"No one is harder on a talented person than the person themselves" - Linda Wilkinson ; "Trust your guts and don't follow the herd" ; "Validate direction not destination" ;

September 29, 2021

Leaf / Plant Detection - Reads :)

Never stop collecting / identifying/analyzing perspectives :).

Paper #1 - Real-world plant species identification based on deep convolutional neural networks and visual attention

Key Notes

  • Data augmentation method for deep learning
  • Crop the image in terms with visual attention
  • Considering flowers and fruits of plants are seasonal, some researchers believe that leaves are more suitable for identification
  • Samples is also strict


  • PlantCLEF. There are different view types and the samples are close to realistic scenarios.

  • Image segmentation is carried out for generating the regions of interest (ROI) for recognition
  • Comparisons between original images and final attention cropping results.

Paper #2 - Deep Learning in Agriculture: A Survey

Key Notes

  • High occlusion, depth variation, and uncontrolled illumination, including high color similarity between fruit/foliage
  • Rotations, cropping, scaling, transposing, mirroring
  • DetectNet CNN
  • Faster Region-based CNN, DetectNet CNN

Paper #3 - PlantDoc: A Dataset for Visual Plant Disease Detection

Key Notes

  • The PlantVillage dataset contains images taken under controlled settings. 
  • Final dataset having a total of 27 classes spanning over 13 species with 2,598 images
  • model which can detect a leaf in an image and then classify it into the particular classes

Paper #4 - Leaf Classification Using Shape, Color, and Texture Features

Key Notes

  • Texture, on its own does not have the capability of finding similar images, but it can be used to classify textured images from non-textured ones 
  • Texture features can be extracted by using various methods. Gray-level occurrence matrices (GLCMs), Gabor Filter, and Local binary pattern (LBP) 




  • Fourier descriptors, slimness ratio, roundness ratio, and dispersion are used to represent shape features

Paper #5 - Multi-Organ Plant Classification Based on Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks

Key Notes

  • Feature engineering approaches such as Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), Bag of Word (Bow), Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF), Gabor, Local Binary Pattern (LBP)

Take multiple images and deduce plant, flower, leaf

Paper #6 - Two-View Fine-grained Classification of Plant Species

  • Three levels of abstraction: family, genus, and species
  • The input of the SCNN model is the whole leaf image characterizing a global
  • view in terms of problem representation. The output of this stage is a ranked list of the top-K genus candidates
  • SCNN takes into account global features extracted from the entire leaf image (shape and color), while in the second view, local features based on texture and the plant veins are considered. 
  • The output of the first stage is a ranked list of the top-k genus candidates.
  • In the second stage, given the top-k genus candidates found in the first stage, a fine classification considering only the plant species which belong to such a genus is performed

  • A coarse-to-fine classification is performed considering the hierarchical botanic taxonomy
  • e. Finally, the genus (coarse classification) and species (fine classification) are combined to produce a final ranked list of the k-best hypotheses of plant species.

LifeCLEF 2015 and LeafSnap datasets.

Paper #7 - Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Plant Species In The Wild: Object Detection as A Reinforced Means of Attention

Key Notes

  • We introduce a bottom-up approach based on detecting plant organs and fusing the predictions of a variable number of organ-based species classifiers
  • Object detection has mostly had its use in plant analysis constrained to invasive species detection
  • First, an object detector identifies and localizes plant organs, including leaves, flowers, fruit, stems, and regions with a high volume of leaves, termed “highdensity leaves” (HDL)
  • These regions of interest (ROIs) are then individually passed into an organ-based species classifier
  • Leaf, flower, fruit, stem, HDL

Paper #8 - COMPUTER-AIDED INTERPRETABLE FEATURES FOR LEAF IMAGE CLASSIFICATION

Key Notes

  • i) Convert original image to RGB (Red-Green-Blue) image, ii) Gray scaling, iii) Gaussian smoothing, iv) Binary thresholding, v) Remove the stalk, vi) Closing holes, and vii) Resize the image.


  • Gray-scaling is the process of converting an image to shades of gray from other colour spaces like RGB
  • Image smoothing techniques help in smoothing images and removing intensity edges.
  • Thresholding is a segmentation technique that is used to separate the foreground from its background



Paper #9 - A Review of Visual Descriptors and Classification Techniques Used in Leaf Species Identification

  • Leaf Snap Dataset
  • The Middle European Wood Database
  • The Smithsonian Leaf Dataset
  • The Austrian Federal Forest (AFF) Dataset
  • Pl@ntNet

More Reads

Keep Exploring!!!

