Question: Advancing edge-caching techniques for image recognition applications.

A novel object recognition system has been devised, employing a distinctive class of local image features designed to withstand transformations typical in visual processing. These features exhibit robustness against alterations in image scale, position, orientation, as well as partial tolerance to changes in lighting conditions and perspective or affine distortions. Mirroring the functionality of neurons in the primate visual system's inferior temporal cortex, which are pivotal for object recognition, these features are identified through an efficient multi-stage filtering process that pinpoints stable points within the scale space. The system generates image keys, which accommodate local geometric distortions by encapsulating blurred gradients across multiple orientation planes and scales. These keys serve as inputs for a nearest-neighbor indexing technique, enabling the system to propose potential object matches. The accuracy of each match is subsequently confirmed through a least-squares solution, optimizing for unknown model parameters and achieving a minimal residual error. Empirical evidence demonstrates the system's ability to reliably recognize objects in cluttered, partially occluded images, with a processing time under 2 seconds.

**Question**: An examination of the role of data augmentation in improving the accuracy of deep learning models

**Documents**: Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the state-of-the-art models in many computer vision tasks. However, overfitting remains a problem in these models. In this paper, we propose a new regularization method, Cutout, that improves the performance of CNNs on the CIFAR10, CIFAR100, SVHN, and ImageNet datasets. Cutout works by masking out random rectangular regions of an input image during training. We find that Cutout improves the generalization performance of CNNs on image classification tasks. We also show that Cutout can be combined with other regularization methods such as dropout and weight decay to further improve performance. We hypothesize that Cutout improves generalization by forcing the network to learn features that are invariant to occlusion. We also show that Cutout can be used as a data augmentation technique to improve the performance of CNNs on datasets with small amounts of training data.

**Similar Documents**: This paper introduces Cutout, a novel regularization technique that enhances the performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on various computer vision benchmarks, including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, SVHN, and ImageNet. Despite their superior capabilities, CNNs are prone to overfitting, a common challenge in deep learning. Cutout mitigates this issue by strategically masking

Fog computing, an extension of cloud computing services to the edge of the network to decrease latency and network congestion, is a relatively recent research trend. Although both cloud and fog offer similar resources and services, the latter is characterized by low latency with a wider spread and geographically distributed nodes to support mobility and real-time interaction. In this paper, we describe the fog computing architecture and review its different services and applications. We then discuss security and privacy issues in fog computing, focusing on service and resource availability. Virtualization is a vital technology in both fog and cloud computing that enables virtual machines (VMs) to coexist in a physical server (host) to share resources. These VMs could be subject to malicious attacks or the physical server hosting it could experience system failure, both of which result in unavailability of services and resources. Therefore, a conceptual smart pre-copy live migration approach is presented for VM migration. Using this approach, we can estimate the downtime after each iteration to determine whether to proceed to the stop-and-copy stage during a system failure or an attack on a fog computing node. This will minimize both the downtime and the migration time to guarantee resource and service availability to the end users of fog computing. Last, future research directions are outlined.

Computer vision based technologies have seen widespread adoption over the recent years. This use is not limited to the rapid adoption of facial recognition technology but extends to facial expression recognition, scene recognition and more. These developments raise privacy concerns and call for novel solutions to ensure adequate user awareness, and ideally, control over the resulting collection and use of potentially sensitive data. While cameras have become ubiquitous, most of the time users are not even aware of their presence. In this paper we introduce a novel distributed privacy infrastructure for the Internet-of-Things and discuss in particular how it can help enhance user's awareness of and control over the collection and use of video data about them. The infrastructure, which has undergone early deployment and evaluation on two campuses, supports the automated discovery of IoT resources and the selective notification of users. This includes the presence of computer vision applications that collect data about users. In particular, we describe an implementation of functionality that helps users discover nearby cameras and choose whether or not they want their faces to be denatured in the video streams.

Implementing E cient, Portable Computations for Machine Learning

For the efficient execution of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) on edge devices, various approaches have been presented which reduce the bit width of the network parameters down to 1 bit. Binarization of the first layer was always excluded, as it leads to a significant error increase. Here, we present the novel concept of binary input layer (BIL), which allows the usage of binary input data by learning bit specific binary weights. The concept is evaluated on three datasets (PAMAP2, SVHN, CIFAR-10). Our results show that this approach is in particular beneficial for multimodal datasets (PAMAP2) where it outperforms networks using full precision weights in the first layer by 1.92 percentage points (pp) while consuming only 2% of the chip area.

In this paper, we present an algorithm that extends the Color Edge Co-occurrence Histogram (CECH) object detection scheme on compound color objects, for the retrieval of logos and trademarks in unconstrained color image databases. We introduce more accurate information to the CECH, by virtue of incorporating color edge detection using vector order statistics. This produces a more accurate representation of edges in color images, as compared to the simple color pixel difference classification of edges seen with the CECH. Our proposed method is thus reliant on edge gradient information, and so we call it the Color Edge Gradient Co-occurrence Histogram (CEGCH). We also introduce a color quantization method based in the hue–saturation–value (HSV) color space, illustrating that it is a more suitable scheme of quantization for image retrieval, compared to the color quantization scheme introduced with the CECH. Experimental results demonstrate that the CEGCH and the HSV color quantization scheme is insensitive to scaling, rotation, and partial deformations, and outperforms the use of the CECH in image retrieval, with higher precision and recall. We also perform experiments on a closely related algorithm based on the Color Co-occurrence Histogram (CCH) and demonstrate that our algorithm is also superior in comparison, with higher precision and recall. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Image classification is critical and significant research problems in computer vision applications such as facial expression classification, satellite image classification, plant (fruits, flowers, leaf…) classification base on images. This paper proposes the image classification model applied for identifying the display of the online advertisement. The proposal model uses Convolutional Neural Network with two parameters (n, m) where n is a number of layers and m is number of filters in Conv layer. The proposed model is called nLmF-CNN. The suitable values of parameters (n, m) for advertisement image classification are identified by experiments. The input data of the proposed model are online captured images. The processing components of nLmF-CNN are developed as deep neural networks using ConvNetJs library. The output of the proposed model is YES/NO. YES means that the advertisements display clearly. NO means that the advertisements do not display or not clear. The experimental results 86% in our normalizing dataset showed the feasibility of a proposed model nLmF-CNN.

We present a class of extremely efficient CNN models, MobileFaceNets, which use less than 1 million parameters and are specifically tailored for high-accuracy real-time face verification on mobile and embedded devices. We first make a simple analysis on the weakness of common mobile networks for face verification. The weakness has been well overcome by our specifically designed MobileFaceNets. Under the same experimental conditions, our MobileFaceNets achieve significantly superior accuracy as well as more than 2 times actual speedup over MobileNetV2. After trained by ArcFace loss on the refined MS-Celeb-1M, our single MobileFaceNet of 4.0MB size achieves 99.55% accuracy on LFW and 92.59% TAR@FAR1e-6 on MegaFace, which is even comparable to state-of-the-art big CNN models of hundreds MB size. The fastest one of MobileFaceNets has an actual inference time of 18 milliseconds on a mobile phone. For face verification, MobileFaceNets achieve significantly improved efficiency over previous state-of-the-art mobile CNNs.

Online image analysis is used in a wide variety of applications. Edge detection is a fundamental tool used to obtain features of objects as a prerequisite step to object segmentation. This paper presents a simple and relatively fast online edge detection algorithm based on second derivative. The proposed edge detector is less sensitive to noise and may be applied on color, gray and binary images without preprocessing requirements. The merits of the algorithm are demonstrated by comparison with Canny’s and Sobel’s edge detectors.

