Morphological neurons, that is morphological operators such as dilation and erosion with learnable structuring elements, have intrigued researchers for quite some time because of the power these operators bring to the table despite their simplicity. These operators are known to be powerful nonlinear tools, but for a given problem coming up with a sequence of operations and their structuring element is a non-trivial task. So, the existing works have mainly focused on this part of the problem without delving deep into their applicability as generic operators. A few works have tried to utilize morphological neurons as a part of classification (and regression) networks when the input is a feature vector. However, these methods mainly focus on a specific problem, without going into generic theoretical analysis. In this work, we have theoretically analyzed morphological neurons and have shown that these are far more powerful than previously anticipated. Our proposed morphological block, containing dilation and erosion followed by their linear combination, represents a sum of hinge functions. Existing works show that hinge functions perform quite well in classification and regression problems. Two morphological blocks can even approximate any continuous function. However, to facilitate the theoretical analysis that we have done in this paper, we have restricted ourselves to the 1D version of the operators, where the structuring element operates on the whole input. Experimental evaluations also indicate the effectiveness of networks built with morphological neurons, over similarly structured neural networks.

The open-radio access network (O-RAN) embraces cloudification and network function virtualization for base-band function processing by dis-aggregated radio units (RUs), distributed units (DUs), and centralized units (CUs). These enable the cloud-RAN vision in full, where multiple mobile network operators (MNOs) can install their proprietary or open RUs, but lease on-demand computational resources for DU-CU functions from commonly available open-clouds via open x-haul interfaces. In this paper, we propose and compare the performances of min-max fairness and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction-based x-haul and DU-CU resource allocation mechanisms to create a multi-tenant O-RAN ecosystem that is sustainable for small, medium, and large MNOs. The min-max fair approach minimizes the maximum OPEX of RUs through cost-sharing proportional to their demands, whereas the VCG auction-based approach minimizes the total OPEX for all resources utilized while extracting truthful demands from RUs. We consider time-wavelength division multiplexed (TWDM) passive optical network (PON)-based x-haul interfaces where PON virtualization technique is used to flexibly provide optical connections among RUs and edge-clouds at macro-cell RU locations as well as open-clouds at the central office locations. Moreover, we design efficient heuristics that yield significantly better economic efficiency and network resource utilization than conventional greedy resource allocation algorithms and reinforcement learning-based algorithms.

In this paper, we propose SceNDD: a scenario-based naturalistic driving dataset that is built upon data collected from an instrumented vehicle in downtown Indianapolis. The data collection was completed in 68 driving sessions with different drivers, where each session lasted about 20--40 minutes. The main goal of creating this dataset is to provide the research community with real driving scenarios that have diverse trajectories and driving behaviors. The dataset contains ego-vehicle's waypoints, velocity, yaw angle, as well as non-ego actor's waypoints, velocity, yaw angle, entry-time, and exit-time. Certain flexibility is provided to users so that actors, sensors, lanes, roads, and obstacles can be added to the existing scenarios. We used a Joint Probabilistic Data Association (JPDA) tracker to detect non-ego vehicles on the road. We present some preliminary results of the proposed dataset and a few applications associated with it. The complete dataset is expected to be released by early 2023.

Long-term OCR services aim to provide high-quality output to their users at competitive costs. It is essential to upgrade the models because of the complex data loaded by the users. The service providers encourage the users who provide data where the OCR model fails by rewarding them based on data complexity, readability, and available budget. Hitherto, the OCR works include preparing the models on standard datasets without considering the end-users. We propose a strategy of consistently upgrading an existing Handwritten Hindi OCR model three times on the dataset of 15 users. We fix the budget of 4 users for each iteration. For the first iteration, the model directly trains on the dataset from the first four users. For the rest iteration, all remaining users write a page each, which service providers later analyze to select the 4 (new) best users based on the quality of predictions on the human-readable words. Selected users write 23 more pages for upgrading the model. We upgrade the model with Curriculum Learning (CL) on the data available in the current iteration and compare the subset from previous iterations. The upgraded model is tested on a held-out set of one page each from all 23 users. We provide insights into our investigations on the effect of CL, user selection, and especially the data from unseen writing styles. Our work can be used for long-term OCR services in crowd-sourcing scenarios for the service providers and end users.

Indian e-commerce industry has evolved over the last decade and is expected to grow over the next few years. The focus has now shifted to turnaround time (TAT) due to the emergence of many third-party logistics providers and higher customer expectations. The key consideration for delivery providers is to balance their overall operating costs while meeting the promised TAT to their customers. E-commerce delivery partners operate through a network of facilities whose strategic locations help to run the operations efficiently. In this work, we identify the locations of hubs throughout the country and their corresponding mapping with the distribution centers. The objective is to minimize the total network costs with TAT adherence. We use Genetic Algorithm and leverage business constraints to reduce the solution search space and hence the solution time. The results indicate an improvement of 9.73% in TAT compliance compared with the current scenario.

