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Automatic identity recognition from ear images is an active research topic in the biometric community. The ability to secretly acquire images of the ear remotely and the stability of the ear shape over time make this technology a promising alternative for surveillance, authentication, and forensic applications. In recent years, significant research has been conducted in this area. Nevertheless, challenges remain that limit the commercial use of this technology. Several phases of the ear recognition system have been studied in the literature, from ear detection, normalization, and feature extraction to classification. This paper reviews the most recent methods used to describe and classify biometric features of the ear. We propose a first taxonomy to group existing approaches to ear recognition, including 2D, 3D, and combined 2D and 3D methods, as well as an overview of historical advances in this field. It is well known that data and algorithms are the essential components in biometrics, particularly in-ear recognition. However, early ear recognition datasets were very limited and collected in laboratory with controlled environments. With the wider use of deep neural networks, a considerable amount of training data has become necessary if acceptable ear recognition performance is to be achieved. As a consequence, current ear recognition datasets have increased significantly in size. This paper gives an overview of the chronological evolution of ear recognition datasets and compares the performance of conventional vs. deep learning methods on several datasets. We proposed a second taxonomy to classify the existing databases, including 2D, 3D, and video ear datasets. Finally, some open challenges and trends are debated for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This is a comprehensive review of Transformer for Skeleton-based Action Recognition. • This paper proposes a new taxonomy of transformer-style techniques. • This survey aims to help researchers systematically select promising future directions. Skeleton-based action recognition has rapidly become one of the most popular and essential research topics in computer vision. The task is to analyze the characteristics of human joints and accurately classify their behaviors through deep learning technology. Skeleton provides numerous unique advantages over other data modalities, such as robustness, compactness, noise immunity, etc. In particular, the skeleton modality is extremely lightweight, which is especially beneficial for deep learning research in low-resource environments. Due to the non-European nature of skeleton data, Graph Convolution Network (GCN) has become mainstream in the past few years, leveraging the benefits of processing topological information. However, with the explosive development of transformer methods in natural language processing and computer vision, many works have applied transformer into the field of skeleton action recognition, breaking the accuracy monopoly of GCN. Therefore, we conduct a survey using transformer method for skeleton-based action recognition, forming of a taxonomy on existing works. This paper gives a comprehensive overview of the recent transformer techniques for skeleton action recognition, proposes a taxonomy of transformer-style techniques for action recognition, conducts a detailed study on benchmark datasets, compares the algorithm accuracy of standard methods, and finally discusses the future research directions and trends. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to describe skeleton-based action recognition techniques in the style of transformers and to suggest novel recognition taxonomies in a review. We are confident that Transformer-based action recognition technology will become mainstream in the near future, so this survey aims to help researchers systematically learn core tasks, select appropriate datasets, understand current challenges, and select promising future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing availability of remote sensing data allows dealing with spatial-spectral limitations by means of pan-sharpening methods. However, fusing inter-sensor data poses important challenges, in terms of resolution differences, sensor-dependent deformations and ground-truth data availability, that demand more accurate pan-sharpening solutions. In response, this paper proposes a novel deep learning-based pan-sharpening model which is termed as the double-U network for self-supervised pan-sharpening (W-NetPan). In more details, the proposed architecture adopts an innovative W-shape that integrates two U-Net segments which sequentially work for spatially matching and fusing inter-sensor multi-modal data. In this way, a synergic effect is produced where the first segment resolves inter-sensor deviations while stimulating the second one to achieve a more accurate data fusion. Additionally, a joint loss formulation is proposed for effectively training the proposed model without external data supervision. The experimental comparison, conducted over four coupled Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 datasets, reveals the advantages of W-NetPan with respect to several of the most important state-of-the-art pan-sharpening methods available in the literature. The codes related to this paper will be available at https://github.com/rufernan/WNetPan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We focus on the data dilemma encountered in the field of human activity understanding, solve practical application problems from a new perspective, and use the proposed method to reduce the model's dependence on data. • We construct a human physical activity dataset containing 10 categories Human SA-10 for use in human activity understanding research. • A Core-Weight Entropy data information evaluation method that can be applied to human behavior recognition tasks is proposed. On Human SA-10, our method can reduce data usage by 50%. Compared to other methods, this method achieved state-of-the-art performance. • In addition, we propose a new unlabeled data redundancy information removal module, which effectively avoids introducing similar data into the training set. With the development of computer vision, the research on human activity understanding has been greatly promoted. The recognition algorithm based on vision transformer has made some achievements in a large number of computer vision tasks, but it still needs to be driven by a large amount of data. How to get rid of the constraints of large amounts of data is crucial for human behavior recognition based on vision transformer. This paper focuses on solving the dilemma of big data, and tries to achieve a high-performance model through a small amount of high information human activity data. The advantage of our work is that by studying feature distribution, we proposed a core weight entropy data information evaluation method for obtaining high information data, and through redundant information elimination strategy, we can avoid introducing similar data. A large number of experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared with existing methods, our method reduces the data consumption by 5% to 30%, and can achieve the performance of using only 50% of 100% data. More importantly, the data our method selected has no redundancy, which is not available in other methods. In addition, we carried out a large number of ablation experiments to prove the rationality of the method. The work of this paper solves the challenge of relying on a large amount of data when using the visual converter to recognize human behavior, which is of practical significance for realizing efficient human activity understanding research with low data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • The dense feature adaptive connection module improves the quality of depth map. • The distributed 3D convolution reduces the computational cost and memory space. • The joint loss function makes the network sensitive to small depth structures. The goal of Multi-View Stereo is to reconstruct the 3D point cloud model from multiple views. With the development of deep learning, more and more learning-based research has achieved remarkable results. However, existing methods ignore the fine-grained features of the bottom layer, which leads to the poor quality of model reconstruction, especially in terms of completeness. Besides, current methods still rely on a large amount of consumed memory resources because of the application of 3D convolution. To this end, this paper proposes a Multiple Granularities Feature Fusion Network for Multi-View Stereo, an end-to-end depth estimation network combining global and local features, which is characterized by fine-granularity multi-feature fusion. Firstly, we propose a dense feature adaptive connection module, which can adaptively fuse the global and local features in the scene, provide a more complete and effective feature map for inferring a more detailed depth map, and make the ultimate model more complete. Secondly, in order to further improve the accuracy and completeness of the reconstructed point cloud, we introduce normal and edge loss futead of only using depth loss functions as in the existing methods, which makes the network more sensitive to small depth structures. Finally, we propose distributed 3D convolution instead of traditional 3D convolution, which reduces memory consumption. The experimental results on the DTU and Tanks & Temples datasets demonstrate that the proposed method in this papaer achieves the state-of-the-art performance, which proves the accuracy and effectiveness of the MG-MVSNet proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Providing an in-depth and comprehensive review related to underwater object detection. • Extensively exploring the correlation between underwater image enhancement and underwater object detection. • Analyzing the impact and augmentation forms of underwater image enhancement in underwater object detection. • Discussing the challenges, future trends and applications of underwater object detection. Underwater object detection is one of the most challenging research topics in computer vision technology. The complex underwater environment makes underwater images suffer from high noise, low visibility, blurred edges, low contrast and color deviation, which brings significant challenges to underwater object detection tasks. In underwater object detection tasks, traditional object detection methods often perform poorly in terms of accuracy and generalization capabilities. Underwater object detection requires accurate, stable, generalizable, real-time and lightweight detection models, for which many researchers have proposed various underwater object detection techniques based on deep learning. Although many outstanding results have been achieved on underwater object detection over the years, the research status of underwater object detection techniques are still lack of unified induction, and some existing problems need to be further probed from the latest perspective. In addition, previous reviews lack analysis on the relationship between underwater image enhancement and object detection. