Comparison of local image descriptors for plant identification from leaf images

In this paper we present several descriptors used for the task of Plant recognition based on the images of leaves. The set of descriptors include texture based descriptors, fractal descriptors as well as some of the state of the art descriptors for image retrieval and object recognition in images. The descriptors are generated from the leaf images taken from single leaves on homogenous background. The descriptors are then used for training classifiers from a dataset of leaf images. The comparison of the obtained results will be presented in this paper

Fintech and Artificial Intelligence in Finance - Towards a transparent financialindustry” (FinAI) CA19130

The financial sector is the largest user of digital technologies and a major driver in the digital transformation of the economy. Financial technology (FinTech) aims to both compete with and support the established financial industry in the delivery of financial services. Globally, more than $100 billion of investments have been made into FinTech companies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) since 2010, and continue growing substantially. In early 2018, the European Commission unveiled (a) their action plan for a more competitive and innovative financial market, and (b) an initiative on AI with the aim to harness the opportunities presented by technology-enabled innovations. Europe should become a global hub for FinTech, with the economy being able to benefit from the European Single Market. The Action will investigate AI and Fintech from three different angles: Transparency in FinTech, Transparent versus Black Box Decision-Support Models in the Financial Industry and Transparency into Investment Product Performance for Clients. The Action will bridge the gap between academia, industry, the public and governmental organisations by working in an interdisciplinary way across Europe and focusing on innovation. The key objectives are: to improve transparency of AI supported processes in the Fintech space to address the disparity between the proliferation in AI models within the financial industry for risk assessment and decision-making, and the limited insight the public has in its consequences by developing policy papers and methods to increase transparency to develop methods to scrutinize the quality of products, especially rule-based “smart beta” ones, across the asset management, banking and insurance industries

Deep learning for feature extraction in remote sensing: A case-study of aerial scene classification

Scene classification relying on images is essential in many systems and applications related to remote sensing. The scientific interest in scene classification from remotely collected images is increasing, and many datasets and algorithms are being developed. The introduction of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and other deep learning techniques contributed to vast improvements in the accuracy of image scene classification in such systems. To classify the scene from areal images, we used a two-stream deep architecture. We performed the first part of the classification, the feature extraction, using pre-trained CNN that extracts deep features of aerial images from different network layers: the average pooling layer or some of the previous convolutional layers. Next, we applied feature concatenation on extracted features from various neural networks, after dimensionality reduction was performed on enormous feature vectors. We experimented extensively with different CNN architectures, to get optimal results. Finally, we used the Support Vector Machine (SVM) for the classification of the concatenated features. The competitiveness of the examined technique was evaluated on two real-world datasets: UC Merced and WHU-RS. The obtained classification accuracies demonstrate that the considered method has competitive results compared to other cutting-edge techniques

Aerial scene classification through fine-tuning with adaptive learning rates and label smoothing

Remote Sensing (RS) image classification has recently attracted great attention for its application in different tasks, including environmental monitoring, battlefield surveillance, and geospatial object detection. The best practices for these tasks often involve transfer learning from pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). A common approach in the literature is employing CNNs for feature extraction, and subsequently train classifiers exploiting such features. In this paper, we propose the adoption of transfer learning by fine-tuning pre-trained CNNs for end-to-end aerial image classification. Our approach performs feature extraction from the fine-tuned neural networks and remote sensing image classification with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model with linear and Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernels. To tune the learning rate hyperparameter, we employ a linear decay learning rate scheduler as well as cyclical learning rates. Moreover, in order to mitigate the overfitting problem of pre-trained models, we apply label smoothing regularization. For the fine-tuning and feature extraction process, we adopt the Inception-v3 and Xception inception-based CNNs, as well the residual-based networks ResNet50 and DenseNet121. We present extensive experiments on two real-world remote sensing image datasets: AID and NWPU-RESISC45. The results show that the proposed method exhibits classification accuracy of up to 98%, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods

Multi-horizon air pollution forecasting with deep neural networks

Air pollution is a global problem, especially in urban areas where the population density is very high due to the diverse pollutant sources such as vehicles, industrial plants, buildings, and waste. North Macedonia, as a developing country, has a serious problem with air pollution. The problem is highly present in its capital city, Skopje, where air pollution places it consistently within the top 10 cities in the world during the winter months. In this work, we propose using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models with long short-term memory units to predict the level of PM10 particles at 6, 12, and 24 h in the future. We employ historical air quality measurement data from sensors placed at multiple locations in Skopje and meteorological conditions such as temperature and humidity. We compare different deep learning models’ performance to an Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model. The obtained results show that the proposed models consistently outperform the baseline model and can be successfully employed for air pollution prediction. Ultimately, we demonstrate that these models can help decision-makers and local authorities better manage the air pollution consequences by taking proactive measures

