Learned versus Hand-Designed Feature Representations for 3d Agglomeration

For image recognition and labeling tasks, recent results suggest that machine learning methods that rely on manually specified feature representations may be outperformed by methods that automatically derive feature representations based on the data. Yet for problems that involve analysis of 3d objects, such as mesh segmentation, shape retrieval, or neuron fragment agglomeration, there remains a strong reliance on hand-designed feature descriptors. In this paper, we evaluate a large set of hand-designed 3d feature descriptors alongside features learned from the raw data using both end-to-end and unsupervised learning techniques, in the context of agglomeration of 3d neuron fragments. By combining unsupervised learning techniques with a novel dynamic pooling scheme, we show how pure learning-based methods are for the first time competitive with hand-designed 3d shape descriptors. We investigate data augmentation strategies for dramatically increasing the size of the training set, and show how combining both learned and hand-designed features leads to the highest accuracy

Study of Various Techniques for Medicinal Plant Identification

Ayurveda, the Indian ancient medicinal system, has gained importance because of its effectiveness in treating diseases. Medicinal plants are used in Ayurvedic medicines since ancient times. It is necessary to classify these plants so that it would be easy to select the right plant for the medicinal preparation or to study more about its characteristics. Identification is the pre-condition of classification of medicinal plant. In this paper, we have reviewed Image processing Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS), taxonomic key repository, neural network and DeoxyriboNucleic Acid (DNA) barcoding. The study shows that image processing is leading domain in identification of medicinal plant. The results are improved when multiple methods are used together in a sequence to identify a medicinal plant. Apart from that none of these methods are using geographical information to identify medicinal plants and we can use geographical Information System (GIS) information to improve its accuracy further

Detection of deformable objects in a non-stationary scene

Image registration is the process of determining a mapping between points of interest on separate images to achieve a correspondence. This is a fundamental area of many problems in computer vision including object recognition and motion tracking. This research focuses on applying image registration to identify differences between frames in non-stationary video scenes for the purpose of motion tracking. The major stages for the image registration process include point detection, image correspondence, and an affine transformation. After applying image registration to spatially align the image frames and detect areas of motion segmentation is applied to segment the moving deformable objects in the non-stationary scenes. In this paper, specific techniques are reviewed to implement image registration. First, I will present other work related to image registration for feature point extraction, image correspondence, and spatial transformations. Then I will discuss deformable object recognition. This will be followed by a detailed description on the methods developed for this research and implementation. Included is a discussion on the Harris Corner Detection operator that allows the identification of key points on separate frames based on detecting areas in frames with strong contrasts in intensity values that can be identified as corners. These corners are the feature points that are comparable between frames. Then there will be an explanation on finding point correspondences between two separate video frames using ordinal and orientation measures. When a correspondence is made, the data acquired from the image correspondence calculations will be used to apply translation to align the video frames. With these methods, two frames of video can be properly aligned and then subtracted to detect deformable objects. Finally, areas of motions are segmented using histograms in the HSV color space. The algorithms are implemented using INTEL?s open computer vision library called OpenCV. The results demonstrate that this approach is successful at detecting deformable objects in non-stationary scenes

A Likelihood-Free Inference Framework for Population Genetic Data using Exchangeable Neural Networks

An explosion of high-throughput DNA sequencing in the past decade has led to a surge of interest in population-scale inference with whole-genome data. Recent work in population genetics has centered on designing inference methods for relatively simple model classes, and few scalable general-purpose inference techniques exist for more realistic, complex models. To achieve this, two inferential challenges need to be addressed: (1) population data are exchangeable, calling for methods that efficiently exploit the symmetries of the data, and (2) computing likelihoods is intractable as it requires integrating over a set of correlated, extremely high-dimensional latent variables. These challenges are traditionally tackled by likelihood-free methods that use scientific simulators to generate datasets and reduce them to hand-designed, permutation-invariant summary statistics, often leading to inaccurate inference. In this work, we develop an exchangeable neural network that performs summary statistic-free, likelihood-free inference. Our framework can be applied in a black-box fashion across a variety of simulation-based tasks, both within and outside biology. We demonstrate the power of our approach on the recombination hotspot testing problem, outperforming the state-of-the-art.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Evaluation of Texture and Shape Features for Classification of Four Paddy Varieties

This research is aimed at evaluating the texture and shape features using the most commonly used neural network architectures for cereal grain classification. An evaluation of the classification accuracy of texture and shape features and neural network was done to classify four Paddy (rice) grains, namely, Karjat-6(K6), Ratnagiri-2(R2), Ratnagiri-4(R4), and Ratnagiri-24(R24). Algorithms were written to extract the features from the high-resolution images of kernels of four grain types and used as input features for classification. Different feature models were tested for their ability to classify these cereal grains. Effect of using different parameters on the accuracy of classification was studied. The most suitable feature from the features for accurate classification was identified. The shape feature set outperformed the texture feature set in almost all the instances of classification

Attention-dependent modulation of cortical taste circuits revealed by granger causality with signal-dependent noise

We show, for the first time, that in cortical areas, for example the insular, orbitofrontal, and lateral prefrontal cortex, there is signal-dependent noise in the fMRI blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) time series, with the variance of the noise increasing approximately linearly with the square of the signal. Classical Granger causal models are based on autoregressive models with time invariant covariance structure, and thus do not take this signal-dependent noise into account. To address this limitation, here we describe a Granger causal model with signal-dependent noise, and a novel, likelihood ratio test for causal inferences. We apply this approach to the data from an fMRI study to investigate the source of the top-down attentional control of taste intensity and taste pleasantness processing. The Granger causality with signal-dependent noise analysis reveals effects not identified by classical Granger causal analysis. In particular, there is a top-down effect from the posterior lateral prefrontal cortex to the insular taste cortex during attention to intensity but not to pleasantness, and there is a top-down effect from the anterior and posterior lateral prefrontal cortex to the orbitofrontal cortex during attention to pleasantness but not to intensity. In addition, there is stronger forward effective connectivity from the insular taste cortex to the orbitofrontal cortex during attention to pleasantness than during attention to intensity. These findings indicate the importance of explicitly modeling signal-dependent noise in functional neuroimaging, and reveal some of the processes involved in a biased activation theory of selective attention