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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.

This paper investigates noise/fault tolerant incremental algorithms for the extreme learning machine (ELM) concept. Existing incremental ELM algorithms can be classified into two approaches: non-recomputation and recomputation. This paper first formulates a noise/fault aware objective function for nonlinear regression problems. Instead of developing noise/fault aware algorithms for the two computational approaches in a one-by-one manner, this paper uses two representative incremental algorithms, namely incremental ELM (I-ELM) and error minimized ELM (EM-ELM), to develop two noise/fault aware incremental algorithms. The proposed algorithms are called generalized I-ELM (GI-ELM) and generalized EM-ELM (GEM-ELM). The GI-ELM adds k hidden nodes into the existing network at each incremental step without recomputing the existing weights. To have a fair comparison, we consider a modified version of I-ELM as a comparison algorithm. The simulation demonstrates that the noise/fault tolerance of the proposed GI-ELM is better than that of the modified I-ELM. In the GEM-ELM, k hidden nodes are added into the existing network at each incremental step. Meanwhile, all output weights are recomputed based on a recursive formula. We also consider a modified version of EM-ELM as a comparison algorithm. The simulation demonstrates that the noise/fault tolerance of the proposed GEM-ELM is better than that of the modified EM-ELM. Moreover, we demonstrate that the multiple set concept can further enhance the performance of the two proposed algorithms. Following our research results, one can make some non-noise/fault tolerant incremental algorithms to be noise/fault tolerant.

The process of aligning one image, in the coordinate system of another is called registration. Image registration is vital in the medical domain and is used for diagnosis, therapy planning, and treatment of diseases. Due to its huge applicability and importance, medical image registration has emerged to be a separate domain of research. Beginning from the invasive landmark based registration, innumerable algorithms have been proposed to register two images of the human physiology. However, a breakthrough in the literature occurred when an information theory based measure, mutual information was used to register two images. Since then a large number of new algorithms have developed, which use mutual information for fully automatic registration of medical images. This paper is a survey of these algorithms. Beginning from its development, it discusses about some of the major works done on mutual information based image registration. Some comparative studies with other algorithms have also been discussed. The paper ends with a discussion of the developments in medical image registration algorithms post mutual information, which primarily include deep neural network (DNN) based algorithms.

This paper proposes a sensor network information fusion based distributed state estimation algorithm for tracking non-cooperative maneuvering target. In order to lower the communication burden and energy consumption, an event-triggered mechanism is introduced. The distributed state estimation algorithm for maneuvering target tracking is designed by two stages, namely, local filtering stage and consensus fusion stage. The algorithm proposed in this paper can be used to obtain the high accurate state estimation of the target by introducing a multiple suboptimal fading factor even when the target makes big maneuvering. Moreover, a contribution factor is designed in the information fusion stage to improve the accuracy of maneuvering target state estimation and reduce the consensus iteration times. Besides, the stochastic boundedness of the event-triggered distributed estimation algorithm is proved by introducing a stochastic process. Finally, Monte Carlo numerical simulation example is designed to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

The target of this paper is studying the problem of quasi-synchronization of heterogeneous Lur’e networks with uncertain parameters and impulsive effect. Considering the heterogeneity of Lur’e networks, quasi-synchronization instead of synchronization is discussed. Noting that the uncertain factors exist extensively in reality, uncertain parameters are introduced to the system in this paper. By using the Schur complement lemma, stability theory and the principle of comparison, the sufficient criteria for the heterogeneous networks to achieve quasi-synchronization are derived, and the upper bound of exponential quasi-synchronization errors is calculated. In addition, two corollaries are presented in consideration of homogeneous systems and weighted undirected graphs. Finally, three numerical simulations are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the control protocol and theoretical results.

Video-based person re-identification plays a critical role in intelligent video surveillance by learning temporal correlations from consecutive video frames. Most existing methods aim to solve the challenging variations of pose, occlusion, backgrounds and so on by using attention mechanism. They almost all draw attention to the occlusion and learn occlusion-invariant video representations by abandoning the occluded area or frames, while the other areas in these frames contain sufficient spatial information and temporal cues. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes a comprehensive attention mechanism covering what, where, and when to pay attention in the discriminative spatial-temporal feature learning, namely What-Where-When Attention Network (W3AN). Concretely, W3AN designs a spatial attention module to focus on pedestrian identity and obvious attributes by the importance estimating layer (What and Where), and a temporal attention module to calculate the frame-level importance (when), which is embedded into a graph attention network to exploit temporal attention features rather than computing weighted average feature for video frames like existing methods. Moreover, the experiments on three widely-recognized datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed W3AN model and the discussion of major modules elaborates the contributions of this paper.

As the smallest structural unit of feature mapping, the convolution kernel in a deep convolution neural networks (DCNN) convolutional layer is responsible for the input channel features to output channel features. A specific convolution kernel belongs to a specific group from the perspective of the input channel, and it belongs to a specific filter from the perspective of the output channel. If the input and output channels are simultaneously considered in the pruning process, the performance of the pruning model can be further improved. This paper proposes progressive kernel pruning with salient mapping of input-output channels, introduces the concept of input-output channel saliency and defines single-port salient mapping channels and dual-port salient mapping channels. This study demonstrates that single-port salient mapping channels can ensure that each input channel signal has a relatively strong convolution kernel mapped to the output channel, and vice versa. The dual-port salient mapping channel is a channel with high feature mapping abilities from both the input and output directions. Additionally, the average mapping ability measure index is defined, which is used to control the kernel pruning process of the single-port salient mapping channel to switch to the kernel pruning process of the dual-port salient mapping channel. The experimental results and analysis show that the method proposed in this paper can be used to effectively prune a heavyweight model and a lightweight model and can obtain a better accuracy under the conditions of higher compression ratio and acceleration ratios. For example, when VGG-16 is pruned on CIFAR-10, the compression ratio and acceleration ration are 91.00 × and 15.24 × , respectively, and the classification accuracy of the model decreased slightly by 0.22%. When ResNet-101 is pruned on ImageNet, the compression ratio and acceleration ratio are 3.90 × and 3.38 × , respectively, and the classification accuracy of the model decreased slightly by 0.48%. The proposed method is significantly better than state-of-the-art methods.

