Xiang Xie

Buqing Cao, Qian Peng, Xiang Xie et al.

Real-world graphs or networks are usually heterogeneous, involving multiple types of nodes and relationships. Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) can effectively handle these diverse nodes and edges, capturing heterogeneous information within the graph, thus exhibiting outstanding performance. However, most methods of HGNNs usually involve complex structural designs, leading to problems such as high memory usage, long inference time, and extensive consumption of computing resources. These limitations pose certain challenges for the practical application of HGNNs, especially for resource-constrained devices. To mitigate this issue, we propose the Spiking Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks (SpikingHAN), which incorporates the brain-inspired and energy-saving properties of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) into heterogeneous graph learning to reduce the computing cost without compromising the performance. Specifically, SpikingHAN aggregates metapath-based neighbor information using a single-layer graph convolution with shared parameters. It then employs a semantic-level attention mechanism to capture the importance of different meta-paths and performs semantic aggregation. Finally, it encodes the heterogeneous information into a spike sequence through SNNs, simulating bioinformatic processing to derive a binarized 1-bit representation of the heterogeneous graph. Comprehensive experimental results from three real-world heterogeneous graph datasets show that SpikingHAN delivers competitive node classification performance. It achieves this with fewer parameters, quicker inference, reduced memory usage, and lower energy consumption. Code is available at https://github.com/QianPeng369/SpikingHAN.

Ke Wang, Zanting Ye, Xiang Xie et al.

Accurate segmentation of clustered microcalcifications in mammography is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. Despite exhibiting expert-level accuracy, recent deep learning advancements in medical image segmentation provide insufficient contribution to practical applications, due to the domain shift resulting from differences in patient postures, individual gland density, and imaging modalities of mammography etc. In this paper, a novel framework named MLN-net, which can accurately segment multi-source images using only single source images, is proposed for clustered microcalcification segmentation. We first propose a source domain image augmentation method to generate multi-source images, leading to improved generalization. And a structure of multiple layer normalization (LN) layers is used to construct the segmentation network, which can be found efficient for clustered microcalcification segmentation in different domains. Additionally, a branch selection strategy is designed for measuring the similarity of the source domain data and the target domain data. To validate the proposed MLN-net, extensive analyses including ablation experiments are performed, comparison of 12 baseline methods. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of MLN-net in segmenting clustered microcalcifications from different domains and the its segmentation accuracy surpasses state-of-the-art methods. Code will be available at https://github.com/yezanting/MLN-NET-VERSON1.

Xiang Xie, Xiaonan Liu

Building height, the third dimension (3D) of urban spatial data, is absent in over 95% of structures in global geospatial databases. For the emerging low-altitude economy, this data gap forces each aerial platform to rely on real-time onboard sensing rather than pre-computed 3D scene geometry. We present the Location Prior Generation Framework (LPGF), a multi-source data fusion pipeline that integrates Sentinel-2 imagery, UAV telemetry, vehicle GPS trajectories, and OpenStreetMap footprints into structured, reusable urban location priors. LPGF assigns building heights through a three-tier priority hierarchy: (1) explicit OSM height tags where available, (2) floor count multiplied by 3.2 m per story where recorded, and (3) building-type default heights otherwise, yielding a worst-case error of approximately 5.5 m. An optional shadow-based height estimation module (SHEM) is activated only when a four-criterion quality gate is satisfied; when any criterion fails, the pipeline routes to structured fallback. On the MiTra A50 Milan dataset, the quality gate correctly identified two imaging failure modes: sub-pixel shadows at 10 m GSD and ground shadow merging at 0.93 m GSD, producing a consistent 27-building prior in both cases. Tier 3 type-default heights were validated against manual floor counts (n=15), achieving MAE=3.07 m within the 5.0 m uncertainty bound. The framework demonstrates that structured, quality-gated fusion of universally available data streams can bootstrap 3D scene coverage for low-altitude urban operations.

Fengrun Zhang, Xiang Xie, Kai Guo

Unsupervised Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) aims to design a generalizable method that can be used to detect anomalies when only normal sounds are given. In this paper, Anomalous Sound Detection based on Diffusion Models (ASD-Diffusion) is proposed for ASD in real-world factories. In our pipeline, the anomalies in acoustic features are reconstructed from their noisy corrupted features into their approximate normal pattern. Secondly, a post-processing anomalies filter algorithm is proposed to detect anomalies that exhibit significant deviation from the original input after reconstruction. Furthermore, denoising diffusion implicit model is introduced to accelerate the inference speed by a longer sampling interval of the denoising process. The proposed method is innovative in the application of diffusion models as a new scheme. Experimental results on the development set of DCASE 2023 challenge task 2 outperform the baseline by 7.75%, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Justas Brazauskas, Rohit Verma, Vadim Safronov et al.

