Cognition-Based Networks: A New Perspective on Network Optimization Using Learning and Distributed Intelligence

IEEE Access Volume 3, 2015, Article number 7217798, Pages 1512-1530 Open Access Cognition-based networks: A new perspective on network optimization using learning and distributed intelligence (Article) Zorzi, M.a , Zanella, A.a, Testolin, A.b, De Filippo De Grazia, M.b, Zorzi, M.bc a Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Padua, Italy b Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy c IRCCS San Camillo Foundation, Venice-Lido, Italy View additional affiliations View references (107) Abstract In response to the new challenges in the design and operation of communication networks, and taking inspiration from how living beings deal with complexity and scalability, in this paper we introduce an innovative system concept called COgnition-BAsed NETworkS (COBANETS). The proposed approach develops around the systematic application of advanced machine learning techniques and, in particular, unsupervised deep learning and probabilistic generative models for system-wide learning, modeling, optimization, and data representation. Moreover, in COBANETS, we propose to combine this learning architecture with the emerging network virtualization paradigms, which make it possible to actuate automatic optimization and reconfiguration strategies at the system level, thus fully unleashing the potential of the learning approach. Compared with the past and current research efforts in this area, the technical approach outlined in this paper is deeply interdisciplinary and more comprehensive, calling for the synergic combination of expertise of computer scientists, communications and networking engineers, and cognitive scientists, with the ultimate aim of breaking new ground through a profound rethinking of how the modern understanding of cognition can be used in the management and optimization of telecommunication network

A Comprehensive Survey of Deep Learning in Remote Sensing: Theories, Tools and Challenges for the Community

In recent years, deep learning (DL), a re-branding of neural networks (NNs), has risen to the top in numerous areas, namely computer vision (CV), speech recognition, natural language processing, etc. Whereas remote sensing (RS) possesses a number of unique challenges, primarily related to sensors and applications, inevitably RS draws from many of the same theories as CV; e.g., statistics, fusion, and machine learning, to name a few. This means that the RS community should be aware of, if not at the leading edge of, of advancements like DL. Herein, we provide the most comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art RS DL research. We also review recent new developments in the DL field that can be used in DL for RS. Namely, we focus on theories, tools and challenges for the RS community. Specifically, we focus on unsolved challenges and opportunities as it relates to (i) inadequate data sets, (ii) human-understandable solutions for modelling physical phenomena, (iii) Big Data, (iv) non-traditional heterogeneous data sources, (v) DL architectures and learning algorithms for spectral, spatial and temporal data, (vi) transfer learning, (vii) an improved theoretical understanding of DL systems, (viii) high barriers to entry, and (ix) training and optimizing the DL.Comment: 64 pages, 411 references. To appear in Journal of Applied Remote Sensin

Discovery of Visual Semantics by Unsupervised and Self-Supervised Representation Learning

The success of deep learning in computer vision is rooted in the ability of deep networks to scale up model complexity as demanded by challenging visual tasks. As complexity is increased, so is the need for large amounts of labeled data to train the model. This is associated with a costly human annotation effort. To address this concern, with the long-term goal of leveraging the abundance of cheap unlabeled data, we explore methods of unsupervised "pre-training." In particular, we propose to use self-supervised automatic image colorization. We show that traditional methods for unsupervised learning, such as layer-wise clustering or autoencoders, remain inferior to supervised pre-training. In search for an alternative, we develop a fully automatic image colorization method. Our method sets a new state-of-the-art in revitalizing old black-and-white photography, without requiring human effort or expertise. Additionally, it gives us a method for self-supervised representation learning. In order for the model to appropriately re-color a grayscale object, it must first be able to identify it. This ability, learned entirely self-supervised, can be used to improve other visual tasks, such as classification and semantic segmentation. As a future direction for self-supervision, we investigate if multiple proxy tasks can be combined to improve generalization. This turns out to be a challenging open problem. We hope that our contributions to this endeavor will provide a foundation for future efforts in making self-supervision compete with supervised pre-training.Comment: Ph.D. thesi

