Hyperdimensional Computing-based Multimodality Emotion Recognition with Physiological Signals

We investigated whether a deep neural network (DNN)-based source enhancement function can be self-optimized by reinforcement learning (RL). The use of a DNN is a powerful approach to describing the relationship between two sets of variables and can be useful for source enhancement function design. By training the DNN using a huge amount of training data, sound quality of output signals are improved. However, collecting a huge amount of training data is often difficult in practice. To use limited training data efficiently, we focus on the "self-optimization" of DNN-based source enhancement function in which RL is commonly utilized in the development of game playing computers. As a reward for RL, quantitative metrics that reflect a human's perceptual score (perceptual score), e.g., perceptual evaluation methods for audio source separation (PEASS), are utilized. To investigate whether the sound quality is improved by RL-based source enhancement, subjective tests were conducted. It was confirmed that the output sound quality of the RL-based source enhancement function improved as the number of iterations was increased and finally outperformed the conventional method.

In this paper, we propose a novel method of online learning of sparse pseudo-data, representative of the whole training data, for Gaussian Process (GP) regressions. We call the proposed method Incremental Sparse Pseudo-input Gaussian Process (ISPGP) regression. The proposed ISPGP algorithm allows for training from either a huge amount of training data by scanning through it only once or an online incremental training dataset. Thanks to the nature of the incremental learning algorithm, the proposed ISPGP algorithm can theoretically work with infinite data to which the conventional GP or SPGP algorithm is not applicable. From our experimental results on the KIN40K dataset, we can see that the proposed ISPGP algorithm is comparable to the conventional GP algorithm using the same number of training data. Although the proposed ISPGP algorithm performs slightly worse than Snelson and Ghahramani's SPGP algorithm, the level of performance degradation is acceptable.

Surface electromyogram (sEMG)-based gesture recognition has emerged as a promising avenue for developing intelligent prostheses for upper limb amputees. However, the temporal variations in sEMG have rendered recognition models less efficient than anticipated. By using cross-session calibration and increasing the amount of training data, it is possible to reduce these variations. The impact of varying the amount of calibration and training data on gesture recognition performance for amputees is still unknown. To assess these effects, we present four datasets for the evaluation of calibration data and examine the impact of the amount of training data on benchmark performance. Two amputees who had undergone amputations years prior were recruited, and seven sessions of data were collected for analysis from each of them. Ninapro DB6, a publicly available database containing data from ten healthy subjects across ten sessions, was also included in this study. The experimental results show that the calibration data improved the average accuracy by 3.03%, 6.16%, and 9.73% for the two subjects and Ninapro DB6, respectively, compared to the baseline results. Moreover, it was discovered that increasing the number of training sessions was more effective in improving accuracy than increasing the number of trials. Three potential strategies are proposed in light of these findings to enhance cross-session models further. We consider these findings to be of the utmost importance for the commercialization of intelligent prostheses, as they demonstrate the criticality of gathering calibration and cross-session training data, while also offering effective strategies to maximize the utilization of the entire dataset.

Context-aware computing has become an essential component of modern wearable technology, enabling devices to sense, interpret, and respond to users’ environments and affective states. By integrating contextual intelligence, smart systems can adapt their own behavior to better align with user needs, enhancing efficiency, personalization, and user experience. A critical aspect of context awareness is the ability to recognize a user’s internal state, particularly emotions, which influence decision-making, communication, and overall well-being. While emotion recognition is traditionally approached through multimodal sensing—using cameras, microphones, or physiological sensors such as Electroencephalography (EEG), Electrocardiography (ECG), and Electro-dermal Activity (EDA)—these methods often require multiple sensors, leading to challenges related to power consumption, complexity, and privacy. The demand for a more efficient and unobtrusive approach to emotion and context recognition has driven research toward minimal-sensor solutions that can extract meaningful affective and contextual information with reduced hardware requirements. Restricting sensing sources of contextual information by using only limited number of sensors might come at the expense of constraining the ultimate goal of context-awareness. Such expense can be mitigated by “doing more with less” i.e. delving into the opportunities of using a single sensor for multiple purposes. What is desirable is a minimal-sensor solution capable of capturing both motion and physiological signals for both robust emotion recognition and additional context estimation. Among wearable sensors, chest-worn Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) stand out as promising candidates for comprehensive context estimation, as they are well-positioned to capture motion patterns, and physiological vibrations, being the subtle cardio-respiratory signals. This raises the question of whether a single chest-worn IMU could serve as a minimal yet effective sensor for simultaneously estimating both emotional and contextual information, offering a practical alternative to traditional multi-sensor approaches. To address the challenge of using chest-worn IMU for multiple context sensing, I investigated the potential of using Seismocardiography (SCG) and Accelerometry-Derived Respiration (ADR) to estimate emotional states. First, I explored the existing capabilities of chest-worn IMUs in capturing cardio-respiratory vibrations and motion data, which I used as a knowledge base for embedding such IMUs in context sensing. Data plays a crucial role in this problem, therefore I developed a flexible software interface, ColEmo, to facilitate the scalable collection of emotion-related data and introduced a novel dataset, EmoWear, integrating physiological and motion data for emotion recognition and context awareness. Then, I examined the feasibility of using SCG for emotion recognition, comparing its performance with traditional physiological signals and evaluating its effectiveness as a single-sensor solution. This thesis presents a detailed analysis of the potential of chest-worn IMUs for emotion and context recognition. It reports on the design and validation of a SCG-based wearable system, the development and characteristics of the EmoWear dataset, and the implementation of the ColEmo platform for emotion data collection. The research also examines machine learning techniques applied to the SCG and ADR signals, assessing their effectiveness in estimating emotional states. My findings indicate that SCG-based emotion recognition achieves performance comparable to conventional physiological counterparts, demonstrating the feasibility of using a single IMU sensor for affective computing. The publicly-available EmoWear dataset provides a valuable resource for future research, highlighting the potential of combining motion and physiological data for enhanced context awareness. Additionally, the ColEmo software interface, which I published open-source, proves to be an effective tool for multi-modal emotion data collection, facilitating further advancements in wearable emotion recognition. The results pave the way for a minimal-sensor approach for context information estimation that can significantly reduce system complexity while maintaining high performance. These findings confirm that chest-worn IMUs present an opportunity to further improve emotion recognition in addition to the motion-based context information estimation. My research highlights the need for standardized methodologies in affective computing and demonstrates the viability of motion-based physiological sensing for emotion estimation. By using a single chest-worn IMU, this work presents an alternative to multi-sensor systems, reducing power consumption, and privacy concerns while maintaining robust performance. Future research should focus on refining IMU-based emotion recognition using deep learning techniques and larger datasets to enhance classification accuracy. Further validation in real-world settings is necessary to assess the practical applicability of the proposed system. The EmoWear dataset should be explored for additional context-awareness applications, such as activity recognition and stress monitoring, to maximize its utility. The ColEmo platform offers opportunities for expansion beyond emotion recognition, including cognitive load estimation, stress monitoring, and human-computer interaction. This research moves wearable technology forward by using fewer sensors, helping make affective computing more efficient, versatile, and respectful of privacy.

As an essential challenge within the realm of affective computing, emotion recognition assumes a vital role in bestowing computers with a higher level and comprehensive intelligence. Furthermore, it has emerged as a crucial research topic in both human–computer interaction (HCI) and medical rehabilitation related to mental illnesses. However, the related fusion studies for modeling physiological signals in emotion recognition are less based on multimodal coordinated representation and lack the exploration of multimodal physiological signal correlation. In this article, we propose a tensor correlation fusion framework for emotion recognition based on multimodal physiological signals. After extracting effective features from various physiological signals, the coordinated representation module of the framework first simultaneously learns the linear correlation of all input physiological signals based on the covariance tensor. An optimized solution strategy is constructed to obtain the coordinated representation corresponding to each physiological signal. Finally, an emotion recognition module fuses the correlation information of the coordinated representation of different physiological signals as input to the emotion recognition classifier. This framework constructs coordinated representation by introducing a strategy to simultaneously capture the correlation among multiple physiological signals, providing a fresh perspective with a well-defined mathematical foundation for the fusion of multimodal physiological signals in the realm of emotion recognition. The experiments conducted on the DEAP dataset demonstrate that compared with related methods, the framework achieves relatively higher emotion recognition performance while obtaining a coordinated representation of multimodal physiological signal correlations of emotions, all while achieving superior processing speed.

