Microorganisms are widely distributed in the human daily living environment. They play an essential role in environmental pollution control, disease prevention and treatment, and food and drug production. The identification, counting, and detection are the basic steps for making full use of different microorganisms. However, the conventional analysis methods are expensive, laborious, and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations, artificial neural networks are applied for microorganism image analysis. We conduct this review to understand the development process of microorganism image analysis based on artificial neural networks. In this review, the background and motivation are introduced first. Then, the development of artificial neural networks and representative networks are introduced. After that, the papers related to microorganism image analysis based on classical and deep neural networks are reviewed from the perspectives of different tasks. In the end, the methodology analysis and potential direction are discussed.
We introduce CaloFlow, a fast detector simulation framework based on normalizing flows. For the first time, we demonstrate that normalizing flows can reproduce many-channel calorimeter showers with extremely high fidelity, providing a fresh alternative to computationally expensive GEANT4 simulations, as well as other state-of-the-art fast simulation frameworks based on GANs and VAEs. Besides the usual histograms of physical features and images of calorimeter showers, we introduce a new metric for judging the quality of generative modeling: the performance of a classifier trained to differentiate real from generated images. We show that GAN-generated images can be identified by the classifier with 100% accuracy, while images generated from CaloFlow are able to fool the classifier much of the time. More broadly, normalizing flows offer several advantages compared to other state-of-the-art approaches (GANs and VAEs), including: tractable likelihoods; stable and convergent training; and principled model selection. Normalizing flows also provide a bijective mapping between data and the latent space, which could have other applications beyond simulation, for example, to detector unfolding.
The problem of automatic forecasting of time-series data has been a long-standing challenge for the machine learning and forecasting community. The problem is relatively simple when the series is stationary. However, the majority of the real-world time-series problems have non-stationary characteristics making the understanding of the trend and seasonality very complex. Further, it is assumed that the future response is dependent on the past data and, therefore, can be modeled using a function approximator. Our interest in this paper is to study the applicability of the popular deep neural networks (DNN) comprehensively as function approximators for non-stationary time-series forecasting. We employ the following DNN models: Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and RNN with Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM-RNN) and RNN with Gated-Recurrent Unit (GRU-RNN). These powerful DNN methods have been evaluated over popular Indian financial stocks data comprising of five stocks from National Stock Exchange Nifty-50 (NSE-Nifty50), and five stocks from Bombay Stock Exchange 30 (BSE-30). Further, the performance evaluation of these DNNs in terms of their predictive power has been done using two fashions: (1) single-step forecasting, (2) multi-step forecasting. Our extensive simulation experiments on these ten datasets report that the performance of these DNNs for single-step forecasting is pretty convincing as the predictions are found to follow the truely observed values closely. However, we also find that all these DNN models perform miserably in the case of multi-step time-series forecasting, based on the datasets used by us. Consequently, we observe that none of these DNN models are reliable for multi-step time-series forecasting.
LiDAR panoptic segmentation is a newly proposed technical task for autonomous driving. In contrast to popular end-to-end deep learning solutions, we propose a hybrid method with an existing semantic segmentation network to extract semantic information and a traditional LiDAR point cloud cluster algorithm to split each instance object. We argue geometry-based traditional clustering algorithms are worth being considered by showing a state-of-the-art performance among all published end-to-end deep learning solutions on the panoptic segmentation leaderboard of the SemanticKITTI dataset. To our best knowledge, we are the first to attempt the point cloud panoptic segmentation with clustering algorithms. Therefore, instead of working on new models, we give a comprehensive technical survey in this paper by implementing four typical cluster methods and report their performances on the benchmark. Those four cluster methods are the most representative ones with real-time running speed. They are implemented with C++ in this paper and then wrapped as a python function for seamless integration with the existing deep learning frameworks. We release our code for peer researchers who might be interested in this problem.
Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) is a fundamental building block in information retrieval with graph-based indices being the current state-of-the-art and widely used in the industry. Recent advances in graph-based indices have made it possible to index and search billion-point datasets with high recall and millisecond-level latency on a single commodity machine with an SSD. However, existing graph algorithms for ANNS support only static indices that cannot reflect real-time changes to the corpus required by many key real-world scenarios (e.g. index of sentences in documents, email, or a news index). To overcome this drawback, the current industry practice for manifesting updates into such indices is to periodically re-build these indices, which can be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we present the first graph-based ANNS index that reflects corpus updates into the index in real-time without compromising on search performance. Using update rules for this index, we design FreshDiskANN, a system that can index over a billion points on a workstation with an SSD and limited memory, and support thousands of concurrent real-time inserts, deletes and searches per second each, while retaining $>95\%$ 5-recall@5. This represents a 5-10x reduction in the cost of maintaining freshness in indices when compared to existing methods.
