Italy

In this paper we address unsupervised machine learning for two use cases in satellite communication, which are scheduling problems: (i) Ka-band frequency plan optimization and (ii) dynamic configuration of an active antenna array satellite. We apply approaches based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework to both of them. We compare against baselines of currently deployed solutions, and show that they can be significantly outperformed by the EM-based approach. In addition, the approaches can be applied incrementally, thus supporting fast adaptation to small changes in the input configuration.

ICPR 2020

Expectation-Maximization for Scheduling Problems in Satellite Communication

beamforming

satellite communication

resource allocation

ECAI2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI, including:




**An extensive programme of workshops, tutorials, and invited speakers**

**The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference (PAIS)**

**The Frontiers in AI track sessions**

**The Lab To Market event**

**The Women in AI time**

**The EU Challenges forum**

… and many more!

ECAI 2020

ECAI 2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI.

poster

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


Mixture model (MM) is a probabilistic framework allows us to define dataset containing K different modes. When each of the modes is associated with a Gaussian distribution, we refer to it as Gaussian MM or GMM. Given a data point x, a GMM may assume the existence of a random index k ∈ {1, . . . , K} identifying which Gaussian the particular data is associated with. In a traditional GMM paradigm, it is straightforward to compute in closed-form, the conditional likelihood p(x|k,θ) as well as the responsibility probability p(k|x, θ) describing the distribution weights for each data. Computing the responsibility allows us to retrieve many important statistics of the overall dataset, including the weights of each of the modes/clusters. Modern large datasets are often containing multiple unlabelled modes, such as paintings dataset may con- tain several styles; fashion images containing several unlabelled categories. In its raw representation, the Euclidean distances between the data (e.g., images) do not allow them to form mixtures naturally, nor it’s feasible to compute responsibility distribution analytically, making GMM unable to apply. In this paper, we utilize the generative adversarial network (GAN) framework to achieve a plausible alternative method to compute these probabilities. The key insight is that we compute them at the data’s latent space z instead of x. However, this process of z → x is irreversible under GAN which renders the computation of responsibility p(k|x, θ) infeasible. Our paper proposed a novel method to solve it by using a so-called posterior consistency module (PCM). PCM acts like a GAN, except its generator CPCM does not output the data, but instead it outputs a distribution to approximate p(k|x,θ). The entire network is trained in an “end-to-end” fashion. Trough these techniques, it allows us to model the dataset of very complex structure using GMM and subsequently to discover interesting properties of an unsupervised dataset, including its segments, as well as generating new “out- distribution” data by smooth linear interpolation across any combinations of the modes in a completely unsupervised manner.

GAN-based Gaussian Mixture Model Responsibility Learning


Blind reduction of speckle noise has become a long-standing unsolved problem in several imaging applications, such as medical ultrasound imaging, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, and underwater sonar imaging, etc. The unwanted noise could lead to negative effects on the reliable detection and recognition of objects of interest. From a statistical point of view, speckle noise could be assumed to be multiplicative, significantly different from the common additive Gaussian noise. The purpose of this study is to blindly reduce the speckle noise under non-ideal imaging conditions. The multiplicative relationship between latent sharp image and random noise will be first converted into an additive version through a logarithmic transformation. To promote imaging performance, we introduced the feature pyramid network (FPN) and atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP), contributing to a more powerful deep blind DeSPeckling Network (named as DSPNet). In particular, DSPNet is mainly composed of two subnetworks, i.e., Log-NENet (i.e., noise estimation network in logarithmic domain) and Log-DNNet (i.e., denoising network in logarithmic domain). Log-NENet and Log-DNNet are, respectively, proposed to estimate noise level map and reduce random noise in logarithmic domain. The multi-scale mixed loss function is further proposed to improve the robust generalization of DSPNet. The proposed deep blind despeckling network is capable of reducing random noise and preserving salient image details. Both synthetic and realistic experiments have demonstrated the superior performance of our DSPNet in terms of quantitative evaluations and visual image qualities.

DSPNet: Deep Learning-Enabled Blind Reduction of Speckle Noise


This paper studies the problem of Person Re-Identification (ReID)
for large-scale applications. Recent research efforts have been devoted
to building complicated part models, which introduce considerably
high computational cost and memory consumption, inhibiting its practicability
in large-scale applications. This paper aims to develop a novel learning
strategy to find efficient feature embeddings while maintaining the
balance of accuracy and model complexity. More specifically, we find
by enhancing the classical triplet loss together with cross-entropy
loss, our method can explore the hard examples and build a discriminant
feature embedding yet compact enough for large-scale applications.
Our method is carried out progressively using Bayesian optimization,
and we call it the Progressive Learning Algorithm (PLA). Extensive
experiments on three large-scale datasets show that our PLA is comparable
or better than the state-of-the-arts. Especially, on the challenging
Market-1501 dataset, we achieve Rank-1=94.7%/mAP=89.4% while saving
at least 30\% parameters than strong part models.

