted place can cause severe health issues. The detection of brain tumors requires careful and intricate analysis for surgical planning and treatment. Most physicians employ Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to diagnose such tumors. A manual diagnosis of the tumors using MRI is known to be time-consuming; approximately, it takes up to eighteen hours per sample. Thus, the automatic segmentation of tumors has become an optimal solution for this problem. Studies have shown that this technique provides better accuracy and it is faster than manual analysis resulting in patients receiving the treatment at the right time. Our research introduces an efficient strategy called Multi-channel MRI embedding to improve the result of deep learning-based tumor segmentation. The experimental analysis on the Brats-2019 dataset wrt the U-Net encoder-decoder (EnDec) model shows significant improvement. The embedding strategy surmounts the state-of-the-art approaches with an improvement of 2% without any timing overheads.

Non-iterative recomputation of dense layers for performance improvement of DCNN

An iterative method of learning has become a paradigm for training deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). However, utilizing a non-iterative learning strategy can accelerate the training process of the DCNN and surprisingly such approach has been rarely explored by the deep learning (DL) community. It motivates this paper to introduce a non-iterative learning strategy that eliminates the backpropagation (BP) at the top dense or fully connected (FC) layers of DCNN, resulting in, lower training time and higher performance. The proposed method exploits the Moore-Penrose Inverse to pull back the current residual error to each FC layer, generating well-generalized features. Then using the recomputed features, i.e., the new generalized features the weights of each FC layer is computed according to the Moore-Penrose Inverse. We evaluate the proposed approach on six widely accepted object recognition benchmark datasets: Scene-15, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SUN-397, Places365, and ImageNet. The experimental results show that the proposed method obtains significant improvements over 30 state-of-the-art methods. Interestingly, it also indicates that any DCNN with the proposed method can provide better performance than the same network with its original training based on BP.

A Foreground Inference Network for Video Surveillance Using Multi-View Receptive Field

Foreground (FG) pixel labelling plays a vital role in video surveillance. Recent engineering solutions have attempted to exploit the efficacy of deep learning (DL) models initially targeted for image classification to deal with FG pixel labelling. One major drawback of such strategy is the lacking delineation of visual objects when training samples are limited. To grapple with this issue, we introduce a multi-view receptive field fully convolutional neural network (MV-FCN) that harness recent seminal ideas, such as, fully convolutional structure, inception modules, and residual networking. Therefrom, we implement a system in an encoder-decoder fashion that subsumes a core and two complementary feature flow paths. The model exploits inception modules at early and late stages with three different sizes of receptive fields to capture invariance at various scales. The features learned in the encoding phase are fused with appropriate feature maps in the decoding phase through residual connections for achieving enhanced spatial representation. These multi-view receptive fields and residual feature connections are expected to yield highly generalized features for an accurate pixel-wise FG region identification. It is, then, trained with database specific exemplary segmentations to predict desired FG objects. The comparative experimental results on eleven benchmark datasets validate that the proposed model achieves very competitive performance with the prior- and state-of-the-art algorithms. We also report that how well a transfer learning approach can be useful to enhance the performance of our proposed MV-FCN.