Most existing Siamese-based tracking methods execute the classification and regression of the target object based on the similarity maps. However, they either employ a single map from the last convolutional layer which degrades the localization accuracy in complex scenarios or separately use multiple maps for decision making, introducing intractable computations for aerial mobile platforms. Thus, in this work, we propose an efficient and effective hierarchical feature transformer (HiFT) for aerial tracking. Hierarchical similarity maps generated by multi-level convolutional layers are fed into the feature transformer to achieve the interactive fusion of spatial (shallow layers) and semantics cues (deep layers). Consequently, not only the global contextual information can be raised, facilitating the target search, but also our end-to-end architecture with the transformer can efficiently learn the interdependencies among multi-level features, thereby discovering a tracking-tailored feature space with strong discriminability. Comprehensive evaluations on four aerial benchmarks have proven the effectiveness of HiFT. Real-world tests on the aerial platform have strongly validated its practicability with a real-time speed. Our code is available at https://github.com/vision4robotics/HiFT.
In network link prediction, it is possible to hide a target link from being predicted with a small perturbation on network structure. This observation may be exploited in many real world scenarios, for example, to preserve privacy, or to exploit financial security. There have been many recent studies to generate adversarial examples to mislead deep learning models on graph data. However, none of the previous work has considered the dynamic nature of real-world systems. In this work, we present the first study of adversarial attack on dynamic network link prediction (DNLP). The proposed attack method, namely time-aware gradient attack (TGA), utilizes the gradient information generated by deep dynamic network embedding (DDNE) across different snapshots to rewire a few links, so as to make DDNE fail to predict target links. We implement TGA in two ways: one is based on traversal search, namely TGA-Tra; and the other is simplified with greedy search for efficiency, namely TGA-Gre. We conduct comprehensive experiments which show the outstanding performance of TGA in attacking DNLP algorithms.
Multi-contrast MRI images provide complementary contrast information about the characteristics of anatomical structures and are commonly used in clinical practice. Recently, a multi-flip-angle (FA) and multi-echo GRE method (MULTIPLEX MRI) has been developed to simultaneously acquire multiple parametric images with just one single scan. However, it poses two challenges for MULTIPLEX to be used in the 3D high-resolution setting: a relatively long scan time and the huge amount of 3D multi-contrast data for reconstruction. Currently, no DL based method has been proposed for 3D MULTIPLEX data reconstruction. We propose a deep learning framework for undersampled 3D MRI data reconstruction and apply it to MULTIPLEX MRI. The proposed deep learning method shows good performance in image quality and reconstruction time.
Synthetic X-ray images can be helpful for image guiding systems and VR simulations. However, it is difficult to produce high-quality arbitrary view synthetic X-ray images in real-time due to limited CT scanning resolution, high computation resource demand or algorithm complexity. Our goal is to generate high-resolution synthetic X-ray images in real-time by upsampling low-resolution im-ages. Reference-based Super Resolution (RefSR) has been well studied in recent years and has been proven to be more powerful than traditional Single Image Su-per-Resolution (SISR). RefSR can produce fine details by utilizing the reference image but it still inevitably generates some artifacts and noise. In this paper, we propose texture transformer super-resolution with frequency domain (TTSR-FD). We introduce frequency domain loss as a constraint to further improve the quality of the RefSR results with fine details and without obvious artifacts. This makes a real-time synthetic X-ray image-guided procedure VR simulation system possible. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper utilizing the frequency domain as part of the loss functions in the field of super-resolution. We evaluated TTSR-FD on our synthetic X-ray image dataset and achieved state-of-the-art results.
The fine-grained relationship between form and function with respect to deep neural network architecture design and hardware-specific acceleration is one area that is not well studied in the research literature, with form often dictated by accuracy as opposed to hardware function. In this study, a comprehensive empirical exploration is conducted to investigate the impact of deep neural network architecture design on the degree of inference speedup that can be achieved via hardware-specific acceleration. More specifically, we empirically study the impact of a variety of commonly used macro-architecture design patterns across different architectural depths through the lens of OpenVINO microprocessor-specific and GPU-specific acceleration. Experimental results showed that while leveraging hardware-specific acceleration achieved an average inference speed-up of 380%, the degree of inference speed-up varied drastically depending on the macro-architecture design pattern, with the greatest speedup achieved on the depthwise bottleneck convolution design pattern at 550%. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth exploration of the correlation between FLOPs requirement, level 3 cache efficacy, and network latency with increasing architectural depth and width. Finally, we analyze the inference time reductions using hardware-specific acceleration when compared to native deep learning frameworks across a wide variety of hand-crafted deep convolutional neural network architecture designs as well as ones found via neural architecture search strategies. We found that the DARTS-derived architecture to benefit from the greatest improvement from hardware-specific software acceleration (1200%) while the depthwise bottleneck convolution-based MobileNet-V2 to have the lowest overall inference time of around 2.4 ms.