Minuscule Cell Detection in AS-OCT Images with Progressive Field-of-View Focusing

Anterior Segment Optical Coherence Tomography (AS-OCT) is an emerging imaging technique with great potential for diagnosing anterior uveitis, a vision-threatening ocular inflammatory condition. A hallmark of this condition is the presence of inflammatory cells in the eye's anterior chamber, and detecting these cells using AS-OCT images has attracted research interest. While recent efforts aim to replace manual cell detection with automated computer vision approaches, detecting extremely small (minuscule) objects in high-resolution images, such as AS-OCT, poses substantial challenges: (1) each cell appears as a minuscule particle, representing less than 0.005\% of the image, making the detection difficult, and (2) OCT imaging introduces pixel-level noise that can be mistaken for cells, leading to false positive detections. To overcome these challenges, we propose a minuscule cell detection framework through a progressive field-of-view focusing strategy. This strategy systematically refines the detection scope from the whole image to a target region where cells are likely to be present, and further to minuscule regions potentially containing individual cells. Our framework consists of two modules. First, a Field-of-Focus module uses a vision foundation model to segment the target region. Subsequently, a Fine-grained Object Detection module introduces a specialized Minuscule Region Proposal followed by a Spatial Attention Network to distinguish individual cells from noise within the segmented region. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods for cell detection, providing enhanced efficacy for clinical applications. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/joeybyc/MCD.

KAE: A Property-based Method for Knowledge Graph Alignment and Extension

A common solution to the semantic heterogeneity problem is to perform knowledge graph (KG) extension exploiting the information encoded in one or more candidate KGs, where the alignment between the reference KG and candidate KGs is considered the critical procedure. However, existing KG alignment methods mainly rely on entity type (etype) label matching as a prerequisite, which is poorly performing in practice or not applicable in some cases. In this paper, we design a machine learning-based framework for KG extension, including an alternative novel property-based alignment approach that allows aligning etypes on the basis of the properties used to define them. The main intuition is that it is properties that intentionally define the etype, and this definition is independent of the specific label used to name an etype, and of the specific hierarchical schema of KGs. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the experimental results show the validity of the KG alignment approach and the superiority of the proposed KG extension framework, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Knowledge Graph Extension by Entity Type Recognition

Knowledge graphs have emerged as a sophisticated advancement and refinement of semantic networks, and their deployment is one of the critical methodologies in contemporary artificial intelligence. The construction of knowledge graphs is a multifaceted process involving various techniques, where researchers aim to extract the knowledge from existing resources for the construction since building from scratch entails significant labor and time costs. However, due to the pervasive issue of heterogeneity, the description diversity across different knowledge graphs can lead to mismatches between concepts, thereby impacting the efficacy of knowledge extraction. This Ph.D. study focuses on automatic knowledge graph extension, i.e., properly extending the reference knowledge graph by extracting and integrating concepts from one or more candidate knowledge graphs. We propose a novel knowledge graph extension framework based on entity type recognition. The framework aims to achieve high-quality knowledge extraction by aligning the schemas and entities across different knowledge graphs, thereby enhancing the performance of the extension. This paper elucidates three major contributions: (i) we propose an entity type recognition method exploiting machine learning and property-based similarities to enhance knowledge extraction; (ii) we introduce a set of assessment metrics to validate the quality of the extended knowledge graphs; (iii) we develop a platform for knowledge graph acquisition, management, and extension to benefit knowledge engineers practically. Our evaluation comprehensively demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed extension framework and its functionalities through quantitative experiments and case studies.

Towards a Gateway for Knowledge Graph Schemas Collection, Analysis, and Embedding

One of the significant barriers to the training of statistical models on knowledge graphs is the difficulty that scientists have in finding the best input data to address their prediction goal. In addition to this, a key challenge is to determine how to manipulate these relational data, which are often in the form of particular triples (i.e., subject, predicate, object), to enable the learning process. Currently, many high-quality catalogs of knowledge graphs, are available. However, their primary goal is the re-usability of these resources, and their interconnection, in the context of the Semantic Web. This paper describes the LiveSchema initiative, namely, a first version of a gateway that has the main scope of leveraging the gold mine of data collected by many existing catalogs collecting relational data like ontologies and knowledge graphs. At the current state, LiveSchema contains - 1000 datasets from 4 main sources and offers some key facilities, which allow to: i) evolving LiveSchema, by aggregating other source catalogs and repositories as input sources; ii) querying all the collected resources; iii) transforming each given dataset into formal concept analysis matrices that enable analysis and visualization services; iv) generating models and tensors from each given dataset.

