Automated Blood Cell Detection and Counting via Deep Learning for Microfluidic Point-of-Care Medical Devices

Automated in-vitro cell detection and counting have been a key theme for artificial and intelligent biological analysis such as biopsy, drug analysis and decease diagnosis. Along with the rapid development of microfluidics and lab-on-chip technologies, in-vitro live cell analysis has been one of the critical tasks for both research and industry communities. However, it is a great challenge to obtain and then predict the precise information of live cells from numerous microscopic videos and images. In this paper, we investigated in-vitro detection of white blood cells using deep neural networks, and discussed how state-of-the-art machine learning techniques could fulfil the needs of medical diagnosis. The approach we used in this study was based on Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (Faster RCNNs), and a transfer learning process was applied to apply this technique to the microscopic detection of blood cells. Our experimental results demonstrated that fast and efficient analysis of blood cells via automated microscopic imaging can achieve much better accuracy and faster speed than the conventionally applied methods, implying a promising future of this technology to be applied to the microfluidic point-of-care medical devices

In-house deep environmental sentience for smart homecare solutions toward ageing society.

With an increasing amount of elderly people needing home care around the clock, care workers are not able to keep up with the demand of providing maximum support to those who require it. As medical costs of home care increase the quality is care suffering as a result of staff shortages, a solution is desperately needed to make the valuable care time of these workers more efficient. This paper proposes a system that is able to make use of the deep learning resources currently available to produce a base system that could provide a solution to many of the problems that care homes and staff face today. Transfer learning was conducted on a deep convolutional neural network to recognize common household objects was proposed. This system showed promising results with an accuracy, sensitivity and specificity of 90.6%, 0.90977 and 0.99668 respectively. Real-time applications were also considered, with the system achieving a maximum speed of 19.6 FPS on an MSI GTX 1060 GPU with 4GB of VRAM allocated

Distant Pedestrian Detection in the Wild using Single Shot Detector with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks

In this work, we examine the feasibility of applying Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGANs) with Single Shot Detector (SSD) as data-processing technique to handle with the challenge of pedestrian detection in the wild. Specifically, we attempted to use in-fill completion to generate random transformations of images with missing pixels to expand existing labelled datasets. In our work, GAN's been trained intensively on low resolution images, in order to neutralize the challenges of the pedestrian detection in the wild, and considered humans, and few other classes for detection in smart cities. The object detector experiment performed by training GAN model along with SSD provided a substantial improvement in the results. This approach presents a very interesting overview in the current state of art on GAN networks for object detection. We used Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Caltech, KITTI data set for training and testing the network under different resolutions and the experimental results with comparison been showed between DCGAN cascaded with SSD and SSD itself

3D Printed Brain-Controlled Robot-Arm Prosthetic via Embedded Deep Learning From sEMG Sensors

In this paper, we present our work on developing robot arm prosthetic via deep learning. Our work proposes to use transfer learning techniques applied to the Google Inception model to retrain the final layer for surface electromyography (sEMG) classification. Data have been collected using the Thalmic Labs Myo Armband and used to generate graph images comprised of 8 subplots per image containing sEMG data captured from 40 data points per sensor, corresponding to the array of 8 sEMG sensors in the armband. Data captured were then classified into four categories (Fist, Thumbs Up, Open Hand, Rest) via using a deep learning model, Inception-v3, with transfer learning to train the model for accurate prediction of each on real-time input of new data. This trained model was then downloaded to the ARM processor based embedding system to enable the brain-controlled robot-arm prosthetic manufactured from our 3D printer. Testing of the functionality of the method, a robotic arm was produced using a 3D printer and off-the-shelf hardware to control it. SSH communication protocols are employed to execute python files hosted on an embedded Raspberry Pi with ARM processors to trigger movement on the robot arm of the predicted gesture

A Deep Learning Based Wearable Healthcare Iot Device for AI-Enabled Hearing Assistance Automation

With the recent booming of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning techniques, digital healthcare is one of the prevalent areas that could gain benefits from AI-enabled functionality. This research presents a novel AI-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) device operating from the ESP-8266 platform capable of assisting those who suffer from impairment of hearing or deafness to communicate with others in conversations. In the proposed solution, a server application is created that leverages Google's online speech recognition service to convert the received conversations into texts, then deployed to a micro-display attached to the glasses to display the conversation contents to deaf people, to enable and assist conversation as normal with the general population. Furthermore, in order to raise alert of traffic or dangerous scenarios, an 'urban-emergency' classifier is developed using a deep learning model, Inception-v4, with transfer learning to detect/recognize alerting/alarming sounds, such as a horn sound or a fire alarm, with texts generated to alert the prospective user. The training of Inception-v4 was carried out on a consumer desktop PC and then implemented into the AI-based IoT application. The empirical results indicate that the developed prototype system achieves an accuracy rate of 92% for sound recognition and classification with real-time performance

Feature Space Augmentation: Improving Prediction Accuracy of Classical Problems in Cognitive Science and Computer Vison

