Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity

Statistical models for natural scene data

This thesis considers statistical modelling of natural image data. Obtaining advances in this field can have significant impact for both engineering applications, and for the understanding of the human visual system. Several recent advances in natural image modelling have been obtained with the use of unsupervised feature learning. We consider a class of such models, restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), used in many recent state-of-the-art image models. We develop extensions of these stochastic artificial neural networks, and use them as a basis for building more effective image models, and tools for computational vision. We first develop a novel framework for obtaining Boltzmann machines, in which the hidden unit activations co-transform with transformed input stimuli in a stable and predictable way throughout the network. We define such models to be transformation equivariant. Such properties have been shown useful for computer vision systems, and have been motivational for example in the development of steerable filters, a widely used classical feature extraction technique. Translation equivariant feature sharing has been the standard method for scaling image models beyond patch-sized data to large images. In our framework we extend shallow and deep models to account for other kinds of transformations as well, focusing on in-plane rotations. Motivated by the unsatisfactory results of current generative natural image models, we take a step back, and evaluate whether they are able to model a subclass of the data, natural image textures. This is a necessary subcomponent of any credible model for visual scenes. We assess the performance of a state- of-the-art model of natural images for texture generation, using a dataset and evaluation techniques from in prior work. We also perform a dissection of the model architecture, uncovering the properties important for good performance. Building on this, we develop structured extensions for more complicated data comprised of textures from multiple classes, using the single-texture model architecture as a basis. These models are shown to be able to produce state-of-the-art texture synthesis results quantitatively, and are also effective qualitatively. It is demonstrated empirically that the developed multiple-texture framework provides a means to generate images of differently textured regions, more generic globally varying textures, and can also be used for texture interpolation, where the approach is radically dfferent from the others in the area. Finally we consider visual boundary prediction from natural images. The work aims to improve understanding of Boltzmann machines in the generation of image segment boundaries, and to investigate deep neural network architectures for learning the boundary detection problem. The developed networks (which avoid several hand-crafted model and feature designs commonly used for the problem), produce the fastest reported inference times in the literature, combined with state-of-the-art performance

Fundamentals

Volume 1 establishes the foundations of this new field. It goes through all the steps from data collection, their summary and clustering, to different aspects of resource-aware learning, i.e., hardware, memory, energy, and communication awareness. Machine learning methods are inspected with respect to resource requirements and how to enhance scalability on diverse computing architectures ranging from embedded systems to large computing clusters

Fundamentals

Volume 1 establishes the foundations of this new field. It goes through all the steps from data collection, their summary and clustering, to different aspects of resource-aware learning, i.e., hardware, memory, energy, and communication awareness. Machine learning methods are inspected with respect to resource requirements and how to enhance scalability on diverse computing architectures ranging from embedded systems to large computing clusters