Recently, a new ICT approach to agriculture called “Smart Agriculture” has been received great attention to support farmers' decision-making for good final yield on various kinds of field conditions. For this purpose, this paper presents two image sensing methods that enable an automatic observation to capture flowers and seedpods of soybeans in real fields. The developed image sensing methods are considered as sensors in an agricultural cyber-physical system in which big data on the growth status of agricultural plants and environmental information (e.g., weather, temperature, humidity, solar radiation, soil condition, etc.) are analyzed to mine useful rules for appropriate cultivation. The proposed image sensing methods are constructed by combining several image processing and machine learning techniques. The flower detection is realized based on a coarse-to-fine approach where candidate areas of flowers are first detected by SLIC and hue information, and the acceptance of flowers is decided by CNN. In the seedpod detection, candidates of seedpod regions are first detected by the Viola-Jones object detection method, and we also use CNN to make a final decision on the acceptance of detected seedpods. The performance of the proposed image sensing methods is evaluated for a data set of soybean images that were taken from a crowd of soybeans in real agricultural fields in Hokkaido, Japan.

With the recent advance of wearable devices and Internet of Things (IoTs), it becomes attractive to implement the Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) in embedded and portable systems. Currently, executing the software-based DCNNs requires high-performance servers, restricting the widespread deployment on embedded and mobile IoT devices. To overcome this obstacle, considerable research efforts have been made to develop highly-parallel and specialized DCNN accelerators using GPGPUs, FPGAs or ASICs.
 Stochastic Computing (SC), which uses a bit-stream to represent a number within [-1, 1] by counting the number of ones in the bit-stream, has high potential for implementing DCNNs with high scalability and ultra-low hardware footprint. Since multiplications and additions can be calculated using AND gates and multiplexers in SC, significant reductions in power (energy) and hardware footprint can be achieved compared to the conventional binary arithmetic implementations. The tremendous savings in power (energy) and hardware resources allow immense design space for enhancing scalability and robustness for hardware DCNNs.
 This paper presents SC-DCNN, the first comprehensive design and optimization framework of SC-based DCNNs, using a bottom-up approach. We first present the designs of function blocks that perform the basic operations in DCNN, including inner product, pooling, and activation function. Then we propose four designs of feature extraction blocks, which are in charge of extracting features from input feature maps, by connecting different basic function blocks with joint optimization. Moreover, the efficient weight storage methods are proposed to reduce the area and power (energy) consumption. Putting all together, with feature extraction blocks carefully selected, SC-DCNN is holistically optimized to minimize area and power (energy) consumption while maintaining high network accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the LeNet5 implemented in SC-DCNN consumes only 17 mm2 area and 1.53 W power, achieves throughput of 781250 images/s, area efficiency of 45946 images/s/mm2, and energy efficiency of 510734 images/J.


Question: Advancing edge-caching techniques for image recognition tasks.

This paper explores enhancements to the KD-tree structure specifically for optimizing the indexing of a large volume of SIFT descriptors and other image descriptor types. We have innovated upon the conventional priority search method, introducing a mechanism for priority search across multiple KD-trees. By constructing several KD-trees from the identical data set and conducting concurrent searches across these trees, we have observed a notable enhancement in the search efficiency of the KD-tree. Moreover, we have capitalized on the inherent structure within SIFT descriptors, or any data set, to minimize the computational time dedicated to backtracking. Through the application of Principal Component Analysis to align the primary axes of the data with the coordinate axes, we have achieved a further improvement in the search performance of the KD-tree. These modifications are aimed at expediting image descriptor matching, making it more efficient for image recognition tasks.

Neural networks are both computationally intensive and memory intensive, making them difficult to deploy on embedded systems with limited hardware resources. To address this limitation, we introduce “deep compression”, a three stage pipeline: pruning, trained quantization and Huffman coding, that work together to reduce the storage requirement of neural networks by 35× to 49× without affecting their accuracy. Our method first prunes the network by learning only the important connections. Next, we quantize the weights to enforce weight sharing, finally, we apply Huffman coding. After the first two steps we retrain the network to fine tune the remaining connections and the quantized centroids. Pruning, reduces the number of connections by 9× to 13×; Quantization then reduces the number of bits that represent each connection from 32 to 5. On the ImageNet dataset, our method reduced the storage required by AlexNet by 35×, from 240MB to 6.9MB, without loss of accuracy. Our method reduced the size of VGG-16 by 49× from 552MB to 11.3MB, again with no loss of accuracy. This allows fitting the model into on-chip SRAM cache rather than off-chip DRAM memory. Our compression method also facilitates the use of complex neural networks in mobile applications where application size and download bandwidth are constrained. Benchmarked on CPU, GPU and mobile GPU, compressed network has 3× to 4× layerwise speedup and 3× to 7× better energy efficiency.

Despite the increasing usage of cloud computing, there are still issues unsolved due to inherent problems of cloud computing such as unreliable latency, lack of mobility support and location-awareness. Fog computing can address those problems by providing elastic resources and services to end users at the edge of network, while cloud computing are more about providing resources distributed in the core network. This survey discusses the definition of fog computing and similar concepts, introduces representative application scenarios, and identifies various aspects of issues we may encounter when designing and implementing fog computing systems. It also highlights some opportunities and challenges, as direction of potential future work, in related techniques that need to be considered in the context of fog computing.

Convolutional networks are one of the most widely employed architectures in computer vision and machine learning. In order to leverage their ability to learn complex functions, large amounts of data are required for training. Training a large convolutional network to produce state-of-the-art results can take weeks, even when using modern GPUs. Producing labels using a trained network can also be costly when dealing with web-scale datasets. In this work, we present a simple algorithm which accelerates training and inference by a significant factor, and can yield improvements of over an order of magnitude compared to existing state-of-the-art implementations. This is done by computing convolutions as pointwise products in the Fourier domain while reusing the same transformed feature map many times. The algorithm is implemented on a GPU architecture and addresses a number of related challenges.

In vision-enabled autonomous systems such as robots and autonomous cars, video object detection plays a crucial role, and both its speed and accuracy are important factors to provide reliable operation. The key insight we show in this paper is that speed and accuracy are not necessarily a trade-off when it comes to image scaling. Our results show that re-scaling the image to a lower resolution will sometimes produce better accuracy. Based on this observation, we propose a novel approach, dubbed AdaScale, which adaptively selects the input image scale that improves both accuracy and speed for video object detection. To this end, our results on ImageNet VID and mini YouTube-BoundingBoxes datasets demonstrate 1.3 points and 2.7 points mAP improvement with 1.6× and 1.8× speedup, respectively. Additionally, we improve state-of-the-art video acceleration work by an extra 1.25× speedup with slightly better mAP on ImageNet VID dataset.

Recognizing arbitrary multi-character text in unconstrained natural photographs is a hard problem. In this paper, we address an equally hard sub-problem in this domain viz. recognizing arbitrary multi-digit numbers from Street View imagery. Traditional approaches to solve this problem typically separate out the localization, segmentation, and recognition steps. In this paper we propose a unified approach that integrates these three steps via the use of a deep convolutional neural network that operates directly on the image pixels. We employ the DistBelief (Dean et al., 2012) implementation of deep neural networks in order to train large, distributed neural networks on high quality images. We find that the performance of this approach increases with the depth of the convolutional network, with the best performance occurring in the deepest architecture we trained, with eleven hidden layers. We evaluate this approach on the publicly available SVHN dataset and achieve over 96% accuracy in recognizing complete street numbers. We show that on a per-digit recognition task, we improve upon the state-of-the-art and achieve 97.84% accuracy. We also evaluate this approach on an even more challenging dataset generated from Street View imagery containing several tens of millions of street number annotations and achieve over 90% accuracy. Our evaluations further indicate that at specific operating thresholds, the performance of the proposed system is comparable to that of human operators. To date, our system has helped us extract close to 100 million physical street numbers from Street View imagery worldwide.

We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection.

