Schedule-Based Cooperative Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Multi-channel Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

International audienceWireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become an important component in the Internet of things (IoT) field. In WSNs, multi-channel protocols have been developed to overcome some limitations related to the throughput and delivery rate which have become necessary for many IoT applications that require sufficient bandwidth to transmit a large amount of data. However, the requirement of frequent negotiation for channel assignment in distributed multi-channel protocols incurs an extra-large communication overhead which results in a reduction of the network lifetime. To deal with this requirement in an energy-efficient way is a challenging task. Hence, the Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach for channel assignment is used to overcome this problem. Nevertheless, the use of the RL approach requires a number of iterations to obtain the best solution which in turn creates a communication overhead and time-wasting. In this paper, a Self-schedule based Cooperative multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Channel Assignment (SCRL CA) approach is proposed to improve the network lifetime and performance. The proposal addresses both regular traffic scheduling and assignment of the available orthogonal channels in an energy-efficient way. We solve the cooperation between the RL agents problem by using the self-schedule method to accelerate the RL iterations, reduce the communication overhead and balance the energy consumption in the route selection process. Therefore, two algorithms are proposed, the first one is for the Static channel assignment (SSCRL CA) while the second one is for the Dynamic channel assignment (DSCRL CA). The results of extensive simulation experiments show the effectiveness of our approach in improving the network lifetime and performance through the two algorithms

Feature fusion via deep random forest for facial age estimation

International audienceIn the last few years, human age estimation from face images attracted the attention of many researchers in computer vision and machine learning fields. This is due to its numerous applications. In this paper, we propose a new architecture for age estimation based on facial images. It is mainly based on a cascade of classification trees ensembles, which are known recently as a Deep Random Forest. Our architecture is composed of two types of DRF. The first type extends and enhances the feature representation of a given facial descriptor. The second type operates on the fused form of all enhanced representations in order to provide a prediction for the age while taking into account the fuzziness property of the human age. While the proposed methodology is able to work with all kinds of image features, the face descriptors adopted in this work used off-the-shelf deep features allowing to retain both the rich deep features and the powerful enhancement and decision provided by the proposed architecture. Experiments conducted on six public databases prove the superiority of the proposed architecture over other state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Kinship verification based deep and tensor features through extreme learning machine

Abstract Checking the kinship of facial images is a difficult research topic in computer vision that has attracted attention in recent years. The methods suggested so far are not strong enough to predict kinship relationships only by facial appearance. To mitigate this problem, we propose a new approach called Deep-Tensor+ELM to kinship verification based on deep (VGG-Face descriptor) and tensor (BSIF-Tensor & LPQ-Tensor using MSIDA method) features through Extreme Learning Machine (ELM). While ELM aims to deal with small size training features dimension, deep and tensor features are proven to provide significant enhancement over shallow features or vector-based counterparts. We evaluate our proposed method on the largest kinship benchmark namely FIW database using four Grandparent-Grandchild relations (GF-GD, GF-GS, GM-GD and GM-GS). The results obtained are positively compared with some modern methods, including those that rely on deep learning

Tensor cross-view quadratic discriminant analysis for kinship verification in the wild

Abstract This paper presents a new Tensor Cross-view Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (TXQDA) method based on the XQDA method for kinship verification in the wild. Many researchers used metric learning methods and have achieved reasonably good performance in kinship verification, none of these methods looks at the kinship verification as a cross-view matching problem. To tackle this issue, we propose a tensor cross-view method to train multilinear data using local histograms of local features descriptors. Therefore, we learn a hierarchical tensor transformation to project each pair face images into the same implicit feature space, in which the distance of each positive pair is minimized and that of each negative pair is maximized. Moreover, TXQDA was proposed to separate the multifactor structure of face images (i.e. kinship, age, gender, expression, illumination and pose) from different dimensions of the tensor. Thus, our TXQDA achieves better classification results through discovering a lowdimensional tensor subspace that enlarges the margin of different kin relation classes. Experimental evaluation on five challenging databases namely Cornell KinFace, UB KinFace, TSKinFace, KinFaceW-II and FIW databases, show that the proposed TXQDA significantly outperforms the current state of the art

Multi-view deep features for robust facial kinship verification

Abstract Automatic kinship verification from facial images is an emerging research topic in machine learning community. In this paper, we proposed an effective facial features extraction model based on multi-view deep features. Thus, we used four pre-trained deep learning models using eight features layers (FC6 and FC7 layers of each VGG-F, VGG-M, VGG-S and VGG-Face models) to train the proposed Multilinear Side-Information based Discriminant Analysis integrating Within Class Covariance Normalization (MSIDA + WCCN) method. Furthermore, we show that how can metric learning methods based on WCCN method integration improves the Simple Scoring Cosine similarity (SSC) method. We refer that we used the SSC method in RFIW’20 competition using the eight deep features concatenation. Thus, the integration of WCCN in the metric learning methods decreases the intra-class variations effect introduced by the deep features weights. We evaluate our proposed method on two kinship benchmarks namely KinFaceW-I and KinFaceW-II databases using four Parent-Child relations (Father-Son, Father-Daughter, Mother-Son and Mother-Daughter). Thus, the proposed MSIDA + WCCN method improves the SSC method with 12.80% and 14.65% on KinFaceW-I and KinFaceW-II databases, respectively. The results obtained are positively compared with some modern methods, including those that rely on deep learning

Knowledge-based tensor subspace analysis system for kinship verification

International audienceMost existing automatic kinship verification methods focus on learning the optimal distance metrics between family members. However, learning facial features and kinship features simultaneously may cause the proposed models to be too weak. In this work, we explore the possibility of bridging this gap by developing knowledge-based tensor models based on pre-trained multi-view models. We propose an effective knowledge-based tensor similarity extraction framework for automatic facial kinship verification using four pre-trained networks (i.e., VGG-Face, VGG-F, VGG-M, and VGG-S). Therefore, knowledge-based deep face and general features (such as identity, age, gender, ethnicity, expression, lighting, pose, contour, edges, corners, shape, etc.) were successfully fused by our tensor design to understand the kinship cue. Multiple effective representations are learned for kinship verification statements (children and parents) using a margin maximization learning scheme based on Tensor Cross-view Quadratic Exponential Discriminant Analysis. Through the exponential learning process, the large gap between distributions of the same family can be reduced to the maximum, while the small gap between distributions of different families is simultaneously increased. The WCCN metric successfully reduces the intra-class variability problem caused by deep features. The explanation of black-box models and the problems of ubiquitous face recognition are considered in our system. The extensive experiments on four challenging datasets show that our system performs very well compared to state-of-the-art approaches