On Learning Navigation Behaviors for Small Mobile Robots With Reservoir Computing Architectures

Abstract—This work proposes a general Reservoir Computing (RC) learning framework which can be used to learn navigation behaviors for mobile robots in simple and complex unknown, partially observable environments. RC provides an efficient way to train recurrent neural networks by letting the recurrent part of the network (called reservoir) fixed while only a linear readout output layer is trained. The proposed RC framework builds upon the notion of navigation attractor or behavior which can be embedded in the high-dimensional space of the reservoir after learning. The learning of multiple behaviors is possible because the dynamic robot behavior, consisting of a sensory-motor sequence, can be linearly discriminated in the high-dimensional nonlinear space of the dynamic reservoir. Three learning approaches for navigation behaviors are shown in this paper. The first approach learns multiple behaviors based on examples of navigation behaviors generated by a supervisor, while the second approach learns goal-directed navigation behaviors based only on rewards. The third approach learns complex goal-directed behaviors, in a supervised way, using an hierarchical architecture whose internal predictions of contextual switches guide the sequence of basic navigation behaviors towards the goal. Index Terms—robot navigation, reservoir computing, rein-forcement learning, goal-directed navigation, recurrent neural networks, echo state network, sensory-motor coupling. I

Online Super-Resolution For Fibre-Bundle-Based Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy

Probe-based Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (pCLE) produces microscopic images enabling real-time in vivo optical biopsy. However, the miniaturisation of the optical hardware, specifically the reliance on an optical fibre bundle as an imaging guide, fundamentally limits image quality by producing artefacts, noise, and relatively low contrast and resolution. The reconstruction approaches in clinical pCLE products do not fully alleviate these problems. Consequently, image quality remains a barrier that curbs the full potential of pCLE. Enhancing the image quality of pCLE in real-time remains a challenge. The research in this thesis is a response to this need. I have developed dedicated online super-resolution methods that account for the physics of the image acquisition process. These methods have the potential to replace existing reconstruction algorithms without interfering with the fibre design or the hardware of the device. In this thesis, novel processing pipelines are proposed for enhancing the image quality of pCLE. First, I explored a learning-based super-resolution method that relies on mapping from the low to the high-resolution space. Due to the lack of high-resolution pCLE, I proposed to simulate high-resolution data and use it as a ground truth model that is based on the pCLE acquisition physics. However, pCLE images are reconstructed from irregularly distributed fibre signals, and grid-based Convolutional Neural Networks are not designed to take irregular data as input. To alleviate this problem, I designed a new trainable layer that embeds Nadaraya- Watson regression. Finally, I proposed a novel blind super-resolution approach by deploying unsupervised zero-shot learning accompanied by a down-sampling kernel crafted for pCLE. I evaluated these new methods in two ways: a robust image quality assessment and a perceptual quality test assessed by clinical experts. The results demonstrate that the proposed super-resolution pipelines are superior to the current reconstruction algorithm in terms of image quality and clinician preference

Compressed Optical Imaging

We address the resolution of inverse problems where visual data must be recovered from incomplete information optically acquired in the spatial domain. The optical acquisition models that are involved share a common mathematical structure consisting of a linear operator followed by optional pointwise nonlinearities. The linear operator generally includes lowpass filtering effects and, in some cases, downsampling. Both tend to make the problems ill-posed. Our general resolution strategy is to rely on variational principles, which allows for a tight control on the objective or perceptual quality of the reconstructed data. The three related problems that we investigate and propose to solve are 1. The reconstruction of images from sparse samples. Following a non-ideal acquisition framework, the measurements take the form of spatial-domain samples whose locations are specified a priori. The reconstruction algorithm that we propose is linked to PDE flows with tensor-valued diffusivities. We demonstrate through several experiments that our approach preserves finer visual features than standard interpolation techniques do, especially at very low sampling rates. 2. The reconstruction of images from binary measurements. The acquisition model that we consider relies on optical principles and fits in a compressed-sensing framework. We develop a reconstruction algorithm that allows us to recover grayscale images from the available binary data. It substantially improves upon the state of the art in terms of quality and computational performance. Our overall approach is physically relevant; moreover, it can handle large amounts of data efficiently. 3. The reconstruction of phase and amplitude profiles from single digital holographic acquisitions. Unlike conventional approaches that are based on demodulation, our iterative reconstruction method is able to accurately recover the original object from a single downsampled intensity hologram, as shown in simulated and real measurement settings. It also consistently outperforms the state of the art in terms of signal-to-noise ratio and with respect to the size of the field of view. The common goal of the proposed reconstruction methods is to yield an accurate estimate of the original data from all available measurements. In accordance with the forward model, they are typically capable of handling samples that are sparse in the spatial domain and/or distorted due to pointwise nonlinear effects, as demonstrated in our experiments

