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Bing Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Bing Zhang.

At least 253 records · Page 14Linked to original sources

Endmember-Guided Unmixing Network (EGU-Net): A General Deep Learning Framework for Self-Supervised Hyperspectral Unmixing

Over the past decades, enormous efforts have been made to improve the performance of linear or nonlinear mixing models for hyperspectral unmixing, yet their ability to simultaneously generalize various spectral variabilities and extract physically meaningful endmembers still remains limited due to the poor ability in data fitting and reconstruction and the sensitivity to various spectral variabilities. Inspired by the powerful learning ability of deep learning, we attempt to develop a general deep learning approach for hyperspectral unmixing, by fully considering the properties of endmembers extracted from the hyperspectral imagery, called endmember-guided unmixing network (EGU-Net). Beyond the alone autoencoder-like architecture, EGU-Net is a two-stream Siamese deep network, which learns an additional network from the pure or nearly-pure endmembers to correct the weights of another unmixing network by sharing network parameters and adding spectrally meaningful constraints (e.g., non-negativity and sum-to-one) towards a more accurate and interpretable unmixing solution. Furthermore, the resulting general framework is not only limited to pixel-wise spectral unmixing but also applicable to spatial information modeling with convolutional operators for spatial-spectral unmixing. Experimental results conducted on three different datasets with the ground-truth of abundance maps corresponding to each material demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the EGU-Net over state-of-the-art unmixing algorithms. The codes will be available from the website: https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TNNLS_EGU-Net.

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Cross-Modality Brain Tumor Segmentation via Bidirectional Global-to-Local Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Accurate segmentation of brain tumors from multi-modal Magnetic Resonance (MR) images is essential in brain tumor diagnosis and treatment. However, due to the existence of domain shifts among different modalities, the performance of networks decreases dramatically when training on one modality and performing on another, e.g., train on T1 image while performing on T2 image, which is often required in clinical applications. This also prohibits a network from being trained on labeled data and then transferred to unlabeled data from a different domain. To overcome this, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods provide effective solutions to alleviate the domain shift between labeled source data and unlabeled target data. In this paper, we propose a novel Bidirectional Global-to-Local (BiGL) adaptation framework under a UDA scheme. Specifically, a bidirectional image synthesis and segmentation module is proposed to segment the brain tumor using the intermediate data distributions generated for the two domains, which includes an image-to-image translator and a shared-weighted segmentation network. Further, a global-to-local consistency learning module is proposed to build robust representation alignments in an integrated way. Extensive experiments on a multi-modal brain MR benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation methods by a large margin, while a comprehensive ablation study validates the effectiveness of each key component. The implementation code of our method will be released at \url{https://github.com/KeleiHe/BiGL}.

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Kilonova Emission From Black Hole-Neutron Star Mergers. II. Luminosity Function and Implications for Target-of-opportunity Observations of Gravitational-wave Triggers and Blind Searches

We present detailed simulations of black hole-neutron star (BH-NS) mergers kilonova and gamma-ray burst (GRB) afterglow and kilonova luminosity function, and discuss the detectability of electromagnetic (EM) counterpart in connection with gravitational wave (GW) detections, GW-triggered target-of-opportunity observations, and time-domain blind searches. The predicted absolute magnitude of the BH-NS kilonovae at $0.5\,{\rm days}$ after the merger falls in $[-10,-15.5]$. The simulated luminosity function contains the potential viewing-angle distribution information of the anisotropic kilonova emission. We simulate the GW detection rates, detectable distances and signal duration, for the future networks of 2nd/2.5th/3rd-generation GW detectors. BH-NSs tend to produce brighter kilonovae and afterglows if the BH has a higher aligned-spin, and a less massive NS with a stiffer EoS. The detectability of kilonova is especially sensitive to the BH spin. If BHs typically have low spins, the BH-NS EM counterparts are hard to discover. For the 2nd generation GW detector networks, a limiting magnitude of $m_{\rm limit}\sim23-24\,{\rm mag}$ is required to detect the kilonovae even if BH high spin is assumed. Thus, a plausible explanation for the lack of BH-NS associated kilonova detection during LIGO/Virgo O3 is that either there is no EM counterpart (plunging events), or the current follow-ups are too shallow. These observations still have the chance to detect the on-axis jet afterglow associated with an sGRB or an orphan afterglow. Follow-up observations can detect possible associated sGRB afterglows, from which kilonova signatures may be studied. For time-domain observations, a high-cadence search in redder filters is recommended to detect more BH-NS associated kilonovae and afterglows.

