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Haitao Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Haitao Zhao.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

ODCR: Orthogonal Decoupling Contrastive Regularization for Unpaired Image Dehazing

Unpaired image dehazing (UID) holds significant research importance due to the challenges in acquiring haze/clear image pairs with identical backgrounds. This paper proposes a novel method for UID named Orthogonal Decoupling Contrastive Regularization (ODCR). Our method is grounded in the assumption that an image consists of both haze-related features, which influence the degree of haze, and haze-unrelated features, such as texture and semantic information. ODCR aims to ensure that the haze-related features of the dehazing result closely resemble those of the clear image, while the haze-unrelated features align with the input hazy image. To accomplish the motivation, Orthogonal MLPs optimized geometrically on the Stiefel manifold are proposed, which can project image features into an orthogonal space, thereby reducing the relevance between different features. Furthermore, a task-driven Depth-wise Feature Classifier (DWFC) is proposed, which assigns weights to the orthogonal features based on the contribution of each channel's feature in predicting whether the feature source is hazy or clear in a self-supervised fashion. Finally, a Weighted PatchNCE (WPNCE) loss is introduced to achieve the pulling of haze-related features in the output image toward those of clear images, while bringing haze-unrelated features close to those of the hazy input. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our ODCR method on UID.

cs.CV↗

Power Optimization for Integrated Active and Passive Sensing in DFRC Systems

Most existing works on dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) systems mainly focus on active sensing, but ignore passive sensing. To leverage multi-static sensing capability, we explore integrated active and passive sensing (IAPS) in DFRC systems to remedy sensing performance. The multi-antenna base station (BS) is responsible for communication and active sensing by transmitting signals to user equipments while detecting a target according to echo signals. In contrast, passive sensing is performed at the receive access points (RAPs). We consider both the cases where the capacity of the backhaul links between the RAPs and BS is unlimited or limited and adopt different fusion strategies. Specifically, when the backhaul capacity is unlimited, the BS and RAPs transfer sensing signals they have received to the central controller (CC) for signal fusion. The CC processes the signals and leverages the generalized likelihood ratio test detector to determine the present of a target. However, when the backhaul capacity is limited, each RAP, as well as the BS, makes decisions independently and sends its binary inference results to the CC for result fusion via voting aggregation. Then, aiming at maximize the target detection probability under communication quality of service constraints, two power optimization algorithms are proposed. Finally, numerical simulations demonstrate that the sensing performance in case of unlimited backhaul capacity is much better than that in case of limited backhaul capacity. Moreover, it implied that the proposed IAPS scheme outperforms only-passive and only-active sensing schemes, especially in unlimited capacity case.

cs.IT↗

Gradient Sparsification for Efficient Wireless Federated Learning with Differential Privacy

Federated learning (FL) enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing raw data with each other. However, it suffers the leakage of private information from uploading models. In addition, as the model size grows, the training latency increases due to limited transmission bandwidth and the model performance degrades while using differential privacy (DP) protection. In this paper, we propose a gradient sparsification empowered FL framework over wireless channels, in order to improve training efficiency without sacrificing convergence performance. Specifically, we first design a random sparsification algorithm to retain a fraction of the gradient elements in each client's local training, thereby mitigating the performance degradation induced by DP and and reducing the number of transmission parameters over wireless channels. Then, we analyze the convergence bound of the proposed algorithm, by modeling a non-convex FL problem. Next, we formulate a time-sequential stochastic optimization problem for minimizing the developed convergence bound, under the constraints of transmit power, the average transmitting delay, as well as the client's DP requirement. Utilizing the Lyapunov drift-plus-penalty framework, we develop an analytical solution to the optimization problem. Extensive experiments have been implemented on three real life datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. We show that our proposed algorithms can fully exploit the interworking between communication and computation to outperform the baselines, i.e., random scheduling, round robin and delay-minimization algorithms.

cs.DC↗

DFR-Net: Density Feature Refinement Network for Image Dehazing Utilizing Haze Density Difference

