Showing papers on "Robustness (computer science) published in 2021"

TEASER: Fast and Certifiable Point Cloud Registration

Abstract: We propose the first fast and certifiable algorithm for the registration of two sets of three-dimensional (3-D) points in the presence of large amounts of outlier correspondences. A certifiable algorithm is one that attempts to solve an intractable optimization problem (e.g., robust estimation with outliers) and provides readily checkable conditions to verify if the returned solution is optimal (e.g., if the algorithm produced the most accurate estimate in the face of outliers) or bound its suboptimality or accuracy. Toward this goal, we first reformulate the registration problem using a truncated least squares (TLS) cost that makes the estimation insensitive to a large fraction of spurious correspondences. Then, we provide a general graph-theoretic framework to decouple scale, rotation, and translation estimation, which allows solving in cascade for the three transformations. Despite the fact that each subproblem (scale, rotation, and translation estimation) is still nonconvex and combinatorial in nature, we show that 1) TLS scale and (component-wise) translation estimation can be solved in polynomial time via an adaptive voting scheme, 2) TLS rotation estimation can be relaxed to a semidefinite program (SDP) and the relaxation is tight, even in the presence of extreme outlier rates, and 3) the graph-theoretic framework allows drastic pruning of outliers by finding the maximum clique. We name the resulting algorithm TEASER ( Truncated least squares Estimation And SEmidefinite Relaxation ). While solving large SDP relaxations is typically slow, we develop a second fast and certifiable algorithm, named TEASER++, that uses graduated nonconvexity to solve the rotation subproblem and leverages Douglas-Rachford Splitting to efficiently certify global optimality. For both algorithms, we provide theoretical bounds on the estimation errors, which are the first of their kind for robust registration problems. Moreover, we test their performance on standard benchmarks, object detection datasets, and the 3DMatch scan matching dataset, and show that 1) both algorithms dominate the state-of-the-art (e.g., RANSAC, branch-&-bound, heuristics) and are robust to more than $\text{99}\%$ outliers when the scale is known, 2) TEASER++ can run in milliseconds and it is currently the fastest robust registration algorithm, and 3) TEASER++ is so robust it can also solve problems without correspondences (e.g., hypothesizing all-to-all correspondences), where it largely outperforms ICP and it is more accurate than Go-ICP while being orders of magnitude faster. We release a fast open-source C++ implementation of TEASER++.

Data-Driven Model Predictive Control With Stability and Robustness Guarantees

Abstract: We propose a robust data-driven model predictive control (MPC) scheme to control linear time-invariant systems. The scheme uses an implicit model description based on behavioral systems theory and past measured trajectories. In particular, it does not require any prior identification step, but only an initially measured input–output trajectory as well as an upper bound on the order of the unknown system. First, we prove exponential stability of a nominal data-driven MPC scheme with terminal equality constraints in the case of no measurement noise. For bounded additive output measurement noise, we propose a robust modification of the scheme, including a slack variable with regularization in the cost. We prove that the application of this robust MPC scheme in a multistep fashion leads to practical exponential stability of the closed loop w.r.t. the noise level. The presented results provide the first (theoretical) analysis of closed-loop properties, resulting from a simple, purely data-driven MPC scheme.

DASNet: Dual Attentive Fully Convolutional Siamese Networks for Change Detection in High-Resolution Satellite Images

