arXiv subjects

Yi Fang

Publications and source records attributed to Yi Fang.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Residual Networks as Flows of Velocity Fields for Diffeomorphic Time Series Alignment

Non-linear (large) time warping is a challenging source of nuisance in time-series analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel diffeomorphic temporal transformer network for both pairwise and joint time-series alignment. Our ResNet-TW (Deep Residual Network for Time Warping) tackles the alignment problem by compositing a flow of incremental diffeomorphic mappings. Governed by the flow equation, our Residual Network (ResNet) builds smooth, fluid and regular flows of velocity fields and consequently generates smooth and invertible transformations (i.e. diffeomorphic warping functions). Inspired by the elegant Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping (LDDMM) framework, the final transformation is built by the flow of time-dependent vector fields which are none other than the building blocks of our Residual Network. The latter is naturally viewed as an Eulerian discretization schema of the flow equation (an ODE). Once trained, our ResNet-TW aligns unseen data by a single inexpensive forward pass. As we show in experiments on both univariate (84 datasets from UCR archive) and multivariate time-series (MSR Action-3D, Florence-3D and MSR Daily Activity), ResNet-TW achieves competitive performance in joint alignment and classification.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

G-VAE, a Geometric Convolutional VAE for ProteinStructure Generation

Analyzing the structure of proteins is a key part of understanding their functions and thus their role in biology at the molecular level. In addition, design new proteins in a methodical way is a major engineering challenge. In this work, we introduce a joint geometric-neural networks approach for comparing, deforming and generating 3D protein structures. Viewing protein structures as 3D open curves, we adopt the Square Root Velocity Function (SRVF) representation and leverage its suitable geometric properties along with Deep Residual Networks (ResNets) for a joint registration and comparison. Our ResNets handle better large protein deformations while being more computationally efficient. On top of the mathematical framework, we further design a Geometric Variational Auto-Encoder (G-VAE), that once trained, maps original, previously unseen structures, into a low-dimensional (latent) hyper-sphere. Motivated by the spherical structure of the pre-shape space, we naturally adopt the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution to model our hidden variables. We test the effectiveness of our models by generating novel protein structures and predicting completions of corrupted protein structures. Experimental results show that our method is able to generate plausible structures, different from the structures in the training data.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

A New Frequency-Bin-Index LoRa System for High-Data-Rate Transmission: Design and Performance Analysis

As an attempt to tackle the low-data-rate issue of the conventional LoRa systems, we propose two novel frequency-bin-index (FBI) LoRa schemes. In scheme I, the indices of starting frequency bins (SFBs) are utilized to carry the information bits. To facilitate the actual implementation, the SFBs of each LoRa signal are divided into several groups prior to the modulation process in the proposed FBI-LoRa system. To further improve the system flexibility, we formulate a generalized modulation scheme and propose scheme II by treating the SFB groups as an additional type of transmission entity. In scheme II, the combination of SFB indices and that of SFB group indices are both exploited to carry the information bits. We derive the theoretical expressions for bit-error-rate (BER) and throughput of the proposed FBI-LoRa system with two modulation schemes over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels. Theoretical and simulation results show that the proposed FBI-LoRa schemes can significantly increases the transmission throughput compared with the existing LoRa systems at the expense of a slight loss in BER performance. Thanks to the appealing superiorities, the proposed FBI-LoRa system is a promising alternative for high-data-rate Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2021

Rate-Diverse Gaussian Multiple Access: Efficient Encoder and Decoder Designs

In this work, we develop a pair of rate-diverse encoder and decoder for a two-user Gaussian multiple access channel (GMAC). The proposed scheme enables the users to transmit with the same codeword length but different coding rates under diverse user channel conditions. First, we propose the row-combining (RC) method and row-extending (RE) method to design practical low-density parity-check (LDPC) channel codes for rate-diverse GMAC. Second, we develop an iterative rate-diverse joint user messages decoding (RDJD) algorithm for GMAC, where all user messages are decoded with a single parity-check matrix. In contrast to the conventional network-coded multiple access (NCMA) and compute-forward multiple access (CFMA) schemes that first recover a linear combination of the transmitted codewords and then decode both user messages, this work can decode both the user messages simultaneously. Extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis and simulation results indicate that RDJD can achieve gains up to 1.0 dB over NCMA and CFMA in the two-user GMAC. In particular, we show that there exists an optimal rate allocation for the two users to achieve the best decoding performance given the channel conditions and sum rate.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2021

