This paper describes an auditory display of Hawaii's 2019 coral bleaching data via means of spatial audio and parameter mapping methods. Selected data fields spanning 78 days are mapped to sound surrogates of coral reefs' natural soundscapes, which are progressively altered in their constituent elements as the corresponding coral locations undergo bleaching. For some of these elements, this process outlines a trajectory from a dense to a sparser, reduced soundscape, while for others it translates moving away from harmonic tones and towards complex spectra. This experiment is accompanied by a short evaluation study to contextualize it in an established aesthetic perspective space and to probe its potential for public engagement in the discourse around climate change.
Monocular depth estimation is a challenging task that predicts the pixel-wise depth from a single 2D image. Current methods typically model this problem as a regression or classification task. We propose DiffusionDepth, a new approach that reformulates monocular depth estimation as a denoising diffusion process. It learns an iterative denoising process to `denoise' random depth distribution into a depth map with the guidance of monocular visual conditions. The process is performed in the latent space encoded by a dedicated depth encoder and decoder. Instead of diffusing ground truth (GT) depth, the model learns to reverse the process of diffusing the refined depth of itself into random depth distribution. This self-diffusion formulation overcomes the difficulty of applying generative models to sparse GT depth scenarios. The proposed approach benefits this task by refining depth estimation step by step, which is superior for generating accurate and highly detailed depth maps. Experimental results on KITTI and NYU-Depth-V2 datasets suggest that a simple yet efficient diffusion approach could reach state-of-the-art performance in both indoor and outdoor scenarios with acceptable inference time.
This report introduces the Attention Visualizer package, which is crafted to visually illustrate the significance of individual words in encoder-only transformer-based models. In contrast to other methods that center on tokens and self-attention scores, our approach will examine the words and their impact on the final embedding representation. Libraries like this play a crucial role in enhancing the interpretability and explainability of neural networks. They offer the opportunity to illuminate their internal mechanisms, providing a better understanding of how they operate and can be enhanced. You can access the code and review examples on the following GitHub repository: //github.com/AlaFalaki/AttentionVisualizer.
In stark contrast to the case of images, finding a concise, learnable discrete representation of 3D surfaces remains a challenge. In particular, while polygon meshes are arguably the most common surface representation used in geometry processing, their irregular and combinatorial structure often make them unsuitable for learning-based applications. In this work, we present VoroMesh, a novel and differentiable Voronoi-based representation of watertight 3D shape surfaces. From a set of 3D points (called generators) and their associated occupancy, we define our boundary representation through the Voronoi diagram of the generators as the subset of Voronoi faces whose two associated (equidistant) generators are of opposite occupancy: the resulting polygon mesh forms a watertight approximation of the target shape's boundary. To learn the position of the generators, we propose a novel loss function, dubbed VoroLoss, that minimizes the distance from ground truth surface samples to the closest faces of the Voronoi diagram which does not require an explicit construction of the entire Voronoi diagram. A direct optimization of the Voroloss to obtain generators on the Thingi32 dataset demonstrates the geometric efficiency of our representation compared to axiomatic meshing algorithms and recent learning-based mesh representations. We further use VoroMesh in a learning-based mesh prediction task from input SDF grids on the ABC dataset, and show comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while guaranteeing closed output surfaces free of self-intersections.
This paper proposes a new method for determining the simulation parameters of the Jiles-Atherton Model used to simulate the first magnetization curve and hysteresis loop in ferromagnetic materials. The Jiles-Atherton Model is an important tool in engineering applications due to its relatively simple differential formulation. However, determining the simulation parameters for the anhysteretic curve is challenging. Several methods have been proposed, primarily based on mathematical aspects of the anhysteretic and first magnetization curves and hysteresis loops. This paper focuses on finding the magnetic moments of the material, which are used to define the simulation parameters for its anhysteretic curve. The proposed method involves using the susceptibility of the material and a linear approximation of a paramagnet to find the magnetic moments. The simulation parameters can then be found based on the magnetic moments. The method is validated theoretically and experimentally and offers a more physical approach to finding simulation parameters for the anhysteretic curve and a simplified way of determining the magnetic moments of the material.
