There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

A very deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has recently achieved great success for image super-resolution (SR) and offered hierarchical features as well. However, most deep CNN based SR models do not make full use of the hierarchical features from the original low-resolution (LR) images, thereby achieving relatively-low performance. In this paper, we propose a novel residual dense network (RDN) to address this problem in image SR. We fully exploit the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers. Specifically, we propose residual dense block (RDB) to extract abundant local features via dense connected convolutional layers. RDB further allows direct connections from the state of preceding RDB to all the layers of current RDB, leading to a contiguous memory (CM) mechanism. Local feature fusion in RDB is then used to adaptively learn more effective features from preceding and current local features and stabilizes the training of wider network. After fully obtaining dense local features, we use global feature fusion to jointly and adaptively learn global hierarchical features in a holistic way. Experiments on benchmark datasets with different degradation models show that our RDN achieves favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods.

/pdf/residual-dense-network-for-image-super-resolution-2lcgpkzt2a.pdf

Residual Dense Network for Image Super-Resolution

Thank you for reading principles of optics electromagnetic theory of propagation interference and diffraction of light. As you may know, people have search hundreds times for their favorite novels like this principles of optics electromagnetic theory of propagation interference and diffraction of light, but end up in harmful downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they are facing with some infectious bugs inside their computer.

Principles Of Optics Electromagnetic Theory Of Propagation Interference And Diffraction Of Light

MUCKE aims to mine a large volume of images, to structure them conceptually and to use this conceptual structuring in order to improve large-scale image retrieval. The last decade witnessed important progress concerning low-level image representations. However, there are a number problems which need to be solved in order to unleash the full potential of image mining in applications. The central problem with low-level representations is the mismatch between them and the human interpretation of image content. This problem can be instantiated, for instance, by the incapability of existing descriptors to capture spatial relationships between the concepts represented or by their incapability to convey an explanation of why two images are similar in a content-based image retrieval framework. We start by assessing existing local descriptors for image classification and by proposing to use co-occurrence matrices to better capture spatial relationships in images. The main focus in MUCKE is on cleaning large scale Web image corpora and on proposing image representations which are closer to the human interpretation of images. Consequently, we introduce methods which tackle these two problems and compare results to state of the art methods. Note: some aspects of this deliverable are withheld at this time as they are pending review. Please contact the authors for a preview.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel2/4524/12820/00592460.pdf

Image Processing

The intensive computation of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) engenders challenges for the hardwired encoder in terms of the hardware overhead and the power dissipation. On the other hand, the constrains in hardwired encoder design seriously degrade the efficiency of software oriented fast coding unit (CU) partition mode decision algorithms. A fast algorithm is attributed as VLSI friendly, when it possesses the following properties. First, the maximum complexity of encoding a coding tree unit (CTU) could be reduced. Second, the parallelism of the hardwired encoder should not be deteriorated. Third, the process engine of the fast algorithm must be of low hardware- and power-overhead. In this paper, we devise the convolution neural network based fast algorithm to decrease no less than two CU partition modes in each CTU for full rate-distortion optimization (RDO) processing, thereby reducing the encoder’s hardware complexity. As our algorithm does not depend on the correlations among CU depths or spatially nearby CUs, it is friendly to the parallel processing and does not deteriorate the rhythm of RDO pipelining. Experiments illustrated that, an averaged 61.1% intraencoding time was saved, whereas the Bjontegaard-Delta bit-rate augment is 2.67%. Capitalizing on the optimal arithmetic representation, we developed the high-speed [714 MHz in the worst conditions (125 °C, 0.9 V)] and low-cost (42.5k gate) accelerator for our fast algorithm by using TSMC 65-nm CMOS technology. One accelerator could support HD1080p at 55 frames/s real-time encoding. The corresponding power dissipation was 16.2 mW at 714 MHz. Finally, our accelerator is provided with good scalability. Four accelerators fulfill the throughput requirements of UltraHD-4K at 55 frames/s.