Correction to the photometric magnitudes of the Gaia Early Data Release 3

In this letter, we have carried out an independent validation of the Gaia EDR3 photometry using about 10,000 Landolt standard stars from Clem & Landolt (2013). Using a machine learning technique, the UBVRI magnitudes are converted into the Gaia magnitudes and colors and then compared to those in the EDR3, with the effect of metallicity incorporated. Our result confirms the significant improvements in the calibration process of the Gaia EDR3. Yet modest trends up to 10 mmag with G magnitude are found for all the magnitudes and colors for the 10 < G < 19 mag range, particularly for the bright and faint ends. With the aid of synthetic magnitudes computed on the CALSPEC spectra with the Gaia EDR3 passbands, absolute corrections are further obtained, paving the way for optimal usage of the Gaia EDR3 photometry in high accuracy investigations.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2020

Universal Urban Spreading Pattern of COVID-19 and Its Underlying Mechanism

Currently, the global situation of COVID-19 is aggravating, pressingly calling for efficient control and prevention measures. Understanding spreading pattern of COVID-19 has been widely recognized as a vital step for implementing non-pharmaceutical measures. Previous studies investigated such an issue in large-scale (e.g., inter-country or inter-state) scenarios while urban spreading pattern still remains an open issue. Here, we fill this gap by leveraging the trajectory data of 197,808 smartphone users (including 17,808 anonymous confirmed cases) in 9 cities in China. We find a universal spreading pattern in all cities: the spatial distribution of confirmed cases follows a power-law-like model and the spreading centroid is time-invariant. Moreover, we reveal that human mobility in a city drives the spatialtemporal spreading process: long average travelling distance results in a high growth rate of spreading radius and wide spatial diffusion of confirmed cases. With such insight, we adopt Kendall model to simulate urban spreading of COVID-19 that can well fit the real spreading process. Our results unveil the underlying mechanism behind the spatial-temporal urban evolution of COVID-19, and can be used to evaluate the performance of mobility restriction policies implemented by many governments and to estimate the evolving spreading situation of COVID-19.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2020

Leveraging an Efficient and Semantic Location Embedding to Seek New Ports of Bike Share Services

For short distance traveling in crowded urban areas, bike share services are becoming popular owing to the flexibility and convenience. To expand the service coverage, one of the key tasks is to seek new service ports, which requires to well understand the underlying features of the existing service ports. In this paper, we propose a new model, named for Efficient and Semantic Location Embedding (ESLE), which carries both geospatial and semantic information of the geo-locations. To generate ESLE, we first train a multi-label model with a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) by feeding the static map-tile images and then extract location embedding vectors from the model. Compared to most recent relevant literature, ESLE is not only much cheaper in computation, but also easier to interpret via a systematic semantic analysis. Finally, we apply ESLE to seek new service ports for NTT DOCOMO's bike share services operated in Japan. The initial results demonstrate the effectiveness of ESLE, and provide a few insights that might be difficult to discover by using the conventional approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

3D Meta-Registration: Learning to Learn Registration of 3D Point Clouds

Deep learning-based point cloud registration models are often generalized from extensive training over a large volume of data to learn the ability to predict the desired geometric transformation to register 3D point clouds. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning based 3D registration model, named 3D Meta-Registration, that is capable of rapidly adapting and well generalizing to new 3D registration tasks for unseen 3D point clouds. Our 3D Meta-Registration gains a competitive advantage by training over a variety of 3D registration tasks, which leads to an optimized model for the best performance on the distribution of registration tasks including potentially unseen tasks. Specifically, the proposed 3D Meta-Registration model consists of two modules: 3D registration learner and 3D registration meta-learner. During the training, the 3D registration learner is trained to complete a specific registration task aiming to determine the desired geometric transformation that aligns the source point cloud with the target one. In the meantime, the 3D registration meta-learner is trained to provide the optimal parameters to update the 3D registration learner based on the learned task distribution. After training, the 3D registration meta-learner, which is learned with the optimized coverage of distribution of 3D registration tasks, is able to dynamically update 3D registration learners with desired parameters to rapidly adapt to new registration tasks. We tested our model on synthesized dataset ModelNet and FlyingThings3D, as well as real-world dataset KITTI. Experimental results demonstrate that 3D Meta-Registration achieves superior performance over other previous techniques (e.g. FlowNet3D).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