The Internet of Things (IoT) conceives a world where everyday objects are able to join the Internet and exchange data as well as process, store, collect them from the surrounding environment, and actively intervene on it. An unprecedented number of services may be envisioned by exploiting the Internet of Things. Fog Computing, which is also known as Edge Computing, was proposed in 2012 as the ideal paradigm to support the resource-constrained IoT devices in data processing and information delivery. Indeed, the Fog, which does not replace the centralized Cloud but cooperates with it, distributes Cloud Computing technologies and principles anywhere along the Cloud-to-Things continuum and particularly at the network edge. The Fog proximity to the IoT devices allows for several advantages that must be continuously guaranteed, also when end devices move from one place to another. In this paper, we aim at examining in depth what it means to provide mobility support in a Fog environment and at investigating what are the main challenges to be faced. Besides, in order to highlight the importance of this topic in everyday life, we provide the reader with three scenarios where there is an integration between the IoT and Fog Computing, and in which mobility support is essential. We finally point out the main research directions in the field.

Fog Computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage, and application services to end-users. In this article, we elaborate the motivation and advantages of Fog computing, and analyse its applications in a series of real scenarios, such as Smart Grid, smart traffic lights in vehicular networks and software defined networks. We discuss the state-of-the-art of Fog computing and similar work under the same umbrella. Security and privacy issues are further disclosed according to current Fog computing paradigm. As an example, we study a typical attack, man-in-the-middle attack, for the discussion of security in Fog computing. We investigate the stealthy features of this attack by examining its CPU and memory consumption on Fog device.

This paper describes a visual object detection framework that is capable of processing images extremely rapidly while achieving high detection rates. There are three key contributions. The first is the introduction of a new image representation called the “Integral Image” which allows the features used by our detector to be computed very quickly. The second is a learning algorithm, based on AdaBoost, which selects a small number of critical visual features and yields extremely efficient classifiers [6]. The third contribution is a method for combining classifiers in a “cascade” which allows background regions of the image to be quickly discarded while spending more computation on promising object-like regions. A set of experiments in the domain of face detection are presented. The system yields face detection performace comparable to the best previous systems [18, 13, 16, 12, 1]. Implemented on a conventional desktop, face detection proceeds at 15 frames per second.

Multi-resolution image features may be approximated via extrapolation from nearby scales, rather than being computed explicitly. This fundamental insight allows us to design object detection algorithms that are as accurate, and considerably faster, than the state-of-the-art. The computational bottleneck of many modern detectors is the computation of features at every scale of a finely-sampled image pyramid. Our key insight is that one may compute finely sampled feature pyramids at a fraction of the cost, without sacrificing performance: for a broad family of features we find that features computed at octave-spaced scale intervals are sufficient to approximate features on a finely-sampled pyramid. Extrapolation is inexpensive as compared to direct feature computation. As a result, our approximation yields considerable speedups with negligible loss in detection accuracy. We modify three diverse visual recognition systems to use fast feature pyramids and show results on both pedestrian detection (measured on the Caltech, INRIA, TUD-Brussels and ETH data sets) and general object detection (measured on the PASCAL VOC). The approach is general and is widely applicable to vision algorithms requiring fine-grained multi-scale analysis. Our approximation is valid for images with broad spectra (most natural images) and fails for images with narrow band-pass spectra (e.g., periodic textures).


Question: Advancing edge-caching techniques for image recognition tasks.

Exploring Edge-Caching for Enhanced Image Recognition

In the realm of computer vision, the amalgamation of algorithms and applications has significantly advanced the capabilities of image recognition technology. This paper delves into the potential of edge-caching as a strategic approach to boost the performance and efficiency of image recognition systems. The concept of edge-caching involves storing frequently accessed or computationally heavy data closer to the end-user, thereby reducing latency and enhancing the overall user experience. When applied to the context of image recognition, edge-caching can play a pivotal role in optimizing the retrieval and processing of visual data.

The benefits of edge-caching for image recognition are manifold. Firstly, it minimizes the bandwidth requirements by caching commonly used image datasets at the edge of the network, closer to the devices that access them. This reduces the load on the central servers and ensures faster access to images, crucial for real-time applications. Secondly, edge-caching can improve the robustness of image recognition systems by providing local copies of data that can be accessed even under network disruptions. This is particularly beneficial in scenarios where continuous network connectivity is not guaranteed.

Moreover, edge-caching supports the scalability of image recognition systems. As the volume of visual data continues to grow exponentially, the ability to distribute this data across multiple edge nodes becomes increasingly important. By caching data at the edge, the system can handle larger datasets without overloading the central infrastructure, ensuring that image recognition remains efficient and responsive.

To illustrate the effectiveness of edge-caching for image recognition, this paper presents a case study involving a large-scale image dataset. The results demonstrate significant improvements in latency, bandwidth utilization, and overall system performance when edge-caching strategies are employed. The study also highlights the importance of intelligent caching algorithms that can dynamically adjust the caching policies based on usage patterns and network conditions.

In conclusion, edge-caching emerges as a promising technique for optimizing image recognition systems. By leveraging the power of edge computing, this approach not only enhances the efficiency and reliability of image recognition but also paves the way for more sophisticated applications in fields such as augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, and surveillance systems. Future research should focus on developing more advanced caching algorithms and exploring the integration of edge-caching with other emerging technologies to further push the boundaries of image recognition capabilities.

Autonomous vehicles, surveillance systems, face detection systems lead to the development of accurate object detection system [1]. These systems recognize, classify and localize every object in an image by drawing bounding boxes around the object [2]. These systems use existing classification models as backbone for Object Detection purpose. Object detection is the process of finding instances of real-world objects such as human faces, animals and vehicles etc., in pictures, images or in videos. An Object detection algorithm uses extracted features and learning techniques to recognize the objects in an image. In this paper, various Object Detection techniques have been studied and some of them are implemented. As a part of this paper, three algorithms for object detection in an image were implemented and their results were compared. The algorithms are “Object Detection using Deep Learning Framework by OpenCV”, “Object Detection using Tensorflow” and “Object Detection using Keras models”.

A major challenge in scaling object detection is the difficulty of obtaining labeled images for large numbers of categories. Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as clear winners on object classification benchmarks, in part due to training with 1.2M+ labeled classification images. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of those labels are available for the detection task. It is much cheaper and easier to collect large quantities of image-level labels from search engines than it is to collect detection data and label it with precise bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose Large Scale Detection through Adaptation (LSDA), an algorithm which learns the difference between the two tasks and transfers this knowledge to classifiers for categories without bounding box annotated data, turning them into detectors. Our method has the potential to enable detection for the tens of thousands of categories that lack bounding box annotations, yet have plenty of classification data. Evaluation on the ImageNet LSVRC-2013 detection challenge demonstrates the efficacy of our approach. This algorithm enables us to produce a >7.6K detector by using available classification data from leaf nodes in the ImageNet tree. We additionally demonstrate how to modify our architecture to produce a fast detector (running at 2fps for the 7.6K detector). Models and software are available at lsda.berkeleyvision.org.

The advance of deep learning has made huge changes in computer vision and produced various off-the-shelf trained models. Particularly, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been widely used to build image classification model which allow researchers transfer the pre-trained learning model for other classifications. We propose a transfer learning method to detect breast cancer using histopathology images based on Google's Inception v3 model which were initially trained for the classification of non-medical images. The pilot study shows the feasibility of transfer learning in the detection of breast cancer with AUC of 0.93.

This paper presents an architecture of a low-power real-time object detection processor using Adaboost with Haar-Like features. We employ a register array based architecture, and introduce two architectural-level power optimization techniques; signal gating domain for integral image extraction, and low-power integral image update. The power efficiency of our proposed architecture including nine classifiers is estimated to be 0.64mW/fps when handling VGA(640 × 480) 70fps video.

Despite the increasing usage of cloud computing, there are still issues unsolved due to inherent problems of cloud computing such as unreliable latency, lack of mobility support and location-awareness. Fog computing can address those problems by providing elastic resources and services to end users at the edge of network, while cloud computing are more about providing resources distributed in the core network. This survey discusses the definition of fog computing and similar concepts, introduces representative application scenarios, and identifies various aspects of issues we may encounter when designing and implementing fog computing systems. It also highlights some opportunities and challenges, as direction of potential future work, in related techniques that need to be considered in the context of fog computing.

