This paper builds upon the current methods to increase their capability and automation for 3D surface construction from noisy and potentially sparse point clouds. It presents an analysis of an artificial neural network surface regression and mapping method, describing caveats, improvements and justification for the different approach.
Yumer and Kara suggest a NN regression method of surface fitting and hole stitching. The flexibility achieved by an adaptive neural network topology differs from previous attempts as the ideal topology of the network obtained (the hyperaparmeters) are not fixed @cite_11 , meaning the network can be tailored to each point cloud automatically. This method is good for removing noise as the underlying geometry of the point data and not random noise is represented in the final surface.
@cite_11
2963382930 2793035069 2734271713 1944319588 2800435828 2042249109 2964340589 2963951674 2746193234 2287558205 236111108 2119814172 2340427832 2584994008 2794561444 2752640714 2891561769 2775143585 2762473905 2139906443
Deep convolutional neural networks have liberated its extraordinary power on various tasks. However, it is still very challenging to deploy state-of-the-art models into real-world applications due to their high computational complexity. How can we design a compact and effective network without massive experiments and expert knowledge? In this paper, we propose a simple and effective framework to learn and prune deep models in an end-to-end manner. In our framework, a new type of parameter – scaling factor is first introduced to scale the outputs of specific structures, such as neurons, groups or residual blocks. Then we add sparsity regularizations on these factors, and solve this optimization problem by a modified stochastic Accelerated Proximal Gradient (APG) method. By forcing some of the factors to zero, we can safely remove the corresponding structures, thus prune the unimportant parts of a CNN. Comparing with other structure selection methods that may need thousands of trials or iterative fine-tuning, our method is trained fully end-to-end in one training pass without bells and whistles. We evaluate our method, Sparse Structure Selection with several state-of-the-art CNNs, and demonstrate very promising results with adaptive depth and width selection. Code is available at: https: github.com huangzehao sparse-structure-selection. While the research on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is progressing quickly, the real-world deployment of these models is often limited by computing resources and memory constraints. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a novel filter pruning method to compress and accelerate CNNs. Our work is based on the linear relationship identified in different feature map subspaces via visualization of feature maps. Such linear relationship implies that the information in CNNs is redundant. Our method eliminates the redundancy in convolutional filters by applying subspace clustering to feature maps. In this way, most of the representative information in the network can be retained in each cluster. Therefore, our method provides an effective solution to filter pruning for which most existing methods directly remove filters based on simple heuristics. The proposed method is independent of the network structure, thus it can be adopted by any off-the-shelf deep learning libraries. Experiments on different networks and tasks show that our method outperforms existing techniques before fine-tuning, and achieves the state-of-the-art results after fine-tuning. Deep convolutional neural networks have liberated its extraordinary power on various tasks. However, it is still very challenging to deploy state-of-the-art models into real-world applications due to their high computational complexity. How can we design a compact and effective network without massive experiments and expert knowledge? In this paper, we propose a simple and effective framework to learn and prune deep models in an end-to-end manner. In our framework, a new type of parameter -- scaling factor is first introduced to scale the outputs of specific structures, such as neurons, groups or residual blocks. Then we add sparsity regularizations on these factors, and solve this optimization problem by a modified stochastic Accelerated Proximal Gradient (APG) method. By forcing some of the factors to zero, we can safely remove the corresponding structures, thus prune the unimportant parts of a CNN. Comparing with other structure selection methods that may need thousands of trials or iterative fine-tuning, our method is trained fully end-to-end in one training pass without bells and whistles. We evaluate our method, Sparse Structure Selection with several state-of-the-art CNNs, and demonstrate very promising results with adaptive depth and width selection. In this paper, we describe a system for the reconstruction of deforming geometry from a time sequence of unstructured, noisy point clouds, as produced by recent real-time range scanning devices. Our technique reconstructs both the geometry and dense correspondences over time. Using the correspondences, holes due to occlusion are filled in from other frames. Our reconstruction technique is based on a statistical framework: The reconstruction should both match the measured data points and maximize prior probability densities that prefer smoothness, rigid deformation and smooth movements over time. The optimization procedure consists of an inner loop that optimizes the 4D shape using continuous numerical optimization and an outer loop that infers the discrete 4D topology of the data set using an iterative model assembly algorithm. We apply the