Privacy Enhancing Machine Learning via Removal of Unwanted Dependencies

The rapid rise of IoT and Big Data has facilitated copious data driven applications to enhance our quality of life. However, the omnipresent and all-encompassing nature of the data collection can generate privacy concerns. Hence, there is a strong need to develop techniques that ensure the data serve only the intended purposes, giving users control over the information they share. To this end, this paper studies new variants of supervised and adversarial learning methods, which remove the sensitive information in the data before they are sent out for a particular application. The explored methods optimize privacy preserving feature mappings and predictive models simultaneously in an end-to-end fashion. Additionally, the models are built with an emphasis on placing little computational burden on the user side so that the data can be desensitized on device in a cheap manner. Experimental results on mobile sensing and face datasets demonstrate that our models can successfully maintain the utility performances of predictive models while causing sensitive predictions to perform poorly.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning System

A Novel Image Compression Method Based on Classified Energy and Pattern Building Blocks

In this paper, a novel image compression method based on generation of the so-called classified energy and pattern blocks (CEPB) is introduced and evaluation results are presented. The CEPB is constructed using the training images and then located at both the transmitter and receiver sides of the communication system. Then the energy and pattern blocks of input images to be reconstructed are determined by the same way in the construction of the CEPB. This process is also associated with a matching procedure to determine the index numbers of the classified energy and pattern blocks in the CEPB which best represents (matches) the energy and pattern blocks of the input images. Encoding parameters are block scaling coefficient and index numbers of energy and pattern blocks determined for each block of the input images. These parameters are sent from the transmitter part to the receiver part and the classified energy and pattern blocks associated with the index numbers are pulled from the CEPB. Then the input image is reconstructed block by block in the receiver part using a mathematical model that is proposed. Evaluation results show that the method provides considerable image compression ratios and image quality even at low bit rates.The work described in this paper was funded by the Isik University Scientific Research Fund (Project contract no. 10B301). The author would like to thank to Professor B. S. Yarman (Istanbul University, College of Engineering, Department of Electrical-Electronics Engineering), Assistant Professor Hakan Gurkan (Isik University, Engineering Faculty, Department of Electrical-Electronics Engineering), the researchers in the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Speech Group, University of California at Berkeley, CA, USA and the researchers in the SRI International, Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA, USA for many helpful discussions on this work during his postdoctoral fellow years. The author also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions which substantially improved the quality of this paperPublisher's Versio

Recognition of Planar Segments in Point Cloud Based on Wavelet Transform

Within industrial automation systems, three-dimensional (3-D) vision provides very useful feedback information in autonomous operation of various manufacturing equipment (e.g., industrial robots, material handling devices, assembly systems, and machine tools). The hardware performance in contemporary 3-D scanning devices is suitable for online utilization. However, the bottleneck is the lack of real-time algorithms for recognition of geometric primitives (e.g., planes and natural quadrics) from a scanned point cloud. One of the most important and the most frequent geometric primitive in various engineering tasks is plane. In this paper, we propose a new fast one-pass algorithm for recognition (segmentation and fitting) of planar segments from a point cloud. To effectively segment planar regions, we exploit the orthonormality of certain wavelets to polynomial function, as well as their sensitivity to abrupt changes. After segmentation of planar regions, we estimate the parameters of corresponding planes using standard fitting procedures. For point cloud structuring, a z-buffer algorithm with mesh triangles representation in barycentric coordinates is employed. The proposed recognition method is tested and experimentally validated in several real-world case studies

Fractal image compression and the self-affinity assumption : a stochastic signal modelling perspective

