Spectral identification of networks using sparse measurements

We propose a new method to recover global information about a network of interconnected dynamical systems based on observations made at a small number (possibly one) of its nodes. In contrast to classical identification of full graph topology, we focus on the identification of the spectral graph-theoretic properties of the network, a framework that we call spectral network identification. The main theoretical results connect the spectral properties of the network to the spectral properties of the dynamics, which are well-defined in the context of the so-called Koopman operator and can be extracted from data through the Dynamic Mode Decomposition algorithm. These results are obtained for networks of diffusively-coupled units that admit a stable equilibrium state. For large networks, a statistical approach is considered, which focuses on spectral moments of the network and is well-suited to the case of heterogeneous populations. Our framework provides efficient numerical methods to infer global information on the network from sparse local measurements at a few nodes. Numerical simulations show for instance the possibility of detecting the mean number of connections or the addition of a new vertex using measurements made at one single node, that need not be representative of the other nodes' properties.Comment: 3

Laser Scanning and the Continuous Wavelet Transform for Flatness Control

Current methods for surface flatness control in construction are based on sparse measurements and therefore may lead to inaccurate and imprecise results. Previous research has shown that Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS), with the accuracy and density of 3D point clouds it can provide, could support more complete and reliable control of surface flatness in construction. However, these previous works have only applied to existing methods based on sparse measurements, or used defect detection methods that are not based on the analysis of surface waviness (i.e. the frequencies in the floor surface profile), although this generally constitutes the key information sought after in surface flatness assessment. In this paper, we investigate the application of a frequency analysis technique, more particularly the Continuous Wavelet Trans-form (CWT), to TLS point clouds associated to surfaces. The aim is to make full use of the density of points provided by TLS and provide detailed results frequency-wise. We provide the reasoning behind employing the CWT for analyzing frequencies in this context, and report results obtained using data acquired from actual slabs. The CWT results are also compared with those obtained when applying the Waviness Index method. The encouraging preliminary results lead us to suggest a path forward for future development and testing with a view on possibly establishing a new standard test method for floor flatness

Sparse measurements, compressed sampling, and DNA microarrays

DNA microarrays comprising tens of thousands of probe spots are currently being employed to test multitude of targets in a single experiment. Typically, each microarray spot contains a large number of copies of a single probe designed to capture a single target, and hence collects only a single data point. This is a wasteful use of the sensing resources in comparative DNA microarray experiments, where a test sample is measured relative to a reference sample. Since only a small fraction of the total number of genes represented by the two samples is differentially expressed, a vast number of probe spots will not provide any useful information. To this end we consider an alternative design, the so-called compressed microarrays, wherein each spot is a composite of several different probes and the total number of spots is potentially much smaller than the number of targets being tested. Fewer spots directly translates to significantly lower costs due to cheaper array manufacturing, simpler image acquisition and processing, and smaller amount of genomic material needed for experiments. To recover signals from compressed microarray measurements, we leverage ideas from compressive sampling. Moreover, we propose an algorithm which has far less computational complexity than the widely-used linear-programming-based methods, and can also recover signals with less sparsity

Learning Rank Reduced Interpolation with Principal Component Analysis

In computer vision most iterative optimization algorithms, both sparse and dense, rely on a coarse and reliable dense initialization to bootstrap their optimization procedure. For example, dense optical flow algorithms profit massively in speed and robustness if they are initialized well in the basin of convergence of the used loss function. The same holds true for methods as sparse feature tracking when initial flow or depth information for new features at arbitrary positions is needed. This makes it extremely important to have techniques at hand that allow to obtain from only very few available measurements a dense but still approximative sketch of a desired 2D structure (e.g. depth maps, optical flow, disparity maps, etc.). The 2D map is regarded as sample from a 2D random process. The method presented here exploits the complete information given by the principal component analysis (PCA) of that process, the principal basis and its prior distribution. The method is able to determine a dense reconstruction from sparse measurement. When facing situations with only very sparse measurements, typically the number of principal components is further reduced which results in a loss of expressiveness of the basis. We overcome this problem and inject prior knowledge in a maximum a posterior (MAP) approach. We test our approach on the KITTI and the virtual KITTI datasets and focus on the interpolation of depth maps for driving scenes. The evaluation of the results show good agreement to the ground truth and are clearly better than results of interpolation by the nearest neighbor method which disregards statistical information.Comment: Accepted at Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), Los Angeles, USA, June 201