Signal Classification under structure sparsity constraints

Object Classification is a key direction of research in signal and image processing, computer vision and artificial intelligence. The goal is to come up with algorithms that automatically analyze images and put them in predefined categories. This dissertation focuses on the theory and application of sparse signal processing and learning algorithms for image processing and computer vision, especially object classification problems. A key emphasis of this work is to formulate novel optimization problems for learning dictionary and structured sparse representations. Tractable solutions are proposed subsequently for the corresponding optimization problems. An important goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate the wide applications of these algorithmic tools for real-world applications. To that end, we explored important problems in the areas of: 1. Medical imaging: histopathological images acquired from mammalian tissues, human breast tissues, and human brain tissues. 2. Low-frequency (UHF to L-band) ultra-wideband (UWB) synthetic aperture radar: detecting bombs and mines buried under rough surfaces. 3. General object classification: face, flowers, objects, dogs, indoor scenes, etc.Comment: PhD Thesi

Structured Dictionary Learning for Classification

Sparsity driven signal processing has gained tremendous popularity in the last decade. At its core, the assumption is that the signal of interest is sparse with respect to either a fixed transformation or a signal dependent dictionary. To better capture the data characteristics, various dictionary learning methods have been proposed for both reconstruction and classification tasks. For classification particularly, most approaches proposed so far have focused on designing explicit constraints on the sparse code to improve classification accuracy while simply adopting $l_0$-norm or $l_1$-norm for sparsity regularization. Motivated by the success of structured sparsity in the area of Compressed Sensing, we propose a structured dictionary learning framework (StructDL) that incorporates the structure information on both group and task levels in the learning process. Its benefits are two-fold: (i) the label consistency between dictionary atoms and training data are implicitly enforced; and (ii) the classification performance is more robust in the cases of a small dictionary size or limited training data than other techniques. Using the subspace model, we derive the conditions for StructDL to guarantee the performance and show theoretically that StructDL is superior to $l_0$-norm or $l_1$-norm regularized dictionary learning for classification. Extensive experiments have been performed on both synthetic simulations and real world applications, such as face recognition and object classification, to demonstrate the validity of the proposed DL framework

Exploring Structure-Adaptive Graph Learning for Robust Semi-Supervised Classification

Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNNs) are generalizations of CNNs to graph-structured data, in which convolution is guided by the graph topology. In many cases where graphs are unavailable, existing methods manually construct graphs or learn task-driven adaptive graphs. In this paper, we propose Graph Learning Neural Networks (GLNNs), which exploit the optimization of graphs (the adjacency matrix in particular) from both data and tasks. Leveraging on spectral graph theory, we propose the objective of graph learning from a sparsity constraint, properties of a valid adjacency matrix as well as a graph Laplacian regularizer via maximum a posteriori estimation. The optimization objective is then integrated into the loss function of the GCNN, which adapts the graph topology to not only labels of a specific task but also the input data. Experimental results show that our proposed GLNN outperforms state-of-the-art approaches over widely adopted social network datasets and citation network datasets for semi-supervised classification

On The Projection Operator to A Three-view Cardinality Constrained Set

The cardinality constraint is an intrinsic way to restrict the solution structure in many domains, for example, sparse learning, feature selection, and compressed sensing. To solve a cardinality constrained problem, the key challenge is to solve the projection onto the cardinality constraint set, which is NP-hard in general when there exist multiple overlapped cardinality constraints. In this paper, we consider the scenario where the overlapped cardinality constraints satisfy a Three-view Cardinality Structure (TVCS), which reflects the natural restriction in many applications, such as identification of gene regulatory networks and task-worker assignment problem. We cast the projection into a linear programming, and show that for TVCS, the vertex solution of this linear programming is the solution for the original projection problem. We further prove that such solution can be found with the complexity proportional to the number of variables and constraints. We finally use synthetic experiments and two interesting applications in bioinformatics and crowdsourcing to validate the proposed TVCS model and method

Learning Discriminative Multilevel Structured Dictionaries for Supervised Image Classification

Sparse representations using overcomplete dictionaries have proved to be a powerful tool in many signal processing applications such as denoising, super-resolution, inpainting, compression or classification. The sparsity of the representation very much depends on how well the dictionary is adapted to the data at hand. In this paper, we propose a method for learning structured multilevel dictionaries with discriminative constraints to make them well suited for the supervised pixelwise classification of images. A multilevel tree-structured discriminative dictionary is learnt for each class, with a learning objective concerning the reconstruction errors of the image patches around the pixels over each class-representative dictionary. After the initial assignment of the class labels to image pixels based on their sparse representations over the learnt dictionaries, the final classification is achieved by smoothing the label image with a graph cut method and an erosion method. Applied to a common set of texture images, our supervised classification method shows competitive results with the state of the art

