Efficient algorithms for convolutional dictionary learning via accelerated proximal gradient

Convolutional sparse representations and convolutional dictionary learning are mathematical models that consist in representing a whole signal or image as a sum of convolutions between dictionary filters and coefficient maps. Unlike the patch-based counterparts, these convolutional forms are receiving an increase attention in multiple image processing tasks, since they do not present the usual patchwise drawbacks such as redundancy, multi-evaluations and non-translational invariant. Particularly, the convolutional dictionary learning (CDL) problem is addressed as an alternating minimization between coefficient update and dictionary update stages. A wide number of different algorithms based on FISTA (Fast Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm), ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers) and ADMM consensus frameworks have been proposed to efficiently solve the most expensive steps of the CDL problem in the frequency domain. However, the use of the existing methods on large sets of images is computationally restricted by the dictionary update stage. The present thesis report is strategically organized in three parts. On the first part, we introduce the general topic of the CDL problem and the state-of-the-art methods used to deal with each stage. On the second part, we propose our first computationally efficient method to solve the entire CDL problem using the Accelerated Proximal Gradient (APG) framework in both updates. Additionally, a novel update model reminiscent of the Block Gauss-Seidel (BGS) method is incorporated to reduce the number of estimated components during the coefficient update. On the final part, we propose another alternative method to address the dictionary update stage based on APG consensus approach. This last method considers particular strategies of theADMMconsensus and our first APG framework to develop a less complex solution decoupled across the training images. In general, due to the lower number of operations, our first approach is a better serial option while our last approach has as advantage its independent and highly parallelizable structure. Finally, in our first set of experimental results, which is composed of serial implementations, we show that our first APG approach provides significant speedup with respect to the standard methods by a factor of 1:6 5:3. A complementary improvement by a factor of 2 is achieved by using the reminiscent BGS model. On the other hand, we also report that the second APG approach is the fastest method compared to the state-of-the-art consensus algorithm implemented in serial and parallel. Both proposed methods maintain comparable performance as the other ones in terms of reconstruction metrics, such as PSNR, SSIM and sparsity, in denoising and inpainting tasks.Tesi

Designing the next generation intelligent transportation sensor system using big data driven machine learning techniques

Accurate traffic data collection is essential for supporting advanced traffic management system operations. This study investigated a large-scale data-driven sequential traffic sensor health monitoring (TSHM) module that can be used to monitor sensor health conditions over large traffic networks. Our proposed module consists of three sequential steps for detecting different types of abnormal sensor issues. The first step detects sensors with abnormally high missing data rates, while the second step uses clustering anomaly detection to detect sensors reporting abnormal records. The final step introduces a novel Bayesian changepoint modeling technique to detect sensors reporting abnormal traffic data fluctuations by assuming a constant vehicle length distribution based on average effective vehicle length (AEVL). Our proposed method is then compared with two benchmark algorithms to show its efficacy. Results obtained by applying our method to the statewide traffic sensor data of Iowa show it can successfully detect different classes of sensor issues. This demonstrates that sequential TSHM modules can help transportation agencies determine traffic sensors’ exact problems, thereby enabling them to take the required corrective steps. The second research objective will focus on the traffic data imputation after we discard the anomaly/missing data collected from failure traffic sensors. Sufficient high-quality traffic data are a crucial component of various Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications and research related to congestion prediction, speed prediction, incident detection, and other traffic operation tasks. Nonetheless, missing traffic data are a common issue in sensor data which is inevitable due to several reasons, such as malfunctioning, poor maintenance or calibration, and intermittent communications. Such missing data issues often make data analysis and decision-making complicated and challenging. In this study, we have developed a generative adversarial network (GAN) based traffic sensor data imputation framework (TSDIGAN) to efficiently reconstruct the missing data by generating realistic synthetic data. In recent years, GANs have shown impressive success in image data generation. However, generating traffic data by taking advantage of GAN based modeling is a challenging task, since traffic data have strong time dependency. To address this problem, we propose a novel time-dependent encoding method called the Gramian Angular Summation Field (GASF) that converts the problem of traffic time-series data generation into that of image generation. We have evaluated and tested our proposed model using the benchmark dataset provided by Caltrans Performance Management Systems (PeMS). This study shows that the proposed model can significantly improve the traffic data imputation accuracy in terms of Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) compared to state-of-the-art models on the benchmark dataset. Further, the model achieves reasonably high accuracy in imputation tasks even under a very high missing data rate (\u3e50%), which shows the robustness and efficiency of the proposed model. Besides the loop and radar sensors, traffic cameras have shown great ability to provide insightful traffic information using the image and video processing techniques. Therefore, the third and final part of this work aimed to introduce an end to end real-time cloud-enabled traffic video analysis (IVA) framework to support the development of the future smart city. As Artificial intelligence (AI) growing rapidly, Computer vision (CV) techniques are expected to significantly improve the development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which are anticipated to be a key component of future Smart City (SC) frameworks. Powered by computer vision techniques, the converting of existing traffic cameras into connected ``smart sensors called intelligent video analysis (IVA) systems has shown the great capability of producing insightful data to support ITS applications. However, developing such IVA systems for large-scale, real-time application deserves further study, as the current research efforts are focused more on model effectiveness instead of model efficiency. Therefore, we have introduced a real-time, large-scale, cloud-enabled traffic video analysis framework using NVIDIA DeepStream, which is a streaming analysis toolkit for AI-based video and image analysis. In this study, we have evaluated the technical and economic feasibility of our proposed framework to help traffic agency to build IVA systems more efficiently. Our study shows that the daily operating cost for our proposed framework on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is less than $0.14 per camera, and that, compared with manual inspections, our framework achieves an average vehicle-counting accuracy of 83.7% on sunny days