September 28, 2021

Interesting Vision Products

 

  • Dress customization
  • Look Customization
  • Smartphone based measurements - Link
  • Size / Body measurements - Link

Keep Exploring

September 27, 2021

Forecasting Notes - Forecasting Daily Supermarkets Sales with Machine Learning

Paper - Forecasting Daily Supermarkets Sales with Machine Learning

Key Notes

  • Facebook Prophet is an additive and decomposable model with three main components. Trend, Seasonality and Holidays
  • XGBoost is an abbreviation of extreme gradient boosting and is based on the gradient tree boosting methods
  • LSTM is an acronym for long short-term memory and is an artificial neural network that is based on a recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture
  • Utilizing weather as a predictor in machine learning models can increase the predictive performance and thus improving the results according
  • Public holidays
  • Missing values regarding sold quantity could have two underlying reasons, there was no sale of that product at that store at that particular date or that the information was missing.
  • Weekdays feature, ranging from 0 to 6, where 0 corresponds to Mondays and 6 to Sundays.



Keep Exploring!!!

September 26, 2021

Ongoing reads - Interesting Sections - Applied ML - Vision

From this post onwards will review every section of Applied ML and capture the important reads.

Interesting Read#1 - RepNet: Counting Repetitions in Videos

For each frame, we then use Transformers to predict the period of repetition and the periodicity

  • Repnet can be used to find number of product interactions
  • Measure numbers of counts of physical activity
  • Analyze count echocardiogram videos 

Interesting Read - 2 On-device Supermarket Product Recognition

  • OCR + Text + N-Grams + Jaccard similarity coefficient

Interesting Read #3 - Drone control via gestures using MediaPipe Hands

Interesting Read #4 - Categorizing Listing Photos at Airbnb

  • Dynamically cluster image captions instead of using rule-based heuristics
  • One important note is that we built in production multiple binary-class models for different room types instead of building a multi-class model to cover all room types.

Keep Exploring!!!

September 25, 2021

Data Curation Paper Reads - Data Quality - Data Cleaning

Paper #1 - Auto-Detect: Data-Driven Error Detection in Tables

Key Notes

  • Values in a column not conforming to patterns associated with a data-type are flagged as errors.
  • Formulas inconsistent with other formulas in the region 
  • Text clustering feature that groups together similar values in a column
  • Single-column approaches detect errors only based on values within an input column.
  • When certain multi-column data quality rules (e.g. function-dependencies and other types of first-order logic)

Methods

  • Fixed-Regex (F-Regex)
  • dBoost
  • Compression-based dissimilarity measure (CDM)
  • Support vector data description (SVDD)
  • Distance-based outlier detection (DBOD)
  • Local outlier factor (LOF)
  • Multi-column error detection using rules
  • Single-column error detection
  • Numeric error detection
  • Outlier detection
  • Application-driven error correction. Recent approaches such as BoostClean  and ActiveClean

Record Linkage


I like this technique for data merging

  • Similarity between two words 
  • Match between numbers
  • Match between First Name
  • Match between Last Name

Similarity distance function

Deep learning for ER



BoostClean selects an ensemble of methods (statistical and logic rules) for error detection and for repair combinations using statistical boosting.

More Reads

Keep Exploring!!!

Good Idea - needgap.com - Product Ideas Discussion

Something similar to hackernews but more of product ideas validation needgap. Good place to validate ideas.

Keep Exploring!!!

Data Quality - Algorithm Fairness - Data Curation Papers

Paper #1 - Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work”: Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI

Key Notes

  • Poor data quality in high-stakes domains can have outsized effects on vulnerable communities and context
  • Data Cascades: compounding events causing negative, downstream effects from data issues, resulting in technical debt over time
  • Many researchers have pointed to the undervalued human labour that powers AI models 
  • Practitioners often work with a set of assumptions about their data during analysis and visualisation
  • Other frameworks to discover data bugs and clean data include ActiveClean and BoostClean
  • Data cascades are complex, long-term, occur frequently and persistently
  • Under-valuing of data work is common to all of AI development
  • Practitioners viewed data as operations, moved fast, hacked model performance (through hyperparameters rather than data quality)
  • Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work
  • It was difficult to get buy-in from clients and funders to invest in good quality data collection and annotation work
  • Lack of adequate training on AI data quality
  • Cascades triggered by ‘hardware drifts’
  • Cascades triggered by ‘environmental drifts’

Paper #2 - Re-imagining Algorithmic Fairness in India and Beyond

Key Notes

  • While Indians are part of the AI workforce, a majority work in services, and engineers do not entirely represent marginalities,limiting re-mediation of distances
  • While other axes of discrimination and injustices such as disability status
  • Algorithmic powerful in India, where the distance between models and oppressed communities is large
  • “rich people problems like cardiac disease and cancer, not poor people’s Tuberculosis, prioritised in AI"


More Reads

Keep Thinking!!!

