arXiv subjects

Moncef Gabbouj

Publications and source records attributed to Moncef Gabbouj.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Blind Underwater Image Restoration using Co-Operational Regressor Networks

The exploration of underwater environments is essential for applications such as biological research, archaeology, and infrastructure maintenanceHowever, underwater imaging is challenging due to the waters unique properties, including scattering, absorption, color distortion, and reduced visibility. To address such visual degradations, a variety of approaches have been proposed covering from basic signal processing methods to deep learning models; however, none of them has proven to be consistently successful. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning model, Co-Operational Regressor Networks (CoRe-Nets), designed to achieve the best possible underwater image restoration. A CoRe-Net consists of two co-operating networks: the Apprentice Regressor (AR), responsible for image transformation, and the Master Regressor (MR), which evaluates the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the images generated by the AR and feeds it back to AR. CoRe-Nets are built on Self-Organized Operational Neural Networks (Self-ONNs), which offer a superior learning capability by modulating nonlinearity in kernel transformations. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated on the benchmark Large Scale Underwater Image (LSUI) dataset. Leveraging the joint learning capabilities of the two cooperating networks, the proposed model achieves the state-of-art restoration performance with significantly reduced computational complexity and often presents such results that can even surpass the visual quality of the ground truth with a 2-pass application. Our results and the optimized PyTorch implementation of the proposed approach are now publicly shared on GitHub.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Relevance-guided Audio Visual Fusion for Video Saliency Prediction

Audio data, often synchronized with video frames, plays a crucial role in guiding the audience's visual attention. Incorporating audio information into video saliency prediction tasks can enhance the prediction of human visual behavior. However, existing audio-visual saliency prediction methods often directly fuse audio and visual features, which ignore the possibility of inconsistency between the two modalities, such as when the audio serves as background music. To address this issue, we propose a novel relevance-guided audio-visual saliency prediction network dubbed AVRSP. Specifically, the Relevance-guided Audio-Visual feature Fusion module (RAVF) dynamically adjusts the retention of audio features based on the semantic relevance between audio and visual elements, thereby refining the integration process with visual features. Furthermore, the Multi-scale feature Synergy (MS) module integrates visual features from different encoding stages, enhancing the network's ability to represent objects at various scales. The Multi-scale Regulator Gate (MRG) could transfer crucial fusion information to visual features, thus optimizing the utilization of multi-scale visual features. Extensive experiments on six audio-visual eye movement datasets have demonstrated that our AVRSP network achieves competitive performance in audio-visual saliency prediction.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Personalized Zero-Shot ECG Arrhythmia Monitoring System: From Sparse Representation Based Domain Adaption to Energy Efficient Abnormal Beat Detection for Practical ECG Surveillance

This paper proposes a low-cost and highly accurate ECG-monitoring system intended for personalized early arrhythmia detection for wearable mobile sensors. Earlier supervised approaches for personalized ECG monitoring require both abnormal and normal heartbeats for the training of the dedicated classifier. However, in a real-world scenario where the personalized algorithm is embedded in a wearable device, such training data is not available for healthy people with no cardiac disorder history. In this study, (i) we propose a null space analysis on the healthy signal space obtained via sparse dictionary learning, and investigate how a simple null space projection or alternatively regularized least squares-based classification methods can reduce the computational complexity, without sacrificing the detection accuracy, when compared to sparse representation-based classification. (ii) Then we introduce a sparse representation-based domain adaptation technique in order to project other existing users' abnormal and normal signals onto the new user's signal space, enabling us to train the dedicated classifier without having any abnormal heartbeat of the new user. Therefore, zero-shot learning can be achieved without the need for synthetic abnormal heartbeat generation. An extensive set of experiments performed on the benchmark MIT-BIH ECG dataset shows that when this domain adaptation-based training data generator is used with a simple 1-D CNN classifier, the method outperforms the prior work by a significant margin. (iii) Then, by combining (i) and (ii), we propose an ensemble classifier that further improves the performance. This approach for zero-shot arrhythmia detection achieves an average accuracy level of 98.2% and an F1-Score of 92.8%. Finally, a personalized energy-efficient ECG monitoring scheme is proposed using the above-mentioned innovations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