In image dehazing task, haze density is a key feature and affects the performance of dehazing methods. However, some of the existing methods lack a comparative image to measure densities, and others create intermediate results but lack the exploitation of their density differences, which can facilitate perception of density. To address these deficiencies, we propose a density-aware dehazing method named Density Feature Refinement Network (DFR-Net) that extracts haze density features from density differences and leverages density differences to refine density features. In DFR-Net, we first generate a proposal image that has lower overall density than the hazy input, bringing in global density differences. Additionally, the dehazing residual of the proposal image reflects the level of dehazing performance and provides local density differences that indicate localized hard dehazing or high density areas. Subsequently, we introduce a Global Branch (GB) and a Local Branch (LB) to achieve density-awareness. In GB, we use Siamese networks for feature extraction of hazy inputs and proposal images, and we propose a Global Density Feature Refinement (GDFR) module that can refine features by pushing features with different global densities further away. In LB, we explore local density features from the dehazing residuals between hazy inputs and proposal images and introduce an Intermediate Dehazing Residual Feedforward (IDRF) module to update local features and pull them closer to clear image features. Sufficient experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves results beyond the state-of-the-art methods on various datasets.

cs.CV↗

FoSp: Focus and Separation Network for Early Smoke Segmentation

Early smoke segmentation (ESS) enables the accurate identification of smoke sources, facilitating the prompt extinguishing of fires and preventing large-scale gas leaks. But ESS poses greater challenges than conventional object and regular smoke segmentation due to its small scale and transparent appearance, which can result in high miss detection rate and low precision. To address these issues, a Focus and Separation Network (FoSp) is proposed. We first introduce a Focus module employing bidirectional cascade which guides low-resolution and high-resolution features towards mid-resolution to locate and determine the scope of smoke, reducing the miss detection rate. Next, we propose a Separation module that separates smoke images into a pure smoke foreground and a smoke-free background, enhancing the contrast between smoke and background fundamentally, improving segmentation precision. Finally, a Domain Fusion module is developed to integrate the distinctive features of the two modules which can balance recall and precision to achieve high F_beta. Futhermore, to promote the development of ESS, we introduce a high-quality real-world dataset called SmokeSeg, which contains more small and transparent smoke than the existing datasets. Experimental results show that our model achieves the best performance on three available datasets: SYN70K (mIoU: 83.00%), SMOKE5K (F_beta: 81.6%) and SmokeSeg (F_beta: 72.05%). Especially, our FoSp outperforms SegFormer by 7.71% (F_beta) for early smoke segmentation on SmokeSeg.

cs.CV↗

Ultra Lite Convolutional Neural Network for Fast Automatic Modulation Classification in Low-Resource Scenarios

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is a key technique for designing non-cooperative communication systems, and deep learning (DL) is applied effectively to AMC for improving classification accuracy. However, most of the DL-based AMC methods have a large number of parameters and high computational complexity, and they cannot be directly applied to low-resource scenarios with limited computing power and storage space. In this letter, we propose a fast AMC method with lightweight and low-complexity using ultra lite convolutional neural network (ULCNN) consisting of data augmentation, complex-valued convolution, separable convolution, channel attention, and channel shuffle. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed ULCNN-based AMC method achieves an average accuracy of 62.47% on RML2016.10a and only 9,751 parameters. Moreover, ULCNN is verified on a typical edge device (Raspberry Pi), where the interference time per sample is about 0.775 ms. The reproducible code can be downloaded from GitHub\footnote{https://github.com/BeechburgPieStar/Ultra-Lite-Convolutional-Neural-Network-for-Automatic-Modulation-Classification}.