Use of autonomous vehicles aims to eventually reduce the number of motor vehicle fatalities caused by humans. Deep learning plays an important role in making this possible because it can leverage the huge amount of training data that comes from autonomous car sensors. Automatic recognition of traffic light and vehicle signal is a perception module critical to autonomous vehicles because a deadly car accident could happen if a vehicle fails to follow traffic lights or vehicle signals. A practical Traffic Light Recognition (TLR) or Vehicle Signal Recognition (VSR) faces some challenges, including varying illumination conditions, false positives and long computation time. In this chapter, we propose a novel approach to recognize Traffic Light (TL) and Vehicle Signal (VS) with high dynamic range imaging and deep learning in real-time. Different from existing approaches which use only bright images, we use both high exposure/bright and low exposure/dark images provided by a high dynamic range camera. TL candidates can be detected robustly from low exposure/dark frames because they have a clean dark background. The TL candidates on the consecutive high exposure/bright frames are then classified accurately using a convolutional neural network. The dual-channel mechanism can achieve promising results because it uses undistorted color and shape information of low exposure/dark frames as well as rich texture of high exposure/bright frames. Furthermore, the TLR performance is boosted by incorporating a temporal trajectory tracking method. To speed up the process, a region of interest is generated to reduce the search regions for the TL candidates. The experimental results on a large dual-channel database have shown that our dual-channel approach outperforms the state of the art which uses only bright images. Encouraged by the promising performance of the TLR, we extend the dual-channel approach to vehicle signal recognition. The algorithm reported in this chapter has been integrated into our autonomous vehicle via Data Distribute Service (DDS) and works robustly in real roads.

We present a supervised deep learning method to automatically segment 3D volumes of biomedical image data. The presented method takes advantage of a neural network with the main layers consisting of multi-dimensional gated recurrent units. We apply an on-the-fly data augmentation technique which allows for accurate estimations without the need for either a huge amount of training data or advanced data pre- or postprocessing. We show that our method performs amongst the leading techniques on a popular brain segmentation challenge dataset in terms of speed, accuracy and memory efficiency. We describe in detail advantages over a similar method which uses the well-established long short-term memory.

This paper introduces an approach to employ deep features for person re-identification. In contrast to existing works, we focus on using pre-trained deep models and their concept-based output to enhance attribute presentations of person images. There are two main contributions. First, we investigate recent state-of-the-art deep learning models for the task and provide a comprehensive evaluation. Second, we present an approach to improve identification accuracy of a standard attribute-based person re-identification approach. By using pre-trained models, we avoid re-training new deep models which always require a huge amount of training data and high computational cost. The idea is to utilize the correlation between generic concepts learned by the deep models and specific pre-defined attributes commonly used for person re-identification. We employ the deeply learned features from generic concepts to represent person images. These images and their manually annotated attributes are then used to train attribute classifiers. Given the classifiers, attributes of the probe and gallery images can be automatically extracted to compose attribute-based feature vectors. Re-identification is done by matching the vectors. Experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Airplane detection from satellite imagery is a challenging task due to the complex backgrounds in the images and differences in data acquisition conditions caused by the sensor geometry and atmospheric effects. Deep learning methods provide reliable and accurate solutions for automatic detection of airplanes; however, huge amount of training data is required to obtain promising results. In this study, we create a novel airplane detection dataset called High Resolution Planes (HRPlanes) by using images from Google Earth (GE) and labeling the bounding box of each plane on the images. HRPlanes include GE images of several different airports across the world to represent a variety of landscape, seasonal and satellite geometry conditions obtained from different satellites. We evaluated our dataset with two widely used object detection methods namely YOLOv4 and Faster R-CNN. Our preliminary results show that the proposed dataset can be a valuable data source and benchmark data set for future applications. Moreover, proposed architectures and results of this study could be used for transfer learning of different datasets and models for airplane detection.

Many classification/segmentation tasks in medical imaging are particularly challenging for machine learning algorithms because of the huge amount of training data required to cover biological variability. Learning methods scaling badly in the number of training data points may not be applicable. This may exclude powerful classifiers with good generalization performance such as standard non-linear support vector machines (SVMs). Further, many medical imaging problems have highly imbalanced class populations, because the object to be segmented has only few pixels/voxels compared to the background. This article presents a two-stage classifier for large-scale medical imaging problems. In the first stage, a classifier that is easily trainable on large data sets is employed. The class imbalance is exploited and the classifier is adjusted to correctly detect background with a very high accuracy. Only the comparatively few data points not identified as background are passed to the second stage. Here a powerful classifier with high training time complexity can be employed for making the final decision whether a data point belongs to the object or not. We applied our method to the problem of automatically segmenting tibial articular cartilage from knee MRI scans. We show that by using nearest neighbor (kNN) in the first stage we can reduce the amount of data for training a non-linear SVM in the second stage. The cascaded system achieves better results than the state-of-the-art method relying on a single kNN classifier.

