arXiv subjects

Sreyas Mohan

Publications and source records attributed to Sreyas Mohan.

23 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Be Like Water: Robustness to Extraneous Variables Via Adaptive Feature Normalization

Extraneous variables are variables that are irrelevant for a certain task, but heavily affect the distribution of the available data. In this work, we show that the presence of such variables can degrade the performance of deep-learning models. We study three datasets where there is a strong influence of known extraneous variables: classification of upper-body movements in stroke patients, annotation of surgical activities, and recognition of corrupted images. Models trained with batch normalization learn features that are highly dependent on the extraneous variables. In batch normalization, the statistics used to normalize the features are learned from the training set and fixed at test time, which produces a mismatch in the presence of varying extraneous variables. We demonstrate that estimating the feature statistics adaptively during inference, as in instance normalization, addresses this issue, producing normalized features that are more robust to changes in the extraneous variables. This results in a significant gain in performance for different network architectures and choices of feature statistics.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Robust and interpretable blind image denoising via bias-free convolutional neural networks

Deep convolutional networks often append additive constant ("bias") terms to their convolution operations, enabling a richer repertoire of functional mappings. Biases are also used to facilitate training, by subtracting mean response over batches of training images (a component of "batch normalization"). Recent state-of-the-art blind denoising methods (e.g., DnCNN) seem to require these terms for their success. Here, however, we show that these networks systematically overfit the noise levels for which they are trained: when deployed at noise levels outside the training range, performance degrades dramatically. In contrast, a bias-free architecture -- obtained by removing the constant terms in every layer of the network, including those used for batch normalization-- generalizes robustly across noise levels, while preserving state-of-the-art performance within the training range. Locally, the bias-free network acts linearly on the noisy image, enabling direct analysis of network behavior via standard linear-algebraic tools. These analyses provide interpretations of network functionality in terms of nonlinear adaptive filtering, and projection onto a union of low-dimensional subspaces, connecting the learning-based method to more traditional denoising methodology.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2019

Knee Cartilage Segmentation Using Diffusion-Weighted MRI

The integrity of articular cartilage is a crucial aspect in the early diagnosis of osteoarthritis (OA). Many novel MRI techniques have the potential to assess compositional changes of the cartilage extracellular matrix. Among these techniques, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of cartilage provides a simultaneous assessment of the two principal components of the solid matrix: collagen structure and proteoglycan concentration. DTI, as for any other compositional MRI technique, require a human expert to perform segmentation manually. The manual segmentation is error-prone and time-consuming ($\sim$ few hours per subject). We use an ensemble of modified U-Nets to automate this segmentation task. We benchmark our model against a human expert test-retest segmentation and conclude that our model is superior for Patellar and Tibial cartilage using dice score as the comparison metric. In the end, we do a perturbation analysis to understand the sensitivity of our model to the different components of our input. We also provide confidence maps for the predictions so that radiologists can tweak the model predictions as required. The model has been deployed in practice. In conclusion, cartilage segmentation on DW-MRI images with modified U-Nets achieves accuracy that outperforms the human segmenter. Code is available at https://github.com/aakashrkaku/knee-cartilage-segmentation

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Data Driven Coded Aperture Design for Depth Recovery

Inserting a patterned occluder at the aperture of a camera lens has been shown to improve the recovery of depth map and all-focus image compared to a fully open aperture. However, design of the aperture pattern plays a very critical role. Previous approaches for designing aperture codes make simple assumptions on image distributions to obtain metrics for evaluating aperture codes. However, real images may not follow those assumptions and hence the designed code may not be optimal for them. To address this drawback we propose a data driven approach for learning the optimal aperture pattern to recover depth map from a single coded image. We propose a two stage architecture where, in the first stage we simulate coded aperture images from a training dataset of all-focus images and depth maps and in the second stage we recover the depth map using a deep neural network. We demonstrate that our learned aperture code performs better than previously designed codes even on code design metrics proposed by previous approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Blind nonnegative source separation using biological neural networks

Blind source separation, i.e. extraction of independent sources from a mixture, is an important problem for both artificial and natural signal processing. Here, we address a special case of this problem when sources (but not the mixing matrix) are known to be nonnegative, for example, due to the physical nature of the sources. We search for the solution to this problem that can be implemented using biologically plausible neural networks. Specifically, we consider the online setting where the dataset is streamed to a neural network. The novelty of our approach is that we formulate blind nonnegative source separation as a similarity matching problem and derive neural networks from the similarity matching objective. Importantly, synaptic weights in our networks are updated according to biologically plausible local learning rules.

q-bio.NC↗