technique to a variety of data sets, demonstrating that the new approach is capable of robustly retrieving animated models with correspondences from data sets suffering from significant noise, outliers and acquisition holes. We propose a system for surface completion and inpainting of 3D shapes using denoising autoencoders with convolutional layers, learnt on local patches. Our method uses height map based local patches parameterized using 3D mesh quadrangulation of the low resolution input shape. This provides us sufficient amount of local 3D patch dataset to learn deep generative Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for the task of repairing moderate sized holes. We design generative networks specifically suited for the 3D encoding following ideas from the recent progress in 2D inpainting, and show our results to be better than the previous methods of surface inpainting that use linear dictionary. We validate our method on both synthetic shapes and real world scans. There has been a long history of using neural networks for combinatorial optimization and constraint satisfaction problems. Symmetric Hopfield networks and similar approaches use steepest descent dynamics, and they always converge to the closest local minimum of the energy landscape. For finding global minima additional parameter-sensitive techniques are used, such as classical simulated annealing or the so-called chaotic simulated annealing, which induces chaotic dynamics by addition of extra terms to the energy landscape. Here we show that asymmetric continuous-time neural networks can solve constraint satisfaction problems without getting trapped in non-solution attractors. We concentrate on a model solving Boolean satisfiability (k-SAT), which is a quintessential NP-complete problem. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the stable fixed points of the neural network and the k-SAT solutions and we present numerical evidence that limit cycles may also be avoided by appropriately choosing the parameters of the model. This optimal parameter region is fairly independent of the size and hardness of instances, this way parameters can be chosen independently of the properties of problems and no tuning is required during the dynamical process. The model is similar to cellular neural networks already used in CNN computers. On an analog device solving a SAT problem would take a single operation: the connection weights are determined by the k-SAT instance and starting from any initial condition the system searches until finding a solution. In this new approach transient chaotic behavior appears as a natural consequence of optimization hardness and not as an externally induced effect. Conventional convolutional neural networks use either a linear or a nonlinear filter to extract features from an image patch (region) of spatial size @math (typically, @math is small and is equal to @math , e.g., @math is 5 or 7). Generally, the size of the filter is equal to the size @math of the input patch. We argue that the representational ability of equal-size strategy is not strong enough. To overcome the drawback, we propose to use subpatch filter whose spatial size @math is smaller than @math . The proposed subpatch filter consists of two subsequent filters. The first one is a linear filter of spatial size @math and is aimed at extracting features from spatial domain. The second one is of spatial size @math and is used for strengthening the connection between different input feature channels and for reducing the number of parameters. The subpatch filter convolves with the input patch and the resulting network is called a subpatch network. Taking the output of one subpatch network as input, we further repeat constructing subpatch networks until the output contains only one neuron in spatial domain. These subpatch networks form a new network called the cascaded subpatch network (CSNet). The feature layer generated by CSNet is called the csconv layer. For the whole input image, we construct a deep neural network by stacking a sequence of csconv layers. Experimental results on five benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and compactness of the proposed CSNet. For example, our CSNet reaches a test error of 5.68 on the CIFAR10 data set without model averaging. To the best of our knowledge, this is the best result ever obtained on the CIFAR10 data set. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become a key element in the recent breakthrough of salient object detection. However, existing CNN-based methods are based on either patchwise (regionwise) training and inference or fully convolutional networks. Methods in the former category are generally time-consuming due to severe storage and computational redundancies among overlapping patches. To overcome this deficiency, methods in the second category attempt to directly map a raw input image to a predicted dense saliency map in a single network forward pass. Though being very efficient, it is arduous for these methods to detect salient objects of different scales or salient regions with weak semantic information. In this paper, we develop hybrid contrast-oriented deep neural networks to overcome the aforementioned limitations. Each of our deep networks is composed of two complementary components, including a fully convolutional stream for dense prediction and a segment-level spatial pooling stream for sparse saliency inference. We further propose an attentional module that learns weight maps for fusing the two saliency predictions from these two streams. A tailored alternate scheme is designed to train these deep networks by fine-tuning pretrained baseline models. Finally, a customized fully