Planogram Notes

 Session #1

  • Brand / Distributor has to plan their store space
  • Limited space / Short product life cycle / competition
  • Increase sales - Right products on the shelf
  • Space management and Visual merchandising
  • Catalog / Products
  • Merchandise displayed with signage, Setup, Planogram execution, stocking, maintaining, restocking
  • Maximize sales, Increase volumes
  • Before and After Images (After Restock)
  • Rotation of products

Key Notes
  • Planogram - Product Placement Strategy. 
  • Shelf - Distance between shelves, Height of shelf, Number of Isles
  • Visual placement, alignment with software


  • Goal of planogram
  • Grab attention from customers
  • Adding incremental products
  • Merchandising Techniques
  • Top shelf - Regional brands, smaller brands
  • Second shelf - Bulls eye - Best Sellers
  • Bottom Shelf - Bulk items, Heavier products

  • Find Categories and their sales distribution

  • Color complementing approach



Session #2


  • Each Store
  • Each Article
  • Each Season




Session #3


Key Notes
Consumer Decision Trees






Keep Thinking!!!

September 22, 2021

Carve your passion

  • The Domain you love to work with 
  • The Aspirational Domain you love to experiment
  • Expertise in NLP or Data or Vision - Pick and Master one well, Primary vs Secondary
  • Expertise in Data Engineering vs Data Lakes vs Data Mesh - Pick and Master one
  • Know well artifacts/patterns in GCP or AWS or Azure
  • Balance your ability to solve business problems and pick the best of tools/experiment with scale/performance in mind
  • Fail more, Learn more
  • More success, Scale more, Experiment more
  • Fail / Succeed / Fail again
Smile on the day of death I have collected memories :)

Keep Learning!!!

September 19, 2021

Respect Failed People - Knowledge also comes with Failure

Failed people/failed entrepreneurs will have more lessons than accomplished people. Not earning much, Not well studied / not being so successful does not mean the person has limited thinking or expertise. Passion is poisonous. 

What Failed people can teach?

  • Where you have to be careful
  • Who could potentially be your silent competitor
  • What things look similar to his execution
  • How time played a role
  • How tech played a role
  • What you mistrust
  • Where you seek more support
  • What thinks they overlooked

Look beyond normal perspectives.

Question to understand product mindset / Experience

  • How many times you have to had thought to build MVP that beats current competitors/products you felt could be better
  • What key lessons have you learned with bad UX, Any experiences?
  • What product would you rebuild from your past projects, if you have to go back 10 years and use the latest tech tools?
  • Code vs Architect vs Learn domain - What is important with experience?
  • What lessons you picked from a major failed project 

Keep Exploring!!! Curiosity never fails!!!


What comes with experience ?

More than coding, architecture few things I feel comes up with Deep Expertise in Tech, Projects, Products

  • Understand, Analyze, Translate your big picture vision into a buildable version 1
  • Establish differentiators vs. the competition, Know why you do and what impact it would create
  • Iterate, Validate, Trial it, Scale it - It happens with collaboration and regular feedback
  • Buildable version is a skill that is a blend of the domain, architecture, coding, and what we can build with what we know and skills we have in our team :)

#MyPerspective


September 17, 2021

Segmentation To-do List

Labelling List

Existing Datasets

The Oxford-IIIT Pet Dataset

CelebAMask-HQ

Useful blogs

Image segmentation with a U-Net-like architecture - Keras Code Examples

Good to reuse models

Keep Updating!!!

Sports TT Analysis

Sports TT Analysis

Very good paper

TTNet: Real-time temporal and spatial video analysis of table tennis

Notes

  • Tracking of players 
  • Sports equipment (like balls or hockey sticks)
  • Human pose estimation 
  • Multiple levels of detection of game-related actions

  • Ball Detection from Top View
  • Ball Detection from full table side view
  • Player Body Segmentation
  • Action Recognition
  • Semantic masks of the table, humans, and scoreboard as well as the ball position
  • Second stage of the ball detection is introduced. 
  • Event spotting - According to the table tennis rules, only ball bounces, serves, and net hits are essential to keep the score updated
  • The required semantic masks of three classes (humans, table, scoreboard) 
  • Ball detection by the global detector were achieved in the case of the longest 9-frame sequences

More Experiments

Keep Thinking!!!

