Seeing through disguise: Getting to know you with a deep convolutional neural network

Text recognition in natural scene images is a challenging problem in computer vision. Different than the optical character recognition (OCR), text recognition in natural scene images is more complex due to variations in text size, colors, fonts, orientations, complex backgrounds, occlusion, illuminations and uneven lighting conditions. In this paper, we propose a segmentation-free method based on a deep convolutional recurrent neural network to solve the problem of cursive text recognition, particularly focusing on Urdu text in natural scenes. Compared to the non-cursive scripts, Urdu text recognition is more complex due to variations in the writing styles, several shapes of the same character, connected text, ligature overlapping, stretched, diagonal and condensed text. The proposed model gets a whole word image as an input without pre-segmenting into individual characters, and then transforms into the sequence of the relevant features. Our model is based on three components: a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with shortcut connections to extract and encode the features, a recurrent neural network (RNN) to decode the convolutional features, and a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) to map the predicted sequences into the target labels. To increase the text recognition accuracy further, we explore deeper CNN architectures like VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet-18 and ResNet-34 to extract more appropriate Urdu text features, and compare the recognition results. To conduct the experiments, a new large-scale benchmark dataset of cropped Urdu word images in natural scenes is developed. The experimental results show that the proposed deep CRNN network with shortcut connections outperform than other network architectures. The dataset is publicly available and can be downloaded from <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/k5fz57zd9z/1</uri> .

Purpose: The aim of the article is to develop an algorithm for classifying cracks in the analyzed images using modern methods of deep machine learning and transfer learning based on pretrained convolutional neural network - Inception-ResNet-v2. Design/Methodology/Approach: Transfer learning based on the pretrained convolutional neural network was used to categorize the images. The fully conected layer of the Inception-ResNet-v2 network has been modified. The last layer was trained using a two-class (binary) linear SVM (Support Vector Machine). In total, 20,000 training cases (images) were used to train the fully connected layer within transfer learning process. The research analyzed the possibility of using the deep neural networks for quick and fully automatic identification of cracks / defects on the surface of analyzed parts. Findings: The results indicate that pretrained convolutional neural network using SVM to train a fully connected layer is a very effective solution for visual crack / fault detection. In the analyzed model, a positive classification was obtained at the level of 99.89%. Practical Implications: The model presented in the article can be used in quality control carried out by process monitoring. An effective model for identifying defective parts can be used in both logistics and production processes. Originality/Value: A novelty is the use of a freely available, deep neural network trained to classify 1000 categories of various images for binary categorization of faults (cracks). The algorithm was adjusted by replacing the primary, 1000-output fully connected layer in the Inception-ResNet-v2 network with a binary layer (2 categories). The fully connected layer has been trained using the classification version of the popular SVM learner, but thanks to the combination of this layer with the sophisticated fearure extraction ability of the pre-trained Inception-ResNet-v2 deep network, the resulting predictive model enables the classification of defects with a very high level of accuracy.

Evaluation of the benchmark datasets for testing the efficacy of deep convolutional neural networks

Predictive analysis on cellular traffic is important for the control and monitoring of wireless networks. Cellular traffic prediction is a challenging problem due to the non- stationarity and dynamic spatial-temporal correlation of the traffic. In this paper, we address the problem of accurate traffic prediction in a base station by proposing a deep neural network called RAConv. Its structure includes residual network, attention mechanism, and deep convolutional network. In the proposed architecture, a deep 3D residual convolutional network (ResConv3D) with three residual blocks are employed to learn the local spatial-temporal features. An attention-aided convolutional long short-term memory network (AConvLSTM) is then used to capture the long-term spatial-temporal dependencies. The use of the attention modules enable the network to focus on the most important spatial-temporal information. We evaluate the performance of the proposed RAConv network using a dataset provided by a Canadian wireless service provider. We consider the traffic prediction on two time scales (i.e., hourly and daily), which exhibit different spatial-temporal dependency patterns. Experimental results show that the proposed RAConv network can achieve accurate prediction under both time scales. Results also show that our proposed network provides a lower root-mean-square error (RMSE) than the conventional ConvLSTM baseline scheme.

Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning, hierarchical learning, or deep machine learning) is a branch of machine learning based on a set of algorithms that attempt to model high-level abstractions in data by using a deep graph with multiple processing layers, composed of multiple linear and nonlinear transformations. Deep learning has been characterized as a class of machine learning algorithms with the following characteristics [257]: • They use a cascade of many layers of nonlinear processing units for feature extraction and transformation. Each successive layer uses the output from the previous layer as input. The algorithms may be supervised or unsupervised and applications include pattern analysis (unsupervised) and classification (supervised). • They are based on the (unsupervised) learning of multiple levels of features or representations of the data. Higher-level features are derived from lower-level features to form a hierarchical representation. • They are part of the broader machine learning field of learning representations of data. • They learn multiple levels of representations that correspond to different levels of abstraction; the levels form a hierarchy of concepts. These definitions have in common: multiple layers of nonlinear processing units and the supervised or unsupervised learning of feature representations in each layer, with the layers forming a hierarchy from low-level to high-level features. Various deep learning architectures such as deep neural networks, convolutional deep neural networks, deep belief networks (DBN), and recurrent neural networks have been applied to fields like computer vision, automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, audio recognition, and bioinformatics where they have been shown to produce state-of-the-art results on various tasks. In this chapter we start in Section 7.1 with an introduction, giving a brief history of this field, the relevant literature, and its applications. Then we study some basic concepts of deep learning such as convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, backpropagation algorithm, restricted Boltzmann machines, and deep learning networks in Section 7.2. Then we illustrate three examples for Apache Spark implementation for mobile big data (MBD), user moving pattern extraction, and combination with nonparametric Bayesian learning, respectively, in Sections 7.3 through 7.5. Finally, we have summary in Section 7.6.

An end-to-end deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based on deep residual network (ResNet) was proposed to efficiently reconstruct reliable T2 mapping from single-shot overlapping-echo detachment (OLED) planar imaging. The training dataset was obtained from simulations that were carried out on SPROM (Simulation with PRoduct Operator Matrix) software developed by our group. The relationship between the original OLED image containing two echo signals and the corresponding T2 mapping was learned by ResNet training. After the ResNet was trained, it was applied to reconstruct the T2 mapping from simulation and in vivo human brain data. Although the ResNet was trained entirely on simulated data, the trained network was generalized well to real human brain data. The results from simulation and in vivo human brain experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the echo-detachment-based method. Reliable T2 mapping with higher accuracy is achieved within 30 ms after the network has been trained, while the echo-detachment-based OLED reconstruction method took approximately 2 min. The proposed method will facilitate real-time dynamic and quantitative MR imaging via OLED sequence, and deep convolutional neural network has the potential to reconstruct maps from complex MRI sequences efficiently.

Recently, the fusion of hyperspectral and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data has obtained a great attention in the remote sensing community. In this paper, we propose a new feature fusion framework using deep neural network (DNN). The proposed framework employs a novel 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract the spectral-spatial features of hyperspectral data, a deep 2D CNN to extract the elevation features of LiDAR data, and then a fully connected deep neural network to fuse the extracted features in the previous CNNs. Through the aforementioned three deep networks, one can extract the discriminant and invariant features of hyperspectral and LiDAR data. At last, logistic regression is used to produce the final classification results. The experimental results reveal that the proposed deep fusion model provides competitive results. Furthermore, the proposed deep fusion idea opens a new window for future research.

In view of the scene’s complexity and diversity in scene classification, this paper makes full use of the contextual semantic relationships between the objects to describe the visual attention regions of the scenes and combines with the deep convolution neural networks, so that a scene classification model using visual attention and deep networks is constructed. Firstly, the visual attention regions in the scene image are marked by using the context-based saliency detection algorithm. Then, the original image and the visual attention region detection image are superimposed to obtain a visual attention region enhancement image. Furthermore, the deep convolution features of the original image, the visual attention region detection image, and the visual attention region enhancement image are extracted by using the deep convolution neural networks pretrained on the large-scale scene image dataset Places. Finally, the deep visual attention features are constructed by using the multilayer deep convolution features of the deep convolution networks, and a classification model is constructed. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, the experiments are carried out on four standard scene datasets LabelMe, UIUC-Sports, Scene-15, and MIT67. The results show that the proposed model improves the performance of the classification well and has good adaptability.

An area of particular importance in developing advanced imaging techniques concerns 3D motion measurement in small-scale mechatronics and automated microscopy. One major drawback is related to complex motion measurement with 6 degrees of freedom. In the proposed work, the extraction of unknown metrics such as focusing distance, in plane and out-of-plane positioning from digital holograms is performed including real‐time constraints. This work explores extended computer micro-vision capabilities offered by combining digital holographic microscopy (DHM) and last generation of deep learning algorithms such as Vision Transformer (ViT) networks. Our experiments show that the reconstruction in-focus distance can be predicted in DHM with a high accuracy using tiny modified architectures of deep ViT networks and convolutional neural networks (CNN). We compare ViT and Tiny ViT models with deep CNN usually used in digital holography such as VGG16, LeNet and AlexNet.