Outsourcing an image classification task raises privacy concerns, both from the image provider’s perspective, who wishes to keep their images confidential, and from the classification algorithm provider’s perspective, who wishes to protect the intellectual property of their classifier. We propose EPIC, an efficient private image classification system based on support vector machine (SVM) learning, secure against malicious adversaries. EPIC builds upon transfer learning techniques known from the Machine Learning (ML) literature and minimizes the load on the privacy-preserving part. Our solution is based on Multiparty Computation (MPC), it is 34 times faster than Gazelle (USENIX’18) –the state-of-the-art in private image classification– and it improves the communication cost by 50 times, with a 7% higher accuracy on CIFAR-10 dataset. For the same accuracy as Gazelle achieves on CIFAR-10, EPIC is 700 times faster and the communication cost is reduced by 500 times.

We present an integrated framework for using Convolutional Networks for classification , localization and detection. We show how a multiscale and sliding window approach can be efficiently implemented within a ConvNet. We also introduce a novel deep learning approach to localization by learning to predict object boundaries. Bounding boxes are then accumulated rather than suppressed in order to increase detection confidence. We show that different tasks can be learned simultaneously using a single shared network. This integrated framework is the winner of the localization task of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013 (ILSVRC2013) and obtained very competitive results for the detection and classifications tasks. In post-competition work, we establish a new state of the art for the detection task. Finally, we release a feature extractor from our best model called OverFeat.

Recently, there has been a flurry of industrial activity around logo recognition, such as Ditto’s service for marketers to track their brands in user-generated images, and LogoGrab’s mobile app platform for logo recognition. However, relatively little academic or open-source logo recognition progress has been made in the last four years. Meanwhile, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have revolutionized a broad range of object recognition applications. In this work, we apply DCNNs to logo recognition. We propose several DCNN architectures, with which we surpass published state-of-art accuracy on a popular logo recognition dataset.

Mobile systems have limited resources, such as battery life, network bandwidth, storage capacity, and processor performance. These restrictions may be alleviated by computation of f loading: sending heavy computation to resourceful servers and receiving the results from these servers. Many issues related to offloading have been investigated in the past decade. This survey paper provides an overview of the background, techniques, systems, and research areas for offloading computation. We also describe directions for future research.

For the efficient execution of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) on edge devices, various approaches have been presented which reduce the bit width of the network parameters down to 1 bit. Binarization of the first layer was always excluded, as it leads to a significant error increase. Here, we present the novel concept of binary input layer (BIL), which allows the usage of binary input data by learning bit specific binary weights. The concept is evaluated on three datasets (PAMAP2, SVHN, CIFAR-10). Our results show that this approach is in particular beneficial for multimodal datasets (PAMAP2) where it outperforms networks using full precision weights in the first layer by 1.92 percentage points (pp) while consuming only 2% of the chip area.


Question: Advancing edge-caching techniques for image recognition applications.

In the realm of mobile computing, which is perpetually advancing due to the tireless efforts of researchers, there is a significant enhancement in augmenting users' cognitive abilities. This augmentation is facilitated through compute-intensive tasks like speech recognition and natural language processing, thereby transforming various facets of human activity. This article delves into the technical hurdles that impede these transformations and proposes an innovative architectural solution to surmount them. Central to this architecture is the utilization of virtual machine (VM) technology, enabling a mobile user to swiftly instantiate customized service software on a nearby cloudlet, and subsequently access that service over a wireless LAN, often with the mobile device functioning as a thin client. A cloudlet, defined as a trusted, resource-rich computer or cluster of computers that is well-connected to the Internet and accessible to nearby mobile devices, plays a pivotal role in this strategy. This strategy, known as cloudlet-based, resource-rich, mobile computing, capitalizes on transiently customized proximate infrastructure as the mobile device moves with its user through the physical world. The architecture facilitates crisp interactive response, a critical component for seamless cognitive augmentation, due to the cloudlet's geographical proximity and minimal network latency. The cloudlet's proximity also eases the challenge of meeting the peak bandwidth demands of multiple users engaged in generating and receiving media, such as high-definition video and high-resolution images. The necessity for rapid infrastructure customization for diverse applications is underscored, and our findings from a prototype suggest that VM technology is indeed a viable solution to this requirement.

License Plate Recognition System (LPRS) plays a vital role in smart city initiatives such as traffic control, smart parking, toll management and security. In this article, a cloud-based LPRS is addressed in the context of efficiency where accuracy and speed of processing plays a critical role towards its success. Signature-based features technique as a deep convolutional neural network in a cloud platform is proposed for plate localization, character detection and segmentation. Extracting significant features makes the LPRS to adequately recognize the license plate in a challenging situation such as i) congested traffic with multiple plates in the image ii) plate orientation towards brightness, iii) extra information on the plate, iv) distortion due to wear and tear and v) distortion about captured images in bad weather like as hazy images. Furthermore, the deep learning algorithm computed using bare-metal cloud servers with kernels optimized for NVIDIA GPUs, which speed up the training phase of the CNN LPDS algorithm. The experiments and results show the superiority of the performance in both recall and precision and accuracy in comparison with traditional LP detecting systems.

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) is facing significant scalability and security challenges. On the one hand, IoT devices are “weak” and need external assistance. Edge computing provides a promising direction addressing the deficiency of centralized cloud computing in scaling massive number of devices. On the other hand, IoT devices are also relatively “vulnerable” facing malicious hackers due to resource constraints. The emerging blockchain and smart contracts technologies bring a series of new security features for IoT and edge computing. In this paper, to address the challenges, we design and prototype an edge-IoT framework named “EdgeChain” based on blockchain and smart contracts. The core idea is to integrate a permissioned blockchain and the internal currency or “coin” system to link the edge cloud resource pool with each IoT device’ account and resource usage, and hence behavior of the IoT devices. EdgeChain uses a credit-based resource management system to control how much resource IoT devices can obtain from edge servers, based on pre-defined rules on priority, application types and past behaviors. Smart contracts are used to enforce the rules and policies to regulate the IoT device behavior in a non-deniable and automated manner. All the IoT activities and transactions are recorded into blockchain for secure data logging and auditing. We implement an EdgeChain prototype and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the ideas. The results show that while gaining the security benefits of blockchain and smart contracts, the cost of integrating them into EdgeChain is within a reasonable and acceptable range.

We perform fast vehicle detection from traffic surveillance cameras. A novel deep learning framework, namely Evolving Boxes, is developed that proposes and refines the object boxes under different feature representations. Specifically, our framework is embedded with a light-weight proposal network to generate initial anchor boxes as well as to early discard unlikely regions; a fine-turning network produces detailed features for these candidate boxes. We show intriguingly that by applying different feature fusion techniques, the initial boxes can be refined for both localization and recognition. We evaluate our network on the recent DETRAC benchmark and obtain a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art Faster RCNN by 9.5% mAP. Further, our network achieves 9–13 FPS detection speed on a moderate commercial GPU.

Recently, Cloud Computing, Edge Computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have been converging ever stronger, sparking creation of very large-scale, geographically distributed systems [1, 2]. Such systems intensively exploit Cloud Computing models and technologies, predominantly by utilizing large and remote data centers, but also nearby Cloudlets [3, 4] to enhance resource-constrained Edge devices (e.g., in terms of computation offloading [5–7] and data staging [8]) or to provide an execution environment for cloud-centric IoT/Edge applications [9, 10]. Serverless computing is an emerging paradigm, typically referring to a software architecture where application is decomposed into “triggers” and “actions” (or functions), and there is a platform that provides seamless hosting and execution of developer-defined functions (FaaS), making it easy to develop, manage, scale, and operate them. This complexity mitigation is mainly achieved by incorporating sophisticated runtime mechanisms into serverless or FaaS platforms. Hence, such platforms are usually characterized by fully automating many of the management and operations processes. Therefore, serverless computing can be considered as the next step in the evolution of Cloud platforms, such as PaaS, or more generally of the utility computing. While originally designed for centralized cloud deployments, the benefits of serverless paradigm become especially evident in the context of Edge Computing [11]. This is mainly because in such systems, traditional infrastructure and application management solutions are tedious, ineffective, error-prone, and ultimately very costly. Luckily, some of the existing serverless techniques, such

Digital image processing techniques (DIP) have been widely used in various types of application recently. Classification and recognition of a specific object using vision system require some challenging tasks in the field of image processing and artificial intelligence. The ability and efficiency of vision system to capture and process the images is very important for any intelligent system such as autonomous robot. This paper gives attention to the development of a vision system that could contribute to the development of an automated vision based lawn mower robot. The works involve on the implementation of DIP techniques to detect and recognize three different types of obstacles that usually exist on a football field. The focus was given on the study on different types and sizes of obstacles, the development of vision based obstacle recognition system and the evaluation of the system’s performance. Image processing techniques such as image filtering, segmentation, enhancement and edge detection have been applied in the system. The results have shown that the developed system is able to detect and recognize various types of obstacles on a football field with recognition rate of more 80%.