eess.SP↗

CourtNet for Infrared Small-Target Detection

Infrared small-target detection (ISTD) is an important computer vision task. ISTD aims at separating small targets from complex background clutter. The infrared radiation decays over distances, making the targets highly dim and prone to confusion with the background clutter, which makes the detector challenging to balance the precision and recall rate. To deal with this difficulty, this paper proposes a neural-network-based ISTD method called CourtNet, which has three sub-networks: the prosecution network is designed for improving the recall rate; the defendant network is devoted to increasing the precision rate; the jury network weights their results to adaptively balance the precision and recall rate. Furthermore, the prosecution network utilizes a densely connected transformer structure, which can prevent small targets from disappearing in the network forward propagation. In addition, a fine-grained attention module is adopted to accurately locate the small targets. Experimental results show that CourtNet achieves the best F1-score on the two ISTD datasets, MFIRST (0.62) and SIRST (0.73).

cs.CV↗

Dynamic Background Reconstruction via MAE for Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection (ISTD) under complex backgrounds is a difficult problem, for the differences between targets and backgrounds are not easy to distinguish. Background reconstruction is one of the methods to deal with this problem. This paper proposes an ISTD method based on background reconstruction called Dynamic Background Reconstruction (DBR). DBR consists of three modules: a dynamic shift window module (DSW), a background reconstruction module (BR), and a detection head (DH). BR takes advantage of Vision Transformers in reconstructing missing patches and adopts a grid masking strategy with a masking ratio of 50\% to reconstruct clean backgrounds without targets. To avoid dividing one target into two neighboring patches, resulting in reconstructing failure, DSW is performed before input embedding. DSW calculates offsets, according to which infrared images dynamically shift. To reduce False Positive (FP) cases caused by regarding reconstruction errors as targets, DH utilizes a structure of densely connected Transformer to further improve the detection performance. Experimental results show that DBR achieves the best F1-score on the two ISTD datasets, MFIRST (64.10\%) and SIRST (75.01\%).

cs.CV↗

Object Preserving Siamese Network for Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds

Obviously, the object is the key factor of the 3D single object tracking (SOT) task. However, previous Siamese-based trackers overlook the negative effects brought by randomly dropped object points during backbone sampling, which hinder trackers to predict accurate bounding boxes (BBoxes). Exploring an approach that seeks to maximize the preservation of object points and their object-aware features is of particular significance. Motivated by this, we propose an Object Preserving Siamese Network (OPSNet), which can significantly maintain object integrity and boost tracking performance. Firstly, the object highlighting module enhances the object-aware features and extracts discriminative features from template and search area. Then, the object-preserved sampling selects object candidates to obtain object-preserved search area seeds and drop the background points that contribute less to tracking. Finally, the object localization network precisely locates 3D BBoxes based on the object-preserved search area seeds. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method outperforms the state-of-the-art performance (9.4% and 2.5% success gain on KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset respectively).

cs.CV↗

DRPN: Making CNN Dynamically Handle Scale Variation

Based on our observations of infrared targets, serious scale variation along within sequence frames has high-frequently occurred. In this paper, we propose a dynamic re-parameterization network (DRPN) to deal with the scale variation and balance the detection precision between small targets and large targets in infrared datasets. DRPN adopts the multiple branches with different sizes of convolution kernels and the dynamic convolution strategy. Multiple branches with different sizes of convolution kernels have different sizes of receptive fields. Dynamic convolution strategy makes DRPN adaptively weight multiple branches. DRPN can dynamically adjust the receptive field according to the scale variation of the target. Besides, in order to maintain effective inference in the test phase, the multi-branch structure is further converted to a single-branch structure via the re-parameterization technique after training. Extensive experiments on FLIR, KAIST, and InfraPlane datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DRPN. The experimental results show that detectors using the proposed DRPN as the basic structure rather than SKNet or TridentNet obtained the best performances.

