Muhammad Asim

Yiheng Huang, Junhong Chen, Nick Michiels et al.

Due to the visual properties of reflection and refraction, RGB-D cameras cannot accurately capture the depth of transparent objects, leading to incomplete depth maps. To fill in the missing points, recent studies tend to explore new visual features and design complex networks to reconstruct the depth, however, these approaches tremendously increase computation, and the correlation of different visual features remains a problem. To this end, we propose an efficient depth completion network named DistillGrasp which distillates knowledge from the teacher branch to the student branch. Specifically, in the teacher branch, we design a position correlation block (PCB) that leverages RGB images as the query and key to search for the corresponding values, guiding the model to establish correct correspondence between two features and transfer it to the transparent areas. For the student branch, we propose a consistent feature correlation module (CFCM) that retains the reliable regions of RGB images and depth maps respectively according to the consistency and adopts a CNN to capture the pairwise relationship for depth completion. To avoid the student branch only learning regional features from the teacher branch, we devise a distillation loss that not only considers the distance loss but also the object structure and edge information. Extensive experiments conducted on the ClearGrasp dataset manifest that our teacher network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and generalization, and the student network achieves competitive results with a higher speed of 48 FPS. In addition, the significant improvement in a real-world robotic grasping system illustrates the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed system.

Muhammad Asim, Yong Wang, Kezhi Wang et al.

Cloud computing (CC) is a centralized computing paradigm that accumulates resources centrally and provides these resources to users through Internet. Although CC holds a large number of resources, it may not be acceptable by real-time mobile applications, as it is usually far away from users geographically. On the other hand, edge computing (EC), which distributes resources to the network edge, enjoys increasing popularity in the applications with low-latency and high-reliability requirements. EC provides resources in a decentralized manner, which can respond to users' requirements faster than the normal CC, but with limited computing capacities. As both CC and EC are resource-sensitive, several big issues arise, such as how to conduct job scheduling, resource allocation, and task offloading, which significantly influence the performance of the whole system. To tackle these issues, many optimization problems have been formulated. These optimization problems usually have complex properties, such as non-convexity and NP-hardness, which may not be addressed by the traditional convex optimization-based solutions. Computational intelligence (CI), consisting of a set of nature-inspired computational approaches, recently exhibits great potential in addressing these optimization problems in CC and EC. This paper provides an overview of research problems in CC and EC and recent progresses in addressing them with the help of CI techniques. Informative discussions and future research trends are also presented, with the aim of offering insights to the readers and motivating new research directions.

Siddique Latif, Muhammad Asim, Rajib Rana et al.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown potential in learning emotional attributes and generating new data samples. However, their performance is usually hindered by the unavailability of larger speech emotion recognition (SER) data. In this work, we propose a framework that utilises the mixup data augmentation scheme to augment the GAN in feature learning and generation. To show the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we present results for SER on (i) synthetic feature vectors, (ii) augmentation of the training data with synthetic features, (iii) encoded features in compressed representation. Our results show that the proposed framework can effectively learn compressed emotional representations as well as it can generate synthetic samples that help improve performance in within-corpus and cross-corpus evaluation.

Muhammad Asim, Muaaz Zakria

k-nearest neighbour (kNN) is one of the most prominent, simple and basic algorithm used in machine learning and data mining. However, kNN has limited prediction ability, i.e., kNN cannot predict any instance correctly if it does not belong to any of the predefined classes in the training data set. The purpose of this paper is to suggest an Advanced kNN (A-kNN) algorithm that will be able to classify an instance as unknown, after verifying that it does not belong to any of the predefined classes. Performance of kNN and A-kNN is compared on three different data sets namely iris plant data set, BUPA liver disorder data set, and Alpha Beta detection data set. Results of A-kNN are significantly accurate for detecting unknown instances.

Muhammad Usama, Muhammad Asim, Junaid Qadir et al.

Modulation classification is an important component of cognitive self-driving networks. Recently many ML-based modulation classification methods have been proposed. We have evaluated the robustness of 9 ML-based modulation classifiers against the powerful Carlini \& Wagner (C-W) attack and showed that the current ML-based modulation classifiers do not provide any deterrence against adversarial ML examples. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to report the results of the application of the C-W attack for creating adversarial examples against various ML models for modulation classification.

Muhammad Asim, Fahad Shamshad, Ali Ahmed

This paper proposes a novel approach to regularize the ill-posed blind image deconvolution (blind image deblurring) problem using deep generative networks. We employ two separate deep generative models - one trained to produce sharp images while the other trained to generate blur kernels from lower dimensional parameters. To deblur, we propose an alternating gradient descent scheme operating in the latent lower-dimensional space of each of the pretrained generative models. Our experiments show excellent deblurring results even under large blurs and heavy noise. To improve the performance on rich image datasets not well learned by the generative networks, we present a modification of the proposed scheme that governs the deblurring process under both generative and classical priors.

Muhammad Asim, Mara Daniels, Oscar Leong et al.

