MGTAB: A Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection BenchmarkShuhao Shi, Kai Qiao, Jian Chen et al.
The development of social media user stance detection and bot detection methods rely heavily on large-scale and high-quality benchmarks. However, in addition to low annotation quality, existing benchmarks generally have incomplete user relationships, suppressing graph-based account detection research. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Relational Graph-Based Twitter Account Detection Benchmark (MGTAB), the first standardized graph-based benchmark for account detection. To our knowledge, MGTAB was built based on the largest original data in the field, with over 1.55 million users and 130 million tweets. MGTAB contains 10,199 expert-annotated users and 7 types of relationships, ensuring high-quality annotation and diversified relations. In MGTAB, we extracted the 20 user property features with the greatest information gain and user tweet features as the user features. In addition, we performed a thorough evaluation of MGTAB and other public datasets. Our experiments found that graph-based approaches are generally more effective than feature-based approaches and perform better when introducing multiple relations. By analyzing experiment results, we identify effective approaches for account detection and provide potential future research directions in this field. Our benchmark and standardized evaluation procedures are freely available at: https://github.com/GraphDetec/MGTAB.
5.3LGAug 1, 2023
Dynamic ensemble selection based on Deep Neural Network Uncertainty Estimation for Adversarial RobustnessRuoxi Qin, Linyuan Wang, Xuehui Du et al.
The deep neural network has attained significant efficiency in image recognition. However, it has vulnerable recognition robustness under extensive data uncertainty in practical applications. The uncertainty is attributed to the inevitable ambient noise and, more importantly, the possible adversarial attack. Dynamic methods can effectively improve the defense initiative in the arms race of attack and defense of adversarial examples. Different from the previous dynamic method depend on input or decision, this work explore the dynamic attributes in model level through dynamic ensemble selection technology to further protect the model from white-box attacks and improve the robustness. Specifically, in training phase the Dirichlet distribution is apply as prior of sub-models' predictive distribution, and the diversity constraint in parameter space is introduced under the lightweight sub-models to construct alternative ensembel model spaces. In test phase, the certain sub-models are dynamically selected based on their rank of uncertainty value for the final prediction to ensure the majority accurate principle in ensemble robustness and accuracy. Compared with the previous dynamic method and staic adversarial traning model, the presented approach can achieve significant robustness results without damaging accuracy by combining dynamics and diversity property.
8.1IVJul 30, 2022
LRIP-Net: Low-Resolution Image Prior based Network for Limited-Angle CT ReconstructionQifeng Gao, Rui Ding, Linyuan Wang et al.
In the practical applications of computed tomography imaging, the projection data may be acquired within a limited-angle range and corrupted by noises due to the limitation of scanning conditions. The noisy incomplete projection data results in the ill-posedness of the inverse problems. In this work, we theoretically verify that the low-resolution reconstruction problem has better numerical stability than the high-resolution problem. In what follows, a novel low-resolution image prior based CT reconstruction model is proposed to make use of the low-resolution image to improve the reconstruction quality. More specifically, we build up a low-resolution reconstruction problem on the down-sampled projection data, and use the reconstructed low-resolution image as prior knowledge for the original limited-angle CT problem. We solve the constrained minimization problem by the alternating direction method with all subproblems approximated by the convolutional neural networks. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our double-resolution network outperforms both the variational method and popular learning-based reconstruction methods on noisy limited-angle reconstruction problems.
2.6CVOct 6, 2022
Dynamic Stochastic Ensemble with Adversarial Robust Lottery Ticket SubnetworksQi Peng, Wenlin Liu, Ruoxi Qin et al.
Adversarial attacks are considered the intrinsic vulnerability of CNNs. Defense strategies designed for attacks have been stuck in the adversarial attack-defense arms race, reflecting the imbalance between attack and defense. Dynamic Defense Framework (DDF) recently changed the passive safety status quo based on the stochastic ensemble model. The diversity of subnetworks, an essential concern in the DDF, can be effectively evaluated by the adversarial transferability between different networks. Inspired by the poor adversarial transferability between subnetworks of scratch tickets with various remaining ratios, we propose a method to realize the dynamic stochastic ensemble defense strategy. We discover the adversarial transferable diversity between robust lottery ticket subnetworks drawn from different basic structures and sparsity. The experimental results suggest that our method achieves better robust and clean recognition accuracy by adversarial transferable diversity, which would decrease the reliability of attacks.
