Showing papers by "Vincenzo Piuri published in 2020"

A Decision Support System for Wind Power Production

Abstract: Renewable energy production is constantly growing worldwide, and some countries produce a relevant percentage of their daily electricity consumption through wind energy. Therefore, decision support systems that can make accurate predictions of wind-based power production are of paramount importance for the traders operating in the energy market and for the managers in charge of planning the nonrenewable energy production. In this paper, we present a decision support system that can predict electric power production, estimate a variability index for the prediction, and analyze the wind farm (WF) production characteristics. The main contribution of this paper is a novel system for long-term electric power prediction based solely on the weather forecasts; thus, it is suitable for the WFs that cannot collect or manage the real-time data acquired by the sensors. Our system is based on neural networks and on novel techniques for calibrating and thresholding the weather forecasts based on the distinctive characteristics of the WF orography. We tuned and evaluated the proposed system using the data collected from two WFs over a two-year period and achieved satisfactory results. We studied different feature sets, training strategies, and system configurations before implementing this system for a player in the energy market. This company evaluated the power production prediction performance and the impact of our system at ten different WFs under real-world conditions and achieved a significant improvement with respect to their previous approach.

Finger Vein Verification Algorithm Based on Fully Convolutional Neural Network and Conditional Random Field

Abstract: Owing to the complexity of finger vein patterns in shape and spatial dependence, the existing methods suffer from an inability to obtain accurate and stable finger vein features. This paper, so as to compensate this defect, proposes an end-to-end model to extract vein textures through integrating the fully convolutional neural network (FCN) with conditional random field (CRF). Firstly, to reduce missing pixels during ROI extraction, the method of sliding window summation is employed to filter and adjusted with self-built tools. In addition, the traditional baselines are endowed with different weights to automatically assign labels. Secondly, the deformable convolution network, through replacing the plain counterparts in the standard U-Net mode, can capture the complex venous structural features by adaptively adjusting the receptive fields according to veins’ scales and shapes. Moreover, the above features can be further mined and accumulated by combining the recurrent neural network (RNN) and the residual network (ResNet). With the steps mentioned above, the fully convolutional neural network is constructed. Finally, the CRF with Gaussian pairwise potential conducts mean-field approximate inference as the RNN, and then is embedded as a part of the FCN, so that the model can fully integrate CRF with FCNs, which provides the possibility to involve the usual back-propagation algorithm in training the whole deep network end-to-end. The proposed models in this paper were tested on three public finger vein datasets SDUMLA, MMCBNU and HKPU with experimental results to certify their superior performance on finger-vein verification tasks compared with other equivalent models including U-Net.

2M BeautyNet: Facial Beauty Prediction Based on Multi-Task Transfer Learning

Abstract: Facial beauty prediction (FBP) has become an emerging area in the field of artificial intelligence. However, the lacks of data and accurate face representation hinder the development of FBP. Multi-task transfer learning can effectively avoid over-fitting, and utilize auxiliary information of related tasks to optimize the main task. In this paper, we present a network named Multi-input Multi-task Beauty Network (2M BeautyNet) and use transfer learning to predict facial beauty. In the experiment, beauty prediction is the main task, and gender recognition is the auxiliary. For multi-task training, we employ multi-task loss weights automatic learning strategy to improve the performance of FBP. Finally, we replace the softmax classifier with a random forest. We conduct experiments on the Large Scale Facial Beauty Database (LSFBD) and SCUT-FBP5500 database. Results show that our method has achieved good results on LSFBD, the accuracy of FBP is up to 68.23%. Our 2M BeautyNet structure is suitable for multiple inputs of different databases.

TAI-SARNET: Deep Transferred Atrous-Inception CNN for Small Samples SAR ATR.

Abstract: Since Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) targets are full of coherent speckle noise, the traditional deep learning models are difficult to effectively extract key features of the targets and share high computational complexity. To solve the problem, an effective lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model incorporating transfer learning is proposed for better handling SAR targets recognition tasks. In this work, firstly we propose the Atrous-Inception module, which combines both atrous convolution and inception module to obtain rich global receptive fields, while strictly controlling the parameter amount and realizing lightweight network architecture. Secondly, the transfer learning strategy is used to effectively transfer the prior knowledge of the optical, non-optical, hybrid optical and non-optical domains to the SAR target recognition tasks, thereby improving the model's recognition performance on small sample SAR target datasets. Finally, the model constructed in this paper is verified to be 97.97% on ten types of MSTAR datasets under standard operating conditions, reaching a mainstream target recognition rate. Meanwhile, the method presented in this paper shows strong robustness and generalization performance on a small number of randomly sampled SAR target datasets.

