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Learning discriminative features is of vital importance for automatic facial expression recognition (FER) in the wild. In this article, we propose a novel Slide-Patch and Whole-Face Attention model with SE blocks (SPWFA-SE), which jointly perceives the discriminative locality characteristics and informative global features of the face for effective FER. Specifically, the well-designed slide patches are proposed to extract local features. Different from the existing methods, our slide patches not only can maintain the information at the edge area of patches, but also do not need to detect facial landmarks. Moreover, to make the model adaptively focus on the distinguishable regions, an attention module is proposed in the patch level to learn the weight of each patch. Furthermore, squeeze-and-excitation blocks are explored in the channel level to learn the weight of each channel. As such, the proposed multi-level feature extraction and attention mechanisms can enhance the representative ability of the learned features. Extensive experiments on five challenging datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Cross database experiments on another three databases show the superior generalization performance of our model. Furthermore, complexity analysis results show that our model contains fewer parameters with fast training advantages than other competing models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Infiltration is important for the surgical planning and prognosis of pituitary adenomas. Differences in preoperative diagnosis have been noted. The aim of this article is to assess the accuracy of machine learning analysis of texture-derived parameters of pituitary adenoma obtained from preoperative MRI for the prediction of high infiltration. Methods: A total of 196 pituitary adenoma patients (training set: n = 176; validation set: n = 20) were enrolled in this retrospective study. In total, 4120 quantitative imaging features were extracted from CE-T1 MR images. To select the most informative features, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) and variance threshold method were performed. The linear support vector machine (SVM) was used to fit the predictive model based on infiltration features. Furthermore, the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) was generated, and the diagnostic performance of the model was evaluated by calculating the area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 value. Results: A variance threshold of 0.85 was used to exclude 16 features with small differences using the LASSO algorithm, and 19 optimal features were finally selected. The SVM models for predicting high infiltration yielded an AUC of 0.86 (sensitivity: 0.81, specificity 0.79) in the training set and 0.73 (sensitivity: 0.87, specificity: 0.80) in the validation set. The four evaluation indicators of the predictive model achieved good diagnostic capabilities in the training set (accuracy: 0.80, precision: 0.82, recall: 0.81, F1 score: 0.81) and independent verification set (accuracy: 0.85, precision: 0.93, recall: 0.87, F1 score: 0.90). Conclusions: The radiomics model developed in this study demonstrates efficacy for the prediction of pituitary adenoma infiltration. This model could potentially aid neurosurgeons in the preoperative prediction of infiltration in PAs and contribute to the selection of ideal surgical strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single image super-resolution (SISR) using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieves the state-of-the-art performance. Most existing SISR models mainly focus on pursuing high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and neglect textures and details. As a result, the recovered images are often perceptually unpleasant. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a texture and detail-preserving network (TDPN), which focuses not only on local region feature recovery but also on preserving textures and details. Specifically, the high-resolution image is recovered from its corresponding low-resolution input in two branches. First, a multi-reception field based branch is designed to let the network fully learn local region features by adaptively selecting local region features in different reception fields. Then, a texture and detail-learning branch supervised by the textures and details decomposed from the ground-truth high resolution image is proposed to provide additional textures and details for the super-resolution process to improve the perceptual quality. Finally, we introduce a gradient loss into the SISR field and define a novel hybrid loss to strengthen boundary information recovery and to avoid overly smooth boundary in the final recovered high-resolution image caused by using only the MAE loss. More importantly, the proposed method is model-agnostic, which can be applied to most off-the-shelf SISR networks. The experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our TDPN on most state-of-the-art SISR methods in PSNR, SSIM and perceptual quality. We will share our code on https://github.com/tocaiqing/TDPN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The informativeness and discriminativeness of features collaboratively ensure high-accuracy Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild. Most of existing methods use the single-path deep convolutional neural network with softmax loss for basic FER, while they cannot deal with the challenging situations of the compound FER in the wild, because they fail to learn informative and discriminative features in a targeted manner. To this end, we present an Informative and Discriminative Feature Learning (IDFL) framework that consists of two key components: the Multi-Path Attention Convolutional Neural Network (MPACNN) and Balanced Separate loss (BS loss), for both basic and compound high-accuracy FER in the wild. Specifically, MPACNN leverages different paths to learn diverse features. These features are then adaptively fused into informative ones via an attention module, such that the model can adequately capture detailed information for both basic and compound FER. The BS loss maximizes the inter-class distance of features and minimizes the intra-class one. In this way, the features are discriminative enough for high-accuracy FER in the wild. Particularly, the BS loss is invoked as the objective function of MPACNN, so the model can learn informative and discriminative features at the same time, yielding better performance. Seven databases are utilized to evaluate the proposed method, and the results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both basic and compound expressions with good generalization ability. Moreover, our model contains fewer parameters and can be trained faster than other related models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pore-based fingerprint recognition has been researched for decades. Many algorithms have been proposed to improve the recognition accuracy of the system. However, the accuracies are always improved at the cost of speed. This article proposes a novel method to compare the pores in high-resolution fingerprint images using the popular coarse-to-fine strategy. A multiple spatial pairwise local co-occurrence descriptor is proposed to improve the calculation of the similarities between pores. It calculates multiple local co-occurrence statistics for each pore using its neighbors. The proposed method can establish correspondences between pores more accurately. The refinement of the correspondences is then achieved by using a local topology-preserving matching algorithm. The algorithm uses rotational invariant local structures and pore pair local topology similarities to calculate the cost of each correspondence. It can remove the mismatches more accurately and efficiently. The experimental results