Noise and physical constraints of redundant manipulators are the two major challenges in the repetitive motion planning (RMP) problems. Therefore, this paper proposed a power-exponent-type modified recurrent neural network (PET-MRNN) to simultaneously address both noise and physical constraints. Moreover, PET-MRNN model is activated by a new Sbp-sinh type nonlinear activation function proposed in this paper. The Sbp-sinh type activation function is first applied to such time varying quadratic program (TVQP) solving and possesses excellent convergence performance. Theoretical analysis proves that the PET-MRNN model can completely eliminate noise disturbance through learning and compensation during the convergence process, and then converge the residual error to zero and obtain the theoretical solution. Finally, simulation and experiments further proved the superiority of the PET-MRNN and the Sbp-sinh type activation function.

In this paper, we study a projective multi-synchronization problem for fractional-order complex-valued coupled multi-stable neural networks (FCVCMNNs) with time-delays. Using a complex decomposition approach, FCVCMNNs are divided into their real and imaginary components. Our method uses certain conditions for each subnetwork to achieve the multiple local equilibrium points or stable periodic orbits that are exponentially stable, which, when combined with the Lyapunov functions method, result in FCVCMNNs that are projectively multi-synchronized. The FCVCMNNs, on the other hand, are examined directly through the use of the Lyapunov functional method and linear matrix inequality (LMI). Various new sufficient conditions in the form of complex-valued LMIs are presented for the projective multi-synchronization of the considered FCVCMNNs. As a final step, we provide two numerical simulations to verify the effectiveness of the main results derived in this paper.

In this paper, we propose a control framework for intelligent surgical robots under the Remote Center of Motion (RCM). The goal of a surgical robot is to assist surgeons in performing complex surgeries. RCM constraint implies that the surgical tip attached to the end-effector of the surgical robot does not slide away from the point of the incision while performing surgery. Implementation of a control algorithm to comply with RCM constraints is a complicated task because of the nonlinear model of the surgical robots and stringent conditions of accuracy imposed by the patient’s safety. This paper proposes an optimization-driven approach to perform the surgical maneuver under RCM constraints. We then applied a bio-inspired optimization algorithm to solve the problem efficiently. For testing the performance of ZNNBAS, we used MATLAB to simulate a surgical procedure. A 7-DOF surgical robot (KUKA LBR IIWA 7) was used as a test bench for running the simulations. The simulation results show that the ZNNBAS is comparable with BAS, PSO, and GA and efficiently and robustly performed the task commanded maneuvers while enforcing the RCM constraints.

Recent works have demonstrated the vulnerability of text classifiers to universal adversarial attacks, which are splicing carefully designed word sequences into the original text. These word sequences are natural, and adversarial examples generated by splicing them with the original text are unnatural. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating natural adversarial examples with an adversarially regularized autoencoder (ARAE) model and an inverter model. The framework maps discrete text into the continuous space, get the conversion of adversarial examples by adding universal adversarial perturbations in the continuous space, then generates natural adversarial examples. In order to achieve universal adversarial attacks, we design a universal adversarial perturbations search (UAPS) algorithm with the gradient of the loss function of the target classifier. Perturbations found by the UAPS algorithm can be directly added to the conversion of the original text in the continuous space. On two textual entailment datasets, we evaluate the fooling rate of generated adversarial examples on two RNN-based architectures and one Transformer-based architecture. The results show that all architectures are vulnerable to the adversarial examples. For example, on the SNLI dataset, the accuracy of the ESIM model for the “entailment” category drops from 88.35% to 2.26%. While achieving a high fooling rate, generated adversarial examples have good performance in naturalness. By further analysis, adversarial examples generated in this paper have transferability in neural networks.

Recently, intelligent cephalometric landmark detection systems that employ deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have been widely developed. In this paper, we concentrate on two challenging difficulties of DCNNs based cephalometric landmark detection. First, previous DCNN methods usually decreased the resolution of high-resolution cephalometric images. Hence, the trained DCNNs missed the detailed local features of original images. Moreover, the detected landmarks’ locations were recovered using a fixed ratio, so location error was increased after recovery. Second, the performance of cephalometric landmark detection is dependent on DCNNs’ translational invariance because the target landmarks’ locations are influenced by any shift of the cephalometric images. However, modern DCNNs have limited translational invariance, and previous DCNN methods did not take translational invariance into consideration. In this paper, we developed the widely used two-stage framework to resolve the above two challenges. In the first stage, we train a global detection network, which receives the whole images as input, to generate candidate landmarks. In the second stage, we split the input image into patches and train a local refine network, which receives image patches as input, to refine the landmarks’ locations. The proposed local refine network can produce accurate landmarks’ locations because it entirely focuses on the detailed local features of high-resolution cephalometric images. The global detection network and local refine network are structured with translational invariance as their primary consideration. The proposed method achieved robust performance on a private dataset and the public Automatic Cephalometric X-ray Landmark Detection Challenge 2015 dataset.