Asian Female Facial Beauty Prediction Using Deep Neural Networks via Transfer Learning and Multi-Channel Feature Fusion

Abstract: Facial beauty plays an important role in many fields today, such as digital entertainment, facial beautification surgery and etc. However, the facial beauty prediction task has the challenges of insufficient training datasets, low performance of traditional methods, and rarely takes advantage of the feature learning of Convolutional Neural Networks. In this paper, a transfer learning based CNN method that integrates multiple channel features is utilized for Asian female facial beauty prediction tasks. Firstly, a Large-Scale Asian Female Beauty Dataset (LSAFBD) with a more reasonable distribution has been established. Secondly, in order to improve CNN’s self-learning ability of facial beauty prediction task, an effective CNN using a novel Softmax-MSE loss function and a double activation layer has been proposed. Then, a data augmentation method and transfer learning strategy were also utilized to mitigate the impact of insufficient data on proposed CNN performance. Finally, a multi-channel feature fusion method was explored to further optimize the proposed CNN model. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to traditional learning method combating the Asian female FBP task. Compared with other state-of-the-art CNN models, the proposed CNN model can improve the rank-1 recognition rate from 60.40% to 64.85%, and the pearson correlation coefficient from 0.8594 to 0.8829 on the LSAFBD and obtained 0.9200 regression prediction results on the SCUT dataset.

MFFA-SARNET: Deep Transferred Multi-Level Feature Fusion Attention Network with Dual Optimized Loss for Small-Sample SAR ATR

Abstract: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR), most algorithms of which have employed and relied on sufficient training samples to receive a strong discriminative classification model, has remained a challenging task in recent years, among which the challenge of SAR data acquisition and further insight into the intuitive features of SAR images are the main concerns. In this paper, a deep transferred multi-level feature fusion attention network with dual optimized loss, called a multi-level feature attention Synthetic Aperture Radar network (MFFA-SARNET), is proposed to settle the problem of small samples in SAR ATR tasks. Firstly, a multi-level feature attention (MFFA) network is established to learn more discriminative features from SAR images with a fusion method, followed by alleviating the impact of background features on images with the following attention module that focuses more on the target features. Secondly, a novel dual optimized loss is incorporated to further optimize the classification network, which enhances the robust and discriminative learning power of features. Thirdly, transfer learning is utilized to validate the variances and small-sample classification tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on a public database with three different configurations consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed network, and the significant improvements yielded to surpass those of the state-of-the-art methods under small-sample conditions.

Weakly supervised facial expression recognition via transferred DAL-CNN and active incremental learning

Abstract: In recent years, facial expression recognition (FER) has becoming a growing topic in computer vision with promising applications on virtual reality and human–robot interaction. Due to the influence of illumination, individual differences, attitude variation, etc., facial expression recognition with robust accuracy in complex environment is still an unsolved problem. Meanwhile, with the wide use of social communication, massive data are uploaded to the Internet; the effective utilization of those data is still a challenge due to noisy label phenomenon in the study of FER. To resolve the above-mentioned problems, firstly, a double active layer-based CNN is established to recognize the facial expression with high accuracy by learning robust and discriminative features from the data, which could enhance the robustness of network. Secondly, an active incremental learning method was utilized to tackle the problem of using Internet data. During the training phase, a two-stage transfer learning method is explored to transfer the relative information from face recognition to FER task to alleviate the inadequate training data in deep convolution network. Besides, in order to make better use of facial expression data from Web site and further improve the FER accuracy, Unconstrained Facial Expression Database from Web site database is built in this paper. Extensive experiments performed on two public facial expression recognition databases FER 2013 and SFEW 2.0 have demonstrated that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which could achieve 67.08% and 51.90%, respectively.

Facial Beauty Prediction via Local Feature Fusion and Broad Learning System

Abstract: Facial beauty prediction (FBP), as a frontier topic in the domain of artificial intelligence regarding anthropology, has witnessed some good results as deep learning technology progressively develops. However, it is still limited by the complexity of the deep structure network in need of a large number of parameters and high dimensions, easily leading to a great consumption of time. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a fast training FBP method based on local feature fusion and broad learning system (BLS). Firstly, two-dimensional principal component analysis (2DPCA) is employed to reduce the dimension of the local texture image so as to lessen its redundancy. Secondly, local feature fusion method is adopted to extract more advanced features through avoiding the effects from unstable illumination, individual differences, and various postures. Finally, extensional feature eigenvectors are input to the broad learning network to train an efficient FBP model, which effectively shortens operational time and improve its preciseness. Extensive experiments with the proposed method on large scale Asian female beauty database (LSAFBD) can be conducted within 13.33s while sustaining an accuracy of 58.97%, impressively outstripping other state-of-the-art methods in training speed.