The prediction accuracy in many classical problems across multiple domains has seen a rise since computational tools such as multi-layer neural nets and complex machine learning algorithms have become widely accessible to the research community. In this research, we take a step back and examine the feature space in two problems from very different domains. We show that novel augmentation to the feature space yields higher performance. Emotion Recognition in Adults from a Control Group: The objective is to quantify the emotional state of an individual at any time using data collected by wearable sensors. We define emotional state as a mixture of amusement, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, anxiety and neutral and their respective levels at any time. The generated model predicts an individual’s dominant state and generates an emotional spectrum, 1x7 vector indicating levels of each emotional state and anxiety. We present an iterative learning framework that alters the feature space uniquely to an individual’s emotion perception, and predicts the emotional state using the individual specific feature space. Hybrid Feature Space for Image Classification: The objective is to improve the accuracy of existing image recognition by leveraging text features from the images. As humans, we perceive objects using colors, dimensions, geometry and any textual information we can gather. Current image recognition algorithms rely exclusively on the first 3 and do not use the textual information. This study develops and tests an approach that trains a classifier on a hybrid text based feature space that has comparable accuracy to the state of the art CNN’s while being significantly inexpensive computationally. Moreover, when combined with CNN’S the approach yields a statistically significant boost in accuracy. Both models are validated using cross validation and holdout validation, and are evaluated against the state of the art

Shallow Unorganized Neural Networks Using Smart Neuron Model for Visual Perception

The recent success of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has revealed the significant capability of neural computing in many challenging applications. Although DNNs are derived from emulating biological neurons, there still exist doubts over whether or not DNNs are the final and best model to emulate the mechanism of human intelligence. In particular, there are two discrepancies between computational DNN models and the observed facts of biological neurons. First, human neurons are interconnected randomly, while DNNs need carefully-designed architectures to work properly. Second, human neurons usually have a long spiking latency (∼100ms) which implies that not many layers can be involved in making a decision, while DNNs could have hundreds of layers to guarantee high accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new computational model, namely shallow unorganized neural networks (SUNNs), in contrast to ANNs/DNNs. The proposed SUNNs differ from standard ANNs or DNNs in three fundamental aspects: 1) SUNNs are based on an adaptive neuron cell model, Smart Neurons, that allows each artificial neuron cell to adaptively respond to its inputs rather than carrying out a fixed weighted-sum operation like the classic neuron model in ANNs/DNNs; 2) SUNNs can cope with computational tasks with very shallow architectures; 3) SUNNs have a natural topology with random interconnections, as the human brain does, and as proposed by Turing’s B-type unorganized machines. We implemented the proposed SUNN architecture and tested it on a number of unsupervised early stage visual perception tasks. Surprisingly, such simple shallow architectures achieved very good results in our experiments. The success of our new computational model makes it the first workable example of Turing’s B-Type unorganized machine that can achieve comparable or better performance against the state-of-the-art algorithms

Emotion recognition from scrambled facial images via many graph embedding

Facial expression verification has been extensively exploited due to its wide application in affective computing, robotic vision, man-machine interaction and medical diagnosis. With the recent development of Internet-of-Things (IoT), there is a need of mobile-targeted facial expression verification, where face scrambling has been proposed for privacy protection during image/video distribution over public network. Consequently, facial expression verification needs to be carried out in a scrambled domain, bringing out new challenges in facial expression recognition. An immediate impact from face scrambling is that conventional semantic facial components become not identifiable, and 3D face models cannot be clearly fitted to a scrambled image. Hence, the classical facial action coding system cannot be applied to facial expression recognition in the scrambled domain. To cope with chaotic signals from face scrambling, this paper proposes an new approach – Many Graph Embedding (MGE) to discover discriminative patterns from the subspaces of chaotic patterns, where the facial expression recognition is carried out as a fuzzy combination from many graph embedding. In our experiments, the proposed MGE was evaluated on three scrambled facial expression datasets: JAFFE, MUG and CK++. The benchmark results demonstrated that the proposed method is able to improve the recognition accuracy, making our method a promising candidate for the scrambled facial expression recognition in the emerging privacy-protected IoT applications

Emotion recognition from scrambled facial images via many graph embedding

Facial expression verification has been extensively exploited due to its wide application in affective computing, robotic vision, man-machine interaction and medical diagnosis. With the recent development of Internet-of-Things (IoT), there is a need of mobile-targeted facial expression verification, where face scrambling has been proposed for privacy protection during image/video distribution over public network. Consequently, facial expression verification needs to be carried out in a scrambled domain, bringing out new challenges in facial expression recognition. An immediate impact from face scrambling is that conventional semantic facial components become not identifiable, and 3D face models cannot be clearly fitted to a scrambled image. Hence, the classical facial action coding system cannot be applied to facial expression recognition in the scrambled domain. To cope with chaotic signals from face scrambling, this paper proposes an new approach – Many Graph Embedding (MGE) to discover discriminative patterns from the subspaces of chaotic patterns, where the facial expression recognition is carried out as a fuzzy combination from many graph embedding. In our experiments, the proposed MGE was evaluated on three scrambled facial expression datasets: JAFFE, MUG and CK++. The benchmark results demonstrated that the proposed method is able to improve the recognition accuracy, making our method a promising candidate for the scrambled facial expression recognition in the emerging privacy-protected IoT applications