Ghulam Mohiuddin Bhat

Abdul Mueed Hafiz, Ghulam Mohiuddin Bhat

Traditional machine learning approaches may fail to perform satisfactorily when dealing with complex data. In this context, the importance of data mining evolves w.r.t. building an efficient knowledge discovery and mining framework. Ensemble learning is aimed at integration of fusion, modeling and mining of data into a unified model. However, traditional ensemble learning methods are complex and have optimization or tuning problems. In this paper, we propose a simple, sequential, efficient, ensemble learning approach using multiple deep networks. The deep network used in the ensembles is ResNet50. The model draws inspiration from binary decision/classification trees. The proposed approach is compared against the baseline viz. the single classifier approach i.e. using a single multiclass ResNet50 on the ImageNet and Natural Images datasets. Our approach outperforms the baseline on all experiments on the ImageNet dataset. Code is available in https://github.com/mueedhafiz1982/CNNTreeEnsemble.git

Abdul Mueed Hafiz, Ghulam Mohiuddin Bhat

Deep Q-Network (DQN) based multi-agent systems (MAS) for reinforcement learning (RL) use various schemes where in the agents have to learn and communicate. The learning is however specific to each agent and communication may be satisfactorily designed for the agents. As more complex Deep QNetworks come to the fore, the overall complexity of the multi-agent system increases leading to issues like difficulty in training, need for higher resources and more training time, difficulty in fine-tuning, etc. To address these issues we propose a simple but efficient DQN based MAS for RL which uses shared state and rewards, but agent-specific actions, for updation of the experience replay pool of the DQNs, where each agent is a DQN. The benefits of the approach are overall simplicity, faster convergence and better performance as compared to conventional DQN based approaches. It should be noted that the method can be extended to any DQN. As such we use simple DQN and DDQN (Double Q-learning) respectively on three separate tasks i.e. Cartpole-v1 (OpenAI Gym environment) , LunarLander-v2 (OpenAI Gym environment) and Maze Traversal (customized environment). The proposed approach outperforms the baseline on these tasks by decent margins respectively.

Abdul Mueed Hafiz, Ghulam Mohiuddin Bhat

One-class CNNs have shown promise in novelty detection. However, very less work has been done on extending them to multiclass classification. The proposed approach is a viable effort in this direction. It uses one-class CNNs i.e., it trains one CNN per class, for multiclass classification. An ensemble of such one-class CNNs is used for multiclass classification. The benefits of the approach are generally better recognition accuracy while taking almost even half or two-thirds of the training time of a conventional multi-class deep network. The proposed approach has been applied successfully to face recognition and object recognition tasks. For face recognition, a 1000 frame RGB video, featuring many faces together, has been used for benchmarking of the proposed approach. Its database is available on request via e-mail. For object recognition, the Caltech-101 Image Database and 17Flowers Dataset have also been used. The experimental results support the claims made.

Abdul Mueed Hafiz, Ghulam Mohiuddin Bhat

Object detection or localization is an incremental step in progression from coarse to fine digital image inference. It not only provides the classes of the image objects, but also provides the location of the image objects which have been classified. The location is given in the form of bounding boxes or centroids. Semantic segmentation gives fine inference by predicting labels for every pixel in the input image. Each pixel is labelled according to the object class within which it is enclosed. Furthering this evolution, instance segmentation gives different labels for separate instances of objects belonging to the same class. Hence, instance segmentation may be defined as the technique of simultaneously solving the problem of object detection as well as that of semantic segmentation. In this survey paper on instance segmentation -- its background, issues, techniques, evolution, popular datasets, related work up to the state of the art and future scope have been discussed. The paper provides valuable information for those who want to do research in the field of instance segmentation.

Abdul Mueed Hafiz, Ghulam Mohiuddin Bhat

We present a simple yet efficient Hybrid Classifier based on Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning. Q-Learning is used with two Q-states and four actions. Conventional techniques use feature maps extracted from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and include them in the Qstates along with past history. This leads to difficulties with these approaches as the number of states is very large number due to high dimensions of the feature maps. Since our method uses only two Q-states it is simple and has much lesser number of parameters to optimize and also thus has a straightforward reward function. Also, the approach uses unexplored actions for image processing vis-a-vis other contemporary techniques. Three datasets have been used for benchmarking of the approach. These are the MNIST Digit Image Dataset, the USPS Digit Image Dataset and the MATLAB Digit Image Dataset. The performance of the proposed hybrid classifier has been compared with other contemporary techniques like a well-established Reinforcement Learning Technique, AlexNet, CNN-Nearest Neighbor Classifier and CNNSupport Vector Machine Classifier. Our approach outperforms these contemporary hybrid classifiers on all the three datasets used.