Visual localization plays an important role in the positioning and navigation of robotics systems within previously visited environments. When visits occur over long periods of time, changes in the environment related to seasons or day-night cycles present a major challenge. Under water, the sources of variability are due to other factors such as water conditions or growth of marine organisms. Yet it remains a major obstacle and a much less studied one, partly due to the lack of data. This paper presents a new deep-sea dataset to benchmark underwater long-term visual localization. The dataset is composed of images from four visits to the same hydrothermal vent edifice over the course of five years. Camera poses and a common geometry of the scene were estimated using navigation data and Structure-from-Motion. This serves as a reference when evaluating visual localization techniques. An analysis of the data provides insights about the major changes observed throughout the years. Furthermore, several well-established visual localization methods are evaluated on the dataset, showing there is still room for improvement in underwater long-term visual localization. The data is made publicly available at https://www.seanoe.org/data/00810/92226/.
In this study, we propose a big data pipeline for cotton bloom detection using a Lambda architecture, which enables real-time and batch processing of data. Our proposed approach leverages Azure resources such as Data Factory, Event Grids, Rest APIs, and Databricks. This work is the first to develop and demonstrate the implementation of such a pipeline for plant phenotyping through Azure's cloud computing service. The proposed pipeline consists of data preprocessing, object detection using a YOLOv5 neural network model trained through Azure AutoML, and visualization of object detection bounding boxes on output images. The trained model achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) score of 0.96, demonstrating its high performance for cotton bloom classification. We evaluate our Lambda architecture pipeline using 9000 images yielding an optimized runtime of 34 minutes. The results illustrate the scalability of the proposed pipeline as a solution for deep learning object detection, with the potential for further expansion through additional Azure processing cores. This work advances the scientific research field by providing a new method for cotton bloom detection on a large dataset and demonstrates the potential of utilizing cloud computing resources, specifically Azure, for efficient and accurate big data processing in precision agriculture.
The first ACM/IEEE TinyML Design Contest (TDC) held at the 41st International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in 2022 is a challenging, multi-month, research and development competition. TDC'22 focuses on real-world medical problems that require the innovation and implementation of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms on implantable devices. The challenge problem of TDC'22 is to develop a novel AI/ML-based real-time detection algorithm for life-threatening ventricular arrhythmia over low-power microcontrollers utilized in Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillators (ICDs). The dataset contains more than 38,000 5-second intracardiac electrograms (IEGMs) segments over 8 different types of rhythm from 90 subjects. The dedicated hardware platform is NUCLEO-L432KC manufactured by STMicroelectronics. TDC'22, which is open to multi-person teams world-wide, attracted more than 150 teams from over 50 organizations. This paper first presents the medical problem, dataset, and evaluation procedure in detail. It further demonstrates and discusses the designs developed by the leading teams as well as representative results. This paper concludes with the direction of improvement for the future TinyML design for health monitoring applications.
The knowledge distillation uses a high-performance teacher network to guide the student network. However, the performance gap between the teacher and student networks can affect the student's training. This paper proposes a novel knowledge distillation algorithm based on dynamic entropy correction to reduce the gap by adjusting the student instead of the teacher. Firstly, the effect of changing the output entropy (short for output information entropy) in the student on the distillation loss is analyzed in theory. This paper shows that correcting the output entropy can reduce the gap. Then, a knowledge distillation algorithm based on dynamic entropy correction is created, which can correct the output entropy in real-time with an entropy controller updated dynamically by the distillation loss. The proposed algorithm is validated on the CIFAR100 and ImageNet. The comparison with various state-of-the-art distillation algorithms shows impressive results, especially in the experiment on the CIFAR100 regarding teacher-student pair resnet32x4-resnet8x4. The proposed algorithm raises 2.64 points over the traditional distillation algorithm and 0.87 points over the state-of-the-art algorithm CRD in classification accuracy, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency.