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is more interesting and challenging than printed text due to uneven variations in the handwriting style of the writers, content, and time. HTR becomes more challenging for the Indic languages because of (i) multiple characters combined to form conjuncts which increase the number of characters of respective languages, and (ii) near to 100 unique basic Unicode characters in each Indic script. Recently, many recognition methods based on the encoder-decoder framework have been proposed to handle such problems. They still face many challenges, such as image blur and incomplete characters due to varying writing styles and ink density. We argue that most encoder-decoder methods are based on local visual features without explicit global semantic information. In this work, we enhance the performance of Indic handwritten text recognizers using global semantic information. We use a semantic module in an encoder-decoder framework for extracting global semantic information to recognize the Indic handwritten texts. The semantic information is used in both the encoder for supervision and the decoder for initialization. The semantic information is predicted from the word embedding of a pre-trained language model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on handwritten texts of ten Indic languages.

For low-level computer vision and image processing ML tasks, training on large datasets is critical for generalization. However, the standard practice of relying on real-world images primarily from the Internet comes with image quality, scalability, and privacy issues, especially in commercial contexts. To address this, we have developed a procedural synthetic data generation pipeline and dataset tailored to low-level vision tasks. Our Unreal engine-based synthetic data pipeline populates large scenes algorithmically with a combination of random 3D objects, materials, and geometric transformations. Then, we calibrate the camera noise profiles to synthesize the noisy images. From this pipeline, we generated a fully synthetic image denoising dataset (FSID) which consists of 175,000 noisy/clean image pairs. We then trained and validated a CNN-based denoising model, and demonstrated that the model trained on this synthetic data alone can achieve competitive denoising results when evaluated on real-world noisy images captured with smartphone cameras.

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for point cloud generation. A key component that drives the impressive performance for generating high-quality samples from noise is iteratively denoise for thousands of steps. While beneficial, the complexity of learning steps has limited its applications to many 3D real-world. To address this limitation, we propose Point Straight Flow (PSF), a model that exhibits impressive performance using one step. Our idea is based on the reformulation of the standard diffusion model, which optimizes the curvy learning trajectory into a straight path. Further, we develop a distillation strategy to shorten the straight path into one step without a performance loss, enabling applications to 3D real-world with latency constraints. We perform evaluations on multiple 3D tasks and find that our PSF performs comparably to the standard diffusion model, outperforming other efficient 3D point cloud generation methods. On real-world applications such as point cloud completion and training-free text-guided generation in a low-latency setup, PSF performs favorably.

Timely and effective response to humanitarian crises requires quick and accurate analysis of large amounts of text data - a process that can highly benefit from expert-assisted NLP systems trained on validated and annotated data in the humanitarian response domain. To enable creation of such NLP systems, we introduce and release HumSet, a novel and rich multilingual dataset of humanitarian response documents annotated by experts in the humanitarian response community. The dataset provides documents in three languages (English, French, Spanish) and covers a variety of humanitarian crises from 2018 to 2021 across the globe. For each document, HUMSET provides selected snippets (entries) as well as assigned classes to each entry annotated using common humanitarian information analysis frameworks. HUMSET also provides novel and challenging entry extraction and multi-label entry classification tasks. In this paper, we take a first step towards approaching these tasks and conduct a set of experiments on Pre-trained Language Models (PLM) to establish strong baselines for future research in this domain. The dataset is available at https://blog.thedeep.io/humset/.

医疗图像分类是图像识别领域中最关键的问题之一。该领域的主要挑战之一是缺乏标记的培训数据。此外，数据集通常会出现类不平衡，因为某些情况很少发生。结果，分类任务的准确性通常很低。特别是深度学习模型，在图像细分和分类问题上显示出令人鼓舞的结果，但它们需要很大的数据集进行培训。因此，需要从相同分布中生成更多的合成样品。先前的工作表明，特征生成更有效，并且比相应的图像生成更高。我们将此想法应用于医学成像领域。我们使用转移学习来训练针对金标准班级注释的小数据集的细分模型。我们提取了学习的功能，并使用它们使用辅助分类器GAN（ACGAN）来生成在类标签上进行调节的合成特征。我们根据其严重程度测试了下游分类任务中生成特征的质量。实验结果表明，这些生成特征的有效性及其对平衡数据和提高分类类别的准确性的总体贡献的结果有希望的结果。