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Multi-Messenger Astrophysics with THESEUS in the 2030s

Multi-messenger astrophysics is becoming a major avenue to explore the Universe, with the potential to span a vast range of redshifts. The growing synergies between different probes is opening new frontiers, which promise profound insights into several aspects of fundamental physics and cosmology. In this context, THESEUS will play a central role during the 2030s in detecting and localizing the electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave and neutrino sources that the unprecedented sensitivity of next generation detectors will discover at much higher rates than the present. Here, we review the most important target signals from multi-messenger sources that THESEUS will be able to detect and characterize, discussing detection rate expectations and scientific impact.

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Using Low-rank Representation of Abundance Maps and Nonnegative Tensor Factorization for Hyperspectral Nonlinear Unmixing

Tensor-based methods have been widely studied to attack inverse problems in hyperspectral imaging since a hyperspectral image (HSI) cube can be naturally represented as a third-order tensor, which can perfectly retain the spatial information in the image. In this article, we extend the linear tensor method to the nonlinear tensor method and propose a nonlinear low-rank tensor unmixing algorithm to solve the generalized bilinear model (GBM). Specifically, the linear and nonlinear parts of the GBM can both be expressed as tensors. Furthermore, the low-rank structures of abundance maps and nonlinear interaction abundance maps are exploited by minimizing their nuclear norm, thus taking full advantage of the high spatial correlation in HSIs. Synthetic and real-data experiments show that the low rank of abundance maps and nonlinear interaction abundance maps exploited in our method can improve the performance of the nonlinear unmixing. A MATLAB demo of this work will be available at https://github.com/LinaZhuang for the sake of reproducibility.

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Constraints on the maximum mass of neutron stars with a quark core from GW170817 and NICER PSR J0030+0451 data

We perform a Bayesian analysis of the maximum mass $M_{\rm TOV}$ of neutron stars with a quark core, incorporating the observational data from tidal deformability of the GW170817 binary neutron star merger as detected by LIGO/Virgo and the mass and radius of PSR J0030+0451 as detected by \nicer. The analysis is performed under the assumption that the hadron-quark phase transition is of first order, where the low-density hadronic matter described in a unified manner by the soft QMF or the stiff DD2 equation of state (EOS) transforms into a high-density phase of quark matter modeled by the generic "Constant-sound-speed" (CSS) parameterization. The mass distribution measured for the $2.14 \,{\rm M}_{\odot}$ pulsar, MSP J0740+6620, is used as the lower limit on $M_{\rm TOV}$. We find the most probable values of the hybrid star maximum mass are $M_{\rm TOV}=2.36^{+0.49}_{-0.26}\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$ ($2.39^{+0.47}_{-0.28}\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$) for QMF (DD2), with an absolute upper bound around $2.85\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$, to the $90\%$ posterior credible level. Such results appear robust with respect to the uncertainties in the hadronic EOS. We also discuss astrophysical implications of this result, especially on the post-merger product of GW170817, short gamma-ray bursts, and other likely binary neutron star mergers.

