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This paper presents the prediction of aging state of oil impregnated insulating Kraft paper using textural properties. Under conditions of prolonged thermal stress, the insulating capacity of Kraft paper decreases due to carbonization and degradation of cellulose. To analyze these effects, a new accelerated aging kit is developed for the experiments. Four groups of samples are collected, and the morphology is examined. Texture feature is extracted for the samples using normalization and Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM). Supervised (Support Vector Machine (SVM)) and unsupervised (K-means) machine intelligence methods are trained to classify images based on the feature. In addition, new samples are checked for feasibility of the prediction of aging state. The calculated training accuracy of SVM is 92.67%, and for k-means is 95.0%, on the other hand, the testing accuracy of SVM is 91.0%, and for k-means is 92.6%. Therefore, this machine intelligence-based methodology using image features is effective in classifying the aging state of the Kraft Insulating Paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recycled paper is extensively used worldwide. In the last decades, its market has expanded considerably. The increasing use of recycled paper in papermaking has led to the production of paper containing several types of impurities. Consequently, wastepaper mills are forced to implement quality control schemes for evaluating the incoming wastepaper stock, thus guarantying the specifications of the final product. The main objective of this work is to present a fast and reliable system for identifying different paper types. Therefore, undesirable paper types can be refused, improving the performance of the paper machine and the final quality of the paper manufactured. For this purpose, two fast techniques, i.e., Fourier transform midinfrared (FTIR) and reflectance near infrared (NIR), were applied to acquire the infrared spectra of the paper samples. Next, four processing multivariate methods, i.e., principal component analysis, canonical variate analysis (CVA), extended CVA (ECVA), and support vector machines (SVMs), were employed in the feature-extraction or dimension-reduction stage. Afterward, the k nearest neighbor (kNN) algorithm was used in the classification phase. Experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed methodology and the potential of both FTIR and NIR spectroscopic methods. Using the FTIR spectrum in association with SVM and kNN, the system achieved a maximum classification accuracy of 100%, whereas using the NIR spectrum in association with ECVA or SVM and kNN, the system achieved a maximum classification accuracy of 96.4%. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we investigate a very challenging task of automatically generating presentation slides for academic papers. The generated presentation slides can be used as drafts to help the presenters prepare their formal slides in a quicker way. A novel system called PPSGen is proposed to address this task. It first employs the regression method to learn the importance scores of the sentences in an academic paper, and then exploits the integer linear programming (ILP) method to generate well-structured slides by selecting and aligning key phrases and sentences. Evaluation results on a test set of 200 pairs of papers and slides collected on the web demonstrate that our proposed PPSGen system can generate slides with better quality. A user study is also illustrated to show that PPSGen has a few evident advantages over baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the controller development process, it is required to verify whether control functions operate normally, without fault or anomaly. Many control functions with complex system structures require various actual tests and test data analysis for verification. This paper presents an anomaly detection algorithm to verify control functions and to more efficiently analyze test data of a hybrid control unit (HCU) of a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV). The anomaly detection algorithm automatically detects anomaly of control functions from the test data, instead of manual labor by engineers. The examined target HCU control functions in this paper are the engine clutch engagement/disengagement control function and the engine start cooperative control function, which are crucial functions of transmission mounted electric drive (TMED) HEVs. A data-driven approach using a one-class support vector machine (SVM) is used to make it easy to apply various control functions. Actual vehicle test data is examined by the algorithm to verify the control functions at an actual vehicle level. The developed anomaly detection algorithm demonstrates feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in detecting not only prior-known anomalies but also prior-unknown anomalies. Because other vehicle control functions have similar characteristics with the target functions of this paper, this algorithm is expected to be successfully applied to other HCU control functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Available data in machine learning applications is becoming increasingly complex, due to higher dimensionality and difficult classes. There exists a wide variety of approaches to measuring complexity of labeled data, according to class overlap, separability or boundary shapes, as well as group morphology. Many techniques can transform the data in order to find better features, but few focus on specifically reducing data complexity. Most data transformation methods mainly treat the dimensionality aspect, leaving aside the available information within class labels which can be useful when classes are somehow complex. This paper proposes an autoencoder-based approach to complexity reduction, using class labels in order to inform the loss function about the adequacy of the generated variables. This leads to three different new feature learners, Scorer, Skaler and Slicer. They are based on Fisher’s discriminant ratio, the Kullback-Leibler divergence and least-squares support vector machines, respectively. They can be applied as a preprocessing stage for a binary classification problem. A thorough experimentation across a collection of 27 datasets and a range of complexity and classification metrics shows that class-informed autoencoders perform better than 4 other popular unsupervised feature extraction techniques, especially when the final objective is using the data for a classification task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Available data in machine learning applications is becoming increasingly complex, due to higher dimensionality and difficult classes. There exists a wide variety of approaches to measuring complexity of labeled data, according to class overlap, separability or boundary shapes, as well as group morphology. Many techniques can transform the data in order to find better features, but few focus on specifically reducing data complexity. Most data transformation methods mainly treat the dimensionality aspect, leaving aside the available information within class labels which can be useful when classes are somehow complex. This paper proposes an autoencoder-based approach to complexity reduction, using class labels in order to inform the loss function about the adequacy of the generated variables. This leads to three different new feature learners, Scorer, Skaler and Slicer. They are based on Fisher’s discriminant ratio, the Kullback-Leibler divergence and least-squares support vector machines, respectively. They can be applied as a preprocessing stage for a binary classification problem. A thorough experimentation across a collection of 27 datasets and a range of complexity and classification metrics shows that class-informed autoencoders perform better than 4 other popular unsupervised feature extraction techniques, especially when the final objective is using the data for a classification task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The natural gas tightly correlates with our everyday life. However, driven by gray incomes, some users are prone to stealing gas by refitting the equipment without permission. Especially for the boiler room users in winter, this phenomenon appears more rampant. Traditional gas-theft detection methods highly rely on the on-site inspection, where exists ineffective and randomness. With the rapidly deployed IoT sensors, we can collect real-time gas consumption data to analyze users’ behavior patterns, where the gas-theft suspects could be discovered early and accurately. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach, named SVOC, to detect gas-theft suspects among boiler room users. Our approach consists of a scenario-based data quality detection algorithm, a deformation-based normality detection algorithm, and an One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) based anomaly detection algorithm. Specifically, considering the temporal proximity between the gas consumption and the outdoor temperature, the normality detection algorithm adopts a similarity-based deformation correlation to detect normal boiler room users out of abnormal ones. Then, we employ OCSVM as the anomaly detection algorithm to capture various features across multiple data sources, aiming to distinguish gas-theft suspects from the remaining irregular users. Here, the detected normal and abnormal users are fed into the OCSVM for training and prediction, respectively, which can overcome the label scarcity problem. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset during one heating season. The results demonstrate distinct advantages of our approach over various baselines. We have developed a real-time system on the cloud, providing daily gas-theft suspects for gas companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The blood pressure (BP) is generally measured using a cuff based sphygmomanometer. However, it is inconvenient to be used. Recently, an alternative solution only using the photoplethesmograms (PPGs) was proposed. In this case, the continuous BP estimation could be performed. First, the features were extracted from the PPGs. Then, a regression network was employed to estimate the BP values. Nevertheless, the accuracy of this approach was not so high. In order to improve the estimation accuracy, this paper proposes to cascade a two layer piecewise neural network to the output of the existing regression network to correct the estimation error. In particular, the overall system is a three layer network. The first layer of the network is the existing regression network. It generates the initial estimated BP values. The second layer of the network consists of the window functions. It segments the range of the BP values into various regions for the further processing. The final layer of the network performs the estimation correction. The performance of our proposed network is evaluated via two practical datasets and three common regression networks including the three layer artificial neural network (ANN) based regression network, the random forest (RF) based regression network and the support vector regression (SVR) based network. For the first dataset, our proposed method with the RF model and the piecewise neural network achieves the systolic BP (SBP) estimation error and the diastolic BP (DBP) estimation error at $3.01{\pm }2.22$ mmHg with the correlation coefficient at 0.926 and $4.43{\pm }3.37$ mmHg with the correlation coefficient at 0.935, respectively. On the other hand, the conventional RF model without the piecewise neural network achieves the SBP estimation error and the DBP estimation error at $5.34{\pm }4.08$ mmHg with the correlation coefficient at 0.740 and $5.89{\pm }4.98$ mmHg with the correlation coefficient at 0.840, respectively. For the second dataset, our proposed method with the RF model and the piecewise neural network achieves the SBP estimation error and the DBP estimation error at $7.91{\pm }8.06$ mmHg with the correlation coefficient at 0.876 and $3.47{\pm }5.59$ mmHg with the correlation coefficient at 0.859, respectively. On the other hand, the conventional RF model without the piecewise neural network achieves the SBP estimation error and the DBP estimation error at $9.77{\pm }9.01$ mmHg with the correlation coefficient at 0.805 and $7.08{\pm }5.55$ mmHg with the correlation coefficient at 0.612, respectively. It can be seen that our proposed network yields the estimated BP values highly correlated to the reference BP values. Also, our proposed method yields the higher accuracies compared to the existing networks. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection is an optional preprocessing procedure and is frequently used to improve the classification accuracy of a machine learning algorithm by removing irrelevant and/or redundant features. However, in many real-world applications, the test cost is also required for making optimal decisions, in addition to the classification accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, thus far, few studies have been conducted on test-cost-sensitive feature selection (TCSFS). In TCSFS, the objectives are twofold: 1) to improve the classification accuracy and 2) to decrease the test cost. Therefore, in fact, it constitutes a multiobjective optimization problem. In this paper, we transformed this multiobjective optimization problem into a single-objective optimization problem by utilizing a new evaluation function and in this paper, we propose a new general wrapper framework for TCSFS. Specifically, in our proposed framework, we add a new term to the evaluation function of a wrapper feature selection method so that the test cost of measuring features is taken into account. We experimentally tested our proposed framework, using 36 classification problems from the University of California at Irvine (UCI) repository, and compared it to some other state-of-the-art feature selection frameworks. The experimental results showed that our framework allows users to select an optimal feature subset with the minimal test cost, while simultaneously maintaining a high classification accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network alignment is a critical task in a wide variety of fields. Many existing works leverage on representation learning to accomplish this task without eliminating domain representation bias induced by domain-dependent features, which yield inferior alignment performance. This paper proposes a unified deep architecture (DANA) to obtain a domain-invariant representation for network alignment via an adversarial domain classifier. Specifically, we employ the graph convolutional networks to perform network embedding under the domain adversarial principle, given a small set of observed anchors. Then, the semi-supervised learning framework is optimized by maximizing a posterior probability distribution of observed anchors and the loss of a domain classifier simultaneously. We also develop a few variants of our model, such as, direction-aware network alignment, weight-sharing for directed networks and simplification of parameter space. Experiments on three real-world social network datasets demonstrate that our proposed approaches achieve state-of-the-art alignment results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main challenges in multi-source domain adaptation is how to reduce the domain discrepancy between each source domain and a target domain, and then evaluate the domain relevance to determine how much knowledge should be transferred from different source domains to the target domain. However, most prior approaches barely consider both discrepancies and relevance among domains. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, called Iterative Refinement based on Feature Selection and the Wasserstein distance (IRFSW), to solve semi-supervised domain adaptation with multiple sources. Specifically, IRFSW aims to explore both the discrepancies and relevance among domains in an iterative learning procedure, which gradually refines the learning performance until the algorithm stops. In each iteration, for each source domain and the target domain, we develop a sparse model to select features in which the domain discrepancy and training loss are reduced simultaneously. Then a classifier is constructed with the selected features of the source and labeled target data. After that, we exploit optimal transport over the selected features to calculate the transferred weights. The weight values are taken as the ensemble weights to combine the learned classifiers to control the amount of knowledge transferred from source domains to the target domain. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semiconductors are essential components in many electronic devices. Because wafers are produced quickly and in large quantities, defects occur that adversely affect semiconductor properties. This makes it necessary to install powerful and robust inspection systems which use artificial intelligence techniques in the early stages of the manufacturing chain in order to detect and classify those defects. This paper proposes a method for defect detection and classification on images of semiconductor wafer materials obtained by means of a scanning electron microscope based in the following stages: (i) use of computer vision techniques to isolate the defect from the background; (ii) use of several descriptors based on shape, size, texture, histogram, and key-points to create a feature vector for the characterization of the defect; (iii) application of an exhaustive search as a feature selection method to determine the optimal subset of feature descriptors; and (iv) evaluation of the feature descriptors by using a support vector machine classifier providing the optimal set with highest F1-score metrics. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is compared with five popular feature selection methods, reporting better classification results than the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address challenges of detecting instances from emerging classes over a non-stationary data stream during data classification. In particular, data instances from an entirely unknown class may appear in a data stream over time. Existing classification techniques utilize unsupervised clustering to identify emergence of such data instances. Unfortunately, they make strong assumptions which are typically invalid in practice; (i) Most instances associated with a class are closer to each other in feature space than instances associated with different classes, (ii) Covariates of data are normalized through an oracle to overcome the effect of a few data instances having large feature values, and (iii) Labels of instances from emerging classes are readily available soon after detection. To address the challenges that occur in practice when the above assumptions are weak, i.e., instances of each class are scattered and the true labels of novel class instances are sparsely available, we propose a practical semi-supervised emerging class detection framework. Particularly, we aim to identify similar data instances within local regions in feature space by incorporating a mutual graph clustering mechanism. We also perform online normalization along the data stream instead of assuming an oracle, and propose a classification technique that uses only a small amount of true labels for training and emerging class detection. Our empirical evaluation of this framework on real-world datasets demonstrates its superiority of classification performance compared to existing methods, while using significantly fewer labeled instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wafer bin maps contain vital information that helps semiconductor manufacturers to identify the root causes and defect pattern failures in wafers. Conventional manual inspection techniques in inspecting these failures are labour intensive and cause prolonged production cycle time. Therefore, automatic inspection techniques can solve this problem. This paper proposes a deep learning approach based on deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) and a new Capsule Network (WaferCaps). DCGAN was used to upsample the original dataset and therefore increase the data used for training and balance the classes at the same time. While WaferCaps was proposed to classify the defect patterns according to eight classes. The performance of our proposed DCGAN and WaferCaps was compared with different deep learning models such as the original Capsule Network (CapsNet), CNN, and MLP. In all of our experiment, WM-811K dataset was used for the data upsampling and training. The proposed approach has shown an effective performance in generating new synthetic data and classify them with training accuracy of 99.59%, validation accuracy of 97.53% and test accuracy of 91.4%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increasing development of renewable energy and high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission technology, the integration of power electronics-interfaced components has caused sub-/super-synchronous inter-harmonics into power signals, yielding the subsynchronous oscillations (SSOs). Online monitoring and identification of SSOs are crucial to the secure and stable operation of power systems. This paper proposes a data driven SSOs identification method using realistic phasor measurement unit (PMU) data. Three features are extracted via the analysis of a large number of historical PMU data, which can reflect the SSO features and the interference level. An SSOs identification method is proposed through a multiple-support vector machine (SVM) model. It allows us to adaptively select the proper classifier among the multiple-SVM models according to the interference level estimated by the extracted features. This significantly improves the identification accuracy under both low and high interference inputs of a practical power grid. An automatic update function based on incremental learning is also developed to enhance the model performance when the SSO data are subject to new features. Experimental results using field-measured PMU data validate the advantages of the proposed method over other alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fault diagnosis of bearings using classification techniques plays an important role in industrial applications, and, hence, has received increasing attention. Recently, significant efforts have been made to develop various methods for bearing fault classification and the application of Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) data for validation has become a standard reference to test the fault classification algorithms. However, a systematic research for evaluating bearing fault classification performance using the CWRU data is still lacking. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive benchmark analysis of the CWRU data using various entropy and classification methods. The main contribution of this paper is applying entropy-based fault classification methods to establish a benchmark analysis of entire CWRU datasets, aiming to provide a proper assessment of any new classification methods. Recommendations are provided for the selection of the CWRU data to aid in testing new fault classification algorithms, which will enable the researches to develop and evaluate various diagnostic algorithms. In the end, the comparison results and discussion are reported as a useful baseline for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel deep learning-based method that integrates a Convolutional Auto-Encoder (CAE) with support vector machine (SVM) for finger-vein verification. The CAE is used to learn the features from finger-vein images, and the SVM is used to classify finger vein from these learned feature codes. The CAE consists of a finger-vein encoder, which extracts high-level feature representation from raw pixels of the images, and a decoder which outputs reconstruct finger-vein images from high-level feature code. As an effective classifier, SVM is introduced in this paper to classify the feature code which is obtained from CAE. Experiments prove that the proposed deep learning-based approach has superior performance in learning features than traditional method without any prior knowledge, presenting a good potential in the verification of finger vein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new technique for the identification of fundamental heart sounds (HSs), namely, $S_{1}$ and $S_{2}$ from the cardiac cycle, the first and foremost step in the automated HSs analysis for the detection of pathological events, without incorporating time-interval informations between $S_{1}$ and $S_{2}$ or electrocardiogram signal as reference. The motive of this paper is to demonstrate that the reliable $S_{1}$ and $S_{2}$ classification performances based on the combinatory feature (CF) derived from higher order moments and cepstral-based domain can still be achieved, under the circumstances where the timing interval information might not be easily understood due to cardiac abnormalities. Using deep neural networks approach, a stacked autoencoder (SAE) based on the CF is proposed for the classification of fundamental HSs. Experiments are conducted on both publicly available and recorded HSs signals for the validation of the proposed method. The SAE using the proposed CF achieves better classification results in recognizing $S_{1}$ and $S_{2}$ in comparison to well-known classifiers such as deep belief neural network, support vector machine, Naive Bayes, linear discriminant analysis, and boosting ensemble. The proposed method shows higher classification rate in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity by considering CF, which uses Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and its derivative features. A second approach for addressing the problem of $S_{1}$ and $S_{2}$ identifications is carried out by employing 1-D convolutional neural network that uses the signals directly to learn the relevant features by its own for the recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimal selection of features of Partial Discharge (PD) signals recorded from defects in High Voltage (HV) cables will contribute not only to the improvement of PD pattern recognition accuracy and efficiency but also to PD parameter visualization in HV cable condition monitoring and diagnostics. This paper presents a novel Random Forest (RF)-based feature-selection algorithm for PD pattern recognition of HV cables. The algorithm is applied to feature selection of both PD signals and interference signals with the aim of obtaining the optimal features for data processing. First, the experimental data acquisition and feature extraction processes are introduced. PD signals were captured from faults created in a cable to obtain the raw PD data, and then, a set of 3500 transient PD pulses and a set of 3500 typical interference pulses were extracted, based on which 34 PD features were extracted for further processing. Furthermore, 119 two-dimensional features and 1082 