arXiv subjects

Le Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Le Zhang.

At least 253 records · Page 14Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Automatic Assessment of Full Left Ventricular Coverage in Cardiac Cine Magnetic Resonance Imaging with Fisher-Discriminative 3D CNN

Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images play a growing role in the diagnostic imaging of cardiovascular diseases. Full coverage of the left ventricle (LV), from base to apex, is a basic criterion for CMR image quality and necessary for accurate measurement of cardiac volume and functional assessment. Incomplete coverage of the LV is identified through visual inspection, which is time-consuming and usually done retrospectively in the assessment of large imaging cohorts. This paper proposes a novel automatic method for determining LV coverage from CMR images by using Fisher-discriminative three-dimensional (FD3D) convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In contrast to our previous method employing 2D CNNs, this approach utilizes spatial contextual information in CMR volumes, extracts more representative high-level features and enhances the discriminative capacity of the baseline 2D CNN learning framework, thus achieving superior detection accuracy. A two-stage framework is proposed to identify missing basal and apical slices in measurements of CMR volume. First, the FD3D CNN extracts high-level features from the CMR stacks. These image representations are then used to detect the missing basal and apical slices. Compared to the traditional 3D CNN strategy, the proposed FD3D CNN minimizes within-class scatter and maximizes between-class scatter. We performed extensive experiments to validate the proposed method on more than 5,000 independent volumetric CMR scans from the UK Biobank study, achieving low error rates for missing basal/apical slice detection (4.9\%/4.6\%). The proposed method can also be adopted for assessing LV coverage for other types of CMR image data.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Testing the ABS method with the simulated Planck temperature maps

In this study, we apply the Analytical method of Blind Separation (ABS) of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) from foregrounds to estimate the CMB temperature power spectrum from multi-frequency microwave maps. We test the robustness of the ABS estimator and assess the accuracy of the power spectrum recovery by using realistic simulations based on the seven-frequency Planck data, including various frequency-dependent and spatially-varying foreground components (synchrotron, free-free, thermal dust and anomalous microwave emission), as well as an uncorrelated Gaussian-distributed instrumental noise. Considering no prior information about the foregrounds, the ABS estimator can analytically recover the CMB power spectrum over almost all scales with less than $0.5\%$ error for maps where the Galactic plane region ($|b|<10^{\circ}$) is masked out. To further test the flexibility and effectiveness of the ABS approach in a variety of situations, we apply the ABS to the simulated Planck maps in three cases: (1) without any mask, (2) imposing a two-times-stronger synchrotron emission and (3) including only the Galactic plane region ($|b|<10^{\circ}$) in the analysis. In such extreme cases, the ABS approach can still provide an unbiased estimate of band powers at the level of 1 $μ\rm{K}^2$ on average over all $\ell$ range, and the recovered powers are consistent with the input values within 1-$σ$ for most $\ell$ bins.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Medium-induced gluon emission via transverse and longitudinal scattering in dense nuclear matter

We study the medium-induced gluon emission from a hard quark jet traversing the dense nuclear matter within the framework of deep inelastic scattering off a large nucleus. We extend the previous work and compute the single gluon emission spectrum including both transverse and longitudinal momentum exchanges between the hard jet parton and the medium constituents. On the other hand, with only transverse scattering and using static scattering centers for the traversed medium, our induced gluon emission spectrum in the soft gluon limit reduces to the Gyulassy-Levai-Vitev one-rescattering-one-emission formula.

nucl-th↗

arXiv2018

Image Matching: An Application-oriented Benchmark

Image matching approaches have been widely used in computer vision applications in which the image-level matching performance of matchers is critical. However, it has not been well investigated by previous works which place more emphases on evaluating local features. To this end, we present a uniform benchmark with novel evaluation metrics and a large-scale dataset for evaluating the overall performance of image matching methods. The proposed metrics are application-oriented as they emphasize application requirements for matchers. The dataset contains two portions for benchmarking video frame matching and unordered image matching separately, where each portion consists of real-world image sequences and each sequence has a specific attribute. Subsequently, we carry out a comprehensive performance evaluation of different state-of-the-art methods and conduct in-depth analyses regarding various aspects such as application requirements, matching types, and data diversity. Moreover, we shed light on how to choose appropriate approaches for different applications based on empirical results and analyses. Conclusions in this benchmark can be used as general guidelines to design practical matching systems and also advocate potential future research directions in this field.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

MatchBench: An Evaluation of Feature Matchers

Feature matching is one of the most fundamental and active research areas in computer vision. A comprehensive evaluation of feature matchers is necessary, since it would advance both the development of this field and also high-level applications such as Structure-from-Motion or Visual SLAM. However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous work targets the evaluation of feature matchers while they only focus on evaluating feature detectors and descriptors. This leads to a critical absence in this field that there is no standard datasets and evaluation metrics to evaluate different feature matchers fairly. To this end, we present the first uniform feature matching benchmark to facilitate the evaluation of feature matchers. In the proposed benchmark, matchers are evaluated in different aspects, involving matching ability, correspondence sufficiency, and efficiency. Also, their performances are investigated in different scenes and in different matching types. Subsequently, we carry out an extensive evaluation of different state-of-the-art matchers on the benchmark and make in-depth analyses based on the reported results. This can be used to design practical matching systems in real applications and also advocates the potential future research directions in the field of feature matching.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Progress in the Construction and Testing of the Tianlai Radio Interferometers

The Tianlai Pathfinder is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of using a wide field of view radio interferometers to map the density of neutral hydrogen in the Universe after the Epoch of Reionizaton. This approach, called 21~cm intensity-mapping, promises an inexpensive means for surveying the large-scale structure of the cosmos. The Tianlai Pathfinder presently consists of an array of three, 15~m $\times$ 40~m cylinder telescopes and an array of sixteen, 6~m diameter dish antennas located in a radio-quiet part of western China. The two types of arrays were chosen to determine the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. The primary goal of the Pathfinder is to make 3D maps by surveying neutral hydrogen over large areas of the sky %$20,000 {\rm deg}^2$ in two different redshift ranges: first at $1.03 > z > 0.78$ ($700 - 800$~MHz) and later at $0.21 > z > 0.12$ ($1170 - 1270$~MHz). The most significant challenge to $21$~cm intensity-mapping is the removal of strong foreground radiation that dwarfs the cosmological signal. It requires exquisite knowledge of the instrumental response, i.e. calibration. In this paper, we provide an overview of the status of the Pathfinder and discuss the details of some of the analysis that we have carried out to measure the beam function of both arrays. We compare electromagnetic simulations of the arrays to measurements, discuss measurements of the gain and phase stability of the instrument, and provide a brief overview of the data processing pipeline.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2018

SybilBlind: Detecting Fake Users in Online Social Networks without Manual Labels

Detecting fake users (also called Sybils) in online social networks is a basic security research problem. State-of-the-art approaches rely on a large amount of manually labeled users as a training set. These approaches suffer from three key limitations: 1) it is time-consuming and costly to manually label a large training set, 2) they cannot detect new Sybils in a timely fashion, and 3) they are vulnerable to Sybil attacks that leverage information of the training set. In this work, we propose SybilBlind, a structure-based Sybil detection framework that does not rely on a manually labeled training set. SybilBlind works under the same threat model as state-of-the-art structure-based methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SybilBlind using 1) a social network with synthetic Sybils and 2) two Twitter datasets with real Sybils. For instance, SybilBlind achieves an AUC of 0.98 on a Twitter dataset.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Learning Pixel-wise Labeling from the Internet without Human Interaction

Deep learning stands at the forefront in many computer vision tasks. However, deep neural networks are usually data-hungry and require a huge amount of well-annotated training samples. Collecting sufficient annotated data is very expensive in many applications, especially for pixel-level prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation. To solve this fundamental issue, we consider a new challenging vision task, Internetly supervised semantic segmentation, which only uses Internet data with noisy image-level supervision of corresponding query keywords for segmentation model training. We address this task by proposing the following solution. A class-specific attention model unifying multiscale forward and backward convolutional features is proposed to provide initial segmentation "ground truth". The model trained with such noisy annotations is then improved by an online fine-tuning procedure. It achieves state-of-the-art performance under the weakly-supervised setting on PASCAL VOC2012 dataset. The proposed framework also paves a new way towards learning from the Internet without human interaction and could serve as a strong baseline therein. Code and data will be released upon the paper acceptance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Kernel Cross-Correlator