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High Energy Neutrinos from Choked Gamma-Ray Bursts in AGN Accretion Disks

Both long-duration gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs) from core collapse of massive stars and short-duration GRBs (SGRBs) from mergers of binary neutron star (BNS) or neutron star--black hole (NSBH) are expected to occur in the accretion disk of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). We show that GRB jets embedded in the migration traps of AGN disks are promised to be choked by the dense disk material. Efficient shock acceleration of cosmic rays at the reverse shock is expected, and high-energy neutrinos would be produced. We find that these sources can effectively produce detectable TeV--PeV neutrinos through $pγ$ interactions. From a choked LGRB jet with isotropic equivalent energy of $10^{53}\,{\rm erg}$ at $100\,{\rm Mpc}$, one expects $\sim2\,(7)$ neutrino events detectable by IceCube (IceCube-Gen2). The contribution from choked LGRBs to the observed diffuse neutrino background depends on the unknown local event rate density of these GRBs in AGN disks. For example, if the local event rate density of choked LGRBs in AGN disk is $\sim5\%$ that of low-luminosity GRBs $(\sim10\,{\rm Gpc}^{-3}\,{\rm yr}^{-1})$, the neutrinos from these events would contribute to $\sim10\%$ of the observed diffuse neutrino background. Choked SGRBs in AGN disks are potential sources for future joint electromagnetic, neutrino, and gravitational wave multi-messenger observations.

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Hyperspectral Image Denoising and Anomaly Detection Based on Low-rank and Sparse Representations

Hyperspectral imaging measures the amount of electromagnetic energy across the instantaneous field of view at a very high resolution in hundreds or thousands of spectral channels. This enables objects to be detected and the identification of materials that have subtle differences between them. However, the increase in spectral resolution often means that there is a decrease in the number of photons received in each channel, which means that the noise linked to the image formation process is greater. This degradation limits the quality of the extracted information and its potential applications. Thus, denoising is a fundamental problem in hyperspectral image (HSI) processing. As images of natural scenes with highly correlated spectral channels, HSIs are characterized by a high level of self-similarity and can be well approximated by low-rank representations. These characteristics underlie the state-of-the-art methods used in HSI denoising. However, where there are rarely occurring pixel types, the denoising performance of these methods is not optimal, and the subsequent detection of these pixels may be compromised. To address these hurdles, in this article, we introduce RhyDe (Robust hyperspectral Denoising), a powerful HSI denoiser, which implements explicit low-rank representation, promotes self-similarity, and, by using a form of collaborative sparsity, preserves rare pixels. The denoising and detection effectiveness of the proposed robust HSI denoiser is illustrated using semireal and real data.

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Dissecting the Energy Budget of a Gamma-Ray Burst Fireball

The jet composition and radiative efficiency of GRBs are poorly constrained from the data. If the jet composition is matter-dominated (i.e. a fireball), the GRB prompt emission spectra would include a dominant thermal component originating from the fireball photosphere, and a non-thermal component presumably originating from internal shocks whose radii are greater than the photosphere radius. We propose a method to directly dissect the GRB fireball energy budget into three components and measure their values by combining the prompt emission and early afterglow data. The measured parameters include the initial dimensionless specific enthalpy density ($η$), bulk Lorentz factors at the photosphere radius ($Γ_{\rm ph}$) and before fireball deceleration ($Γ_0$), the amount of mass loading ($M$), as well as the GRB radiative efficiency ($η_γ$). All the parameters can be derived from the data for a GRB with a dominant thermal spectral component, a deceleration bump feature in the early afterglow lightcurve, and a measured redshift. The results only weakly depend on the density $n$ of the interstellar medium when the composition ${\cal Y}$ parameter (typically unity) is specified.