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive review of the current research challenges, future development trends, and potential applications of underwater object detection techniques. More importantly, this paper has explored the internal relationship between underwater image enhancement and object detection, and analyzed the possible implementation manners of underwater image enhancement in the object detection task in order to further enhance its benefits. The experiments show the performances of current underwater image enhancement and state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, point out their limitations, and indicate that there is not a strict positive correlation between underwater image enhancement and the accuracy improvement of object detection. The domain shift caused by underwater image enhancement cannot be ignored. This paper can be regarded as a guide for future works on underwater object detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A high-performance method is proposed for RGB-D salient object detection. • RGB and depth data are adaptively fused to boost the performance. • Features of all levels are refined in an iterative manner. • The proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art models on six datasets. Existing state-of-the-art RGB-D saliency detection models mainly utilize the depth information as complementary cues to enhance the RGB information. However, depth maps can be easily influenced by environment and hence are full of noises. Thus, indiscriminately integrating multi-modality (i.e., RGB and depth) features may induce noise-degraded saliency maps. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Fusion Network (AFNet) to solve this problem. Specifically, we design a triplet encoder network consisting of three subnetworks to process RGB, depth, and fused features, respectively. The three subnetworks are interlinked and form a grid net to facilitate mutual refinement of these multi-modality features. Moreover, we propose a Multi-modality Feature Interaction (MFI) module to exploit complementary cues between depth and RGB modalities and adaptively fuse the multi-modality features. Finally, we design the Cascaded Feature Interweaved Decoder (CFID) to exploit complementary information between multi-level features and refine them iteratively to achieve accurate saliency detection. Experimental results on six commonly used benchmark datasets verify that the proposed AFNet outperforms 20 state-of-the-art counterparts in terms of six widely adopted evaluation metrics. Source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/clelouch/AFNet upon paper acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper introduces the mutual learning strategy train the brain tumor segmentation network, using the shallowest feature map to supervise the subsequent feature map of the network. using the deepest logits to supervise the previous shallow network's logits. The shallow feature map and deep logit supervise mutually and improve the accuracy of tumor sub-region segmentation. • This paper introduces the depth supervision to train this network, using the prediction of each up-sample layer is to deep supervise the training process for enlarging the receptive field to improve the overall segmentation accuracy. • A large number of experiments on BraTS dataset show that our method can effectively improve the accuracy of brain tumor segmentation and achieve the performance of SOTA. Deep learning methods have been successfully applied to Brain tumor segmentation. However, the extreme data imbalance exists in the different sub-regions of tumor, results in training the deep learning methods on these data will reduce the accuracy of segmentation. We introduce the deep mutual learning strategy to address the challenges, the proposed integrates transformer layers in both encoder and decoder of a U-Net architecture. In the network, using the prediction of up-sampled layer is to deep supervise the training process for enlarging the receptive field to extract features, the feature map of the shallowest layer supervises the subsequent feature map of layers to keep more edge information to guide the sub-region segmentation accuracy. the classification logits of the deepest layer supervise the previous layer of logits to get more semantic information for distinguish of tumor sub-regions. Furthermore, the feature map and the classification logits supervise mutually to improve the overall segmentation accuracy. The experimental results on benchmark dataset shows that our method has significant performance gain over existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper proposes a filter pruning approach for CNN model compression by transferring the knowledge of unimportant filters to the filters of higher importance. • Before pruning unimportant filters, a custom regularizer is utilized for knowledge transfer, which increases the gap between L1-norms of important and unimportant filters. • The effect of the penalty imposed in the custom regularizer is analyzed to justify the need for knowledge transfer before pruning. • In order to validate the robustness of the proposed framework across different CNN architectures, we experiment with five popular CNNs, namely, LeNet-5, VGG-16, ResNet-56, ResNet-110, and ResNet-50. • Experiments are performed on three benchmark datasets MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet. • An improvement over the baseline in terms of accuracy is observed even after removing 95.15%, 62.28%, and 62.39% of the Floating Point OPerations (FLOPs) from architectures LeNet-5, ResNet-56, and ResNet-110, respectively. As the deep learning models have been widely used in recent years, there is a high demand for reducing the model size in terms of memory and computation without much compromise in the model performance. Filter pruning is a very widely adopted strategy for model compression. The existing filter pruning methods identify the unimportant filters and prune them without worrying about information loss. They try to recover the same by fine-tuning the remaining filters, limiting their performance. In this paper, we tackle this problem by utilizing the knowledge from unimportant filters before pruning to minimize information loss. First, the proposed method identifies the unimportant and important filters by exploiting the lower and higher importance, respectively, using the L 1 -norm of filters. Next, the proposed custom UFKT-Reg regularizer ( R ufkt ) transfers the knowledge from unimportant filters before pruning to remaining filters, notably to a fixed number of important filters. Hence, the proposed method minimizes information loss due to the removal of unimportant filters. The experiments are conducted using the three benchmark datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet. The proposed filter pruning method outperforms many recent state-of-the-art filter pruning methods. An improvement over the baseline in terms of accuracy is observed even after removing 95.15%, 62.28%, and 62.39% of the Floating Point OPerations (FLOPs) from architectures LeNet-5, ResNet-56, and ResNet-110, respectively. After pruning 53.25% of FLOPS from ResNet-50, only 1.02% and 0.47% of drops are observed in top-1 and top-5 accuracies, respectively. The code used in this paper will be publicly available at (https://github.com/sarvanichinthapalli/UFKT). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an approach that makes use of knuckle creases and fingernails for person identification is presented. It introduces a framework for automatic person identification that includes localisation of the region of interest (ROI) of many components within hand images, recognition and segmentation of the detected components using bounding boxes, and similarity matching between two different sets of segmented images. The following hand components are considered: i) the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joint, commonly known as the base knuckle; ii) the proximal interphalangeal (PIP) joint, commonly known as the major knuckle; iii) the distal interphalangeal (DIP) joint, commonly known as the minor knuckle; iv) the interphalangeal (IP) joint, commonly known as the thumb knuckle, and v) the fingernails. Crucial elements of the proposed framework are the feature extraction and similarity matching. This paper exploits different deep learning neural networks (DLNNs), which are essential in extracting discriminative high-level abstract features. We further use various similarity measures for the matching process. We validate the proposed approach on well-known benchmarks, including the 11k Hands dataset and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Contactless Hand Dorsal Images known as PolyU. The results indicate that knuckle patterns and fingernails play a significant role in the person identification framework. The 11K Hands dataset results indicate that the left-hand results are better than the right-hand results and the fingernails produce consistently higher identification results than other hand components, with a rank-1 score of 100 %. In addition, the PolyU dataset attains 100 % in the fingernail of the thumb finger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The paper fills the gap in the literature by reviewing and analyzing the current studies that apply deep learning for Covid-19 forecasting. • The initial search identified 152 studies of which 53 passed the quality control. • The existing literature is categorized using a model-based taxonomy. • The description of the models along with their performance