Generation of high-quality image using generative adversarial network

Automatic image annotation (AIA) has been adopted in different applications such as image retrieval and classification. Deep Learning is used in AIA to extract image features and then convert these features into text descriptions and labels. However, conventional AIA models that employ deep learning methods suffer from various shortcomings, such as poor annotation performance. This work proposes an AIA model based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), generative adversarial networks (GANs), and transfer learning. GANs have attracted a lot of interest because of its ability to generate data without explicitly using probability density. Thus, it has proven its usefulness in image annotation and image augmentation. In this work, an Auxiliary classifier-GAN (ACGAN) has been used, where the discriminator predicts the class of an image rather than taking it as a given input; therefore, the stabilization of the training stage is ensured, and the generation of high-quality images is provided. Transfer learning is also used to enhance the performance of the classification. The proposed model outperforms the best state-of-the-art models in terms of MiAP, F-measure and error rate using ImageClef, ESPGame and IAPR-TC12 datasets.

Computer vision is one of the hottest research fields in deep learning. The emergence of generative adversarial networks (GANs) provides a new method and model for computer vision. The idea of GANs using the game training method is superior to traditional machine learning algorithms in terms of feature learning and image generation. GANs are widely used not only in image generation and style transfer but also in the text, voice, video processing, and other fields. However, there are still some problems with GANs, such as model collapse and uncontrollable training. This paper deeply reviews the theoretical basis of GANs and surveys some recently developed GAN models, in comparison with traditional GAN models. The applications of GANs in computer vision include data enhancement, domain transfer, high-quality sample generation, and image restoration. The latest research progress of GANs in artificial intelligence (AI) based security attack and defense is introduced. The future development of GANs in computer vision is also discussed at the end of the paper with possible applications of AI in computer vision.

Surface defect recognition (SDC) is essential in intelligent manufacturing. Deep learning (DL) is a research hotspot in SDC. Limited defective samples are available in most real-world cases, which poses challenges for DL methods. Given such circumstances, generating defective samples by generative adversarial networks (GANs) is applied. However, insufficient samples and high-frequency texture details in defects make GANs very hard to train, yield mode collapse, and poor image quality, which can further impact SDC. To solve these problems, this article proposes a new GAN called contrastive GAN, which can be trained to generate diverse defects with only extremely limited samples. Specifically, a shared data augmentation (SDA) module is proposed for avoiding overfitting. Then, a feature attention matching (FAM) module is proposed to align features for improving the quality of generated images. Finally, a contrastive loss based on hypersphere is employed to constrain GANs to generate images that differ from the traditional transform. Experiments show that the proposed GAN generates defective images with higher quality and lower variance between real defects compared to other GANs. Synthetic images contribute to pretrained DL networks with accuracies of up to 95.00%–99.56% for Northeastern University (NEU) datasets of different sizes and 91.84% for printed circuit board (PCB) cases, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In recent years, Deep Learning (DL), such as the algorithms of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), has been widely studied and applied in various fields including agriculture. Researchers in the fields of agriculture often use software frameworks without sufficiently examining the ideas and mechanisms of a technique. This article provides a concise summary of major DL algorithms, including concepts, limitations, implementation, training processes, and example codes, to help researchers in agriculture to gain a holistic picture of major DL techniques quickly. Research on DL applications in agriculture is summarized and analyzed, and future opportunities are discussed in this paper, which is expected to help researchers in agriculture to better understand DL algorithms and learn major DL techniques quickly, and further to facilitate data analysis, enhance related research in agriculture, and thus promote DL applications effectively. Keywords: deep learning, smart agriculture, neural network, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, generative adversarial networks, artificial intelligence, image processing, pattern recognition DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20181104.4475 Citation: Zhu N Y, Liu X, Liu Z Q, Hu K, Wang Y K, Tan J L, et al. Deep learning for smart agriculture: Concepts, tools, applications, and opportunities. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2018; 11(4): 32-44.