The existing Pavlov associative memory circuit only realizes the simple conditioned reflex process, secondary conditional reflex can make the simple conditioning process more complicated and make the circuit more bionic, but there is a lack of relevant circuit implementation. In this paper, a Pavlov associative memory circuit with secondary conditional reflex is proposed by utilizing the memristor. The proposed circuit can respond to a conditional stimulus after initial learning and have two kinds of forgetting process. Besides, this circuit can indirectly establish conditioned reflexes through conditioned stimuli, instead of directly establishing conditioned reflex with unconditioned stimulus. The realization of secondary conditional reflex is confirmed in the PSPICE simulation results. Meanwhile, an extended classification circuit based on secondary conditioned reflex is proposed. Based on the features of objects as input, the output of the circuit is used to achieve the function of classification. The accuracy of application circuit proposed in this paper can be verified by the simulation results in PSPICE.

Dynamic networks are popularly used to describe networks that change with time. Although there have been a large number of research works on understanding dynamic networks using link prediction, node classification and community detection, there is rare work that is specially designed to address the challenge of big network size of dynamic networks. To this end, we study in this paper an emerging and challenging problem of network coarsening in dynamic networks. Network coarsening refers to a class of network “zoom-out” operations where node pairs and edges are grouped together for efficient analysis on big networks. However, existing network coarsening approaches can only handle static networks where network structure weights have been predefined before the coarsening calculation. Under the observation that big networks are highly dynamic and naturally change over time, we consider in this paper to embed information diffusion data which reflect the dynamics of networks for network coarsening. Specifically, we present a new Semi-NetCoarsen approach that jointly maximizes the likelihood of observing the information diffusion data and minimizes the network regularization with respect to the predefined network structural data. The learning function is convex and we use the accelerated proximal gradient algorithm to obtain the global optimal solution. We conduct experiments on two synthetic and five real-world data sets to validate the performance of the proposed method.

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a challenging task in natural language processing (NLP), which requires machine to determine the corresponding answer to a given passage and question. Whereas, there always exist unanswerable questions in the real world, which poses a new challenge to MRC tasks. Abundant research work has been carried out on the verification mechanism for the answerability of passage-question pairs. However, these researches only focus on its design and implementation, which has limitations in real-world scenarios. Thus, the method proposed in this paper not only verifies the answerability, but also validates and adjusts the predicted answer to obtain an elaborate answer span. Using powerful pre-trained model as encoder block, this paper explores a more comprehensive verification mechanism. Similar to how humans read passages and give answers, we propose a three-stage mechanism called ”Verification for an Elaborate Span” (V4ES): 1) sketchy reading that the model briefly browses the overall information of the passage and question, and then generates an initial answer; 2) intensive reading that it reads the passage and question again, judges the answerability of the question and gives an answer at this stage; 3) verification that it verifies these two answers produced at the previous two stages, and then gives the final prediction. Moreover, the proposed model is evaluated on two MRC challenge datasets: SQuAD2.0 and CMRC2018, and the experiment results show that our model has achieved great improvement compared with the ALBERT and BERT baselines. In conclusion, our proposed verification mechanism has demonstrated its effectiveness through a series of experiments and analysis.

Object detection and semantic segmentation are two fundamental techniques for Intelligent Vehicles (IV) and Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS). Motivated by recent studies demonstrating that object detection and semantic segmentation are two highly-correlated tasks, this paper handles the problem of joint object detection and semantic segmentation in traffic scenes. Existing methods perform the joint object detection and semantic segmentation by sharing the same backbone network, but always ignore the interactive connection between the subdividing detection branch and segmentation branch, leading to the insufficient interaction between the two branches. Considering this situation, this paper proposes a joint object detection and semantic segmentation model with the cross-attention and inner-attention mechanisms. The cross-attention mechanism enables to build up the essential interaction between the subdividing detection branch and segmentation branch to fully make use of their correlation. In addition, the inner-attention contributes to strengthening the representations of feature maps in the model. Given an image, an encoder-decoder network is firstly used to extract initial feature maps. Then, the inner-attention mechanism is applied to strengthen the initial feature maps to obtain segmentation feature maps. Subsequently, the cross-attention mechanism utilizes the segmentation feature maps to guide the generation of object detection feature maps. Finally, the semantic segmentation is performed on the segmentation feature maps and object detection is performed on the detection feature maps. In the experiments, two well-known public traffic datasets are used to evaluate our model. Our model achieves the highest performance in comparison with several recently-proposed methods. In addition, some ablation studies are conducted to evaluate the proposed inner-attention and cross-attention mechanisms, and experiment results validate their effectiveness.

This paper focuses on two related sub-tasks of aspect-based sentiment analysis, namely aspect-term extraction and aspect sentiment classification. The former aims to extract aspect-terms from given sentences and the latter aims to identify the sentiment polarity expressed on the extracted terms. Considering the practical application, researchers use more joint methods rather than pipeline methods. However, existing joint methods cannot model the interaction between aspect-terms and the sentence they belong to, or consider the relevance among the sentiments of different aspect-terms. In this paper, a novel end-to-end generative model based on encoder-decoder, namely Joint Term-Sentiment Generator (JTSG), is presented to generate all aspect term-polarity pairs. Specifically, a pre-trained model based encoder is used to encode the sentences, and specially, the decoder generates the start and end position to determine an aspect-term, rather than generate aspect-terms themselves. This new generative method contributes to avoid generating incomplete aspect-terms. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach yields competitive performance on three benchmark datasets.