connected conditional random field model incorporating a salient contour feature embedding can be optionally applied as a postprocessing step to improve spatial coherence and contour positioning in the fused result from these two streams. Extensive experiments on six benchmark data sets demonstrate that our proposed model can significantly outperform the state of the art in terms of all popular evaluation metrics. This paper presents a novel method for fully automatic and convenient extrinsic calibration of a 3D LiDAR and a panoramic camera with a normally printed chessboard. The proposed method is based on the 3D corner estimation of the chessboard from the sparse point cloud generated by one frame scan of the LiDAR. To estimate the corners, we formulate a full-scale model of the chessboard and fit it to the segmented 3D points of the chessboard. The model is fitted by optimizing the cost function under constraints of correlation between the reflectance intensity of laser and the color of the chessboard’s patterns. Powell’s method is introduced for resolving the discontinuity problem in optimization. The corners of the fitted model are considered as the 3D corners of the chessboard. Once the corners of the chessboard in the 3D point cloud are estimated, the extrinsic calibration of the two sensors is converted to a 3D-2D matching problem. The corresponding 3D-2D points are used to calculate the absolute pose of the two sensors with Unified Perspective-n-Point (UPnP). Further, the calculated parameters are regarded as initial values and are refined using the Levenberg-Marquardt method. The performance of the proposed corner detection method from the 3D point cloud is evaluated using simulations. The results of experiments, conducted on a Velodyne HDL-32e LiDAR and a Ladybug3 camera under the proposed re-projection error metric, qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the accuracy and stability of the final extrinsic calibration parameters. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are able to model local stationary structures in natural images in a multi-scale fashion, when learning all model parameters with supervision. While excellent performance was achieved for image classification when large amounts of labeled visual data are available, their success for unsupervised tasks such as image retrieval has been moderate so far.Our paper focuses on this latter setting and explores several methods for learning patch descriptors without supervision with application to matching and instance-level retrieval. To that effect, we propose a new family of patch representations, based on the recently introduced convolutional kernel networks. We show that our descriptor, named Patch-CKN, performs better than SIFT as well as other convolutional networks learned by artificially introducing supervision and is significantly faster to train. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we perform an extensive evaluation on standard benchmarks for patch and image retrieval where we obtain state-of-the-art results. We also introduce a new dataset called RomePatches, which allows to simultaneously study descriptor performance for patch and image retrieval. We present a novel probabilistic approach for fitting a statistical model to an image. A 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) of faces is interpreted as a generative (Top-Down) Bayesian model. Random Forests are used as noisy detectors (Bottom-Up) for the face and facial landmark positions. The Top-Down and Bottom-Up parts are then combined using a Data-Driven Markov Chain Monte Carlo Method (DDMCMC). As core of the integration, we use the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which has two main advantages. First, the algorithm can handle unreliable detections and therefore does not need the detectors to take an early and possible wrong hard decision before fitting. Second, it is open for integration of various cues to guide the fitting process. Based on the proposed approach, we implemented a completely automatic, pose and illumination invariant face recognition application. We are able to train and test the building blocks of our application on different databases. The system is evaluated on the Multi-PIE database and reaches state of the art performance. Research in neuroevolution---that is, evolving artificial neural networks (ANNs) through evolutionary algorithms---is inspired by the evolution of biological brains, which can contain trillions of connections. Yet while neuroevolution has produced successful results, the scale of natural brains remains far beyond reach. This article presents a method called hypercube-based NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (HyperNEAT) that aims to narrow this gap. HyperNEAT employs an indirect encoding called connective compositional pattern-producing networks (CPPNs) that can produce connectivity patterns with symmetries and repeating motifs by interpreting spatial patterns generated within a hypercube as connectivity patterns in a lower-dimensional space. This approach can exploit the geometry of the task by mapping its regularities onto the topology of the network, thereby shifting problem difficulty away from dimensionality to the underlying problem structure. Furthermore, connective CPPNs can represent the same connectivity pattern at any resolution, allowing ANNs to scale to new numbers of inputs and outputs without further evolution. HyperNEAT is demonstrated through visual discrimination and food-gathering tasks, including successful visual discrimination networks containing over eight million connections. The main conclusion is that the ability to explore the space of regular