Nowadays computer vision technology is helping the visually impaired by recognizing objects in their surroundings. Unlike research of navigation and wayfinding, there are no camera-based systems available in the market to find personal items for the blind. This paper proposes an object recognition method to help blind people find missing items using Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF). SURF features can extract distinctive invariant features that can be utilized to perform reliable matching between different images in multiple scenarios. These features are invariant to image scale, translation, rotation, illumination, and partial occlusion. The proposed recognition process begins by matching individual features of the user queried object to a database of features with different personal items which are saved in advance. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

In this paper, we introduce the DEEP-SEE FACE framework, an assistive device designed to improve cognition, interaction, and communication of visually impaired (VI) people in social encounters. The proposed approach jointly exploits computer vision algorithms (region proposal networks, ATLAS tracking and global, and low-level image descriptors) and deep convolutional neural networks in order to detect, track, and recognize, in real-time, various persons existent in the video streams. The major contribution of the paper concerns a global, fixed-size face representation that takes into the account of various video frames while remaining independent of the length of the image sequence. To this purpose, we introduce an effective weight adaptation scheme that is able to determine the relevance assigned to each face instance, depending on the frame degree of motion/camera blur, scale variation, and compression artifacts. Another relevant contribution involves a hard negative mining stage that helps us differentiating between known and unknown face identities. The experimental results, carried out on a large-scale data set, validate the proposed methodology with an average accuracy and recognition rates superior to 92%. When tested in real life, indoor/outdoor scenarios, the DEEP-SEE FACE prototype proves to be effective and easy to use, allowing the VI people to access visual information during social events.

Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm to meet the ever-increasing computation demands from mobile applications. By offloading the computationally intensive workloads to the MEC server, the quality of computation experience, e.g., the execution latency, could be greatly improved. Nevertheless, as the on-device battery capacities are limited, computation would be interrupted when the battery energy runs out. To provide satisfactory computation performance as well as achieving green computing, it is of significant importance to seek renewable energy sources to power mobile devices via energy harvesting (EH) technologies. In this paper, we will investigate a green MEC system with EH devices and develop an effective computation offloading strategy. The execution cost, which addresses both the execution latency and task failure, is adopted as the performance metric. A low-complexity online algorithm is proposed, namely, the Lyapunov optimization-based dynamic computation offloading algorithm, which jointly decides the offloading decision, the CPU-cycle frequencies for mobile execution, and the transmit power for computation offloading. A unique advantage of this algorithm is that the decisions depend only on the current system state without requiring distribution information of the computation task request, wireless channel, and EH processes. The implementation of the algorithm only requires to solve a deterministic problem in each time slot, for which the optimal solution can be obtained either in closed form or by bisection search. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is shown to be asymptotically optimal via rigorous analysis. Sample simulation results shall be presented to corroborate the theoretical analysis as well as validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Automatic identification and recognition of medicinal plant species in environments such as forests, mountains and dense regions is necessary to know about their existence. In recent years, plant species recognition is carried out based on the shape, geometry and texture of various plant parts such as leaves, stem, flowers etc. Flower based plant species identification systems are widely used. While modern search engines provide methods to visually search for a query image that contains a flower, it lacks in robustness because of the intra-class variation among millions of flower species around the world. Hence in this proposed research work, a Deep learning approach using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) is used to recognize flower species with high accuracy. Images of the plant species are acquired using the built-in camera module of a mobile phone. Feature extraction of flower images is performed using a Transfer Learning approach (i.e. extraction of complex features from a pre-trained network). A machine learning classifier such as Logistic Regression or Random Forest is used on top of it to yield a higher accuracy rate. This approach helps in minimizing the hardware requirement needed to perform the computationally intensive task of training a CNN. It is observed that, CNN combined with Transfer Learning approach as feature extractor outperforms all the handcrafted feature extraction methods such as Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Color Channel Statistics, Color Histograms, Haralick Texture, Hu Moments and Zernike Moments. CNN combined with Transfer Learning approach yields impressive Rank-1 accuracies of 73.05%, 93.41% and 90.60% using OverFeat, Inception-v3 and Xception architectures, respectively as Feature Extractors on FLOWERS102 dataset.

Fog Computing is a recent computing paradigm that is extending cloud computing towards the edge of network. Due to its proximity to end-users, dense geographical distribution, open platform and support for high mobility, Fog Computing platforms can provide services with reduced latency and improved QoS. Thus it is becoming an important enabler for consumer centric Internet of Things based applications and services that require real time operations e.g. connected vehicles, smart road intersection management and smart grid. The paper discusses one such architecture for connected vehicles with Road Side Units (RSUs) and M2M gateways including the Fog Computing Platform. M2M data processing with semantics, discovery and management of connected vehicles are briefly discussed as consumer centric IoT services enabled by the distinct characteristics of Fog Computing.


Question: Moving towards edge-caching techniques for image recognition tasks.

This document explores the application of unsupervised feature learning techniques in the challenging task of detecting and reading text within natural images, focusing on the specific scenario of recognizing digits. The problem of character recognition in documents has been extensively researched and is considered nearly solved for practical uses, such as identifying handwritten digits. However, the task becomes significantly more complex when applied to more intricate scenes, such as photographs, where current methods fall short compared to human capabilities. To tackle this issue, the paper introduces a novel benchmark dataset for research purposes, consisting of over 600,000 labeled digits extracted from Street View images. The authors highlight the difficulty in recognizing these digits using conventional, hand-designed features. Subsequently, they apply and evaluate two recently proposed unsupervised feature learning methods, demonstrating their clear superiority in addressing this benchmark, thereby advancing the state of the art in digit recognition from real-world images.

Recently, general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) has been enabled on mobile devices thanks to the emerging heterogeneous programming models such as OpenCL. The capability of GPGPU on mobile devices opens a new era for mobile computing and can enable many computationally demanding computer vision algorithms on mobile devices. As a case study, this paper proposes to accelerate an exemplar-based inpainting algorithm for object removal on a mobile GPU using OpenCL. We discuss the methodology of exploring the parallelism in the algorithm as well as several optimization techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that our optimization strategies for mobile GPUs have significantly reduced the processing time and make computationally intensive computer vision algorithms feasible for a mobile device. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this work is the first published implementation of general-purpose computing using OpenCL on mobile GPUs.