Air pollution prediction with multi-modal data and deep neural networks

Air pollution is becoming a rising and serious environmental problem, especially in urban areas affected by an increasing migration rate. The large availability of sensor data enables the adoption of analytical tools to provide decision support capabilities. Employing sensors facilitates air pollution monitoring, but the lack of predictive capability limits such systems’ potential in practical scenarios. On the other hand, forecasting methods offer the opportunity to predict the future pollution in specific areas, potentially suggesting useful preventive measures. To date, many works tackled the problem of air pollution forecasting, most of which are based on sequence models. These models are trained with raw pollution data and are subsequently utilized to make predictions. This paper proposes a novel approach evaluating four different architectures that utilize camera images to estimate the air pollution in those areas. These images are further enhanced with weather data to boost the classification accuracy. The proposed approach exploits generative adversarial networks combined with data augmentation techniques to mitigate the class imbalance problem. The experiments show that the proposed method achieves robust accuracy of up to 0.88, which is comparable to sequence models and conventional models that utilize air pollution data. This is a remarkable result considering that the historic air pollution data is directly related to the output—future air pollution data, whereas the proposed architecture uses camera images to recognize the air pollution—which is an inherently much more difficult problem

Improving Activity Recognition Accuracy in Ambient-Assisted Living Systems by Automated Feature Engineering

Ambient-assisted living (AAL) is promising to become a supplement of the current care models, providing enhanced living experience to people within context-aware homes and smart environments. Activity recognition based on sensory data in AAL systems is an important task because 1) it can be used for estimation of levels of physical activity, 2) it can lead to detecting changes of daily patterns that may indicate an emerging medical condition, or 3) it can be used for detection of accidents and emergencies. To be accepted, AAL systems must be affordable while providing reliable performance. These two factors hugely depend on optimizing the number of utilized sensors and extracting robust features from them. This paper proposes a generic feature engineering method for selecting robust features from a variety of sensors, which can be used for generating reliable classi cation models. From the originally recorded time series and some newly generated time series [i.e., magnitudes, rst derivatives, delta series, and fast Fourier transformation (FFT)-based series], a variety of time and frequency domain features are extracted. Then, using two-phase feature selection, the number of generated features is greatly reduced. Finally, different classi cation models are trained and evaluated on an independent test set. The proposed method was evaluated on ve publicly available data sets, and on all of them, it yielded better accuracy than when using hand-tailored features. The bene ts of the proposed systematic feature engineering method are quickly discovering good feature sets for any given task than manually nding ones suitable for a particular task, selecting a small feature set that outperforms manually determined features in both execution time and accuracy, and identi cation of relevant sensor types and body locations automatically. Ultimately, the proposed method could reduce the cost of AAL systems by facilitating execution of algorithms on devices with limited resources and by using as few sensors as possible.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

SHELDON Smart habitat for the elderly.

An insightful document concerning active and assisted living under different perspectives: Furniture and habitat, ICT solutions and Healthcare

Ambient Assisted Living: Scoping Review of Artificial Intelligence Models, Domains, Technology, and Concerns

Background: Ambient assisted living (AAL) is a common name for various artificial intelligence (AI)—infused applications and platforms that support their users in need in multiple activities, from health to daily living. These systems use different approaches to learn about their users and make automated decisions, known as AI models, for personalizing their services and increasing outcomes. Given the numerous systems developed and deployed for people with different needs, health conditions, and dispositions toward the technology, it is critical to obtain clear and comprehensive insights concerning AI models used, along with their domains, technology, and concerns, to identify promising directions for future work. Objective: This study aimed to provide a scoping review of the literature on AI models in AAL. In particular, we analyzed specific AI models used in AАL systems, the target domains of the models, the technology using the models, and the major concerns from the end-user perspective. Our goal was to consolidate research on this topic and inform end users, health care professionals and providers, researchers, and practitioners in developing, deploying, and evaluating future intelligent AAL systems. Methods: This study was conducted as a scoping review to identify, analyze, and extract the relevant literature. It used a natural language processing toolkit to retrieve the article corpus for an efficient and comprehensive automated literature search. Relevant articles were then extracted from the corpus and analyzed manually. This review included 5 digital libraries: IEEE, PubMed, Springer, Elsevier, and MDPI. Results: We included a total of 108 articles. The annual distribution of relevant articles showed a growing trend for all categories from January 2010 to July 2022. The AI models mainly used unsupervised and semisupervised approaches. The leading models are deep learning, natural language processing, instance-based learning, and clustering. Activity assistance and recognition were the most common target domains of the models. Ambient sensing, mobile technology, and robotic devices mainly implemented the models. Older adults were the primary beneficiaries, followed by patients and frail persons of various ages. Availability was a top beneficiary concern. Conclusions: This study presents the analytical evidence of AI models in AAL and their domains, technologies, beneficiaries, and concerns. Future research on intelligent AAL should involve health care professionals and caregivers as designers and users, comply with health-related regulations, improve transparency and privacy, integrate with health care technological infrastructure, explain their decisions to the users, and establish evaluation metrics and design guidelines. Trial Registration: PROSPERO (International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews) CRD42022347590; https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42022347590This work was part of and supported by GoodBrother, COST Action 19121—Network on Privacy-Aware Audio- and Video-Based Applications for Active and Assisted Living