Object detection is one of the most important tasks involved in intelligent agriculture systems, especially in pest detection. This paper focuses on a most devastated agricultural disaster: grasshopper plagues. Grasshopper detection and monitoring is of paramount importance in preventing grasshopper plagues. This paper proposes a probabilistic faster R-CNN algorithm with stochastic region proposing, where a probabilistic region proposal network, an image classification network, and an object detection network are integrated to detect and locate grasshoppers. More specifically, in the proposed framework, the probabilistic region proposal network considers attributes (e.g. size, shape) of region proposals and the image classification network identifies the existence of grasshoppers while the object detection network scores recognition confidence for a region proposal. By integrating these three networks, the uncertainty can be passed from end to end, and the final confidence is obtained for each region proposal can be explicitly quantified. To enhance algorithm robustness, a stochastic region proposing algorithm is developed to screen region proposals rather than using a predetermined threshold. The proposed algorithm is validated by recently collected grasshopper datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only outperforms competing algorithms in terms of average precision (0.91), average missed rate (0.36), and maximum F1-score (0.9263), but also reduces the false positive rate of recognising the existence of grasshoppers in an open field.

Brain tumor segmentation using MRI data remains challenging for some reasons. Hence, how to accurately segment the brain tumor is kept as a significant topic in the area of medical image segmentation. To follow the idea of “coarse-to-fine” in practice, this paper proposes an end-to-end two-stage generative adversarial neural network (ToStaGAN) to improve the braintumor is kept as a significant topic in the area of medical image segmentation. To follow the idea of “coarse-to-fine” in practice, this paper proposes an end-to-end two-stage generative adversarial neural network (ToStaGAN) to improve the brain tumor segmentation performance by making full use of semantic information in high-level.In the proposed ToStaGAN, the UNET network is adopted as the “coarse” generation network in the first stage, while a U-Shaped contextual autoencoder (ConEnDer), which consists of the proposed fine-grained extraction module (FEM) and dense skip connection, is proposed as the “fine” generation network in the second stage. To be more specific, the FEM is mainly used to effectively extract “fine-grained” features that plays a crucial role in semantic segmentation with only increasing a few parameters. Furthermore, it has the ability to obtain more diverse and abstract features. And by further utilizing the features extracted from the FEM and the coarse prediction map from the first stage, the ConEnDer holds the great potential to generate the optimized segmentation results. We then evaluate the performance of ToStaGAN on the BARATS 2015. Findings from the evaluations suggest that the proposed two-stage generation network achieves a better performance than the one-stage network; thus, also implying the effectiveness of the proposed ConEnder for “fine” segmentation. A comparative summary also shows that the ToStaGAN achieves a better segmentation performance in comparison to other competing approaches.

This paper investigates the distributed output tracking problem via linear sampled-data control for a class of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems. Specifically, for the case where the graph topology is directed and the leader is the neighbor of only a small portion of followers, by combining the backstepping method with sampled-data method, a series of linear sampled-data controllers are obtained. Stability analysis is performed by using calculus, comparison principle and so on. The main results of this paper are concluded that all the states of the closed-loop system are globally bounded and the output tracking errors can be tuned arbitrarily small. Finally, a numerical example is given to verify the validity of the conclusion.

Benefiting with the rapid development of communication networks, effective video quality assessment (VQA) models which provide guidance for video transmission and compression technologies are highly demanded. This paper proposes a general-purpose full-reference VQA method combining DenseNet with spatial pyramid pooling and RankNet to not only extract high-level distortion representation and global spatial information of samples but also characterize the temporal correlation among frames. Firstly, the pretrained DenseNet is modified and finetuned to extract high-level features of distorBenefiting with the rapid development of communication networks, effective video quality assessment (VQA) models which provide guidance for video transmission and compression technologies are highly demanded. This paper proposes a general-purpose full-reference VQA method combining DenseNet with spatial pyramid pooling and RankNet to not only extract high-level distortion representation and global spatial information of samples but also characterize the temporal correlation among frames. Firstly, the pretrained DenseNet is modified and finetuned to extract high-level features of distorted videos. Then, spatial pyramid pooling is equipped in the DenseNet module to process flexible inputs with arbitrary spatial resolution. Thus, this kind of input which has the same spatial resolution as the original distorted video is processed by the well-trained DenseNet to generate frame-level quality, which considers the global spatial information of videos directly. Finally, learning to rank is introduced to explore the high-level temporal correlation of distorted videos by taking the RankNet as the temporal pooling function. The experimental results on two public VQA databases show that the proposed algorithm performs consistently with human visual perception.

Quite often a machine learning problem lends itself to be split in several well-defined subproblems, or tasks. The goal of Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is to leverage the joint learning of the problem from two different perspectives: on the one hand, a single, overall model, and on the other hand task-specific models. In this way, the found solution by MTL may be better than those of either the common or the task-specific models. Starting with the work of Evgeniou et al., support vector machines (SVMs) have lent themselves naturally to this approach. This paper proposes a convex formulation of MTL for the L1-, L2- and LS-SVM models that results in dual problems quite similar to the single-task ones, but with multi-task kernels; in turn, this makes possible to train the convex MTL models using standard solvers. As an alternative approach, the direct optimal combination of the already trained common and task-specific models can also be considered. In this paper, a procedure to compute the optimal combining parameter with respect to four different error functions is derived. As shown experimentally, the proposed convex MTL approach performs generally better than the alternative optimal convex combination, and both of them are better than the straight use of either common or task-specific models, With partial support from Spain’s grant TIN2016-76406-P. Work supported also by the UAM–ADIC Chair for Data Science and Machine Learning.

As a special type of neurodynamic methodology dedicated to finding zeros of equations, zeroing neurodynamics has shown a powerful ability in solving challenging online time-varying problems. Multi-linear systems, on the other hand, are a type of tensor equations with a wide range of applications. In this paper, a zeroing neurodynamics approach for solving multi-linear systems with M -tensors is proposed along with three specific accelerated finite-time convergent zeroing neurodynamics models, which breaks the limitations of a recently presented neural network approach termed continuous time neural network. Activation functions available in constructing zeroing neurodynamics models for solving multi-linear systems with M -tensors are also investigated in the rest of the paper. Theoretical analyses prove that the proposed zeroing neurodynamics approach is stable in the sense of Lyapunov stability theory and the proposed models converge to the theoretical solution in finite time. Finally, computer simulations are provided to substantiate the efficacy and superiority of the proposed zeroing neurodynamics models for solving multi-linear systems with M -tensors.