evaluation is presented. • Recommendations for future improvements are provided. The Covid-19 pandemic has galvanized scientists to apply machine learning methods to help combat the crisis. Despite the significant amount of research there exists no comprehensive survey devoted specifically to examining deep learning methods for Covid-19 forecasting. In this paper, we fill the gap in the literature by reviewing and analyzing the current studies that use deep learning for Covid-19 forecasting. In our review, all published papers and preprints, discoverable through Google Scholar, for the period from Apr 1, 2020 to Feb 20, 2022 which describe deep learning approaches to forecasting Covid-19 were considered. Our search identified 152 studies, of which 53 passed the initial quality screening and were included in our survey. We propose a model-based taxonomy to categorize the literature. We describe each model and highlight its performance. Finally, the deficiencies of the existing approaches are identified and the necessary improvements for future research are elucidated. The study provides a gateway for researchers who are interested in forecasting Covid-19 using deep learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An overview of deep learning algorithms used in medical image segmentation is presented. • More than 150 papers applying deep learning to different medical applications are summarised. • Challenges and future directions in medical image segmentation are discussed. Deep learning (DL) algorithms have rapidly become a robust tool for analyzing medical images. They have been used extensively for medical image segmentation as the first and significant components of the diagnosis and treatment pipeline. Medical image segmentation is efficiently addressed by many types of deep neural networks, such as convolutional neural networks, fully convolutional network recurrent networks, adversarial networks, and U-shaped networks. This paper reviews the major DL models and applications pertinent to medical image segmentation and summarizes over 150 contributions to the field. Brief overviews of articles are provided by application area: anatomical structures such as organs, bones, and vessels, and abnormalities such as lesions and calcification. Moreover, we discuss current challenges and suggest directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A detailed literature review for the existing methods about anchor assignment and sample sampling is investigated and analyzed in a taxonomy. We identify a definition of each component, challenging problems in existing methods and their solution, and a comprehensive comparison of all methods. To the best of our knowledge, there is no prior work discussing these problems in object detection literature. • Open research direction in both anchor assignment and sampling heuristics is discussed. Based on these directions, we hope the object detection community can identify the current status of object detection methods to propose better solutions to anchor assignment and sampling heuristics. • We review the state-of-the-art object detection in the last two years that complement existing surveys. We also provide paper literature related to the above problems via the repository webpage. Deep learning-based object detection is a fundamental but challenging problem in computer vision field, has attracted a lot of study in recent years. State-of-the-art object detection methods rely on the selection of positive samples and negative samples, i.e., called sample assignment, and the definition of a useful set for training, i.e., called sample sampling heuristics. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the advanced anchor assignment and sampling approaches in deep learning-based object detection. Each problem is classified and analyzed systematically. According to the problem-based taxonomy, we identify the advantages and disadvantages of each problem in-depth and present open issues regarding the current methods. Furthermore, this paper also reviews the new trends in solving object detection that has not been discussed during the last two years. To track the latest research, a webpage related to the above problems is provided, which is available at https://github.com/VoXuanThuy/ObjectDetectionReview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Model-based and model-free gait recognition techniques apt for handling covariates. • An exploration of benefits/ limitations of deep learning pipelines under covariates. • List of covariates-based gait datasets for training robust gait recognition system. • Overview of the proposed fusion-based pipeline with the 3D dataset for covariates. • Research gaps and challenges in the implementation of deep learning pipelines. Gait recognition is an essential biometric technique that recognizes humans at a distance through their unique walking style. In the present era of deep learning, automated gait analysis has become easier with an increase in processing power. However, the recognition accuracy is affected by many covariates such as clothing conditions, carrying objects, varying viewing angles, occlusion, walking speed variations, and thus, it remains a challenging problem. For this complex problem, huge datasets are required to train for given conditions and predict new situations; thus, deep learning is preferred. In this review paper, we categorize various gait covariates which have been recently handled. There are various approaches, but the most effective approach is deep learning; hence in this paper, we include the most used deep learning approaches for each covariate condition found in the literature. Further, we highlight open problem areas handling these covariates and offer some suggestions about their better handling. Based on the review and our understanding of all the gait pipelines employed in deep learning, we have suggested a comprehensive and universal deep learning pipeline that can handle most gait covariates rather than customized deep learning pipelines. The methods of handling gait covariates are summarized according to appearance, pose, and sensors. A comprehensive comparison of reviewed approaches for real-time scenarios in terms of their novelty, benefits, and limitations is then offered, which led us to identify open research problems related to gait covariates. In the end, the paper concludes with the challenges identified and prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign species can deteriorate the environment and the economy of a country. To automatically monitor biosecurity threats at country borders, this paper investigates compact deep networks for accurate and real-time object segmentation for hyperspectral images. To this end, knowledge distillation (KD) approaches compress the model by distilling the knowledge of a large teacher network to a compact student network. However, when the student is over-compressed, the performance of standard KD methods degrades significantly due to the large capacity gap between the teacher and the student. This gap can be addressed by adding medium-sized teacher assistants, but training them incurs significant computation and hence is impractical. To address this problem, this paper proposes a new framework called Knowledge Distillation from Multi-head Teacher (KDM), which distills the knowledge of a multi-head teacher to the student. By encapsulating multiple teachers in a single network, our proposed KDM assists the learning of a very compact student and significantly reduces the training time. We also introduce Bio-HSI, a new large benchmark hyperspectral image dataset of 3,125 high-resolution images with dense segmentation ground truth. This new, large dataset can be expected to advance research on deep models for hyperspectral image segmentation. Evaluated on this dataset, the student trained via our KDM has 762 times fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art segmentation model (i.e., HRNet), while achieving competitive accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of global warming is getting more serious, and vehicle emission is the main cause. In recent years, the number of locomotives in China has been increasing at a rate of more than 20% per year, and the problem of automobile pollution is becoming more serious. The transportation industry is the main source of fossil fuel combustion and environmental pollution. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multi-view deep neural network (MVDNN) to analyze the key factors affecting the fuel consumption of automobiles. The experiments show that the introduction of human input improves the prediction accuracy and the root mean square error (RMSE) achieves 0.993. In addition, this paper also finds that for drivers, driving habits, driving frequency, and safety awareness are the most important factors affecting the fuel consumption of vehicles by combining Lasso regression with MVDNN. Finally, by comparing the prediction accuracy of different experiments, relevant policy suggestions are made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computational Ethology studies focused on human beings is usually referred as Human Activity Recognition (HAR). Specifically, this paper belongs to a line of work on the identification of broad cognitive activities that users carry out with computers. The keystone of this kind of systems is the noninvasive detection of the subject's gaze fixations in selected display areas. Noninvasiveness is ensured by using the conventional laptop cameras without additional illumination or tracking devices. The gaze ethograms, composed as sequences of gaze fixations, are the basis to identify the user activities. To determine the gaze fixation display areas with the highest accuracy, this paper explores the use of a transfer learning approach applied to several well-known deep learning network (DLN) architectures whose input is the eye area extracted from the face image,and output is the identification of the gaze fixation area in the computer screen. Two different datasets are created and used in the validation experiments. We report encouraging results that may allow the general use of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of semantic segmentation is to segment the input image according to semantic information and predict the semantic category of each pixel from a given label set. With the gradual intellectualization of modern life, more and more applications need to infer relevant semantic information from images for subsequent processing, such as augmented reality, autonomous driving, video surveillance, etc. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art technologies of semantic segmentation based on deep learning. Because semantic segmentation requires a large number of pixel-level annotations, in order to reduce the fine-grained requirements of annotation and reduce the economic and time cost of manual annotation, this paper studies the works on weakly-supervised semantic segmentation. In order to enhance the generalization ability and robustness of the segmentation model, this paper investigates the works on domain adaptation in semantic segmentation. Many types of sensors are usually equipped in some practical applications, such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. In order to mine the association between multi-modal data and improve the accuracy of the segmentation model, this paper investigates the works based on multi-modal data fusion semantic segmentation. The real-time performance of the model needs to be considered in practical application. This paper analyzes the key factors affecting the real-time performance of the segmentation model and investigates the works on real-time semantic segmentation. Finally, this paper summarizes the challenges and promising research directions of semantic segmentation tasks based on deep learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces Elegans-AI models, a class of neural networks that leverage the connectome topology of the Caenorhabditis elegans to design deep and reservoir architectures. Utilizing deep learning models inspired by the connectome, this paper leverages the evolutionary selection process to consolidate the functional arrangement of biological neurons within their networks. The initial goal involves the conversion of natural connectomes into artificial representations. The second objective centers on embedding the complex circuitry topology of artificial connectomes into both deep learning and deep reservoir networks, highlighting their neural-dynamic short-term and long-term memory and learning capabilities. Lastly, our third objective aims to establish structural explainability by examining the heterophilic/homophilic properties within the connectome and their impact on learning capabilities. In our study, the Elegans-AI models demonstrate superior performance compared to similar models that utilize either randomly rewired artificial connectomes or simulated bio-plausible ones. Notably, these Elegans-AI models achieve a top-1 accuracy of 99.99% on both Cifar10 and Cifar100, and 99.84% on MNIST Unsup. They do this with significantly fewer learning parameters, particularly when reservoir configurations of the connectome are used. Our findings indicate a clear connection between bio-plausible network patterns, the small-world characteristic, and learning outcomes, emphasizing the significant role of evolutionary optimization in shaping the topology of artificial neural networks for improved learning performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steganography and steganalysis are two interrelated aspects of the field of information security. Steganography seeks to conceal communications, whereas steganalysis aims to discover or, if possible, recover the data they contain. These two areas have garnered significant interest, especially among law enforcement agencies. Cybercriminals and even terrorists often employ steganography to avoid detection while in possession of incriminating evidence, even when that evidence is encrypted, since cryptography is prohibited or restricted in many countries. Therefore, a deep understanding of cutting-edge techniques for uncovering concealed information is essential in exposing illegal activities. Over the last few years, a number of strong and reliable steganography and steganalysis techniques have been introduced in the literature. This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of deep learning-based steganalysis techniques used to detect hidden information within digital media. The paper covers all types of cover in steganalysis, including image, audio, and video, and discusses the most commonly used deep learning techniques. In addition, the paper explores the use of more advanced deep learning techniques, such as deep transfer learning (DTL) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), to enhance the performance of steganalysis systems. The paper provides a systematic review of recent research in the field, including data sets and evaluation metrics used in recent studies. It also presents a detailed analysis of DTL-based steganalysis approaches and their performance on different data sets. The review concludes with a discussion on the current state of deep learning-based steganalysis, challenges, and future research directions. • Detect covert messages through neural nets, enhancing steganalysis accuracy. • Steganalysis can benefit from auto-encoders, DNN, CNN, RNN, LSTM, GNN, DBN, and DRN. • Reinforcement learning, transfer learning, and adversarial-based methods are effective to steganalysis. • Transform domain, attention layer, and noise-based features empower steganalysis schemes. • Unsupervised learning extracts nuanced patterns from multimedia for detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In personal identity recognition systems, detecting a person's age, gender, and language using voice signal characteristics is a crucial issue, especially because of the importance of security considerations. Age, gender, and language classification problems are important in signal processing because they are used to analyze and understand human behavior, interactions, and preferences. This can be especially useful in the fields of human-computer interaction, psychology, and social science research. In this paper, a new system for detecting a speaker's age, gender, and language based on deep learning models is presented. Deep learning models have shown great efficacy in various fields of signal processing. For this paper, a range of deep models were tested, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent neural network (RNN), and a fine-tuning ResNet34 architecture. Additionally, techniques such as transfer learning were applied to improve the efficiency of the proposed system. The input voice signals are preprocessed by applying the spectro-temporal transform to obtain additional features that can be fed to the ResNet34 model, which is designed specifically for the task of voice signal processing. The dataset used in this paper was sourced from the Mozilla common voice initiative, which is dedicated to advancing speech recognition and language identification technologies. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated in the presence of Gaussian noise to determine its robustness. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm significantly outperformed basic algorithms and other deep neural networks in terms of age and gender recognition from voice signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global epidemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Initially, COVID-19 was diagnosed using real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests with a turnaround time of 2–3 days. To enhance diagnostic accuracy, medical professionals use medical imaging alongside RT-PCR. A positive result on both RT-PCR and medical imaging confirms a COVID-19 diagnosis. Imaging modalities like chest X-ray (CXR), computed tomography (CT) scans, and ultrasound are widely utilized for rapid and precise COVID-19 diagnoses. However, interpreting COVID-19 from these images is time-consuming and susceptible to human error. Therefore, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) methods, particularly deep learning (DL) models, can deliver consistent, high-performance results. Unlike conventional machine learning (ML), DL models automate all stages of feature extraction, selection, and classification. This paper presents a comprehensive review of using DL techniques for diagnosing COVID-19 from medical imaging. The introduction provides an overview of diagnosing the coronavirus using medical imaging, highlighting associated challenges. Subsequently, the paper delves into key aspects of Computer-Aided Diagnosis Systems (CADS) based on DL methods for diagnosing COVID-19, covering segmentation, classification, explainable AI (XAI), and predictive research. Additionally, it reviews the rehabilitation systems such as the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) in the context of COVID-19. In another section, uncertainty quantification (UQ) research is showcased, focusing on DL models for the diagnosis of Covid-19. Crucial challenges and future research directions are outlined in another section. Finally, discussion and conclusion sections are also provided at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning (DL) has been shown to be very effective for many application domains of machine learning (ML), including image classification, voice recognition, natural language processing, and bioinformatics. The success of DL techniques is directly related to the availability of large amounts of training data. However, in many cases, the data are sensitive to the users and should be protected to preserve the privacy. Privacy-preserving deep learning (PPDL) has thus become a very active research field to ensure the training process and use of DL models are productive without exposing or leaking information about the data. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of PPDL. We concentrate on the risks that affect data privacy in DL and conduct a detailed investigation into the models that ensure privacy. Finally, we propose a set of evaluation criteria, detailing the advantages and disadvantages of the solutions. Based on the analyzed strengths and weaknesses, the paper has highlighted some important research problems and application cases that have not been studied and these point to certain open research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most existing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms solely apply to discrete action or continuous action spaces. However, the agent often has both continuous and discrete action space, named hybrid action space. This paper proposes an action-decoupled algorithm for hybrid action space. Specifically, the hybrid action is decoupled, and then the original agent in the hybrid action space is abstracted into two agents. Each agent contains only discrete or continuous action space. The discrete and continuous actions are independent of each other to be executed simultaneously. We use the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm as the optimization method and name our proposed algorithm Action Decoupled SAC (AD-SAC). We handle multi-agent problems using a framework of Centralized Training Decentralized Execution (CTDE) and then reduce the concatenation of partial agent observations to avoid the interference of redundant observations. We design a hybrid action space environment for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) path planning and gimbal scanning using AirSim. The results show that our algorithm has better convergence and robustness than the discretization, relaxation, and the Parametrized Deep Q-Networks Learning (P-DQN) algorithms. Finally, we carried out a Hardware in the Loop (HITL) simulation experiment based on Pixhawk to verify the feasibility of our algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, a massive number of deep learning-based approaches have been successfully applied to various remote sensing image (RSI) recognition tasks. However, most existing advances of deep learning methods in the RSI field heavily rely on the features extracted by the manually designed backbone network, which severely hinders the potential of deep learning models due to the complexity of RSI and the limitation of prior knowledge. In this paper, we research a new design paradigm for the backbone architecture in RSI recognition tasks, including scene classification, land-cover classification and object detection. A novel one-shot architecture search framework based on a weight-sharing strategy and an evolutionary algorithm is proposed, called RSBNet, which consists of three stages: Firstly, a supernet constructed in a layer-wise search space is pretrained on a self-assembled large-scale RSI dataset based on an ensemble single-path training strategy. Next, the pre-trained supernet is equipped with different recognition heads through the switchable recognition module and respectively fine-tuned on the target dataset to obtain task-specific supernet. Finally, we search for the optimal backbone architecture for different recognition tasks based on the evolutionary algorithm without any network training. Extensive experiments have been conducted on five benchmark datasets for different recognition tasks, the results show the effectiveness of the proposed search paradigm and demonstrate that the searched backbone is able to flexibly adapt different RSI recognition tasks and achieve impressive performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an effective weakly supervised learning algorithm LLP-AAE to leverage the adversarial autoencoder (AAE) for learning from label proportions (LLP), in which only the bag-level proportional information is available. Our LLP-AAE utilizes an autoencoder backbone and performs adversarial training in latent space to match the aggregated posterior distribution of hidden coding with the prior distributions. In this way, apart from the reconstruction task, the encoder is also dedicated to producing fake samples, in order to deceive discriminators as far as possible. Ultimately, the encoder is employed as a competent label predictor for unseen data. In addition to the LLP classifier, our model can also achieve controllable samples generation by feeding the decoder with gradually changing latent code, which is proven to be useful for a better LLP performance. We also provide a panoramic explanation for LLP-AAE by regarding the LLP problem as an alternative learning procedure between proportion-based pseudo label generation and discriminative reconstruction. Experiments on six benchmark image datasets demonstrate the advantage of our method both in style manipulation with the latent feature representation and comparable multi-class LLP performance with the state-of-the-art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an effective method for strengthening the discriminative ability of high-level deep features by enhancing and aggregating discriminative part-level features for the fine-grained vehicle recognition task. In general, the task of visual recognition concentrates more on the visual differences at the object level. However, for fine-grained object recognition, the visual differences between target objects typically exist in local discriminative areas, so it is more concerned about extracting fine-grained features from these part regions. In this context, we propose solving this issue with a novel feature extraction method from two perspectives: the generation of more feature descriptors of part regions through the learning process of deep networks and the aggregation of part-level discriminative features. This approach is designed to improve the backbone networks to generate finer-level part features through a part-level feature enhancement module and to investigate the intrinsic part-level features of the backbone networks with the help of a feature aggregation module. The enhancement module efficiently finds the finer features highly correlated to the part regions. Then the feature aggregation module builds correlations of similar part features through feature grouping and fusion. Moreover, our proposed method does not require additional parts annotations and achieves comparable performance on two widely-used benchmarks for recognizing fine-grained vehicle types. Experimental results and explainable visualizations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mammography is an important screening criterion for breast cancer, one of the major diseases causing numerous deaths among female patients. Meanwhile, manual diagnosis of mammography is a time-consuming and labor-consuming job. Mammogram classification based on deep learning plays a vital role in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems to mitigate the pressure on physicians. This paper proposes a learning-based multi-view mammogram classification model that captures long-distance dependence and extracts features of multiple receptive fields. Our model considers global and local features of mammography images using Transformer for global features and the proposed multiplex convolutions module for local features. We evaluate our proposed method on a dataset of mammography images obtained from a hospital in China. The proposed method achieves 90.57% accuracy and 94.86% AUC in benign or malignant classification tasks and outperforms other advanced methods for mammogram classification. It is worth noting that the proposed method only requires image-level labels and acts on the whole raw mammogram, which has clinical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, many efforts have been concentrated on land use land cover (LULC) classification due to rapid urbanization, environmental pollution, agriculture drought, frequent floods, and climate change. However, various aspects have attracted hyperspectral imaging due to there being informative discriminative features, such as spectral-spatial features. To this end, this paper is a comprehensive and systematic review of LULC classification using hyperspectral images by reviewing four significant research investigations. Moreover, the four investigations have addressed the following points: (1) the main components of the hyperspectral imaging, the modes of hyperspectral imaging with data acquisition methods, and the intrinsic differences between hyperspectral image and multispectral image, (2) the role of machine learning in LULC classification, and the standard deep learning methods: Convolution Neural Network (CNN), Stacked Autoencoder (SAE), Deep Belief Network (DBN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), (3) the standard benchmark hyperspectral datasets and the evaluation criteria, (4) the main challenges of LULC classification with the possible solutions for the limited training samples issue, the promising future directions, and finally the recent applications for LULC classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance of deep learning-based methods depends mainly on the availability of large-scale labeled learning data. However, obtaining precisely annotated examples is challenging in the medical domain. Although some semi-supervised deep learning methods have been proposed to train models with fewer labels, only a few studies have focused on the uncertainty caused by the low quality of the images and the lack of annotations. This paper addresses the above issues using Dempster-Shafer theory and deep learning: 1) a semi-supervised learning algorithm is proposed based on an image transformation strategy; 2) a probabilistic deep neural network and an evidential neural network are used in parallel to provide two sources of segmentation evidence; 3) Dempster's rule is used to combine the two pieces of evidence and reach a final segmentation result. Results from a series of experiments on the BraTS2019 brain tumor dataset show that our framework achieves promising results when only some training data are labeled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the semantic segmentation task, spatial information and the receptive field are indispensable. For semantic segmentation to be practically applicable, it must have real-time inference speed. However, most of today's methods almost choose to compromise the spatial resolution and low-level detail information, which leads to a significant decrease in accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new architecture based on Bilateral Segmentation Network (BiSeNet) called BiSeNet V3. It introduces a new feature refinement module to optimize the feature map and a feature fusion module to combine the features efficiently. An attention mechanism is introduced to assist the model in capturing contextual information. We also use edge detection to enhance features for boundaries. Extensive experiments on the Cityscapes dataset show that our proposed approach achieves an excellent performance between segmentation accuracy and inference speed. Specifically, for a 768 × 1536 input, BiSeNet V3 achieved 79.0% mIoU on the Cityscapes test set with a speed of 93.8 FPS on an NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti. For a 720 × 960 input, BiSeNet V3 achieved 76.6% mIoU on the CamVid dataset with a speed of 147.6 FPS on an NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti. The result is significantly better than the other methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconstructing natural image from its corresponding compressive sensing (CS) measurements is an ill-posed problem. Learning accurate prior of desirable image is essential to solve this inverse problem in high quality, especially for CS reconstruction from noisy measurements. The existing learning-based methods cannot effectively simulate whole potential noise in the testing data during external learning, and cannot effectively exploit the information from internal testing data. In this paper, we present an effective convolutional neural network (CNN) based method for CS reconstruction from noisy measurements, which learns the deep prior from an external dataset and internal noisy testing data with Stein's unbiased risk estimator (SURE). Specifically, we first pre-train an arbitrary CNN for CS reconstruction with an external dataset to learn a common prior. Then, we utilize meta learning to find a generic initial parameter that is suitable for fast internal learning and adaption to various noisy measurements. Finally, we customize the learned network to learn a specific prior for each internal testing data under Gaussian noise or more general mixed Poisson-Gaussian noise. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under both comprehensively quantitative metrics and perceptive quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a federated learning approach based on utilizing computational resources of the IoT edge devices for training deep neural networks. In this approach, the edge devices and the cloud server collaborate in the training phase while preserving the privacy of the edge device data. Owing to the limited computational power and resources available to the edge devices, instead of the original neural network (NN), we suggest to use a smaller NN generated using a proposed heuristic method. In the proposed approach, the smaller model, which is trained on the edge device, is generated from the main NN model. By the exploiting Knowledge Distillation (K D) approach, the learned knowledge in the server and the edge devices can be exchanged, leading to lower required computation on the server and preserving data privacy of the edge devices. Also, to reduce the knowledge transfer overhead on the communication links between the server and the edge devices, a method for selecting the most valuable data to transfer the knowledge is introduced. The effectiveness of this method is assessed by comparing it to state-of-the-art methods. The results show that the proposed method lowers the communication traffic by up to 250 × and increases the learning accuracy by an average of 8.9 % in the cloud compared to the prior K D -based distributed training approaches in CIFAR-10 dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filter pruning has drawn extensive attention due to its advantage in reducing computational costs and memory requirements of deep convolutional neural networks. However, most existing methods only prune filters based on their intrinsic properties or spatial feature maps, ignoring the correlation between filters. In this paper, we suggest the correlation is valuable and consider it from a novel view: the frequency domain. Specifically, we first transfer features to the frequency domain by Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Then, for each feature map, we compute a uniqueness score, which measures its probability of being replaced by others. This way allows to prune the filters corresponding to the low-uniqueness maps without significant performance degradation. Compared to the methods focusing on intrinsic properties, our proposed method introduces a more comprehensive criterion to prune filters, further improving the network compactness while preserving good performance. In addition, our method is more robust against noise than the spatial ones since the critical clues for pruning are more concentrated after DCT. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method. To be specific, our method outperforms the baseline ResNet-56 by 0.38 % on CIFAR-10 while reducing the floating-point operations (FLOPs) by 47.4 %. In addition, a consistent improvement can be observed when pruning the baseline ResNet-110: 0.23 % performance increase and up to 71 % FLOPs drop. Finally, on ImageNet, our method reduces the FLOPs of the baseline ResNet-50 by 48.7 % with only 0.32 % accuracy loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying influential nodes in social networks is a fundamental task. Due to the development of Graph Neural Networks, Graph Convolution Network (GCN) based model has been introduced to solve this problem. Compared to traditional methods, the existing GCN-based models are more accurate in identifying influential nodes because they can better aggregate the multi-dimension features. However, the GCN-based method treats this problem as a binary classification task rather than a regression task, making it less practical. To make the GCN-based model more practical, we treat identifying influential nodes as a regression task. Moreover, when aggregating neighbor features, GCN ignores the difference in neighbor importance, which will affect the prediction performance of the GCN-based models. This paper proposes a graph multi-head attention regression model to address these problems. Vast experiments on twelve real-world social networks demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms baseline methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce the multi-head attention mechanism to identify influential nodes in social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We propose a new graph convolution network with subgraph embedding. • It extracts local information with subgraphs partitioned by Girvan Newman algorithm. • Experiments confirm the superiority of predicting mutagenicity in aromatic hydrocarbons. • The accuracy is verified with comparison of nine SOTA deep learning models. • The proposed method prevents about 15 %p of GCN's information dilution. An aromatic hydrocarbon refers to an organic material having a carbon ring such as benzene and a functional group in the carbon ring. As the industry develops, natural pollution becomes harsh, new compounds emerge, and the exposure to aromatic hydrocarbons is continuously increasing. Predicting mutagenicity is one of the crucial issues in reducing the risk because these organisms may have properties that penetrate the DNA of living things to cause mutations. Recently, the accuracy of mutation prediction has improved due to the power of deep learning. However, most conventional methods do not consider the characteristics of molecular aromatic hydrocarbons, which dilutes local information and results in a severe deterioration of the prediction performance. In this paper, we propose a method of exploiting subgraph convolution neural networks that enables the extraction of local information of a graph by partitioning it to maintain the detailed information. For extracting the features of molecules, we use the Girvan Newman algorithm to partition the graph according to the carbon ring and functional group and obtain the embedding vectors of the subgraphs as well as the original graph with graph convolution network (GCN). The embedding vectors are combined to represent the whole graph information and predict mutagenicity. Experiments with MUTAG, NCI1 and NCI109, datasets for predicting mutagenicity of molecules in graph structure, confirm that we successfully segment carbon rings and functional groups from molecular graphs and predict mutations using the partitioned graphs, leading to a 2 %p performance improvement. In addition, the proposed method has prevented about 15 %p of information dilution in GCN, and an analysis of the latent space of graphs reveals that the subgraphs extracted maintain the local information appropriately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monocular 3D object detection aims to localize objects in 3D space from a single image. This is a difficult problem due to the lack of accurate depth measurements. Many methods predict depths upfront using a pre-trained vision-based depth estimator to assist in 3D object detection. However, the methods show limited improved performances because of the depth inaccuracy and the neglect of depth confidence. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end 3D object detection framework by combining a monocular camera with a cheap 4-beam LiDAR. The minimal LiDAR signal is leveraged as an additional input to predict high-quality and dense depth maps from monocular images. Meanwhile, several 3D proposals are generated by a keypoint-based detector. The key challenge is encoding the depth confidence to capture the depth estimation uncertainty. Therefore, we propose probabilistic instance shape reconstruction to exploit instance shape information for box refinement. Our method employs a fully differentiable end-to-end framework, making it simple and efficient. The experimental results on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance, thus validating the effectiveness of the sparse LiDAR data and the probabilistic instance shape reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/xjtuwh/SparseLiDAR_fusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • We propose a black-box adversarial text generation scheme called TextGuise, which can be used for almost all text classification tasks. The experiments show that TextGuise is superior to the state-of-the-art text adversarial example generation methods in terms of its attack success rate and attack efficiency when the perturbation ratio does not exceed 0.2.The adversarial examples generated using TextGuise retain the semantic information and strong readability of the text. None of the current defense methods can effectively defend against TextGuise. Adversarial examples greatly compromise the security of deep learning models. The key to improving the robustness of a natural language processing (NLP) model is to study attacks and defenses involving adversarial text. However, the current adversarial attack