3D Meta Point Signature: Learning to Learn 3D Point Signature for 3D Dense Shape Correspondence

Point signature, a representation describing the structural neighborhood of a point in 3D shapes, can be applied to establish correspondences between points in 3D shapes. Conventional methods apply a weight-sharing network, e.g., any kind of graph neural networks, across all neighborhoods to directly generate point signatures and gain the generalization ability by extensive training over a large amount of training samples from scratch. However, these methods lack the flexibility in rapidly adapting to unseen neighborhood structures and thus generalizes poorly on new point sets. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning based 3D point signature model, named 3Dmetapointsignature (MEPS) network, that is capable of learning robust point signatures in 3D shapes. By regarding each point signature learning process as a task, our method obtains an optimized model over the best performance on the distribution of all tasks, generating reliable signatures for new tasks, i.e., signatures of unseen point neighborhoods. Specifically, the MEPS consists of two modules: a base signature learner and a meta signature learner. During training, the base-learner is trained to perform specific signature learning tasks. In the meantime, the meta-learner is trained to update the base-learner with optimal parameters. During testing, the meta-learner that is learned with the distribution of all tasks can adaptively change parameters of the base-learner, accommodating to unseen local neighborhoods. We evaluate the MEPS model on two datasets, e.g., FAUST and TOSCA, for dense 3Dshape correspondence. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only gains significant improvements over the baseline model and achieves state-of-the-art results, but also is capable of handling unseen 3D shapes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Deep-3DAligner: Unsupervised 3D Point Set Registration Network With Optimizable Latent Vector

Point cloud registration is the process of aligning a pair of point sets via searching for a geometric transformation. Unlike classical optimization-based methods, recent learning-based methods leverage the power of deep learning for registering a pair of point sets. In this paper, we propose to develop a novel model that organically integrates the optimization to learning, aiming to address the technical challenges in 3D registration. More specifically, in addition to the deep transformation decoding network, our framework introduce an optimizable deep \underline{S}patial \underline{C}orrelation \underline{R}epresentation (SCR) feature. The SCR feature and weights of the transformation decoder network are jointly updated towards the minimization of an unsupervised alignment loss. We further propose an adaptive Chamfer loss for aligning partial shapes. To verify the performance of our proposed method, we conducted extensive experiments on the ModelNet40 dataset. The results demonstrate that our method achieves significantly better performance than the previous state-of-the-art approaches in the full/partial point set registration task.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Geometry-Aware Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images via Implicit Height Estimation

Recent studies have shown the benefits of using additional elevation data (e.g., DSM) for enhancing the performance of the semantic segmentation of aerial images. However, previous methods mostly adopt 3D elevation information as additional inputs. While in many real-world applications, one does not have the corresponding DSM information at hand and the spatial resolution of acquired DSM images usually do not match the aerial images. To alleviate this data constraint and also take advantage of 3D elevation information, in this paper, we introduce a geometry-aware segmentation model that achieves accurate semantic labeling of aerial images via joint height estimation. Instead of using a single-stream encoder-decoder network for semantic labeling, we design a separate decoder branch to predict the height map and use the DSM images as side supervision to train this newly designed decoder branch. In this way, our model does not require DSM as model input and still benefits from the helpful 3D geometric information during training. Moreover, we develop a new geometry-aware convolution module that fuses the 3D geometric features from the height decoder branch and the 2D contextual features from the semantic segmentation branch. The fused feature embeddings can produce geometry-aware segmentation maps with enhanced performance. Our model is trained with DSM images as side supervision, while in the inference stage, it does not require DSM data and directly predicts the semantic labels in an end-to-end fashion. Experiments on ISPRS Vaihingen and Potsdam datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for the semantic segmentation of aerial images. The proposed model achieves remarkable performance on both datasets without using any hand-crafted features or post-processing.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Unsupervised Partial Point Set Registration via Joint Shape Completion and Registration

We propose a self-supervised method for partial point set registration. While recent proposed learning-based methods have achieved impressive registration performance on the full shape observations, these methods mostly suffer from performance degradation when dealing with partial shapes. To bridge the performance gaps between partial point set registration with full point set registration, we proposed to incorporate a shape completion network to benefit the registration process. To achieve this, we design a latent code for each pair of shapes, which can be regarded as a geometric encoding of the target shape. By doing so, our model does need an explicit feature embedding network to learn the feature encodings. More importantly, both our shape completion network and the point set registration network take the shared latent codes as input, which are optimized along with the parameters of two decoder networks in the training process. Therefore, the point set registration process can thus benefit from the joint optimization process of latent codes, which are enforced to represent the information of full shape instead of partial ones. In the inference stage, we fix the network parameter and optimize the latent codes to get the optimal shape completion and registration results. Our proposed method is pure unsupervised and does not need any ground truth supervision. Experiments on the ModelNet40 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for partial point set registration.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Robust Image Matching By Dynamic Feature Selection

Estimating dense correspondences between images is a long-standing image under-standing task. Recent works introduce convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract high-level feature maps and find correspondences through feature matching. However,high-level feature maps are in low spatial resolution and therefore insufficient to provide accurate and fine-grained features to distinguish intra-class variations for correspondence matching. To address this problem, we generate robust features by dynamically selecting features at different scales. To resolve two critical issues in feature selection,i.e.,how many and which scales of features to be selected, we frame the feature selection process as a sequential Markov decision-making process (MDP) and introduce an optimal selection strategy using reinforcement learning (RL). We define an RL environment for image matching in which each individual action either requires new features or terminates the selection episode by referring a matching score. Deep neural networks are incorporated into our method and trained for decision making. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable/superior performance with state-of-the-art methods on three benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our feature selection strategy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

GP-Aligner: Unsupervised Non-rigid Groupwise Point Set Registration Based On Optimized Group Latent Descriptor

In this paper, we propose a novel method named GP-Aligner to deal with the problem of non-rigid groupwise point set registration. Compared to previous non-learning approaches, our proposed method gains competitive advantages by leveraging the power of deep neural networks to effectively and efficiently learn to align a large number of highly deformed 3D shapes with superior performance. Unlike most learning-based methods that use an explicit feature encoding network to extract the per-shape features and their correlations, our model leverages a model-free learnable latent descriptor to characterize the group relationship. More specifically, for a given group we first define an optimizable Group Latent Descriptor (GLD) to characterize the gruopwise relationship among a group of point sets. Each GLD is randomly initialized from a Gaussian distribution and then concatenated with the coordinates of each point of the associated point sets in the group. A neural network-based decoder is further constructed to predict the coherent drifts as the desired transformation from input groups of shapes to aligned groups of shapes. During the optimization process, GP-Aligner jointly updates all GLDs and weight parameters of the decoder network towards the minimization of an unsupervised groupwise alignment loss. After optimization, for each group our model coherently drives each point set towards a middle, common position (shape) without specifying one as the target. GP-Aligner does not require large-scale training data for network training and it can directly align groups of point sets in a one-stage optimization process. GP-Aligner shows both accuracy and computational efficiency improvement in comparison with state-of-the-art methods for groupwise point set registration. Moreover, GP-Aligner is shown great efficiency in aligning a large number of groups of real-world 3D shapes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Design and Performance Analysis of a New STBC-MIMO LoRa System