Toward Zero-shot Character Recognition: A Gold Standard Dataset with Radical-level Annotations

Optical character recognition (OCR) methods have been applied to diverse tasks, e.g., street view text recognition and document analysis. Recently, zero-shot OCR has piqued the interest of the research community because it considers a practical OCR scenario with unbalanced data distribution. However, there is a lack of benchmarks for evaluating such zero-shot methods that apply a divide-and-conquer recognition strategy by decomposing characters into radicals. Meanwhile, radical recognition, as another important OCR task, also lacks radical-level annotation for model training. In this paper, we construct an ancient Chinese character image dataset that contains both radical-level and character-level annotations to satisfy the requirements of the above-mentioned methods, namely, ACCID, where radical-level annotations include radical categories, radical locations, and structural relations. To increase the adaptability of ACCID, we propose a splicing-based synthetic character algorithm to augment the training samples and apply an image denoising method to improve the image quality. By introducing character decomposition and recombination, we propose a baseline method for zero-shot OCR. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of ACCID and the baseline model quantitatively and qualitatively.

Recognizing Entity Types via Properties

The mainstream approach to the development of ontologies is merging ontologies encoding different information, where one of the major difficulties is that the heterogeneity motivates the ontology merging but also limits high-quality merging performance. Thus, the entity type (etype) recognition task is proposed to deal with such heterogeneity, aiming to infer the class of entities and etypes by exploiting the information encoded in ontologies. In this paper, we introduce a property-based approach that allows recognizing etypes on the basis of the properties used to define them. From an epistemological point of view, it is in fact properties that characterize entities and etypes, and this definition is independent of the specific labels and hierarchical schemas used to define them. The main contribution consists of a set of property-based metrics for measuring the contextual similarity between etypes and entities, and a machine learning-based etype recognition algorithm exploiting the proposed similarity metrics. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the experimental results show the validity of the similarity metrics and the superiority of the proposed etype recognition algorithm.

Towards Ranking Schemas by Focus

The main goal of this paper is to evaluate knowledge base schemas, modeled as a set of entity types, each such type being associated with a set of properties, according to their focus. We intuitively model the notion of focus as ''the state or quality of being relevant in storing and retrieving information''. This definition of focus is adapted from the notion of ''categorization purpose'', as first defined in cognitive psychology, thus giving us a high level of understandability on the side of users. In turn, this notion is formalized based on a set of knowledge metrics that, for any given focus, rank knowledge base schemas according to their quality. We apply the proposed methodology to more than 200 state-of-the-art knowledge base schemas. The experimental results show the utility of our approach

RCRN: Real-world Character Image Restoration Network via Skeleton Extraction

Constructing high-quality character image datasets is challenging because real-world images are often affected by image degradation. There are limitations when applying current image restoration methods to such real-world character images, since (i) the categories of noise in character images are different from those in general images; (ii) real-world character images usually contain more complex image degradation, e.g., mixed noise at different noise levels. To address these problems, we propose a real-world character restoration network (RCRN) to effectively restore degraded character images, where character skeleton information and scale-ensemble feature extraction are utilized to obtain better restoration performance. The proposed method consists of a skeleton extractor (SENet) and a character image restorer (CiRNet). SENet aims to preserve the structural consistency of the character and normalize complex noise. Then, CiRNet reconstructs clean images from degraded character images and their skeletons. Due to the lack of benchmarks for real-world character image restoration, we constructed a dataset containing 1,606 character images with real-world degradation to evaluate the validity of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that RCRN outperforms state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively.

CharFormer: A Glyph Fusion based Attentive Framework for High-precision Character Image Denoising

Degraded images commonly exist in the general sources of character images, leading to unsatisfactory character recognition results. Existing methods have dedicated efforts to restoring degraded character images. However, the denoising results obtained by these methods do not appear to improve character recognition performance. This is mainly because current methods only focus on pixel-level information and ignore critical features of a character, such as its glyph, resulting in character-glyph damage during the denoising process. In this paper, we introduce a novel generic framework based on glyph fusion and attention mechanisms, i.e., CharFormer, for precisely recovering character images without changing their inherent glyphs. Unlike existing frameworks, CharFormer introduces a parallel target task for capturing additional information and injecting it into the image denoising backbone, which will maintain the consistency of character glyphs during character image denoising. Moreover, we utilize attention-based networks for global-local feature interaction, which will help to deal with blind denoising and enhance denoising performance. We compare CharFormer with state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets. The experimental results show the superiority of CharFormer quantitatively and qualitatively.

LiveSchema: A Gateway Towards Learning on Knowledge Graph Schemas

One of the major barriers to the training of algorithms on knowledge graph schemas, such as vocabularies or ontologies, is the difficulty that scientists have in finding the best input resource to address the target prediction tasks. In addition to this, a key challenge is to determine how to manipulate (and embed) these data, which are often in the form of particular triples (i.e., subject, predicate, object), to enable the learning process. In this paper, we describe the LiveSchema initiative, namely a gateway that offers a family of services to easily access, analyze, transform and exploit knowledge graph schemas, with the main goal of facilitating the reuse of these resources in machine learning use cases. As an early implementation of the initiative, we also advance an online catalog, which relies on more than 800 resources, with the first set of example services.