Epilepsy is a neurological disorder and for its detection, encephalography (EEG) is a commonly used clinical approach. Manual inspection of EEG brain signals is a time-consuming and laborious process, which puts heavy burden on neurologists and affects their performance. Several automatic techniques have been proposed using traditional approaches to assist neurologists in detecting binary epilepsy scenarios e.g. seizure vs. non-seizure or normal vs. ictal. These methods do not perform well when classifying ternary case e.g. ictal vs. normal vs. inter-ictal; the maximum accuracy for this case by the state-of-the-art-methods is 97±1%. To overcome this problem, we propose a system based on deep learning, which is an ensemble of pyramidal one-dimensional convolutional neural network (P-1D-CNN) models. In a CNN model, the bottleneck is the large number of learnable parameters. P-1D-CNN works on the concept of refinement approach and it results in 60% fewer parameters compared to traditional CNN models. Further to overcome the limitations of small amount of data, we proposed augmentation schemes for learning P-1D-CNN model. In almost all the cases concerning epilepsy detection, the proposed system gives an accuracy of 99.1±0.9% on the University of Bonn dataset.

Make and model recognition (MMR) of vehicles plays an important role in automatic vision-based systems. This paper proposes a novel deep learning approach for MMR using the SqueezeNet architecture. The frontal views of vehicle images are first extracted and fed into a deep network for training and testing. The SqueezeNet architecture with bypass connections between the Fire modules, a variant of the vanilla SqueezeNet, is employed for this study, which makes our MMR system more efficient. The experimental results on our collected large-scale vehicle datasets indicate that the proposed model achieves 96.3% recognition rate at the rank-1 level with an economical time slice of 108.8 ms. For inference tasks, the deployed deep model requires less than 5 MB of space and thus has a great viability in real-time applications.

Data security, complete system control, and missed storage and computing opportunities in personal portable devices are some of the major limitations of the centralized cloud environment. Among these limitations, security is a prime concern due to potential unauthorized access to private data. Biometrics, in particular, is considered sensitive data, and its usage is subject to the privacy protection law. To address this issue, a multimodal authentication system using encrypted biometrics for the edge-centric cloud environment is proposed in this study. Personal portable devices are utilized for encrypting biometrics in the proposed system, which optimizes the use of resources and tackles another limitation of the cloud environment. Biometrics is encrypted using a new method. In the proposed system, the edges transmit the encrypted speech and face for processing in the cloud. The cloud then decrypts the biometrics and performs authentication to confirm the identity of an individual. The model for speech authentication is based on two types of features, namely, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and perceptual linear prediction coefficients. The model for face authentication is implemented by determining the eigenfaces. The final decision about the identity of a user is based on majority voting. Experimental results show that the new encryption method can reliably hide the identity of an individual and accurately decrypt the biometrics, which is vital for errorless authentication.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) brought revolution without any doubt to various challenging tasks, mainly in computer vision. However, their model designing still requires attention to reduce number of learnable parameters, with no meaningful reduction in performance. In this paper we investigate to what extend CNN may take advantage of pyramid structure typical of biological neurons. A generalized statement over convolutional layers from input till fully connected layer is introduced that helps further in understanding and designing a successful deep network. It reduces ambiguity, number of parameters, and their size on disk without degrading overall accuracy. Performance are shown on state-of-the-art models for MNIST, Cifar-10, Cifar-100, and ImageNet-12 datasets. Despite more than 80% reduction in parameters for Caffe LENET, challenging results are obtained. Further, despite 10 − 20% reduction in training data along with 10 − 40% reduction in parameters for Alexnet model and its variations, competitive results are achieved when compared to similar well-engineered deeper architectures.

In various biometric applications, gender recognition from facial images plays an important role. In this paper, we investigate Weber's Local Descriptor (WLD) for gender recognition. WLD is a texture descriptor that performs better than other similar descriptors but it is holistic due to its very construction. We extend it by introducing local spatial information; divide an image into a number of blocks, calculate WLD descriptor for each block and concatenate them. This spatial WLD descriptor has better discriminatory power. Spatial WLD descriptor has three parameters. Through a large number of experiments performed on FERET database, we report the best combination of these parameters and that our proposed spatial WLD descriptor with simplest classifier gives much better accuracy i.e. 99.08% with lesser algorithmic complexity than state-of-the-art gender recognition approaches.

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Nowadays, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is applied to various real-world tasks and attracts much attention in the fields of games, robotics, and autonomous driving. It is very challenging and devices overwhelming to directly apply RL to real-world environments. Due to the reality gap simulated environment does not match perfectly to the real-world scenario and additional learning cannot be performed. Therefore, an efficient approach is required for RL to find an optimal control policy and get better learning efficacy. In this paper, we propose federated reinforcement learning based on multi agent environment which applying a new federation policy. The new federation policy allows multi agents to perform learning and share their learning experiences with each other e.g., gradient and model parameters to increase their learning level. The Actor-Critic PPO algorithm is used with four types of RL simulation environments, OpenAI Gym's CartPole, MoutainCar, Acrobot, and Pendulum. In addition, we did real experiments with multiple Rotary Inverted Pendulum (RIP) to evaluate and compare the learning efficiency of the proposed scheme with both environments.

Studies are proceeded to stabilize cardiac surgery using thin micro-guidewires and catheter robots. To control the robot to a desired position and pose, it is necessary to accurately track the robot tip in real time but tracking and accurately delineating the thin and small tip is challenging. To address this problem, a novel image analysis-based tracking method using deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) has been proposed in this paper. The proposed tracker consists of two parts; (1) a detection network for rough detection of the tip position and (2) a segmentation network for accurate tip delineation near the tip position. To learn a robust real-time tracker, we extract small image patches, including the tip in successive frames and then learn the informative spatial and motion features for the segmentation network. During inference, the tip bounding box is first estimated in the initial frame via the detection network, thereafter tip delineation is consecutively performed through the segmentation network in the following frames. The proposed method enables accurate delineation of the tip in real time and automatically restarts tracking via the detection network when tracking fails in challenging frames. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better tracking accuracy than existing methods, with a considerable real-time speed of 19ms. INDEX TERMS Convolutional neural networks, micro-robot tracking, guidewire tracking, patch-wise segmentation.