Weakly-supervised Dictionary Learning

We present a probabilistic modeling and inference framework for discriminative analysis dictionary learning under a weak supervision setting. Dictionary learning approaches have been widely used for tasks such as low-level signal denoising and restoration as well as high-level classification tasks, which can be applied to audio and image analysis. Synthesis dictionary learning aims at jointly learning a dictionary and corresponding sparse coefficients to provide accurate data representation. This approach is useful for denoising and signal restoration, but may lead to sub-optimal classification performance. By contrast, analysis dictionary learning provides a transform that maps data to a sparse discriminative representation suitable for classification. We consider the problem of analysis dictionary learning for time-series data under a weak supervision setting in which signals are assigned with a global label instead of an instantaneous label signal. We propose a discriminative probabilistic model that incorporates both label information and sparsity constraints on the underlying latent instantaneous label signal using cardinality control. We present the expectation maximization (EM) procedure for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of the proposed model. To facilitate a computationally efficient E-step, we propose both a chain and a novel tree graph reformulation of the graphical model. The performance of the proposed model is demonstrated on both synthetic and real-world data

Classifying Multi-channel UWB SAR Imagery via Tensor Sparsity Learning Techniques

Using low-frequency (UHF to L-band) ultra-wideband (UWB) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology for detecting buried and obscured targets, e.g. bomb or mine, has been successfully demonstrated recently. Despite promising recent progress, a significant open challenge is to distinguish obscured targets from other (natural and manmade) clutter sources in the scene. The problem becomes exacerbated in the presence of noisy responses from rough ground surfaces. In this paper, we present three novel sparsity-driven techniques, which not only exploit the subtle features of raw captured data but also take advantage of the polarization diversity and the aspect angle dependence information from multi-channel SAR data. First, the traditional sparse representation-based classification (SRC) is generalized to exploit shared information of classes and various sparsity structures of tensor coefficients for multi-channel data. Corresponding tensor dictionary learning models are consequently proposed to enhance classification accuracy. Lastly, a new tensor sparsity model is proposed to model responses from multiple consecutive looks of objects, which is a unique characteristic of the dataset we consider. Extensive experimental results on a high-fidelity electromagnetic simulated dataset and radar data collected from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory side-looking SAR demonstrate the advantages of proposed tensor sparsity models

Collaborative Multi-sensor Classification via Sparsity-based Representation

In this paper, we propose a general collaborative sparse representation framework for multi-sensor classification, which takes into account the correlations as well as complementary information between heterogeneous sensors simultaneously while considering joint sparsity within each sensor's observations. We also robustify our models to deal with the presence of sparse noise and low-rank interference signals. Specifically, we demonstrate that incorporating the noise or interference signal as a low-rank component in our models is essential in a multi-sensor classification problem when multiple co-located sources/sensors simultaneously record the same physical event. We further extend our frameworks to kernelized models which rely on sparsely representing a test sample in terms of all the training samples in a feature space induced by a kernel function. A fast and efficient algorithm based on alternative direction method is proposed where its convergence to an optimal solution is guaranteed. Extensive experiments are conducted on several real multi-sensor data sets and results are compared with the conventional classifiers to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods

Manifold-Based Signal Recovery and Parameter Estimation from Compressive Measurements

A field known as Compressive Sensing (CS) has recently emerged to help address the growing challenges of capturing and processing high-dimensional signals and data sets. CS exploits the surprising fact that the information contained in a sparse signal can be preserved in a small number of compressive (or random) linear measurements of that signal. Strong theoretical guarantees have been established on the accuracy to which sparse or near-sparse signals can be recovered from noisy compressive measurements. In this paper, we address similar questions in the context of a different modeling framework. Instead of sparse models, we focus on the broad class of manifold models, which can arise in both parametric and non-parametric signal families. Building upon recent results concerning the stable embeddings of manifolds within the measurement space, we establish both deterministic and probabilistic instance-optimal bounds in $\ell_2$ for manifold-based signal recovery and parameter estimation from noisy compressive measurements. In line with analogous results for sparsity-based CS, we conclude that much stronger bounds are possible in the probabilistic setting. Our work supports the growing empirical evidence that manifold-based models can be used with high accuracy in compressive signal processing

Sparse Deep Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative matrix factorization is a powerful technique to realize dimension reduction and pattern recognition through single-layer data representation learning. Deep learning, however, with its carefully designed hierarchical structure, is able to combine hidden features to form more representative features for pattern recognition. In this paper, we proposed sparse deep nonnegative matrix factorization models to analyze complex data for more accurate classification and better feature interpretation. Such models are designed to learn localized features or generate more discriminative representations for samples in distinct classes by imposing $L_1$-norm penalty on the columns of certain factors. By extending one-layer model into multi-layer one with sparsity, we provided a hierarchical way to analyze big data and extract hidden features intuitively due to nonnegativity. We adopted the Nesterov's accelerated gradient algorithm to accelerate the computing process with the convergence rate of $O(1/k^2)$ after $k$ steps iteration. We also analyzed the computing complexity of our framework to demonstrate their efficiency. To improve the performance of dealing with linearly inseparable data, we also considered to incorporate popular nonlinear functions into this framework and explored their performance. We applied our models onto two benchmarking image datasets, demonstrating our models can achieve competitive or better classification performance and produce intuitive interpretations compared with the typical NMF and competing multi-layer models.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure