arXiv subjects

Juan José Murillo-Fuentes

Publications and source records attributed to Juan José Murillo-Fuentes.

18 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Forensic Study of Paintings Through the Comparison of Fabrics

The study of canvas fabrics in works of art is a crucial tool for authentication, attribution and conservation. Traditional methods are based on thread density map matching, which cannot be applied when canvases do not come from contiguous positions on a roll. This paper presents a novel approach based on deep learning to assess the similarity of textiles. We introduce an automatic tool that evaluates the similarity between canvases without relying on thread density maps. A Siamese deep learning model is designed and trained to compare pairs of images by exploiting the feature representations learned from the scans. In addition, a similarity estimation method is proposed, aggregating predictions from multiple pairs of cloth samples to provide a robust similarity score. Our approach is applied to canvases from the Museo Nacional del Prado, corroborating the hypothesis that plain weave canvases, widely used in painting, can be effectively compared even when their thread densities are similar. The results demonstrate the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed method, opening new avenues for the analysis of masterpieces.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Boosting offline handwritten text recognition in historical documents with few labeled lines

In this paper, we face the problem of offline handwritten text recognition (HTR) in historical documents when few labeled samples are available and some of them contain errors in the train set. Three main contributions are developed. First we analyze how to perform transfer learning (TL) from a massive database to a smaller historical database, analyzing which layers of the model need a fine-tuning process. Second, we analyze methods to efficiently combine TL and data augmentation (DA). Finally, an algorithm to mitigate the effects of incorrect labelings in the training set is proposed. The methods are analyzed over the ICFHR 2018 competition database, Washington and Parzival. Combining all these techniques, we demonstrate a remarkable reduction of CER (up to 6% in some cases) in the test set with little complexity overhead.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

The Generalized Complex Kernel Least-Mean-Square Algorithm

We propose a novel adaptive kernel based regression method for complex-valued signals: the generalized complex-valued kernel least-mean-square (gCKLMS). We borrow from the new results on widely linear reproducing kernel Hilbert space (WL-RKHS) for nonlinear regression and complex-valued signals, recently proposed by the authors. This paper shows that in the adaptive version of the kernel regression for complex-valued signals we need to include another kernel term, the so-called pseudo-kernel. This new solution is endowed with better representation capabilities in complex-valued fields, since it can efficiently decouple the learning of the real and the imaginary part. Also, we review previous realizations of the complex KLMS algorithm and its augmented version to prove that they can be rewritten as particular cases of the gCKLMS. Furthermore, important conclusions on the kernels design are drawn that help to greatly improve the convergence of the algorithms. In the experiments, we revisit the nonlinear channel equalization problem to highlight the better convergence of the gCKLMS compared to previous solutions. Also, the flexibility of the proposed generalized approach is tested in a second experiment with non-independent real and imaginary parts. The results illustrate the significant performance improvements of the gCKLMS approach when the complex-valued signals have different properties for the real and imaginary parts.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

Equalization with Expectation Propagation at Smoothing Level

In this paper we propose a smoothing turbo equalizer based on the expectation propagation (EP) algorithm with quite improved performance compared to the Kalman smoother, at similar complexity. In scenarios where high-order modulations or/and large memory channels are employed, the optimal BCJR algorithm is computationally unfeasible. In this situation, low-cost but suboptimal solutions, such as the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE), are commonly used. Recently, EP has been proposed as a tool to improve the Kalman smoothing performance. In this paper we review these solutions to apply the EP at the smoothing level, rather than at the forward and backwards stages. Also, we better exploit the information coming from the channel decoder in the turbo equalization schemes. With these improvements we reduce the computational complexity, speed up convergence and outperform previous approaches. We included some simulation results to show the robust behavior of the proposed method regardless of the scenario, and its improvement in terms of performance in comparison with other EP-based solutions in the literature.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

A double EP-based proposal for turbo equalization

This letter deals with the application of the expectation propagation (EP) algorithm to turbo equalization. The EP has been successfully applied to obtain either a better approximation at the output of the equalizer or at the output of the channel decoder to better initialize the Gaussian prior used by the equalizer. In this letter we combine both trends to propose a novel double EP-based equalizer that is able to decrease the number of iterations needed, reducing the computational complexity to twice that of the linear MMSE. This novel equalizer is developed in three different implementations: a block design that exploits the whole vector of observations, a Wiener filter-type approach that just uses the observations within a predefined window and a Kalman smoothing filter-type approach that emulates the BCJR behavior. Finally, we include some experimental results to compare the three different implementations and to detail their improvements with respect to other EP-based proposals in the literature.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Self and turbo iterations for MIMO receivers and large-scale systems