methods still face problems, such as the low success rates of attacks on some datasets, and the existing defense methods can already successfully defend against some attack methods. As a result, such attacks are unable to dig deeper into the flaws of NLP models to inform further defense improvements. Hence, it is necessary to design an adversarial attack method with a wider attack range and stronger performance. Aiming at the advantages and disadvantages of existing methods, this paper proposes a new adaptive black-box text adversarial example generation scheme, TextGuise. First, we design a keyword selection method in which word scores are calculated by combining context semantics to select the appropriate keywords to modify. Second, to maintain semantics, new keyword substitution rules are designed in combination with the characteristics of text and popular text expressions. Finally, the best modification strategy is adaptively selected through a querying model to reduce the magnitudes of disturbances. TextGuise can automatically select replacement keywords and replacement strategies that efficiently generate adversarial examples with good readability for various text classification tasks. Attack experiments conducted with TextGuise on 5 datasets yield high attack success rates that can surpass 80% when the perturbation ratio does not exceed 0.2. In addition, we present and discuss experiments focusing on defense, text similarity, query times, time consumption, etc., to test the attack performance of TextGuise. The results show that our attack method can achieve a good balance among various metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A blind spot speckle suppression method based on a global awareness strategy is proposed to achieve self-supervised denoising of sonar images, which helps to reduce the noise interference to downstream tasks. • A hybrid contextual dynamic attention mechanism (HCDAM) is introduced to enhance and correct the locality map for salient region extraction to improve the reliability of segmented targets. • A co-training method for the joint speckle suppression task and the garbage instance segmentation task is presented, which facilitates the flexible execution of underwater garbage detection tasks. Sonar is widely used in marine water cleaning tasks, so sonar images have become an effective tool for garbage detection and underwater scene analysis. However, it is an extremely difficult task to achieve fully supervised denoising and garbage detection for sonar images. This is because sonar images are weakly annotated samples that are susceptible to noise interference and have no reference clean image. To this end, we propose a sonar image garbage instance segmentation model via global despeckling and dynamic attention graph optimization(GD-DAGO). Specifically, a self-supervised blind spot network denoising structure is presented in this paper. The proposed denoising model overcomes the defects of information loss in the traditional blind spot network structure and performs global awareness speckle suppression for the noise characteristics of sonar images themselves. In addition, a novel dynamic attention structure is employed to improve the target region estimation in the instance segmentation module and does not require supervision beyond image-level category labeling. Finally, in order to enhance the cooperative ability between the two tasks, we adopt a local perceptual loss strategy based on mask proposals guided by the downstream task, so that the whole model takes more into account the characteristics of sonar images and better serves the sonar garbage detection task. Experimental results on ARACATI 2017 and marine-debris-fls-datasets (MDFD) show that the proposed algorithm achieves a performance gain of 0.4218 and 4.2% in terms of denoising effect (ENL) and detection accuracy ( AP 25 ), respectively, compared with suboptimal algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a powerful data modeling tool, Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN) has been successfully used in auxiliary information exploitation to boost recommendation performance. For HIN based recommendation, it is challenging to extract and fuse useful features of user preferences and item attributes under different semantic paths in HINs. Existing methods leverage a pre-defined fusion function to integrate different semantics for recommendation, which cannot characterize the complex nonlinear interactions between users and items. In this paper, we present a general framework named MNRec, short for Meta-path fusion based Neural Recommendation, to extract and fuse user and item embeddings under different meta-paths for recommendation. Under the framework, we propose an instantiation of MNRec with Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) structure. It consists of two major steps, i.e., meta-path based heterogeneous network embedding and deep learning based rating prediction. Concretely, appropriate meta-paths are first designed according to domain knowledge. Then the embeddings of users and items are obtained through a meta-path and commuting matrix based heterogeneous network embedding method. Finally, in light of the powerful nonlinear modeling capabilities of deep neural networks, the learned embeddings under different meta-paths are integrated into a two-pathway MLP structure for rating prediction. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of MNRec compared with state-of-the-art baselines in rating prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most Internet of Things (IoT) scenes, data missing can be unavoidable when huge number of smart devices are collecting data uninterruptedly. Therefore, data imputation can be an integral part of pre-processing before data mining. It is widely known that IoT time series show strong dependencies in both spatial and temporal dimension, and the spatial relation among the devices is in non-euclidean space. However, most machine-learning-based and deep-learning-based approaches either only take temporal features into account or only catch spatial features in euclidean space. In this paper, we propose a novel network as ST-VAE (Spatio-Temporal Variational Auto-Encoder) to address the problem above. Our architecture is mainly based on Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). Specifically, two kinds of VAE are utilized. One is for calculating the adjacent matrix of device network which is the essential input of GCN, and the other is for data imputation task based on the spatial and temporal dependencies. Experiments conducted on different real-world and public datasets demonstrate that our ST-VAE can not only populate the missing spatio-temporal data accurately but also outperforms other state-of-art approaches from the whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Introduces the novel task of Sexual Facial Expression Recognition (SFER). • Triple-BigGAN; a conditional GAN with a generator, discriminator, and classifier. • SEA-Faces-30k; a new dataset with Erotic, Suggestive-Erotic, and Non-Erotic classes. • Evaluation using FER-2013, ExpW, MNIST, CIFAR-10, SVHN, and SEA-Faces-30k datasets. Automatic recognition of facial images showing erotic expressions can help to understand our social interaction and to detect non-appropriate images even when there is no nakedness present in them. This paper contemplates, for the first time, to exploit facial cues applied to automatic Sexual Facial Expression Recognition (SFER). With this goal, we introduce a new dataset named Sexual Expression and Activity Faces (SEA-Faces-30k) for SFER, which contains 30k manually labeled images under three categories: erotic, suggestive-erotic, and non-erotic. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks require large-scale annotated image datasets with diversity and variations to be properly trained. Unfortunately, gathering such a massive amount of data is not feasible in this area. Therefore, we present a new semi-supervised GAN framework named Triple-BigGAN, which learns a generative model and a classifier simultaneously. It learns both tasks in an end-to-end fashion while using unlabeled or partially labeled data. The Triple-BigGAN framework shows promising classification performance for the SFER task (i.e., 93.59 %) and other five benchmark datasets, i.e., FER-2013, CIFAR-10, Expression in-the-Wild (ExpW), Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database (MNIST), and Street View House Numbers (SVHN). Next, we evaluated the quality of samples generated by Triple-BigGAN with a resolution of 256 × 256 pixels using Inception Score (IS) and Frechet Inception Distance (FID). Our approach obtained the best FID (i.e., 19.94 %) and IS (i.e., 97.98 %) scores on the SEA-Faces-30k dataset. Further, we empirically demonstrated that synthetic erotic face images generated by Triple-BigGAN could also help in improving the classification performance of deep supervised networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of deep learning has brought great change to the community of computer science and also revitalized numerous fields where traditional machine learning methods failed to make breakthroughs. Benefitted from the development of deep learning, analysis of medical images, which used to be a challenging yet exhausting task carried out manually by physicians, has experienced fast development as well. However, training deep learning models in these systems for analysis from scratch can be quite challenging. The small-scale data can't guarantee the performance of the developed systems, while large-scale data is usually unavailable due to expensive costs in the process of collection and storage. To allow a fast transition from one domain to another for reuse, experts and researchers have extensively delved transfer learning, which turns out to be an efficient and low-cost learning technique. In this paper, we will present a comprehensive survey of transfer learning on medical image analysis. The imaging modalities include but not limits to Computed Tomography (CT), Ultrasound (US), and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The subjects covered in this paper include the brain, breast, lung, kidney, etc. Besides, this survey provides systematic knowledge about deep learning and transfer learning for beginners. Readers with different backgrounds can easily catch up with the interdisciplinary