The complex and varied urban road conditions have always been a difficult and a pivotal component in the study of driverless technology especially at intersections. In China, it is necessary for driverless cars to understand the gestures of traffic police. To identify the traffic police gesture at the intersection, the key step is to detect the traffic police at the intersection. At present, the research on traffic police detection is still in its infancy, there exists common problems such as slow detection speed and other real time problems in this method, and there is not a standardized traffic police data set ether. For the real time problems, this paper introduces the attention mechanism, and proposes a new real-time detection method of traffic police based on attention mechanism. The method proposed in this paper has strong robustness and can quickly complete the target detection task. For the data set problem, this paper analyzes and discloses similar data sets published through research. In the meanwhile, this paper collects 24,530 video data on the actual road, and it extracts and saves 12,000 pictures containing traffic police at frame rate of 30FPS as traffic police detection training and validated data set.

In this paper, adaptive neural tracking control problem is considered for non-strict-feedback high-order nonlinear systems with quantized input signal. Compared with the logarithmic quantizer, the quantizer introduced in this paper can avoid chattering problem. The dynamic surface control (DSC) technique is introduced to solve the problem of ‘explosion of complexity’, which is appeared in the classic adaptive backstepping control of high-order nonlinear systems. The structural properties of radial basis function neural networks (RBF NNs) are used to simplify the design difficulty from the functions of whole state variables. According to the classic adaptive backstepping technique and neural network algorithm, an output tracking controller is designed, which can guarantee that all the signals of the closed-loop system are semiglobally uniformly bounded and the output of the system can track the reference signal. Finally, a numerical example is presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, an adaptive neural network (NN) optimized control strategy is presented to improve the inherent tradeoff between ride comfort of passengers and the suspension travel for full vehicle active suspension system with state constraints. To the best of our knowledge, the automotive suspension system control using hydraulic actuators is a highly complex nonlinear control task, involving external disturbances and uncertainties. To address it, this paper develops the virtual and actual optimal controllers based on backstepping technique and the identifier-actor-critic structure. Meanwhile, the Barrier Lyapunov functions are developed to prevent the systems from the state constraints and the systems states are limited in the preselected compact sets. It is particularly worth mentioning that the proposed optimal control strategy ensures that all the closed-loop signals remain bounded, while the power of the control input as well as the amplitude of the vertical displacement has been minimized. The simulation results show how the full-car system can be controlled optimally and satisfactorily, and confirm the superiority of proposed method.

Scientific literature retrieval provides convenience for researchers to find scientific literature related to the query. It is an important part of scientific research to search related papers given a paper title as query. However, for scientific literature retrieval tasks, most of the existing retrieval methods do not consider sentence-level semantic matching so that the retrieval performance is limited. With the success of neural networks, neural information retrieval methods have been widely studied and achieved good retrieval results. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised semantic-enhanced scientific literature retrieval framework. The framework is composed of two networks: a self-attention convolutional encoder-decoder network and a sentence-level attention scientific literature retrieval network. By joint training of the two networks, the proposed semi-supervised semantic-enhanced scientific literature retrieval model can fully capture the rich semantic information of scientific text data and leverages human labeled scientific text data to improve the discriminativeness of the learned semantic representation. The retrieval results on two scientific literature datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly and consistently outperforms the other baseline methods.

This paper investigates the problem of adaptive tracking control for multi-agent systems subject to output constraint and unknown hysteresis. Different from most existing results that use the barrier Lyapunov function and integral barrier Lyapunov function to solve the output constraint problem, the transformation technique is introduced in this paper, which can convert the original system to a constrained or completely unconstrained system. The difficulty caused by unknown Bouc-Wen hysteresis is solved via the Nussbaum gain technique. The continuous unknown function is estimated by using the radial basis function neural networks. The tracking differentiator is utilized to overcome the difficulty of “explosion of complexity”. By using the Lyapunov stability theory, it is indicated that all signals of the closed-loop system are semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded, and the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of the origin. Eventually, the feasibility of the designed approach is demonstrated by some simulation results.

Person re-identification is to recognize a pedestrian who has been observed at different places in monitoring system, which is done by computer automatically. Important practical significance can be found in this paper on improving the intelligence of monitoring system. There are two challenging problems needed to be solved for person re-identification, which is feature representation and matching. Designing a suitable feature representation method is both challenging and crucial. Ideally, the extracted features should be robust enough to cope with the various situations of the monitoring environment, such as posture difference, illumination changing, and shooting angle difference, etc. There are a lot of challenges for feature matching too, such as small sample size, inter-class confusion, and intra-class variation, etc. In order to meet these challenges, a new person re-identification scheme was put forward in this paper. The following three aspects would be used to describe it. First, an improved BOF feature extraction algorithm based on SURF was put forwarded, SURF algorithm extracts the preliminary feature descriptor and generates visual dictionary, so the influence factors such as illumination and scale invariants can be deal with. And then, covariance descriptor was adopted by the algorithm. It has high robustness, and matching accuracy can be improved too for the case of small sample. Finally, an effective classifier was designed by LIBSVM based on improved BOF algorithm, so the efficiency of the person re-identification algorithm can be improved. The proposed method was compared with the current mainstream algorithm through experiment, and it can be found through the experimental results that it is effective to solve the difficult problems for person re-identification.