We investigate a turbo soft detector based on the expectation propagation (EP) algorithm for large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Optimal detection in MIMO systems becomes computationally unfeasible for high-order modulations and/or large number of antennas. In this situation, the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) exhibits a low-complexity with a good performance, however far from optimal. To improve the performance, the EP algorithm can be used. In this paper, we review previous EP-based detectors and enhance their estimation in terms of complexity and performance. Specifically, we improve the convergence of the self-iterated EP stage by replacing the uniform prior by a non-uniform one, which better characterizes the information returned by the decoder once the turbo procedure starts. We also review the EP parameters to avoid instabilities when using high-order modulations and to reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results illustrate the robustness and enhanced performance of this novel detector in comparison with previous approaches found in the literature. Results also show that the proposed detector is robust in the presence of imperfect channel state information (CSI).

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Turbo EP-based Equalization: a Filter-Type Implementation

This manuscript has been submitted to Transactions on Communications on September 7, 2017; revised on January 10, 2018 and March 27, 2018; and accepted on April 25, 2018 We propose a novel filter-type equalizer to improve the solution of the linear minimum-mean squared-error (LMMSE) turbo equalizer, with computational complexity constrained to be quadratic in the filter length. When high-order modulations and/or large memory channels are used the optimal BCJR equalizer is unavailable, due to its computational complexity. In this scenario, the filter-type LMMSE turbo equalization exhibits a good performance compared to other approximations. In this paper, we show that this solution can be significantly improved by using expectation propagation (EP) in the estimation of the a posteriori probabilities. First, it yields a more accurate estimation of the extrinsic distribution to be sent to the channel decoder. Second, compared to other solutions based on EP the computational complexity of the proposed solution is constrained to be quadratic in the length of the finite impulse response (FIR). In addition, we review previous EP-based turbo equalization implementations. Instead of considering default uniform priors we exploit the outputs of the decoder. Some simulation results are included to show that this new EP-based filter remarkably outperforms the turbo approach of previous versions of the EP algorithm and also improves the LMMSE solution, with and without turbo equalization.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Recursive Estimation of Dynamic RSS Fields Based on Crowdsourcing and Gaussian Processes

In this paper, we address the estimation of a time-varying spatial field of received signal strength (RSS) by relying on measurements from randomly placed and not very accurate sensors. We employ a radio propagation model where the path loss exponent and the transmitted power are unknown with Gaussian priors whose hyper-parameters are estimated by applying the empirical Bayes method. We consider the locations of the sensors to be imperfectly known, which entails that they represent another source of error in the model. The propagation model includes shadowing which is considered to be a zero-mean Gaussian process where the correlation of attenuation between two spatial points is quantified by an exponential function of the distance between the points. The location of the transmitter is also unknown and estimated from the data with a weighted centroid approach. We propose to estimate time-varying RSS fields by a recursive Bayesian method and crowdsourcing. The method is based on Gaussian processes (GP), and it produces the joint distribution of the spatial field. Further, it summarizes all the acquired information by keeping the size of the needed memory bounded. We also present the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (BCRB) of the estimated parameters. Finally, we illustrate the performance of our method with experimental results on synthetic data sets.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2018

Inference in Deep Gaussian Processes using Stochastic Gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs) are hierarchical generalizations of Gaussian Processes that combine well calibrated uncertainty estimates with the high flexibility of multilayer models. One of the biggest challenges with these models is that exact inference is intractable. The current state-of-the-art inference method, Variational Inference (VI), employs a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution. This can be a potentially poor unimodal approximation of the generally multimodal posterior. In this work, we provide evidence for the non-Gaussian nature of the posterior and we apply the Stochastic Gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method to generate samples. To efficiently optimize the hyperparameters, we introduce the Moving Window MCEM algorithm. This results in significantly better predictions at a lower computational cost than its VI counterpart. Thus our method establishes a new state-of-the-art for inference in DGPs.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2018