Driver Profiling - Telematics - Connected Cars

Sometimes we need more data pointers, research paper reads for a use case. arxiv / phd papers are a wealth of information to get right directions for dataset, features, models

Paper - Telematics and Contextual Data Analysis and Driving Risk Prediction

Key Notes

  • Usecase - Driving Risk Prediction
  • Solution that consists of three parts
  • a) characterizing driving context, 
  • b) characterizing driving style, and 
  • c) context-aware driving risk prediction

Areas

  • Driving context can be described as a combination of location (e.g., Interstate-90) and time (e.g., weekdays between 3pm to 7pm).
  • Characteristics of contexts from the aggregate behavior of drivers Segmenting trajectories to identify meaningful driving patterns
  • Analyze each pattern with respect to contextual data to identify cause-andeffect patterns of significance

Features

  • Contextual data - traffic data
  • Weather data - weather stations
  • Road-network characteristics - (e.g., road type and road shape)

Analysis of telematics alongside contextual data provides valuable insights regarding an individual’s behavior, common driving habits, and characteristics of the road network with regard to dynamic traffic flow


  • Roads Analysis - sharp-turn , smooth-turn, exit/merge, intersection, exit/merge, ramp, bridge
  • Drive Analysis - speed, acceleration, GPS coordinates, heading
  • Time features - Type of Day, Time of the Day, frequency of congestion events
  • For traffic data, we have loc = (latitude, longitude, Street Name, Street Side, Zipcode, City, State)

Patterns

  • Monthly Traffic Distribution
  • Monthly Weather Distribution
  • Weekly Traffic Distribution

Weather Entity

  • Severe-Cold: the case of having extremely low temperature, with temperature 
  • Fog: the case where there is low visibility condition as result of fog or haze.
  • Hail: the case of having solid precipitation including ice pallets and hail.
  • Rain: the case of having rain, including any type of the rain, ranging from light to heavy.
  • Snow: the case of having snow, including any type, ranging from light to heavy.
  • Storm: the extremely windy condition, where the wind speed is at least 60kmh.
  • Precipitation: a generic label which we frequently observed in raw weather data, however, we have no further information to include them in any of the previously described entity types

Road-network - Interstates and Freeways, Cities

Clustering based on Traffic patterns

Study the behavior of an individual driver in order to evaluate how risky or safe he/she is

Common propagation patterns of traffic and weather entities

rain → accident → congestion

major construction → more congestions

Tree-pattern-mining-based process, which we name short-term pattern discovery

Input: A trajectory T.

Model: A predictive model M to capture variations in driving behavior to derive driving style information


gps, accelerometer, and magnetometer

Contextual  data such as traffic events, weather data, points-of-interest, and time

Comprehensive set of attributes to describe each accident including location data, time data, natural language description of event, weather data, period-of-day information22, and relevant points-of-interest data

Dataset - US Accidents

Dataset which is called the 100-car naturalistic driving study



Cluster based on accident history leveraging accident datasets

Using telematics data alone for driving risk prediction is a recent trend given notable attention in the past few years

Risk assessment for individual drivers, based on crash and near-crash

  • (CNC) events, as well as critical-incident events (CIE), age, and personality of drivers to be the important risk factors 
  • Using K-Means clustering, they performed clustering of CNC rates, and identified three clusters of low, moderate, and high risk drivers
  • Average monthly drive time, age, gender, living region, and car’s age, to predict the frequency of claims for different drivers
  • Coarse-grained attributes such as yearly distance, number of trips, average Distance per trip, and coverage of different road types by distance
  • Driving state variables (e.g., sharp-turn, lane-change, abnormal acceleration/deceleration, and speeding with respect to speed-limit data)
  • (a) Smooth turn (b) Sharp and smooth turn (c) Sharp turn trajectories


Very Good Phd Document :)

Loved it, A lot of inspiration to apply it in use cases.

More reads

Happy Reading!!!

September 15, 2021

Data Curation Reads

Data curation – the process of discovering, integrating, and cleaning data. Data Curation needs to be guided by Data Governance

Paper - Data Curation with Deep Learning [Vision]

  • (Towards Automatic Curation)
  • Diverse DC tasks (such as deduplication, error detection, data repair) 
  • DC problems, such as data discovery [17] and entity resolution
  • Series of techniques (e.g., unsupervised representation learning, data augmentation, synthetic data generation, weak supervision, domain adaptation, and crowdsourcing)

An Approach Adapted from Word Embeddings

  • map words to a dense high dimensional vector such that semantically related words are close to each other
  • A big difference between databases and documents is that databases have many data dependencies (or integrity constraints), within tables

Combining Word and Graph Embeddings

  • Treat each relation as a heterogeneous network
  • Learn distributed representations for the cells over the entire data ocean, not only on one relation

Experiment for different levels

  • Column Embeddings (Column2Vec)
  • Table Embeddings (Table2Vec) 
  • Database Embeddings (Database2Vec)
  • Contextual Embeddings for DC

Entity Matching

  • Entity matching is a key problem in data integration

DeepER, applies DL techniques for ER.

DeepMatcher [35] proposes a template based architecture for entity matching


Paper - A Survey on Data Collection for Machine Learning

Key Notes

More Reads

Keep Reading!!!