Abstract: Change detection is a basic task of remote sensing image processing. The research objective is to identify the change information of interest and filter out the irrelevant change information as interference factors. Recently, the rise in deep learning has provided new tools for change detection, which have yielded impressive results. However, the available methods focus mainly on the difference information between multitemporal remote sensing images and lack robustness to pseudochange information. To overcome the lack of resistance in current methods to pseudochanges, in this article, we propose a new method, namely, dual attentive fully convolutional Siamese networks, for change detection in high-resolution images. Through the dual attention mechanism, long-range dependencies are captured to obtain more discriminant feature representations to enhance the recognition performance of the model. Moreover, the imbalanced sample is a serious problem in change detection, i.e., unchanged samples are much more abundant than changed samples, which is one of the main reasons for pseudochanges. We propose the weighted double-margin contrastive loss to address this problem by punishing attention to unchanged feature pairs and increasing attention to changed feature pairs. The experimental results of our method on the change detection dataset and the building change detection dataset demonstrate that compared with other baseline methods, the proposed method realizes maximum improvements of 2.9% and 4.2%, respectively, in the F 1 score. Our PyTorch implementation is available at https://github.com/lehaifeng/DASNet .

Classification of Skin Disease Using Deep Learning Neural Networks with MobileNet V2 and LSTM

Abstract: Deep learning models are efficient in learning the features that assist in understanding complex patterns precisely. This study proposed a computerized process of classifying skin disease through deep learning based MobileNet V2 and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM). The MobileNet V2 model proved to be efficient with a better accuracy that can work on lightweight computational devices. The proposed model is efficient in maintaining stateful information for precise predictions. A grey-level co-occurrence matrix is used for assessing the progress of diseased growth. The performance has been compared against other state-of-the-art models such as Fine-Tuned Neural Networks (FTNN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition developed by Visual Geometry Group (VGG), and convolutional neural network architecture that expanded with few changes. The HAM10000 dataset is used and the proposed method has outperformed other methods with more than 85% accuracy. Its robustness in recognizing the affected region much faster with almost 2× lesser computations than the conventional MobileNet model results in minimal computational efforts. Furthermore, a mobile application is designed for instant and proper action. It helps the patient and dermatologists identify the type of disease from the affected region's image at the initial stage of the skin disease. These findings suggest that the proposed system can help general practitioners efficiently and effectively diagnose skin conditions, thereby reducing further complications and morbidity.

Model-Free Predictive Current Control of PMSM Drives Based on Extended State Observer Using Ultralocal Model

Abstract: Conventional model predictive current control (MPCC) is a powerful control strategy for three-phase inverters that has the advantages of simple concept, quick response, easy implementation, and good performance. However, MPCC is sensitive to machine parameter variation, and the performance degrades substantially if a mismatch exists between the model parameters and real machine parameters. Model-free predictive current control (MFPCC) based on an ultralocal model, which uses only the input and output of the system without considering any motor parameters, has been proposed to solve this problem in this article. Since parameters are not required, the robustness of the control system is improved. However, conventional MFPCC based on an ultralocal model uses many control parameters, which increases the tuning work. Furthermore, the control performance is not ideal at low sampling frequency. This article proposes an improved MFPCC based on the extended state observer of PMSM drives that does not require motor parameters and needs less tuning work and lower computational time while achieving the better performance in terms of current harmonics, tracking error, and dynamic overshoot. The proposed method is compared to conventional MPCC and MFPCC, and the effectiveness is confirmed by the simulation and experimental results.

Fuzzy Detection Aided Real-Time and Robust Visual Tracking Under Complex Environments

Abstract: Today, a new generation of artificial intelligence has brought several new research domains such as computer vision (CV). Thus, target tracking, the base of CV, has been a hotspot research domain. Correlation filter (CF)-based algorithm has been the basis of real-time tracking algorithms because of the high tracking efficiency. However, CF-based algorithms usually failed to track objects in complex environments. Therefore, this article proposes a fuzzy detection strategy to prejudge the tracking result. If the prejudge process determines that the tracking result is not good enough in the current frame, the stored target template is used for following tracking to avoid the template pollution. During testing on the OTB100 dataset, the experimental results show that the proposed auxiliary detection strategy improves the tracking robustness under complex environment by ensuring the tracking speed.