High-Quality and Full Bandwidth Seismic Signal Synthesis using Operational GANs

Vibration sensors are essential in acquiring seismic activity for an accurate earthquake assessment. The state-of-the-art sensors can provide the best signal quality and the highest bandwidth; however, their high cost usually hinders a wide range of applicability and coverage, which is otherwise possible with their basic and cheap counterparts. But, their poor quality and low bandwidth can significantly degrade the signal fidelity and result in an imprecise analysis. To address these drawbacks, in this study, we propose a novel, high-quality, and full bandwidth seismic signal synthesis by transforming the signal acquired from an inferior sensor. We employ 1D Operational Generative Adversarial Networks (Op-GANs) with novel loss functions to achieve this. Therefore, the study's key contributions include releasing a new dataset, addressing operational constraints in seismic monitoring, and pioneering a deep-learning transformation technique to create the first virtual seismic sensor. The proposed method is extensively evaluated over the Simulated Ground Motion (SimGM) benchmark dataset, and the results demonstrated that the proposed approach significantly improves the quality and bandwidth of seismic signals acquired from a variety of sensors, including a cheap seismic sensor, the CSN-Phidgets, and the integrated accelerometers of an Android, and iOS phone, to the same level as the state-of-the-art sensor (e.g., Kinemetrics-Episensor). The SimGM dataset, our results, and the optimized PyTorch implementation of the proposed approach are publicly shared.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Refining Myocardial Infarction Detection: A Novel Multi-Modal Composite Kernel Strategy in One-Class Classification

Early detection of myocardial infarction (MI), a critical condition arising from coronary artery disease (CAD), is vital to prevent further myocardial damage. This study introduces a novel method for early MI detection using a one-class classification (OCC) algorithm in echocardiography. Our study overcomes the challenge of limited echocardiography data availability by adopting a novel approach based on Multi-modal Subspace Support Vector Data Description. The proposed technique involves a specialized MI detection framework employing multi-view echocardiography incorporating a composite kernel in the non-linear projection trick, fusing Gaussian and Laplacian sigmoid functions. Additionally, we enhance the update strategy of the projection matrices by adapting maximization for both or one of the modalities in the optimization process. Our method boosts MI detection capability by efficiently transforming features extracted from echocardiography data into an optimized lower-dimensional subspace. The OCC model trained specifically on target class instances from the comprehensive HMC-QU dataset that includes multiple echocardiography views indicates a marked improvement in MI detection accuracy. Our findings reveal that our proposed multi-view approach achieves a geometric mean of 71.24%, signifying a substantial advancement in echocardiography-based MI diagnosis and offering more precise and efficient diagnostic tools.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Operational Support Estimator Networks

In this work, we propose a novel approach called Operational Support Estimator Networks (OSENs) for the support estimation task. Support Estimation (SE) is defined as finding the locations of non-zero elements in sparse signals. By its very nature, the mapping between the measurement and sparse signal is a non-linear operation. Traditional support estimators rely on computationally expensive iterative signal recovery techniques to achieve such non-linearity. Contrary to the convolutional layers, the proposed OSEN approach consists of operational layers that can learn such complex non-linearities without the need for deep networks. In this way, the performance of non-iterative support estimation is greatly improved. Moreover, the operational layers comprise so-called generative super neurons with non-local kernels. The kernel location for each neuron/feature map is optimized jointly for the SE task during training. We evaluate the OSENs in three different applications: i. support estimation from Compressive Sensing (CS) measurements, ii. representation-based classification, and iii. learning-aided CS reconstruction where the output of OSENs is used as prior knowledge to the CS algorithm for enhanced reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves computational efficiency and outperforms competing methods, especially at low measurement rates by significant margins. The software implementation is shared at https://github.com/meteahishali/OSEN.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

