Italy


A reliable detection of the R-peaks in an electrocardiogram
(ECG) is a fundamental step for further heart
rate variability (HRV) analysis, biometric recognition techniques
and additional ECG waveform based analysis. In this paper, a
novel real-time and low-complexity R-peak detection algorithm is
presented for single lead ECG signals. The detection algorithm
is divided in two stages. In the first pre-processing stage, the
QRS complex is enhanced by taking the double derivative,
squaring and moving window integration. In the second, the
detection of the R-peak is achieved based on a finite state machine
(FSM) approach. The detection threshold is dynamically adapted
and follows an exponential decay after each detection, making
it suitable for R-peak detection under fast heart rate (HR)
and R-wave amplitude changes without additional search back.
The proposed algorithm was evaluated in a private single lead
ECG database acquired using a FieldWiz wearable device. The
database comprises five recordings from four different subjects,
recorded during dynamic conditions, namely: running, trail
running and weightlifting. The raw ECG signals were annotated
for the R-peak and the proposed method benchmarked against
common QRS detectors. The combined acquisition setup and
presented approach resulted in R-peak detection Sensitivity (Se)
of 99.77% and Positive Predictive Value of (PPV) of 99.18%,
comparable to state of the art real time QRS detectors. Due to its
low computational complexity, this method can be implemented
in embedded wearable systems, suited for cardiovascular tracking
devices in dynamic use cases and R-peak detection.

ICPR 2020

A Low-Complexity R-peak Detection Algorithm with Adaptive Thresholding for Wearable Devices

electrocardiogram and r-peak detection

wearable devices

The University Big Data Challenge (IUBDC) successfully concluded its latest edition, bringing together national health industry leaders, policymakers, and dignitaries for a conference centered on mental health research and innovation. Participants had the opportunity to showcase their projects in a poster session, engaging with representatives from industry and academia. The event provided a rich network of industry and academic professionals, offering pathways for scholarly publication, access to curated datasets, learning materials materials, and workshops.

Held at the Microsoft Headquarters in Toronto on July 26, 2024, the challenge featured hands-on data science and AI research projects focused on mental health. For over seven years, IUBDC has fostered collaboration between data science and health professionals and motivated university students. This year’s projects, which spanned topics from dementia to addictions, aimed to enhance our understanding of mental health, improve patient lifestyles, and reduce disease risk. Abstracts from teams were published in the NRC Research Press STEM Fellowship Journal, with all team's works featured by Underline publications.

Leveraging Open Data Analytics and Machine Learning to Improve Mental Health Research and Innovation

2024 Inter-University Big Data And AI Challenge -

Thee challenge featured hands-on data science and AI research projects focused on mental health. 

poster

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


The characteristics of training data is a fundamental consideration when constructing any supervised classifier. Class mislabelling and imbalance are major training data issues that often adversely affect machine learning algorithms, including ensembles. This work proposes extended bagging algorithms to better handle noisy and multi-class imbalanced classification tasks. These algorithms upgrade the sampling procedure by taking benefit of the confidence in ensemble classification outcome. The underlying idea is that a bagging ensemble learning algorithm can achieve greater performance if it is allowed to choose the data from which it learns. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is demonstrated in performing classification on 10 various data sets.

Boundary bagging to address training data issues in ensemble classification

In this paper we define a deep multi-stage architec-
ture for automated landmarking of craniomaxillofacial (CMF)
CT images. Our model is composed of three subnetworks that
first localize, on reduced-resolution images, areas where land-
marks may be found and then refine the search, at full-resolution
scale, through a hierarchical structure aiming at increasing the
granularity of the investigated region. The multi-stage pipeline is
designed to deal with full resolution data and does not require any
additional pre-processing step to reduce search space, as opposed
to existing methods that can be only adopted for searching
landmarks located in well-defined anatomical structures (e.g.,
mandibles). The automated landmarking system is tested on
identifying landmarks located in several CMF regions, achieving
an average error of 0.8 mm, significantly lower than expert
readings. The proposed model also outperforms baselines and
is on par with existing models that employ additional upstream
segmentation, on state-of-the-art benchmarks.


Deep Multi-stage Model for Automated Landmarking of Craniomaxillofacial Ct Scans


Estimating the Ratio of Edge-Users (REU) is an important issue in mobile networks, as it helps the subsequent adjustment of loads in different cells. However, existing approaches usually determine the REU manually, which are experience-dependent and labor-intensive, and thus the estimated REU might be imprecise. Considering the inherited graph structure of mobile networks, in this paper, we utilize a graph-based deep learning method for automatic REU estimation, where the practical cells are deemed as nodes and the load switchings among them constitute edges. Concretely, Graph Attention Network (GAT) is employed as the backbone of our method due to its impressive generalizability in dealing with networked data. Nevertheless, conventional GAT cannot make full use of the information in mobile networks, since it only incorporates node features to infer the pairwise importance and conduct graph convolutions, while the edge features that are actually critical in our problem are disregarded. To accommodate this issue, we propose an Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network (EAGAT), which is able to fuse the node features and edge features for REU estimation. Extensive experimental results on two real-world mobile network datasets demonstrate the superiority of our EAGAT approach to several state-of-the-art methods.

