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Shuang Song

Publications and source records attributed to Shuang Song.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Deep Learning Meets Satellite Images -- An Evaluation on Handcrafted and Learning-based Features for Multi-date Satellite Stereo Images

A critical step in the digital surface models(DSM) generation is feature matching. Off-track (or multi-date) satellite stereo images, in particular, can challenge the performance of feature matching due to spectral distortions between images, long baseline, and wide intersection angles. Feature matching methods have evolved over the years from handcrafted methods (e.g., SIFT) to learning-based methods (e.g., SuperPoint and SuperGlue). In this paper, we compare the performance of different features, also known as feature extraction and matching methods, applied to satellite imagery. A wide range of stereo pairs(~500) covering two separate study sites are used. SIFT, as a widely used classic feature extraction and matching algorithm, is compared with seven deep-learning matching methods: SuperGlue, LightGlue, LoFTR, ASpanFormer, DKM, GIM-LightGlue, and GIM-DKM. Results demonstrate that traditional matching methods are still competitive in this age of deep learning, although for particular scenarios learning-based methods are very promising.

cs.CV↗

Perceptual learning in contour detection transfer across changes in contour path and orientation

The integration of local elements into shape contours is critical for target detection and identification in cluttered scenes. Previous studies have shown that observers can learn to use image regularities for contour integration and target identification. However, we still know little about the generalization of perceptual learning in contour integration. Specifically, whether training in contour detection task could transfer to untrained contour type, path or orientation is still unclear. In a series of four experiments, human perceptual learning in contour detection was studied using psychophysical methods. We trained participants to detect contours in cluttered scenes over several days, which resulted in a significant improvement in sensitivity to trained contour type. This improved sensitivity was highly specific to contour type, but transfer across changes in contour path and contour orientation. These results suggest that short-term training improves the ability to integrate specific types of contours by optimizing the ability of the visual system to extract specific image regularities. The differential specificity and generalization across different stimulus features may support the involvement of both low-level and higher-level visual areas in perceptual learning in contour detection. These findings provide further insights into understanding the nature and the brain plasticity mechanism of contour integration learning.

q-bio.NC↗

EAR: Edge-Aware Reconstruction of 3-D vertebrae structures from bi-planar X-ray images

X-ray images ease the diagnosis and treatment process due to their rapid imaging speed and high resolution. However, due to the projection process of X-ray imaging, much spatial information has been lost. To accurately provide efficient spinal morphological and structural information, reconstructing the 3-D structures of the spine from the 2-D X-ray images is essential. It is challenging for current reconstruction methods to preserve the edge information and local shapes of the asymmetrical vertebrae structures. In this study, we propose a new Edge-Aware Reconstruction network (EAR) to focus on the performance improvement of the edge information and vertebrae shapes. In our network, by using the auto-encoder architecture as the backbone, the edge attention module and frequency enhancement module are proposed to strengthen the perception of the edge reconstruction. Meanwhile, we also combine four loss terms, including reconstruction loss, edge loss, frequency loss and projection loss. The proposed method is evaluated using three publicly accessible datasets and compared with four state-of-the-art models. The proposed method is superior to other methods and achieves 25.32%, 15.32%, 86.44%, 80.13%, 23.7612 and 0.3014 with regard to MSE, MAE, Dice, SSIM, PSNR and frequency distance. Due to the end-to-end and accurate reconstruction process, EAR can provide sufficient 3-D spatial information and precise preoperative surgical planning guidance.

eess.IV↗

Multi-view X-ray Image Synthesis with Multiple Domain Disentanglement from CT Scans