Rotating machinery is typical complex electromechanical equipment under non-stationary working conditions and hazardous environments, which is thus vulnerable to an unexpected fault. The currently wide-applied deep learning-based fault diagnosis methods for rotating machines require a huge amount of training data and can only extract features from independent samples. In this study, a Semi-Supervised Self-Correcting Graph Neural Network (SSGNN) is proposed for fault diagnosis, which effectively extracts features from vibrational signals and generates a graph-structured representation of fault knowledge. First, a preprocessing layer is introduced to mine the propinquity of vibration samples and construct a graph, where circle loss is applied to enhance convergence. Second, the state transform algorithm is improved by proposing a graph convolutional layer for efficiently implementing state propagation. Finally, an alternate learning method is proposed based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, in which the feature extraction network and graph structure are optimized alternately to reduce the training complexity. The proposed method is validated through experiments conducted on a publicly available dataset and a dynamic condition dataset obtained from a drivetrain dynamic simulator. The results show that the proposed method has higher accuracy and faster convergence speed compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Histopathological image analysis remains at the forefront of computational pathology presenting numerous challenges and demanding tasks, primarily due to the complex nature of tissue structures and the extensive scale of whole slide images (WSIs). Deep learning models have been widely used in histopathology image analysis, especially convolutional neural network (CNN)-based models for classification. However, CNNs have certain limitations due to their small receptive field. Recent works employed adaptations of the classical transformer architecture to visual data [1] [2]. Models such as Vision Transformer (ViT) and Swin Transformer leverage the powerful multi-head self-attention mechanism and have demonstrated comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art CNN-based classification models. Despite their successes, these models require huge amounts of training data to effectively learn representations as they lack the inherent inductive biases of CNNs. This work compares Vision Transformers with baseline CNN models using a breast cancer histopathological dataset. Further, we employ a novel knowledge-distillation approach to enhance the learning efficiency of vits, When trained with a limited amount of data, Unlike previous works, we aimed to minimize convolution operations when generating patch embeddings to preserve spatial information before reaching the transformer attention layers, we achieved an accuracy of 87.7% for the ViT-base trained as a student of ResNet50, which represents a 1.2% improvement in accuracy over the standalone ViT-base. [3]

Monitoring animals by the sounds they produce is an important and challenging task, whether the application is outdoors in a natural habitat, or in the controlled environment of a laboratory setting. In the former case, the density and diversity of animal sounds can act as a measure of biodiversity. In the latter case, researchers often create control and treatment groups of animals, expose them to different interventions, and test for different outcomes. One possible manifestation of different outcomes may be changes in the bioacoustics of the animals. With such a plethora of important applications, there have been significant efforts to build bioacoustic classification tools. However, we argue that most current tools are severely limited. They often require the careful tuning of many parameters (and thus huge amounts of training data), are either too computationally expensive for deployment in resource-limited sensors, specialized for a very small group of species, or are simply not accurate enough to be useful. In this work we introduce a novel bioacoustic recognition/classification framework that mitigates or solves all of the above problems. We propose to classify animal sounds in the visual space, by treating the texture of their sonograms as an acoustic fingerprint using a recently introduced parameter-free texture measure as a distance measure. We further show that by searching for the most representative acoustic fingerprint, we can significantly outperform other techniques in terms of speed and accuracy.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with sparse input features have been widely used in recommender systems in industry. These models have large memory requirements and need a huge amount of training data. The large model size usually entails a cost, in the range of millions of dollars, for storage and communication with the inference services. In this paper, we propose a hybrid hashing method to combine frequency hashing and double hashing techniques for model size reduction, without compromising performance. We evaluate the proposed models on two product surfaces. In both cases, experiment results demonstrated that we can reduce the model size by around 90 while keeping the performance on par with the original baselines.

Existing deep learning based visual servoing approaches regress the relative camera pose between a pair of images. Therefore, they require a huge amount of training data and sometimes fine-tuning for adaptation to a novel scene. Furthermore, current approaches do not consider underlying geometry of the scene and rely on direct estimation of camera pose. Thus, inaccuracies in prediction of the camera pose, especially for distant goals, lead to a degradation in the servoing performance. In this paper, we propose a two-fold solution: (i) We consider optical flow as our visual features, which are predicted using a deep neural network. (ii) These flow features are then systematically integrated with depth estimates provided by another neural network using interaction matrix. We further present an extensive benchmark in a photo-realistic 3D simulation across diverse scenes to study the convergence and generalisation of visual servoing approaches. We show convergence for over 3m and 40 degrees while maintaining precise positioning of under 2cm and 1 degree on our challenging benchmark where the existing approaches that are unable to converge for majority of scenarios for over 1.5m and 20 degrees. Furthermore, we also evaluate our approach for a real scenario on an aerial robot. Our approach generalizes to novel scenarios producing precise and robust servoing performance for 6 degrees of freedom positioning tasks with even large camera transformations without any retraining or fine-tuning.