Cross-correlator plays a significant role in many visual perception tasks, such as object detection and tracking. Beyond the linear cross-correlator, this paper proposes a kernel cross-correlator (KCC) that breaks traditional limitations. First, by introducing the kernel trick, the KCC extends the linear cross-correlation to non-linear space, which is more robust to signal noises and distortions. Second, the connection to the existing works shows that KCC provides a unified solution for correlation filters. Third, KCC is applicable to any kernel function and is not limited to circulant structure on training data, thus it is able to predict affine transformations with customized properties. Last, by leveraging the fast Fourier transform (FFT), KCC eliminates direct calculation of kernel vectors, thus achieves better performance yet still with a reasonable computational cost. Comprehensive experiments on visual tracking and human activity recognition using wearable devices demonstrate its robustness, flexibility, and efficiency. The source codes of both experiments are released at https://github.com/wang-chen/KCC

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Non-negative matrix factorization for self-calibration of photometric redshift scatter in weak lensing surveys

Photo-z error is one of the major sources of systematics degrading the accuracy of weak lensing cosmological inferences. Zhang et al. (2010) proposed a self-calibration method combining galaxy-galaxy correlations and galaxy-shear correlations between different photo-z bins. Fisher matrix analysis shows that it can determine the rate of photo-z outliers at a level of 0.01-1% merely using photometric data and do not rely on any prior knowledge. In this paper, we develop a new algorithm to implement this method by solving a constrained nonlinear optimization problem arising in the self-calibration process. Based on the techniques of fixed-point iteration and non-negative matrix factorization, the proposed algorithm can efficiently and robustly reconstruct the scattering probabilities between the true-z and photo-z bins. The algorithm has been tested extensively by applying it to mock data from simulated stage IV weak lensing projects. We find that the algorithm provides a successful recovery of the scatter rates at the level of 0.01-1%, and the true mean redshifts of photo-z bins at the level of 0.001, which may satisfy the requirements in future lensing surveys.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Faster Randomized Worst-Case Update Time for Dynamic Subgraph Connectivity

Real-world networks are prone to breakdowns. Typically in the underlying graph $G$, besides the insertion or deletion of edges, the set of active vertices changes overtime. A vertex might work actively, or it might fail, and gets isolated temporarily. The active vertices are grouped as a set $S$. $S$ is subjected to updates, i.e., a failed vertex restarts, or an active vertex fails, and gets deleted from $S$. Dynamic subgraph connectivity answers the queries on connectivity between any two active vertices in the subgraph of $G$ induced by $S$. The problem is solved by a dynamic data structure, which supports the updates and answers the connectivity queries. In the general undirected graph, the best results for it include $\widetilde{O}(m^{2/3})$ deterministic amortized update time, $\widetilde{O}(m^{4/5})$ and $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{mn})$ deterministic worst-case update time. In the paper, we propose a randomized data structure, which has $\widetilde{O}(m^{3/4})$ worst-case update time.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2016

Photon bremsstrahlung from quark jet via transverse and longitudinal scatterings: single versus multiple scatterings

We study the production of jet-bremsstrahlung photons through the scattering with the constituents of a dense nuclear matter within the framework of deep-inelastic scattering off a large nucleus. Applying a gradient expansion up to the second order for the exchanged three-dimensional momentum between jet and medium, we derive the single photon bremsstrahlung spectrum with the inclusion of the contributions from the transverse broadening as well as the longitudinal drag and diffusion of the hard parton's momentum. We also compare the medium-induced photon radiation spectra for single scattering and from the resummation of multiple scatterings. It is found that the coupling between different scatterings can give additional contribution to medium-induced photon radiation, while for small momentum exchange, the leading contribution from the drag and diffusions to the photon emission spectra remain the same for single and multiple scatterings.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2016

Bayesian semi-blind component separation for foreground removal in interferometric 21-cm observations