X-ray images play a vital role in the intraoperative processes due to their high resolution and fast imaging speed and greatly promote the subsequent segmentation, registration and reconstruction. However, over-dosed X-rays superimpose potential risks to human health to some extent. Data-driven algorithms from volume scans to X-ray images are restricted by the scarcity of paired X-ray and volume data. Existing methods are mainly realized by modelling the whole X-ray imaging procedure. In this study, we propose a learning-based approach termed CT2X-GAN to synthesize the X-ray images in an end-to-end manner using the content and style disentanglement from three different image domains. Our method decouples the anatomical structure information from CT scans and style information from unpaired real X-ray images/ digital reconstructed radiography (DRR) images via a series of decoupling encoders. Additionally, we introduce a novel consistency regularization term to improve the stylistic resemblance between synthesized X-ray images and real X-ray images. Meanwhile, we also impose a supervised process by computing the similarity of computed real DRR and synthesized DRR images. We further develop a pose attention module to fully strengthen the comprehensive information in the decoupled content code from CT scans, facilitating high-quality multi-view image synthesis in the lower 2D space. Extensive experiments were conducted on the publicly available CTSpine1K dataset and achieved 97.8350, 0.0842 and 3.0938 in terms of FID, KID and defined user-scored X-ray similarity, respectively. In comparison with 3D-aware methods ($π$-GAN, EG3D), CT2X-GAN is superior in improving the synthesis quality and realistic to the real X-ray images.

eess.IV↗

Chained Flexible Capsule Endoscope: Unraveling the Conundrum of Size Limitations and Functional Integration for Gastrointestinal Transitivity

Capsule endoscopes, predominantly serving diagnostic functions, provide lucid internal imagery but are devoid of surgical or therapeutic capabilities. Consequently, despite lesion detection, physicians frequently resort to traditional endoscopic or open surgical procedures for treatment, resulting in more complex, potentially risky interventions. To surmount these limitations, this study introduces a chained flexible capsule endoscope (FCE) design concept, specifically conceived to navigate the inherent volume constraints of capsule endoscopes whilst augmenting their therapeutic functionalities. The FCE's distinctive flexibility originates from a conventional rotating joint design and the incision pattern in the flexible material. In vitro experiments validated the passive navigation ability of the FCE in rugged intestinal tracts. Further, the FCE demonstrates consistent reptile-like peristalsis under the influence of an external magnetic field, and possesses the capability for film expansion and disintegration under high-frequency electromagnetic stimulation. These findings illuminate a promising path toward amplifying the therapeutic capacities of capsule endoscopes without necessitating a size compromise.

physics.med-ph↗

Scalable Scene Modeling from Perspective Imaging: Physics-based Appearance and Geometry Inference

3D scene modeling techniques serve as the bedrocks in the geospatial engineering and computer science, which drives many applications ranging from automated driving, terrain mapping, navigation, virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality (for gaming and movie industry etc.). This dissertation presents a fraction of contributions that advances 3D scene modeling to its state of the art, in the aspects of both appearance and geometry modeling. In contrast to the prevailing deep learning methods, as a core contribution, this thesis aims to develop algorithms that follow first principles, where sophisticated physic-based models are introduced alongside with simpler learning and inference tasks. The outcomes of these algorithms yield processes that can consume much larger volume of data for highly accurate reconstructing 3D scenes at a scale without losing methodological generality, which are not possible by contemporary complex-model based deep learning methods. Specifically, the dissertation introduces three novel methodologies that address the challenges of inferring appearance and geometry through physics-based modeling. Overall, the research encapsulated in this dissertation marks a series of methodological triumphs in the processing of complex datasets. By navigating the confluence of deep learning, computational geometry, and photogrammetry, this work lays down a robust framework for future exploration and practical application in the rapidly evolving field of 3D scene reconstruction. The outcomes of these studies are evidenced through rigorous experiments and comparisons with existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the efficacy and scalability of the proposed approaches.

cs.CV↗

Advancing Differential Privacy: Where We Are Now and Future Directions for Real-World Deployment