1 - Congruence of deep learning in biomedical engineering: future prospects and challenges

Deep Learning is a new generation of artificial neural networks that have transformed our daily lives and has impacted several industries and scientific disciplines in recent years. Recent development in deep learning provides various significant methods to obtain end-to-end learning models from complex data. Generative Adversarial Networks give the idea of learning the deep representations without extensively interpreting the training data. The generative adversarial network involves the generative modeling approach that uses the deep learning approach. The chapter is broadly divided into the following sections as (1) Insights of deep learning & the generative adversarial networks, (2) GAN’s representative variants, training methods, architecture, and mathematical representation, and (3) Efficacy of GAN in different applications. This chapter will gain the recent work done in GAN and implement this technique in the different deep learning applications for healthcare. Here, we will also analyze some of the future perspectives and trends in the forthcoming time.<br>

The vast application of artificial intelligence in numerous fields—image generation being one of them—has been made possible by the quick development of deep learning. Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) can generate high-quality images through an adversarial training mechanism. The use and performance of GAN and its conditional variation, CGAN, in the field of handwritten digital image generation, are thoroughly examined in this research. The basic GAN and CGAN models, based on the PyTorch deep learning framework and the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) dataset, are applied to generate handwritten digital images respectively. To assess and compare the variations between the two models concerning the fineness of image generation, the loss changes, and other relevant factors, the generation outcomes and the loss changes that occur during the training phase are documented. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the basic GAN, CGAN exhibits notable advantages in terms of image quality stability, the avoidance of model collapse, and the control of image categories. Furthermore, an investigation of other cutting-edge generating models indicates that there is still room for optimization in the CGAN network structure to improve its performance for increasingly intricate generative tasks.

Crop yield estimation and prediction constitutes a key issue in agricultural management, particularly under the context of demographic pressure and climate change. Currently, the main challenge in estimating crop yields based on remotely sensed data and data-driven methods is how to cope with small datasets and the limited amount of annotated samples. In order to cope with small datasets and the limited amount of annotated samples and improve the accuracy of winter wheat yield estimation in the Guanzhong Plain, PR China, this study proposed a method of combining generative adversarial networks (GANs) and convolutional neural network (CNN) for comprehensive growth monitoring of winter wheat, in which the remotely sensed leaf area index (LAI), vegetation temperature condition index (VTCI) and meteorological data at four growth stages of winter wheat during 2012–2017 were generated as the inputs of multi-layer convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and GAN was employed to artificially increase the number of training samples. Then, a linear regression model between the simulated comprehensive growth monitoring (I) and the measured yields was established to estimate yields of winter wheat in the Guanzhong Plain pixel by pixel. The final results showed when GAN was used to double the size of the training samples, and the simulation values obtained by CNN based on augmented samples using GAN provided a better training (R2 = 0.95, RMSE = 0.05), validation (R2 = 0.54, RMSE = 0.16) and testing (R2 = 0.50, RMSE = 0.14) performance than that just using the original samples. The achieved best pixel-scale yield estimation accuracy of winter wheat (R2 = 0.50, RMSE = 591.46 kg/ha) in the Guanzhong Plain. These results showed that small samples can be enlarged by GAN, thus, more important features for reflecting the growth conditions and yields of winter wheat from the remotely sensed indices and meteorological indices can be extracted, and indicated that CNN accompanied with GAN could contribute a lot to the comprehensive growth monitoring and yield estimation of winter wheat and data augmentation methods are extremely useful for the application of small samples in deep learning.

Hyperspectral remote sensing image classification based on residual generative Adversarial Neural Networks

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have received a great deal of attention due in part to recent success in generating original, high-quality samples from visual domains. However, most current methods only allow for users to guide this image generation process through limited interactions. In this work we develop a novel GAN framework that allows humans to be “in-the-loop” of the image generation process. Our technique iteratively accepts relative constraints of the form “Generate an image more like image A than image B”. After each constraint is given, the user is presented with new outputs from the GAN, informing the next round of feedback. This feedback is used to constrain the output of the GAN with respect to an underlying semantic space that can be designed to model a variety of different notions of similarity (e.g. classes, attributes, object relationships, color, etc.). In our experiments, we show that our GAN framework is able to generate images that are of comparable quality to equivalent unsupervised GANs while satisfying a large number of the constraints provided by users, effectively changing a GAN into one that allows users interactive control over image generation without sacrificing image quality.