Many methods achieve the visual object tracking task with deep learning technologies. As the deep features of different levels contain various semantic information and functions, this paper presents a multi-hierarchy feature aggregation approach to tackle the specific issues in the tracking task, which consists of two aspects. On one hand, this paper integrates the features captured by the offline and online classifiers at the score level, which constructs complementary roles of these classifiers to enhance the stability of classification. Besides, the proposed offline classifier is continuously optimized with different levels of features to reinforce classification constraints. On the other hand, we design a butterfly attention module to promote the capacity of multi-hierarchy feature aggregation in the regression network, which aims to fuse and strengthen the multi-scale features by attending to their spatial information. It can capture more spatial contexts by utilizing the self-attention mechanism during the fusion procedure, and preserve the hierarchy of the features during the strengthening process. Extensive experiments on four public datasets, i.e., VOT2018, OTB100, NFS and LaSOT datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Context and rationale Intrusion Detection, the ability to detect malware and other attacks, is a crucial aspect to ensure cybersecurity. So is the ability to identify this myriad of attacks. Objective Artificial Neural Networks (as well as other machine learning bio-inspired approaches) are an established and proven method of accurate classification. ANNs are extremely versatile – a wide range of setups can achieve significantly different classification results. The main objective and contribution of this paper is the evaluation of the way the hyperparameters can influence the final classification result. Method and results In this paper, a wide range of ANN setups is put to comparison. We have performed our experiments on two benchmark datasets, namely NSL-KDD and CICIDS2017. Conclusions The most effective arrangement achieves the multi-class classification accuracy of 99.909% on an established benchmark dataset.

Single-object tracking is regarded as a challenging task in computer vision, especially in complex spatio-temporal contexts. The changes in the environment and object deformation make it difficult to track. In the last 10 years, the application of correlation filters and deep learning enhances the performance of trackers to a large extent. This paper summarizes single-object tracking algorithms based on correlation filters and deep learning. Firstly, we explain the definition of single-object tracking and analyze the components of general object tracking algorithms. Secondly, the single-object tracking algorithms proposed in the past decade are summarized according to different categories. Finally, this paper summarizes the achievements and problems of existing algorithms by analyzing experimental results and discusses the development trends.

In the process of Human-robot skill transfer, we require the robot to reproduce the trajectory of teacher and expect that the robot can generalize the learned trajectory. For the trajectory after generalization, we expect that the robot arm can accurately track. However, because the model of the robot can not be accurately obtained, some researchers have proposed using a neural network to approximate the unknown term. The parameters of the traditional RBF neural network are usually selected through the empirical and trial-and-error method, which maybe biased and inefficient. In addition, due to the end-effector of the mechanical arm trajectory will be constantly changing according to the needs of the task, when the neural network of compact set cannot contain the whole input vector, the neural network cannot achieve the ideal approximation effect. In this paper, the broad neural network is used to approximate the unknown terms of the robot. This method can reuse the motion controller that has been learned and complete other motions in the robot operating space without relearning its weight parameters. In this paper, the effectiveness of the proposed method is proved by the ultrasound scanning task.

The problem of pursuing the data items of a large database whose distances to a query item are the least is known as Similarity Search (Nearest Neighbor Search) problem. There exist various algorithms to address this problem. Some of the well known algorithms are i) exact algorithms ii) approximation algorithms and iii) randomized algorithms. This paper has made study only on exact and approximation algorithms because randomized algorithm produces approximate results with some probability. Recently, there are several approximation algorithms are proposed by the researchers because this type of algorithms minimizes the problem of Curse of Dimensionality. This paper mainly has two major sections. In first section, various methods under exact and approximation algorithms are discussed with regard to storage, preprocessing and query time. In the second section, efficient algorithms for similarity search suitable for certain physiological characteristics based biometric systems are considered. Biometric system has five main steps viz acquisition of Image, pre-processing, extraction of features, matching and making final decision. In this paper, indexing algorithms for similarity search suitable for iris trait based on different features are discussed in detail. Since the nature of features are distinct and different in biometric traits, there does not exist a universal (one unique) solution which can apply to all traits of biometric systems. Various performance measures like Penetration Rate and Hit Rate are used to determine the correct recognition rate with top best match (rank-1 accuracy).

In this work, we propose a Fractional-order Residual Convolutional Neural Network (FRCNN) for Low-Dose CT (LDCT) denoising. As increasing the dose of radiation is harmful to the patient, how to trade off between reducing the radiation dose and improving the quality of the CT image has become a challenging problem. To this end, this paper proposes a new approach for LDCT image denoising using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Fractional-order Total Variation (FTV) loss, as well as residual learning. Firstly, this paper introduced the FTV loss function for structural details enhancement. Secondly, skip connections were added to optimize the network. Thirdly, extensive experimental analysis was used to evaluate the capacity of this method in suppressing noise and preserving detailed information. The FTV loss can retain essential structural details while suppressing noise, generating high-quality CT images ready for interpretation by radiologists. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our method obtained better results visually and numerically, especially in structural details preservation. These promising results will significantly improve the usability of LDCT images.

