Abstract: This paper presents a novel unsupervised approach to estimate the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI).The NDVI is obtained as the ratio between information from the visible and near infrared spectral bands; in the current work, the NDVI is estimated just from an image of the visible spectrum through a Cyclic Generative Adversarial Network (CyclicGAN). This unsupervised architecture learns to estimate the NDVI index by means of an image translation between the red channel of a given RGB image and the NDVI unpaired index’s image. The translation is obtained by means of a ResNET architecture and a multiple loss function. Experimental results obtained with this unsupervised scheme show the validity of the implemented model. Additionally, comparisons with the state of the art approaches are provided showing improvements with the proposed approach.

Abstract: In open-ended domains, robots must continuously learn new object categories. When the training sets are created offline, it is not possible to ensure their representativeness with respect to the object categories and features the system will find when operating online. In the Bag of Words model, visual codebooks are usually constructed from training sets created offline. This might lead to non-discriminative visual words and, as a consequence, to poor recognition performance. This paper proposes a visual object recognition system which concurrently learns in an incremental and online fashion both the visual object category representations as well as the codebook words used to encode them. The codebook is defined using Gaussian Mixture Models which are updated using new object views. The approach contains similarities with the human visual object recognition system: evidence suggests that the development of recognition capabilities occurs on multiple levels and is sustained over large periods of time. Results show that the proposed system with concurrent learning of object categories and codebooks is capable of learning more categories, requiring less examples, and with similar accuracies, when compared to the classical Bag of Words approach using codebooks constructed offline.

Abstract: This paper proposes a Deep Learning based edge de- tector, which is inspired on both HED (Holistically-Nested Edge Detection) and Xception networks. The proposed ap- proach generates thin edge-maps that are plausible for hu- man eyes; it can be used in any edge detection task without previous training or fine tuning process. As a second contri- bution, a large dataset with carefully annotated edges, has been generated. This dataset has been used for training the proposed approach as well the state-of-the-art algorithms for comparisons. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations have been performed on different benchmarks showing im- provements with the proposed method when F-measure of ODS and OIS are considered.

Abstract: The authors present a model-free policy-based reinforcement learning
model that introduces perturbations on the pattern of a metasurface.
The objective is to learn a policy that changes the size of the
patches, and therefore the impedance in the sides of an artificially structured
material. The proposed iterative model assigns the highest reward
when the patch sizes allow the transmission along a constrained path
and penalties when the patch sizes make the surface wave radiate to
the sides of the metamaterial. After convergence, the proposed
model learns an optimal patch pattern that achieves lateral confinement
along the metasurface. Simulation results show that the proposed
learned-pattern can effectively guide the electromagnetic wave
through a metasurface, maintaining its instantaneous eigenstate when
the homogeneity is perturbed. Moreover, the pattern learned to
prevent reflections by changing the patch sizes adiabatically. The
reflection coefficient S1, 2 shows that most of the power gets transferred
from the source to the destination with the proposed design.