We present in this paper a new Bayesian semi-blind approach for foreground removal in observations of the 21-cm signal with interferometers. The technique, which we call HIEMICA (HI Expectation-Maximization Independent Component Analysis), is an extension of the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) technique developed for two-dimensional (2D) CMB maps to three-dimensional (3D) 21-cm cosmological signals measured by interferometers. This technique provides a fully Bayesian inference of power spectra and maps and separates the foregrounds from signal based on the diversity of their power spectra. Only relying on the statistical independence of the components, this approach can jointly estimate the 3D power spectrum of the 21-cm signal and, the 2D angular power spectrum and the frequency dependence of each foreground component, without any prior assumptions about foregrounds. This approach has been tested extensively by applying it to mock data from interferometric 21-cm intensity mapping observations under idealized assumptions of instrumental effects. We also discuss the impact when the noise properties are not known completely. As a first step toward solving the 21 cm power spectrum analysis problem we compare the semi-blind HIEMICA technique with the commonly used Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Under the same idealized circumstances the proposed technique provides significantly improved recovery of the power spectrum. This technique can be applied straightforwardly to all 21-cm interferometric observations, including epoch of reionization measurements, and can be extended to single-dish observations as well.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2015

Very weak solutions of the Stokes problem in a convex polygon

Motivated by the study of the corner singularities in the so-called cavity flow, we establish in this article, the existence and uniqueness of solutions in $L^2(Ω)^2$ for the Stokes problem in a domain $Ω,$ when $Ω$ is a smooth domain or a convex polygon. We establish also a trace theorem and show that the trace of $u$ can be arbitrary in $L^2(\partialΩ)^2.$ The results are also extended to the linear evolution Stokes problem.

math.AP↗

arXiv2014

Simulation of the analysis of interferometric microwave background polarization data

We present results from an end-to-end simulation pipeline interferometric observations of cosmic microwave background polarization. We use both maximum-likelihood and Gibbs sampling techniques to estimate the power spectrum. In addition, we use Gibbs sampling for image reconstruction from interferometric visibilities. The results indicate the level to which various systematic errors (e.g., pointing errors, gain errors, beam shape errors, cross- polarization) must be controlled in order to successfully detect and characterize primordial B modes as well as other scientific goals. In addition, we show that Gibbs sampling is an effective method of image reconstruction for interferometric data in other astrophysical contexts.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2013

Probabilistic image reconstruction for radio interferometers

We present a novel, general-purpose method for deconvolving and denoising images from gridded radio interferometric visibilities using Bayesian inference based on a Gaussian process model. The method automatically takes into account incomplete coverage of the uv-plane, signal mode coupling due to the primary beam, and noise mode coupling due to uv sampling. Our method uses Gibbs sampling to efficiently explore the full posterior distribution of the underlying signal image given the data. We use a set of widely diverse mock images with a realistic interferometer setup and level of noise to assess the method. Compared to results from a proxy for point source- based CLEAN method we find that in terms of RMS error and signal-to-noise ratio our approach performs better than traditional deconvolution techniques, regardless of the structure of the source image in our test suite. Our implementation scales as O(np log np), provides full statistical and uncertainty information of the reconstructed image, requires no supervision, and provides a robust, consistent framework for incorporating noise and parameter marginalizations and foreground removal.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2013

Bulk viscosity of hot dense Quark matter in PNJL model

Starting from the Kubo formula and the the QCD low energy theorem, we study the the bulk viscosity of hot dense quark matter in the PNJL model from the equation of state . We show that the bulk viscosity has a sharp peak near the chiral phase transition, and the ratio of bulk viscosity over entropy rises dramatically in the vicinity of the phase transition. These results agrees with that from lattice and other model calculations. In addition, we show that the increase of chemical potential raises the bulk viscosity.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2013

Maximum likelihood analysis of systematic errors in interferometric observations of the cosmic microwave background

We investigate the impact of instrumental systematic errors in interferometric measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization power spectra. We simulate interferometric CMB observations to generate mock visibilities and estimate power spectra using the statistically optimal maximum likelihood technique. We define a quadratic error measure to determine allowable levels of systematic error that do not induce power spectrum errors beyond a given tolerance. As an example, in this study we focus on differential pointing errors. The effects of other systematics can be simulated by this pipeline in a straightforward manner. We find that, in order to accurately recover the underlying B-modes for r=0.01 at 28<l<384, Gaussian-distributed pointing errors must be controlled to 0.7^\circ rms for an interferometer with an antenna configuration similar to QUBIC, in agreement with analytical estimates. Only the statistical uncertainty for 28<l<88 would be changed at ~10% level. With the same instrumental configuration, we find the pointing errors would slightly bias the 2-σupper limit of the tensor-to-scalar ratio r by ~10%. We also show that the impact of pointing errors on the TB and EB measurements is negligibly small.

astro-ph.CO↗