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CRAFTS for Fast Radio Bursts Extending the dispersion-fluence relation with new FRBs detected by FAST

We report three new FRBs discovered by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), namely FRB 181017.J0036+11, FRB 181118 and FRB 181130, through the Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey (CRAFTS). Together with FRB 181123 that was reported earlier, all four FAST-discovered FRBs share the same characteristics of low fluence ($\leq$0.2 Jy ms) and high dispersion measure (DM, $>1000$ \dmu), consistent with the anti-correlation between DM and fluence of the entire FRB population. FRB 181118 and FRB 181130 exhibit band-limited features. FRB 181130 is prominently scattered ($τ_s\simeq8$ ms) at 1.25 GHz. FRB 181017.J0036+11 has full-bandwidth emission with a fluence of 0.042 Jy ms, which is one of the faintest FRB sources detected so far. CRAFTS starts to built a new sample of FRBs that fills the region for more distant and fainter FRBs in the fluence-$\rm DM_E$ diagram, previously out of reach of other surveys. The implied all sky event rate of FRBs is $1.24^{+1.94}_{-0.90} \times 10^5$ sky$^{-1}$ day$^{-1}$ at the $95\%$ confidence interval above 0.0146 Jy ms. We also demonstrate here that the probability density function of CRAFTS FRB detections is sensitive to the assumed intrinsic FRB luminosity function and cosmological evolution, which may be further constrained with more discoveries.

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"A more probable explanation" is still impossible to explain GN-z11-flash: in response to Steinhardt et al. (arXiv:2101.12738)

In Jiang et al. (2020), we reported a possible bright flash (hereafter GN-z11-flash) from a galaxy GN-z11 at z ~ 11. Recently, Steinhardt et al. (2021; arXiv:2101.12738) found 27 images with transient signals in Keck MOSFIRE archival data and claimed that GN-z11-flash was more likely from a moving object in our Solar system. We show that the Steinhardt et al.'s definition of the chance probability and their methodology of finding GN-z11-flash-like transients are problematic in several aspects. In particular, none of their transients is analogous to GN-z11-flash, and none of them is positionally coincident with a known object in their imaging data. In Jiang et al., we performed a comprehensive analysis of the origin of GN-z11-flash and ruled out, to the best of our knowledge, the possibility of known man-made objects or moving objects in the Solar system, based on all available information and our current understanding of these objects. Steinhardt et al. did not use such information and did not analyse the GN-z11-flash event itself. The majority of their transients are apparently low-Earth orbit satellites or aircrafts. Therefore, their analysis can neither prove nor disprove our results. Finally, we present a method to estimate the chance probability of finding GN-z11-flash-like transients in archival data. Based on this method and the archival data used by Steinhardt et al., we obtain a loose upper limit of the probability that actually support the original results of Jiang et al. (2020).

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MetricUNet: Synergistic Image- and Voxel-Level Learning for Precise CT Prostate Segmentation via Online Sampling

Fully convolutional networks (FCNs), including UNet and VNet, are widely-used network architectures for semantic segmentation in recent studies. However, conventional FCN is typically trained by the cross-entropy or Dice loss, which only calculates the error between predictions and ground-truth labels for pixels individually. This often results in non-smooth neighborhoods in the predicted segmentation. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage framework, with the first stage to quickly localize the prostate region and the second stage to precisely segment the prostate by a multi-task UNet architecture. We introduce a novel online metric learning module through voxel-wise sampling in the multi-task network. Therefore, the proposed network has a dual-branch architecture that tackles two tasks: 1) a segmentation sub-network aiming to generate the prostate segmentation, and 2) a voxel-metric learning sub-network aiming to improve the quality of the learned feature space supervised by a metric loss. Specifically, the voxel-metric learning sub-network samples tuples (including triplets and pairs) in voxel-level through the intermediate feature maps. Unlike conventional deep metric learning methods that generate triplets or pairs in image-level before the training phase, our proposed voxel-wise tuples are sampled in an online manner and operated in an end-to-end fashion via multi-task learning. To evaluate the proposed method, we implement extensive experiments on a real CT image dataset consisting of 339 patients. The ablation studies show that our method can effectively learn more representative voxel-level features compared with the conventional learning methods with cross-entropy or Dice loss. And the comparisons show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a reasonable margin.