A preliminary study of micro-gestures:dataset collection and analysis with multi-modal dynamic networks

Abstract. Micro-gestures (MG) are gestures that people performed spontaneously during communication situations. A preliminary exploration of Micro-Gesture is made in this thesis. By collecting recorded sequences of body gestures in a spontaneous state during games, a MG dataset is built through Kinect V2. A novel term ‘micro-gesture’ is proposed by analyzing the properties of MG dataset. Implementations of two sets of neural network architectures are achieved for micro-gestures segmentation and recognition task, which are the DBN-HMM model and the 3DCNN-HMM model for skeleton data and RGB-D data respectively. We also explore a method for extracting neutral states used in the HMM structure by detecting the activity level of the gesture sequences. The method is simple to derive and implement, and proved to be effective. The DBN-HMM and 3DCNN-HMM architectures are evaluated on MG dataset and optimized for the properties of micro-gestures. Experimental results show that we are able to achieve micro-gesture segmentation and recognition with satisfied accuracy with these two models. The work we have done about the micro-gestures in this thesis also explores a new research path for gesture recognition. Therefore, we believe that our work could be widely used as a baseline for future research on micro-gestures

Visual scene recognition with biologically relevant generative models

This research focuses on developing visual object categorization methodologies that are based on machine learning techniques and biologically inspired generative models of visual scene recognition. Modelling the statistical variability in visual patterns, in the space of features extracted from them by an appropriate low level signal processing technique, is an important matter of investigation for both humans and machines. To study this problem, we have examined in detail two recent probabilistic models of vision: a simple multivariate Gaussian model as suggested by (Karklin & Lewicki, 2009) and a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) proposed by (Hinton, 2002). Both the models have been widely used for visual object classification and scene analysis tasks before. This research highlights that these models on their own are not plausible enough to perform the classification task, and suggests Fisher kernel as a means of inducing discrimination into these models for classification power. Our empirical results on standard benchmark data sets reveal that the classification performance of these generative models could be significantly boosted near to the state of the art performance, by drawing a Fisher kernel from compact generative models that computes the data labels in a fraction of total computation time. We compare the proposed technique with other distance based and kernel based classifiers to show how computationally efficient the Fisher kernels are. To the best of our knowledge, Fisher kernel has not been drawn from the RBM before, so the work presented in the thesis is novel in terms of its idea and application to vision problem

Learning Object Recognition and Object Class Segmentation with Deep Neural Networks on GPU