three-dimensional features were generated. The paper then discusses the basic principle of the RF algorithm. Finally, RF-based feature selection was implemented to determine the optimal features for PD pattern recognition. The results were obtained and evaluated with the Back Propagation Neural Network and Support Vector Machine. Results show that the proposed RF-based method is effective for PD feature selection of HV cables with the potential for application to additional HV power apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a machine-learning-based method for counting vehicles and classifying their maneuvers in a traffic intersection using inexpensive low-density Lidar sensors. First, each vehicle is automatically detected using hierarchical clustering and then its trajectory is tracked using a virtual point method that compensates for the low angular resolution of the sensor. Then, characteristic low-dimensional features of each trajectory are extracted for the classification task, so that use of the entire time-varying trajectory can be avoided. The novel features extracted include selected locations/velocities, and zero-mean singular vectors that describe the shape of the trajectory around the mean vehicle location. These features are found to provide excellent separation between various inlet-outlet maneuvers. Both simulation and extensive experimental results are presented. A single sensor that covers 2 out of 4 roads at a traffic intersection is found to work with high accuracy but has occlusion errors due to the limited coverage of the sensor. A two-sensor system that covers all 4 roads at an intersection needs an additional algorithm to merge trajectories from the two sensors to avoid double counting. High counting and classification accuracies are achieved with the developed systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Pain assessment in children continues to challenge clinicians and researchers, as subjective experiences of pain require inference through observable behaviors, both involuntary and deliberate. The presented approach supplements the subjective self-report-based method by fusing electrodermal activity (EDA) recordings with video facial expressions to develop an objective pain assessment metric. Such an approach is specifically important for assessing pain in children who are not capable of providing accurate self-pain reports, requiring nonverbal pain assessment. We demonstrate the performance of our approach using data recorded from children in post-operative recovery following laparoscopic appendectomy. We examined separately and combined the usefulness of EDA and video facial expression data as predictors of children's self-reports of pain following surgery through recovery. Findings indicate that EDA and facial expression data independently provide above chance sensitivities and specificities, but their fusion for classifying clinically significant pain vs. clinically nonsignificant pain achieved substantial improvement, yielding 90.91% accuracy, with 100% sensitivity and 81.82% specificity. The multimodal measures capitalize upon different features of the complex pain response. Thus, this paper presents both evidence for the utility of a weighted maximum likelihood algorithm as a novel feature selection method for EDA and video facial expression data and an accurate and objective automated classification algorithm capable ofdiscriminating clinically significant pain from clinically nonsignificant pain in children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel local feature descriptor coined as a local instant-and-center-symmetric neighbor-based pattern of the extrema-images (LINPE) to detect breast abnormalities in thermal breast images. It is a hybrid descriptor that combines two different feature descriptors: one is the inverse-probability difference extrema (IpDE), and another is the local instant and center-symmetric neighbor-based pattern (LICsNP). IpDE is developed to compute the intensity-inhomogeneity-invariant feature-based image of the breast thermogram. Besides, the LICsNP is intended to capture the local microstructure pattern information in the IpDE image. A new paradigm, named Broad Learning (BL) network, is introduced here as a classifier to differentiate the healthy and sick breast thermograms efficiently. The efficacy of the proposed system is quantitatively validated on the images of DMR-IR and DBT-TU-JU databases. Extensive experimentation on these databases with an average accuracy of 96.90% and 94%, respectively, justifies proposed system’s superiority in the differentiation of healthy and sick breast thermograms over the other related existing state-of-the-art methods. The proposed system also performs consistently in the presence of noise and rotational changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we first derive the channel capacity of the full-duplex spatial modulation (FD-SM) system and its upper and lower bounds. Furthermore, different from the traditional optimization-driven decision, we use the data-driven prediction method to solve the transmit antenna selection (TAS) problem in the FD-SM system. Specifically, two novel TAS methods based on the support vector machine (SVM) and deep neural network (DNN) are proposed for reducing the effect of residual self-interference (RSI) on the FD-SM system performance. In our design, we propose a novel feature extraction method based on the principal component analysis (PCA) to help the proposed classifiers improve training. Our simulation results show that our data-driven TAS schemes can approach the optimal performance achieved by exhaustive search while significantly reducing complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a framework for performing automatic analysis of Land Use Zones based on Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs). We model city areas using a hierarchical structure of POIs extracted from foursquare. We encode such structures in kernel machines, e.g., Support Vector Machines, using a new Tree Kernel, i.e., the Hierarchical POI Kernel (HPK), which can take the importance of the individual POIs into account during the substructure matching. This way, HPK projects structures in the space of all their possible substructures such that each dimension corresponds to a semantic structural feature, weighted according to the discriminative power of POIs. We generated four different datasets for the following cities: Barcelona, Lisbon, Amsterdam and Milan, where we trained and tested our models. The results show that our approach largely outperforms previous work and standard baseline built on simple features, such as counts of different POIs. Finally, we apply a mining algorithm to extract the most relevant features (tree fragments) from the implicit TK space according to the weights the kernel machine assigned to them. Our approach can produce an explicit set of representative features that can be used to classify and characterize urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the running of electric locomotives, a large amount of operating data will be stored through the Analog-Digital Converter (ADC) and the recording oscillograph of the on-board Traction Control Unit (TCU). Analysis based on mass data to detect slipping is of great significance for saving energy, improving the performance and safety of the traction control system of electric locomotives. Therefore, after analyzing and summarizing the advantages of Empirical Wavelet Transform (EWT) and Fuzzy Entropy (FE) algorithm in data processing and the classification theory of Support Vector Machine (SVM), this paper proposed a SVM slipping detection method based on EWT and FE algorithm. Firstly, feature extraction is carried out on the locomotive wheelset velocity data collected by the on-board velocity sensor, that is, the feature vector of data is extracted by calculating fuzzy entropy value after EWT, and the velocity data is converted into feature matrix for slipping-detection of SVM. Then considering the defects of traditional optimization algorithms such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) in the parameter optimization of SVM, Genetic Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (GAPSO) is proposed to optimize the parameters of SVM classification model, and the slipping detection model of SVM is established through training samples, which realizes high-precision slipping detection. Finally, combined with a large number of locomotive data, the comparative analysis test is carried out, the results show that the feature extraction method based on EWT and FE algorithm has excellent ability of mode decomposition and feature extraction, GAPSO has efficient optimization ability, and the proposed slipping detection method can accurately detect slipping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of Internet-of-Things and big data, health assessment of equipment is receiving more attention in recent years. It is critical to bridge the gap between real-time production data and health status evaluation, which helps maintenance team understand the health status of equipment exactly, and then make rational maintenance plans. For this purpose, this paper proposes a framework to realize real-time equipment health assessment with health status quantitatively characterized by health degree (HD). The proposed framework begins with removing redundant features using a principal component analysis (PCA) method. Then, to represent the optimal operation status, a support vector data description (SVDD) algorithm is employed for extracting normal observations in the offline part. Thereafter, HD is introduced based on the Euclidean distance between current observation and the normal sample set. In order to achieve online updating of the normal sample set, and promote accuracy and computational efficiency of the offline part, an improved incremental SVDD algorithm based on adaptive threshold N (NISVDD) is proposed. A case study is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and model using a benchmark dataset of rolling bearing. Results suggest that the proposed framework is effective, and PCA shows good potential to extract features and keep most of the original information. The proposed NISVDD model is able to trace the dynamics of equipment health status for whole run-to-failure process, and outperforms other models in both accuracy and computational efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapidly increasing demand for security and E-health applications, device-free human detection has attracted interest because it does not require a wearable device or camera setup. This paper proposes a deep-learning-based approach that monitors wireless signals to learn three human modes, i.e., absence, working, and sleeping, in realistic indoor environments. This paper integrates the amplitude and phase of channel state information to propose a hybrid complex feature; this facilitates robust and efficient human detection even with fewer data samples. Experiments conducted in two unmodified WiFi networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Four machine-learning algorithms provide satisfactory performance with sufficient data, and deep neural networks perform the best. Results show that by using 6% training samples, the proposed hybrid feature still achieves 93% accuracy and can even outperform three typical machine learning algorithms that use full training samples. Moreover, the proposed feature significantly improves detection accuracy by 11.62%–27.76% than traditional amplitude feature with fewer training samples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Croup, a respiratory tract infection common in children, causes an inflammation of the upper airway restricting normal breathing and producing cough sounds typically described as seallike “barking cough.” Physicians use the existence of barking cough as the defining characteristic of croup. This paper aims to develop automated cough sound analysis methods to objectively diagnose croup. Methods: In automating croup diagnosis, we propose the use of mathematical features inspired by the human auditory system. In particular, we utilize the cochleagram for feature extraction, a time-frequency representation where the frequency components are based on the frequency selectivity property of the human cochlea. Speech and cough share some similarities in the generation process and physiological wetware used. As such, we also propose the use of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients which has been shown to capture the relevant aspects of the short-term power spectrum of speech signals. Feature combination and backward sequential feature selection are also experimented with. Experimentation is performed on cough sound recordings from patients presenting various clinically diagnosed respiratory tract infections divided into croup and non-croup. The dataset is divided into training and test sets of 364 and 115 patients, respectively, with automatically segmented cough sound segments. Results: Croup and non-croup patient classification on the test dataset with the proposed methods achieve a sensitivity and specificity of 92.31% and 85.29%, respectively. Conclusion: Experimental results show the significant improvement in automatic croup diagnosis against earlier methods. Significance: This paper has the potential to automate croup diagnosis based solely on cough sound analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In active and assisted living environments, a major service that can be provided is the automated assessment of elderly people’s well-being. Therefore, activity recognition is required to detect what types of help disabled persons need to support them in their daily life activities. Unfortunately, it is still a difficult task to estimate the size of the required window for online sensor data streams to recognize a specific activity, especially when new sensor events are recorded. This paper proposes a windowing algorithm, which presents promising results to recognize complex human activities for multi-resident homes. The approach is based on the analysis of the sensor data to identify the best fitting sensors that should be considered in a specified window. Moreover, the second part of this paper proposes a set of different statistical spatio-temporal features to recognize human activities. In order to check the overall performance, this approach is tested using the CASAS data set and artificially generated laboratory data using our HBMS simulator. The results show high performance based on different evaluation metrics compared to other approaches. We believe that the proposed windowing approach provides a good approximation of the required window size in order to robustly detect human activities in comparison to other windowing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To protect underage people from accessing objectionable videos in the Internet, an effective objectionable video recognition algorithm is necessary for web filtering. Recently, the multi-instance learning has been introduced for objectionable video recognition and achieves impressive results. However, hand-crafted features as well as redundant and noisy frames in objectionable videos become an intractable problem that inevitably degrades the recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a novel representative prototype selection algorithm embedding deep multi-instance representation learning. In the proposed method, an improved convolutional neural network is designed for multimodal multi-instance feature learning and a self-expressive dictionary learning model based on sparse and low rank constraint is designed to select the representative prototypes from each subspace of instances. Then the bag-level feature is constructed via mapping the bag to the selected prototypes. Experiments on three objectionable video sets show the effectiveness of our method for objectionable video recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an accurate pedestrian detection scheme with privacy preservation (PPPD) based on pedestrian images. By utilizing the vector homomorphic encryption (VHE), private linear-transforming matrices are ingeniously designed to enable arbitrary permutation operations for the encrypted vectors. In this way, the feature vector extraction of the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) can be efficiently performed over the encrypted pedestrian images. Furthermore, due to the encrypted inner product calculations supported by VHE, an encrypted kernel matrix is constructed to generate multiple encrypted kernels (i.e., linear, polynomial, and Gaussian kernels). The pedestrian detection model based on the supported vector machine (SVM) can be securely trained over the encrypted kernels. With the proposed scheme, the extracted features of pedestrian images are not necessary to be returned to the image owner for decryption, such that the communication costs can be significantly reduced. In addition, the privacy of the whole process in pedestrian detection can also be guaranteed. Extensive experiments are conducted over multiple pedestrian datasets, and it is demonstrated that PPPD can achieve high accuracy of pedestrian detection with lower computation and communication overhead compared with the existing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Detection of Atrial fibrillation (AF) from premature atrial contraction (PAC) and premature ventricular contraction (PVC) is difficult as frequent occurrences of these ectopic beats can mimic the typical irregular patterns of AF. In this paper, we present a novel density Poincaré plot-based machine learning method to detect AF from PAC/PVCs using electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. Methods: First, we propose the generation of this new density Poincaré plot which is derived from the difference of the heart rate (DHR) and provides the overlapping phase-space trajectory information of the DHR. Next, from this density Poincaré plot, several image processing domain-based approaches including statistical central moments, template correlation, Zernike moment, discrete wavelet transform and Hough transform features are used to extract suitable features. Subsequently, the infinite latent feature selection algorithm is implemented to rank the features. Finally, classification of AF vs. PAC/PVC is performed using K-Nearest Neighbor, Support vector machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) classifiers. Our method is developed and validated using a subset of Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) III database containing 10 AF and 10 PAC/PVC subjects. Results- During the segment-wise 10-fold cross-validation, SVM achieved the best performance with 98.99% sensitivity, 95.18% specificity and 97.45% accuracy with the extracted features. In subject-wise scenario, RF achieved the highest accuracy of 91.93%. Moreover, we further validated the proposed method using two other databases: wearable armband ECG data and the Physionet AFPDB. 