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The inclusion of a macroscopic adaptive threshold is studied for the retrieval dynamics of both layered feedforward and fully connected neural network models with synaptic noise. These two types of architectures require a different method to be solved numerically. In both cases it is shown that, if the threshold is chosen appropriately as a function of the cross-talk noise and of the activity of the stored patterns, adapting itself automatically in the course of the recall process, an autonomous functioning of the network is guaranteed. This self-control mechanism considerably improves the quality of retrieval, in particular the storage capacity, the basins of attraction and the mutual information content.

Traditional training methods need to collect a large amount of data for every subject to train a subject-specific classifier, which causes subjects fatigue and training burden. This study proposes a novel training method, TrAdaBoost based on cross-validation and an adaptive threshold (CV-T-TAB), to reduce the amount of data required for training by selecting and combining multiple subjects’ classifiers that perform well on a new subject to train a classifier. This method adopts cross-validation to extend the amount of the new subject’s training data and sets an adaptive threshold to select the optimal combination of the classifiers. Twenty-five subjects participated in the N200- and P300-based brain–computer interface. The study compares CV-T-TAB to five traditional training methods by testing them on the training of a support vector machine. The accuracy, information transfer rate, area under the curve, recall and precision are used to evaluate the performances under nine conditions with different amounts of data. CV-T-TAB outperforms the other methods and retains a high accuracy even when the amount of data is reduced to one-third of the original amount. The results imply that CV-T-TAB is effective in improving the performance of a subject-specific classifier with a small amount of data by adopting multiple subjects’ classifiers, which reduces the training cost.

Classification of imbalanced datasets has attracted substantial research interest over the past decades. Imbalanced datasets are common in several domains such as health, finance, security and others. A wide range of solutions to handle imbalanced datasets focus mainly on the class distribution problem and aim at providing more balanced datasets by means of resampling. However, existing literature shows that class overlap has a higher negative impact on the learning process than class distribution. In this paper, we propose overlap-based undersampling methods for maximizing the visibility of the minority class instances in the overlapping region. This is achieved by the use of soft clustering and the elimination threshold that is adaptable to the overlap degree to identify and eliminate negative instances in the overlapping region. For more accurate clustering and detection of overlapped negative instances, the presence of the minority class at the borderline areas is emphasized by means of oversampling. Extensive experiments using simulated and real-world datasets covering a wide range of imbalance and overlap scenarios including extreme cases were carried out. Results show significant improvement in sensitivity and competitive performance with well-established and state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, we propose a method for text-query-based keyword spotting from online Chinese handwritten documents using character classification model. The similarity between the query word and handwriting is obtained by combining the character classification scores. The classifier is trained by one-versus-all strategy so that it gives high similarity to the target class and low scores to the others. Using character classification-based word similarity also helps overcome the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem. We use a character-synchronous dynamic search algorithm to efficiently spot the query word in large database. The retrieval performance is further improved by using competing character confusion and writer-adaptive thresholds. Our experimental results on a large handwriting database CASIA-OLHWDB justify the superiority of one-versus-all trained classifiers and the benefits of confidence transformation, character confusion and adaptive thresholds. Particularly, a one-versus-all trained prototype classifier performs as well as a linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier, but consumes much less storage of index file. The experimental comparison with keyword spotting based on handwritten text recognition also demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

As an important part of metal processing, welding is widely used in industrial manufacturing activities, and its application scenarios are very extensive. Due to technical limitations, the welding process always unavoidably leaves weld defects. Weld defects are extremely hazardous, and the work used must be guaranteed to be defect-free, regardless of the field. However, manual weld inspection has subjective factors such as inefficiency and easy missed detection, and although some automatic weld inspection methods have appeared, these traditional methods still do not meet actual demand in terms of detection time and detection accuracy. Therefore, there is a need for a higher quality weld image automatic detection method to replace the manual method and the traditional automatic detection method. In view of the above, this paper proposes a weld seam image recognition algorithm based on deep learning. The Adam adaptive moment estimation algorithm is chosen as the backpropagation optimization algorithm to accelerate the training of convolutional neural networks and design an independent adaptive learning rate. Through the simulation of the collected 4500 tube images, the adaptive threshold-based method is used for weld seam extraction. The algorithm proposed in this paper is compared with the weld seam recognition method based on image texture feature value distribution (ITFVD) and the SUSAN-based weld defect target detection method. The results show that the proposed method can identify weld defects in a short time on different sizes of weld images, and can further detect the type of weld defects. In addition, the method in this paper is better than the other two methods in the false detection rate, recall rate and overall recognition accuracy, which shows that the experimental results have achieved the expected results.

Occlusion detection is an important problem in 3D computer vision which uses multiple views, such as stereo vision. The presence of occlusion complicates the problem of vergence and the subsequent stereo matching in the generation of 3D data. This paper presents an approach which detects the presence of occlusion concurrently during the vergence process. The main limitation of the approach where the maximum correlation coefficient can be very high even when a significant amount of occlusions is present in the stereo images is shown. This paper presents an adaptive method of adjusting the correlation threshold with respect to the contrast-levels of the image being analyzed to alleviate this limitation. The proposed adaptive threshold method ensures that the sensitivity of detecting mismatches is less dependent upon the contrast-levels of the image being analyzed. The computational advantage of the proposed adaptive threshold method over the fixed threshold method is also presented. Experimental results which show the strengths of the proposed adaptive threshold method over the fixed threshold method on real scenes are given.

Cognitive Radio based Wireless Sensor Network is a novel concept that integrates the dynamic spectrum access capability of cognitive radio into wireless sensor networks for the futuristic sensor networks and wireless communication technology. Spectrum sensing plays a quintessential role in a cognitive radio network but is a major constraint for a battery powered sensor with stringent energy limitations. The spectrum sensing algorithms are expected to yield acceptable detection probability at low SNR under noise uncertainty with minimum power consumption in a WSN. In this paper, a new spectrum sensing method has been proposed to overcome sensing failure under low SNR environment. The proposed technique is based on adaptive double threshold theory which improves the detection performance by 39.63 and 27.22% at SNR = −10dB as compared to the conventional energy detection and available double threshold-based method respectively. Furthermore, the proposed method of spectrum sensing is evaluated for its deployment into a CR-WSN using the evaluation metrics: Time and Sample Complexity. The comparative evaluation of the spectrum sensing method in a WSN through simulations shows that the proposed technique offers substantial reduction in sample and time complexity of the wireless sensor nodes.

Due to the haze weather, the outdoor image quality is degraded, which reduces the image contrast, thereby reducing the efficiency of computer vision systems such as target recognition. There are two aspects of the traditional algorithm based on the principle of dark channel to be improved. First, the restored images obviously contain color distortion in the sky region. Second, the white regions in the scene easily affect the atmospheric light estimated. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes a single-image dehazing and image segmentation method via dark channel prior (DCP) and adaptive threshold. The sky region of hazing image is relatively bright, so sky region does not meet the DCP. The sky part is separated by the adaptive threshold, then the scenery and the sky area are dehazed, respectively. In order to avoid the interference caused by white objects to the estimation of atmospheric light, we estimate the value of atmospheric light using the separated area of the sky. The algorithm in this paper makes up for the shortcoming that the algorithm based on the DCP cannot effectively process the hazing image with sky region, avoiding the effect of white objects on estimating atmospheric light. Experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the improved algorithm.