CU Partition Mode Decision for HEVC Hardwired Intra Encoder Using Convolution Neural Network

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard achieves half bit-rate reduction while keeping the same quality compared with AVC. However, it still cannot satisfy the demand of higher quality in real applications, especially at low bit rates. To further improve the quality of reconstructed frame while reducing the bitrates, a residual highway convolutional neural network (RHCNN) is proposed in this paper for in-loop filtering in HEVC. The RHCNN is composed of several residual highway units and convolutional layers. In the highway units, there are some paths that could allow unimpeded information across several layers. Moreover, there also exists one identity skip connection (shortcut) from the beginning to the end, which is followed by one small convolutional layer. Without conflicting with deblocking filter (DF) and sample adaptive offset (SAO) filter in HEVC, RHCNN is employed as a high-dimension filter following DF and SAO to enhance the quality of reconstructed frames. To facilitate the real application, we apply the proposed method to I frame, P frame, and B frame, respectively. For obtaining better performance, the entire quantization parameter (QP) range is divided into several QP bands, where a dedicated RHCNN is trained for each QP band. Furthermore, we adopt a progressive training scheme for the RHCNN where the QP band with lower value is used for early training and their weights are used as initial weights for QP band of higher values in a progressive manner. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to not only raise the PSNR of reconstructed frame but also prominently reduce the bit-rate compared with HEVC reference software.

Residual Highway Convolutional Neural Networks for in-loop Filtering in HEVC.

Weakly supervised object localization remains a challenge when learning object localization models from image category labels. Optimizing image classification tends to activate object parts and ignore the full object extent, while expanding object parts into full object extent could deteriorate the performance of image classification. In this paper, we propose a divergent activation (DA) approach, and target at learning complementary and discriminative visual patterns for image classification and weakly supervised object localization from the perspective of discrepancy. To this end, we design hierarchical divergent activation (HDA), which leverages the semantic discrepancy to spread feature activation, implicitly. We also propose discrepant divergent activation (DDA), which pursues object extent by learning mutually exclusive visual patterns, explicitly. Deep networks implemented with HDA and DDA, referred to as DANets, diverge and fuse discrepant yet discriminative features for image classification and object localization in an end-to-end manner. Experiments validate that DANets advance the performance of object localization while maintaining high performance of image classification on CUB-200 and ILSVRC datasets

/pdf/danet-divergent-activation-for-weakly-supervised-object-4nhktanads.pdf

DANet: Divergent Activation for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

We present an algorithm for marker-less performance capture of interacting humans using only three hand-held Kinect cameras. Our method reconstructs human skeletal poses, deforming surface geometry and camera poses for every time step of the depth video. Skeletal configurations and camera poses are found by solving a joint energy minimization problem which optimizes the alignment of RGBZ data from all cameras, as well as the alignment of human shape templates to the Kinect data. The energy function is based on a combination of geometric correspondence finding, implicit scene segmentation, and correspondence finding using image features. Only the combination of geometric and photometric correspondences and the integration of human pose and camera pose estimation enables reliable performance capture with only three sensors. As opposed to previous performance capture methods, our algorithm succeeds on general uncontrolled indoor scenes with potentially dynamic background, and it succeeds even if the cameras are moving.

/pdf/performance-capture-of-interacting-characters-with-handheld-2hod7u90zu.pdf

Performance Capture of Interacting Characters with Handheld Kinects

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used and have achieved great success in computer vision and speech processing applications. However, deploying the large-scale CNN model in the embedded system is subject to the constraints of computation and memory. An optimized block-floating-point (BFP) arithmetic is adopted in our accelerator for efficient inference of deep neural networks in this paper. The feature maps and model parameters are represented in 16-bit and 8-bit formats, respectively, in the off-chip memory, which can reduce memory and off-chip bandwidth requirements by 50% and 75% compared to the 32-bit FP counterpart. The proposed 8-bit BFP arithmetic with optimized rounding and shifting-operation-based quantization schemes improves the energy and hardware efficiency by three times. One CNN model can be deployed in our accelerator without retraining at the cost of an accuracy loss of not more than 0.12%. The proposed reconfigurable accelerator with three parallelism dimensions, ping-pong off-chip DDR3 memory access, and an optimized on-chip buffer group is implemented on the Xilinx VC709 evaluation board. Our accelerator achieves a performance of 760.83 GOP/s and 82.88 GOP/s/W under a 200-MHz working frequency, significantly outperforming previous accelerators.

Xiangyang Ji

Papers

CU Partition Mode Decision for HEVC Hardwired Intra Encoder Using Convolution Neural Network

Residual Highway Convolutional Neural Networks for in-loop Filtering in HEVC.

DANet: Divergent Activation for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

Performance Capture of Interacting Characters with Handheld Kinects

High-Performance FPGA-Based CNN Accelerator With Block-Floating-Point Arithmetic