Artificial Neural Network based Model for Fruit Grade Empirical Thresholding and Feature Extraction based Back Propagation

This study details a novel attribute retrieval method for use in pre-processing images, and then applies it to the development of an "artificial neural network" system based on back propagation for identifying fruits in photographs. The “Scale Conjugate Gradient” (SCG) technique is used For back propagation. In this paper, there are three stages to the process. First, MATLAB was used to process a variety of external image-based apple properties. Since merely colour is insufficient to judge the quality, size and weight characteristics were also taken into consideration. Second, features extraction was carried out during picture pre-processing to simplify the method by concentrating only on important features. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm is a favourite for creating classification models that are relatively small in weight. The classification in this work is done using the MATLAB-ANN (Artificial Neural Network) toolkit. A single hidden layer BP-ANN (Back propagation- artificial neural network) was employed with sigmoid activation functions,. The outcome was determined by the appropriate output variables, which is the apple's quality class, which was determined to be Class A, Class B, Class C, and Class D, respectively. The modeling result indicates the tremendous match between the data used in training and assumed output values. It also has shorter calculation time due to the SCG algorithm. It is also possible for apple producers and distributors to classify their fruit using this model and reduce the cost by avoiding manual classification

Development of a Novel Quantum Pre-processing Filter to Improve Image Classification Accuracy of Neural Network Models

This paper proposes a novel quantum pre-processing filter (QPF) to improve the image classification accuracy of neural network (NN) models. A simple four qubit quantum circuit that uses Y rotation gates for encoding and two controlled NOT gates for creating correlation among the qubits is applied as a feature extraction filter prior to passing data into the fully connected NN architecture. By applying the QPF approach, the results show that the image classification accuracy based on the MNIST (handwritten 10 digits) and the EMNIST (handwritten 47 class digits and letters) datasets can be improved, from 92.5% to 95.4% and from 68.9% to 75.9%, respectively. These improvements were obtained without introducing extra model parameters or optimizations in the machine learning process. However, tests performed on the developed QPF approach against a relatively complex GTSRB dataset with 43 distinct class real-life traffic sign images showed a degradation in the classification accuracy. Considering this result, further research into the understanding and the design of a more suitable quantum circuit approach for image classification neural networks could be explored utilizing the baseline method proposed in this paper.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

Improving Pattern Recognition and Neural Network Algorithms With Applications to Solar Panel Energy Optimization

Artificial Intelligence is a big part of automation and with today\u27s technological advances, artificial intelligence has taken great strides towards positioning itself as the technology of the future to control, enhance and perfect automation. Computer vision includes pattern recognition and classification and machine learning. Computer vision is at the core of decision making and it is a vast and fruitful branch of artificial intelligence. In this work, we expose novel algorithms and techniques built upon existing technologies to improve pattern recognition and neural network training, initially motivated by a multidisciplinary effort to build a robot that helps maintain and optimize solar panel energy production. Our contributions detail an improved non-linear pre-processing technique to enhance poorly illuminated images based on modifications to the standard histogram equalization for an image. While the original motivation was to improve nocturnal navigation, the results have applications in surveillance, search and rescue, medical imaging enhancing, and many others. We created a vision system for precise camera distance positioning motivated to correctly locate the robot for capture of solar panel images for classification. The classification algorithm marks solar panels as clean or dirty for later processing. Our algorithm extends past image classification and, based on historical and experimental data, it identifies the optimal moment in which to perform maintenance on marked solar panels as to minimize the energy and profit loss. In order to improve upon the classification algorithm, we delved into feedforward neural networks because of their recent advancements, proven universal approximation and classification capabilities, and excellent recognition rates. We explore state-of-the-art neural network training techniques offering pointers and insights, culminating on the implementation of a complete library with support for modern deep learning architectures, multilayer percepterons and convolutional neural networks. Our research with neural networks has encountered a great deal of difficulties regarding hyperparameter estimation for good training convergence rate and accuracy. Most hyperparameters, including architecture, learning rate, regularization, trainable parameters (or weights) initialization, and so on, are chosen via a trial and error process with some educated guesses. However, we developed the first quantitative method to compare weight initialization strategies, a critical hyperparameter choice during training, to estimate among a group of candidate strategies which would make the network converge to the highest classification accuracy faster with high probability. Our method provides a quick, objective measure to compare initialization strategies to select the best possible among them beforehand without having to complete multiple training sessions for each candidate strategy to compare final results

A survey of outlier detection methodologies

Outlier detection has been used for centuries to detect and, where appropriate, remove anomalous observations from data. Outliers arise due to mechanical faults, changes in system behaviour, fraudulent behaviour, human error, instrument error or simply through natural deviations in populations. Their detection can identify system faults and fraud before they escalate with potentially catastrophic consequences. It can identify errors and remove their contaminating effect on the data set and as such to purify the data for processing. The original outlier detection methods were arbitrary but now, principled and systematic techniques are used, drawn from the full gamut of Computer Science and Statistics. In this paper, we introduce a survey of contemporary techniques for outlier detection. We identify their respective motivations and distinguish their advantages and disadvantages in a comparative review

Few-Shot Image Recognition by Predicting Parameters from Activations

In this paper, we are interested in the few-shot learning problem. In particular, we focus on a challenging scenario where the number of categories is large and the number of examples per novel category is very limited, e.g. 1, 2, or 3. Motivated by the close relationship between the parameters and the activations in a neural network associated with the same category, we propose a novel method that can adapt a pre-trained neural network to novel categories by directly predicting the parameters from the activations. Zero training is required in adaptation to novel categories, and fast inference is realized by a single forward pass. We evaluate our method by doing few-shot image recognition on the ImageNet dataset, which achieves the state-of-the-art classification accuracy on novel categories by a significant margin while keeping comparable performance on the large-scale categories. We also test our method on the MiniImageNet dataset and it strongly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods

A Hybrid Neural Network Framework and Application to Radar Automatic Target Recognition

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have found applications in diverse signal processing (SP) problems. Most efforts either directly adopt the DNN as a black-box approach to perform certain SP tasks without taking into account of any known properties of the signal models, or insert a pre-defined SP operator into a DNN as an add-on data processing stage. This paper presents a novel hybrid-NN framework in which one or more SP layers are inserted into the DNN architecture in a coherent manner to enhance the network capability and efficiency in feature extraction. These SP layers are properly designed to make good use of the available models and properties of the data. The network training algorithm of hybrid-NN is designed to actively involve the SP layers in the learning goal, by simultaneously optimizing both the weights of the DNN and the unknown tuning parameters of the SP operators. The proposed hybrid-NN is tested on a radar automatic target recognition (ATR) problem. It achieves high validation accuracy of 96\% with 5,000 training images in radar ATR. Compared with ordinary DNN, hybrid-NN can markedly reduce the required amount of training data and improve the learning performance