1.8LGMay 8, 2022
Select and Calibrate the Low-confidence: Dual-Channel Consistency based Graph Convolutional NetworksShuhao Shi, Jian Chen, Kai Qiao et al.
The Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have achieved excellent results in node classification tasks, but the model's performance at low label rates is still unsatisfactory. Previous studies in Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) for graph have focused on using network predictions to generate soft pseudo-labels or instructing message propagation, which inevitably contains the incorrect prediction due to the over-confident in the predictions. Our proposed Dual-Channel Consistency based Graph Convolutional Networks (DCC-GCN) uses dual-channel to extract embeddings from node features and topological structures, and then achieves reliable low-confidence and high-confidence samples selection based on dual-channel consistency. We further confirmed that the low-confidence samples obtained based on dual-channel consistency were low in accuracy, constraining the model's performance. Unlike previous studies ignoring low-confidence samples, we calibrate the feature embeddings of the low-confidence samples by using the neighborhood's high-confidence samples. Our experiments have shown that the DCC-GCN can more accurately distinguish between low-confidence and high-confidence samples, and can also significantly improve the accuracy of low-confidence samples. We conducted extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets and demonstrated that DCC-GCN is significantly better than state-of-the-art baselines at different label rates.
1.5CVAug 29, 2023
A Multimodal Visual Encoding Model Aided by Introducing Verbal Semantic InformationShuxiao Ma, Linyuan Wang, Bin Yan
Biological research has revealed that the verbal semantic information in the brain cortex, as an additional source, participates in nonverbal semantic tasks, such as visual encoding. However, previous visual encoding models did not incorporate verbal semantic information, contradicting this biological finding. This paper proposes a multimodal visual information encoding network model based on stimulus images and associated textual information in response to this issue. Our visual information encoding network model takes stimulus images as input and leverages textual information generated by a text-image generation model as verbal semantic information. This approach injects new information into the visual encoding model. Subsequently, a Transformer network aligns image and text feature information, creating a multimodal feature space. A convolutional network then maps from this multimodal feature space to voxel space, constructing the multimodal visual information encoding network model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multimodal visual information encoding network model outperforms previous models under the exact training cost. In voxel prediction of the left hemisphere of subject 1's brain, the performance improves by approximately 15.87%, while in the right hemisphere, the performance improves by about 4.6%. The multimodal visual encoding network model exhibits superior encoding performance. Additionally, ablation experiments indicate that our proposed model better simulates the brain's visual information processing.
3.7CVJan 8, 2024
Aligned with LLM: a new multi-modal training paradigm for encoding fMRI activity in visual cortexShuxiao Ma, Linyuan Wang, Senbao Hou et al.
Recently, there has been a surge in the popularity of pre trained large language models (LLMs) (such as GPT-4), sweeping across the entire Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) communities. These LLMs have demonstrated advanced multi-modal understanding capabilities and showcased strong performance across various benchmarks. The LLM has started to embody traits of artificial general intelligence, which holds vital guidance for enhancing brain-like characteristics within visual encoding models. Hence, This paper proposes a new multi-modal training paradigm, aligning with LLM, for encoding fMRI activity in visual cortex. Based on this paradigm, we trained an encoding model in fMRI data named the LLM-Visual Encoding Model (LLM-VEM). Specifically, we utilize LLM (miniGPT4) to generate descriptive text for all stimulus images, forming a high-quality textual description set. Moreover, we use the pre-trained text encoder (CLIP) to process these detailed descriptions, obtaining the text embedding features. Next, we use the contrast loss function to minimize the distance between the image embedding features and the text embedding features to complete the alignment operation of the stimulus image and text information. With the assistance of the pre-trained LLM, this alignment process facilitates better learning of the visual encoding model, resulting in higher precision. The final experimental results indicate that our training paradigm has significantly aided in enhancing the performance of the visual encoding model.