Boosting Handwriting Text Recognition in Small Databases with Transfer Learning

In this paper we deal with the offline handwriting text recognition (HTR) problem with reduced training datasets. Recent HTR solutions based on artificial neural networks exhibit remarkable solutions in referenced databases. These deep learning neural networks are composed of both convolutional (CNN) and long short-term memory recurrent units (LSTM). In addition, connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is the key to avoid segmentation at character level, greatly facilitating the labeling task. One of the main drawbacks of the CNNLSTM-CTC (CLC) solutions is that they need a considerable part of the text to be transcribed for every type of calligraphy, typically in the order of a few thousands of lines. Furthermore, in some scenarios the text to transcribe is not that long, e.g. in the Washington database. The CLC typically overfits for this reduced number of training samples. Our proposal is based on the transfer learning (TL) from the parameters learned with a bigger database. We first investigate, for a reduced and fixed number of training samples, 350 lines, how the learning from a large database, the IAM, can be transferred to the learning of the CLC of a reduced database, Washington. We focus on which layers of the network could be not re-trained. We conclude that the best solution is to re-train the whole CLC parameters initialized to the values obtained after the training of the CLC from the larger database. We also investigate results when the training size is further reduced. The differences in the CER are more remarkable when training with just 350 lines, a CER of 3.3% is achieved with TL while we have a CER of 18.2% when training from scratch. As a byproduct, the learning times are quite reduced. Similar good results are obtained from the Parzival database when trained with this reduced number of lines and this new approach.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Deep Gaussian Processes with Decoupled Inducing Inputs

Deep Gaussian Processes (DGP) are hierarchical generalizations of Gaussian Processes (GP) that have proven to work effectively on a multiple supervised regression tasks. They combine the well calibrated uncertainty estimates of GPs with the great flexibility of multilayer models. In DGPs, given the inputs, the outputs of the layers are Gaussian distributions parameterized by their means and covariances. These layers are realized as Sparse GPs where the training data is approximated using a small set of pseudo points. In this work, we show that the computational cost of DGPs can be reduced with no loss in performance by using a separate, smaller set of pseudo points when calculating the layerwise variance while using a larger set of pseudo points when calculating the layerwise mean. This enabled us to train larger models that have lower cost and better predictive performance.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2016

Complex-Valued Kernel Methods for Regression

Usually, complex-valued RKHS are presented as an straightforward application of the real-valued case. In this paper we prove that this procedure yields a limited solution for regression. We show that another kernel, here denoted as pseudo kernel, is needed to learn any function in complex-valued fields. Accordingly, we derive a novel RKHS to include it, the widely RKHS (WRKHS). When the pseudo-kernel cancels, WRKHS reduces to complex-valued RKHS of previous approaches. We address the kernel and pseudo-kernel design, paying attention to the kernel and the pseudo-kernel being complex-valued. In the experiments included we report remarkable improvements in simple scenarios where real a imaginary parts have different similitude relations for given inputs or cases where real and imaginary parts are correlated. In the context of these novel results we revisit the problem of non-linear channel equalization, to show that the WRKHS helps to design more efficient solutions.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2015

Proper Complex Gaussian Processes for Regression

Complex-valued signals are used in the modeling of many systems in engineering and science, hence being of fundamental interest. Often, random complex-valued signals are considered to be proper. A proper complex random variable or process is uncorrelated with its complex conjugate. This assumption is a good model of the underlying physics in many problems, and simplifies the computations. While linear processing and neural networks have been widely studied for these signals, the development of complex-valued nonlinear kernel approaches remains an open problem. In this paper we propose Gaussian processes for regression as a framework to develop 1) a solution for proper complex-valued kernel regression and 2) the design of the reproducing kernel for complex-valued inputs, using the convolutional approach for cross-covariances. In this design we pay attention to preserve, in the complex domain, the measure of similarity between near inputs. The hyperparameters of the kernel are learned maximizing the marginal likelihood using Wirtinger derivatives. Besides, the approach is connected to the multiple output learning scenario. In the experiments included, we first solve a proper complex Gaussian process where the cross-covariance does not cancel, a challenging scenario when dealing with proper complex signals. Then we successfully use these novel results to solve some problems previously proposed in the literature as benchmarks, reporting a remarkable improvement in the estimation error.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2013

