59,518 research outputs found
Sleep-like slow oscillations improve visual classification through synaptic homeostasis and memory association in a thalamo-cortical model
The occurrence of sleep passed through the evolutionary sieve and is
widespread in animal species. Sleep is known to be beneficial to cognitive and
mnemonic tasks, while chronic sleep deprivation is detrimental. Despite the
importance of the phenomenon, a complete understanding of its functions and
underlying mechanisms is still lacking. In this paper, we show interesting
effects of deep-sleep-like slow oscillation activity on a simplified
thalamo-cortical model which is trained to encode, retrieve and classify images
of handwritten digits. During slow oscillations,
spike-timing-dependent-plasticity (STDP) produces a differential homeostatic
process. It is characterized by both a specific unsupervised enhancement of
connections among groups of neurons associated to instances of the same class
(digit) and a simultaneous down-regulation of stronger synapses created by the
training. This hierarchical organization of post-sleep internal representations
favours higher performances in retrieval and classification tasks. The
mechanism is based on the interaction between top-down cortico-thalamic
predictions and bottom-up thalamo-cortical projections during deep-sleep-like
slow oscillations. Indeed, when learned patterns are replayed during sleep,
cortico-thalamo-cortical connections favour the activation of other neurons
coding for similar thalamic inputs, promoting their association. Such mechanism
hints at possible applications to artificial learning systems.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, v5 is the final version published on Scientific
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Semantic Concept Co-Occurrence Patterns for Image Annotation and Retrieval.
Describing visual image contents by semantic concepts is an effective and straightforward way to facilitate various high level applications. Inferring semantic concepts from low-level pictorial feature analysis is challenging due to the semantic gap problem, while manually labeling concepts is unwise because of a large number of images in both online and offline collections. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically generate intermediate image descriptors by exploiting concept co-occurrence patterns in the pre-labeled training set that renders it possible to depict complex scene images semantically. Our work is motivated by the fact that multiple concepts that frequently co-occur across images form patterns which could provide contextual cues for individual concept inference. We discover the co-occurrence patterns as hierarchical communities by graph modularity maximization in a network with nodes and edges representing concepts and co-occurrence relationships separately. A random walk process working on the inferred concept probabilities with the discovered co-occurrence patterns is applied to acquire the refined concept signature representation. Through experiments in automatic image annotation and semantic image retrieval on several challenging datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed concept co-occurrence patterns as well as the concept signature representation in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches
Lifelong Learning of Spatiotemporal Representations with Dual-Memory Recurrent Self-Organization
Artificial autonomous agents and robots interacting in complex environments
are required to continually acquire and fine-tune knowledge over sustained
periods of time. The ability to learn from continuous streams of information is
referred to as lifelong learning and represents a long-standing challenge for
neural network models due to catastrophic forgetting. Computational models of
lifelong learning typically alleviate catastrophic forgetting in experimental
scenarios with given datasets of static images and limited complexity, thereby
differing significantly from the conditions artificial agents are exposed to.
In more natural settings, sequential information may become progressively
available over time and access to previous experience may be restricted. In
this paper, we propose a dual-memory self-organizing architecture for lifelong
learning scenarios. The architecture comprises two growing recurrent networks
with the complementary tasks of learning object instances (episodic memory) and
categories (semantic memory). Both growing networks can expand in response to
novel sensory experience: the episodic memory learns fine-grained
spatiotemporal representations of object instances in an unsupervised fashion
while the semantic memory uses task-relevant signals to regulate structural
plasticity levels and develop more compact representations from episodic
experience. For the consolidation of knowledge in the absence of external
sensory input, the episodic memory periodically replays trajectories of neural
reactivations. We evaluate the proposed model on the CORe50 benchmark dataset
for continuous object recognition, showing that we significantly outperform
current methods of lifelong learning in three different incremental learning
scenario
Gabor Barcodes for Medical Image Retrieval
In recent years, advances in medical imaging have led to the emergence of
massive databases, containing images from a diverse range of modalities. This
has significantly heightened the need for automated annotation of the images on
one side, and fast and memory-efficient content-based image retrieval systems
on the other side. Binary descriptors have recently gained more attention as a
potential vehicle to achieve these goals. One of the recently introduced binary
descriptors for tagging of medical images are Radon barcodes (RBCs) that are
driven from Radon transform via local thresholding. Gabor transform is also a
powerful transform to extract texture-based information. Gabor features have
exhibited robustness against rotation, scale, and also photometric
disturbances, such as illumination changes and image noise in many
applications. This paper introduces Gabor Barcodes (GBCs), as a novel framework
for the image annotation. To find the most discriminative GBC for a given query
image, the effects of employing Gabor filters with different parameters, i.e.,
different sets of scales and orientations, are investigated, resulting in
different barcode lengths and retrieval performances. The proposed method has
been evaluated on the IRMA dataset with 193 classes comprising of 12,677 x-ray
images for indexing, and 1,733 x-rays images for testing. A total error score
as low as ( accuracy for the first hit) was achieved.Comment: To appear in proceedings of The 2016 IEEE International Conference on
Image Processing (ICIP 2016), Sep 25-28, 2016, Phoenix, Arizona, US
When holography meets coherent diffraction imaging
Modern imaging techniques at the molecular scale rely on utilizing novel
coherent light sources like X-ray free electron lasers for the ultimate goal of
visualizing such objects as individual biomolecules rather than crystals. Here,
unlike in the case of crystals where structures can be solved by model building
and phase refinement, the phase distribution of the wave scattered by an
individual molecule must directly be recovered. There are two well-known
solutions to the phase problem: holography and coherent diffraction imaging
(CDI). Both techniques have their pros and cons. In holography, the
reconstruction of the scattered complex-valued object wave is directly provided
by a well-defined reference wave that must cover the entire detector area which
often is an experimental challenge. CDI provides the highest possible, only
wavelength limited, resolution, but the phase recovery is an iterative process
which requires some pre-defined information about the object and whose outcome
is not always uniquely-defined. Moreover, the diffraction patterns must be
recorded under oversampling conditions, a pre-requisite to be able to solve the
phase problem. Here, we report how holography and CDI can be merged into one
superior technique: holographic coherent diffraction imaging (HCDI). An inline
hologram can be recorded by employing a modified CDI experimental scheme. We
demonstrate that the amplitude of the Fourier transform of an inline hologram
is related to the complex-valued visibility, thus providing information on
both, the amplitude and the phase of the scattered wave in the plane of the
diffraction pattern. With the phase information available, the condition of
oversampling the diffraction patterns can be relaxed, and the phase problem can
be solved in a fast and unambiguous manner.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figure
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