Mehrdad Yaghoobi

Shuo Li, Mehrdad Yaghoobi

Hyperspectral images are typically composed of hundreds of narrow and contiguous spectral bands, each containing information about the material composition of the imaged scene. However, these images can be affected by various sources of noise, distortions, or data losses, which can significantly degrade their quality and usefulness. To address these problems, we introduce two novel self-supervised Hyperspectral Images (HSI) inpainting algorithms: Low Rank and Sparsity Constraint Plug-and-Play (LRS-PnP), and its extension LRS-PnP-DIP, which features the strong learning capability, but is still free of external training data. We conduct the stability analysis under some mild assumptions which guarantees the algorithm to converge. It is specifically very helpful for the practical applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed solution is able to produce visually and qualitatively superior inpainting results, achieving state-of-the-art performance. The code for reproducing the results is available at \url{https://github.com/shuoli0708/LRS-PnP-DIP}.

Calum Heggan, Sam Budgett, Timothy Hospedales et al.

Currently available benchmarks for few-shot learning (machine learning with few training examples) are limited in the domains they cover, primarily focusing on image classification. This work aims to alleviate this reliance on image-based benchmarks by offering the first comprehensive, public and fully reproducible audio based alternative, covering a variety of sound domains and experimental settings. We compare the few-shot classification performance of a variety of techniques on seven audio datasets (spanning environmental sounds to human-speech). Extending this, we carry out in-depth analyses of joint training (where all datasets are used during training) and cross-dataset adaptation protocols, establishing the possibility of a generalised audio few-shot classification algorithm. Our experimentation shows gradient-based meta-learning methods such as MAML and Meta-Curvature consistently outperform both metric and baseline methods. We also demonstrate that the joint training routine helps overall generalisation for the environmental sound databases included, as well as being a somewhat-effective method of tackling the cross-dataset/domain setting.

Ruchika Chavhan, Henry Gouk, Jan Stuehmer et al.

Contrastive self-supervised learning methods famously produce high quality transferable representations by learning invariances to different data augmentations. Invariances established during pre-training can be interpreted as strong inductive biases. However these may or may not be helpful, depending on if they match the invariance requirements of downstream tasks or not. This has led to several attempts to learn task-specific invariances during pre-training, however, these methods are highly compute intensive and tedious to train. We introduce the notion of amortised invariance learning for contrastive self supervision. In the pre-training stage, we parameterize the feature extractor by differentiable invariance hyper-parameters that control the invariances encoded by the representation. Then, for any downstream task, both linear readout and task-specific invariance requirements can be efficiently and effectively learned by gradient-descent. We evaluate the notion of amortised invariances for contrastive learning over two different modalities: vision and audio, on two widely-used contrastive learning methods in vision: SimCLR and MoCo-v2 with popular architectures like ResNets and Vision Transformers, and SimCLR with ResNet-18 for audio. We show that our amortised features provide a reliable way to learn diverse downstream tasks with different invariance requirements, while using a single feature and avoiding task-specific pre-training. This provides an exciting perspective that opens up new horizons in the field of general purpose representation learning.

Shuo Li, Mehrdad Yaghoobi

Hyperspectral Image (HSI)s cover hundreds or thousands of narrow spectral bands, conveying a wealth of spatial and spectral information. However, due to the instrumental errors and the atmospheric changes, the HSI obtained in practice are often contaminated by noise and dead pixels(lines), resulting in missing information that may severely compromise the subsequent applications. We introduce here a novel HSI missing pixel prediction algorithm, called Low Rank and Sparsity Constraint Plug-and-Play (LRS-PnP). It is shown that LRS-PnP is able to predict missing pixels and bands even when all spectral bands of the image are missing. The proposed LRS-PnP algorithm is further extended to a self-supervised model by combining the LRS-PnP with the Deep Image Prior (DIP), called LRS-PnP-DIP. In a series of experiments with real data, It is shown that the LRS-PnP-DIP either achieves state-of-the-art inpainting performance compared to other learning-based methods, or outperforms them.

Shuo Li, Mike Davies, Mehrdad Yaghoobi

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is a key technology for earth observation, surveillance, medical imaging and diagnostics, astronomy and space exploration. The conventional technology for HSI in remote sensing applications is based on the push-broom scanning approach in which the camera records the spectral image of a stripe of the scene at a time, while the image is generated by the aggregation of measurements through time. In real-world airborne and spaceborne HSI instruments, some empty stripes would appear at certain locations, because platforms do not always maintain a constant programmed attitude, or have access to accurate digital elevation maps (DEM), and the travelling track is not necessarily aligned with the hyperspectral cameras at all times. This makes the enhancement of the acquired HS images from incomplete or corrupted observations an essential task. We introduce a novel HSI inpainting algorithm here, called Hyperspectral Equivariant Imaging (Hyper-EI). Hyper-EI is a self-supervised learning-based method which does not require training on extensive datasets or access to a pre-trained model. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art inpainting performance compared to the existing methods.