UTNet: A Hybrid Transformer Architecture for Medical Image Segmentation

Abstract: Transformer architecture has emerged to be successful in a number of natural language processing tasks. However, its applications to medical vision remain largely unexplored. In this study, we present UTNet, a simple yet powerful hybrid Transformer architecture that integrates self-attention into a convolutional neural network for enhancing medical image segmentation. UTNet applies self-attention modules in both encoder and decoder for capturing long-range dependency at different scales with minimal overhead. To this end, we propose an efficient self-attention mechanism along with relative position encoding that reduces the complexity of self-attention operation significantly from \(O(n^2)\) to approximate O(n). A new self-attention decoder is also proposed to recover fine-grained details from the skipped connections in the encoder. Our approach addresses the dilemma that Transformer requires huge amounts of data to learn vision inductive bias. Our hybrid layer design allows the initialization of Transformer into convolutional networks without a need of pre-training. We have evaluated UTNet on the multi-label, multi-vendor cardiac magnetic resonance imaging cohort. UTNet demonstrates superior segmentation performance and robustness against the state-of-the-art approaches, holding the promise to generalize well on other medical image segmentations.

Human Memory Update Strategy: A Multi-Layer Template Update Mechanism for Remote Visual Monitoring

Abstract: In the era of rapid development of artificial intelligence, the integration of multimedia and human-artificial intelligence has become an important research hotspot. Especially in the multimedia environment, effective remote visual monitoring has become the exploration direction of many scholars. The use of traditional correlation filtering (CF) algorithm for real-time monitoring in the context of multimedia is a practical strategy. However, most existing filtering-based visual monitoring algorithms still have the problem of insufficient robustness and effectiveness. Therefore, by considering the strategy of updating human memory, this paper proposes a multi-layer template update mechanism to achieve effective monitoring in a multimedia environment. In this strategy, the weighted template of the high-confidence matching memory is used as the confidence memory, and the unweighted template of the low-confidence matching memory is used as the cognitive memory. Through the alternate use of confidence memory, matching memory, and cognitive memory, it is ensured that the target will not be lost during the monitoring process. Experimental results show that this strategy does not affect the speed (still real-time) and improves the robustness in the multimedia background.

Event-Triggered Robust Fuzzy Adaptive Finite-Time Control of Nonlinear Systems With Prescribed Performance

Abstract: In this article, an event-triggered robust fuzzy adaptive prescribed performance finite-time control strategy is presented for a class of strict-feedback nonlinear systems with external disturbances. The relative-threshold-based event-triggered signal is introduced to reduce communication burden, and the dynamic surface control technique is applied to address the computational complexity problem. A disturbance observer is designed to estimate the compounded disturbances, which are composed of external disturbances and fuzzy approximation errors. The proposed control strategy can guarantee that the closed-loop system is semiglobally practically finite-time stable, and the tracking error converges to a small residual set by incorporating the prescribed performance bound in finite-time. Finally, simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed robust fuzzy control strategy.

Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation

Abstract: Representation learning on user-item graph for recommendation has evolved from using single ID or interaction history to exploiting higher-order neighbors. This leads to the success of graph convolution networks (GCNs) for recommendation such as PinSage and LightGCN. Despite effectiveness, we argue that they suffer from two limitations: (1) high-degree nodes exert larger impact on the representation learning, deteriorating the recommendations of low-degree (long-tail) items; and (2) representations are vulnerable to noisy interactions, as the neighborhood aggregation scheme further enlarges the impact of observed edges. In this work, we explore self-supervised learning on user-item graph, so as to improve the accuracy and robustness of GCNs for recommendation. The idea is to supplement the classical supervised task of recommendation with an auxiliary self-supervised task, which reinforces node representation learning via self-discrimination. Specifically, we generate multiple views of a node, maximizing the agreement between different views of the same node compared to that of other nodes. We devise three operators to generate the views --- node dropout, edge dropout, and random walk --- that change the graph structure in different manners. We term this new learning paradigm asSelf-supervised Graph Learning (SGL), implementing it on the state-of-the-art model LightGCN. Through theoretical analyses, we find that SGL has the ability of automatically mining hard negatives. Empirical studies on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SGL, which improves the recommendation accuracy, especially on long-tail items, and the robustness against interaction noises. Our implementations are available at \urlhttps://github.com/wujcan/SGL.