1.4CVOct 23, 2021
RPT++: Customized Feature Representation for Siamese Visual TrackingZiang Ma, Haitao Zhang, Linyuan Wang et al.
While recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in the feature representation of visual tracking, the problem of feature misalignment between the classification and regression tasks is largely overlooked. The approaches of feature extraction make no difference for these two tasks in most of advanced trackers. We argue that the performance gain of visual tracking is limited since features extracted from the salient area provide more recognizable visual patterns for classification, while these around the boundaries contribute to accurately estimating the target state. We address this problem by proposing two customized feature extractors, named polar pooling and extreme pooling to capture task-specific visual patterns. Polar pooling plays the role of enriching information collected from the semantic keypoints for stronger classification, while extreme pooling facilitates explicit visual patterns of the object boundary for accurate target state estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the task-specific feature representation by integrating it into the recent and advanced tracker RPT. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks show that our Customized Features based RPT (RPT++) achieves new state-of-the-art performances on OTB-100, VOT2018, VOT2019, GOT-10k, TrackingNet and LaSOT.
3.1LGSep 29, 2021
Adaptive Multi-layer Contrastive Graph Neural NetworksShuhao Shi, Pengfei Xie, Xu Luo et al.
We present Adaptive Multi-layer Contrastive Graph Neural Networks (AMC-GNN), a self-supervised learning framework for Graph Neural Network, which learns feature representations of sample data without data labels. AMC-GNN generates two graph views by data augmentation and compares different layers' output embeddings of Graph Neural Network encoders to obtain feature representations, which could be used for downstream tasks. AMC-GNN could learn the importance weights of embeddings in different layers adaptively through the attention mechanism, and an auxiliary encoder is introduced to train graph contrastive encoders better. The accuracy is improved by maximizing the representation's consistency of positive pairs in the early layers and the final embedding space. Our experiments show that the results can be consistently improved by using the AMC-GNN framework, across four established graph benchmarks: Cora, Citeseer, Pubmed, DBLP citation network datasets, as well as four newly proposed datasets: Co-author-CS, Co-author-Physics, Amazon-Computers, Amazon-Photo.
7.5LGJun 3, 2021
Improving the Transferability of Adversarial Examples with New Iteration Framework and Input DropoutPengfei Xie, Linyuan Wang, Ruoxi Qin et al.
Deep neural networks(DNNs) is vulnerable to be attacked by adversarial examples. Black-box attack is the most threatening attack. At present, black-box attack methods mainly adopt gradient-based iterative attack methods, which usually limit the relationship between the iteration step size, the number of iterations, and the maximum perturbation. In this paper, we propose a new gradient iteration framework, which redefines the relationship between the above three. Under this framework, we easily improve the attack success rate of DI-TI-MIM. In addition, we propose a gradient iterative attack method based on input dropout, which can be well combined with our framework. We further propose a multi dropout rate version of this method. Experimental results show that our best method can achieve attack success rate of 96.2\% for defense model on average, which is higher than the state-of-the-art gradient-based attacks.
11.3LGMay 25, 2021
Boosting-GNN: Boosting Algorithm for Graph Networks on Imbalanced Node ClassificationS. Shi, Kai Qiao, Shuai Yang et al.
The Graph Neural Network (GNN) has been widely used for graph data representation. However, the existing researches only consider the ideal balanced dataset, and the imbalanced dataset is rarely considered. Traditional methods such as resampling, reweighting, and synthetic samples that deal with imbalanced datasets are no longer applicable in GNN. This paper proposes an ensemble model called Boosting-GNN, which uses GNNs as the base classifiers during boosting. In Boosting-GNN, higher weights are set for the training samples that are not correctly classified by the previous classifier, thus achieving higher classification accuracy and better reliability. Besides, transfer learning is used to reduce computational cost and increase fitting ability. Experimental results indicate that the proposed Boosting-GNN model achieves better performance than GCN, GraphSAGE, GAT, SGC, N-GCN, and most advanced reweighting and resampling methods on synthetic imbalanced datasets, with an average performance improvement of 4.5%
10.7CRMay 6, 2021
Dynamic Defense Approach for Adversarial Robustness in Deep Neural Networks via Stochastic Ensemble Smoothed ModelRuoxi Qin, Linyuan Wang, Xingyuan Chen et al.