This paper proposes a hybrid architecture based on neural networks, fuzzy systems, and n-uninorms for solving pattern classification problems, termed as ENFS-Uni0 (short for evolving neuro-fuzzy system based on uni-nullneurons). The model can produce knowledge in an on-line (single-pass) and evolving learning context in a particular form of neuro-fuzzy rules representing the dependencies among input features through IF-THEN type relations. The rules antecedents are thereby realized through uni-nullneurons, which are constructed from n-uninorms, leading to the possibility to express both, AND- and OR-connections (and a mixture of these) among the single antecedent parts of a rule (and thus achieving an advanced interpretability aspect of the rules). The neurons’ evolution is done through an extended version of an autonomous data partition method (ADPA). On-line interpretation of the timely evolution of rules is addressed by (i) a concept for tracking the degree of changes of the rules over data stream samples, which may indicate experts/operators how much dynamics is in the process and may be used as a structural active learning component to request operator’s feedback in the case of significant changes and (ii) a concept for updating feature weights incrementally. These weights express the (possibly changing) impact degrees of features on the classification problem: features with low weights can be seen as unimportant and masked out when showing rules to an expert ( → rule length reduction). The rules’ consequents are represented by certainty vectors and are recursively updated by an indicator-based recursive weighted least squares (I-RWLS) approach (one RWLS estimator per class) where the weights are given through the neuron activation levels in order to gain stable local learning. The model proposed in this paper was successfully compared to related hybrid and evolving approaches in the literature for classifying binary and multi-class patterns. The results obtained by the proposed model show an outperformance of the related works in terms of higher accuracy trend lines over time, while offering a high degree of interpretability through coherent neuro-fuzzy rules to solve the classification problems.

Subtle facial expression recognition (SFER) aims to classify facial expressions with very low intensity into corresponding human emotions. Subtle facial expression can be regarded as a special kind of facial expression, whose facial muscle movements are more difficult to capture. In the last decade, various methods have been developed for common facial expression recognition (FER). However, most of them failed to automatically find the most discriminative parts of facial expression and the correlation of muscle movements when human makes facial expression, which makes them unsuitable for SFER. To better solve SFER problem, an attention mechanism based model focusing on salient local regions and their correlations is proposed in this paper. The proposed method: 1) utilizes multiple attention blocks to attend to distinct discriminative regions and extract corresponding local features automatically, 2) a correlation attention module is integrated in the model to extract global correlation feature over the salient regions, and finally 3) fuses the correlation feature and local features in an efficient way for the final facial expression classification. By this way, the useful but subtle local information can be utilized in more detail, and the correlation of different local regions is also extracted. Extensive experiment on the LSEMSW and CK+ datasets shows that the method proposed in this paper achieves superior results, which demonstrates its effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of various well known medical image registration techniques with a special focus on registration between anatomical and functional medical images. Examples of anatomical medical images (AMI) are Computer Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI), X-ray radiographs and ultrasound etc. whereas Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Single Photon Emission Tomography (SPECT) and fMRI are examples of functional medical images (FMI). Irrespective of such types (AMI or FMI), every case can be considered as a medical imaging modality. All these modalities are widely used by clinicians to study the structure/functionality of human body parts for diagnosis and treatment. It is frequently required to combine PET/SPECT with CT/MRI to simultaneous study the metabolic and molecular information received through PET/SPECT with fine anatomical details observed by CT/MRI. This concurrent study will help in the diagnosis and localization of many diseases like cancer, blockage in coronary arteries and brain-related diseases like Parkinson, Alzheimer etc. Further, in many cases, clinicians are required to co-register one or more anatomical images with functional images, for example, ultrasound-guided biopsy fused with PET and MRI. This registration can be done either at the hardware level or at the software level. The introduction of integrated PET-CT machine increases the acceptability of hardware-based registration systems as compared to software-based methods among the medics. One possible reason for this is the lack of validation of results achieved through software-based registration methods. On the other hand, software-based registration methods also have many advantages over the hardware-based registration systems like lesser exposure to radiation and no need for new investment on hardware etc. In this paper, both the methods with their merits and demerits are discussed in detail.

Extreme-learning-machine based auto-encoder (ELM-AE) is regarded as a useful architecture with fast learning speed and general approximation ability, and stacked ELM is used to develop efficient and effective deep learning networks. However, considering features learned from conventional ELM-AEs have issues of weak nonlinear representation ability and random factors in feature projection, this paper proposes an improved ELM-AE architecture which utilize low-rank matrix factorization to learn optimal low-dimensional features. Two superiorities can be obtained compared to conventional ELM-AEs. One is the dimensionality of the hidden layer in ELM-AE could be set arbitrarily, e.g. a higher-dimension hidden layer could lower the random effect in feature learning and enhance features representation ability. The other is enhancing features nonlinear ability, since features are learned directly from the nonlinear outputs of hidden layer. Finally, comparison experiments on numerical and image datasets are implemented in this paper to verify the superior performance of the proposed ELM-AE in this paper.

Deep learning has made substantial progress in crowd density estimation, but in practical application, due to the interference factors such as uneven distribution of crowd and changes in illumination, the existing methods still have large errors in counting. To solve the above problems, a crowd density estimation method based on multichannel dense grouping network is proposed. To solve the problem that it is difficult to extract the multiscale information of the crowd due to the uneven distribution of the crowd, multichannel dense grouping module (McDGM) is designed. In the module, Improved grouping convolution block (IGCB) is dense connected with other layers to obtain different levels of crowd characteristics, so as to avoid the loss of multi-scale information. In addition, the parameters of IGCB are reduced by group convolution. Then, to overcome the change of illumination, a crowd image enhancement algorithm is designed, which makes the image clear by the average pixel value and adjusting the contrast. Finally, to enhance the sensitivity of the network to crowd counting, a new loss function is proposed, which adds counting loss to the previous pixel space loss to improve the accuracy of crowd counting. The algorithm in this paper has been tested on ShanghaiTech and UCF_CC_50 datasets. The test results show that the algorithm in this paper has better statistical accuracy.

From the perspective of large-scale system, a directed complex dynamic network (DCDN) may be considered as a coupling system of the node subsystem (NS) and the link subsystem (LS). In this paper, by using the outgoing link vector and incoming link vector for DCDN, the dynamics of LS is described by employing the vector differential equation instead of the matrix differential equation. Since the outgoing and incoming link vectors have the stronger geometric intuition, the results in this paper show that this kind model of links can not only reflect the direction of links but also find the dynamic tracking goal of links more easily when the state synchronization of NS emerges. Furthermore, by employing the simple mathematical conditions, the nonlinear controller of NS and the coupling term of LS are proposed to ensure achieving the asymptotical state synchronization for DCDN. Finally, the numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the validity of the results in this paper.