Constructing Geographic and Long-term Temporal Graph for Traffic Forecasting


Text visual question answering (TextVQA) targets at answering the question related to texts appearing in the given images, posing more challenges than VQA by requiring a deeper recognition and understanding of various shapes of humanreadable scene texts as well as their meanings in different contexts. To overcome the weakness of exiting works, we propose a novel multi-modal contextual graph neural network (MCG) model for TextVQA. The proposed MCG model can capture the relationships between visual features of scene texts and non-textual objects in the given images as well as utilize richer sources of multi-modal features to improve the model performance. In particular, we encode the scene texts into richer features containing textual, visual and positional features, then model the visual relations between scene texts and non-textual objects through a contextual graph neural network. Our extensive experiments on real-world dataset demonstrate the advantages of the proposed MCG model over baseline approaches.

Multi-Modal Contextual Graph Neural Network for Text Visual Question Answering

Adversarial examples are slightly modified inputs devised to cause erroneous inference of deep learning models. Protection against the intervention of adversarial examples is a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed before the wide adoption of deep-learning based intelligent systems. In this research, we utilize the method known as input recharacterization to effectively eliminate the perturbations found in the adversarial examples. By converting images from the intensity domain into density-based representation using halftoning operation, performance of the classifier can be properly maintained. With adversarial attacks generated using FGSM, I-FGSM, and PGD, the top-5 accuracy of the hybrid model can still achieve 80.97%, 78.77%, 81.56%, respectively. Although the accuracy has been slightly affected, the influence of adversarial examples is significantly discounted. The average improvement over existing input transform defense mechanisms is approximately 10%.

Defense Mechanism Against Adversarial Attacks Using Density-based Representation of Images


In this work, we propose a generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture, which is named as multi-Laplacian GAN with edge enhancement and abbreviated as MLGE. MLGE reconstructs HR images from 16×16 pixels to 128×128 pixels and does not use any prior face information. Experimental results verify that MLGE effectively reconstructs HR images and outperforms state-of-the-art methods Both quantitatively and qualitatively.


Multi-Laplacian GAN with Edge Enhancement for Face Super Resolution

Action recognition in continuous video streams is a growing field since the past few years. Deep learning techniques and in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieved good results in this topic. However, intrinsic CNNs limitations begin to cap the results since 2D CNN cannot capture temporal information and 3D CNN are too much resource demanding for real-time applications. Capsule Network, evolution of CNN, already proves its interesting benefits on small and low informational datasets like MNIST but yet its true potential has not emerged. In this paper we tackle the action recognition problem by proposing a new architecture combining Temporal Shift module over deep Capsule Network. Temporal Shift module permits us to insert temporal information over 2D Capsule Network with a zero computational cost to conserve the lightness of 2D capsules and their ability to connect spatial features. Our proposed approach outperforms or brings near state-of-the-art results on color and depth information on public datasets like First Person Hand Action and DHG 14/28 with a number of parameters 10 to 40 times less than existing approaches.

2D Deep Video Capsule Network with Temporal Shift for Action Recognition


Stylizing images as paintings has been a popular computer vision technique for a long time. However, most studies only consider the art styles known today, and rarely have investigated styles that have not been painted yet. We fill this gap by projecting the high-dimensional style space of Convolutional Neural Network features to the latent low-dimensional style manifold space. It is worth noting that in our visualized space, simple style linear interpolation is enabled to generate new artistic styles that would revolutionize the future of art in technology. We propose a model of an Interactive Style Space (ISS) to prove that in a manifold style space, the unknown styles are obtainable through interpolation of known styles. We verify the correctness and feasibility of our Interactive Style Space (ISS) and validate style interpolation within the space.

Interactive Style Space of Deep Features and Style Innovation


Vessels segmentation often relies on a vessel filtering step. However,
selecting a filter for an application is a challenging problem using the
literature alone. We have chosen 7 methods representative of the last 20
years of vesselness enhancement and designed a common comparison
framework to help the community compare these filters.

Vesselness Filters: A Survey with BenchmarksApplied to Liver Imaging


In recent years, deep learning has been popular in combining with cytopathology diagnosis. Using the whole slide images (WSI) scanned by electronic scanners at clinics, researchers have developed many algorithms to classify the slide (benign or malignant). However, the key area that support the diagnosis result can be relatively small in a thyroid WSI, and only the global label can be acquired, which make the direct use of the strongly supervised learning framework infeasible. What’s more, because the clinical diagnosis of the thyroid cells requires the use of visual features in different scales, a generic feature extraction way may not achieve good performance. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised multi-instance learning framework based on attention mechanism with multi-scale feature fusion (MSF) using convolutional neural network (CNN) for thyroid cytopathological diagnosis. We take each WSI as a bag, each bag contains multiple instances which are the different regions of the WSI, our framework is trained to learn the key area automatically and make the classification. We also propose a feature fusion structure, merge the low-level features into the final feature map and add an instance-level attention module in it, which improves the classification accuracy. Our model is trained and tested on the collected clinical data, reaches the accuracy of 93.2%, which outperforms the other existing methods. We also tested our model on a public histopathology dataset and achieves better result than the state-of-the-art deep multi-instance method.

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GAN-based Gaussian Mixture Model Responsibility Learning

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