Faced with continuously increasing scale of data, original back-propagation neural network based machine learning algorithm presents two non-trivial challenges: huge amount of data makes it difficult to maintain both efficiency and accuracy; redundant data aggravates the system workload. This project is mainly focused on the solution to the issues above, combining deep learning algorithm with cloud computing platform to deal with large-scale data. A MapReduce-based handwriting character recognizer will be designed in this project to verify the efficiency improvement this mechanism will achieve on training and practical large-scale data. Careful discussion and experiment will be developed to illustrate how deep learning algorithm works to train handwritten digits data, how MapReduce is implemented on deep learning neural network, and why this combination accelerates computation. Besides performance, the scalability and robustness will be mentioned in this report as well. Our system comes with two demonstration software that visually illustrates our handwritten digit recognition/encoding application. 1

The multimedia community has witnessed the rise of deep learning–based techniques in analyzing multimedia content more effectively. In the past decade, the convergence of deep-learning and multimedia analytics has boosted the performance of several traditional tasks, such as classification, detection, and regression, and has also fundamentally changed the landscape of several relatively new areas, such as semantic segmentation, captioning, and content generation. This article aims to review the development path of major tasks in multimedia analytics and take a look into future directions. We start by summarizing the fundamental deep techniques related to multimedia analytics, especially in the visual domain, and then review representative high-level tasks powered by recent advances. Moreover, the performance review of popular benchmarks gives a pathway to technology advancement and helps identify both milestone works and future directions.

With the recent advance of wearable devices and Internet of Things (IoTs), it becomes attractive to implement the Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) in embedded and portable systems. Currently, executing the software-based DCNNs requires high-performance servers, restricting the widespread deployment on embedded and mobile IoT devices. To overcome this obstacle, considerable research efforts have been made to develop highly-parallel and specialized DCNN accelerators using GPGPUs, FPGAs or ASICs.
 Stochastic Computing (SC), which uses a bit-stream to represent a number within [-1, 1] by counting the number of ones in the bit-stream, has high potential for implementing DCNNs with high scalability and ultra-low hardware footprint. Since multiplications and additions can be calculated using AND gates and multiplexers in SC, significant reductions in power (energy) and hardware footprint can be achieved compared to the conventional binary arithmetic implementations. The tremendous savings in power (energy) and hardware resources allow immense design space for enhancing scalability and robustness for hardware DCNNs.
 This paper presents SC-DCNN, the first comprehensive design and optimization framework of SC-based DCNNs, using a bottom-up approach. We first present the designs of function blocks that perform the basic operations in DCNN, including inner product, pooling, and activation function. Then we propose four designs of feature extraction blocks, which are in charge of extracting features from input feature maps, by connecting different basic function blocks with joint optimization. Moreover, the efficient weight storage methods are proposed to reduce the area and power (energy) consumption. Putting all together, with feature extraction blocks carefully selected, SC-DCNN is holistically optimized to minimize area and power (energy) consumption while maintaining high network accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the LeNet5 implemented in SC-DCNN consumes only 17 mm2 area and 1.53 W power, achieves throughput of 781250 images/s, area efficiency of 45946 images/s/mm2, and energy efficiency of 510734 images/J.

Along with the rapid advancement of digital image processing technology, image denoising remains a fundamental task, which aims to recover the original image from its noisy observation. With the explosive growth of images on the Internet, one recent trend is to seek high quality similar patches at cloud image databases and harness rich redundancy therein for promising denoising performance. Despite the well-understood benefits, such a cloud-based denoising paradigm would undesirably raise security and privacy issues, especially for privacy-sensitive image data sets. In this paper, we initiate the first endeavor toward privacy-preserving image denoising from external cloud databases. Our design enables the cloud hosting encrypted databases to provide secure query-based image denoising services. Considering that image denoising intrinsically demands high quality similar image patches, our design builds upon recent advancements on secure similarity search, Yao’s garbled circuits, and image denoising operations, where each is used at a different phase of the design for the best performance. We formally analyze the security strengths. Extensive experiments over real-world data sets demonstrate that our design achieves the denoising quality close to the optimal performance in plaintext.

In this paper, we report the feature obtained from the Deep Convolutional Neural Network boosts food recognition accuracy greatly by integrating it with conventional hand-crafted image features, Fisher Vectors with HoG and Color patches. In the experiments, we have achieved 72.26% as the top-1 accuracy and 92.00% as the top-5 accuracy for the 100-class food dataset, UEC-FOOD100, which outperforms the best classification accuracy of this dataset reported so far, 59.6%, greatly.

Online image analysis is used in a wide variety of applications. Edge detection is a fundamental tool used to obtain features of objects as a prerequisite step to object segmentation. This paper presents a simple and relatively fast online edge detection algorithm based on second derivative. The proposed edge detector is less sensitive to noise and may be applied on color, gray and binary images without preprocessing requirements. The merits of the algorithm are demonstrated by comparison with Canny’s and Sobel’s edge detectors.

In this paper, we introduce the DEEP-SEE FACE framework, an assistive device designed to improve cognition, interaction, and communication of visually impaired (VI) people in social encounters. The proposed approach jointly exploits computer vision algorithms (region proposal networks, ATLAS tracking and global, and low-level image descriptors) and deep convolutional neural networks in order to detect, track, and recognize, in real-time, various persons existent in the video streams. The major contribution of the paper concerns a global, fixed-size face representation that takes into the account of various video frames while remaining independent of the length of the image sequence. To this purpose, we introduce an effective weight adaptation scheme that is able to determine the relevance assigned to each face instance, depending on the frame degree of motion/camera blur, scale variation, and compression artifacts. Another relevant contribution involves a hard negative mining stage that helps us differentiating between known and unknown face identities. The experimental results, carried out on a large-scale data set, validate the proposed methodology with an average accuracy and recognition rates superior to 92%. When tested in real life, indoor/outdoor scenarios, the DEEP-SEE FACE prototype proves to be effective and easy to use, allowing the VI people to access visual information during social events.

Today, the characterization of the technological age is done by the digital images spread. They are the most common form of conveying information whether through internet, newspapers, magazines, or scientific journals. They are used as a strong proof of various crimes and as evidence used for various purposes. The modification, capturing or creating of the image has become easier and available with the emergence of means of image editing and processing tools. One of the most important and popular types of image forgery is a copy-move forgery in which an image part is copied and then pasted into the same image that has the intention of hiding something important or showing a false scene. Because the important properties of the copied parts come from the same image, such as brightness, noise, and texture which will be compatible with the entire image that makes more difficult for experts for the detection and distinguishing the alteration. Usually, the detecting copy move forgery conventional techniques suffer severely from the time-consuming problem. The evaluation of the improved method had been done using (150) images that were selected from two different datasets, “CoMoFoD” and “MICC-F2000”. Experimental results show that the improved method can accurately and quickly reveal the doubled regions of a tampered image. In addition, greatly reducing the processing time in comparison to the Khan algorithm, and the accuracy is kept at the same level. Owing to the availability and technological advancement of the image editing sophisticated tools, there is an increase in the loss of authentication in digital images. Thus, this led us to the proposal of different detection techniques that checks whether the digital images are forged or authentic. The specific type of forgery technique is copy move forgery in which widely used research topic is detection under digital image forensics. In this thesis, an enhancement of copy move image forgery classification is done by implementing hybrid features with classification algorithms like SIFT with SVM and EM algorithm and ORB with SVM and EM.The technique works by applying Firstly the DCT on an image and then on a resultant image, SIFT is obtained after applying DCT. A supervised learning method is proposed for classifying a copy-move image forgery of TIFF, JPEG, and BMP. The process starts with reducing the color of the photos. Achieve the accuracy more than 90%.

This paper describes a method for detecting and recognizing road signs in gray-level and color images acquired by a single camera mounted on a moving vehicle. The method works in three stages. First, the search for the road sign is reduced to a suitable region of the image by using some a priori knowledge on the scene or color clues (when available). Secondly, a geometrical analysis of the edges extracted from the image is carried out, which generates candidates to be circular and triangular signs. Thirdly, a recognition stage tests by cross-correlation techniques each candidate which, if validated, is classi ed according to the data-base of signs. An extensive experimentation has shown that the method is robust against low-level noise corrupting edge detection and contour following, and works for images of cluttered urban streets as well as country roads and highways. A further improvement on the detection and recognition scheme has been obtained by means of temporal integration based on Kalman ltering methods of the extracted information. The proposed approach can be very helpful for the development of a system for driving assistance.


Question: Investigating the impact of word roots in Arabic sentiment analysis.