In this paper, a neural synchronization of the optimal structure-based group of neural networks is proposed. Asymmetric cryptography is widely used to generate a key amongst two parties and to exchange the key through an insecure channel. However, since the methods that used this strategy, like RSA, have been compromised, new methods for producing a key that can offer security must be discovered. A new group of cryptography known as neural cryptography was created to solve this issue. The primary aim of neural cryptography is to produce a secret key over an unreliable medium. The optimal neural network architecture for creating and defining a secret key between the two authorized individuals is examined in this article. Furthermore, studies into the coordination of a group of neural networks are uncommon. For the design of the public key exchange protocol, synchronization of a cluster of neural networks with Three Layer Tree Parity Machine (TLTPM) is proposed. To calculate the synchronization time, steps taken, and the number of times the attacking neural network could replicate the actions of the two accepted networks, more than 15 million simulations were run. Various parametric experiments have been conducted on the proposed methodology. Simulations of the approach show that it is correct, according to the results of the paper.

This paper tackles the event-triggering filtering problem for a class of nonlinear networked control systems subject to the prescribed disturbance attenuation level. To alleviate the data transmission burden of communication channels, an event-triggering mechanism is adopted, where the data can be transmitted only if certain condition is fulfilled. The T-S fuzzy model approach is utilized to approximate the nonlinear dynamics. It is the purpose of this paper to design a filter for the addressed nonlinear system ensuring that the filtering error system is asymptotically stable whereas the prespecified H ∞ criterion is guaranteed. By using Lyapunov approach in combination with matrix analysis method, the sufficient conditions are established for the existence of desired filtering parameters in terms of the solvability of certain linear matrix inequalities. Finally, a numerical simulation example is put forward to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the developed theoretical results.

This paper investigates the motion control of a Stewart parallel robot with uncertain load. The external disturbances caused by load can trigger dynamic coupling among six degree-of-freedoms and have a significant impact on control precision. In practice, the dynamic parameters of load is difficult to be precedent identified and the robot with load is a multi-input multi-output(MIMO) system in physical space, which makes the dynamic coupling problem difficult to solve effectively and the high-performance control is hard to achieve. In this paper, the dynamic effect of the load is first analyzed. Then a novel motion control method, modal space neural network compensation control, is designed with the aim of reducing the effect of the load disturbances. This controller implements the neural network to compensate for the load disturbances. In addition, the modal space control theory is introduced to realize the independent control of each control channel. The feasibility of the proposed controller is evaluated in numerical simulations. Results reveal that the proposed control method gives exceptional tracking performance and dynamic coupling suppression capability.

With the rapid development of deep learning technology and improvement in computing capability, deep learning has been widely used in the field of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. In general, deep learning models often contain many trainable parameters and require a massive number of labeled samples to achieve optimal performance. However, in regard to HSI classification, a large number of labeled samples is generally difficult to acquire due to the difficulty and time-consuming nature of manual labeling. Therefore, many research works focus on building a deep learning model for HSI classification with few labeled samples. In this article, we concentrate on this topic and provide a systematic review of the relevant literature. Specifically, the contributions of this paper are twofold. First, the research progress of related methods is categorized according to the learning paradigm, including transfer learning, active learning and few-shot learning. Second, a number of experiments with various state-of-the-art approaches has been carried out, and the results are summarized to reveal the potential research directions. More importantly, it is notable that although there is a vast gap between deep learning models (that usually need sufficient labeled samples) and the HSI scenario with few labeled samples, the issues of small-sample sets can be well characterized by fusion of deep learning methods and related techniques, such as transfer learning and a lightweight model. For reproducibility, the source codes of the methods assessed in the paper can be found at https://github.com/ShuGuoJ/HSI-Classification.git.

This paper considers the leader-following consensus problem for delayed neural networks with multi-layer signed digraph topologies. Both structurally balanced and unbalanced topologies are considered. By using the structural balance theory and the pinning control strategy, some sufficient conditions are given to guarantee that the bipartite leader-following consensus can be reached in structurally balanced multi-layer signed neural networks, which depend on the node dynamics and the topology of the multi-layer signed network. In addition, a scheme is designed for selecting the pinning nodes and gains of each layer to achieve bipartite leader-following consensus. When the multi-layer signed network is structurally unbalanced, the asymptotic stability of the neural network is investigated by decomposing the structurally unbalanced network into a structurally balanced subgraph and some special edges. The conditions proposed in this paper are also suitable for addressing the consensus problem of traditional single layer signed neural networks. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed theorems and algorithms.

This paper considers the stochastic consensus problem of high-order linear discrete-time multiagent systems (MASs) with uncertain topologies and external disturbances. The randomly switching interaction signed topologies are governed by a time-homogenous Markov chain with incomplete knowledge of the transition probabilities. Based on Lyapunov function theory and adaptive control strategies, we employ a homogeneous parameter-dependent Lyapunov function to propose sufficient conditions under a set of linear matrix inequality (LMI) constraints. A free-weighting matrix method is introduced to give the proposed LMIs extra freedom to search feasible solutions. Furthermore, the adaptive controllers applied in this paper are independent of topologies and fully distributed; i.e., the system achieves robust consensus without continuously updating the controller and dealing with global data. Additionally, we extend the theoretical framework to analyze the disturbance rejection performance of MASs under the stochastic process. Two numerical examples are provided to show the effectiveness of the algorithms.