on two high-resolution fingerprint image databases show that the proposed algorithm perform well in both accuracy and speed comparing to the existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defocus blur detection (DBD), which has been widely applied to various fields, aims to detect the out-of-focus or in-focus pixels from a single image. Despite the fact that the deep learning based methods applied to DBD have outperformed the hand-crafted feature based methods, the performance cannot still meet our requirement. In this paper, a novel network is established for DBD. Unlike existing methods which only learn the projection from the in-focus part to the ground-truth, both in-focus and out-of-focus pixels, which are completely and symmetrically complementary, are taken into account. Specifically, two symmetric branches are designed to jointly estimate the probability of focus and defocus pixels, respectively. Due to their complementary constraint, each layer in a branch is affected by an attention obtained from another branch, effectively learning the detailed information which may be ignored in one branch. The feature maps from these two branches are then passed through a unique fusion block to simultaneously get the two-channel output measured by a complementary loss. Additionally, instead of estimating only one binary map from a specific layer, each layer is encouraged to estimate the ground truth to guide the binary map estimation in its linked shallower layer followed by a top-to-bottom combination strategy, gradually exploiting the global and local information. Experimental results on released datasets demonstrate that our proposed method remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional clinical experiences have shown the benefit of lesion location attention for improving clinical diagnosis tasks. Inspired by this point of interest, in this paper we propose a novel lesion location attention guided network named LLAGnet to focus on the discriminative features from lesion locations for multi-label thoracic disease classification in chest X-rays (CXRs). By revealing the equivalence of the region-level attention (RLA) and channel-level attention (CLA), we find that the RLA is available as priors for object localization while the CLA implicitly provides high weights to the attractive channels, which both enable lesion location attention excitation. To integrate the advantages from both mechanisms, the proposed LLAGnet is structured with two corresponding attention modules, i.e., the RLA and CLA modules. Specifically, the RLA module consists of the global and local branches. And the weakly supervised attention mechanism embedded in the global branch can obtain visual regions of lesion locations by back-propagating gradients. Then the optimal attention region is amplified and applied to the local branch to provide more fine-grained features for the image classification. Finally, the CLA module adaptively enhances the weights of channel-wise features from the lesion locations by modeling interdependencies among channels. Extensive experiments on the ChestX-ray14 dataset clearly substantiate the effectiveness of LLAGnet as compared with the state-of-the-art baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiview learning methods often achieve improvement compared with single-view-based approaches in many applications. Due to the powerful nonlinear ability and probabilistic perspective of Gaussian process (GP), some GP-based multiview efforts were presented. However, most of these methods make a strong assumption on the kernel function (e.g., radial basis function), which limits the capacity of the real data modeling. In order to address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel multiview approach by combining a multikernel and GP latent variable model. Instead of designing a deterministic kernel function, multiple kernel functions are established to automatically adapt various types of data. Considering a simple way of obtaining latent variables at the testing stage, a projection from the observed space to the latent space as a back constraint has also been simultaneously introduced into the proposed method. Additionally, different from some existing methods which apply the classifiers off-line, a hinge loss is embedded into the model to jointly learn the classification hyperplane, encouraging the latent variables belonging to the different classes to be separated. An efficient algorithm based on the gradient decent technique is constructed to optimize our method. Finally, we apply the proposed approach to three real-world datasets and the associated results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model compared with other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since human-labeled samples are free for the target set, unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted much attention in recent years, by additionally exploiting the source set. However, due to the differences on camera styles, illumination and backgrounds, there exists a large gap between source domain and target domain, introducing a great challenge on cross-domain matching. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose a novel method named Dual-stream Reciprocal Disentanglement Learning (DRDL), which is quite efficient in learning domain-invariant features. In DRDL, two encoders are first constructed for id-related and id-unrelated feature extractions, which are respectively measured by their associated classifiers. Furthermore, followed by an adversarial learning strategy, both streams reciprocally and positively effect each other, so that the id-related features and id-unrelated features are completely disentangled from a given image, allowing the encoder to be powerful enough to obtain the discriminative but domain-invariant features. In contrast to existing approaches, our proposed method is free from image generation, which not only reduces the computational complexity remarkably, but also removes redundant information from id-related features. Extensive experiments substantiate the superiority of our proposed method compared with the state-of-the-arts. The source code has been released in https://github.com/lhf12278/DRDL. • A novel two-stream network is proposed for Person Re-ID. • The id-related and id-unrelated classifiers are embedded to disentangle features. • The presented approach is much simpler and more efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing demand for hand hygiene, touchless palmprint recognition has made great strides recently, providing an effective solution for personal identification. Despite many efforts devoted to this area, the discriminative ability of touchless palmprint is still uncertain, especially for large-scale datasets. To address this problem, in this study, a large-scale touchless palmprint dataset was built containing 2334 palms from 1167 individuals. To the best of our knowledge, this is currently the largest touchless palmprint image benchmark regarding the number of individuals and palms. In addition, a novel deep learning framework was proposed for touchless palmprint recognition, referred to as 3D convolution palmprint recognition network (3DCPN), which leverages 3D convolutions to dynamically integrate multiple Gabor features. In 3DCPN, a novel variant of the Gabor filter is embedded into the first layer to enhance curve feature extraction. Using a well-designed ensemble scheme, low-level 3D features are convolved to extract high-level features. Finally, a region-based loss function is implemented to strengthen the discriminative ability of both global and local descriptors. Extensive experiments were conducted on the newly built dataset and other popular databases to demonstrate the superiority of our method. The results show that the proposed 3DCPN achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]