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Graph Convolutional Networks for Hyperspectral Image Classification

To read the final version please go to IEEE TGRS on IEEE Xplore. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been attracting increasing attention in hyperspectral (HS) image classification, owing to their ability to capture spatial-spectral feature representations. Nevertheless, their ability in modeling relations between samples remains limited. Beyond the limitations of grid sampling, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been recently proposed and successfully applied in irregular (or non-grid) data representation and analysis. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate CNNs and GCNs (qualitatively and quantitatively) in terms of HS image classification. Due to the construction of the adjacency matrix on all the data, traditional GCNs usually suffer from a huge computational cost, particularly in large-scale remote sensing (RS) problems. To this end, we develop a new mini-batch GCN (called miniGCN hereinafter) which allows to train large-scale GCNs in a mini-batch fashion. More significantly, our miniGCN is capable of inferring out-of-sample data without re-training networks and improving classification performance. Furthermore, as CNNs and GCNs can extract different types of HS features, an intuitive solution to break the performance bottleneck of a single model is to fuse them. Since miniGCNs can perform batch-wise network training (enabling the combination of CNNs and GCNs) we explore three fusion strategies: additive fusion, element-wise multiplicative fusion, and concatenation fusion to measure the obtained performance gain. Extensive experiments, conducted on three HS datasets, demonstrate the advantages of miniGCNs over GCNs and the superiority of the tested fusion strategies with regards to the single CNN or GCN models. The codes of this work will be available at https://github.com/danfenghong/IEEE_TGRS_GCN for the sake of reproducibility.

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Analytical Solution of Magnetically Dominated Astrophysical Jets and Winds: Jet Launching, Acceleration, and Collimation

We present an analytical solution of a highly magnetized jet/wind flow. The left side of the general force-free jet/wind equation (the "pulsar" equation) is separated into a rotating and a nonrotating term. The two equations with either term can be solved analytically, and the two solutions match each other very well. Therefore, we obtain a general approximate solution of a magnetically dominated jet/wind, which covers from the nonrelativistic to relativistic regimes, with the drift velocity well matching the cold plasma velocity. The acceleration of a jet includes three stages. (1) The jet flow is located within the Alfvén critical surface (i.e. the light cylinder), has a nonrelativistic speed, and is dominated by toroidal motion. (2) The jet is beyond the Alfvén critical surface where the flow is dominated by poloidal motion and becomes relativistic. The total velocity in these two stages follows the same law $vΓ=ΩR$. (3) The evolution law is replaced by $vΓ\approx1/\left(θ\sqrt{2-ν}\right)$, where $θ$ is the half-opening angle of the jet and $0\leqν\leq2$ is a free parameter determined by the magnetic field configuration. This is because the earlier efficient acceleration finally breaks the causality connection between different parts in the jet, preventing a global solution. The jet has to carry local charges and currents to support an electromagnetic balance. This approximate solution is consistent with known theoretical results and numerical simulations, and it is more convenient to directly compare with observations. This theory may be used to constrain the spin of black holes in astrophysical jets.

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Bursts before Burst: A Comparative Study on FRB 200428-associated and FRB-absent X-ray Bursts from SGR J1935+2154