Deep neural networks have been shown to suffer from critical vulnerabilities under adversarial attacks. This phenomenon stimulated the creation of different attack and defense strategies similar to those adopted in cyberspace security. The dependence of such strategies on attack and defense mechanisms makes the associated algorithms on both sides appear as closely reciprocating processes. The defense strategies are particularly passive in these processes, and enhancing initiative of such strategies can be an effective way to get out of this arms race. Inspired by the dynamic defense approach in cyberspace, this paper builds upon stochastic ensemble smoothing based on defense method of random smoothing and model ensemble. Proposed method employs network architecture and smoothing parameters as ensemble attributes, and dynamically change attribute-based ensemble model before every inference prediction request. The proposed method handles the extreme transferability and vulnerability of ensemble models under white-box attacks. Experimental comparison of ASR-vs-distortion curves with different attack scenarios shows that even the attacker with the highest attack capability cannot easily exceed the attack success rate associated with the ensemble smoothed model, especially under untargeted attacks.
16.8CVAug 8, 2020
RPT: Learning Point Set Representation for Siamese Visual TrackingZiang Ma, Linyuan Wang, Haitao Zhang et al.
While remarkable progress has been made in robust visual tracking, accurate target state estimation still remains a highly challenging problem. In this paper, we argue that this issue is closely related to the prevalent bounding box representation, which provides only a coarse spatial extent of object. Thus an effcient visual tracking framework is proposed to accurately estimate the target state with a finer representation as a set of representative points. The point set is trained to indicate the semantically and geometrically significant positions of target region, enabling more fine-grained localization and modeling of object appearance. We further propose a multi-level aggregation strategy to obtain detailed structure information by fusing hierarchical convolution layers. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks including OTB2015, VOT2018, VOT2019 and GOT-10k demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance while running at over 20 FPS.
2.3CVMar 26, 2020
Neural encoding and interpretation for high-level visual cortices based on fMRI using image caption featuresKai Qiao, Chi Zhang, Jian Chen et al.
On basis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers are devoted to designing visual encoding models to predict the neuron activity of human in response to presented image stimuli and analyze inner mechanism of human visual cortices. Deep network structure composed of hierarchical processing layers forms deep network models by learning features of data on specific task through big dataset. Deep network models have powerful and hierarchical representation of data, and have brought about breakthroughs for visual encoding, while revealing hierarchical structural similarity with the manner of information processing in human visual cortices. However, previous studies almost used image features of those deep network models pre-trained on classification task to construct visual encoding models. Except for deep network structure, the task or corresponding big dataset is also important for deep network models, but neglected by previous studies. Because image classification is a relatively fundamental task, it is difficult to guide deep network models to master high-level semantic representations of data, which causes into that encoding performance for high-level visual cortices is limited. In this study, we introduced one higher-level vision task: image caption (IC) task and proposed the visual encoding model based on IC features (ICFVEM) to encode voxels of high-level visual cortices. Experiment demonstrated that ICFVEM obtained better encoding performance than previous deep network models pre-trained on classification task. In addition, the interpretation of voxels was realized to explore the detailed characteristics of voxels based on the visualization of semantic words, and comparative analysis implied that high-level visual cortices behaved the correlative representation of image content.
6.5CVMar 13, 2020
BigGAN-based Bayesian reconstruction of natural images from human brain activityKai Qiao, Jian Chen, Linyuan Wang et al.