Shuo Li, Mehrdad Yaghoobi

Hyperspectral images are typically composed of hundreds of narrow and contiguous spectral bands, each containing information regarding the material composition of the imaged scene. However, these images can be affected by various sources of noise, distortions, or data loss, which can significantly degrade their quality and usefulness. This paper introduces a convergent guaranteed algorithm, LRS-PnP-DIP(1-Lip), which successfully addresses the instability issue of DHP that has been reported before. The proposed algorithm extends the successful joint low-rank and sparse model to further exploit the underlying data structures beyond the conventional and sometimes restrictive unions of subspace models. A stability analysis guarantees the convergence of the proposed algorithm under mild assumptions , which is crucial for its application in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed solution consistently delivers visually and quantitatively superior inpainting results, establishing state-of-the-art performance.

Calum Heggan, Tim Hospedales, Sam Budgett et al.

Contrastive self-supervised learning has gained attention for its ability to create high-quality representations from large unlabelled data sets. A key reason that these powerful features enable data-efficient learning of downstream tasks is that they provide augmentation invariance, which is often a useful inductive bias. However, the amount and type of invariances preferred is not known apriori, and varies across different downstream tasks. We therefore propose a multi-task self-supervised framework (MT-SLVR) that learns both variant and invariant features in a parameter-efficient manner. Our multi-task representation provides a strong and flexible feature that benefits diverse downstream tasks. We evaluate our approach on few-shot classification tasks drawn from a variety of audio domains and demonstrate improved classification performance on all of them

Nikolaos Dionelis, Mehrdad Yaghoobi, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

Generative models trained in an unsupervised manner may set high likelihood and low reconstruction loss to Out-of-Distribution (OoD) samples. This increases Type II errors and leads to missed anomalies, overall decreasing Anomaly Detection (AD) performance. In addition, AD models underperform due to the rarity of anomalies. To address these limitations, we propose the OoD Minimum Anomaly Score GAN (OMASGAN). OMASGAN generates, in a negative data augmentation manner, anomalous samples on the estimated distribution boundary. These samples are then used to refine an AD model, leading to more accurate estimation of the underlying data distribution including multimodal supports with disconnected modes. OMASGAN performs retraining by including the abnormal minimum-anomaly-score OoD samples generated on the distribution boundary in a self-supervised learning manner. For inference, for AD, we devise a discriminator which is trained with negative and positive samples either generated (negative or positive) or real (only positive). OMASGAN addresses the rarity of anomalies by generating strong and adversarial OoD samples on the distribution boundary using only normal class data, effectively addressing mode collapse. A key characteristic of our model is that it uses any f-divergence distribution metric in its variational representation, not requiring invertibility. OMASGAN does not use feature engineering and makes no assumptions about the data distribution. The evaluation of OMASGAN on image data using the leave-one-out methodology shows that it achieves an improvement of at least 0.24 and 0.07 points in AUROC on average on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively, over other benchmark and state-of-the-art models for AD.

Nikolaos Dionelis, Mehrdad Yaghoobi, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris

Generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have been used for unsupervised anomaly detection. While performance keeps improving, several limitations exist particularly attributed to difficulties at capturing multimodal supports and to the ability to approximate the underlying distribution closer to the tails, i.e. the boundary of the distribution's support. This paper proposes an approach that attempts to alleviate such shortcomings. We propose an invertible-residual-network-based model, the Boundary of Distribution Support Generator (BDSG). GANs generally do not guarantee the existence of a probability distribution and here, we use the recently developed Invertible Residual Network (IResNet) and Residual Flow (ResFlow), for density estimation. These models have not yet been used for anomaly detection. We leverage IResNet and ResFlow for Out-of-Distribution (OoD) sample detection and for sample generation on the boundary using a compound loss function that forces the samples to lie on the boundary. The BDSG addresses non-convex support, disjoint components, and multimodal distributions. Results on synthetic data and data from multimodal distributions, such as MNIST and CIFAR-10, demonstrate competitive performance compared to methods from the literature.

Jingshuai Liu, Mehrdad Yaghoobi

Compressed sensing (CS) leverages the sparsity prior to provide the foundation for fast magnetic resonance imaging (fastMRI). However, iterative solvers for ill-posed problems hinder their adaption to time-critical applications. Moreover, such a prior can be neither rich to capture complicated anatomical structures nor applicable to meet the demand of high-fidelity reconstructions in modern MRI. Inspired by the state-of-the-art methods in image generation, we propose a novel attention-based deep learning framework to provide high-quality MRI reconstruction. We incorporate large-field contextual feature integration and attention selection in a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework. We demonstrate that the proposed model can produce superior results compared to other deep learning-based methods in terms of image quality, and relevance to the MRI reconstruction in an extremely low sampling rate diet.

Konstantinos A. Voulgaris, Mike E. Davies, Mehrdad Yaghoobi

Non-negative signals form an important class of sparse signals. Many algorithms have already beenproposed to recover such non-negative representations, where greedy and convex relaxed algorithms are among the most popular methods. The greedy techniques are low computational cost algorithms, which have also been modified to incorporate the non-negativity of the representations. One such modification has been proposed for Matching Pursuit (MP) based algorithms, which first chooses positive coefficients and uses a non-negative optimisation technique that guarantees the non-negativity of the coefficients. The performance of greedy algorithms, like all non-exhaustive search methods, suffer from high coherence with the linear generative model, called the dictionary. We here first reformulate the non-negative matching pursuit algorithm in the form of a deep neural network. We then show that the proposed model after training yields a significant improvement in terms of exact recovery performance, compared to other non-trained greedy algorithms, while keeping the complexity low.