This paper delves into the critical aspect of opinion question answering systems by addressing the distinction between factual information and subjective opinions, both at the document and sentence levels. The task of accurately identifying and categorizing opinions in natural language presents a significant challenge in the field of natural language processing. To tackle this issue, we propose a Bayesian classifier designed to efficiently differentiate between documents rich in opinions, such as editorials, and those predominantly factual, such as standard news articles. Additionally, we introduce three unsupervised, statistical methods aimed at the considerably more complex task of opinion detection within individual sentences. Furthermore, we develop an initial model for the classification of opinion sentences based on the sentiment polarity, distinguishing between positive, negative, and neutral perspectives. Our experimental results, drawn from a comprehensive dataset of news articles and a manual evaluation of 400 sentences, showcase the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, the document classification model achieves outstanding precision and recall rates of over 97%, while our techniques for sentence-level opinion detection and polarity classification demonstrate commendable accuracy, reaching up to 91%. These findings underscore the potential of our methods in enhancing the performance of opinion question answering systems.

This paper describes our SeemGo system for the task of Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis in SemEval-2014. The subtask of aspect term extraction is cast as a sequence labeling problem modeled with Conditional Random Fields that obtains the F-score of 0.683 for Laptops and 0.791 for Restaurants by exploiting both word-based features and context features. The other three subtasks are solved by the Maximum Entropy model, with the occurrence counts of unigram and bigram words of each sentence as features. The subtask of aspect category detection obtains the best result when applying the Boosting method on the Maximum Entropy model, with the precision of 0.869 for Restaurants. The Maximum Entropy model also shows good performance in the subtasks of both aspect term and aspect category polarity classification.

Stemming is an approach used to reduce a word to its stem or root form and is used widely in information retrieval tasks to increase the recall rate and give us most relevant results. There are number of ways to perform stemming ranging from manual to automatic methods, from language specific to language independent each having its own advantage over the other. This paper represents a comparative study of various available stemming alternatives widely used to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of information retrieval.

This paper considers the problem of learning Chinese word embeddings. In contrast to English, a Chinese word is usually composed of characters, and most of the characters themselves can be further divided into components such as radicals. While characters and radicals contain rich information and are capable of indicating semantic meanings of words, they have not been fully exploited by existing word embedding methods. In this work, we propose multi-granularity embedding (MGE) for Chinese words. The key idea is to make full use of such word-character-radical composition, and enrich word embeddings by further incorporating finer-grained semantics from characters and radicals. Quantitative evaluation demonstrates the superiority of MGE in word similarity computation and analogical reasoning. Qualitative analysis further shows its capability to identify finer-grained semantic meanings of words.

The openly available biomedical literature contains over 5 billion words in publication abstracts and full texts. Recent advances in unsupervised language processing methods have made it possible to make use of such large unannotated corpora for building statistical language models and inducing high quality vector space representations, which are, in turn, of utility in many tasks such as text classification, named entity recognition and query expansion. In this study, we introduce the first set of such language resources created from analysis of the entire available biomedical literature, including a dataset of all 1to 5-grams and their probabilities in these texts and new models of word semantics. We discuss the opportunities created by these resources and demonstrate their application. All resources introduced in this study are available under open licenses at http://bio.nlplab.org.

With the advent of Web 2.0, people became more eager to express and share their opinions on web regarding day-to-day activities and global issues as well. Evolution of social media has also contributed immensely to these activities, thereby providing us a transparent platform to share views across the world. These electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) statements expressed on the web are much prevalent in business and service industry to enable customer to share his/her point of view. In the last one and half decades, research communities, academia, public and service industries are working rigorously on sentiment analysis, also known as, opinion mining, to extract and analyze public mood and views. In this regard, this paper presents a rigorous survey on sentiment analysis, which portrays views presented by over one hundred articles published in the last decade regarding necessary tasks, approaches, and applications of sentiment analysis. Several sub-tasks need to be performed for sentiment analysis which in turn can be accomplished using various approaches and techniques. This survey covering published literature during 2002-2015, is organized on the basis of sub-tasks to be performed, machine learning and natural language processing techniques used and applications of sentiment analysis. The paper also presents open issues and along with a summary table of a hundred and sixty one articles.

In recent times, sentiment analysis in low resourced languages and regional languages has become emerging areas in natural language processing. Researchers have shown greater interest towards analyzing sentiment in Indian languages such as Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam, etc. In best of our knowledge, microscopic work has been reported till date towards Indian languages due to lack of annotated data set. In this paper, we proposed a two-phase sentiment analysis for Telugu news sentences using Telugu SentiWordNet. Initially, it identifies subjectivity classification where sentences are classified as subjective or objective. Objective sentences are treated as neutral sentiment as they don't carry any sentiment value. Next, Sentiment Classification has been done where the subjective sentences are further classified into positive and negative sentences. With the existing Telugu SentiWordNet, our proposed system attains an accuracy of 74% and 81% for subjectivity and sentiment classification respectively.

This paper investigates the effect of various types of linguistic features (lexical, syntactic and semantic) for training classifiers to detect threats of violence in a corpus of YouTube comments. Our results show that combinations of lexical features outperform the use of more complex syntactic and semantic features for this task.

Past works on personality detection has shown that psycho-linguistic features, frequency based analysis at lexical level , emotive words and other lexical clues such as number of first person or sec ond person words carry major role to identify personality associated with the te xt. In this work, we propose a new architecture for the same task using common sen se knowledge with associated sentiment polarity and affective labels. To extract the common sense knowledge with sentiment polarity scores and affect iv labels we used Senticnet which is one of the most useful resources for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. In particular, we combined comm n sense knowledge based features with phycho-linguistic features and freque ncy based features and later the features were employed in supervised classifier . We designed five SMO based supervised classifiers for five personality t raits. We observe that the use of common sense knowledge with affective and sentim ent information enhances the accuracy of the existing frameworks which use o nly psycho-linguistic features and frequency based analysis at lexical le ve .

In education system, students' feedback is important to measure the quality of teaching. Students' feedback can be analyzed using lexicon based approach to identify the students' positive or negative attitude. In most of the existing teaching evaluation system, the intensifier words and blind negation words are not considered. The level of opinion result isn't displayed: whether positive or negative opinion. To address this problem, we propose to analyze the students' text feedback automatically using lexicon based approach to predict the level of teaching performance. A database of English sentiment words is created as a lexical source to get the polarity of words. By analyzing the sentiment information including intensifier words extracting from students' feedback, we are able to determine opinion result of teachers, describing the level of positive or negative opinions. This system shows the opinion result of teachers that is represented as to whether strongly positive, moderately positive, weakly positive, strongly negative, moderately negative, weakly negative or neutral.

Sentiment analysis is a growing field of research, driven by both commercial applications and academic interest. In this paper, we explore multiclass classification of diary-like blog posts for the sentiment dimensions of valence and arousal, where the aim of the task is to predict the level of valence and arousal of a post on a ordinal five-level scale, from very negative/low to very positive/high, respectively. We show how to map discrete affective states into ordinal scales in these two dimensions, based on the psychological model of Russell's circumplex model of affect and label a previously available corpus with multidimensional, real-valued annotations. Experimental results using regression and one-versus-all approaches of support vector machine classifiers show that although the latter approach provides better exact ordinal class prediction accuracy, regression techniques tend to make smaller scale errors.


Question: Investigating the impact of word roots in Arabic sentiment analysis.

In this study, we delve into the challenge of sentiment classification, focusing on the differentiation between positive and negative sentiments in documents, rather than their topical content. Employing movie reviews as our dataset, we conduct an in-depth analysis comparing the efficacy of various machine learning algorithms against human-generated benchmarks. Our findings reveal that algorithms such as Naive Bayes, maximum entropy classification, and support vector machines significantly outperform human judgments in sentiment classification. Yet, these methods exhibit lower accuracy in sentiment analysis compared to their performance in traditional topic-based categorization. The paper concludes with an exploration of the complexities inherent in sentiment classification, shedding light on factors that contribute to its increased difficulty. Reference: EMNLP 2002 Proceedings, pp. 79–86.