In this article, we present a detailed review of current practices and state-of-the-art methodologies in the field of differential privacy (DP), with a focus of advancing DP's deployment in real-world applications. Key points and high-level contents of the article were originated from the discussions from "Differential Privacy (DP): Challenges Towards the Next Frontier," a workshop held in July 2022 with experts from industry, academia, and the public sector seeking answers to broad questions pertaining to privacy and its implications in the design of industry-grade systems. This article aims to provide a reference point for the algorithmic and design decisions within the realm of privacy, highlighting important challenges and potential research directions. Covering a wide spectrum of topics, this article delves into the infrastructure needs for designing private systems, methods for achieving better privacy/utility trade-offs, performing privacy attacks and auditing, as well as communicating privacy with broader audiences and stakeholders.

cs.CR↗

Private Learning with Public Features

We study a class of private learning problems in which the data is a join of private and public features. This is often the case in private personalization tasks such as recommendation or ad prediction, in which features related to individuals are sensitive, while features related to items (the movies or songs to be recommended, or the ads to be shown to users) are publicly available and do not require protection. A natural question is whether private algorithms can achieve higher utility in the presence of public features. We give a positive answer for multi-encoder models where one of the encoders operates on public features. We develop new algorithms that take advantage of this separation by only protecting certain sufficient statistics (instead of adding noise to the gradient). This method has a guaranteed utility improvement for linear regression, and importantly, achieves the state of the art on two standard private recommendation benchmarks, demonstrating the importance of methods that adapt to the private-public feature separation.

cs.LG↗

Feature Proliferation -- the "Cancer" in StyleGAN and its Treatments

Despite the success of StyleGAN in image synthesis, the images it synthesizes are not always perfect and the well-known truncation trick has become a standard post-processing technique for StyleGAN to synthesize high-quality images. Although effective, it has long been noted that the truncation trick tends to reduce the diversity of synthesized images and unnecessarily sacrifices many distinct image features. To address this issue, in this paper, we first delve into the StyleGAN image synthesis mechanism and discover an important phenomenon, namely Feature Proliferation, which demonstrates how specific features reproduce with forward propagation. Then, we show how the occurrence of Feature Proliferation results in StyleGAN image artifacts. As an analogy, we refer to it as the" cancer" in StyleGAN from its proliferating and malignant nature. Finally, we propose a novel feature rescaling method that identifies and modulates risky features to mitigate feature proliferation. Thanks to our discovery of Feature Proliferation, the proposed feature rescaling method is less destructive and retains more useful image features than the truncation trick, as it is more fine-grained and works in a lower-level feature space rather than a high-level latent space. Experimental results justify the validity of our claims and the effectiveness of the proposed feature rescaling method. Our code is available at https://github. com/songc42/Feature-proliferation.

cs.CV↗

Mesh Conflation of Oblique Photogrammetric Models using Virtual Cameras and Truncated Signed Distance Field

Conflating/stitching 2.5D raster digital surface models (DSM) into a large one has been a running practice in geoscience applications, however, conflating full-3D mesh models, such as those from oblique photogrammetry, is extremely challenging. In this letter, we propose a novel approach to address this challenge by conflating multiple full-3D oblique photogrammetric models into a single, and seamless mesh for high-resolution site modeling. Given two or more individually collected and created photogrammetric meshes, we first propose to create a virtual camera field (with a panoramic field of view) to incubate virtual spaces represented by Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF), an implicit volumetric field friendly for linear 3D fusion; then we adaptively leverage the truncated bound of meshes in TSDF to conflate them into a single and accurate full 3D site model. With drone-based 3D meshes, we show that our approach significantly improves upon traditional methods for model conflations, to drive new potentials to create excessively large and accurate full 3D mesh models in support of geoscience and environmental applications.

cs.CV↗

Point Cloud Registration for LiDAR and Photogrammetric Data: a Critical Synthesis and Performance Analysis on Classic and Deep Learning Algorithms

Recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have shown promising performance in estimating rigid/similarity transformation between unregistered point clouds of complex objects and scenes. However, their performances are mostly evaluated using a limited number of datasets from a single sensor (e.g. Kinect or RealSense cameras), lacking a comprehensive overview of their applicability in photogrammetric 3D mapping scenarios. In this work, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) point cloud registration methods, where we analyze and evaluate these methods using a diverse set of point cloud data from indoor to satellite sources. The quantitative analysis allows for exploring the strengths, applicability, challenges, and future trends of these methods. In contrast to existing analysis works that introduce point cloud registration as a holistic process, our experimental analysis is based on its inherent two-step process to better comprehend these approaches including feature/keypoint-based initial coarse registration and dense fine registration through cloud-to-cloud (C2C) optimization. More than ten methods, including classic hand-crafted, deep-learning-based feature correspondence, and robust C2C methods were tested. We observed that the success rate of most of the algorithms are fewer than 40% over the datasets we tested and there are still are large margin of improvement upon existing algorithms concerning 3D sparse corresopondence search, and the ability to register point clouds with complex geometry and occlusions. With the evaluated statistics on three datasets, we conclude the best-performing methods for each step and provide our recommendations, and outlook future efforts.

cs.CV↗

Measuring Forgetting of Memorized Training Examples

Machine learning models exhibit two seemingly contradictory phenomena: training data memorization, and various forms of forgetting. In memorization, models overfit specific training examples and become susceptible to privacy attacks. In forgetting, examples which appeared early in training are forgotten by the end. In this work, we connect these phenomena. We propose a technique to measure to what extent models "forget" the specifics of training examples, becoming less susceptible to privacy attacks on examples they have not seen recently. We show that, while non-convex models can memorize data forever in the worst-case, standard image, speech, and language models empirically do forget examples over time. We identify nondeterminism as a potential explanation, showing that deterministically trained models do not forget. Our results suggest that examples seen early when training with extremely large datasets - for instance those examples used to pre-train a model - may observe privacy benefits at the expense of examples seen later.

cs.LG↗

Characterizing the Performance of Emerging Deep Learning, Graph, and High Performance Computing Workloads Under Interference

Throughput-oriented computing via co-running multiple applications in the same machine has been widely adopted to achieve high hardware utilization and energy saving on modern supercomputers and data centers. However, efficiently co-running applications raises new design challenges, mainly because applications with diverse requirements can stress out shared hardware resources (IO, Network and Cache) at various levels. The disparities in resource usage can result in interference, which in turn can lead to unpredictable co-running behaviors. To better understand application interference, prior work provided detailed execution characterization. However, these characterization approaches either emphasize on traditional benchmarks or fall into a single application domain. To address this issue, we study 25 up-to-date applications and benchmarks from various application domains and form 625 consolidation pairs to thoroughly analyze the execution interference caused by application co-running. Moreover, we leverage mini-benchmarks and real applications to pinpoint the provenance of co-running interference in both hardware and software aspects.

cs.PF↗

Multi-Task Differential Privacy Under Distribution Skew

We study the problem of multi-task learning under user-level differential privacy, in which $n$ users contribute data to $m$ tasks, each involving a subset of users. One important aspect of the problem, that can significantly impact quality, is the distribution skew among tasks. Certain tasks may have much fewer data samples than others, making them more susceptible to the noise added for privacy. It is natural to ask whether algorithms can adapt to this skew to improve the overall utility. We give a systematic analysis of the problem, by studying how to optimally allocate a user's privacy budget among tasks. We propose a generic algorithm, based on an adaptive reweighting of the empirical loss, and show that when there is task distribution skew, this gives a quantifiable improvement of excess empirical risk. Experimental studies on recommendation problems that exhibit a long tail of small tasks, demonstrate that our methods significantly improve utility, achieving the state of the art on two standard benchmarks.

