Unconstrained video monitoring of breathing behavior and application to diagnosis of sleep apnea

This paper presents a new real-time automated infrared video monitoring technique for detection of breathing anomalies, and its application in the diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea. We introduce a novel motion model to detect subtle, cyclical breathing signals from video, a new 3-D unsupervised self-adaptive breathing template to learn individuals' normal breathing patterns online, and a robust action classification method to recognize abnormal breathing activities and limb movements. This technique avoids imposing positional constraints on the patient, allowing patients to sleep on their back or side, with or without facing the camera, fully or partially occluded by the bed clothes. Moreover, shallow and abdominal breathing patterns do not adversely affect the performance of the method, and it is insensitive to environmental settings such as infrared lighting levels and camera view angles. The experimental results show that the technique achieves high accuracy (94% for the clinical data) in recognizing apnea episodes and body movements and is robust to various occlusion levels, body poses, body movements (i.e., minor head movement, limb movement, body rotation, and slight torso movement), and breathing behavior (e.g., shallow versus heavy breathing, mouth breathing, chest breathing, and abdominal breathing). © 2013 IEEE

Deep Recurrent Neural Network-Based Autoencoders for Acoustic Novelty Detection

In the emerging field of acoustic novelty detection, most research efforts are devoted to probabilistic approaches such as mixture models or state-space models. Only recent studies introduced (pseudo-)generative models for acoustic novelty detection with recurrent neural networks in the form of an autoencoder. In these approaches, auditory spectral features of the next short term frame are predicted from the previous frames by means of Long-Short Term Memory recurrent denoising autoencoders. The reconstruction error between the input and the output of the autoencoder is used as activation signal to detect novel events. There is no evidence of studies focused on comparing previous efforts to automatically recognize novel events from audio signals and giving a broad and in depth evaluation of recurrent neural network-based autoencoders. The present contribution aims to consistently evaluate our recent novel approaches to fill this white spot in the literature and provide insight by extensive evaluations carried out on three databases: A3Novelty, PASCAL CHiME, and PROMETHEUS. Besides providing an extensive analysis of novel and state-of-the-art methods, the article shows how RNN-based autoencoders outperform statistical approaches up to an absolute improvement of 16.4% average F-measure over the three databases

Latent Space Autoregression for Novelty Detection

Novelty detection is commonly referred to as the discrimination of observations that do not conform to a learned model of regularity. Despite its importance in different application settings, designing a novelty detector is utterly complex due to the unpredictable nature of novelties and its inaccessibility during the training procedure, factors which expose the unsupervised nature of the problem. In our proposal, we design a general framework where we equip a deep autoencoder with a parametric density estimator that learns the probability distribution underlying its latent representations through an autoregressive procedure. We show that a maximum likelihood objective, optimized in conjunction with the reconstruction of normal samples, effectively acts as a regularizer for the task at hand, by minimizing the differential entropy of the distribution spanned by latent vectors. In addition to providing a very general formulation, extensive experiments of our model on publicly available datasets deliver on-par or superior performances if compared to state-of-the-art methods in one-class and video anomaly detection settings. Differently from prior works, our proposal does not make any assumption about the nature of the novelties, making our work readily applicable to diverse contexts

Exploring variability in medical imaging

Although recent successes of deep learning and novel machine learning techniques improved the perfor- mance of classification and (anomaly) detection in computer vision problems, the application of these methods in medical imaging pipeline remains a very challenging task. One of the main reasons for this is the amount of variability that is encountered and encapsulated in human anatomy and subsequently reflected in medical images. This fundamental factor impacts most stages in modern medical imaging processing pipelines. Variability of human anatomy makes it virtually impossible to build large datasets for each disease with labels and annotation for fully supervised machine learning. An efficient way to cope with this is to try and learn only from normal samples. Such data is much easier to collect. A case study of such an automatic anomaly detection system based on normative learning is presented in this work. We present a framework for detecting fetal cardiac anomalies during ultrasound screening using generative models, which are trained only utilising normal/healthy subjects. However, despite the significant improvement in automatic abnormality detection systems, clinical routine continues to rely exclusively on the contribution of overburdened medical experts to diagnosis and localise abnormalities. Integrating human expert knowledge into the medical imaging processing pipeline entails uncertainty which is mainly correlated with inter-observer variability. From the per- spective of building an automated medical imaging system, it is still an open issue, to what extent this kind of variability and the resulting uncertainty are introduced during the training of a model and how it affects the final performance of the task. Consequently, it is very important to explore the effect of inter-observer variability both, on the reliable estimation of model’s uncertainty, as well as on the model’s performance in a specific machine learning task. A thorough investigation of this issue is presented in this work by leveraging automated estimates for machine learning model uncertainty, inter-observer variability and segmentation task performance in lung CT scan images. Finally, a presentation of an overview of the existing anomaly detection methods in medical imaging was attempted. This state-of-the-art survey includes both conventional pattern recognition methods and deep learning based methods. It is one of the first literature surveys attempted in the specific research area.Open Acces

Learning Representations for Novelty and Anomaly Detection

The problem of novelty or anomaly detection refers to the ability to automatically identify data samples that differ from a notion of normality. Techniques that address this problem are necessary in many applications, like in medical diagnosis, autonomous driving, fraud detection, or cyber-attack detection, just to mention a few. The problem is inherently challenging because of the openness of the space of distributions that characterize novelty or outlier data points. This is often matched with the inability to adequately represent such distributions due to the lack of representative data. In this dissertation we address the challenge above by making several contributions. (a)We introduce an unsupervised framework for novelty detection, which is based on deep learning techniques, and which does not require labeled data representing the distribution of outliers. (b) The framework is general and based on first principles by detecting anomalies via computing their probabilities according to the distribution representing normality. (c) The framework can handle high-dimensional data such as images, by performing a non-linear dimensionality reduction of the input space into an isometric lower-dimensional space, leading to a computationally efficient method. (d) The framework is guarded from the potential inclusion of distributions of outliers into the distribution of normality by favoring that only inlier data can be well represented by the model. (e) The methods are evaluated extensively on multiple computer vision benchmark datasets, where it is shown that they compare favorably with the state of the art

A Statistical Framework for Automatic Leakage Detection in Smart Water and Gas Grids

In the last few years, due to the technological improvement of advanced metering infrastructures, water and natural gas grids can be regarded as smart-grids, similarly to power ones. However, considering the number of studies related to the application of computational intelligence to distribution grids, the gap between power grids and water/gas grids is notably wide. For this purpose, in this paper, a framework for leakage identification is presented. The framework is composed of three sections aimed at the extraction and the selection of features and at the detection of leakages. A variation of the Sequential Feature Selection (SFS) algorithm is used to select the best performing features within a set, including, also, innovative temporal ones. The leakage identification is based on novelty detection and exploits the characterization of a normality model. Three statistical approaches, The Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and One-Class Support Vector Machine (OC-SVM), are adopted, under a comparative perspective. Both residential and office building environments are investigated by means of two datasets. One is the Almanac of Minutely Power dataset (AMPds), and it provides water and gas data consumption at 1, 10 and 30 min of time resolution; the other is the Department of International Development (DFID) dataset, and it provides water and gas data consumption at 30 min of time resolution. The achieved performance, computed by means of the Area Under the Curve (AUC), reaches 90 % in the office building case study, thus confirming the suitability of the proposed approach for applications in smart water and gas grids