scholarly journals Deep Learning with Open Data for Desert Road Mapping

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 2274
Author(s):  
Christopher Stewart ◽  
Michele Lazzarini ◽  
Adrian Luna ◽  
Sergio Albani

The availability of free and open data from Earth observation programmes such as Copernicus, and from collaborative projects such as Open Street Map (OSM), enables low cost artificial intelligence (AI) based monitoring applications. This creates opportunities, particularly in developing countries with scarce economic resources, for large–scale monitoring in remote regions. A significant portion of Earth’s surface comprises desert dune fields, where shifting sand affects infrastructure and hinders movement. A robust, cost–effective and scalable methodology is proposed for road detection and monitoring in regions covered by desert sand. The technique uses Copernicus Sentinel–1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite data as an input to a deep learning model based on the U–Net architecture for image segmentation. OSM data is used for model training. The method comprises two steps: The first involves processing time series of Sentinel–1 SAR interferometric wide swath (IW) acquisitions in the same geometry to produce multitemporal backscatter and coherence averages. These are divided into patches and matched with masks of OSM roads to form the training data, the quantity of which is increased through data augmentation. The second step includes the U–Net deep learning workflow. The methodology has been applied to three different dune fields in Africa and Asia. A performance evaluation through the calculation of the Jaccard similarity coefficient was carried out for each area, and ranges from 84% to 89% for the best available input. The rank distance, calculated from the completeness and correctness percentages, was also calculated and ranged from 75% to 80%. Over all areas there are more missed detections than false positives. In some cases, this was due to mixed infrastructure in the same resolution cell of the input SAR data. Drift sand and dune migration covering infrastructure is a concern in many desert regions, and broken segments in the resulting road detections are sometimes due to sand burial. The results also show that, in most cases, the Sentinel–1 vertical transmit–vertical receive (VV) backscatter averages alone constitute the best input to the U–Net model. The detection and monitoring of roads in desert areas are key concerns, particularly given a growing population increasingly on the move.

Author(s):  
Fuqiang Gu ◽  
Weicong Sng ◽  
Xuke Hu ◽  
Fangwen Yu

The advantages of event-sensing over conventional sensors (e.g., higher dynamic range, lower time latency, and lower power consumption) have spurred research into machine learning for event data. Unsurprisingly, deep learning has emerged as a competitive methodology for learning with event sensors; in typical setups, discrete and asynchronous events are first converted into frame-like tensors on which standard deep networks can be applied. However, over-fitting remains a challenge, particularly since event datasets remain small relative to conventional datasets (e.g., ImageNet). In this paper, we introduce EventDrop, a new method for augmenting asynchronous event data to improve the generalization of deep models. By dropping events selected with various strategies, we are able to increase the diversity of training data (e.g., to simulate various levels of occlusion). From a practical perspective, EventDrop is simple to implement and computationally low-cost. Experiments on two event datasets (N-Caltech101 and N-Cars) demonstrate that EventDrop can significantly improve the generalization performance across a variety of deep networks.


Author(s):  
Mario Lasseck

The detection and identification of individual species based on images or audio recordings has shown significant performance increase over the last few years, thanks to recent advances in deep learning. Reliable automatic species recognition provides a promising tool for biodiversity monitoring, research and education. Image-based plant identification, for example, now comes close to the most advanced human expertise (Bonnet et al. 2018, Lasseck 2018a). Besides improved machine learning algorithms, neural network architectures, deep learning frameworks and computer hardware, a major reason for the gain in performance is the increasing abundance of biodiversity training data, either from observational networks and data providers like GBIF, Xeno-canto, iNaturalist, etc. or natural history museum collections like the Animal Sound Archive of the Museum für Naturkunde. However, in many cases, this occurrence data is still insufficient for data-intensive deep learning approaches and is often unbalanced, with only few examples for very rare species. To overcome these limitations, data augmentation can be used. This technique synthetically creates more training samples by applying various subtle random manipulations to the original data in a label-preserving way without changing the content. In the talk, we will present augmentation methods for images and audio data. The positive effect on identification performance will be evaluated on different large-scale data sets from recent plant and bird identification (LifeCLEF 2017, 2018) and detection (DCASE 2018) challenges (Lasseck 2017, Lasseck 2018b, Lasseck 2018c).


Author(s):  
Yi-Quan Li ◽  
Hao-Sen Chang ◽  
Daw-Tung Lin

In the field of computer vision, large-scale image classification tasks are both important and highly challenging. With the ongoing advances in deep learning and optical character recognition (OCR) technologies, neural networks designed to perform large-scale classification play an essential role in facilitating OCR systems. In this study, we developed an automatic OCR system designed to identify up to 13,070 large-scale printed Chinese characters by using deep learning neural networks and fine-tuning techniques. The proposed framework comprises four components, including training dataset synthesis and background simulation, image preprocessing and data augmentation, the process of training the model, and transfer learning. The training data synthesis procedure is composed of a character font generation step and a background simulation process. Three background models are proposed to simulate the factors of the background noise and anti-counterfeiting patterns on ID cards. To expand the diversity of the synthesized training dataset, rotation and zooming data augmentation are applied. A massive dataset comprising more than 19.6 million images was thus created to accommodate the variations in the input images and improve the learning capacity of the CNN model. Subsequently, we modified the GoogLeNet neural architecture by replacing the FC layer with a global average pooling layer to avoid overfitting caused by a massive amount of training data. Consequently, the number of model parameters was reduced. Finally, we employed the transfer learning technique to further refine the CNN model using a small number of real data samples. Experimental results show that the overall recognition performance of the proposed approach is significantly better than that of prior methods and thus demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed framework, which exhibited a recognition accuracy as high as 99.39% on the constructed real ID card dataset.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong He ◽  
Hong Zeng ◽  
Yangyang Fan ◽  
Shuaisheng Ji ◽  
Jianjian Wu

In this paper, we proposed an approach to detect oilseed rape pests based on deep learning, which improves the mean average precision (mAP) to 77.14%; the result increased by 9.7% with the original model. We adopt this model to mobile platform to let every farmer able to use this program, which will diagnose pests in real time and provide suggestions on pest controlling. We designed an oilseed rape pest imaging database with 12 typical oilseed rape pests and compared the performance of five models, SSD w/Inception is chosen as the optimal model. Moreover, for the purpose of the high mAP, we have used data augmentation (DA) and added a dropout layer. The experiments are performed on the Android application we developed, and the result shows that our approach surpasses the original model obviously and is helpful for integrated pest management. This application has improved environmental adaptability, response speed, and accuracy by contrast with the past works and has the advantage of low cost and simple operation, which are suitable for the pest monitoring mission of drones and Internet of Things (IoT).


Diagnostics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 1052
Author(s):  
Leang Sim Nguon ◽  
Kangwon Seo ◽  
Jung-Hyun Lim ◽  
Tae-Jun Song ◽  
Sung-Hyun Cho ◽  
...  

Mucinous cystic neoplasms (MCN) and serous cystic neoplasms (SCN) account for a large portion of solitary pancreatic cystic neoplasms (PCN). In this study we implemented a convolutional neural network (CNN) model using ResNet50 to differentiate between MCN and SCN. The training data were collected retrospectively from 59 MCN and 49 SCN patients from two different hospitals. Data augmentation was used to enhance the size and quality of training datasets. Fine-tuning training approaches were utilized by adopting the pre-trained model from transfer learning while training selected layers. Testing of the network was conducted by varying the endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) image sizes and positions to evaluate the network performance for differentiation. The proposed network model achieved up to 82.75% accuracy and a 0.88 (95% CI: 0.817–0.930) area under curve (AUC) score. The performance of the implemented deep learning networks in decision-making using only EUS images is comparable to that of traditional manual decision-making using EUS images along with supporting clinical information. Gradient-weighted class activation mapping (Grad-CAM) confirmed that the network model learned the features from the cyst region accurately. This study proves the feasibility of diagnosing MCN and SCN using a deep learning network model. Further improvement using more datasets is needed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 364
Author(s):  
Han Gao ◽  
Jinhui Guo ◽  
Peng Guo ◽  
Xiuwan Chen

Recently, deep learning has become the most innovative trend for a variety of high-spatial-resolution remote sensing imaging applications. However, large-scale land cover classification via traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with sliding windows is computationally expensive and produces coarse results. Additionally, although such supervised learning approaches have performed well, collecting and annotating datasets for every task are extremely laborious, especially for those fully supervised cases where the pixel-level ground-truth labels are dense. In this work, we propose a new object-oriented deep learning framework that leverages residual networks with different depths to learn adjacent feature representations by embedding a multibranch architecture in the deep learning pipeline. The idea is to exploit limited training data at different neighboring scales to make a tradeoff between weak semantics and strong feature representations for operational land cover mapping tasks. We draw from established geographic object-based image analysis (GEOBIA) as an auxiliary module to reduce the computational burden of spatial reasoning and optimize the classification boundaries. We evaluated the proposed approach on two subdecimeter-resolution datasets involving both urban and rural landscapes. It presented better classification accuracy (88.9%) compared to traditional object-based deep learning methods and achieves an excellent inference time (11.3 s/ha).


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 7148
Author(s):  
Bedada Endale ◽  
Abera Tullu ◽  
Hayoung Shi ◽  
Beom-Soo Kang

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being widely utilized for various missions: in both civilian and military sectors. Many of these missions demand UAVs to acquire artificial intelligence about the environments they are navigating in. This perception can be realized by training a computing machine to classify objects in the environment. One of the well known machine training approaches is supervised deep learning, which enables a machine to classify objects. However, supervised deep learning comes with huge sacrifice in terms of time and computational resources. Collecting big input data, pre-training processes, such as labeling training data, and the need for a high performance computer for training are some of the challenges that supervised deep learning poses. To address these setbacks, this study proposes mission specific input data augmentation techniques and the design of light-weight deep neural network architecture that is capable of real-time object classification. Semi-direct visual odometry (SVO) data of augmented images are used to train the network for object classification. Ten classes of 10,000 different images in each class were used as input data where 80% were for training the network and the remaining 20% were used for network validation. For the optimization of the designed deep neural network, a sequential gradient descent algorithm was implemented. This algorithm has the advantage of handling redundancy in the data more efficiently than other algorithms.


Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 845
Author(s):  
Dongheun Han ◽  
Chulwoo Lee ◽  
Hyeongyeop Kang

The neural-network-based human activity recognition (HAR) technique is being increasingly used for activity recognition in virtual reality (VR) users. The major issue of a such technique is the collection large-scale training datasets which are key for deriving a robust recognition model. However, collecting large-scale data is a costly and time-consuming process. Furthermore, increasing the number of activities to be classified will require a much larger number of training datasets. Since training the model with a sparse dataset can only provide limited features to recognition models, it can cause problems such as overfitting and suboptimal results. In this paper, we present a data augmentation technique named gravity control-based augmentation (GCDA) to alleviate the sparse data problem by generating new training data based on the existing data. The benefits of the symmetrical structure of the data are that it increased the number of data while preserving the properties of the data. The core concept of GCDA is two-fold: (1) decomposing the acceleration data obtained from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) into zero-gravity acceleration and gravitational acceleration, and augmenting them separately, and (2) exploiting gravity as a directional feature and controlling it to augment training datasets. Through the comparative evaluations, we validated that the application of GCDA to training datasets showed a larger improvement in classification accuracy (96.39%) compared to the typical data augmentation methods (92.29%) applied and those that did not apply the augmentation method (85.21%).


Author(s):  
Shancy Augustine ◽  
Pan Gu ◽  
Xiangjun Zheng ◽  
Toshikazu Nishida ◽  
Z. Hugh Fan

There is a need for low-cost immunoassays that measure the presence and concentration of multiple harmful agents in one device. Currently, comparable immunoassays employ a one-analyte-per-test format that is time consuming and not cost effective for the requirement of detecting multiple analytes in a single sample. For instance, if a spectrum of harmful agents, including E. coli O157, cholera toxin, and Salmonella typhimurium, should be simultaneously monitored in foods and drinking water, then a one-analyte-per-test would be inefficient. This work demonstrates a platform capable of simultaneous detection of multiple analytes in a single, low-cost, microvalve array-enabled multiplexed immunoassay. This multiplexed immunoassay platform is demonstrated in a prototype COC (cyclic olefin copolymer) device with a 2×3 array in which 6 analytes can be detected simultaneously. In order to contain and regulate the flow of reagents in the multichannel device, an array of microfluidic valves actuated by a thermally expandable material and microfabricated resistors have been developed to direct the flow to the necessary assay sites. The microvalve-based immunoassay is shown to be reliable, easy to operate, and compatible with large-scale integration. The all-plastic microvalves use paraffin wax as the thermally sensitive material which drastically reduces power consumption by latching upon closing so that pulsed power is required only to close and latch the microvalve until it is necessary to re-open the valve. The multiplexed detection scheme has been demonstrated by using three proteins, C reactive protein (CRP) and transferrin, both of which are biomarkers associated with traumatic brain injury (TBI) as well as bovine serum albumin (BSA) as the negative control. Since there are no external bulky pneumatic accessories required to operate/latch the microvalves in the device, this compact, thermally actuated and latching microvalve-enabled multiplexed immunoassay has the potential to realize a portable, low power, battery operated microfluidic device for biological assays.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mojtaba Haghighatlari ◽  
Gaurav Vishwakarma ◽  
Mohammad Atif Faiz Afzal ◽  
Johannes Hachmann

<div><div><div><p>We present a multitask, physics-infused deep learning model to accurately and efficiently predict refractive indices (RIs) of organic molecules, and we apply it to a library of 1.5 million compounds. We show that it outperforms earlier machine learning models by a significant margin, and that incorporating known physics into data-derived models provides valuable guardrails. Using a transfer learning approach, we augment the model to reproduce results consistent with higher-level computational chemistry training data, but with a considerably reduced number of corresponding calculations. Prediction errors of machine learning models are typically smallest for commonly observed target property values, consistent with the distribution of the training data. However, since our goal is to identify candidates with unusually large RI values, we propose a strategy to boost the performance of our model in the remoter areas of the RI distribution: We bias the model with respect to the under-represented classes of molecules that have values in the high-RI regime. By adopting a metric popular in web search engines, we evaluate our effectiveness in ranking top candidates. We confirm that the models developed in this study can reliably predict the RIs of the top 1,000 compounds, and are thus able to capture their ranking. We believe that this is the first study to develop a data-derived model that ensures the reliability of RI predictions by model augmentation in the extrapolation region on such a large scale. These results underscore the tremendous potential of machine learning in facilitating molecular (hyper)screening approaches on a massive scale and in accelerating the discovery of new compounds and materials, such as organic molecules with high-RI for applications in opto-electronics.</p></div></div></div>


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