cs.LG↗

ViF-SD2E: A Robust Weakly-Supervised Method for Neural Decoding

Neural decoding plays a vital role in the interaction between the brain and the outside world. In this paper, we directly decode the movement track of a finger based on the neural signals of a macaque. Supervised regression methods may overfit to actual labels containing noise, and require a high labeling cost, while unsupervised approaches often have unsatisfactory accuracy. Besides, the spatial and temporal information is often ignored or not well exploited by those methods. This motivates us to propose a robust weakly-supervised method, called ViF-SD2E, for neural decoding. In particular, it consists of a space-division (SD) module and a exploration--exploitation (2E) strategy, to effectively exploit both the spatial information of the outside world and the temporal information of neural activity, where the SD2E output is analogized with the weak 0/1 vision-feedback (ViF) label for training. It is worth noting that the designed ViF-SD2E is based on a symmetric phenomenon between the unsupervised decoding trajectory and the real trajectory in previous observations, then a cognitive pattern of fuzzy (robust) interaction in the nervous system may be discovered by us. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which can be sometimes comparable to supervised counterparts.

cs.NE↗

Membership Inference Attacks From First Principles

A membership inference attack allows an adversary to query a trained machine learning model to predict whether or not a particular example was contained in the model's training dataset. These attacks are currently evaluated using average-case "accuracy" metrics that fail to characterize whether the attack can confidently identify any members of the training set. We argue that attacks should instead be evaluated by computing their true-positive rate at low (e.g., <0.1%) false-positive rates, and find most prior attacks perform poorly when evaluated in this way. To address this we develop a Likelihood Ratio Attack (LiRA) that carefully combines multiple ideas from the literature. Our attack is 10x more powerful at low false-positive rates, and also strictly dominates prior attacks on existing metrics.

cs.CR↗

A Novel Intrinsic Image Decomposition Method to Recover Albedo for Aerial Images in Photogrammetry Processing

Recovering surface albedos from photogrammetric images for realistic rendering and synthetic environments can greatly facilitate its downstream applications in VR/AR/MR and digital twins. The textured 3D models from standard photogrammetric pipelines are suboptimal to these applications because these textures are directly derived from images, which intrinsically embedded the spatially and temporally variant environmental lighting information, such as the sun illumination, direction, causing different looks of the surface, making such models less realistic when used in 3D rendering under synthetic lightings. On the other hand, since albedo images are less variable by environmental lighting, it can, in turn, benefit basic photogrammetric processing. In this paper, we attack the problem of albedo recovery for aerial images for the photogrammetric process and demonstrate the benefit of albedo recovery for photogrammetry data processing through enhanced feature matching and dense matching. To this end, we proposed an image formation model with respect to outdoor aerial imagery under natural illumination conditions; we then, derived the inverse model to estimate the albedo by utilizing the typical photogrammetric products as an initial approximation of the geometry. The estimated albedo images are tested in intrinsic image decomposition, relighting, feature matching, and dense matching/point cloud generation results. Both synthetic and real-world experiments have demonstrated that our method outperforms existing methods and can enhance photogrammetric processing.

cs.CV↗

Public Data-Assisted Mirror Descent for Private Model Training

In this paper, we revisit the problem of using in-distribution public data to improve the privacy/utility trade-offs for differentially private (DP) model training. (Here, public data refers to auxiliary data sets that have no privacy concerns.) We design a natural variant of DP mirror descent, where the DP gradients of the private/sensitive data act as the linear term, and the loss generated by the public data as the mirror map. We show that, for linear regression with feature vectors drawn from a non-isotropic sub-Gaussian distribution, our algorithm, PDA-DPMD (a variant of mirror descent), provides population risk guarantees that are asymptotically better than the best known guarantees under DP (without having access to public data), when the number of public data samples ($n_{\sf pub}$) is sufficiently large. We further show that our algorithm has natural "noise stability" properties that control the variance due to noise added to ensure DP. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm by showing privacy/utility trade-offs on four benchmark datasets (StackOverflow, WikiText-2, CIFAR-10, and EMNIST). We show that our algorithm not only significantly improves over traditional DP-SGD, which does not have access to public data, but to our knowledge is the first to improve over DP-SGD on models that have been pre-trained with public data.

cs.LG↗