VideoMoCo: Contrastive Video Representation Learning with Temporally Adversarial Examples

Abstract: MoCo [11] is effective for unsupervised image representation learning. In this paper, we propose VideoMoCo for unsupervised video representation learning. Given a video sequence as an input sample, we improve the temporal feature representations of MoCo from two perspectives. First, we introduce a generator to drop out several frames from this sample temporally. The discriminator is then learned to encode similar feature representations regardless of frame removals. By adaptively dropping out different frames during training iterations of adversarial learning, we augment this input sample to train a tempo-rally robust encoder. Second, we use temporal decay to model key attenuation in the memory queue when computing the contrastive loss. As the momentum encoder updates after keys enqueue, the representation ability of these keys degrades when we use the current input sample for contrastive learning. This degradation is reflected via temporal decay to attend the input sample to recent keys in the queue. As a result, we adapt MoCo to learn video representations without empirically designing pretext tasks. By empowering the temporal robustness of the encoder and modeling the temporal decay of the keys, our VideoMoCo improves MoCo temporally based on contrastive learning. Experiments on benchmark datasets including UCF101 and HMDB51 show that VideoMoCo stands as a state-of-the-art video representation learning method.

Feature Refinement and Filter Network for Person Re-Identification

Abstract: In the task of person re-identification, the attention mechanism and fine-grained information have been proved to be effective. However, it has been observed that models often focus on the extraction of features with strong discrimination, and neglect other valuable features. The extracted fine-grained information may include redundancies. In addition, current methods lack an effective scheme to remove background interference. Therefore, this paper proposes the feature refinement and filter network to solve the above problems from three aspects: first, by weakening the high response features, we aim to identify highly valuable features and extract the complete features of persons, thereby enhancing the robustness of the model; second, by positioning and intercepting the high response areas of persons, we eliminate the interference arising from background information and strengthen the response of the model to the complete features of persons; finally, valuable fine-grained features are selected using a multi-branch attention network for person re-identification to enhance the performance of the model. Our extensive experiments on the benchmark Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID, CUHK03 and MSMT17 person re-identification datasets demonstrate that the performance of our method is comparable to that of state-of-the-art approaches.

Secure and Robust Machine Learning for Healthcare: A Survey

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed widespread adoption of machine learning (ML)/deep learning (DL) techniques due to their superior performance for a variety of healthcare applications ranging from the prediction of cardiac arrest from one-dimensional heart signals to computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) using multi-dimensional medical images. Notwithstanding the impressive performance of ML/DL, there are still lingering doubts regarding the robustness of ML/DL in healthcare settings (which is traditionally considered quite challenging due to the myriad security and privacy issues involved), especially in light of recent results that have shown that ML/DL are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we present an overview of various application areas in healthcare that leverage such techniques from security and privacy point of view and present associated challenges. In addition, we present potential methods to ensure secure and privacy-preserving ML for healthcare applications. Finally, we provide insight into the current research challenges and promising directions for future research.

ESA: a hybrid bio-inspired metaheuristic optimization approach for engineering problems

Abstract: In this paper, a hybrid bio-inspired metaheuristic optimization approach namely emperor penguin and salp swarm algorithm (ESA) is proposed. This algorithm imitates the huddling and swarm behaviors of emperor penguin optimizer and salp swarm algorithm, respectively. The efficiency of the proposed ESA is evaluated using scalability analysis, convergence analysis, sensitivity analysis, and ANOVA test analysis on 53 benchmark test functions including classical and IEEE CEC-2017. The effectiveness of ESA is compared with well-known metaheuristics in terms of the optimal solution. The proposed ESA is also applied on six constrained and one unconstrained engineering problems to evaluate its robustness. The results reveal that ESA offers optimal solutions as compared to the other competitor algorithms.