LoRa is a modulation technology for low power wide area networks (LPWAN) with enormous potential in 5G era. However, the performance of LoRa system deteriorates seriously in fading-channel environments. To tackle this problem, in this paper we introduce multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) configuration employing space-time block coding (STBC) schemes into the LoRa system to formulate an STBC-MIMO LoRa system. Then, we investigate the theoretical performance of the proposed system over Rayleigh fading channels. To this end, we derive the distribution of the decision metric for the demodulator in the proposed system. Based on the above distribution, we propose the closed-form approximated bit error rate (BER) expression of the proposed system when perfect and imperfect channel information states (CSIs) are considered. In addition, we analyze the diversity order of the proposed system. The result demonstrates that the diversity order of the system in the imperfect CSI scenario with fixed channel estimate error variance is zero. However, in the imperfect CSI scenario with a decreasing channel estimate error variance and the perfect CSI scenario, the system can achieve full diversity. Finally, experimental results verify the accuracy of the theoretical analysis and the excellent performance of the proposed system. Due to such superiority, the proposed STBC-MIMO LoRa system can be considered as a good scheme for LPWAN.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Meta Deformation Network: Meta Functionals for Shape Correspondence

We present a new technique named "Meta Deformation Network" for 3D shape matching via deformation, in which a deep neural network maps a reference shape onto the parameters of a second neural network whose task is to give the correspondence between a learned template and query shape via deformation. We categorize the second neural network as a meta-function, or a function generated by another function, as its parameters are dynamically given by the first network on a per-input basis. This leads to a straightforward overall architecture and faster execution speeds, without loss in the quality of the deformation of the template. We show in our experiments that Meta Deformation Network leads to improvements on the MPI-FAUST Inter Challenge over designs that utilized a conventional decoder design that has non-dynamic parameters.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

DeepTracking-Net: 3D Tracking with Unsupervised Learning of Continuous Flow

This paper deals with the problem of 3D tracking, i.e., to find dense correspondences in a sequence of time-varying 3D shapes. Despite deep learning approaches have achieved promising performance for pairwise dense 3D shapes matching, it is a great challenge to generalize those approaches for the tracking of 3D time-varying geometries. In this paper, we aim at handling the problem of 3D tracking, which provides the tracking of the consecutive frames of 3D shapes. We propose a novel unsupervised 3D shape registration framework named DeepTracking-Net, which uses the deep neural networks (DNNs) as auxiliary functions to produce spatially and temporally continuous displacement fields for 3D tracking of objects in a temporal order. Our key novelty is that we present a novel temporal-aware correspondence descriptor (TCD) that captures spatio-temporal essence from consecutive 3D point cloud frames. Specifically, our DeepTracking-Net starts with optimizing a randomly initialized latent TCD. The TCD is then decoded to regress a continuous flow (i.e. a displacement vector field) which assigns a motion vector to every point of time-varying 3D shapes. Our DeepTracking-Net jointly optimizes TCDs and DNNs' weights towards the minimization of an unsupervised alignment loss. Experiments on both simulated and real data sets demonstrate that our unsupervised DeepTracking-Net outperforms the current supervised state-of-the-art method. In addition, we prepare a new synthetic 3D data, named SynMotions, to the 3D tracking and recognition community.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

3DMotion-Net: Learning Continuous Flow Function for 3D Motion Prediction

In this paper, we deal with the problem to predict the future 3D motions of 3D object scans from previous two consecutive frames. Previous methods mostly focus on sparse motion prediction in the form of skeletons. While in this paper we focus on predicting dense 3D motions in the from of 3D point clouds. To approach this problem, we propose a self-supervised approach that leverages the power of the deep neural network to learn a continuous flow function of 3D point clouds that can predict temporally consistent future motions and naturally bring out the correspondences among consecutive point clouds at the same time. More specifically, in our approach, to eliminate the unsolved and challenging process of defining a discrete point convolution on 3D point cloud sequences to encode spatial and temporal information, we introduce a learnable latent code to represent the temporal-aware shape descriptor which is optimized during model training. Moreover, a temporally consistent motion Morpher is proposed to learn a continuous flow field which deforms a 3D scan from the current frame to the next frame. We perform extensive experiments on D-FAUST, SCAPE and TOSCA benchmark data sets and the results demonstrate that our approach is capable of handling temporally inconsistent input and produces consistent future 3D motion while requiring no ground truth supervision.

cs.CV↗