Edge-Aware Graph Attention Network for Ratio of Edge User Estimation in Mobile Networks

Learning graph convolutional networks (GCNs) is an emerging field which aims at generalizing convolutional operations to arbitrary non-regular domains. In particular, GCNs operating on spatial domains show superior performances compared to spectral ones, however their success is highly dependent on how the topology of input graphs is defined.
In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for graph convolutional networks that learns the topological properties of graphs. The design principle of our method is based on the optimization of a constrained objective function which learns not only the usual convolutional parameters in GCNs but also a transformation basis that conveys the most relevant topological relationships in these graphs. Experiments conducted on the challenging task of skeleton-based action recognition shows the superiority of the proposed method compared to handcrafted graph design as well as the related work.

Learning Connectivity with Graph Convolutional Networks

Current 3D object detection methods achieve accurate and efficient results on the standard point cloud dataset. However, in real-world applications, the point cloud samples obtained in the real-time running may be much sparser due to various reasons (occlusion, low reflectivity of objects and fewer laser beams) and existing methods do not consider the limitations of their models on sparse point clouds. To improve the robustness of an object detector to sparser point clouds, we propose PointDrop, which learns to drop the features of some key points in the point clouds to generate challenging sparse samples for data augmentation. Moreover, PointDrop is able to adjust the difficulty of the generated samples based on the capacity of the detector and thus progressively improve the performance of the detector. We create two sparse point clouds datasets from the KITTI dataset to evaluate our method, and the experimental results show that PointDrop significantly improves the robustness of the detector to sparse point clouds.

PointDrop: Improving Object Detection from Sparse Point Clouds via Adversarial Data Augmentation

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) model long-range dependencies by deeply stacking convolution operations with small window sizes, which makes the optimizations difficult. This paper presents region-based non-local (RNL) operations as a family of self-attention mechanisms, which can directly capture long-range dependencies without using a deep stack of local operations. Given an intermediate feature map, our method recalibrates the feature at a position by aggregating the information from the neighboring regions of all positions. By combining a channel attention module with the proposed RNL, we design an attention chain, which can be integrated into the off-the-shelf CNNs for end-to-end training. We evaluate our method on two video classification benchmarks. The experimental results of our method outperform other attention mechanisms, and we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Something-Something V1 dataset.

Region-based Non-local Operation for Video Classification

Recovering the 3D geometric structure of a face from a single input image is a challenging active research area in computer vision. In this paper, we present a novel method for reconstructing 3D heads from a single or multiple image(s) using a hybrid approach based on deep learning and geometric techniques. We propose an encoder-decoder network based on the U-net architecture and trained on synthetic data only. It predicts both pixel-wise normal vectors and landmarks maps from a single input photo. Landmarks are used for the pose computation and the initialization of the optimization problem, which, in turn, reconstructs the 3D head geometry by using a parametric morphable model and normal vector fields. State-of-the-art results are achieved through qualitative and quantitative evaluation tests on both single and multi-view settings. Despite the fact that the model was trained only on synthetic data, it successfully recovers 3D geometry and precise poses for real-world images.

Hybrid Approach for 3D Head Reconstruction: Using Neural Networks and Visual Geometry


In the field of facial attractiveness prediction, while deep models using static pictures have shown promising results, little attention is paid to dynamic facial information, which is proven to be influential by psychological studies. Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of short video apps creates an enormous demand for facial attractiveness prediction from short video clips. In this presentation, we target on the dynamic facial attractiveness prediction problem. To begin with, a large-scale video-based facial attractiveness prediction dataset (VFAP) with more than one thousand clips from TikTok is collected. A two-stream temporal convolutional network (2S-TCN) is then proposed to capture dynamic attractiveness features from both facial appearance and landmarks. We employ attentive feature enhancement along with specially designed modality and temporal fusion strategies to better explore the temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on the proposed VFAP dataset demonstrate that 2S-TCN has a distinct advantage over the state-of-the-art static prediction methods.

Two-Stream Temporal Convolutional Network for Dynamic Facial Attractiveness Prediction

In this paper, we look into the problem of disentangled representation learning and controllable image synthesis in a deep generative model. We develop an encoder-decoder architecture for a variant of the Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) with two latent codes z1 and z2. Our framework uses z2 to capture specified factors of variation while z1 captures the complementary factors of variation.
To this end, we analyze the learning problem from the perspective of multivariate mutual information, derive optimizable lower bounds of the conditional mutual information in the image synthesis processes and incorporate them into the training objective. We validate our method empirically on the Color MNIST dataset and the CelebA dataset by showing controllable image syntheses. Our proposed paradigm is simple yet effective and is applicable to many situations, including those where there is not an explicit factorization of features available, or where the features are non-categorical.

Disentangled Representation Learning for Controllable Image Synthesis: an Information-Theoretic Perspective


This paper studies the problem of Person Re-Identification (ReID)
for large-scale applications. Recent research efforts have been devoted
to building complicated part models, which introduce considerably
high computational cost and memory consumption, inhibiting its practicability
in large-scale applications. This paper aims to develop a novel learning
strategy to find efficient feature embeddings while maintaining the
balance of accuracy and model complexity. More specifically, we find
by enhancing the classical triplet loss together with cross-entropy
loss, our method can explore the hard examples and build a discriminant
feature embedding yet compact enough for large-scale applications.
Our method is carried out progressively using Bayesian optimization,
and we call it the Progressive Learning Algorithm (PLA). Extensive
experiments on three large-scale datasets show that our PLA is comparable
or better than the state-of-the-arts. Especially, on the challenging
Market-1501 dataset, we achieve Rank-1=94.7%/mAP=89.4% while saving
at least 30\% parameters than strong part models.

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