Computation-Performance Optimization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Redundant Kernel Removal

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely employed in modern computer vision algorithms, where the input image is convolved iteratively by many kernels to extract the knowledge behind it. However, with the depth of convolutional layers getting deeper and deeper in recent years, the enormous computational complexity makes it difficult to be deployed on embedded systems with limited hardware resources. In this paper, we propose two computation-performance optimization methods to reduce the redundant convolution kernels of a CNN with performance and architecture constraints, and apply it to a network for super resolution (SR). Using PSNR drop compared to the original network as the performance criterion, our method can get the optimal PSNR under a certain computation budget constraint. On the other hand, our method is also capable of minimizing the computation required under a given PSNR drop.Comment: This paper was accepted by 2018 The International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS

Speech Dereverberation Based on Integrated Deep and Ensemble Learning Algorithm

Reverberation, which is generally caused by sound reflections from walls, ceilings, and floors, can result in severe performance degradation of acoustic applications. Due to a complicated combination of attenuation and time-delay effects, the reverberation property is difficult to characterize, and it remains a challenging task to effectively retrieve the anechoic speech signals from reverberation ones. In the present study, we proposed a novel integrated deep and ensemble learning algorithm (IDEA) for speech dereverberation. The IDEA consists of offline and online phases. In the offline phase, we train multiple dereverberation models, each aiming to precisely dereverb speech signals in a particular acoustic environment; then a unified fusion function is estimated that aims to integrate the information of multiple dereverberation models. In the online phase, an input utterance is first processed by each of the dereverberation models. The outputs of all models are integrated accordingly to generate the final anechoic signal. We evaluated the IDEA on designed acoustic environments, including both matched and mismatched conditions of the training and testing data. Experimental results confirm that the proposed IDEA outperforms single deep-neural-network-based dereverberation model with the same model architecture and training data

Learning Discriminative Shrinkage Deep Networks for Image Deconvolution

Most existing methods usually formulate the non-blind deconvolution problem into a maximum-a-posteriori framework and address it by manually designing kinds of regularization terms and data terms of the latent clear images. However, explicitly designing these two terms is quite challenging and usually leads to complex optimization problems which are difficult to solve. In this paper, we propose an effective non-blind deconvolution approach by learning discriminative shrinkage functions to implicitly model these terms. In contrast to most existing methods that use deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or radial basis functions to simply learn the regularization term, we formulate both the data term and regularization term and split the deconvolution model into data-related and regularization-related sub-problems according to the alternating direction method of multipliers. We explore the properties of the Maxout function and develop a deep CNN model with a Maxout layer to learn discriminative shrinkage functions to directly approximate the solutions of these two sub-problems. Moreover, given the fast-Fourier-transform-based image restoration usually leads to ringing artifacts while conjugate-gradient-based approach is time-consuming, we develop the Conjugate Gradient Network to restore the latent clear images effectively and efficiently. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art ones in terms of efficiency and accuracy