knowledge and new trends of transfer learning via this survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of society and the economy, autonomous driving techniques are widely applied in many areas, such as autonomous vehicles, autonomous drones, and robotics. As a dominating technique, deep learning has become more and more popular for 2-D and 3-D object detection. Numerous deep learning-based methods have been proposed to solve various vision issues. To further help with the development of unmanned systems, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of the recent processes from the past five years for 3-D object detection, road detection, traffic sign detection, and traffic light detection and classification. To summarize and analyze previous works in detail, this paper only focuses on deep learning-based object detection tasks in autonomous driving that take place when the input is a point cloud or image(s). It also presents comparative results for insight comparison and inspiring future researches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronary artery disease is among one of the diseases human suffer most. Intravascular coronary arterial image analysis consists of denoising, segmentation, detection, and three-dimensional reconstruction, having a significant meaning for auxiliary diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) are the two most commonly applied intravascular coronary arterial imaging techniques. Based on these fundamental imaging techniques, in recent years, many advanced technologies from traditional machine learning algorithms to deep learning methods were employed in the analysis of intravascular coronary arterial images and made huge progress in this field. In this survey, we reviewed more than one hundred papers published in top journals or conferences such as Neural Networks and MICCAI. These papers proposed approaches or schemes for the intravascular coronary arterial image analysis, including lumen border segmentation, atherosclerotic plaque characterization, media-adventitia segmentation, stent strut detection, and three-dimensional reconstruction. Our survey began with introducing coronary artery intravascular imaging techniques, essential neural networks, and deep learning and then presented an across-the-board review of methods, applications, and trends of intravascular image analysis. This survey is more comprehensive than other articles not only for its scope and reference number but also for discussing the future direction in this field. Compared to other review papers in this field, this article could assist beginners in constructing a basic knowledge frame of coronary artery intravascular image analysis methods and brought state-of-the-art progress in this field to fellow researchers. We hope this paper could benefit either the beginners for coronary arterial image analysis or experienced researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image recognition based on deep learning methods has gained remarkable achievements by feeding with abundant training data. Unfortunately, collecting a tremendous amount of annotated images is time-consuming and expensive, especially in grocery product recognition tasks. It is challenging to recognise grocery products accurately when the deep learning model is trained with insufficient data. This paper proposes multi-angle Generative Adversarial Networks (MAGAN), which can generate realistic training images with different angles for data augmentation. Mutual information is employed in the novel GAN to achieve the learning of angles in an unsupervised manner. This paper aims to create training images containing grocery products from different angles, thus improving grocery product recognition accuracy. We first enlarge the fruit dataset by using MAGAN and the state-of-the-art GAN variants. Then, we compare the top-1 accuracy results from CNN classifiers trained with different data augmentation methods. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the MAGAN exceeds the existing GANs for grocery product recognition tasks, obtaining a significant increase in the accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an extensive review on deep learning methods for image restoration tasks. Deep learning techniques, led by convolutional neural networks, have received a great deal of attention in almost all areas of image processing, especially in image classification. However, image restoration is a fundamental and challenging topic and plays significant roles in image processing, understanding and representation. It typically addresses image deblurring, denoising, dehazing and super-resolution. There are substantial differences in the approaches and mechanisms in deep learning methods for image restoration. Discriminative learning based methods are able to deal with issues of learning a restoration mapping function effectively, while optimisation models based methods can further enhance the performance with certain learning constraints. In this paper, we offer a comparative study of deep learning techniques in image denoising, deblurring, dehazing, and super-resolution, and summarise the principles involved in these tasks from various supervised deep network architectures, residual or skip connection and receptive field to unsupervised autoencoder mechanisms. Image quality criteria are also reviewed and their roles in image restoration are assessed. Based on our analysis, we further present an efficient network for deblurring and a couple of multi-objective training functions for super-resolution restoration tasks. The proposed methods are compared extensively with the state-of-the-art methods with both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Finally, we point out potential challenges and directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern and new integrated technologies have changed the traditional systems by using more advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence methods, new generation standards, and smart and intelligent devices. The new integrated networks like the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G standards offer various benefits and services. However, these networks have suffered from multiple object detection, localization, and classification issues. Conventional Neural Networks (CNN) and their variants have been adopted for object detection, classification, and localization in IoT networks to create autonomous devices to make decisions and perform tasks without human intervention and helpful to learn in-depth features. Motivated by these facts, this paper investigates existing object detection and recognition techniques by using CNN models used in IoT networks. This paper presents a Conventional Neural Networks for 5G-Enabled Internet of Things Network (CNN-5GIoT) model for moving and static objects in IoT networks after a detailed comparison. The proposed model is evaluated with existing models to check the accuracy of real-time tracking. The proposed model is more efficient for real-time object detection and recognition than conventional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies, with the increasing concern for mental health, have shown that interventions along with social support can reduce stress and depression. However, counselling centers do not have enough resources to provide counselling and social support to all the participants in their interest. This paper helps social support organizations (e.g., university counselling centers) sequentially select the participants for interventions. Meanwhile, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown significant success in learning an efficient policy for sequential decision-making problems in both fully observable environments and partially observable environments with small action space. In this paper, we consider emotion propagation from other neighbours of the influencees, initial uncertainties of mental states and influence in the student network. We propose a new architecture called DRLPSO (Deep Reinforcement Learning with Particle Swarm Optimization) to enhance learning performance in a partially observable environment with a large state and action space. DRLPSO consists of two stages: the Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (DPSO) and Deep Q-learning integrated with Long Short-Term Memory (DQ-LSTM). In the first stage, we apply DPSO by initializing n particles that converge to multiple optimal actions for each belief state. In the second stage, the action with the best Q-value from the DPSO action set is executed to obtain belief and observation (history of action). We evaluated the proposed method empirically with the simulated student networks with mental state propagation compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that DRLPSO outperforms the state-of-the-art DRL methods by an average of 32%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we examine the advantages of using multiple types of behaviours in recommendation systems. Intuitively, each user often takes some implicit actions (e.g., click) before making an explicit decision (e.g., purchase). Previous studies show that implicit and explicit feedback has different roles for a useful recommendation. However, these studies either exploit implicit and explicit behaviours separately or ignore the semantics of sequential interactions between users and items. In addition, we go from the hypothesis that a user's preferences at a time are combinations of long-term and short-term interests. In this paper, we propose some Deep Learning architectures. The first one is Implicit to Explicit (ITE) , to exploit users' interests through the sequence of their actions. The second and third ones are two versions of ITE with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers based (BERT-based) architecture called BERT-ITE and BERT-ITE-Si , which combine users' long- and short-term preferences without and with side information to enhance users' representations. The experimental results show that our models outperform previous state-of-the-art ones and also demonstrate our views on the effectiveness of exploiting the implicit to explicit order as well as combining long- and short-term preferences in three large-scale datasets. The source code of our paper is available at: https://github.com/tranquyenbk173/BERT_ITE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]