Scaled Exponential Linear Unit Research Articles

Gravel coverage rate measurement in synchronous chip seal based on deep convolutional neural network

Synchronous chip seal is an advanced road constructing technology, and the gravel coverage rate is an important indicator of the construction quality. In this paper, a novel approach for gravel coverage rate measurement is proposed based on deep learning. Convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to segment the image of ground covered with gravels, and the gravel coverage rate is computed by the percentage of gravel pixels in the segmented image. The gravel coverage rate dataset for model training and testing is built. The performance of fully convolutional neural network (FCN) and U-Net model in the dataset is tested. A better model named GravelNet is constructed based on U-Net. The scaled exponential linear unit (SELU) is employed in the GravelNet to replace the popular combination of rectified linear unit (ReLU) and batch normalization (BN). Data augmentation and alpha dropout are performed to reduce overfitting. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our proposed method. Our trained GravelNet achieves the mean gravel coverage rate error of 0.35% on test dataset.

Design Space Exploration of Neural Network Activation Function Circuits

The widespread application of artificial neural networks has prompted researchers to experiment with FPGA and customized ASIC designs to speed up their computation. These implementation efforts have generally focused on weight multiplication and signal summation operations, and less on activation functions used in these applications. Yet, efficient hardware implementations of nonlinear activation functions like Exponential Linear Units (ELU), Scaled Exponential Linear Units (SELU), and Hyperbolic Tangent (tanh), are central to designing effective neural network accelerators, since these functions require lots of resources. In this paper, we explore efficient hardware implementations of activation functions using purely combinational circuits, with a focus on two widely used nonlinear activation functions, i.e., SELU and tanh. Our experiments demonstrate that neural networks are generally insensitive to the precision of the activation function. The results also prove that the proposed combinational circuit-based approach is very efficient in terms of speed and area, with negligible accuracy loss on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and IMAGENET benchmarks. Synopsys Design Compiler synthesis results show that circuit designs for tanh and SELU can save between 3.13-7.69 and 4.45-8:45 area compared to the LUT/memory-based implementations, and can operate at 5.14GHz and 4.52GHz using the 28nm SVT library, respectively. The implementation is available at: https://github.com/ThomasMrY/ActivationFunctionDemo.

Short-term Wind Power Prediction Method Based on Wavelet Packet Decomposition and Improved GRU

Accurately predicting wind power in wind farms is of great significance to ensure the safe and stable operation of the power system. A novel short-term wind power forecasting method (WPD-GRU-SELU) based on wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) and improved gated recurrent unit (GRU) is proposed. Firstly, this method uses WPD to decompose the time series of wind power into several sub-sequences with different frequencies. Then the sub-sequences of different frequency components are predicted by using the improved GRU neural network, which uses the scaled exponential linear units(SELU) as the activation function to squash the hidden states to calculate the output. Finally, the output datum of GRU neural networks are reconstructed to obtain the complete wind power predicting results. Experiments illustrate that the WPD-GRU-SELU model have a more accurate forecast to the short-term wind power prediction compared with other RNN models.

Remote sensing image scene classification based on generative adversarial networks

ABSTRACTScene classification of remote sensing images plays an important role in many remote sensing image applications. Training a good classifier needs a large number of training samples. The labeled samples are often scarce and difficult to obtain, and annotating a large number of samples is time-consuming. We propose a novel remote sensing image scene classification framework based on generative adversarial networks (GAN) in this paper. GAN can improve the generalization ability of machine learning network model. However, generating large-size images, especially high-resolution remote sensing images is difficult. To address this issue, the scaled exponential linear units (SELU) are applied into the GAN to generate high quality remote sensing images. Experiments carried out on two datasets show that our approach can obtain the state-of-the-art results compared with the classification results of the classic deep convolutional neural networks, especially when the number of training samples is small.

Automatic segmentation method of pelvic floor levator hiatus in ultrasound using a self-normalizing neural network.

.Segmentation of the levator hiatus in ultrasound allows the extraction of biometrics, which are of importance for pelvic floor disorder assessment. We present a fully automatic method using a convolutional neural network (CNN) to outline the levator hiatus in a two-dimensional image extracted from a three-dimensional ultrasound volume. In particular, our method uses a recently developed scaled exponential linear unit (SELU) as a nonlinear self-normalizing activation function, which for the first time has been applied in medical imaging with CNN. SELU has important advantages such as being parameter-free and mini-batch independent, which may help to overcome memory constraints during training. A dataset with 91 images from 35 patients during Valsalva, contraction, and rest, all labeled by three operators, is used for training and evaluation in a leave-one-patient-out cross validation. Results show a median Dice similarity coefficient of 0.90 with an interquartile range of 0.08, with equivalent performance to the three operators (with a Williams’ index of 1.03), and outperforming a U-Net architecture without the need for batch normalization. We conclude that the proposed fully automatic method achieved equivalent accuracy in segmenting the pelvic floor levator hiatus compared to a previous semiautomatic approach.