MMA-DFER: MultiModal Adaptation of unimodal models for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in-the-wild

Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER) has received significant interest in the recent years dictated by its pivotal role in enabling empathic and human-compatible technologies. Achieving robustness towards in-the-wild data in DFER is particularly important for real-world applications. One of the directions aimed at improving such models is multimodal emotion recognition based on audio and video data. Multimodal learning in DFER increases the model capabilities by leveraging richer, complementary data representations. Within the field of multimodal DFER, recent methods have focused on exploiting advances of self-supervised learning (SSL) for pre-training of strong multimodal encoders. Another line of research has focused on adapting pre-trained static models for DFER. In this work, we propose a different perspective on the problem and investigate the advancement of multimodal DFER performance by adapting SSL-pre-trained disjoint unimodal encoders. We identify main challenges associated with this task, namely, intra-modality adaptation, cross-modal alignment, and temporal adaptation, and propose solutions to each of them. As a result, we demonstrate improvement over current state-of-the-art on two popular DFER benchmarks, namely DFEW and MFAW.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Channel-wise Feature Decorrelation for Enhanced Learned Image Compression

The emerging Learned Compression (LC) replaces the traditional codec modules with Deep Neural Networks (DNN), which are trained end-to-end for rate-distortion performance. This approach is considered as the future of image/video compression, and major efforts have been dedicated to improving its compression efficiency. However, most proposed works target compression efficiency by employing more complex DNNS, which contributes to higher computational complexity. Alternatively, this paper proposes to improve compression by fully exploiting the existing DNN capacity. To do so, the latent features are guided to learn a richer and more diverse set of features, which corresponds to better reconstruction. A channel-wise feature decorrelation loss is designed and is integrated into the LC optimization. Three strategies are proposed and evaluated, which optimize (1) the transformation network, (2) the context model, and (3) both networks. Experimental results on two established LC methods show that the proposed method improves the compression with a BD-Rate of up to 8.06%, with no added complexity. The proposed solution can be applied as a plug-and-play solution to optimize any similar LC method.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Efficient Bitrate Ladder Construction using Transfer Learning and Spatio-Temporal Features

Providing high-quality video with efficient bitrate is a main challenge in video industry. The traditional one-size-fits-all scheme for bitrate ladders is inefficient and reaching the best content-aware decision computationally impractical due to extensive encodings required. To mitigate this, we propose a bitrate and complexity efficient bitrate ladder prediction method using transfer learning and spatio-temporal features. We propose: (1) using feature maps from well-known pre-trained DNNs to predict rate-quality behavior with limited training data; and (2) improving highest quality rung efficiency by predicting minimum bitrate for top quality and using it for the top rung. The method tested on 102 video scenes demonstrates 94.1% reduction in complexity versus brute-force at 1.71% BD-Rate expense. Additionally, transfer learning was thoroughly studied through four networks and ablation studies.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2024

Revisiting Generative Adversarial Networks for Binary Semantic Segmentation on Imbalanced Datasets

Anomalous crack region detection is a typical binary semantic segmentation task, which aims to detect pixels representing cracks on pavement surface images automatically by algorithms. Although existing deep learning-based methods have achieved outcoming results on specific public pavement datasets, the performance would deteriorate dramatically on imbalanced datasets. The input datasets used in such tasks suffer from severely between-class imbalanced problems, hence, it is a core challenge to obtain a robust performance on diverse pavement datasets with generic deep learning models. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a deep learning framework based on conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) for the anomalous crack region detection tasks at the pixel level. In particular, the proposed framework containing a cGANs and a novel auxiliary network is developed to enhance and stabilize the generator's performance under two alternative training stages, when estimating a multiscale probability feature map from heterogeneous and imbalanced inputs iteratively. Moreover, several attention mechanisms and entropy strategies are incorporated into the cGANs architecture and the auxiliary network separately to mitigate further the performance deterioration of model training on severely imbalanced datasets. We implement extensive experiments on six accessible pavement datasets. The experimental results from both visual and quantitative evaluation show that the proposed framework can achieve state-of-the-art results on these datasets efficiently and robustly without acceleration of computation complexity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Joint End-to-End Image Compression and Denoising: Leveraging Contrastive Learning and Multi-Scale Self-ONNs