We present an analysis of the representation of gender as a data dimension in data visualizations and propose a set of considerations around visual variables and annotations for gender-related data. Gender is a common demographic dimension of data collected from study or survey participants, passengers, or customers, as well as across academic studies, especially in certain disciplines like sociology. Our work contributes to multiple ongoing discussions on the ethical implications of data visualizations. By choosing specific data, visual variables, and text labels, visualization designers may, inadvertently or not, perpetuate stereotypes and biases. Here, our goal is to start an evolving discussion on how to represent data on gender in data visualizations and raise awareness of the subtleties of choosing visual variables and words in gender visualizations. In order to ground this discussion, we collected and coded gender visualizations and their captions from five different scientific communities (Biology, Politics, Social Studies, Visualisation, and Human-Computer Interaction), in addition to images from Tableau Public and the Information Is Beautiful awards showcase. Overall we found that representation types are community-specific, color hue is the dominant visual channel for gender data, and nonconforming gender is under-represented. We end our paper with a discussion of considerations for gender visualization derived from our coding and the literature and recommendations for large data collection bodies. A free copy of this paper and all supplemental materials are available at //osf.io/v9ams/
Image Signal Processors (ISPs) play important roles in image recognition tasks as well as in the perceptual quality of captured images. In most cases, experts make a lot of effort to manually tune many parameters of ISPs, but the parameters are sub-optimal. In the literature, two types of techniques have been actively studied: a machine learning-based parameter tuning technique and a DNN-based ISP technique. The former is lightweight but lacks expressive power. The latter has expressive power, but the computational cost is too heavy on edge devices. To solve these problems, we propose "DynamicISP," which consists of multiple classical ISP functions and dynamically controls the parameters of each frame according to the recognition result of the previous frame. We show our method successfully controls the parameters of multiple ISP functions and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with low computational cost in single and multi-category object detection tasks.
This paper presents a novel neural implicit radiance representation for free viewpoint relighting from a small set of unstructured photographs of an object lit by a moving point light source different from the view position. We express the shape as a signed distance function modeled by a multi layer perceptron. In contrast to prior relightable implicit neural representations, we do not disentangle the different reflectance components, but model both the local and global reflectance at each point by a second multi layer perceptron that, in addition, to density features, the current position, the normal (from the signed distace function), view direction, and light position, also takes shadow and highlight hints to aid the network in modeling the corresponding high frequency light transport effects. These hints are provided as a suggestion, and we leave it up to the network to decide how to incorporate these in the final relit result. We demonstrate and validate our neural implicit representation on synthetic and real scenes exhibiting a wide variety of shapes, material properties, and global illumination light transport.
This paper discusses the challenges of optical character recognition (OCR) on natural scenes, which is harder than OCR on documents due to the wild content and various image backgrounds. We propose to uniformly use word error rates (WER) as a new measurement for evaluating scene-text OCR, both end-to-end (e2e) performance and individual system component performances. Particularly for the e2e metric, we name it DISGO WER as it considers Deletion, Insertion, Substitution, and Grouping/Ordering errors. Finally we propose to utilize the concept of super blocks to automatically compute BLEU scores for e2e OCR machine translation. The small SCUT public test set is used to demonstrate WER performance by a modularized OCR system.
Recent years have witnessed the enormous success of low-dimensional vector space representations of knowledge graphs to predict missing facts or find erroneous ones. Currently, however, it is not yet well-understood how ontological knowledge, e.g. given as a set of (existential) rules, can be embedded in a principled way. To address this shortcoming, in this paper we introduce a framework based on convex regions, which can faithfully incorporate ontological knowledge into the vector space embedding. Our technical contribution is two-fold. First, we show that some of the most popular existing embedding approaches are not capable of modelling even very simple types of rules. Second, we show that our framework can represent ontologies that are expressed using so-called quasi-chained existential rules in an exact way, such that any set of facts which is induced using that vector space embedding is logically consistent and deductively closed with respect to the input ontology.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.