Accompanied by an X-ray burst, the fast radio burst (FRB) FRB 200428 was recently confirmed as originating from the Galactic magnetar soft gamma repeater (SGR) SGR J1935+2154. Just before and after FRB 200428 was detected, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) had been monitoring SGR J1935+2154 for eight hours. From UTC 2020 April 27 23:55:00 to 2020 April 28 00:50:37, FAST detected no pulsed radio emission from SGR J1935+2154, while Fermi/Gamma-ray Burst Monitor registered 34 bursts in the X/soft $γ$-ray band, forming a unique sample of X-ray bursts in the absence of FRBs. After a comprehensive analysis on light curves, time-integrated, and time-resolved spectral properties of these FRB-absent X-ray bursts, we compare this sample with the FRB-associated X-ray burst detected by Insight-HXMT, INTEGRAL, and Konus-Wind. The FRB-associated burst distinguishes itself from other X-ray bursts by its nonthermal spectrum and a higher spectral peak energy, but otherwise is not atypical. We also compare the cumulative energy distribution of our X-ray burst sample with that of first repeating FRB source, FRB 121102, with the calibration of FRB 200428-X-ray burst association. We find a similarity between the two, offering indirect support of the magnetar origin of cosmological FRBs. The event rate density of magnetar bursts is about $\sim 150$ times higher than the FRB event rate density at the energy of FRB 200428. This again suggests that, if all FRBs originate from magnetars, only a small fraction of X-ray bursts are associated with FRBs.

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Growth of stellar mass black holes in dense molecular clouds and GW190521

A stellar mass black hole can grow its mass noticeably through Bondi accretion, if it is embedded in an extremely dense and massive molecular cloud with slow motion with respect to the ambient medium for an extended period of time. This provides a novel, yet challenging channel for the formation of massive stellar-mass black holes. We discuss how this channel may account for the massive binary black hole merger system GW190521 as observed by LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave detectors as well as the claimed massive black hole candidate LB-1.

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"Slow" Radio Bursts from Galactic Magnetars?

Recently, one fast radio burst, FRB 200428, was detected from the Galactic magnetar SGR J1935+2154 during one X-ray burst. This suggests that magnetars can make FRBs. On the other hand, the majority of X-ray bursts from SGR J1935+2154 are not associated with FRBs. One possible reason for such rarity of FRB-SGR-burst associations is that the FRB emission is much more narrowly beamed than the SGR burst emission. If such an interpretation is correct, one would expect to detect radio bursts with viewing angles somewhat outside the narrow emission beam. These "slow" radio bursts (SRBs) would have broader widths and lower flux densities due to the smaller Doppler factor involved. We derive two "closure relations" to judge whether a long, less luminous radio burst could be an SRB. The 2.2-s, 308 Jy ms, 111 MHz radio burst detected from SGR J1935+2154 by the BSA LPI radio telescope may be such an SRB. The 2-ms, 60 mJy ms faint burst detected by FAST from the same source could be also an SRB if the corresponding FRB has a narrow spectrum. If the FRB beam is narrow, there should be many more SRBs than FRBs from Galactic magnetars. The lack of detection of abundant SRBs from magnetars would disfavor the hypothesis that all SGR bursts are associated with narrow-beam FRBs.

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Neutron Star Mergers in AGN Accretion Disks: Cocoon and Ejecta Shock Breakouts

Neutron star mergers are believed to occur in accretion disks around supermassive black holes. Here we show that a putative jet launched from the merger of a binary neutron star (BNS) or a neutron star--black hole (NSBH) merger occurring at the migration trap in an active galactic nucleus (AGN) disk would be choked. The jet energy is deposited within the disk materials to power a hot cocoon. The cocoon is energetic enough to break out from the AGN disk and produce a bright X-ray shock breakout transient peaking at $\sim0.15\,{\rm d}$ after the merger. The peak luminosity is estimated as $\sim 10^{46}\,{\rm erg}\,{\rm s}^{-1}$, which can be discovered by Einstein Probe from $z\lesssim 0.5$. Later on, the non-relativistic ejecta launched from the merger would break out the disk, powering an X-ray/UV flare peaking at $\sim 0.5\,{\rm d}$ after the merger. This second shock breakout signal may be detected by UV transient searches. The cocoon cooling emission and kilonova emission are outshone by the disk emission and difficult to be detected. Future joint observations of gravitational waves from BNS/NSBH mergers and associated two shock breakout signatures can provide a strong support for the compact binary coalescence formation channel in AGN disks.

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