Noisy images are a challenge to image compression algorithms due to the inherent difficulty of compressing noise. As noise cannot easily be discerned from image details, such as high-frequency signals, its presence leads to extra bits needed for compression. Since the emerging learned image compression paradigm enables end-to-end optimization of codecs, recent efforts were made to integrate denoising into the compression model, relying on clean image features to guide denoising. However, these methods exhibit suboptimal performance under high noise levels, lacking the capability to generalize across diverse noise types. In this paper, we propose a novel method integrating a multi-scale denoiser comprising of Self Organizing Operational Neural Networks, for joint image compression and denoising. We employ contrastive learning to boost the network ability to differentiate noise from high frequency signal components, by emphasizing the correlation between noisy and clean counterparts. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method both in rate-distortion performance, and codec speed, outperforming the current state-of-the-art.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Perceptual Learned Image Compression via End-to-End JND-Based Optimization

Emerging Learned image Compression (LC) achieves significant improvements in coding efficiency by end-to-end training of neural networks for compression. An important benefit of this approach over traditional codecs is that any optimization criteria can be directly applied to the encoder-decoder networks during training. Perceptual optimization of LC to comply with the Human Visual System (HVS) is among such criteria, which has not been fully explored yet. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel framework to integrate Just Noticeable Distortion (JND) principles into LC. Leveraging existing JND datasets, three perceptual optimization methods are proposed to integrate JND into the LC training process: (1) Pixel-Wise JND Loss (PWL) prioritizes pixel-by-pixel fidelity in reproducing JND characteristics, (2) Image-Wise JND Loss (IWL) emphasizes on overall imperceptible degradation levels, and (3) Feature-Wise JND Loss (FWL) aligns the reconstructed image features with perceptually significant features. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of JND integration, highlighting improvements in rate-distortion performance and visual quality, compared to baseline methods. The proposed methods add no extra complexity after training.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Pixel-Wise Color Constancy via Smoothness Techniques in Multi-Illuminant Scenes

Most scenes are illuminated by several light sources, where the traditional assumption of uniform illumination is invalid. This issue is ignored in most color constancy methods, primarily due to the complex spatial impact of multiple light sources on the image. Moreover, most existing multi-illuminant methods fail to preserve the smooth change of illumination, which stems from spatial dependencies in natural images. Motivated by this, we propose a novel multi-illuminant color constancy method, by learning pixel-wise illumination maps caused by multiple light sources. The proposed method enforces smoothness within neighboring pixels, by regularizing the training with the total variation loss. Moreover, a bilateral filter is provisioned further to enhance the natural appearance of the estimated images, while preserving the edges. Additionally, we propose a label-smoothing technique that enables the model to generalize well despite the uncertainties in ground truth. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Panoramic Image Inpainting With Gated Convolution And Contextual Reconstruction Loss

Deep learning-based methods have demonstrated encouraging results in tackling the task of panoramic image inpainting. However, it is challenging for existing methods to distinguish valid pixels from invalid pixels and find suitable references for corrupted areas, thus leading to artifacts in the inpainted results. In response to these challenges, we propose a panoramic image inpainting framework that consists of a Face Generator, a Cube Generator, a side branch, and two discriminators. We use the Cubemap Projection (CMP) format as network input. The generator employs gated convolutions to distinguish valid pixels from invalid ones, while a side branch is designed utilizing contextual reconstruction (CR) loss to guide the generators to find the most suitable reference patch for inpainting the missing region. The proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on SUN360 Street View dataset in terms of PSNR and SSIM. Experimental results and ablation study demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms SOTA both quantitatively and qualitatively.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Trustworthiness of $\mathbb{X}$ Users: A One-Class Classification Approach

