Real-world imagery does not always exhibit good visibility and clean content, but often suffers from various kinds of degradations (e.g., noise, blur, rain drops, fog, color distortion, etc.), which severely affect vision-driven tasks (e.g., image classification, target recognition, and tracking, etc.). Thus, restoring the true scene from such degraded images is of significance. In recent years, a large body of deep learning-based image processing works has been exploited due to the advances in deep neural networks. This paper aims to make a comprehensive review of real-world image restoration algorithms and beyond. More specifically, this review provides overviews of critical benchmark datasets, image quality assessment methods, and four major categories of deep learning-based image restoration methods, i.e., based on convolutional neural network (CNN), generative adversarial network (GAN), Transformer, and multi-layer perceptron (MLP). The paper highlights the latest developments and advances in each category of network architecture to provide an up-to-date overview. Moreover, the representative state-of-the-art image restoration methods are compared visually and numerically. Finally, for real-world image restoration, the current situations are objectively assessed, challenges are discussed, and future directions and trends are presented.

Recently, human being’s curiosity has been expanded from the land to the sky and the sea. Besides sending people to explore the ocean and outer space, robots are designed for some tasks dangerous for living creatures. Take the ocean exploration for an example. There are many projects or competitions on the design of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) which attracted many interests. Authors of this article have learned the necessity of platform upgrade from a previous AUV design project, and would like to share the experience of one task extension in the area of fish detection. Because most of the embedded systems have been improved by fast growing computing and sensing technologies, which makes them possible to incorporate more and more complicated algorithms. In an AUV, after acquiring surrounding information from sensors, how to perceive and analyse corresponding information for better judgement is one of the challenges. The processing procedure can mimic human being’s learning routines. An advanced system with more computing power can facilitate deep learning feature, which exploit many neural network algorithms to simulate human brains. In this paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN) based fish detection method was proposed. The training data set was collected from the Gulf of Mexico by a digital camera. To fit into this unique need, three optimization approaches were applied to the CNN: data augmentation, network simplification, and training process speed up. Data augmentation transformation provided more learning samples; the network was simplified to accommodate the artificial neural network; the training process speed up is introduced to make the training process more time efficient. Experimental results showed that the proposed model is promising, and has the potential to be extended to other underwear objects.

Cybersecurity is a critical issue in today’s internet world. Classical security systems, such as firewalls based on signature detection, cannot detect today’s sophisticated zero-day attacks. Machine learning (ML) based solutions are more attractive for their capabilities of detecting anomaly traffic from benign traffic, but to develop an ML-based anomaly detection system, we need meaningful or realistic network datasets to train the detection engine. There are many public network datasets for ML applications. Still, they have limitations, such as the data creation process and the lack of diverse attack scenarios or background traffic. To create a good detection engine, we need a realistic dataset with various attack scenarios and various types of background traffic, such as HTTPs, streaming, and SMTP traffic. In this work, we have developed realistic network data or datasets considering various attack scenarios and diverse background/benign traffic. Furthermore, considering the importance of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, we have compared the performance of detecting anomaly traffic of some classical supervised and our prior developed unsupervised ML algorithms based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) and pseudo auto-encoder (AE) architecture based on the created datasets. The results show that the performance of the CNN-Pseudo-AE is comparable to that of many classical supervised algorithms. Hence, the CNN-Pseudo-AE algorithm is promising in actual implementation.

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, embedded based electronic devices have penetrated every corner of our daily lives. As the brain of IoT devices, embedded based micro controller unit (MCU) plays an irreplaceable role. The functions of the MCUs are becoming more and more powerful and complicated, which brings huge challenges to embedded programmers. Embedded code, which is highly related to the hardware resources, differs from other popular programming code. The hardware configuration may be a big challenge to the programmers, who may only be good at software development and algorithm design. Online code searching can be time consuming and cannot guarantee an optimal approach. To solve this problem, in this paper, an embedded code classifier, which is designed to help embedded programmers to search for the most efficient code with precise tags, is demonstrated. A high quality embedded code dataset is built. A tag correlated multi-label machine learning model is developed for the embedded code dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed code dataset structure is proved to be more efficient on embedded code classification. The proposed embedded classifier algorithm shows a promising result on embedded code dataset. And it outperforms the traditional machine learning text classification models.

Face recognition is a widely used computer vision, which plays an increasingly important role in user authentication systems, security systems, and consumer electronics. The models for most current applications are based on high-definition digital cameras. In this paper, we focus on digital images derived from historical motion picture films. Historical motion picture films often have poorer resolution than modern digital imagery, making face detection a more challenging task. To approach this problem, we first propose a trunk–branch concatenated multi-task cascaded convolutional neural network (TB-MTCNN), which efficiently extracts facial features from blurry historical films by combining the trunk with branch networks and employing various sizes of kernels to enrich the multi-scale receptive field. Next, we build a deep neural network-integrated object-tracking algorithm to compensate for failed recognition over one or more video frames. The framework combines simple online and real-time tracking with deep data association (Deep SORT), and TB-MTCNN with the residual neural network (ResNet) model. Finally, a state-of-the-art image restoration method is employed to reduce the effect of noise and blurriness. The experimental results show that our proposed joint face recognition and tracking network can significantly reduce missed recognition in historical motion picture film frames.