Bibliography: p. 208-225.Fractal image compression is a comparatively new technique which has gained considerable attention in the popular technical press, and more recently in the research literature. The most significant advantages claimed are high reconstruction quality at low coding rates, rapid decoding, and "resolution independence" in the sense that an encoded image may be decoded at a higher resolution than the original. While many of the claims published in the popular technical press are clearly extravagant, it appears from the rapidly growing body of published research that fractal image compression is capable of performance comparable with that of other techniques enjoying the benefit of a considerably more robust theoretical foundation. . So called because of the similarities between the form of image representation and a mechanism widely used in generating deterministic fractal images, fractal compression represents an image by the parameters of a set of affine transforms on image blocks under which the image is approximately invariant. Although the conditions imposed on these transforms may be shown to be sufficient to guarantee that an approximation of the original image can be reconstructed, there is no obvious theoretical reason to expect this to represent an efficient representation for image coding purposes. The usual analogy with vector quantisation, in which each image is considered to be represented in terms of code vectors extracted from the image itself is instructive, but transforms the fundamental problem into one of understanding why this construction results in an efficient codebook. The signal property required for such a codebook to be effective, termed "self-affinity", is poorly understood. A stochastic signal model based examination of this property is the primary contribution of this dissertation. The most significant findings (subject to some important restrictions} are that "self-affinity" is not a natural consequence of common statistical assumptions but requires particular conditions which are inadequately characterised by second order statistics, and that "natural" images are only marginally "self-affine", to the extent that fractal image compression is effective, but not more so than comparable standard vector quantisation techniques

Algorithms and Systems for IoT and Edge Computing

The idea of distributing the signal processing along the path that starts with the acquisition and ends with the final application has given light to the Internet of Things and Edge Computing, which have demonstrated several advantages in terms of scalability, costs, and reliability. In this dissertation, we focus on designing and implementing algorithms and systems that allow performing a complex task on devices with limited resources. Firstly, we assess the trade-off between compression and anomaly detection from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. Information theory provides the rate-distortion analysis that is extended to consider how information content is processed for detection purposes. Considering an actual Structural Health Monitoring application, two corner cases are analysed: detection in high distortion based on a feature extraction method and detection with low distortion based on Principal Component Analysis. Secondly, we focus on streaming methods for Subspace Analysis. In this context, we revise and study state-of-the-art methods to target devices with limited computational resources. We also consider a real case of deployment of an algorithm for streaming Principal Component Analysis for signal compression in a Structural Health Monitoring application, discussing the trade-off between the possible implementation strategies. Finally, we focus on an alternative compression framework suited for low-end devices that is Compressed Sensing. We propose a different decoding approach that splits the recovery problem into two stages and effectively adopts a deep neural network and basic linear algebra to reconstruct biomedical signals. This novel approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of quality of reconstruction and requires lower computational resources

A real-time KLT implementation for radio-SETI applications

SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, is the search for radio signals emitted by alien civilizations living in the Galaxy. Narrow-band FFT-based approaches have been preferred in SETI, since their computation time only grows like N*lnN, where N is the number of time samples. On the contrary, a wide-band approach based on the Kahrunen-Lo`eve Transform (KLT) algorithm would be preferable, but it would scale like N*N. In this paper, we describe a hardware-software infrastructure based on FPGA boards and GPU-based PCs that circumvents this computation-time problem allowing for a real-time KLT

Learning to compress and search visual data in large-scale systems

The problem of high-dimensional and large-scale representation of visual data is addressed from an unsupervised learning perspective. The emphasis is put on discrete representations, where the description length can be measured in bits and hence the model capacity can be controlled. The algorithmic infrastructure is developed based on the synthesis and analysis prior models whose rate-distortion properties, as well as capacity vs. sample complexity trade-offs are carefully optimized. These models are then extended to multi-layers, namely the RRQ and the ML-STC frameworks, where the latter is further evolved as a powerful deep neural network architecture with fast and sample-efficient training and discrete representations. For the developed algorithms, three important applications are developed. First, the problem of large-scale similarity search in retrieval systems is addressed, where a double-stage solution is proposed leading to faster query times and shorter database storage. Second, the problem of learned image compression is targeted, where the proposed models can capture more redundancies from the training images than the conventional compression codecs. Finally, the proposed algorithms are used to solve ill-posed inverse problems. In particular, the problems of image denoising and compressive sensing are addressed with promising results.Comment: PhD thesis dissertatio