Memory- and time-efficient dense network for single-image super-resolution

Abstract Dense connections in convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which connect each layer to every other layer, can compensate for mid/high‐frequency information loss and further enhance high‐frequency signals. However, dense CNNs suffer from high memory usage due to the accumulation of concatenating feature‐maps stored in memory. To overcome this problem, a two‐step approach is proposed that learns the representative concatenating feature‐maps. Specifically, a convolutional layer with many more filters is used before concatenating layers to learn richer feature‐maps. Therefore, the irrelevant and redundant feature‐maps are discarded in the concatenating layers. The proposed method results in 24% and 6% less memory usage and test time, respectively, in comparison to single‐image super‐resolution (SISR) with the basic dense block. It also improves the peak signal‐to‐noise ratio by 0.24 dB. Moreover, the proposed method, while producing competitive results, decreases the number of filters in concatenating layers by at least a factor of 2 and reduces the memory consumption and test time by 40% and 12%, respectively. These results suggest that the proposed approach is a more practical method for SISR

Lost in the Digital Wild: Hiding Information in Digital Activities

This paper presents a new general framework of information hiding, in which the hidden information is embedded into a collection of activities conducted by selected human and computer entities (e.g., a number of online accounts of one or more online social networks) in a selected digital world. Different from other traditional schemes, where the hidden information is embedded into one or more selected or generated cover objects, in the new framework the hidden information is embedded in the fact that some particular digital activities with some particular attributes took place in some particular ways in the receiver-observable digital world. In the new framework the concept of "cover" almost disappears, or one can say that now the whole digital world selected becomes the cover. The new framework can find applications in both security (e.g., steganography) and non-security domains (e.g., gaming). For security applications we expect that the new framework calls for completely new steganalysis techniques, which are likely more complicated, less effective and less efficient than existing ones due to the need to monitor and analyze the whole digital world constantly and in real time. A proof-of-concept system was developed as a mobile app based on Twitter activities to demonstrate the information hiding framework works. We are developing a more hybrid system involving several online social networks

Chaotic particle swarm optimization with mutation for classification

In this paper, a chaotic particle swarm optimization with mutation-based classifier particle swarm optimization is proposed to classify patterns of different classes in the feature space. The introduced mutation operators and chaotic sequences allows us to overcome the problem of early convergence into a local minima associated with particle swarm optimization algorithms. That is, the mutation operator sharpens the convergence and it tunes the best possible solution. Furthermore, to remove the irrelevant data and reduce the dimensionality of medical datasets, a feature selection approach using binary version of the proposed particle swarm optimization is introduced. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed classifier, mutation-based classifier particle swarm optimization , it is checked out with three sets of data classifications namely, Wisconsin diagnostic breast cancer, Wisconsin breast cancer and heart-statlog, with different feature vector dimensions. The proposed algorithm is compared with different classifier algorithms including k-nearest neighbor, as a conventional classifier, particle swarm-classifier, genetic algorithm, and Imperialist competitive algorithm-classifier, as more sophisticated ones. The performance of each classifier was evaluated by calculating the accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and Matthews′s correlation coefficient. The experimental results show that the mutation-based classifier particle swarm optimization unequivocally performs better than all the compared algorithms