GaitSense: Towards Ubiquitous Gait-Based Human Identification with Wi-Fi

Gait, the walking manner of a person, has been perceived as a physical and behavioral trait for human identification. Compared with cameras and wearable sensors, Wi-Fi-based gait recognition is more attractive because Wi-Fi infrastructure is almost available everywhere and is able to sense passively without the requirement of on-body devices. However, existing Wi-Fi sensing approaches impose strong assumptions of fixed user walking trajectories, sufficient training data, and identification of already known users. In this article, we present GaitSense , a Wi-Fi-based human identification system, to overcome the above unrealistic assumptions. To deal with various walking trajectories and speeds, GaitSense first extracts target specific features that best characterize gait patterns and applies novel normalization algorithms to eliminate gait irrelevant perturbation in signals. On this basis, GaitSense reduces the training efforts in new deployment scenarios by transfer learning and data augmentation techniques. GaitSense also enables a distinct feature of illegal user identification by anomaly detection, making the system readily available for real-world deployment. Our implementation and evaluation with commodity Wi-Fi devices demonstrate a consistent identification accuracy across various deployment scenarios with little training samples, pushing the limit of gait recognition with Wi-Fi signals.

Improved Arabic Alphabet Characters Classification Using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

Handwritten characters recognition is a challenging research topic. A lot of works have been present to recognize letters of different languages. The availability of Arabic handwritten characters databases is limited. Motivated by this topic of research, we propose a convolution neural network for the classification of Arabic handwritten letters. Also, seven optimization algorithms are performed, and the best algorithm is reported. Faced with few available Arabic handwritten datasets, various data augmentation techniques are implemented to improve the robustness needed for the convolution neural network model. The proposed model is improved by using the dropout regularization method to avoid data overfitting problems. Moreover, suitable change is presented in the choice of optimization algorithms and data augmentation approaches to achieve a good performance. The model has been trained on two Arabic handwritten characters datasets AHCD and Hijja. The proposed algorithm achieved high recognition accuracy of 98.48% and 91.24% on AHCD and Hijja, respectively, outperforming other state-of-the-art models.

Endometriosis detection and localization in laparoscopic gynecology

Endometriosis is a common gynecologic condition typically treated via laparoscopic surgery. Its visual versatility makes it hard to identify for non-specialized physicians and challenging to classify or localize via computer-aided analysis. In this work, we take a first step in the direction of localized endometriosis recognition in laparoscopic gynecology videos using region-based deep neural networks Faster R-CNN and Mask R-CNN. We in particular use and further develop publicly available data for transfer learning deep detection models according to distinctive visual lesion characteristics. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance impact of different data augmentation techniques, including selected geometrical and visual transformations, specular reflection removal as well as region tracking across video frames. Finally, particular attention is given to creating reasonable data segmentation for training, validation and testing. The best performing result surprisingly is achieved by randomly applying simple cropping combined with rotation, resulting in a mean average segmentation precision of 32.4% at 50-95% intersection over union overlap (64.2% for 50% overlap).

Hybrid pooling with wavelets for convolutional neural networks

The need to detect and classify objects correctly is a constant challenge, being able to recognize them at different scales and scenarios, sometimes cropped or badly lit is not an easy task. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have become a widely applied technique since they are completely trainable and suitable to extract features. However, the growing number of convolutional neural networks applications constantly pushes their accuracy improvement. Initially, those improvements involved the use of large datasets, augmentation techniques, and complex algorithms. These methods may have a high computational cost. Nevertheless, feature extraction is known to be the heart of the problem. As a result, other approaches combine different technologies to extract better features to improve the accuracy without the need of more powerful hardware resources. In this paper, we propose a hybrid pooling method that incorporates multiresolution analysis within the CNN layers to reduce the feature map size without losing details. To prevent relevant information from losing during the downsampling process an existing pooling method is combined with wavelet transform technique, keeping those details "alive" and enriching other stages of the CNN. Achieving better quality characteristics improves CNN accuracy. To validate this study, ten pooling methods, including the proposed model, are tested using four benchmark datasets. The results are compared with four of the evaluated methods, which are also considered as the state-of-the-art.