Scaling Multidimensional Inference for Big Structured Data

In information technology, big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using traditional data processing applications [151]. In a world of increasing sensor modalities, cheaper storage, and more data oriented questions, we are quickly passing the limits of tractable computations using traditional statistical analysis methods. Methods which often show great results on simple data have difficulties processing complicated multidimensional data. Accuracy alone can no longer justify unwarranted memory use and computational complexity. Improving the scaling properties of these methods for multidimensional data is the only way to make these methods relevant. In this work we explore methods for improving the scaling properties of parametric and nonparametric models. Namely, we focus on the structure of the data to lower the complexity of a specific family of problems. The two types of structures considered in this work are distributive optimization with separable constraints (Chapters 2-3), and scaling Gaussian processes for multidimensional lattice input (Chapters 4-5). By improving the scaling of these methods, we can expand their use to a wide range of applications which were previously intractable open the door to new research questions

Proceedings of the 35th WIC Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux and the 4th joint WIC/IEEE Symposium on Information Theory and Signal Processing in the Benelux, Eindhoven, the Netherlands May 12-13, 2014

Compressive sensing (CS) as an approach for data acquisition has recently received much attention. In CS, the signal recovery problem from the observed data requires the solution of a sparse vector from an underdetermined system of equations. The underlying sparse signal recovery problem is quite general with many applications and is the focus of this talk. The main emphasis will be on Bayesian approaches for sparse signal recovery. We will examine sparse priors such as the super-Gaussian and student-t priors and appropriate MAP estimation methods. In particular, re-weighted l2 and re-weighted l1 methods developed to solve the optimization problem will be discussed. The talk will also examine a hierarchical Bayesian framework and then study in detail an empirical Bayesian method, the Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) method. If time permits, we will also discuss Bayesian methods for sparse recovery problems with structure; Intra-vector correlation in the context of the block sparse model and inter-vector correlation in the context of the multiple measurement vector problem

Towards Quantitative Endoscopy with Vision Intelligence

In this thesis, we work on topics related to quantitative endoscopy with vision-based intelligence. Specifically, our works revolve around the topic of video reconstruction in endoscopy, where many challenges exist, such as texture scarceness, illumination variation, multimodality, etc., and these prevent prior works from working effectively and robustly. To this end, we propose to combine the strength of expressivity of deep learning approaches and the rigorousness and accuracy of non-linear optimization algorithms to develop a series of methods to confront such challenges towards quantitative endoscopy. We first propose a retrospective sparse reconstruction method that can estimate a high-accuracy and density point cloud and high-completeness camera trajectory from a monocular endoscopic video with state-of-the-art performance. To enable this, replacing the role of a hand-crafted local descriptor, a deep image feature descriptor is developed to boost the feature matching performance in a typical sparse reconstruction algorithm. A retrospective surface reconstruction pipeline is then proposed to estimate a textured surface model from a monocular endoscopic video, where self-supervised depth and descriptor learning and surface fusion technique is involved. We show that the proposed method performs superior to a popular dense reconstruction method and the estimate reconstructions are in good agreement with the surface models obtained from CT scans. To align video-reconstructed surface models with pre-operative imaging such as CT, we introduce a global point cloud registration algorithm that is robust to resolution mismatch that often happens in such multi-modal scenarios. Specifically, a geometric feature descriptor is developed where a novel network normalization technique is used to help a 3D network produce more consistent and distinctive geometric features for samples with different resolutions. The proposed geometric descriptor achieves state-of-the-art performance, based on our evaluation. Last but not least, a real-time SLAM system that estimates a surface geometry and camera trajectory from a monocular endoscopic video is developed, where deep representations for geometry and appearance and non-linear factor graph optimization are used. We show that the proposed SLAM system performs favorably compared with a state-of-the-art feature-based SLAM system

Deep learning for fast and robust medical image reconstruction and analysis

Medical imaging is an indispensable component of modern medical research as well as clinical practice. Nevertheless, imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computational tomography (CT) are costly and are less accessible to the majority of the world. To make medical devices more accessible, affordable and efficient, it is crucial to re-calibrate our current imaging paradigm for smarter imaging. In particular, as medical imaging techniques have highly structured forms in the way they acquire data, they provide us with an opportunity to optimise the imaging techniques holistically by leveraging data. The central theme of this thesis is to explore different opportunities where we can exploit data and deep learning to improve the way we extract information for better, faster and smarter imaging. This thesis explores three distinct problems. The first problem is the time-consuming nature of dynamic MR data acquisition and reconstruction. We propose deep learning methods for accelerated dynamic MR image reconstruction, resulting in up to 10-fold reduction in imaging time. The second problem is the redundancy in our current imaging pipeline. Traditionally, imaging pipeline treated acquisition, reconstruction and analysis as separate steps. However, we argue that one can approach them holistically and optimise the entire pipeline jointly for a specific target goal. To this end, we propose deep learning approaches for obtaining high fidelity cardiac MR segmentation directly from significantly undersampled data, greatly exceeding the undersampling limit for image reconstruction. The final part of this thesis tackles the problem of interpretability of the deep learning algorithms. We propose attention-models that can implicitly focus on salient regions in an image to improve accuracy for ultrasound scan plane detection and CT segmentation. More crucially, these models can provide explainability, which is a crucial stepping stone for the harmonisation of smart imaging and current clinical practice.Open Acces

Sparsity in Linear Predictive Coding of Speech

nrpages: 197status: publishe