100% PAC detection accuracy was obtained for both databases without any further training. Conclusion: Our proposed density Poincaré plot-based method showed superior performance when compared with four existing algorithms; thus showing the efficacy of the extracted image domain-based features. Significance: From intensive care unit's ECG to wearable armband ECGs, the proposed method is shown to discriminate PAC/PVCs from AF with high accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN), called SCGNet, for low-complexity and robust modulation recognition in intelligent communication receivers. Principally, the network combines two types of sparse convolutional layers–depthwise and regular grouped in an architecture to achieve high recognition accuracy while keeping the network more lightweight. The network architecture leverages sparsely connected convolutional layers in three principal modules: speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT), deep feature extraction and processing (DFEP), and generic feature extraction (GFE) data pre-processing module. For a good tradeoff between complexity and accuracy, SAT deploys depthwise convolutional layers to enrich the relevant features outputted by the former GFE module. In addition to SAT, DFEP employs a cascade of regular grouped convolutional layers for mining more discriminative features from SAT via a multilayer transformation module. This cascade structure aims to prevent a loss of essential details of the signal as the network becomes deeper. Additionally, skip connections are deployed between sub-blocks within SAT and DFEP to allow inter-module feature sharing and to handle inter-block features loss. Experimental results on the RadioML2018.01A dataset indicate that SCGNet achieves an overall recognition accuracy of around 94.39% at a signal-to-noise ratio of +20 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: in this paper we propose a system to detect a subject's sympathetic reaction, which is related to unexpected or challenging events during a car drive. Methods: we use the Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal and the Skin Potential Response (SPR) signal, which has several advantages with respect to other Electrodermal (EDA) signals. We record one SPR signal for each hand, and use an algorithm that, selecting the smoother signal, is able to remove motion artifacts. We extract statistical features from the ECG and SPR signals in order to classify signal segments and identify the presence or absence of emotional events via a Supervised Learning Algorithm. The experiments were carried out in a company which specializes in driving simulator equipment, using a motorized platform and a driving simulator. Different subjects were tested with this setup, with different challenging events happening on predetermined locations on the track. Results: we obtain an Accuracy as high as 79.10% for signal blocks and as high as 91.27% for events. Conclusion: results demonstrate the good performance of the presented system in detecting sympathetic reactions, and the effectiveness of the motion artifact removal procedure. Significance: our work demonstrates the possibility to classify the emotional state of the driver, using the ECG and EDA signals and a slightly invasive setup. In particular, the proposed use of SPR and of the motion artifact removal procedure are crucial for the effectiveness of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electric field calculations cannot effectively guide the insulation design of high voltage equipment since the insulation strengths of dielectrics cannot be predicted according to the electromagnetic analysis. In this paper, some features related to the electric field distribution such as the electric field strength, electric field gradient, path length, and the electric field integral are defined and extracted from finite element calculations of air gaps. The electric field features are taken as the input parameters of a grey correlative model established by support vector machine (SVM), so as to establish the multi-dimensional nonlinear relationships between these features and the discharge voltage of an air gap. The grid search (GS) method was used to search the optimal parameters of the SVM. This model was applied to predict the 50% discharge voltages of large sphere-plane air gaps in UHVDC valve halls. The predicted results were obtained after multiple iterative calculations, using the golden section search method. Compared to experimental data, the relative errors of the predicted results are within an acceptable range in view of engineering applications, which indicates the validity of the proposed method. This paper achieves the discharge voltage of air gaps by numerical computations instead of costly experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kernel methods, e.g., composite kernels (CKs) and spatial-spectral kernels (SSKs), have been demonstrated to be an effective way to exploit the spatial-spectral information nonlinearly for improving the classification performance of hyperspectral image (HSI). However, these methods are always conducted with square-shaped window or superpixel techniques. Both techniques are likely to misclassify the pixels that lie at the boundaries of class, and thus a small target is always smoothed away. To alleviate these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel patch-based low rank component induced spatial-spectral kernel method, termed LRCISSK, for HSI classification. First, the latent low-rank features of spectra in each cubic patch of HSI are reconstructed by a low rank matrix recovery (LRMR) technique, and then, to further explore more accurate spatial information, they are used to identify a homogeneous neighborhood for the target pixel (i.e., the centroid pixel) adaptively. Finally, the adaptively identified homogenous neighborhood which consists of the latent low-rank spectra is embedded into the spatial-spectral kernel framework. It can easily map the spectra into the nonlinearly complex manifolds and enable a classifier (e.g., support vector machine, SVM) to distinguish them effectively. Experimental results on three real HSI datasets validate that the proposed LRCISSK method can effectively explore the spatial-spectral information and deliver superior performance with at least 1.30% higher OA and 1.03% higher AA on average when compared to other state-of-the-art classifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing smoke vehicle detection methods are vulnerable to false alarms. To solve this issue, this paper presents two automatic smoke vehicle detection methods based on spatiotemporal bag-of-features (S-BoF) and professional convolutional neural network (P-CNN). In the first method, we propose the S-BoF model to characterize the key regions detected by the visual background extractor (ViBe) algorithm. The S-BoF model contains three groups of features, including color moments on three orthogonal planes (CM-TOP), completed robust local binary pattern on three orthogonal planes (CRLBP-TOP), and histogram of oriented gradient on three orthogonal planes (HOG-TOP). The extracted features are fed to the support vector machine (SVM) and classify the key regions to smoke regions or non-smoke regions to further detect smoke vehicles. In the second method, we propose the P-CNN model to extract more robust and complementary spatiotemporal features by designing three professional models to analyze different kinds of features in the key region sequence on three orthogonal planes. The three professional models, including color CNN (CCNN), texture CNN (TCNN), and gradient CNN (GCNN), are based on three independent CNN128 models with different inputs. The experimental results show that the proposed methods achieve higher detection rates and lower false alarm rates than existing smoke detection methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the vehicle type classification area, the necessity to improve classification performance across traffic surveillance cameras has garnered attention in research especially on high