cs.CV↗

Theoretical Analysis of Deep Neural Networks in Physical Layer Communication

Recently, deep neural network (DNN)-based physical layer communication techniques have attracted considerable interest. Although their potential to enhance communication systems and superb performance have been validated by simulation experiments, little attention has been paid to the theoretical analysis. Specifically, most studies in the physical layer have tended to focus on the application of DNN models to wireless communication problems but not to theoretically understand how does a DNN work in a communication system. In this paper, we aim to quantitatively analyze why DNNs can achieve comparable performance in the physical layer comparing with traditional techniques, and also drive their cost in terms of computational complexity. To achieve this goal, we first analyze the encoding performance of a DNN-based transmitter and compare it to a traditional one. And then, we theoretically analyze the performance of DNN-based estimator and compare it with traditional estimators. Third, we investigate and validate how information is flown in a DNN-based communication system under the information theoretic concepts. Our analysis develops a concise way to open the "black box" of DNNs in physical layer communication, which can be applied to support the design of DNN-based intelligent communication techniques and help to provide explainable performance assessment.

eess.SP↗

Opening the Black Box of Deep Neural Networks in Physical Layer Communication

Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based physical layer techniques are attracting considerable interest due to their potential to enhance communication systems. However, most studies in the physical layer have tended to focus on the application of DNN models to wireless communication problems but not to theoretically understand how does a DNN work in a communication system. In this paper, we aim to quantitatively analyze why DNNs can achieve comparable performance in the physical layer comparing with traditional techniques and their cost in terms of computational complexity. We further investigate and also experimentally validate how information is flown in a DNN-based communication system under the information theoretic concepts.

eess.SP↗

Scalable Power Control/Beamforming in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with Graph Neural Networks

Machine learning (ML) has been widely used for efficient resource allocation (RA) in wireless networks. Although superb performance is achieved on small and simple networks, most existing ML-based approaches are confronted with difficulties when heterogeneity occurs and network size expands. In this paper, specifically focusing on power control/beamforming (PC/BF) in heterogeneous device-to-device (D2D) networks, we propose a novel unsupervised learning-based framework named heterogeneous interference graph neural network (HIGNN) to handle these challenges. First, we characterize diversified link features and interference relations with heterogeneous graphs. Then, HIGNN is proposed to empower each link to obtain its individual transmission scheme after limited information exchange with neighboring links. It is noteworthy that HIGNN is scalable to wireless networks of growing sizes with robust performance after trained on small-sized networks. Numerical results show that compared with state-of-the-art benchmarks, HIGNN achieves much higher execution efficiency while providing strong performance.

cs.LG↗

Dynamic Fusion Network for RGBT Tracking

For both visible and infrared images have their own advantages and disadvantages, RGBT tracking has attracted more and more attention. The key points of RGBT tracking lie in feature extraction and feature fusion of visible and infrared images. Current RGBT tracking methods mostly pay attention to both individual features (features extracted from images of a single camera) and common features (features extracted and fused from an RGB camera and a thermal camera), while pay less attention to the different and dynamic contributions of individual features and common features for different sequences of registered image pairs. This paper proposes a novel RGBT tracking method, called Dynamic Fusion Network (DFNet), which adopts a two-stream structure, in which two non-shared convolution kernels are employed in each layer to extract individual features. Besides, DFNet has shared convolution kernels for each layer to extract common features. Non-shared convolution kernels and shared convolution kernels are adaptively weighted and summed according to different image pairs, so that DFNet can deal with different contributions for different sequences. DFNet has a fast speed, which is 28.658 FPS. The experimental results show that when DFNet only increases the Mult-Adds of 0.02% than the non-shared-convolution-kernel-based fusion method, Precision Rate (PR) and Success Rate (SR) reach 88.1% and 71.9% respectively.

cs.CV↗

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Based Distributed Dynamic Spectrum Access in Cognitive Radio Networks

