When completing missions and tasks in the real-world, robots should ideally be able to effectively grasp objects of various shapes and compositions. So far, however, most robots can only grasp specific types of objects. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University have recently developed a new machine learning model that could help to enhance the grasping abilities of robots. This model, presented in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, is specifically designed to predict grasps for objects in a robot's surroundings, so that they can devise optimal strategies for grasping these objects. "In real-world applications, such as intelligent manufacturing, human-machine interaction and domestic services, robotic grasping is becoming more and more essential," Junzhi Yu, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. "Grasp detection, a critical step of robotic grasping, entails finding the best grasp for a target object.

In recent years, neural network based image denoising approaches have revolutionized the analysis of biomedical microscopy data. Self-supervised methods, such as Noise2Void (N2V), are applicable to virtually all noisy datasets, even without dedicated training data being available. Arguably, this facilitated the fast and widespread adoption of N2V throughout the life sciences. Unfortunately, the blind-spot training underlying N2V can lead to rather visible checkerboard artifacts, thereby reducing the quality of final predictions considerably. In this work, we present two modifications to the vanilla N2V setup that both help to reduce the unwanted artifacts considerably. Firstly, we propose a modified network architecture, i.e., using BlurPool instead of MaxPool layers throughout the used U-Net, rolling back the residual U-Net to a non-residual U-Net, and eliminating the skip connections at the uppermost U-Net level. Additionally, we propose new replacement strategies to determine the pixel intensity values that fill in the elected blind-spot pixels. We validate our modifications on a range of microscopy and natural image data. Based on added synthetic noise from multiple noise types and at varying amplitudes, we show that both proposed modifications push the current state-of-the-art for fully self-supervised image denoising.

In this paper, we propose a fixed convolutional layer with an order of smoothness not only for avoiding checkerboard artifacts in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but also for enhancing the performance of CNNs, where the smoothness of its filter kernel can be controlled by a parameter. It is well-known that a number of CNNs generate checkerboard artifacts in both of two process: forward-propagation of upsampling layers and backward-propagation of strided convolutional layers. The proposed layer can perfectly prevent checkerboard artifacts caused by strided convolutional layers or upsampling layers including transposed convolutional layers. In an image-classification experiment with four CNNs: a simple CNN, VGG8, ResNet-18, and ResNet-101, applying the fixed layers to these CNNs is shown to improve the classification performance of all CNNs. In addition, the fixed layer are applied to generative adversarial networks (GANs), for the first time. From image-generation results, a smoother fixed convolutional layer is demonstrated to enable us to improve the quality of images generated with GANs.

In this paper we address the problem of artist style transfer where the painting style of a given artist is applied on a real world photograph. We train our neural networks in adversarial setting via recently introduced quadratic potential divergence for stable learning process. To further improve the quality of generated artist stylized images we also integrate some of the recently introduced deep learning techniques in our method. To our best knowledge this is the first attempt towards artist style transfer via quadratic potential divergence. We provide some stylized image samples in the supplementary material. The source code for experimentation was written in PyTorch and is available online in my GitHub repository.

In this work we propose an adversarial learning approach to generate high resolution MRI scans from low resolution images. The architecture, based on the SRGAN model, adopts 3D convolutions to exploit volumetric information. For the discriminator, the adversarial loss uses least squares in order to stabilize the training. For the generator, the loss function is a combination of a least squares adversarial loss and a content term based on mean square error and image gradients in order to improve the quality of the generated images. We explore different solutions for the upsampling phase. We present promising results that improve classical interpolation, showing the potential of the approach for 3D medical imaging super-resolution. Source code available at https://github.com/imatge-upc/3D-GAN-superresolution

Deconvolutional layers have been widely used in a variety of deep models for up-sampling, including encoder-decoder networks for semantic segmentation and deep generative models for unsupervised learning. One of the key limitations of deconvolutional operations is that they result in the so-called checkerboard problem. This is caused by the fact that no direct relationship exists among adjacent pixels on the output feature map. To address this problem, we propose the pixel deconvolutional layer (PixelDCL) to establish direct relationships among adjacent pixels on the up-sampled feature map. Our method is based on a fresh interpretation of the regular deconvolution operation. The resulting PixelDCL can be used to replace any deconvolutional layer in a plug-and-play manner without compromising the fully trainable capabilities of original models. The proposed PixelDCL may result in slight decrease in efficiency, but this can be overcome by an implementation trick. Experimental results on semantic segmentation demonstrate that PixelDCL can consider spatial features such as edges and shapes and yields more accurate segmentation outputs than deconvolutional layers. When used in image generation tasks, our PixelDCL can largely overcome the checkerboard problem suffered by regular deconvolution operations.