A Novel Temporal Attentive-Pooling based Convolutional Recurrent Architecture for Acoustic Signal Enhancement

Removing background noise from acoustic observations to obtain clean signals is an important research topic regarding numerous real acoustic applications. Owing to their strong model capacity in function mapping, deep neural network-based algorithms have been successfully applied in target signal enhancement in acoustic applications. As most target signals carry semantic information encoded in a hierarchal structure in short-and long-term contexts , noise may distort such structures nonuniformly. In most deep neural network-based algorithms, such local and global effects are not explicitly considered in a modeling architecture for signal enhancement. In this paper, we propose a temporal attentive-pooling (TAP) mechanism combined with a conventional convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) model, called TAP-CRNN, which explicitly considers both global and local information for acoustic signal enhancement (ASE). In the TAP-CRNN model, we first use a convolution layer to extract local information from acoustic signals and a recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture to characterize temporal contextual information. Second, we exploit a novel attention mechanism to contextually process salient regions of noisy signals. We evaluate the proposed ASE system using an infant cry da-taset. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed TAP-CRNN, compared with related deep neu-ral network models, and demonstrate that the proposed TAP-CRNN can more effectively reduce noise components from infant cry signals with unseen background noises at different signal-to-noise levels. Impact Statement-Recently proposed deep learning solutions have proven useful in overcoming certain limitations of conventional acoustic signal enhancement (ASE) tasks. However, the performance of these approaches under real acoustic conditions is not always satisfactory. In this study, we investigated the use of attention models for ASE. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to successfully employ a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) with a temporal attentive pooling (TAP) algorithm for the ASE task. The proposed TAP-CRNN framework can practically benefit the as-sistive communication technology industry, such as the manufacture of hearing aid devices for the elderly and students. In addition, the derived algorithm can benefit other signal processing applications, such as soundscape information retrieval, sound environment analysis in smart homes, and automatic speech/speaker/language recognition systems. Index Terms-Acoustic signal enhancement, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, bidirectional long-short term memory

An Overview on the Generation and Detection of Synthetic and Manipulated Satellite Images

Due to the reduction of technological costs and the increase of satellites launches, satellite images are becoming more popular and easier to obtain. Besides serving benevolent purposes, satellite data can also be used for malicious reasons such as misinformation. As a matter of fact, satellite images can be easily manipulated relying on general image editing tools. Moreover, with the surge of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that can generate realistic synthetic imagery belonging to various domains, additional threats related to the diffusion of synthetically generated satellite images are emerging. In this paper, we review the State of the Art (SOTA) on the generation and manipulation of satellite images. In particular, we focus on both the generation of synthetic satellite imagery from scratch, and the semantic manipulation of satellite images by means of image-transfer technologies, including the transformation of images obtained from one type of sensor to another one. We also describe forensic detection techniques that have been researched so far to classify and detect synthetic image forgeries. While we focus mostly on forensic techniques explicitly tailored to the detection of AI-generated synthetic contents, we also review some methods designed for general splicing detection, which can in principle also be used to spot AI manipulate imagesComment: 25 pages, 17 figures, 5 tables, APSIPA 202

Blind Hyperspectral Unmixing Using Autoencoders

The subject of this thesis is blind hyperspectral unmixing using deep learning based autoencoders. Two methods based on autoencoders are proposed and analyzed. Both methods seek to exploit the spatial correlations in the hyperspectral images to improve the performance. One by using multitask learning to simultaneously unmix a neighbourhood of pixels while the other by using a convolutional neural network autoencoder. This increases the consistency and robustness of the methods. In addition, a review of the various autoencoder methods in the literature is given along with a detailed discussion of different types of autoencoders. The thesis concludes by a critical comparison of eleven different autoencoder based methods. Ablation experiments are performed to answer the question of why autoencoders are so effective in blind hyperspectral unmixing, and an opinion is given on what the future in autoencoder unmixing holds.Efni þessarar ritgerðar er aðgreining fjölrásamynda (e. blind hyperspectral unmixing) með sjálfkóðurum (e. autoencoders) byggðum á djúpum lærdómi (e. deep learning). Tvær aðferðir byggðar á sjálfkóðurum eru kynntar og rannsakaðar. Báðar aðferðirnar leitast við að nýta sér rúmfræðilega fylgni rófa í fjölrásamyndum til að bæta árangur aðgreiningar. Ein aðferð með að nýta sér fjölbeitingarlærdóm (e. multitask learning) og hin með að nota sjálfkóðara útfærðan með földunartaugnaneti (e. convolutional neural network). Hvortveggja bætir samkvæmni og hæfni fjölrásagreiningarinnar. Ennfremur inniheldur ritgerðin yfirgripsmikið yfirlit yfir þær sjálfkóðaraaðferðir sem hafa verið birtar ásamt greinargóðri umræðu um mismunandi gerðir sjálfkóðara og útfærslur á þeim. í lok ritgerðarinnar er svo að finna gagnrýninn samanburð á 11 mismunandi aðferðum byggðum á sjálfkóðurum. Brottnáms (e. ablation) tilraunir eru gerðar til að svara spurningunni hvers vegna sjálfkóðarar eru svo árangursríkir í fjölrásagreiningu og stuttlega rætt um hvað framtíðin ber í skauti sér varðandi aðgreiningu fjölrásamynda með sjálfkóðurum. Megin framlag ritgerðarinnar er eftirfarandi: - Ný sjálfkóðaraaðferð, MTLAEU, sem nýtir á beinan hátt rúmfræðilega fylgni rófa í fjölrásamyndum til að bæta árangur aðgreiningar. Aðferðin notar fjölbeitingarlærdóm til að aðgreina grennd af rófum í einu. - Ný aðferð, CNNAEU, sem notar 2D földunartaugnanet fyrir bæði kóðara og afkóðara og er fyrsta birta aðferðin til að gera það. Aðferðin er þjálfuð á myndbútum (e.patches) og því er rúmfræðileg bygging myndarinnar sem greina á varðveitt í gegnum aðferðina. - Yfirgripsmikil og ítarlegt fræðilegt yfirlit yfir birtar sjálfkóðaraaðferðir fyrir fjölrásagreiningu. Gefinn er inngangur að sjálfkóðurum og elstu tegundir sjálfkóðara eru kynntar. Gefið er greinargott yfirlit yfir helstu birtar aðferðir fyrir fjölrásagreiningu sem byggja á sjálfkóðurum og gerður er gangrýninn samburður á 11 mismunandi sjálfkóðaraaðferðum.The Icelandic Research Fund under Grants 174075-05 and 207233-05