Recently, deep learning has developed rapidly, which has made significant progress in tasks such as target detection and classification. Compared with traditional methods, using deep learning techniques contribute to achieve higher detection accuracy, recognition rate, and other better performance with big data set. In the fields of radar and sonar especially like underwater acoustic signals, training samples are scarce due to the difficulty of the collection or security reason, which leads to poor performance of the classification models, as those need big training samples. In this paper, we present a novel framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to resolve the problem of insufficient samples for the underwater acoustic signals. Our method preprocesses the audio samples to the gray-scale spectrum images, so that, those can fit the GAN to captures the features and reduce the complexity at the same time. Then our method utilizes an independent classification network outside the GAN to evaluate the generated samples by GAN. The experimental results show that the samples generated by our approach outperform existing methods with higher quality, which can significantly improve the prediction accuracy of the classification model.

Image dehazing has always been a challenging topic in image processing. The development of deep learning methods, especially the generative adversarial networks (GAN), provides a new way for image dehazing. In recent years, many deep learning methods based on GAN have been applied to image dehazing. However, GAN has two problems in image dehazing. Firstly, For haze image, haze not only reduces the quality of the image but also blurs the details of the image. For GAN network, it is difficult for the generator to restore the details of the whole image while removing the haze. Secondly, GAN model is defined as a minimax problem, which weakens the loss function. It is difficult to distinguish whether GAN is making progress in the training process. Therefore, we propose a guided generative adversarial dehazing network (GGADN). Different from other generation adversarial networks, GGADN adds a guided module on the generator. The guided module verifies the network of each layer of the generator. At the same time, the details of the map generated by each layer are strengthened. Network training is based on the pre-trained VGG feature model and L1-regularized gradient prior which is developed by new loss function parameters. From the dehazing results of synthetic images and real images, the proposed method is better than the state-of-the-art dehazing methods.

The Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is a state-of-the-art technique in the field of deep learning. A number of recent papers address the theory and applications of GANs in various fields of image processing. Fewer studies, however, have directly evaluated GAN outputs. Those that have been conducted focused on using classification performance, e.g., Inception Score (IS) and statistical metrics, e.g., Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID). Here, we consider a fundamental way to evaluate GANs by directly analyzing the images they generate, instead of using them as inputs to other classifiers. We characterize the performance of a GAN as an image generator according to three aspects: 1) Creativity: non-duplication of the real images. 2) Inheritance: generated images should have the same style, which retains key features of the real images. 3) Diversity: generated images are different from each other. A GAN should not generate a few different images repeatedly. Based on the three aspects of ideal GANs, we have designed the Likeness Score (LS) to evaluate GAN performance, and have applied it to evaluate several typical GANs. We compared our proposed measure with two commonly used GAN evaluation methods: IS and FID, and four additional measures. Furthermore, we discuss how these evaluations could help us deepen our understanding of GANs and improve their performance.

The prediction of stock price movement direction is significant in financial circles and academic. Stock price contains complex, incomplete, and fuzzy information which makes it an extremely difficult task to predict its development trend. Predicting and analysing financial data is a nonlinear, time-dependent problem. With rapid development in machine learning and deep learning, this task can be performed more effectively by a purposely designed network. This paper aims to improve prediction accuracy and minimizing forecasting error loss through deep learning architecture by using Generative Adversarial Networks. It was proposed a generic model consisting of Phase-space Reconstruction (PSR) method for reconstructing price series and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) which is a combination of two neural networks which are Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) as Generative model and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as Discriminative model for adversarial training to forecast the stock market. LSTM will generate new instances based on historical basic indicators information and then CNN will estimate whether the data is predicted by LSTM or is real. It was found that the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) has performed well on the enhanced root mean square error to LSTM, as it was 4.35% more accurate in predicting the direction and reduced processing time and RMSE by 78 secs and 0.029, respectively. This study provides a better result in the accuracy of the stock index. It seems that the proposed system concentrates on minimizing the root mean square error and processing time and improving the direction prediction accuracy, and provides a better result in the accuracy of the stock index.

Evolutionary conditional GANs for supervised data augmentation: The case of assessing berry number per cluster in grapevine