In the visual decoding domain, visually reconstructing presented images given the corresponding human brain activity monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is difficult, especially when reconstructing viewed natural images. Visual reconstruction is a conditional image generation on fMRI data and thus generative adversarial network (GAN) for natural image generation is recently introduced for this task. Although GAN-based methods have greatly improved, the fidelity and naturalness of reconstruction are still unsatisfactory due to the small number of fMRI data samples and the instability of GAN training. In this study, we proposed a new GAN-based Bayesian visual reconstruction method (GAN-BVRM) that includes a classifier to decode categories from fMRI data, a pre-trained conditional generator to generate natural images of specified categories, and a set of encoding models and evaluator to evaluate generated images. GAN-BVRM employs the pre-trained generator of the prevailing BigGAN to generate masses of natural images, and selects the images that best matches with the corresponding brain activity through the encoding models as the reconstruction of the image stimuli. In this process, the semantic and detailed contents of reconstruction are controlled by decoded categories and encoding models, respectively. GAN-BVRM used the Bayesian manner to avoid contradiction between naturalness and fidelity from current GAN-based methods and thus can improve the advantages of GAN. Experimental results revealed that GAN-BVRM improves the fidelity and naturalness, that is, the reconstruction is natural and similar to the presented image stimuli.
3.3CVFeb 1, 2020
AdvJND: Generating Adversarial Examples with Just Noticeable DifferenceZifei Zhang, Kai Qiao, Lingyun Jiang et al.
Compared with traditional machine learning models, deep neural networks perform better, especially in image classification tasks. However, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Adding small perturbations on examples causes a good-performance model to misclassify the crafted examples, without category differences in the human eyes, and fools deep models successfully. There are two requirements for generating adversarial examples: the attack success rate and image fidelity metrics. Generally, perturbations are increased to ensure the adversarial examples' high attack success rate; however, the adversarial examples obtained have poor concealment. To alleviate the tradeoff between the attack success rate and image fidelity, we propose a method named AdvJND, adding visual model coefficients, just noticeable difference coefficients, in the constraint of a distortion function when generating adversarial examples. In fact, the visual subjective feeling of the human eyes is added as a priori information, which decides the distribution of perturbations, to improve the image quality of adversarial examples. We tested our method on the FashionMNIST, CIFAR10, and MiniImageNet datasets. Adversarial examples generated by our AdvJND algorithm yield gradient distributions that are similar to those of the original inputs. Hence, the crafted noise can be hidden in the original inputs, thus improving the attack concealment significantly.
3.3NCJul 27, 2019
Effective and efficient ROI-wise visual encoding using an end-to-end CNN regression model and selective optimizationKai Qiao, Chi Zhang, Jian Chen et al.
Recently, visual encoding based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have realized many achievements with the rapid development of deep network computation. Visual encoding model is aimed at predicting brain activity in response to presented image stimuli. Currently, visual encoding is accomplished mainly by firstly extracting image features through convolutional neural network (CNN) model pre-trained on computer vision task, and secondly training a linear regression model to map specific layer of CNN features to each voxel, namely voxel-wise encoding. However, the two-step manner model, essentially, is hard to determine which kind of well features are well linearly matched for beforehand unknown fMRI data with little understanding of human visual representation. Analogizing computer vision mostly related human vision, we proposed the end-to-end convolution regression model (ETECRM) in the region of interest (ROI)-wise manner to accomplish effective and efficient visual encoding. The end-to-end manner was introduced to make the model automatically learn better matching features to improve encoding performance. The ROI-wise manner was used to improve the encoding efficiency for many voxels. In addition, we designed the selective optimization including self-adapting weight learning and weighted correlation loss, noise regularization to avoid interfering of ineffective voxels in ROI-wise encoding. Experiment demonstrated that the proposed model obtained better predicting accuracy than the two-step manner of encoding models. Comparative analysis implied that end-to-end manner and large volume of fMRI data may drive the future development of visual encoding.
1.8CVApr 12, 2019
Cycle-Consistent Adversarial GAN: the integration of adversarial attack and defenseLingyun Jiang, Kai Qiao, Ruoxi Qin et al.