connectivity patterns opens up a new class of complex high-dimensional tasks to neuroevolution. In this paper we present a deep neural network topology that incorporates a simple to implement transformationinvariant pooling operator (TI-POOLING). This operator is able to efficiently handle prior knowledge on nuisance variations in the data, such as rotation or scale changes. Most current methods usually make use of dataset augmentation to address this issue, but this requires larger number of model parameters and more training data, and results in significantly increased training time and larger chance of under-or overfitting. The main reason for these drawbacks is that that the learned model needs to capture adequate features for all the possible transformations of the input. On the other hand, we formulate features in convolutional neural networks to be transformation-invariant. We achieve that using parallel siamese architectures for the considered transformation set and applying the TI-POOLING operator on their outputs before the fully-connected layers. We show that this topology internally finds the most optimal "canonical" instance of the input image for training and therefore limits the redundancy in learned features. This more efficient use of training data results in better performance on popular benchmark datasets with smaller number of parameters when comparing to standard convolutional neural networks with dataset augmentation and to other baselines. Intelligent fault diagnosis techniques have replaced time-consuming and unreliable human analysis, increasing the efficiency of fault diagnosis. Deep learning models can improve the accuracy of intelligent fault diagnosis with the help of their multilayer nonlinear mapping ability. This paper proposes a novel method named Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with Wide First-layer Kernels (WDCNN). The proposed method uses raw vibration signals as input (data augmentation is used to generate more inputs), and uses the wide kernels in the first convolutional layer for extracting features and suppressing high frequency noise. Small convolutional kernels in the preceding layers are used for multilayer nonlinear mapping. AdaBN is implemented to improve the domain adaptation ability of the model. The proposed model addresses the problem that currently, the accuracy of CNN applied to fault diagnosis is not very high. WDCNN can not only achieve 100 classification accuracy on normal signals, but also outperform the state-of-the-art DNN model which is based on frequency features under different working load and noisy environment conditions. This paper presents Point Convolutional Neural Networks (PCNN): a novel framework for applying convolutional neural networks to point clouds. The framework consists of two operators: extension and restriction, mapping point cloud functions to volumetric functions and vise-versa. A point cloud convolution is defined by pull-back of the Euclidean volumetric convolution via an extension-restriction mechanism. The point cloud convolution is computationally efficient, invariant to the order of points in the point cloud, robust to different samplings and varying densities, and translation invariant, that is the same convolution kernel is used at all points. PCNN generalizes image CNNs and allows readily adapting their architectures to the point cloud setting. Evaluation of PCNN on three central point cloud learning benchmarks convincingly outperform competing point cloud learning methods, and the vast majority of methods working with more informative shape representations such as surfaces and or normals. Implementation of Neuromorphic Systems using post Complementary Met al-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology based Memristive Crossbar Array (MCA) has emerged as a promising solution to enable low-power acceleration of neural networks. However, the recent trend to design Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for achieving human-like cognitive abilities poses significant challenges towards the scalable design of neuromorphic systems (due to the increase in computation storage demands). Network pruning [7] is a powerful technique to remove redundant connections for designing optimally connected (maximally sparse) DNNs. However, such pruning techniques induce irregular connections that are incoherent to the crossbar structure. Eventually they produce DNNs with highly inefficient hardware realizations (in terms of area and energy). In this work, we propose TraNNsformer - an integrated training framework that transforms DNNs to enable their efficient realization on MCA-based systems. TraNNsformer first prunes the connectivity matrix while forming clusters with the remaining connections. Subsequently, it retrains the network to fine tune the connections and reinforce the clusters. This is done iteratively to transform the original connectivity into an optimally pruned and maximally clustered mapping. We evaluated the proposed framework by transforming different Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) based Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on a wide range of datasets (MNIST, SVHN and CIFAR10) and executing them on MCA-based systems to analyze the area and energy benefits. Without accuracy loss, TraNNsformer reduces the area (energy) consumption by 28 - 55 (49 - 67 ) with respect to the original network. Compared to network pruning, TraNNsformer achieves 28 - 49 (15 - 29 ) area (energy) savings. Furthermore, TraNNsformer is a technology-aware framework that allows mapping a given DNN to any MCA size permissible by the memristive technology for reliable operations. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) offer remarkable performance of classifications and regressions in many high-dimensional problems and have been widely utilized in real-word cognitive applications. However, high computational cost of CNNs greatly hinder their deployment in resource-constrained applications, real-time systems and edge computing platforms. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel filter-pruning framework, two-phase filter pruning based on conditional entropy, namely , to compress the CNN models and reduce the inference time with marginal performance degradation. In our proposed method, we formulate filter pruning process as an optimization problem and propose a novel filter selection criteria measured by conditional entropy. Based on the assumption that the representation of neurons shall be evenly distributed, we also develop a maximum-entropy filter freeze technique that can reduce over fitting. Two filter pruning strategies -- global and layer-wise strategies, are compared. Our experiment result shows that combining these two strategies can achieve a higher neural network compression ratio than applying only one of them under the same accuracy drop threshold. Two-phase pruning, that is, combining both global and layer-wise strategies, achieves 10 X FLOPs reduction and 46 inference time reduction on VGG-16, with 2 accuracy drop. In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have played an important role in the field of deep learning. Variants of CNN's have proven to be very successful in classification tasks across different domains. However, there are two big drawbacks to CNN's: their failure to take into account of important spatial hierarchies between features, and their lack of rotational invariance. As long as certain key features of an object are present in the test data, CNN's classify the test data as the object, disregarding features' relative spatial orientation to each other. This causes false positives. The lack of rotational invariance in CNN's would cause the network to incorrectly assign the object another label, causing false negatives. To address this concern, propose a novel type of neural network using the concept of capsules in a recent paper. With the use of dynamic routing and reconstruction regularization, the capsule network model would be both rotation invariant and spatially aware. The capsule network has shown its potential by achieving a state-of-the-art result of 0.25 test error on MNIST without data augmentation such as rotation and scaling, better than the previous baseline of 0.39 . To further test out the application of capsule networks on data with higher dimensionality, we attempt to find the best set of configurations that yield the optimal test error on CIFAR10 dataset. Optimizing deep neural networks (DNNs) often suffers from the ill-conditioned problem. We observe that the scaling-based weight space symmetry property in rectified nonlinear network will cause this negative effect. Therefore, we propose to constrain the incoming weights of each neuron to be unit-norm, which is formulated as an optimization problem over Oblique manifold. A simple yet efficient method referred to as projection based weight normalization (PBWN) is also developed to solve this problem. PBWN executes standard gradient updates, followed by projecting the updated weight back to Oblique manifold. This proposed method has the property of regularization and collaborates well with the commonly used batch normalization technique. We conduct comprehensive experiments on several widely-used image datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN and ImageNet for supervised learning over the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks, such as Inception, VGG and residual networks. The results show that our method is able to improve the performance of DNNs with different architectures consistently. We also apply our method to Ladder network for semi-supervised learning on permutation invariant MNIST dataset, and our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods: we obtain test errors as 2.52 , 1.06 , and 0.91 with only 20, 50, and 100 labeled samples, respectively. This paper presents a new approach for learning in structured domains (SDs) using a constructive neural network for graphs (NN4G). The new model allows the extension of the input domain for supervised neural networks to a general class of graphs including both acyclic cyclic, directed undirected labeled graphs. In particular, the model can realize adaptive contextual transductions, learning the mapping from graphs for both classification and regression tasks. In contrast to previous neural networks for structures that had a recursive dynamics, NN4G is based on a constructive feedforward architecture with state variables that uses neurons with no feedback connections. The neurons are applied to the input graphs by a general traversal process that relaxes the constraints of previous approaches derived by the causality assumption over hierarchical input data. Moreover, the incremental approach eliminates the need to introduce cyclic dependencies in the definition of the system state variables. In the traversal process, the NN4G units exploit (local) contextual information of the graphs vertices. In spite of the simplicity of the approach, we show that, through the compositionality of the contextual information developed by the learning, the model can deal with contextual information that is incrementally extended according to the graphs topology. The effectiveness and the generality of the new approach are investigated by analyzing its theoretical properties and providing experimental results.