Large convolutional networks have achieved impressive classification performances recently. To achieve better performance, convolutional network tends to develop into deeper. However, the increase of network depth causes the linear growth of computational complexity, but cannot bring equivalent increase to the classification accuracy. To alleviate this inconsistence, we propose a cascading approach to accelerate the classification of very deep convolutional neural network. By exploiting the entropy metric to analyze the statistic differences of basic networks between the correctly and mistakenly classified images, we can assign the easily distinguished images to the shallow networks for reducing the computational complexity, and leave the difficultly classified images to the deep networks for maintaining the overall performance. Besides, the proposed cascaded networks can take advantage of the complementarity between different networks, which may boost the classification accuracy compared to the deepest network. We perform the experiments using residual networks of different depths on cifar100 dataset, on the condition of obtaining the similar accuracy to the deepest network, the results show that our cascaded ResNet32-ResNet110 and cascaded ResNet32-ResNet164 can reduce the computation time by 48.6% and 44.3% compared to ResNet110 and ResNet164, respectively. And the cascaded ResNet32-ResNet110-ResNet164 can reduce the computation time by 85.4% compared to the very deep Resnet1001.

Local binary features for texture classification: Taxonomy and experimental study

Handwritten digit recognition is the intelligence of computers to recognize digits written by humans. But it becomes one of the most challenging tasks for machines as handwritten digits are not perfect and can be made with many different: flavors, size, thickness. Thus, as a solution to this problem, Handwriting digit recognition model comes into picture. Many machine learning techniques have been employed to solve the handwritten digit recognition problem. This paper focuses on Neural Network (NN) approaches. Among the three famous NN approaches: deep neural network (DNN), deep belief network (DBN) and convolutional neural network (CNN), the specialization of CNN as compared to other NN of being able to detect pattern is what makes it so useful for recognizing handwritten digits. Humans can very easily see, read &amp; write any handwritten digits, when written in proper format. Even if the digits are not written in proper format we can use our logic and predict what digit it could be. But It is a hard task for the machine to recognize handwritten digits as these are not perfect and can be made with many different flavors. Thus handwritten digit recognition is the solution to this problem which uses the image of a digit and recognizes the digit present in the image. The handwritten digit recognition is the ability of computers to recognize human handwritten digits. The goal is to build a model that can efficiently and reliably recognize the digits and output the proper result. Amongst all the other neural networks, working and implementing a model using Convolution Neural Network gives out the most precise results. It is most popularly used for analyzing images as well as for other data analysis or classification problems. CNN has hidden layers called convolutional layers. These layers work the same way as other layers do but here we need to specify the no of filters each layer should have These filters are actually what detects the pattern. Patterns could be edges, corners, circles or any complex other objects like eyes, ears or even deeper full dogs, cats, etc. Thus, the specialization of CNN as compared to other NN of being able to detect patterns is what makes it so useful for recognizing handwritten digits Key Word: Neural Networks; Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN); Image Processing; Optical Character Recognition (OCR); MNIST Dataset

Self-mixing interferometry (SMI) is superior to other laser interferometry methods due to its simplicity and compactness. However, SMI signals are often complex and difficult to process due to interference in the form of variations in the effective reflectivity of the target, noisy signals, complex signal shapes, and other dependencies. Deep neural networks have been a very popular area of research in computer artificial intelligence in recent years, allowing more implicit features to be uncovered than traditional shallow machine learning. It has been shown that convolutional and back-propagation neural networks can be used for SMI signal processing. There are also studies that have used machine learning genetic algorithms for absolute distance measurement. Based on the above, this study used convolutional neural networks to form a deep neural network for absolute distance measurement based on SMI technology. We first trained the deep convolutional neural network at different feedback strengths. The results of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model showed a coefficient of determination of 0.9987. which is consistent with the required model. The trained network was then used to estimate absolute distances with and without the addition of noise. The comparison proves that the proposed method is noise-proof and has high adaptability for measurements under different conditions.

Deep neural network is an important and effective approach to discover patterns inside data. Most existing neural networks, like deep neural network and convolutional neural network, have a fixed network connection among neurons. This will cause overfitting problems and long training time. This article discusses an algorithm to combat these problems, through creating and removing connections during training, leading to faster training and fewer symmetric problems. This enables the network to adapt itself to the proper number of neurons according to the dataset. It greatly speeds up training process, so it is useful for large datasets and deep networks. This method is simple to implement and requires less memory and computing power than existing machine learning algorithm. It also has good results in machine learning problems.

Identification of crops is an important topic in the agricultural domain. Hyperspectral remote sensing data are very useful for crop feature extraction and classification. Remote sensing data is an unstructured data and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can work on unstructured data efficiently. This paper presents an evaluation of CNN for crop classification using the Indian Pines standard dataset obtained from the AVIRIS sensor and the study area dataset obtained from the EO-1hyperion sensor. Optimized CNN has been tuned by training the model on different parameters. It has been compared with two classification algorithms: Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Convolutional Autoencoder. According to the test results, the proposed optimized CNN model provided better results as compared to the other two methods. CNN has given 97 ± 0.58% overall accuracy for the Indian Pines standard dataset and 78 ± 2.43% for our study area dataset.