A Systematic Review on Data Scarcity Problem in Deep Learning: Solution and Applications

Recent advancements in deep learning architecture have increased its utility in real-life applications. Deep learning models require a large amount of data to train the model. In many application domains, there is a limited set of data available for training neural networks as collecting new data is either not feasible or requires more resources such as in marketing, computer vision, and medical science. These models require a large amount of data to avoid the problem of overfitting. One of the data space solutions to the problem of limited data is data augmentation. The purpose of this study focuses on various data augmentation techniques that can be used to further improve the accuracy of a neural network. This saves the cost and time consumption required to collect new data for the training of deep neural networks by augmenting available data. This also regularizes the model and improves its capability of generalization. The need for large datasets in different fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, security and healthcare is also covered in this survey paper. The goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of recent advancements in data augmentation techniques and their application in various domains.

Adaptive Erasure Coded Fault Tolerant Linear System Solver

As parallel and distributed systems scale, fault tolerance is an increasingly important problem—particularly on systems with limited I/O capacity and bandwidth. Erasure coded computations address this problem by augmenting a given problem instance with redundant data and then solving the augmented problem in a fault oblivious manner in a faulty parallel environment. In the event of faults, a computationally inexpensive procedure is used to compute the true solution from a potentially fault-prone solution. These techniques are significantly more efficient than conventional solutions to the fault tolerance problem. In this article, we show how we can minimize, to optimality, the overhead associated with our problem augmentation techniques for linear system solvers. Specifically, we present a technique that adaptively augments the problem only when faults are detected. At any point in execution, we only solve a system whose size is identical to the original input system. This has several advantages in terms of maintaining the size and conditioning of the system, as well as in only adding the minimal amount of computation needed to tolerate observed faults. We present, in detail, the augmentation process, the parallel formulation, and evaluation of performance of our technique. Specifically, we show that the proposed adaptive fault tolerance mechanism has minimal overhead in terms of FLOP counts with respect to the original solver executing in a non-faulty environment, has good convergence properties, and yields excellent parallel performance. We also demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms an optimized application-level checkpointing scheme that only checkpoints needed data structures.

Fire Detection Method in Smart City Environments Using a Deep-Learning-Based Approach

In the construction of new smart cities, traditional fire-detection systems can be replaced with vision-based systems to establish fire safety in society using emerging technologies, such as digital cameras, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and deep learning. In this study, we developed a fire detector that accurately detects even small sparks and sounds an alarm within 8 s of a fire outbreak. A novel convolutional neural network was developed to detect fire regions using an enhanced You Only Look Once (YOLO) v4network. Based on the improved YOLOv4 algorithm, we adapted the network to operate on the Banana Pi M3 board using only three layers. Initially, we examined the originalYOLOv4 approach to determine the accuracy of predictions of candidate fire regions. However, the anticipated results were not observed after several experiments involving this approach to detect fire accidents. We improved the traditional YOLOv4 network by increasing the size of the training dataset based on data augmentation techniques for the real-time monitoring of fire disasters. By modifying the network structure through automatic color augmentation, reducing parameters, etc., the proposed method successfully detected and notified the incidence of disastrous fires with a high speed and accuracy in different weather environments—sunny or cloudy, day or night. Experimental results revealed that the proposed method can be used successfully for the protection of smart cities and in monitoring fires in urban areas. Finally, we compared the performance of our method with that of recently reported fire-detection approaches employing widely used performance matrices to test the fire classification results achieved.

RFaceID

Face recognition (FR) has been widely used in many areas nowadays. However, the existing mainstream vision-based facial recognition has limitations such as vulnerability to spoofing attacks, sensitivity to lighting conditions, and high risk of privacy leakage, etc. To address these problems, in this paper we take a sparkly different approach and propose RFaceID, a novel RFID-based face recognition system. RFaceID only needs the users to shake their faces in front of the RFID tag matrix for a few seconds to get their faces recognized. Through theoretical analysis and experiment validations, the feasibility of the RFID-based face recognition is studied. Multiple data processing and data augmentation techniques are proposed to minimize the negative impact of environmental noises and user dynamics. A deep neural network (DNN) model is designed to characterize both the spatial and temporal feature of face shaking events. We implement the system and extensive evaluation results show that RFaceID achieves a high face recognition accuracy at 93.1% for 100 users, which shows the potential of RFaceID for future facial recognition applications.