Trained generative models have shown remarkable performance as priors for inverse problems in imaging -- for example, Generative Adversarial Network priors permit recovery of test images from 5-10x fewer measurements than sparsity priors. Unfortunately, these models may be unable to represent any particular image because of architectural choices, mode collapse, and bias in the training dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that invertible neural networks, which have zero representation error by design, can be effective natural signal priors at inverse problems such as denoising, compressive sensing, and inpainting. Given a trained generative model, we study the empirical risk formulation of the desired inverse problem under a regularization that promotes high likelihood images, either directly by penalization or algorithmically by initialization. For compressive sensing, invertible priors can yield higher accuracy than sparsity priors across almost all undersampling ratios, and due to their lack of representation error, invertible priors can yield better reconstructions than GAN priors for images that have rare features of variation within the biased training set, including out-of-distribution natural images. We additionally compare performance for compressive sensing to unlearned methods, such as the deep decoder, and we establish theoretical bounds on expected recovery error in the case of a linear invertible model.

Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Umar Farooq, Siddique Latif et al.

Multishot Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a promising imaging modality that can produce a high-resolution image with relatively less data acquisition time. The downside of multishot MRI is that it is very sensitive to subject motion and even small amounts of motion during the scan can produce artifacts in the final MR image that may cause misdiagnosis. Numerous efforts have been made to address this issue; however, all of these proposals are limited in terms of how much motion they can correct and the required computational time. In this paper, we propose a novel generative networks based conjugate gradient SENSE (CG-SENSE) reconstruction framework for motion correction in multishot MRI. The proposed framework first employs CG-SENSE reconstruction to produce the motion-corrupted image and then a generative adversarial network (GAN) is used to correct the motion artifacts. The proposed method has been rigorously evaluated on synthetically corrupted data on varying degrees of motion, numbers of shots, and encoding trajectories. Our analyses (both quantitative as well as qualitative/visual analysis) establishes that the proposed method significantly robust and outperforms state-of-the-art motion correction techniques and also reduces severalfold of computational times.

Fahad Shamshad, Muhammad Awais, Muhammad Asim et al.

Among the plethora of techniques devised to curb the prevalence of noise in medical images, deep learning based approaches have shown the most promise. However, one critical limitation of these deep learning based denoisers is the requirement of high-quality noiseless ground truth images that are difficult to obtain in many medical imaging applications such as X-rays. To circumvent this issue, we leverage recently proposed approach of [7] that incorporates Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE) to train a deep convolutional neural network without requiring denoised ground truth X-ray data. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SURE based approach for denoising X-ray images.

Siddique Latif, Muhammad Asim, Muhammad Usman et al.

Multishot Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has recently gained popularity as it accelerates the MRI data acquisition process without compromising the quality of final MR image. However, it suffers from motion artifacts caused by patient movements which may lead to misdiagnosis. Modern state-of-the-art motion correction techniques are able to counter small degree motion, however, their adoption is hindered by their time complexity. This paper proposes a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for reconstructing motion free high-fidelity images while reducing the image reconstruction time by an impressive two orders of magnitude.

Muhammad Asim, Fahad Shamshad, Ali Ahmed

This paper proposes a novel approach to regularize the \textit{ill-posed} and \textit{non-linear} blind image deconvolution (blind deblurring) using deep generative networks as priors. We employ two separate generative models --- one trained to produce sharp images while the other trained to generate blur kernels from lower-dimensional parameters. To deblur, we propose an alternating gradient descent scheme operating in the latent lower-dimensional space of each of the pretrained generative models. Our experiments show promising deblurring results on images even under large blurs, and heavy noise. To address the shortcomings of generative models such as mode collapse, we augment our generative priors with classical image priors and report improved performance on complex image datasets. The deblurring performance depends on how well the range of the generator spans the image class. Interestingly, our experiments show that even an untrained structured (convolutional) generative networks acts as an image prior in the image deblurring context allowing us to extend our results to more diverse natural image datasets.

Chengqing Li, Shujun Li, Muhammad Asim et al.

This paper studies the security of a recently-proposed chaos-based image encryption scheme, and points out the following problems: 1) there exist a number of invalid keys and weak keys, and some keys are partially equivalent for encryption/decryption; 2) given one chosen plain-image, a subkey $K_{10}$ can be guessed with a smaller computational complexity than that of the simple brute-force attack; 3) given at most 128 chosen plain-images, a chosen-plaintext attack can possibly break the following part of the secret key: $\{K_i\bmod 128\}_{i=4}^{10}$, which works very well when $K_{10}$ is not too large; 4) when $K_{10}$ is relatively small, a known-plaintext attack can be carried out with only one known plain-image to recover some visual information of any other plain-images encrypted by the same key.

Muhammad Asim, Tanya Ignatenko, Milan Petkovic et al.

Virtual organizations are dynamic, inter-organizational collaborations that involve systems and services belonging to different security domains. Several solutions have been proposed to guarantee the enforcement of the access control policies protecting the information exchanged in a distributed system, but none of them addresses the dynamicity characterizing virtual organizations. In this paper we propose a dynamic hierarchical attribute-based encryption (D-HABE) scheme that allows the institutions in a virtual organization to encrypt information according to an attribute-based policy in such a way that only users with the appropriate attributes can decrypt it. In addition, we introduce a key management scheme that determines which user is entitled to receive which attribute key from which domain authority.