Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the core techniques behind the success of deep neural networks. The gradient provides information on the direction in which a function has the steepest rate of change. The main problem with basic SGD is to change by equal-sized steps for all parameters, irrespective of the gradient behavior. Hence, an efficient way of deep network optimization is to have adaptive step sizes for each parameter. Recently, several attempts have been made to improve gradient descent methods such as AdaGrad, AdaDelta, RMSProp, and adaptive moment estimation (Adam). These methods rely on the square roots of exponential moving averages of squared past gradients. Thus, these methods do not take advantage of local change in gradients. In this article, a novel optimizer is proposed based on the difference between the present and the immediate past gradient (i.e., diffGrad). In the proposed diffGrad optimization technique, the step size is adjusted for each parameter in such a way that it should have a larger step size for faster gradient changing parameters and a lower step size for lower gradient changing parameters. The convergence analysis is done using the regret bound approach of the online learning framework. In this article, thorough analysis is made over three synthetic complex nonconvex functions. The image categorization experiments are also conducted over the CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 data sets to observe the performance of diffGrad with respect to the state-of-the-art optimizers such as SGDM, AdaGrad, AdaDelta, RMSProp, AMSGrad, and Adam. The residual unit (ResNet)-based convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is used in the experiments. The experiments show that diffGrad outperforms other optimizers. Also, we show that diffGrad performs uniformly well for training CNN using different activation functions. The source code is made publicly available at https://github.com/shivram1987/diffGrad.

Local binary pattern (LBP) is widely adopted for efficient image feature description and simplicity. To describe the color images, it is required to combine the LBPs from each channel of the image. The traditional way of binary combination is to simply concatenate the LBPs from each channel, but it increases the dimensionality of the pattern. In order to cope with this problem, this paper proposes a novel method for image description with multichannel decoded LBPs. We introduce adder- and decoder-based two schemas for the combination of the LBPs from more than one channel. Image retrieval experiments are performed to observe the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and compared with the existing ways of multichannel techniques. The experiments are performed over 12 benchmark natural scene and color texture image databases, such as Corel-1k, MIT-VisTex, USPTex, Colored Brodatz, and so on. It is observed that the introduced multichannel adder- and decoder-based LBPs significantly improve the retrieval performance over each database and outperform the other multichannel-based approaches in terms of the average retrieval precision and average retrieval rate.

A new image feature description based on the local wavelet pattern (LWP) is proposed in this paper to characterize the medical computer tomography (CT) images for content-based CT image retrieval. In the proposed work, the LWP is derived for each pixel of the CT image by utilizing the relationship of center pixel with the local neighboring information. In contrast to the local binary pattern that only considers the relationship between a center pixel and its neighboring pixels, the presented approach first utilizes the relationship among the neighboring pixels using local wavelet decomposition, and finally considers its relationship with the center pixel. A center pixel transformation scheme is introduced to match the range of center value with the range of local wavelet decomposed values. Moreover, the introduced local wavelet decomposition scheme is centrally symmetric and suitable for CT images. The novelty of this paper lies in the following two ways: 1) encoding local neighboring information with local wavelet decomposition and 2) computing LWP using local wavelet decomposed values and transformed center pixel values. We tested the performance of our method over three CT image databases in terms of the precision and recall. We also compared the proposed LWP descriptor with the other state-of-the-art local image descriptors, and the experimental results suggest that the proposed method outperforms other methods for CT image retrieval.

The medical image retrieval plays an important role in medical diagnosis where a physician can retrieve most similar images from template images against a query image of a particular patient. In this letter, a new and efficient image features descriptor based on the local diagonal extrema pattern (LDEP) is proposed for CT image retrieval. The proposed approach finds the values and indexes of the local diagonal extremas to exploit the relationship among the diagonal neighbors of any center pixel of the image using first-order local diagonal derivatives. The intensity values of the local diagonal extremas are compared with the intensity value of the center pixel to utilize the relationship of central pixel with its neighbors. Finally, the descriptor is formed on the basis of the indexes and comparison of center pixel and local diagonal extremas. The consideration of only diagonal neighbors greatly reduces the dimension of the feature vector which speeds up the image retrieval task and solves the “Curse of dimensionality” problem also. The LDEP is tested for CT image retrieval over Emphysema-CT and NEMA-CT databases and compared with the existing approaches. The superiority in terms of performance and efficiency in terms of speedup of the proposed method are confirmed by the experiments.

A novel image feature descriptor based on the local bit-plane decoded pattern (LBDP) is introduced for indexing and retrieval of biomedical images in this paper. A local bit-plane transformation scheme is proposed to compute the local bit-plane transformed values for each image pixel from the bit-plane binary contents of its each neighboring pixels. The introduced LBDP is generated by finding a binary pattern using the difference of center pixel's intensity value with the local bit-plane transformed values. The efficacy of the LBDP is tested under biomedical image retrieval using average retrieval precision and average retrieval rate. Three benchmark databases Emphysema-CT, NEMA-CT, and Open Access Series of Imaging Studies magnetic resonance imaging are used for the evaluation and comparison of the proposed approach with recent state-of-art methods. The experimental results confirm the discriminative ability and the efficiency of the proposed LBDP for biomedical image indexing and retrieval and prove the outperformance of existing biomedical image retrieval approaches.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been very successful for synthesizing the images in a given dataset. The artificially generated images by GANs are very realistic. The GANs have shown potential usability in several computer vision applications, including image generation, image-to-image translation, video synthesis, etc. Conventionally, the generator network is the backbone of GANs, which generates the samples and the discriminator network is used to facilitate the training of the generator network. The generator and discriminator networks are usually a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The convolution-based networks exploit the local relationship in a layer, which requires the deep networks to extract the abstract features. However, recently developed Transformer networks are able to exploit the global relationship with tremendous performance improvement for several problems in computer vision. Motivated from the success of Transformer networks and GANs, recent works have tried to exploit the Transformers in GAN framework for the image/video synthesis. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the developments and advancements in GANs utilizing the Transformer networks for computer vision applications. The performance comparison for several applications on benchmark datasets is also performed and analyzed. The conducted survey will be very useful to understand the research trends & gaps related with Transformer-based GANs and to develop the advanced GAN architectures by exploiting the global and local relationships for different applications.