$\mathbb{X}$ (formerly Twitter) is a prominent online social media platform that plays an important role in sharing information making the content generated on this platform a valuable source of information. Ensuring trust on $\mathbb{X}$ is essential to determine the user credibility and prevents issues across various domains. While assigning credibility to $\mathbb{X}$ users and classifying them as trusted or untrusted is commonly carried out using traditional machine learning models, there is limited exploration about the use of One-Class Classification (OCC) models for this purpose. In this study, we use various OCC models for $\mathbb{X}$ user classification. Additionally, we propose using a subspace-learning-based approach that simultaneously optimizes both the subspace and data description for OCC. We also introduce a novel regularization term for Subspace Support Vector Data Description (SSVDD), expressing data concentration in a lower-dimensional subspace that captures diverse graph structures. Experimental results show superior performance of the introduced regularization term for SSVDD compared to baseline models and state-of-the-art techniques for $\mathbb{X}$ user classification.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

Dropout Concrete Autoencoder for Band Selection on HSI Scenes

Deep learning-based informative band selection methods on hyperspectral images (HSI) recently have gained intense attention to eliminate spectral correlation and redundancies. However, the existing deep learning-based methods either need additional post-processing strategies to select the descriptive bands or optimize the model indirectly, due to the parameterization inability of discrete variables for the selection procedure. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a novel end-to-end network for informative band selection. The proposed network is inspired by the advances in concrete autoencoder (CAE) and dropout feature ranking strategy. Different from the traditional deep learning-based methods, the proposed network is trained directly given the required band subset eliminating the need for further post-processing. Experimental results on four HSI scenes show that the proposed dropout CAE achieves substantial and effective performance levels outperforming the competing methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Robust Peak Detection for Holter ECGs by Self-Organized Operational Neural Networks

Although numerous R-peak detectors have been proposed in the literature, their robustness and performance levels may significantly deteriorate in low-quality and noisy signals acquired from mobile electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors, such as Holter monitors. Recently, this issue has been addressed by deep 1-D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that have achieved state-of-the-art performance levels in Holter monitors; however, they pose a high complexity level that requires special parallelized hardware setup for real-time processing. On the other hand, their performance deteriorates when a compact network configuration is used instead. This is an expected outcome as recent studies have demonstrated that the learning performance of CNNs is limited due to their strictly homogenous configuration with the sole linear neuron model. In this study, to further boost the peak detection performance along with an elegant computational efficiency, we propose 1-D Self-Organized ONNs (Self-ONNs) with generative neurons. The most crucial advantage of 1-D Self-ONNs over the ONNs is their self-organization capability that voids the need to search for the best operator set per neuron since each generative neuron has the ability to create the optimal operator during training. The experimental results over the China Physiological Signal Challenge-2020 (CPSC) dataset with more than one million ECG beats show that the proposed 1-D Self-ONNs can significantly surpass the state-of-the-art deep CNN with less computational complexity. Results demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves a 99.10% F1-score, 99.79% sensitivity, and 98.42% positive predictivity in the CPSC dataset, which is the best R-peak detection performance ever achieved.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Class-wise Generalization Error: an Information-Theoretic Analysis

Existing generalization theories of supervised learning typically take a holistic approach and provide bounds for the expected generalization over the whole data distribution, which implicitly assumes that the model generalizes similarly for all the classes. In practice, however, there are significant variations in generalization performance among different classes, which cannot be captured by the existing generalization bounds. In this work, we tackle this problem by theoretically studying the class-generalization error, which quantifies the generalization performance of each individual class. We derive a novel information-theoretic bound for class-generalization error using the KL divergence, and we further obtain several tighter bounds using the conditional mutual information (CMI), which are significantly easier to estimate in practice. We empirically validate our proposed bounds in different neural networks and show that they accurately capture the complex class-generalization error behavior. Moreover, we show that the theoretical tools developed in this paper can be applied in several applications beyond this context.

cs.LG↗