Gaussian Processes for Nonlinear Signal Processing

Gaussian processes (GPs) are versatile tools that have been successfully employed to solve nonlinear estimation problems in machine learning, but that are rarely used in signal processing. In this tutorial, we present GPs for regression as a natural nonlinear extension to optimal Wiener filtering. After establishing their basic formulation, we discuss several important aspects and extensions, including recursive and adaptive algorithms for dealing with non-stationarity, low-complexity solutions, non-Gaussian noise models and classification scenarios. Furthermore, we provide a selection of relevant applications to wireless digital communications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2012

Tree-Structure Expectation Propagation for LDPC Decoding over the BEC

We present the tree-structure expectation propagation (Tree-EP) algorithm to decode low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over discrete memoryless channels (DMCs). EP generalizes belief propagation (BP) in two ways. First, it can be used with any exponential family distribution over the cliques in the graph. Second, it can impose additional constraints on the marginal distributions. We use this second property to impose pair-wise marginal constraints over pairs of variables connected to a check node of the LDPC code's Tanner graph. Thanks to these additional constraints, the Tree-EP marginal estimates for each variable in the graph are more accurate than those provided by BP. We also reformulate the Tree-EP algorithm for the binary erasure channel (BEC) as a peeling-type algorithm (TEP) and we show that the algorithm has the same computational complexity as BP and it decodes a higher fraction of errors. We describe the TEP decoding process by a set of differential equations that represents the expected residual graph evolution as a function of the code parameters. The solution of these equations is used to predict the TEP decoder performance in both the asymptotic regime and the finite-length regime over the BEC. While the asymptotic threshold of the TEP decoder is the same as the BP decoder for regular and optimized codes, we propose a scaling law (SL) for finite-length LDPC codes, which accurately approximates the TEP improved performance and facilitates its optimization.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2012

Tree-Structure Expectation Propagation for LDPC Decoding in Erasure Channels

In this paper we present a new algorithm, denoted as TEP, to decode low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes over the Binary Erasure Channel (BEC). The TEP decoder is derived applying the expectation propagation (EP) algorithm with a tree- structured approximation. Expectation Propagation (EP) is a generalization to Belief Propagation (BP) in two ways. First, it can be used with any exponential family distribution over the cliques in the graph. Second, it can impose additional constraints on the marginal distributions. We use this second property to impose pair-wise marginal constraints in some check nodes of the LDPC code's Tanner graph. The algorithm has the same computational complexity than BP, but it can decode a higher fraction of errors when applied over the BEC. In this paper, we focus on the asymptotic performance of the TEP decoder, as the block size tends to infinity. We describe the TEP decoder by a set of differential equations that represents the residual graph evolution during the decoding process. The solution of these equations yields the capacity of this decoder for a given LDPC ensemble over the BEC. We show that the achieved capacity with the TEP is higher than the BP capacity, at the same computational complexity.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2010

Tree-structure Expectation Propagation for Decoding LDPC codes over Binary Erasure Channels

Expectation Propagation is a generalization to Belief Propagation (BP) in two ways. First, it can be used with any exponential family distribution over the cliques in the graph. Second, it can impose additional constraints on the marginal distributions. We use this second property to impose pair-wise marginal distribution constraints in some check nodes of the LDPC Tanner graph. These additional constraints allow decoding the received codeword when the BP decoder gets stuck. In this paper, we first present the new decoding algorithm, whose complexity is identical to the BP decoder, and we then prove that it is able to decode codewords with a larger fraction of erasures, as the block size tends to infinity. The proposed algorithm can be also understood as a simplification of the Maxwell decoder, but without its computational complexity. We also illustrate that the new algorithm outperforms the BP decoder for finite block-size

cs.IT↗

arXiv2010

Channel Decoding with a Bayesian Equalizer

Low-density parity-check (LPDC) decoders assume the channel estate information (CSI) is known and they have the true a posteriori probability (APP) for each transmitted bit. But in most cases of interest, the CSI needs to be estimated with the help of a short training sequence and the LDPC decoder has to decode the received word using faulty APP estimates. In this paper, we study the uncertainty in the CSI estimate and how it affects the bit error rate (BER) output by the LDPC decoder. To improve these APP estimates, we propose a Bayesian equalizer that takes into consideration not only the uncertainty due to the noise in the channel, but also the uncertainty in the CSI estimate, reducing the BER after the LDPC decoder.

cs.IT↗