In image classification of deep learning, adversarial examples where inputs intended to add small magnitude perturbations may mislead deep neural networks (DNNs) to incorrect results, which means DNNs are vulnerable to them. Different attack and defense strategies have been proposed to better research the mechanism of deep learning. However, those research in these networks are only for one aspect, either an attack or a defense, not considering that attacks and defenses should be interdependent and mutually reinforcing, just like the relationship between spears and shields. In this paper, we propose Cycle-Consistent Adversarial GAN (CycleAdvGAN) to generate adversarial examples, which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances and adversarial examples. For CycleAdvGAN, once the Generator and are trained, can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to make DNNs predict wrong, and recovery adversarial examples to clean instances, so as to make DNNs predict correct. We apply CycleAdvGAN under semi-white box and black-box settings on two public datasets MNIST and CIFAR10. Using the extensive experiments, we show that our method has achieved the state-of-the-art adversarial attack method and also efficiently improve the defense ability, which make the integration of adversarial attack and defense come true. In additional, it has improved attack effect only trained on the adversarial dataset generated by any kind of adversarial attack.
5.4CVFeb 23, 2019
A visual encoding model based on deep neural networks and transfer learningChi Zhang, Kai Qiao, Linyuan Wang et al.
Background: Building visual encoding models to accurately predict visual responses is a central challenge for current vision-based brain-machine interface techniques. To achieve high prediction accuracy on neural signals, visual encoding models should include precise visual features and appropriate prediction algorithms. Most existing visual encoding models employ hand-craft visual features (e.g., Gabor wavelets or semantic labels) or data-driven features (e.g., features extracted from deep neural networks (DNN)). They also assume a linear mapping between feature representation to brain activity. However, it remains unknown whether such linear mapping is sufficient for maximizing prediction accuracy. New Method: We construct a new visual encoding framework to predict cortical responses in a benchmark functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) dataset. In this framework, we employ the transfer learning technique to incorporate a pre-trained DNN (i.e., AlexNet) and train a nonlinear mapping from visual features to brain activity. This nonlinear mapping replaces the conventional linear mapping and is supposed to improve prediction accuracy on brain activity. Results: The proposed framework can significantly predict responses of over 20% voxels in early visual areas (i.e., V1-lateral occipital region, LO) and achieve unprecedented prediction accuracy. Comparison with Existing Methods: Comparing to two conventional visual encoding models, we find that the proposed encoding model shows consistent higher prediction accuracy in all early visual areas, especially in relatively anterior visual areas (i.e., V4 and LO). Conclusions: Our work proposes a new framework to utilize pre-trained visual features and train non-linear mappings from visual features to brain activity.
0.9CVDec 22, 2018
Dissociable neural representations of adversarially perturbed images in convolutional neural networks and the human brainChi Zhang, Xiaohan Duan, Linyuan Wang et al.
Despite the remarkable similarities between convolutional neural networks (CNN) and the human brain, CNNs still fall behind humans in many visual tasks, indicating that there still exist considerable differences between the two systems. Here, we leverage adversarial noise (AN) and adversarial interference (AI) images to quantify the consistency between neural representations and perceptual outcomes in the two systems. Humans can successfully recognize AI images as corresponding categories but perceive AN images as meaningless noise. In contrast, CNNs can correctly recognize AN images but mistakenly classify AI images into wrong categories with surprisingly high confidence. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity evoked by regular and adversarial images in the human brain, and compare it to the activity of artificial neurons in a prototypical CNN-AlexNet. In the human brain, we find that the representational similarity between regular and adversarial images largely echoes their perceptual similarity in all early visual areas. In AlexNet, however, the neural representations of adversarial images are inconsistent with network outputs in all intermediate processing layers, providing no neural foundations for perceptual similarity. Furthermore, we show that voxel-encoding models trained on regular images can successfully generalize to the neural responses to AI images but not AN images. These remarkable differences between the human brain and AlexNet in the representation-perception relation suggest that future CNNs should emulate both behavior and the internal neural presentations of the human brain.
4.6CVJan 16, 2018
Constraint-free Natural Image Reconstruction from fMRI Signals Based on Convolutional Neural NetworkChi Zhang, Kai Qiao, Linyuan Wang et al.