In the field of video analytics, particularly traffic surveillance, there is a growing need for efficient and effective methods for processing and understanding video data. Traditional full video decoding techniques can be computationally intensive and time-consuming, leading researchers to explore alternative approaches in the compressed domain. This study introduces a novel random perturbation-based compressed domain method for reconstructing images from High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) bitstreams, specifically designed for traffic surveillance applications. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose substituting random perturbations for residual values, creating a condensed representation of the original image while retaining information relevant to video understanding tasks, particularly focusing on vehicle detection and classification as key use cases. By not using residual data, our proposed method significantly reduces the data needed in the image reconstruction process, allowing for more efficient storage and transmission of information. This is particularly important when considering the vast amount of video data involved in surveillance applications. Applied to the public BIT-Vehicle dataset, we demonstrate a significant increase in the reconstruction speed compared to the traditional full decoding approach, with our proposed method being approximately 56% faster than the pixel domain method. Additionally, we achieve a detection accuracy of 99.9%, on par with the pixel domain method, and a classification accuracy of 96.84%, only 0.98% lower than the pixel domain method. Furthermore, we showcase the significant reduction in data size, leading to more efficient storage and transmission. Our research establishes the potential of compressed domain methods in traffic surveillance applications, where speed and data size are critical factors.
The commercial use of Machine Learning (ML) is spreading; at the same time, ML models are becoming more complex and more expensive to train, which makes Intellectual Property Protection (IPP) of trained models a pressing issue. Unlike other domains that can build on a solid understanding of the threats, attacks and defenses available to protect their IP, the ML-related research in this regard is still very fragmented. This is also due to a missing unified view as well as a common taxonomy of these aspects. In this paper, we systematize our findings on IPP in ML, while focusing on threats and attacks identified and defenses proposed at the time of writing. We develop a comprehensive threat model for IP in ML, categorizing attacks and defenses within a unified and consolidated taxonomy, thus bridging research from both the ML and security communities.
This paper describes a gradient-descent based optimization algorithm for synthesizing Multi-Tone Sinusoidal Frequency Modulated (MTSFM) waveforms with low Auto-Correlation Function (ACF) sidelobes in a specified region of time delays while preserving the ACF mainlobe width. The algorithm optimizes the Generalized Integrated Sidelobe Level (GISL) which controls the mainlobe and sidelobe structure of the waveform's ACF. This optimization is performed subject to nonlinear constraints on the waveform's RMS bandwidth which directly controls the ACF mainlobe width. Since almost all of the operations of the algorithm utilize the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), it is substantially more computationally efficient than previous methods that synthesized MTSFM waveforms with low ACF sidelobes. The computational efficiency of this new algorithm facilitates the design of larger dimensional and correspondingly larger time-bandwidth product MTSFM waveform designs. The algorithm is demonstrated through several illustrative MTSFM design examples.
Self-supervised monocular depth estimation approaches suffer not only from scale ambiguity but also infer temporally inconsistent depth maps w.r.t. scale. While disambiguating scale during training is not possible without some kind of ground truth supervision, having scale consistent depth predictions would make it possible to calculate scale once during inference as a post-processing step and use it over-time. With this as a goal, a set of temporal consistency losses that minimize pose inconsistencies over time are introduced. Evaluations show that introducing these constraints not only reduces depth inconsistencies but also improves the baseline performance of depth and ego-motion prediction.
With the development of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) technology, high-quality voice conversion (VC) can be achieved by extracting source content information and target speaker information to reconstruct waveforms. However, current methods still require improvement in terms of inference speed. In this study, we propose a lightweight VITS-based VC model that uses the HuBERT-Soft model to extract content information features without speaker information. Through subjective and objective experiments on synthesized speech, the proposed model demonstrates competitive results in terms of naturalness and similarity. Importantly, unlike the original VITS model, we use the inverse short-time Fourier transform (iSTFT) to replace the most computationally expensive part. Experimental results show that our model can generate samples at over 5000 kHz on the 3090 GPU and over 250 kHz on the i9-10900K CPU, achieving competitive speed for the same hardware configuration.
Colorectal cancer is among the most prevalent cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Detection and removal of polyps at an early stage can help reduce mortality and even help in spreading over adjacent organs. Early polyp detection could save the lives of millions of patients over the world as well as reduce the clinical burden. However, the detection polyp rate varies significantly among endoscopists. There is numerous deep learning-based method proposed, however, most of the studies improve accuracy. Here, we propose a novel architecture, Residual Upsampling Network (RUPNet) for colon polyp segmentation that can process in real-time and show high recall and precision. The proposed architecture, RUPNet, is an encoder-decoder network that consists of three encoders, three decoder blocks, and some additional upsampling blocks at the end of the network. With an image size of $512 \times 512$, the proposed method achieves an excellent real-time operation speed of 152.60 frames per second with an average dice coefficient of 0.7658, mean intersection of union of 0.6553, sensitivity of 0.8049, precision of 0.7995, and F2-score of 0.9361. The results suggest that RUPNet can give real-time feedback while retaining high accuracy indicating a good benchmark for early polyp detection.