Andrew Weinert and his colleagues were deeply frustrated. After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, the researchers from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory were hard at work trying to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assess the damage. In hand they had the perfect data set: 80,000 aerial shots of the region taken by the Civil Air Patrol right after the disaster. But there was an issue: there were too many images to sort through manually, and commercial image recognition systems were failing to identify anything meaningful. In one particularly egregious example, ImageNet, the golden standard for image classification, recommended labeling an image of a major flooding zone as a toilet.

They also spent a significant amount of time figuring out the best way to annotate the images. They wanted the annotations to offer emergency responders useful context for their missions, and also needed the annotation scheme to be simple enough for data labelers to perform quickly with minimal errors. Rather than object categories, however, the researchers clustered photos based on increasingly specific disaster characteristics: Is there damage? Should the water be there?

Z Advanced Computing, Inc. (ZAC) of Potomac, MD announced on August 27 that it is funded by the US Air Force, to use ZAC's detailed 3D image recognition technology, based on Explainable-AI, for drones (unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV) for aerial image/object recognition. ZAC is the first to demonstrate Explainable-AI, where various attributes and details of 3D (three dimensional) objects can be recognized from any view or angle. "With our superior approach, complex 3D objects can be recognized from any direction, using only a small number of training samples," said Dr. Saied Tadayon, CTO of ZAC. "For complex tasks, such as drone vision, you need ZAC's superior technology to handle detailed 3D image recognition." "You cannot do this with the other techniques, such as Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, even with an extremely large number of training samples. That's basically hitting the limits of the CNNs," continued Dr. Bijan Tadayon, CEO of ZAC.

Software star-up, Z Advanced Computing, Inc. (ZAC), has received funding from the U.S. Air Force to incorporate the company's 3D image recognition technology into unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and drones for aerial image and object recognition. ZAC's in-house image recognition software is based on Explainable-AI (XAI), where computer-generated image results can be understood by human experts. ZAC – based in Potomac, Maryland – is the first to demonstrate XAI, where various attributes and details of 3D objects can be recognized from any view or angle. "With our superior approach, complex 3D objects can be recognized from any direction, using only a small number of training samples," says Dr. Saied Tadayon, CTO of ZAC. "You cannot do this with the other techniques, such as deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), even with an extremely large number of training samples. That's basically hitting the limits of the CNNs," adds Dr. Bijan Tadayon, CEO of ZAC.

The Image Recognition Technology Is, Usually, Associated with an Array of Security and Surveillance-Related Uses and the Rapidly Developing Autonomous Vehicle Niche. Can Image Recognition Apps Help Businesses in Other Verticals? With Reuters' predictions for the not-so-far-off year of 2022 being in the region of a hefty $43-57 billion, Image Recognition is one big lure for AI outfits, and, simultaneously, a lot of hope for businesses and organizations that depend upon it for their survival and success. These include entities as diverse, as manufacturers of autonomous cars and security systems, national nature parks, border security forces, and companies that produce drones. Be it monitoring the state of a much cherished rainforest or sending drones to remote oil rigs to check if all one's assets are in one piece, almost all of the widely known uses of Image Recognition seem to be related to security and surveillance.

Sometimes recognition software is excellent at correctly categorizing certain types of images but totally fails with others. Some image recognition engines prefer cats over dogs, and some are far more descriptive with their color knowledge. But which is the best overall? Perficient Digital's image recognition accuracy study looked at image recognition -- one of the hottest areas of machine learning. It looked at Amazon AWS Rekognition, Google Vision, IBM Watson, and Microsoft Azure Computer Vision to compare images.

Adversarial examples have recently proven to be able to fool deep learning methods by adding carefully crafted small perturbation to the input space image. In this paper, we study the possibility of generating adversarial examples for code-based iris recognition systems. Since generating adversarial examples requires back-propagation of the adversarial loss, conventional filter bank-based iris-code generation frameworks cannot be employed in such a setup. Therefore, to compensate for this shortcoming, we propose to train a deep auto-encoder surrogate network to mimic the conventional iris code generation procedure. This trained surrogate network is then deployed to generate the adversarial examples using the iterative gradient sign method algorithm. We consider non-targeted and targeted attacks through three attack scenarios. Considering these attacks, we study the possibility of fooling an iris recognition system in white-box and black-box frameworks.

Medical image registration is one of the key processing steps for biomedical image analysis such as cancer diagnosis. Recently, deep learning based supervised and unsupervised image registration methods have been extensively studied due to its excellent performance in spite of ultra-fast computational time compared to the classical approaches. In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised medical image registration method that trains deep neural network for deformable registration of 3D volumes using a cycle-consistency. Thanks to the cycle consistency, the proposed deep neural networks can take diverse pair of image data with severe deformation for accurate registration. Experimental results using multiphase liver CT images demonstrate that our method provides very precise 3D image registration within a few seconds, resulting in more accurate cancer size estimation.

Vision models are interpretable when they classify objects on the basis of features that a person can directly understand. Recently, methods relying on visual feature prototypes have been developed for this purpose. However, in contrast to how humans categorize objects, these approaches have not yet made use of any taxonomical organization of class labels. With such an approach, for instance, we may see why a chimpanzee is classified as a chimpanzee, but not why it was considered to be a primate or even an animal. In this work we introduce a model that uses hierarchically organized prototypes to classify objects at every level in a predefined taxonomy. Hence, we may find distinct explanations for the prediction an image receives at each level of the taxonomy. The hierarchical prototypes enable the model to perform another important task: interpretably classifying images from previously unseen classes at the level of the taxonomy to which they correctly relate, e.g. classifying a hand gun as a weapon, when the only weapons in the training data are rifles. With a subset of ImageNet, we test our model against its counterpart black-box model on two tasks: 1) classification of data from familiar classes, and 2) classification of data from previously unseen classes at the appropriate level in the taxonomy. We find that our model performs approximately as well as its counterpart black-box model while allowing for each classification to be interpreted.