Legacy Building Information Modelling (BIM) systems are not designed to process the high-volume, high-velocity data emitted by in-building Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors. Historical lack of consideration for the real-time nature of such data means that outputs from such BIM systems typically lack the timeliness necessary for enacting decisions as a result of patterns emerging in the sensor data. Similarly, as sensors are increasingly deployed in buildings, antiquated Building Management Systems (BMSs) struggle to maintain functionality as interoperability challenges increase. In combination these motivate the need to fill an important gap in smart buildings research, to enable faster adoption of these technologies, by combining BIM, BMS and sensor data. This paper describes the data architecture of the Adaptive City Platform, designed to address these combined requirements by enabling integrated BIM and real-time sensor data analysis across both time and space.

Liqiang Zhang, Chengzhu Yu, Heng Lu et al.

Singing voice conversion is converting the timbre in the source singing to the target speaker's voice while keeping singing content the same. However, singing data for target speaker is much more difficult to collect compared with normal speech data.In this paper, we introduce a singing voice conversion algorithm that is capable of generating high quality target speaker's singing using only his/her normal speech data. First, we manage to integrate the training and conversion process of speech and singing into one framework by unifying the features used in standard speech synthesis system and singing synthesis system. In this way, normal speech data can also contribute to singing voice conversion training, making the singing voice conversion system more robust especially when the singing database is small.Moreover, in order to achieve one-shot singing voice conversion, a speaker embedding module is developed using both speech and singing data, which provides target speaker identify information during conversion. Experiments indicate proposed sing conversion system can convert source singing to target speaker's high-quality singing with only 20 seconds of target speaker's enrollment speech data.

Shaofeng Zou, Mingzhu Long, Xuyang Wang et al.

The quality of images captured by wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is key for doctors to diagnose diseases of gastrointestinal (GI) tract. However, there exist many low-quality endoscopic images due to the limited illumination and complex environment in GI tract. After an enhancement process, the severe noise become an unacceptable problem. The noise varies with different cameras, GI tract environments and image enhancement. And the noise model is hard to be obtained. This paper proposes a convolutional blind denoising network for endoscopic images. We apply Deep Image Prior (DIP) method to reconstruct a clean image iteratively using a noisy image without a specific noise model and ground truth. Then we design a blind image quality assessment network based on MobileNet to estimate the quality of the reconstructed images. The estimated quality is used to stop the iterative operation in DIP method. The number of iterations is reduced about 36% by using transfer learning in our DIP process. Experimental results on endoscopic images and real-world noisy images demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and quantitative metrics.

Liqiang Zhang, Chengzhu Yu, Heng Lu et al.

We propose an algorithm that is capable of synthesizing high quality target speaker's singing voice given only their normal speech samples. The proposed algorithm first integrate speech and singing synthesis into a unified framework, and learns universal speaker embeddings that are shareable between speech and singing synthesis tasks. Specifically, the speaker embeddings learned from normal speech via the speech synthesis objective are shared with those learned from singing samples via the singing synthesis objective in the unified training framework. This makes the learned speaker embedding a transferable representation for both speaking and singing. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on singing voice conversion task where the content of original singing is covered with the timbre of another speaker's voice learned purely from their normal speech samples. Our experiments indicate that the proposed algorithm generates high-quality singing voices that sound highly similar to target speaker's voice given only his or her normal speech samples. We believe that proposed algorithm will open up new opportunities for singing synthesis and conversion for broader users and applications.

Rahman Attar, Xiang Xie, Zhihua Wang et al.

Examining and interpreting of a large number of wireless endoscopic images from the gastrointestinal tract is a tiresome task for physicians. A practical solution is to automatically construct a two dimensional representation of the gastrointestinal tract for easy inspection. However, little has been done on wireless endoscopic image stitching, let alone systematic investigation. The proposed new wireless endoscopic image stitching method consists of two main steps to improve the accuracy and efficiency of image registration. First, the keypoints are extracted by Principle Component Analysis and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (PCA-SIFT) algorithm and refined with Maximum Likelihood Estimation SAmple Consensus (MLESAC) outlier removal to find the most reliable keypoints. Second, the optimal transformation parameters obtained from first step are fed to the Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) algorithm as an initial solution. With modified Marquardt-Levenberg search strategy in a multiscale framework, the NMI can find the optimal transformation parameters in the shortest time. The proposed methodology has been tested on two different datasets - one with real wireless endoscopic images and another with images obtained from Micro-Ball (a new wireless cubic endoscopy system with six image sensors). The results have demonstrated the accuracy and robustness of the proposed methodology both visually and quantitatively.