Thermodynamics-based Artificial Neural Networks for constitutive modeling

Abstract: Machine Learning methods and, in particular, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in material constitutive modeling. One of the main drawbacks of such approaches is the lack of a rigorous frame based on the laws of physics. This may render physically inconsistent the predictions of a trained network, which can be even dangerous for real applications. Here we propose a new class of data-driven, physics-based, neural networks for constitutive modeling of strain rate independent processes at the material point level, which we define as Thermodynamics-based Artificial Neural Networks (TANNs). The two basic principles of thermodynamics are encoded in the network's architecture by taking advantage of automatic differentiation to compute the numerical derivatives of a network with respect to its inputs. In this way, derivatives of the free-energy, the dissipation rate and their relation with the stress and internal state variables are hardwired in the architecture of TANNs. Consequently, our approach does not have to identify the underlying pattern of thermodynamic laws during training, reducing the need of large datasets. Moreover the training is more efficient and robust, and the predictions more accurate. Finally and more important, the predictions remain thermodynamically consistent, even for unseen data. Based on these features, TANNs are a starting point for data-driven, physics-based constitutive modeling with neural networks. We demonstrate the wide applicability of TANNs for modeling elasto-plastic materials, using both hyper-and hypo-plasticity models. Strain hardening and softening are also considered for the hyper-plastic scenario. Detailed comparisons show that the predictions of TANNs outperform those of standard ANNs. Finally, we demonstrate that the implementation of the laws of thermodynamics confers to TANNs high degrees of robustness to the presence of noise in the training data, compared to standard approaches. TANNs ' architecture is general, enabling applications to materials with different or more complex behavior, without any modification.

Disentangling User Interest and Conformity for Recommendation with Causal Embedding

Abstract: Recommendation models are usually trained on observational interaction data. However, observational interaction data could result from users’ conformity towards popular items, which entangles users’ real interest. Existing methods tracks this problem as eliminating popularity bias, e.g., by re-weighting training samples or leveraging a small fraction of unbiased data. However, the variety of user conformity is ignored by these approaches, and different causes of an interaction are bundled together as unified representations, hence robustness and interpretability are not guaranteed when underlying causes are changing. In this paper, we present DICE, a general framework that learns representations where interest and conformity are structurally disentangled, and various backbone recommendation models could be smoothly integrated. We assign users and items with separate embeddings for interest and conformity, and make each embedding capture only one cause by training with cause-specific data which is obtained according to the colliding effect of causal inference. Our proposed methodology outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with remarkable improvements on two real-world datasets on top of various backbone models. We further demonstrate that the learned embeddings successfully capture the desired causes, and show that DICE guarantees the robustness and interpretability of recommendation.

Battery Fault Diagnosis for Electric Vehicles Based on Voltage Abnormality by Combining the Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network and the Equivalent Circuit Model

Abstract: Battery fault diagnosis is essential for ensuring safe and reliable operation of electric vehicles. In this article, a novel battery fault diagnosis method is presented by combining the long short-term memory recurrent neural network and the equivalent circuit model. The modified adaptive boosting method is utilized to improve diagnosis accuracy, and a prejudging model is employed to reduce computational time and improve diagnosis reliability. Considering the influence of the driver behavior on battery systems, the proposed scheme is able to achieve potential failure risk assessment and accordingly to issue early thermal runaway warning. A large volume of real-world operation data is acquired from the National Monitoring and Management Center for New Energy Vehicles in China to examine its robustness, reliability, and superiority. The verification results show that the proposed method can achieve accurate fault diagnosis for potential battery cell failure and precise locating of thermal runaway cells.