level feature extraction and classification. The backpropagation (BP) training approach of traditional deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approach is time-consuming without using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). In this paper, we propose a semisupervised strategy for the end-to-end Principal Component Analysis Convolutional Network (PCN) in the area of vehicle type classification. Even without using a GPU, the proposed model eliminates the time-consuming training procedure of convolutional filter bank. In particular, the convolutional filters of the network are generated using unsupervised learning by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) which has tremendously reduced training cost and also reinforced the robustness of extracted features against various distortions. In order to further improve the training procedure while still preserving the discriminative characteristic of the system, only the fully-connected layer is fine-tuned in the supervised classification stage. The PCN is tested using a public BIT-Vehicle dataset which comprises 9850 surveillance-nature vehicle frontal-view images. The PCN can be easily implemented and readily compatible with many effective classifiers. Two classifiers, namely softmax classifier and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are employed in this network and their classification performances are then compared. Both classifiers take less than 100 seconds in the training process and are able to produce an average accuracy of above 88.35%, even under various inferior imaging conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detection of double Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compression is an important part of image forensics. Although methods in the past studies have been presented for detecting the double JPEG compression with a different quantization matrix, the detection of double JPEG compression with the same quantization matrix is still a challenging problem. In this paper, an effective method to detect the recompression in the color images by using the conversion error, rounding error, and truncation error on the pixel in the spherical coordinate system is proposed. The randomness of truncation errors, rounding errors, and quantization errors result in random conversion errors. The pixel number of the conversion error is used to extract six-dimensional features. Truncation error and rounding error on the pixel in its three channels are mapped to the spherical coordinate system based on the relation of a color image to the pixel values in the three channels. The former is converted into amplitude and angles to extract 30-dimensional features and 8-dimensional auxiliary features are extracted from the number of special points and special blocks. As a result, a total of 44-dimensional features have been used in the classification by using the support vector machine (SVM) method. Thereafter, the support vector machine recursive feature elimination (SVMRFE) method is used to improve the classification accuracy. The experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is better than the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saliency detection task has witnessed a booming interest for years, due to the growth of the computer vision community. In this paper, we introduce a new saliency model that performs active learning with kernelized subspace ranker (KSR) referred to as KSR-AL. This pool-based active learning algorithm ranks the informativeness of unlabeled data by considering both uncertainty sampling and information density, thereby minimizing the cost of labeling. The informative images are selected to train the KSR iteratively and incrementally. The learning model of this algorithm is designed on object-level proposals and region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) features, by jointly learning a Rank-SVM classifier and a subspace projection. When the active learning process meets its stopping criteria, the saliency map of each image is generated by a weight fusion of its top-ranked proposals, whose ranking scores are graded by the learned ranker. We show that the KSR-AL achieves a reduction in annotation, as well as improvement in performance, compared with the supervised learning scheme. Besides, the proposed algorithm also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. These improvements are demonstrated by extensive experiments on six publicly available benchmark datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the explosive growth of data, the multi-view data is widely used in many fields, such as data mining, machine learning, computer vision, and so on. Because such data always has a complex structure, i.e., many categories, many perspectives of description and high dimension, how to formulate an accurate and reliable framework for the multi-view classification is a very challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view classification method by using multiple multi-class Support Vector Machines (SVMs) with a novel collaborative strategy. Here, each multi-class SVM embeds the scaling factor to renewedly adjust the weight allocation of all features, which is beneficial to highlight more important and discriminative features. Furthermore, we adopt the decision function values to integrate multiple multi-class learners and introduce the confidence score across multiple classes to determine the final classification result. In addition, through a series of the mathematical deduction, we bridge the proposed model with the solvable problem and solve it through an alternating iteration optimization method. We evaluate the proposed method on several image and face datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method performs better than other state-of-the-art learning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing usage of wearable devices for ambulatory monitoring and pervasive computing systems has given rise to the need of convenient and efficient activity recognition techniques. Hand-dominated activity recognition has great potential in understanding users’ gesture and providing context-aware computing services. This paper investigates the feasibility and applicability on the usage of wristband-interaction behavior for recognizing hand-dominated activities, with the advantage of great compliance and long wearing time. For each action, sensor data from wristband are analyzed to obtain kinematic sequences. The sequences are then depicted by statistics-, frequency-, and wavelet-domain features for providing accurate and fine-grained characterization of hand-dominated actions, and the correlation between the wristband-sensor features and the actions is analyzed. Classification techniques (Naive Bayes, nearest neighbor, neural network, support vector machine, and Random Forest) are applied to the feature space for performing hand-dominated activity recognition. Analyses are conducted using the data from 51 participants with a diversity in gender, age, weight, and height. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, achieving a recognition rate of 97.29% and an ${F}$ -score above 0.94. Additional experiments on the effect of feature selection and wristband sampling rate are provided to further examine the effectiveness of our approach. Our data are publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gears are often operated under various working conditions, which may cause the training and testing data have different but related distributions when conducting gear fault diagnosis. To address this issue, a latent feature-based transfer learning (TL) strategy is proposed in this paper. First, the bag-of-fault-words (BOFW) model combined with the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) method is developed to extract and represent every fault feature parameter as a histogram. Before identifying the gear fault, the latent feature-based TL strategy is carried out, which adopts the joint dual-probabilistic latent semantic analysis (JD-PLSA) to model the shared and domain-specific latent features. After that, a mapping matrix between two domains can be constructed by using Pearson’s correlation coefficients (PCCs) to effectively transfer shared and mapped domain specific latent knowledge and to reduce the gap between two domains. Then, a Fisher kernel-based support vector machine (FSVM) is used to identify the gear fault types. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach, gear data sets gathered from Spectra Quest’s drivetrain dynamics simulator (DDS) are analyzed. Experimental results prove that the proposed approach has a significant advantage over gear fault diagnosis, especially under varying working conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seam carving is a content-aware image processing approach that has been successfully applied to resizing or removing objects from digital images. Seam-carved images are hard to identify from the original image, making this detection method an important and attractive research topic. Existing methods are based on steganography attacks or statistical features, and their trained and tested models are all constructed using support vector machines (SVMs). The trained models of these methods take a long time to build from a limited number of images. This paper presents a new patch-based sobel operator (PSO) method using SVM and extreme learning machines (ELMs) based on the patch analysis method with square-based features. The ELM adopts five types of neurons to obtain five prediction results, which are then combined using the jury voting scheme in order to improve the accuracy. In addition, combinatorial fusion is first used to choose two of five prediction results according to the diversity rank/score graph, and these two results are then combined to make the final decision. The PSO method in the ELM with jury voting and combinatorial fusion achieves accuracies of 70.60–98.80% and 95.58–99.36% for 10–50% seam-carved and seam-insertion images, respectively. Additionally, for the PSO method, the ELM required only 1.2% of the training time required by the SVM. In conclusion, the PSO method in the ELM is useful for constructing trained models from a large number of images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) has been widely used for computer-aided diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, e.g., Alzheimer's disease (AD), due to its sensitivity to morphological changes caused by brain atrophy. Recently, a few deep learning methods (e.g., convolutional neural networks, CNNs) have been proposed to learn task-oriented features from sMRI for AD diagnosis, and achieved superior performance than the conventional learning-based methods using hand-crafted features. However, these existing CNN-based methods still require the pre-determination of informative locations in sMRI. That is, the stage of discriminative atrophy localization is isolated to the latter stages of feature extraction and classifier construction. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical fully convolutional network (H-FCN) to automatically identify discriminative local patches and regions in the whole brain sMRI, upon which multi-scale feature representations are then jointly learned and fused to construct hierarchical classification models for AD diagnosis. Our proposed H-FCN method was evaluated on a large cohort of subjects from two independent datasets (i.e., ADNI-1 and ADNI-2), demonstrating good performance on joint discriminative atrophy localization and brain disease diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new application of deep belief network (DBN) as an emerging artificial neural network for recognizing and classifying different partial discharge (PD) patterns. Phase resolved PD (PRPD) technique with different window intervals is used to manipulate three PD types, including corona, surface, and internal discharges measured in a high-voltage lab. Four approaches are proposed for extracting features from the raw measured data. In the first approach, the DBN is used as both a feature extractor and a PD classifier. The other three approaches extract discriminatory features using statistical and vector-norm-based operators to train a DBN classifier. The impact of the various phase windows through the PRPD method on the performance of the trained classifier is evaluated to obtain the best window interval. It is shown that the deep architectures are capable of learning important distinguishable features from PD data without any data preprocessing. This eliminates time-consuming feature extraction processes that produce the handcrafted features. Based on a comparison analysis, when the input data are corrupted by noise levels or no feature extraction technique is used to preprocess the data, the proposed approach outperforms other techniques, such as artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic classifiers, and support vector machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the data-driven remaining useful life (RUL) prediction for rolling bearings, the traditional machine learning-based methods generally provide insufficient feature representation and adaptive extraction. Although deep learning-based RUL prediction methods can solve these problems to some extent, they still do not yield satisfactory predictive results due to less degradation data and inconsistent data distribution among different bearings. To solve these problems, a new RUL prediction method based on deep feature representation and transfer learning is proposed in this paper. This method includes an off-line stage and an online stage. In the off-line stage, the Hilbert–Huang transform marginal spectra of the raw vibration signal of auxiliary bearings are first calculated as the input, and then contractive denoising autoencoder is introduced to extract deep features with good and stable fault representation. Second, by using the obtained deep features and Pearson’s correlation coefficient, a new health condition assessment method is proposed to divide the whole life of each bearing into a normal state and a fast-degradation state. Finally, using the extracted deep features and their RUL values, an RUL prediction model for the fast-degradation state is trained by means of a least-square support vector machine. In the online stage, a kind of transfer learning algorithm, i.e., transfer component analysis, is introduced to sequentially adjust the features of target bearing from auxiliary bearings, and then the corresponding RUL is predicted using the corrected features. Results using the PHM Challenging 2012 data set show a significant performance improvement when using the proposed method in terms of predictive accuracy and numerical stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the failure of power line insulators leads to the failure of power transmission systems, an insulator inspection system based on an aerial platform is widely used. Insulator defect detection is performed against complex backgrounds in aerial images, presenting an interesting but challenging problem. Traditional methods, based on handcrafted features or shallow-learning techniques, can only localize insulators and detect faults under specific detection conditions, such as when sufficient prior knowledge is available, with low background interference, at certain object scales, or under specific illumination conditions. This paper discusses the automatic detection of insulator defects using aerial images, accurately localizing insulator defects appearing in input images captured from real inspection environments. We propose a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) cascading architecture for performing localization and detecting defects in insulators. The cascading network uses a CNN based on a region proposal network to transform defect inspection into a two-level object detection problem. To address the scarcity of defect images in a real inspection environment, a data augmentation method is also proposed that includes four operations: 1) affine transformation; 2) insulator segmentation and background fusion; 3) Gaussian blur; and 4) brightness transformation. Defect detection precision and recall of the proposed method are 0.91 and 0.96 using a standard insulator dataset, and insulator defects under various conditions can be successfully detected. Experimental results demonstrate that this method meets the robustness and accuracy requirements for insulator defect detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, fingerprint authentication systems have been extensively deployed in various applications, including attendance systems, authentications on smartphones, mobile payment authorizations, as well as various safety certifications. However, similar to the other biometric identification technologies, fingerprint recognition is vulnerable to artificial replicas made from cheap materials, such as silicon, gelatin, etc. Thus, it is especially necessary to distinguish whether a given fingerprint is a live or a spoof one prior to such authentication. In order to solve the problems above, a novel local descriptor named Weber local binary descriptor for fingerprint liveness detection (FLD) has been proposed in this paper. The method consists of two components: the local binary differential excitation component that extracts intensity-variance features and the local binary gradient orientation component that extracts orientation features. The co-occurrence probability of the two components is calculated to construct a discriminative feature vector, which is fed into support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. The effectiveness of the proposed method is intuitively analyzed on the image samples and numerically demonstrated by Mahalanobis distance. Experiments are performed on two public databases from FLD competitions from 2011 and 2013. The results have proved that the proposed method obtains the best detection accuracy among the existing image local descriptors in FLD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]