With the development of the 5G and Internet of Things, amounts of wireless devices need to share the limited spectrum resources. Dynamic spectrum access (DSA) is a promising paradigm to remedy the problem of inefficient spectrum utilization brought upon by the historical command-and-control approach to spectrum allocation. In this paper, we investigate the distributed DSA problem for multi-user in a typical multi-channel cognitive radio network. The problem is formulated as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP), and we proposed a centralized off-line training and distributed on-line execution framework based on cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We employ the deep recurrent Q-network (DRQN) to address the partial observability of the state for each cognitive user. The ultimate goal is to learn a cooperative strategy which maximizes the sum throughput of cognitive radio network in distributed fashion without coordination information exchange between cognitive users. Finally, we validate the proposed algorithm in various settings through extensive experiments. From the simulation results, we can observe that the proposed algorithm can converge fast and achieve almost the optimal performance.

cs.NI↗

A Cyber Physical System Framework for UAV Communications

Diverse applications have witnessed the prevalence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) due to their agility and versatility. Compared with computation and control, the communication tends to be the bottleneck of the whole UAV system. Cyber physical system (CPS), which achieves the integration of the cyber and physical domains, can inspire us to deal with the communication problems through a cross-disciplinary method. To this end, we first expound the coupling effects of computation and control to communication. Then, we propose a novel CPS framework for UAV communications. By extending the dimension of communication decisions to computation and control, the framework can precisely orient and settle the communication issues. Further, a quantitative energy optimization model is established to guide the protocol and algorithm design for UAV communications. Case simulation results validate the CPS framework in terms of the energy consumption and communication delay.

eess.SP↗

Attention-based Context Aggregation Network for Monocular Depth Estimation

Depth estimation is a traditional computer vision task, which plays a crucial role in understanding 3D scene geometry. Recently, deep-convolutional-neural-networks based methods have achieved promising results in the monocular depth estimation field. Specifically, the framework that combines the multi-scale features extracted by the dilated convolution based block (atrous spatial pyramid pooling, ASPP) has gained the significant improvement in the dense labeling task. However, the discretized and predefined dilation rates cannot capture the continuous context information that differs in diverse scenes and easily introduce the grid artifacts in depth estimation. In this paper, we propose an attention-based context aggregation network (ACAN) to tackle these difficulties. Based on the self-attention model, ACAN adaptively learns the task-specific similarities between pixels to model the context information. First, we recast the monocular depth estimation as a dense labeling multi-class classification problem. Then we propose a soft ordinal inference to transform the predicted probabilities to continuous depth values, which can reduce the discretization error (about 1% decrease in RMSE). Second, the proposed ACAN aggregates both the image-level and pixel-level context information for depth estimation, where the former expresses the statistical characteristic of the whole image and the latter extracts the long-range spatial dependencies for each pixel. Third, for further reducing the inconsistency between the RGB image and depth map, we construct an attention loss to minimize their information entropy. We evaluate on public monocular depth-estimation benchmark datasets (including NYU Depth V2, KITTI). The experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed ACAN and achieve the competitive results with the state of the arts.

cs.CV↗

Survey on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks: A Cyber Physical System Perspective

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks are playing an important role in various areas due to their agility and versatility, which have attracted significant attention from both the academia and industry in recent years. As an integration of the embedded systems with communication devices, computation capabilities and control modules, the UAV network could build a closed loop from data perceiving, information exchanging, decision making to the final execution, which tightly integrates the cyber processes into the physical devices. Therefore, the UAV network could be considered as a cyber physical system (CPS). Revealing the coupling effects among the three interacted components in this CPS system, i.e., communication, computation and control, is envisioned as the key to properly utilize all the available resources and hence improve the performance of the UAV networks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on the UAV networks from a CPS perspective. Firstly, we respectively research the basics and advances with respect to the three CPS components in the UAV networks. Then we look inside to investigate how these components contribute to the system performance by classifying the UAV networks into three hierarchies, i.e., the cell level, the system level, and the system of system level. Further, the coupling effects among these CPS components are explicitly illustrated, which could be enlightening to deal with the challenges in each individual aspect. New research directions and open issues are discussed at the end of this survey. With this intensive literature review, we try to provide a novel insight into the state-of-the-art in the UAV networks.

cs.NI↗