Robust Secure UAV Communications With the Aid of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Abstract: This paper investigates a novel unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) secure communication system with the assistance of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), where a UAV and a ground user communicate with each other, while an eavesdropper tends to wiretap their information. Due to the limited capacity of UAVs, an RIS is applied to further improve the quality of the secure communication. The time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol is applied for the communications between the UAV and the ground user, namely, the downlink (DL) and the uplink (UL) communications. In particular, the channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropping channels is assumed to be imperfect. We aim to maximize the average worst-case secrecy rate by the robust joint design of the UAV’s trajectory, RIS’s passive beamforming, and transmit power of the legitimate transmitters. However, it is challenging to solve the joint UL/DL optimization problem due to its non-convexity. Therefore, we develop an efficient algorithm based on the alternating optimization (AO) technique. Specifically, the formulated problem is divided into three sub-problems, and the successive convex approximation (SCA), $\mathcal {S}$ -Procedure, and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) are applied to tackle these non-convex sub-problems. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can considerably improve the average secrecy rate compared with the benchmark algorithms, and also confirm the robustness of the proposed algorithm.

Noise-Immune Model Identification and State-of-Charge Estimation for Lithium-Ion Battery Using Bilinear Parameterization

Abstract: Accurate estimation of state of charge (SOC) is critical to the safe and efficient utilization of a battery system. Model-based SOC observers have been widely used due to their high accuracy and robustness, but they rely on a well-parameterized battery model. This article scrutinizes the effect of measurement noises on model parameter identification and SOC estimation. A novel parameterization method combining instrumental variable (IV) estimation and bilinear principle is proposed to compensate for the noise-induced biases of model identification. Specifically, the IV estimator is used to reformulate an overdetermined system so as to allow coestimating the model parameters and noise variances. The coestimation problem is then decoupled into two linear subproblems which are solved efficiently by a two-stage least squares algorithm in a recursive manner. The parameterization method is further combined with a Luenberger observer to estimate the SOC in real time. Simulations and experiments are performed to validate the proposed method. Results reveal that the proposed method is superior to existing method in terms of the immunity to noise corruption.

RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening

Abstract: Enhancing the generalization capability of deep neural networks to unseen domains is crucial for safety-critical applications in the real world such as autonomous driving. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel instance selective whitening loss to improve the robustness of the segmentation networks for unseen domains. Our approach disentangles the domain-specific style and domain-invariant content encoded in higher-order statistics (i.e., feature covariance) of the feature representations and selectively removes only the style information causing domain shift. As shown in Fig. 1, our method provides reasonable predictions for (a) low-illuminated, (b) rainy, and (c) unseen structures. These types of images are not included in the training dataset, where the baseline shows a significant performance drop, contrary to ours. Being simple yet effective, our approach improves the robustness of various backbone networks without additional computational cost. We conduct extensive experiments in urban-scene segmentation and show the superiority of our approach to existing work. Our code is available at this link1.

Geometry-aware Instance-reweighted Adversarial Training

Abstract: In adversarial machine learning, there was a common belief that robustness and accuracy hurt each other. The belief was challenged by recent studies where we can maintain the robustness and improve the accuracy. However, the other direction, whether we can keep the accuracy while improving the robustness, is conceptually and practically more interesting, since robust accuracy should be lower than standard accuracy for any model. In this paper, we show this direction is also promising. Firstly, we find even over-parameterized deep networks may still have insufficient model capacity, because adversarial training has an overwhelming smoothing effect. Secondly, given limited model capacity, we argue adversarial data should have unequal importance: geometrically speaking, a natural data point closer to/farther from the class boundary is less/more robust, and the corresponding adversarial data point should be assigned with larger/smaller weight. Finally, to implement the idea, we propose geometry-aware instance-reweighted adversarial training, where the weights are based on how difficult it is to attack a natural data point. Experiments show that our proposal boosts the robustness of standard adversarial training; combining two directions, we improve both robustness and accuracy of standard adversarial training.