**Question**: Investigating the Role of Deep Learning in Enhancing Image Recognition Systems

**Documents**: Deep Learning for Image Recognition: A Comprehensive Review
This paper provides an extensive review of deep learning techniques for image recognition. We discuss various deep neural network architectures and their applications in image classification, object detection, and segmentation tasks. We also compare the performance of deep learning models against traditional machine learning algorithms and analyze the factors that influence the effectiveness of deep learning in image recognition. Our findings highlight the superiority of deep learning methods in handling complex image data, although they require substantial computational resources and large annotated datasets. Publication info: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2020.

**Similar Documents**: This comprehensive review explores the application of deep learning in the field of image recognition, detailing its impact on image classification, object detection, and segmentation. We examine different deep neural network architectures and compare their performance with traditional machine learning techniques, identifying the conditions under which deep learning excels in image recognition tasks. Our analysis underscores the dominance of deep learning in processing intricate image data, albeit with the prerequisite of significant computational power and extensive, labeled datasets. Reference: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2020.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field which studies the interactions between computers and natural languages. NLP is used to enable computers to attain the capability of manipulating natural languages with a level of expertise equivalent to humans. There exists a wide range of applications for NLP, of which sentiment analysis(SA) plays a major role. In sentimental analysis, the emotional polarity of a given text is analysed, and classified as positive, negative or neutral. A more difficult task is to refine the classification into different moods such as happy, sad, angry etc. Analysing a natural language for mood extraction is not at all an easy task for a computer. Even after achieving capabilities of massive amount of computation within a matter of seconds, understanding the sentiments embodied in phrases and sentences of textual information remains one of the toughest tasks for a computer till date. This paper focuses on tagging the appropriate mood in Malayalam text. Tagging is used to specify whether a sentence indicates a sad, happy or angry mood of the person involved or if the sentence contains just facts, devoid of emotions. This research work is heavily dependent on the language since the structures vary from language to language. Mood extraction and tagging has been successfully implemented for English and other European languages. For the south Indian language Malayalam, no significant work has yet been done on mood extraction. We will be focusing on domain-specific sentence-level mood extraction from Malayalam text. The extraction process involves parts-of-speech tagging of the input sentence, extracting the patterns from the input sentence which will contribute to the mood of the sentence, such as the adjective, adverb etc., and finally scoring the sentence on an emotive scale by calculating the semantic orientation of the sentence using the extracted patterns. Sentiment classification is becoming a promising topic with the rise of social media such as blogs, social networking sites, where people express their views on various topics. Mood extraction enables computers to automate the activities performed by human for making decisions based on the moods of opinions expressed in Malayalam text.

Sentiment analysis is the Natural Language Processing (NLP) task dealing with the detection and classification of sentiments in texts. While some tasks deal with identifying presence of sentiment in text (Subjectivity analysis), other tasks aim at determining the polarity of the text categorizing them as positive, negative and neutral. Whenever there is presence of sentiment in text, it has a source (people, group of people or any entity) and the sentiment is directed towards some entity, object, event or person. Sentiment analysis tasks aim to determine the subject, the target and the polarity or valence of the sentiment. In our work, we try to automatically extract sentiment (positive or negative) from Facebook posts using a machine learning approach. While some works have been done in code-mixed social media data and in sentiment analysis separately, our work is the first attempt (as of now) which aims at performing sentiment analysis of code-mixed social media text. We have used extensive pre-processing to remove noise from raw text. Multilayer Perceptron model has been used to determine the polarity of the sentiment. We have also developed the corpus for this task by manually labelling Facebook posts with their associated sentiments.

In this paper we introduce the novel task of “word epoch disambiguation,” defined as the problem of identifying changes in word usage over time. Through experiments run using word usage examples collected from three major periods of time (1800, 1900, 2000), we show that the task is feasible, and significant differences can be observed between occurrences of words in different periods of time.

In this paper, we present the first deep learning approach to aspect extraction in opinion mining. Aspect extraction is a subtask of sentiment analysis that consists in identifying opinion targets in opinionated text, i.e., in detecting the specific aspects of a product or service the opinion holder is either praising or complaining about. We used a 7-layer deep convolutional neural network to tag each word in opinionated sentences as either aspect or non-aspect word. We also developed a set of linguistic patterns for the same purpose and combined them with the neural network. The resulting ensemble classifier, coupled with a word-embedding model for sentiment analysis, allowed our approach to obtain significantly better accuracy than state-of-the-art methods.

This paper provides a thorough evaluation of a set of six important Arabic OCR systems available in the market; namely: Abbyy FineReader, Leadtools, Readiris, Sakhr, Tesseract and NovoVerus. We test the OCR systems using a randomly selected images from the well known Arabic Printed Text Image database (250 images from the APTI database) and using a set of 8 images from an Arabic book. The APTI database contains 45.313.600 of both decomposable and non-decomposable word images. In the evaluation, we conduct two tests. The first test is based on usual metrics used in the literature. In the second test, we provide a novel measure for Arabic language, which can be used for other non-Latin languages.

Twitter sentiment analysis technology provides the methods to survey public emotion about the events or products related to them. Most of the current researches are focusing on obtaining sentiment features by analyzing lexical and syntactic features. These features are expressed explicitly through sentiment words, emoticons, exclamation marks, and so on. In this paper, we introduce a word embeddings method obtained by unsupervised learning based on large twitter corpora, this method using latent contextual semantic relationships and co-occurrence statistical characteristics between words in tweets. These word embeddings are combined with n-grams features and word sentiment polarity score features to form a sentiment feature set of tweets. The feature set is integrated into a deep convolution neural network for training and predicting sentiment classification labels. We experimentally compare the performance of our model with the baseline model that is a word n-grams model on five Twitter data sets, the results indicate that our model performs better on the accuracy and F1-measure for twitter sentiment classification.

There is high demand for automated tools that assign polarity to microblog content such as tweets (Twitter posts), but this is challenging due to the terseness and informality of tweets in addition to the wide variety and rapid evolution of language in Twitter. It is thus impractical to use standard supervised machine learning techniques dependent on annotated training examples. We do without such annotations by using label propagation to incorporate labels from a maximum entropy classifier trained on noisy labels and knowledge about word types encoded in a lexicon, in combination with the Twitter follower graph. Results on polarity classification for several datasets show that our label propagation approach rivals a model supervised with in-domain annotated tweets, and it outperforms the noisily supervised classifier it exploits as well as a lexicon-based polarity ratio classifier.

We introduce an extended naive Bayes model for word sense induction (WSI) and apply it to a WSI task. The extended model incorporates the idea the words closer to the target word are more relevant in predicting its sense. The proposed model is very simple yet effective when evaluated on SemEval-2010 WSI data.

In this paper we focus on the problem of question ranking in community question answering (cQA) forums in Arabic. We address the task with machine learning algorithms using advanced Arabic text representations. The latter are obtained by applying tree kernels to constituency parse trees combined with textual similarities, including word embeddings. Our two main contributions are: (i) an Arabic language processing pipeline based on UIMA —from segmentation to constituency parsing— built on top of Farasa, a state-of-the-art Arabic language processing toolkit; and (ii) the application of long short-term memory neural networks to identify the best text fragments in questions to be used in our tree-kernel-based ranker. Our thorough experimentation on a recently released cQA dataset shows that the Arabic linguistic processing provided by Farasa produces strong results and that neural networks combined with tree kernels further boost the performance in terms of both efficiency and accuracy. Our approach also enables an implicit comparison between different processing pipelines as our tests on Farasa and Stanford parsers demonstrate.

Sentiment analysis seeks to identify the viewpoint(s) underlying a text span; an example application is classifying a movie review as “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. To determine this sentiment polarity, we propose a novel machine-learning method that applies text-categorization techniques to just the subjective portions of the document. Extracting these portions can be implemented using efficient techniques for finding minimum cuts in graphs; this greatly facilitates incorporation of cross-sentence contextual constraints. Publication info: Proceedings of the ACL, 2004.