Takashi Watanabe

Akihiro Kuwabara, Sorachi Kato, Takuya Fujihashi et al.

This paper presents a novel scheme to efficiently compress Light Detection and Ranging~(LiDAR) point clouds, enabling high-precision 3D scene archives, and such archives pave the way for a detailed understanding of the corresponding 3D scenes. We focus on 2D range images~(RIs) as a lightweight format for representing 3D LiDAR observations. Although conventional image compression techniques can be adapted to improve compression efficiency for RIs, their practical performance is expected to be limited due to differences in bit precision and the distinct pixel value distribution characteristics between natural images and RIs. We propose a novel implicit neural representation~(INR)--based RI compression method that effectively handles floating-point valued pixels. The proposed method divides RIs into depth and mask images and compresses them using patch-wise and pixel-wise INR architectures with model pruning and quantization, respectively. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that the proposed method outperforms existing image, point cloud, RI, and INR-based compression methods in terms of 3D reconstruction and detection quality at low bitrates and decoding latency.

Takuya Fujihashi, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Takashi Watanabe

A key issue in federated learning over wireless channels is how to exchange a large number of the model parameters via time-varying channels. Two types of solutions based on digital and analog schemes are used typically. The digital-based solution takes quantization and entropy coding for compression, whereas transmissions via wireless channels may cause catastrophic errors owing to the all-or-nothing behavior in entropy coding. The analog-based solutions such as AirNet and AirComp use analog modulation for the parameter transmissions. However, such an analog scheme often causes significant distortion due to the source signal's large power without compression gain. This paper proposes a novel hybrid digital-analog transmission-Federated AirNet--for the model parameter transmissions in federated learning. The Federated AirNet integrates low-rate digital coding and energy-compact analog modulation. The digital coding offers the baseline of the model parameters and compacts the source signal power. In addition, the residual parameters, which are obtained from the original and encoded model parameters, are analog-modulated to enhance the baseline according to the instantaneous wireless channel quality. We show that the proposed Federated AirNet yields better image classification accuracy compared with the digital-based and analog-based solutions over a wide range of wireless channel signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).

Takuya Fujihashi, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Takashi Watanabe

The increasing demand for video streaming services is the key driver of modern wireless and mobile communications. For robust and high-quality delivery of video content over wireless and mobile networks, the main challenge is sending image and video signals to single and multiple users over unstable and diverse channel environments. To this end, many studies have designed digital-based video delivery schemes, which mainly consist of a sequence of digital-based coding and transmission schemes. Although digital-based schemes perform well when the channel characteristics are known in advance, significant quality degradation, known as cliff and leveling effects, often occurs owing to the fluctuating channel characteristics. To prevent cliff and leveling effects irrespective of the channel characteristics of each user, a new paradigm for wireless and mobile video streaming has been proposed. Soft delivery schemes skip the digital operations of quantization and entropy and channel coding while directly mapping the power-assigned frequency--domain coefficients onto the transmission symbols. This modification is based on the fact that the pixel distortion due to communication noise is proportional to the magnitude of the noise, resulting in graceful quality improvement, wherein quality is improved gradually, according to the wireless channel quality without any cliff and leveling effects. Herein, we present a comprehensive summary of soft delivery schemes.

Tsubasa Murate, Takashi Watanabe, Masaki Yamada

In this paper, we construct a lightweight, high-precision and high-speed object tracking using a trained CNN. Conventional methods with trained CNNs use VGG16 network which requires powerful computational resources. Therefore, there is a problem that it is difficult to apply in low computation resources environments. To solve this problem, we use MobileNetV3, which is a CNN for mobile terminals.Based on Feature Map Selection Tracking, we propose a new architecture that extracts effective features of MobileNet for object tracking. The architecture requires no online learning but only offline learning. In addition, by using features of objects other than tracking target, the features of tracking target are extracted more efficiently. We measure the tracking accuracy with Visual Tracker Benchmark and confirm that the proposed method can perform high-precision and high-speed calculation even in low computation resource environments.

Sorachi Kato, Takeru Fukushima, Tomoki Murakami et al.

This study aims to find the upper limit of the wireless sensing capability of acquiring physical space information. This is a challenging objective, because at present, wireless sensing studies continue to succeed in acquiring novel phenomena. Thus, although a complete answer cannot be obtained yet, a step is taken towards it here. To achieve this, CSI2Image, a novel channel-state-information (CSI)-to-image conversion method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), is proposed. The type of physical information acquired using wireless sensing can be estimated by checking wheth\-er the reconstructed image captures the desired physical space information. Three types of learning methods are demonstrated: gen\-er\-a\-tor-only learning, GAN-only learning, and hybrid learning. Evaluating the performance of CSI2Image is difficult, because both the clarity of the image and the presence of the desired physical space information must be evaluated. To solve this problem, a quantitative evaluation methodology using an object detection library is also proposed. CSI2Image was implemented using IEEE 802.11ac compressed CSI, and the evaluation results show that the image was successfully reconstructed. The results demonstrate that gen\-er\-a\-tor-only learning is sufficient for simple wireless sensing problems, but in complex wireless sensing problems, GANs are important for reconstructing generalized images with more accurate physical space information.

Takuya Fujihashi, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Siheng Chen et al.

In typical point cloud delivery, a sender uses octree-based digital video compression to send three-dimensional (3D) points and color attributes over band-limited links. However, the digital-based schemes have an issue called the cliff effect, where the 3D reconstruction quality will be a step function in terms of wireless channel quality. To prevent the cliff effect subject to channel quality fluctuation, we have proposed soft point cloud delivery called HoloCast. Although the HoloCast realizes graceful quality improvement according to wireless channel quality, it requires large communication overheads. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for soft point cloud delivery to simultaneously realize better quality and lower communication overheads. The proposed scheme introduces an end-to-end deep learning framework based on graph neural network (GNN) to reconstruct high-quality point clouds from its distorted observation under wireless fading channels. We demonstrate that the proposed GNN-based scheme can reconstruct clean 3D point cloud with low overheads by removing fading and noise effects.

Takuya Fujihashi, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Takashi Watanabe et al.

In conventional point cloud delivery, a sender uses octree-based digital video compression to stream three-dimensional (3D) points and the corresponding color attributes over band-limited links, e.g., wireless channels, for 3D scene reconstructions. However, the digital-based delivery schemes have an issue called cliff effect, where the 3D reconstruction quality is a step function in terms of wireless channel quality. We propose a novel scheme of point cloud delivery, called HoloCast, to gracefully improve the reconstruction quality with the improvement of wireless channel quality. HoloCast regards the 3D points and color components as graph signals and directly transmits linear-transformed signals based on graph Fourier transform (GFT), without digital quantization and entropy coding operations. One of main contributions in HoloCast is that the use of GFT can deal with non-ordered and non-uniformly distributed multi-dimensional signals such as holographic data unlike conventional delivery schemes. Performance results with point cloud data show that HoloCast yields better 3D reconstruction quality compared to digital-based methods in noisy wireless environment.