Robust and Secure Sum-Rate Maximization for Multiuser MISO Downlink Systems With Self-Sustainable IRS

Abstract: This paper investigates robust and secure multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) downlink communications assisted by a self-sustainable intelligent reflection surface (IRS), which can simultaneously reflect and harvest energy from the received signals. We study the joint design of beamformers at an access point (AP) and the phase shifts as well as the energy harvesting schedule at the IRS for maximizing the system sum-rate. The design is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem taking into account the wireless energy harvesting capability of IRS elements, secure communications, and the robustness against the impact of channel state information (CSI) imperfection. Subsequently, we propose a computationally-efficient iterative algorithm to obtain a suboptimal solution to the design problem. In each iteration, $\mathcal {S}$ -procedure and the successive convex approximation are adopted to handle the intermediate optimization problem. Our simulation results unveil that: 1) there is a non-trivial trade-off between the system sum-rate and the self-sustainability of the IRS; 2) the performance gain achieved by the proposed scheme is saturated with a large number of energy harvesting IRS elements; 3) an IRS equipped with small bit-resolution discrete phase shifters is sufficient to achieve a considerable system sum-rate of the ideal case with continuous phase shifts.

CFNet: Cascade and Fused Cost Volume for Robust Stereo Matching

Abstract: Recently, the ever-increasing capacity of large-scale annotated datasets has led to profound progress in stereo matching. However, most of these successes are limited to a specific dataset and cannot generalize well to other datasets. The main difficulties lie in the large domain differences and unbalanced disparity distribution across a variety of datasets, which greatly limit the real-world applicability of current deep stereo matching models. In this paper, we propose CFNet, a Cascade and Fused cost volume based network to improve the robustness of the stereo matching network. First, we propose a fused cost volume representation to deal with the large domain difference. By fusing multiple low-resolution dense cost volumes to enlarge the receptive field, we can extract robust structural representations for initial disparity estimation. Second, we propose a cascade cost volume representation to alleviate the unbalanced disparity distribution. Specifically, we employ a variance-based uncertainty estimation to adaptively adjust the next stage disparity search space, in this way driving the network progressively prune out the space of unlikely correspondences. By iteratively narrowing down the disparity search space and improving the cost volume resolution, the disparity estimation is gradually refined in a coarse-to-fine manner. When trained on the same training images and evaluated on KITTI, ETH3D, and Middlebury datasets with the fixed model parameters and hyperparameters, our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art overall performance and obtains the 1st place on the stereo task of Robust Vision Challenge 2020. The code will be available at https://github.com/gallenszl/CFNet.

Terminal Sliding Mode Control – An Overview

Abstract: Sliding mode control (SMC) has been a very popular control technology due to its simplicity and robustness against uncertainties and disturbances since its inception more than 60 years ago. Its very foundation of stability and stabilization is built on the principle of the Lyapunov theory which ascertains asymptotic stability. In the 1990s, a novel class of SMC, called the terminal sliding mode control (TSMC), was proposed which has been studied and applied extensively, giving rise to a robust control with tunable finite-time convergence delivering fast response, high precision, and strong robustness. In recent years, interest in this particular control technology has been increasing. This paper provides an overview of the state of the art of the TSMC theory and its applications, and postulates key technical issues and future challenges.

Deep Learning for EMG-based Human-Machine Interaction: A Review

Abstract: Electromyography (EMG) has already been broadly used in human-machine interaction (HMI) applications Determining how to decode the information inside EMG signals robustly and accurately is a key problem for which we urgently need a solution Recently, many EMG pattern recognition tasks have been addressed using deep learning methods In this paper, we analyze recent papers and present a literature review describing the role that deep learning plays in EMG-based HMI An overview of typical network structures and processing schemes will be provided Recent progress in typical tasks such as movement classification, joint angle prediction, and force/torque estimation will be introduced New issues, including multimodal sensing, inter-subject/inter-session, and robustness toward disturbances will be discussed We attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis of current research by discussing the advantages, challenges, and opportunities brought by deep learning We hope that deep learning can aid in eliminating factors that hinder the development of EMG-based HMI systems Furthermore, possible future directions will be presented to pave the way for future research