As cameras are becoming ubiquitous and internet storage abundant, the need for computers to understand images is growing rapidly. This thesis is concerned with two computer vision tasks, recognizing objects and their location, and segmenting images according to object classes. We focus on deep learning approaches, which in recent years had a tremendous influence on machine learning in general and computer vision in particular. The thesis presents our research into deep learning models and algorithms. It is divided into three parts. The first part describes our GPU deep learning framework. Its hierarchical structure allows transparent use of GPU, facilitates specification of complex models, model inspection, and constitutes the implementation basis of the later chapters. Components of this framework were used in a real-time GPU library for random forests, which we present and evaluate. In the second part, we investigate greedy learning techniques for semi-supervised object recognition. We improve the feature learning capabilities of restricted Boltzmann machines (RBM) with lateral interactions and auto-encoders with additional hidden layers, and offer empirical insight into the evaluation of RBM learning algorithms. The third part of this thesis focuses on object class segmentation. Here, we incrementally introduce novel neural network models and training algorithms, successively improving the state of the art on multiple datasets. Our novel methods include supervised pre-training, histogram of oriented gradient DNN inputs, depth normalization and recurrence. All contribute towards improving segmentation performance beyond what is possible with competitive baseline methods. We further demonstrate that pixelwise labeling combined with a structured loss function can be utilized to localize objects. Finally, we show how transfer learning in combination with object-centered depth colorization can be used to identify objects. We evaluate our proposed methods on the publicly available MNIST, MSRC, INRIA Graz-02, NYU-Depth, Pascal VOC, and Washington RGB-D Objects datasets.Allgegenwärtige Kameras und preiswerter Internetspeicher erzeugen einen großen Bedarf an Algorithmen für maschinelles Sehen. Die vorliegende Dissertation adressiert zwei Teilbereiche dieses Forschungsfeldes: Erkennung von Objekten und Objektklassensegmentierung. Der methodische Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Lernen von tiefen Modellen (”Deep Learning“). Diese haben in den vergangenen Jahren einen enormen Einfluss auf maschinelles Lernen allgemein und speziell maschinelles Sehen gewonnen. Dabei behandeln wir behandeln wir drei Themenfelder. Der erste Teil der Arbeit beschreibt ein GPU-basiertes Softwaresystem für Deep Learning. Dessen hierarchische Struktur erlaubt schnelle GPU-Berechnungen, einfache Spezifikation komplexer Modelle und interaktive Modellanalyse. Damit liefert es das Fundament für die folgenden Kapitel. Teile des Systems finden Verwendung in einer Echtzeit-GPU-Bibliothek für Random Forests, die wir ebenfalls vorstellen und evaluieren. Der zweite Teil der Arbeit beleuchtet Greedy-Lernalgorithmen für halb überwachtes Lernen. Hier werden hierarchische Modelle schrittweise aus Modulen wie Autokodierern oder restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM ) aufgebaut. Wir verbessern die Repräsentationsfähigkeiten von RBM auf Bildern durch Einführung lokaler und lateraler Verknüpfungen und liefern empirische Erkenntnisse zur Bewertung von RBM-Lernalgorithmen. Wir zeigen zudem, dass die in Autokodierern verwendeten einschichtigen Kodierer komplexe Zusammenhänge ihrer Eingaben nicht erkennen können und schlagen stattdessen einen hybriden Kodierer vor, der sowohl komplexe Zusammenhänge erkennen, als auch weiterhin einfache Zusammenhänge einfach repräsentieren kann. Im dritten Teil der Arbeit stellen wir neue neuronale Netzarchitekturen und Trainingsmethoden für die Objektklassensegmentierung vor. Wir zeigen, dass neuronale Netze mit überwachtem Vortrainieren, wiederverwendeten Ausgaben und Histogrammen Orientierter Gradienten (HOG) als Eingabe den aktuellen Stand der Technik auf mehreren RGB-Datenmengen erreichen können. Anschließend erweitern wir unsere Methoden in zwei Dimensionen, sodass sie mit Tiefendaten (RGB-D) und Videos verarbeiten können. Dazu führen wir zunächst Tiefennormalisierung für Objektklassensegmentierung ein um die Skala zu fixieren, und erlauben expliziten Zugriff auf die Höhe in einem Bildausschnitt. Schließlich stellen wir ein rekurrentes konvolutionales neuronales Netz vor, das einen großen räumlichen Kontext einbezieht, hochaufgelöste Ausgaben produziert und Videosequenzen verarbeiten kann. Dadurch verbessert sich die Bildsegmentierung relativ zu vergleichbaren Methoden, etwa auf der Basis von Random Forests oder CRF . Wir zeigen dann, dass pixelbasierte Ausgaben in neuronalen Netzen auch benutzt werden können um die Position von Objekten zu detektieren. Dazu kombinieren wir Techniken des strukturierten Lernens mit Konvolutionsnetzen. Schließlich schlagen wir eine objektzentrierte Einfärbungsmethode vor, die es ermöglicht auf RGB-Bildern trainierte neuronale Netze auf RGB-D-Bildern einzusetzen. Dieser Transferlernansatz erlaubt es uns auch mit stark reduzierten Trainingsmengen noch bessere Ergebnisse beim Schätzen von Objektklassen, -instanzen und -orientierungen zu erzielen. Wir werten die von uns vorgeschlagenen Methoden auf den öffentlich zugänglichen MNIST, MSRC, INRIA Graz-02, NYU-Depth, Pascal VOC, und Washington RGB-D Objects Datenmengen aus