In recent years, research on decoding brain activity based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has made remarkable achievements. However, constraint-free natural image reconstruction from brain activity is still a challenge. The existing methods simplified the problem by using semantic prior information or just reconstructing simple images such as letters and digitals. Without semantic prior information, we present a novel method to reconstruct nature images from fMRI signals of human visual cortex based on the computation model of convolutional neural network (CNN). Firstly, we extracted the units output of viewed natural images in each layer of a pre-trained CNN as CNN features. Secondly, we transformed image reconstruction from fMRI signals into the problem of CNN feature visualizations by training a sparse linear regression to map from the fMRI patterns to CNN features. By iteratively optimization to find the matched image, whose CNN unit features become most similar to those predicted from the brain activity, we finally achieved the promising results for the challenging constraint-free natural image reconstruction. As there was no use of semantic prior information of the stimuli when training decoding model, any category of images (not constraint by the training set) could be reconstructed theoretically. We found that the reconstructed images resembled the natural stimuli, especially in position and shape. The experimental results suggest that hierarchical visual features can effectively express the visual perception process of human brain.
1.7CVJan 2, 2018
Accurate reconstruction of image stimuli from human fMRI based on the decoding model with capsule network architectureKai Qiao, Chi Zhang, Linyuan Wang et al.
In neuroscience, all kinds of computation models were designed to answer the open question of how sensory stimuli are encoded by neurons and conversely, how sensory stimuli can be decoded from neuronal activities. Especially, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies have made many great achievements with the rapid development of the deep network computation. However, comparing with the goal of decoding orientation, position and object category from activities in visual cortex, accurate reconstruction of image stimuli from human fMRI is a still challenging work. In this paper, the capsule network (CapsNet) architecture based visual reconstruction (CNAVR) method is developed to reconstruct image stimuli. The capsule means containing a group of neurons to perform the better organization of feature structure and representation, inspired by the structure of cortical mini column including several hundred neurons in primates. The high-level capsule features in the CapsNet includes diverse features of image stimuli such as semantic class, orientation, location and so on. We used these features to bridge between human fMRI and image stimuli. We firstly employed the CapsNet to train the nonlinear mapping from image stimuli to high-level capsule features, and from high-level capsule features to image stimuli again in an end-to-end manner. After estimating the serviceability of each voxel by encoding performance to accomplish the selecting of voxels, we secondly trained the nonlinear mapping from dimension-decreasing fMRI data to high-level capsule features. Finally, we can predict the high-level capsule features with fMRI data, and reconstruct image stimuli with the CapsNet. We evaluated the proposed CNAVR method on the dataset of handwritten digital images, and exceeded about 10% than the accuracy of all existing state-of-the-art methods on the structural similarity index (SSIM).
14.5MED-PHJul 29, 2016
Image Prediction for Limited-angle Tomography via Deep Learning with Convolutional Neural NetworkHanming Zhang, Liang Li, Kai Qiao et al.
Limited angle problem is a challenging issue in x-ray computed tomography (CT) field. Iterative reconstruction methods that utilize the additional prior can suppress artifacts and improve image quality, but unfortunately require increased computation time. An interesting way is to restrain the artifacts in the images reconstructed from the practical filtered back projection (FBP) method. Frikel and Quinto have proved that the streak artifacts in FBP results could be characterized. It indicates that the artifacts created by FBP method have specific and similar characteristics in a stationary limited-angle scanning configuration. Based on this understanding, this work aims at developing a method to extract and suppress specific artifacts of FBP reconstructions for limited-angle tomography. A data-driven learning-based method is proposed based on a deep convolutional neural network. An end-to-end mapping between the FBP and artifact-free images is learned and the implicit features involving artifacts will be extracted and suppressed via nonlinear mapping. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations of experimental results indicate that the proposed method show a stable and prospective performance on artifacts reduction and detail recovery for limited angle tomography. The presented strategy provides a simple and efficient approach for improving image quality of the reconstruction results from limited projection data.