Guest Editorial Special Issue on Edge-Cloud Interplay Based on SDN and NFV for Next-Generation IoT Applications

Abstract: With significant and continuing advances in information and communication technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) will play an increasingly important role in domains, such as healthcare, transportation, finance, and energy. In an IoT system, billions of devices (e.g., sensors, wearables, and smart appliances) are connected to the global network infrastructure, and one associated phenomenon is the generation of a large volume of data. Apart from data volume, the velocity, variety, and veracity of these data will pose a significant burden on conventional networking infrastructures. However, as sensor and fifth-generation (5G) cellular technologies advance, so will the pervasiveness of IoT deployment. Parallel to this trend, cloud computing has been integrated with IoT in order to address limitations in existing IoT networks (e.g., storage and computing resources), and examples include Google cloud dataflow and Amazon IoT. However, cloud-centric IoT solutions may not be suited for delay-sensitive and computationally intensive applications, for example, due to resource availability, end-to-end latency, bandwidth, etc. Increasingly, large-scale IoT deployments demand high connectivity, interoperability, and orchestration which are necessary for minimizing latency and maximizing throughput. This highlights the importance of a distributed computing platform that can support the interactions between IoT and cloud computing systems.

Computational intelligence in cloud computing

Abstract: Cloud Computing (CC) is a model that enables ubiquitous, convenient, and on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. In CC applications, it is possible to access both software and hardware architectures remotely and with little or no knowledge about their physical or logical locations. Due to its low deployment and management costs, the CC paradigm is being increasingly used in a wide variety of online services and applications, including remote computation, software-as-a-service, off-site storage, entertainment, and communication platforms. However, several aspects of CC applications, such as system design, optimization, and security issues, have become too complex to be efficiently treated using traditional algorithmic approaches under the increasingly high complexity and performance demands of current applications. Recently, advances in Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques have fostered the development of intelligent solutions for CC applications. CI methods such as artificial neural networks, deep learning, fuzzy logic, and evolutionary algorithms have enabled improving CC paradigms through their capabilities of extracting knowledge from high quantities of real-world data, thus further optimizing their design, performance, and security with respect to traditional techniques. This chapter introduces recent CI techniques, reviews the main applications of CI in CC, and presents challenges and research trends.

Unsupervised Learning From Limited Available Data by β-NMF and Dual Autoencoder

Abstract: Unsupervised Learning (UL) models are a class of Machine Learning (ML) which concerns with reducing dimensionality, data factorization, disentangling and learning the representations among the data. The UL models gain their popularity due to their abilities to learn without any predefined label, and they are able to reduce the noise and redundancy among the data samples. However, generalizing the UL models for different applications including image generation, compression, encoding, and recognition faces different challenges due to limited available data for learning, diversity, and complex dimensions. To overcome such challenges, we propose a partial learning procedure by utilizing the $\beta$-Non Negative Matrix Factorization ($\beta$-NMF), which maps the data into two complementary subspaces constituting generalized driven priors among the data. Moreover, we employ a dual-shallow Autoencoder (AE) to learn the subspaces separately or jointly for image reconstruction and visualization tasks, where our model performance shows superior results to the literary works when learning the model with a small amount of data and generalizing it for large-scale unseen data.

On Approximating the Non-negative Rank: Applications to Unsupervised Image Reduction

Abstract: Unsupervised Learning (UL) methods are a class of machine learning which aims to disentangle the representations and reduce the dimensionality among the data without any predefined labels Among all UL methods, the Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) factorizes the data into two subspaces of non-negative components Moreover, the NMF enforces the non-negativity, sparsity, and part-based analysis, thus the representations can be interpreted and explained for the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) applications However, one of the main issues when using the NMF is to impose the factorization rank r to identify the dimensionality of the subspaces, where the rank is usually unknown in advance and known as the non-negative rank that is used as a prior to carrying out the factorization Accordingly, we propose a novel method for the non-negative rank r approximation to help solving this problem, and we generalize our method among different image scales Where, the results on different image data sets confirm the validity of our approach